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Contents

• Ann Cleeves
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen

Ann Cleeves

Another Man's Poison

Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves is the author behind ITV’s VERA and BBC One’s SHETLAND. She has written over twenty-five novels, and is the creator of detectives Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez – characters loved both on screen and in print. Her books have now sold over one million copies worldwide.

Ann worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She is a member of ‘Murder Squad’, working with other British northern writers to promote crime fiction. In 2006 Ann was awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (CWA Gold Dagger) for Best Crime Novel, for Raven Black, the first book in her Shetland series. In 2012 she was inducted into the CWA Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame. Ann lives in North Tyneside.

Chapter One

Ursula Ottway drove the Land Rover over the cattle grid, then got out to shut the gate carefully behind her. Back in the vehicle she paused for a moment before carrying on. It was late afternoon and the hills threw long shadows over Crow Water. Now she was almost home there was no hurry. She savoured the relief of her return to the valley.

She hardly left the farm now apart from these monthly shopping trips to Appleworth and each time the excursion became more of an ordeal. The drive along the dual carriageway to the Superstore was a nightmare. Everyone seemed to go so fast. Traffic passed her, horns blaring, lights flashing, the drivers apparently irritated beyond reason by the slowness of the Land Rover. Once, she had been so shaken by the journey that she had driven into the back of one of the sleek, new cars queuing at the entrance to the supermarket carpark. The woman had been as polished as her car, quite beautiful Ursula saw, long legged and golden haired, but when she opened her mouth she spoke incoherent filth.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ursula had stammered. ‘It’s my fault. I’ll pay.’

But that, it seemed, would not do, The woman was determined to draw attention to them both.

‘I only passed my test last week!’ she screamed. ‘Do you know what my husband will say?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ursula said again. Once, she thought, I would have been able to deal with this. I might even have enjoyed it. What has happened to me?

Still the woman would not get into her car and drive away. A crowd had gathered and most of the shoppers stared at Ursula. She struck a strange and compelling figure and realised suddenly how different she was from the rest of them. The girls wore designer track suits and smart white trainers, and the middle-aged women were smart enough to be at a Conservatives Ladies’ Luncheon. No one, it seemed, was as old as she.

She was as tall and strong as a man, dressed in loose corduroy trousers, working boots and a thick woollen jersey. I should have changed before I came out, she thought desperately, but none of her clothes would have appeased these hostile women. At least she had taken off Fred’s old tweed jacket before getting out of the Land Rover to face them. She knew it had holes in the elbows and smelled of sheep.

Eventually the woman had run out of steam and the audience had disappeared, leaving Ursula bewildered and frightened in the middle of the carpark. Each time she returned to the supermarket the memory of the confrontation returned, making her blush with shame and embarrassment.

Then she had to face the hot, airless shop. She could, she supposed, go to the small, family-run stores in Appleworth High Street, but she had a horror that there she would meet someone she knew, someone who would trap her in conversation. The supermarket at least was anonymous. She recognised none of the women who jostled past her, disdainful of her inability to make a choice between the competing brands of cat food.

She always bought the cat food first. She had nothing of value left now but the cats. The other residents of Crowford thought she was mad to stay in Back Rigg after her husband had died. How could she survive up there on the fells, all alone? Especially in the winter. Some family could move in there, make a proper go of it. But for the cats it was home and she could not consider moving them elsewhere.

The thought of the cats cheered her and prompted her to move. She started the Land Rover and began to drive along the track to the farmhouse.

She could see it ahead of her, surrounded by the spindly and wind-blown trees they had planted when they first lived there, to give the house some shelter. The track ran parallel to the road, which followed the edge of the lake. It climbed gently. At one time all this had been Back Rigg land but she no longer farmed it herself. When Fred had died she had handed it back to the estate. The lambs on the fell were fat and healthy and she felt momentarily jealous of the farmer to whom the land had been leased. She missed the ritual of dipping and clipping and sending to market. Still, she thought, as she pulled up in the farmyard, she still had Lottie and Belle.

She swung open the heavy door of the Land Rover and jumped down on to the yard. It was still muddy after the winter rain. She rolled up the canvas flap at the back of the vehicle and fastened it with a webbing strap, then began to lift out the plastic carrier bags. All the time she made the soft, cooing noise that let the cats know she was there. She expected them to come racing out of the barn at the side of the house, but the place was quiet and she thought they were getting old, like her, and they were probably curled up in the kitchen next to the Aga.

To get to the kitchen she walked through the garden at the side of the house. It was overgrown and unkempt, the only colour provided by daffodils, blown almost flat by the gale of the previous week, and some spindly twigs of forsythia. In one corner there was a hen house with a corrugated iron roof and a wire mesh run where six bantams scratched and pecked.

The kitchen door was unlocked. She had never felt any need to keep the place fastened. She had nothing she would miss if it were stolen. The kitchen was at the back of the house, built into the hill, almost dark. She left open the door to let in more light. The room was old, shabby, not what people expected to find these days.

There was linoleum the colour of pea soup worn through in places to the stone flags. There were the cupboards Fred had put up when they were first married. Once they had been painted white but they were discoloured now by the smoke from the Aga and grease and cobwebs. Ursula had stopped taking people into the kitchen – even her daughter Sally, on her rare visits, was kept firmly in the drawing room. The visitors’ looks of shock and disapproval made Ursula uneasy. Perhaps there was something shameful about the room, something she could not see. But it had always been good enough for her and Fred. Now it was good enough for her and the cats. She knew it was dirty but thought it had never been very clean. Farmers’ wives were too busy to be over-obsessed with hygiene. It occurred to her that recently she had let things slip and she thought vaguely that she should have a good tidy out. It was the time of year for spring cleaning. The cupboard at the side of the range, for example, was full of damp and disintegrating Farmers Weeklys. The scout group in Appleworth collected waste paper. Perhaps she could take it to them on her next monthly trip to the supermarket. And if she washed the windows she might let in more light.

She went back into the yard to collect the remaining bags of groceries.

‘Lottie!’ she called. ‘Belle!’ She was more concerned about the cats than the state of her kitchen and there had been no sign of them by the Aga or on the scullery roof.

But still they did not come and she stamped back into the house and crouched awkwardly to stack tins in the cupboard under the sink, because that was where the mice always seemed to get, despite the cats, and only tins were safe in there.

She filled a kettle at the deep enamel sink, lifted the lid on the range and put the kettle on the hot plate to boil. While she was waiting for it she took a tin opener from the drawer in the table and began to open a large tin of cat food. She picked up the cats’ earthenware bowls from the corner of the range and rinsed them under the tap, then spooned in the food. She had chosen their favourite flavour and knew nothing would keep them away now.

By the time Ursula made up her mind to go and look for the cats the light had nearly gone. At first she tried to persuade herself that her anxiety about the animals was foolish. They were hiding, playing some sort of game with her. What harm could they come to here? One might go missing but together they would be safe. So while she waited for the tea to brew she put away the rest of her shopping and went to feed the hens their layers’ mash. Then she poured out the tea and opened a packet of supermarket biscuits. She sat in the chair by the Aga and must have dozed off because when she awoke with a start her tea was cold and the room was almost dark. The cats’ food was still untouched in the corner and she was thrown suddenly into panic. She went upstairs, switching on lights, peering under beds, calling them, then, knowing that she would settle to nothing until she knew they were safe, she decided she would have to go out to look for them.

On a hook by the door hung a large gaberdine coat, which she had always used for going out at night during lambing. There was still a torch in the pocket. She pulled on heavy wellington boots which were so wide at the top that they flapped around her legs, then she left the house and set off up the hill. It had been clear all day, and now, out of the house, there was enough light to see the whole of the valley spread below her. There was no real village. That had disappeared in 1963 when Crowford was flooded to provide a reservoir to supply the cities of the industrial north-east and Carlisle. The church and chapel were under the lake, visible only as ruins in times of drought when the water was low. At the bottom of the valley, below the dam, was the Cadver, the big house. She could see it better from here on the hill than from the road, where its privacy was protected by high stone walls and acres of woodland.

Bloody Grenville, she thought, as she climbed steeply through the field behind her house to the dry-stone wall where the cats hunted sometimes, prowling delicately over the top, attracted by the small birds that nested there. Grenville owned most of the land in the valley and she blamed him, irrationally, for all its ills.

At the wall she paused to catch her breath and looked down. It was very cold. She felt in her pocket and pulled out a length of string which she tied around her waist to act as a belt. She looked almost directly on to the roof of her house and saw that she had left the lights on and the kitchen door open.

‘Lottie!’ she called. ‘Belle! Where are you, you infernal animals?’

In the school house, on the road between Back Rigg and the Cadver, the lights were on too, and were reflected on the lake. The school had been built on high ground and was saved when the valley was flooded, but with the destruction of the village there were no children to use it, and it was closed and sold. The class rooms had been turned into a pottery and showrooms and the owners lived in the adjoining house where the old school master had stayed.

Bloody Grenvilles, Ursula thought again. The valley’s full of them.

She began to walk along the wall, shining her torch along the base of it, because by now it was too dark to see anything but the shape of the hills and the dull gleam of Crow Water. She was not sure, even, what she was looking for. From the direction of Appleworth she saw a vehicle’s headlights, reflected first in the lake then turning towards her where the road crossed the dam. She had a brief glimpse of the towers at each end of the dam, then everything went dark again as the vehicle stopped by Keeper’s Cottage on the edge of the Cadver Estate.

That would be the ambulance, she thought, bringing young Cassie Liddle from the special school in Appleworth where she stopped during the week to spend the weekend with her parents. It was late today. Marie would be waiting. From here on the hill she could see everything going on in the valley. She thought she knew them all, was aware of all their secrets.

She decided to give the search five more minutes then return to the house. Her feet and her hands were freezing. She was too old for this sort of nonsense. She should have checked all the farm buildings before coming out on to the hill. Belle and Lottie were probably back in the kitchen, waiting for her. She walked on, shining the torch ahead of her, and came to one of Vic Liddle’s gibbets. The sight shocked her and she stood for a moment, holding on to the wall, trying to recover her composure. She had never seen one on the hill before; usually Liddle strung up the birds and animals he killed on a wire near the wood where they reared the pheasants. She muttered to herself disapprovingly. Why did gamekeepers have to make such a show of the vermin they destroyed, stringing the crows and jays and stoats on to a gibbet until they rotted?

She had always got on well enough with Vic Liddle and thought he would know better. Perhaps it was some sort of pagan superstition. This was a pole, stuck into the ground where two dry-stone walls met at right angles. All the corpses were fresh, most were crows. Then she saw the buzzard. It had been tied by its neck, so the wings and the great claws hung down. It was still beautiful. She shone her torch over it, stretching the wings, looking for signs that it had been shot. There was nothing.

She was so furious that for a moment she could not move, then she took a penknife from her pocket and cut the buzzard loose.

‘Poison,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘That bastard’s been using poison. I thought Vic had put a stop to that years ago.’

It was bad enough that the buzzard had been killed. Many gamekeepers hated them, suspected them of taking young grouse, and though it was illegal to kill them they were often shot. But poison was indiscriminate. The poisoned bait laid on the hill to be taken by the larger birds of prey was also taken by other birds, by farm animals, even by domestic pets.

Then her anger turned to fear and she knew that if Lottie and Belle had strayed on to the hill and eaten the poison, or one of the birds killed by poison, then they would be killed too. She turned the right angle of the dry-stone wall and walked on up the hill, past the keeper’s gibbet. Tears streamed down her face, and she shouted and swore into the still night, promising them vengeance, imagining bloody Grenville strung up by his neck on a pole.

She found the cats curled up together in a nest of grass. They were cold and lifeless, surprisingly small. She lifted them gently into the large poacher’s pocket inside her coat, her anger blown out, still crying. She walked back to the farm, carrying the buzzard over her shoulder, sliding over the frosty grass.

At the house she went into the kitchen without taking off her coat or her boots. She found one of the plastic carrier bags that had contained her supermarket purchases and put the buzzard inside. Even with the neck bent the claws stuck ridiculously out of the end. She tied the carrier bag at the top with a piece of string, fastening it around the horny legs, then put it carefully into the large chest freezer in the scullery. This was evidence. She was quite calm but determined that Marcus Grenville would pay.

She went outside again, this time locking the door behind her with the heavy brass key. Now there was a full moon and she could find her way on to the hill without difficulty. She retraced her steps, walking very slowly, giving all her attention to the search. Cars moved along the road towards Appleworth without her noticing. She moved along the dry-stone wall, inch by inch, moving the long tufts of juncus grass with her boot, shining the torch into the crevices between the stones. She was not wearing gloves and the hand holding the torch was very cold, but still she persisted, towards the keeper’s gibbet, just a silhouette now in the moonlight. She found what she was looking for when she had almost reached it. Set in a nest of grass, similar to that where she had found the dead cats, were four white hen’s eggs. On the open ground some yards away were pieces of broken shell. She lifted the eggs carefully and wrapped them in a large and dirty handkerchief, thinking as she did so that as she usually supplied Marie Liddle with eggs they might have come from her own hens. Ursula began to feel very cold and tired and she turned and made her way back to the house. There would be other poisoned eggs on the hill, but these were enough to serve her purpose. She was sure that when she got home and held them under a bright light she would see the tiny holes in the shell where they had been injected with poison.

She would arrange for them to be tested like the buzzard. That would give her all the proof she needed.

After the cold of the hill the kitchen seemed very hot. Condensation ran down the windows. Ursula stood by the Aga until her hands and feet tingled. She moved the kettle back on to the hot plate and padded into the drawing room in thick woollen socks to fetch a bottle of whisky. She missed Fred desperately. It seemed a daunting prospect that she would have to see the thing through by herself. She had taken all the decisions in their marriage but he had been there, behind her, giving her unquestioning support. She was not sure how she would face Marcus Grenville alone.

The sound of the telephone broke into her thoughts and she went unenthusiastically to answer it. She supposed it would be her daughter.

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