No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (the best electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

‘First day in Woodside and it’s time to pick some onions! Yep, Bram’s much-derided self-sufficiency drive is finally paying off. Let’s harvest those suckers! Let’s–’

He stopped, looking from the screen of the phone to the actual ground.

‘Oh, no! No no no!’

Where the veg patch should be there was just a rectangle of earth covered in shrivelled, dry, yellowing stalks and flopped-over leaves. Stupidly, he looked around for a moment, as if the real veg patch might be somewhere else, before dropping to his knees and examining the nearest plants, a row of Salad Bowl lettuces. They had been succulent lime green and deep purple last time he’d been here but were now a uniform gungy brown, the lower leaves stuck gummily to the soil, already half-decomposed.

Bloody Nora, as Kirsty’s mum would say.

Everything was dead.

Okay so he’d not checked the veg for a few days – he’d been too distracted with the move – and they’d had a very sunny, dry spell. But this was Scotland. Surely it hadn’t been hot enough to kill them? He touched the soil. The top layer was crumbly, powdery between his thumb and forefinger, but when he poked his finger down a few centimetres he hit dampish earth.

He stepped across the row of ex-lettuces to examine the other vegetables. The carrot shaws were withered and papery, but when he pulled up a carrot – a puny specimen at this time of year – it looked more or less okay. But if they’d been hit by some kind of blight, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to eat any of it.

The onions were just starting to fill out, too, the bulbs that were peeping up from the soil fattening nicely. It would have been satisfying to have a few home-grown onions, no matter how small, for their first lunch in the new house.

Oh, well. He supposed these things happened. He wasn’t exactly an expert gardener, but he had grown chillies and peppers and courgettes in their tiny London garden, successfully enough to generate a surplus which he’d proudly offered to the neighbours.

He brushed the soil off his fingers and tapped his phone to start a new video, panning over the dead lettuces. ‘The question I should probably be asking myself is: am I a fit person to have custody of vegetables? I feel like some sort of ban should be slapped on me.’ He zoomed in on the pathetic carrot he’d left lying on the soil. ‘Prohibiting the growing of vegetables for, say, five or ten years.’

He cut the video and pocketed his phone. At least the blog post tonight would be a bit more interesting than usual. A bit more entertaining. He lifted his face as the sun appeared from behind a fluffy white cloud.

And at the exact same moment, somebody screamed.

Phoebe!

He was off and running before the echo from the trees had died away, past the terrace, round the house, and then he could see them, Phoebe and Max, and thank God, thank God, neither of them was hurt, they didn’t look hurt – Phoebe was running across the grass after Max, who was pelting towards the whirly drier, where something, a black cloth, was catching the breeze, flapping as the whirly turned –

It wasn’t a black cloth.

It was a bird.

A crow. Tangled in the whirly, wings flapping.

But before Max reached it, Bram could see that the wings were only flapping because the whirly was spinning round, that the bird was dead, the wind catching its wings, seeming to reanimate it.

‘Daaaad! He’s caught his feet!’ Phoebe wailed as he ran past her. ‘You have to help him!’

Max had reached the whirly and stopped it with his hands. He stood staring at the bird, now hanging, obviously dead, wings spread in a cruel parody of flight.

‘Okay, Max,’ said Bram, gently pulling the boy away.

His face was white. ‘I thought – I thought it was still alive. How did it get here?’

‘I don’t know. It must have become tangled–’ But Bram could see, now, the blue nylon twine around the bird’s legs, tying it to the cord.

‘Oh God, Dad, did someone – did they tie it on, while it was still alive?’

‘What?’ sobbed Phoebe, suddenly there, suddenly reaching past Max –

‘No no.’ Bram pulled her away, hugged her to his chest. ‘It must have already been dead.’

Phoebe wriggled away from him and reached out a hand to the crow, gently touching one of its wings. ‘Are you sure?’ she wailed. ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure. Come on, kleintje. Let’s go back inside.’

‘What happened to him, Dad?’

He crouched in front of her, wiping the tears from her face. ‘I don’t know. I’m going to have a look at him and then bury him, okay?’

She gulped, wiping now at her own face. ‘A kind of post mortem? Do you think he was – murdered?’ She turned to look again at the crow, and of course that set her off again, her face collapsing on a sob.

Bram half-carried her back inside, and took her on his knee for a while as she cried, sitting at the kitchen table while Max busied himself chopping up vegetables for his quiche. When Phoebe was calm again, she said, ‘You have to do the post mortem now, Dad, and bury him,’ and Max said, ‘Come on then, Phoebs, what about this abomination of a quiche filling you’re insisting on making?’

‘Why would someone do it?’ she whispered, looking at Bram as if he had the answers, as if he could explain it, as if he could tell her it was all a mistake and the crow was going to be fine.

But he could only shake his head.

Back out at the whirly, he shrinkingly studied the crow. Its eyes were filmed over and – ugh, yes, something was moving at its neck. Maggots. It must have been dead a while. Just as well he’d brought gloves. He held the dead bird around its middle as he gently untied the nylon twine,