The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves Page B

Anne could smell the river. Although they were a long way from the coast it had traces of salt and seaweed. Across the road a car started up. For a moment it caught Godfrey’s attention and she felt the hand tense. He turned his face away from the headlights. She was flattered by the reaction of guilt. Adultery obviously didn’t come easily to him. It occurred to her that this might be the first time he had ever been unfaithful to his wife.
    “Well?” she said. “Will you come back with me?”
    But they didn’t make it home to the Priory. Their first sexual encounter was in the back of the BMW. Godfrey pulled it off the road and parked in a farm track overhung with trees. Afterwards, lying back on the leather seats, she saw the moonlight filter through the summer foliage. She identified the trees as elder and hawthorn.
    Chapter Fourteen.
    That summer Anne saw Godfrey regularly but secretly. She was discreet in a way which didn’t come naturally to her. In the past she had flaunted her men. Jeremy had pretended he didn’t mind, and perhaps he really didn’t, though he liked the fiction that they were a happy couple of independent means, devoted to each other and to country pursuits. Anne was afraid that if he found out about Godfrey he would laugh. At the Marks & Spencer suits, the pretentious gold watch, the shiny shoes. Despite the company he kept, Jeremy was a snob. Godfrey was even more eager than she that the affair remain secret. He couldn’t face the prospect of his wife or his child finding out that he had a lover.
    Therefore, she continued as usual. It was a hot dry summer and she spent long hours working in her garden. Her forehead turned as brown as leather and her arms and neck spotted with freckles, so once she said to Godfrey, “I look at least sixty. How can you possibly fancy me?” She expected a quip about his liking older women; instead he said, “I don’t fancy you. It’s much, much more than that.” And she believed him. By the beginning of autumn she had picked the early apples, wrapped them in newspaper and stacked them in boxes at the back of the garage. And she still looked forward to the clandestine meetings.
    By the autumn too, opposition to the super quarry had gathered in momentum. She continued to be involved. She liked attending meetings to which Godfrey had been invited. There was an anticipatory thrill in standing outside the door of a shabby church hall, knowing that he was inside. Sometimes she could hear his voice, low and monotonous, making a point. His points were often technical. He might not have passed exams but he carried statistics in his head and could recite them flawlessly, like a child performing a favourite nursery rhyme. She loved arguing with him in public.
    The people in the action group thought she disliked Godfrey Waugh intensely.
    “Come on, lass,” the man with the sheep’s face said to her. “No need to let it get personal.”
    In these confrontations Godfrey was always polite. In private they never discussed the quarry. She thought he was relieved by the pretence that there was antipathy between them. His wife would never believe he could fall for such an aggressive, loud-mouthed harridan.
    On one occasion she saw them together, him and Barbara. Even the child was there. Godfrey had given one of his worked-out quarries to the Wildlife Trust to form the heart of the new reserve. The pits had been flooded and turned into ponds. The director of the Wildlife Trust talked hopefully about reed beds and a wader scrape. Godfrey had donated a lot of money for planning and hides, but he had just made his official planning application for the super quarry at Black Law so there was some nervousness within the Wildlife Trust. What was Godfrey Waugh after? Did he make his donation as a pre-emptive strike in the hope of getting a soft ride over the quarry? Anne didn’t know the answers to those questions, but found it hard to believe that Godfrey was that