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

talking to it as he did so, ridiculously: ‘I’m sorry, mate. I’m sorry.’ There was dried blood on the feathers of its chest. It had been shot?

He couldn’t get Phoebe’s question out of his head:

Why would someone do it?

Not so much shoot the crow – Bram wasn’t such a city slicker that he wasn’t aware of the war on wildlife waged by many farmers – but bring it here and tie it to their whirly drier?

Why? Why would anyone do that?

2

David was manfully eating a large slice of Phoebe’s quiche, washed down with frequent gulps of beer, as if it were a bush tucker trial. ‘Are you a man or a mouse, Bram?’ he chuckled when Bram declined to sample it. Fraser was also shovelling it in, but Linda had surreptitiously fed her portion, against her own no feeding him at the table rules, to her guide dog Bertie – who, being a Labrador, had inhaled it gratefully, hardly able to believe his luck.

Phoebe herself was sitting poking at the food on her plate, eyelids swollen and red from the bouts of crying she couldn’t seem to stop.

‘Aye,’ said David, sitting back on his chair. ‘Farmers hate crows. Shoot them on sight, and–’

‘Do you want another beer?’ Bram interrupted. He had told the other adults what had happened and explicitly asked them not to mention it in front of the kids.

‘If you insist, Bram, if you insist.’ David held out the empty bottle of Potholer as if Bram were a waiter. Bram took the bottle from him, dumped it by the sink and opened the fridge to get another.

‘Farmers hate crows with a passion,’ David continued. ‘You see them strung up on fences all over the place out here – the theory is that crows flying by will think Oh bloody hell, there’s been a massacre down there and move along to some other bastard’s crop.’

‘Dad,’ murmured Kirsty.

‘What?’

‘He’s right enough,’ Fraser put his oar in.

Bram set the fresh bottle of beer at David’s place firmly, giving first David and then Fraser a repressive frown. Fraser was bigger and even more muscle-bound than David, but their features were spookily alike, down to the squashed boxer’s noses and shaved heads. They always reminded Bram of the Mitchell brothers in EastEnders, although he hadn’t shared that little nugget with anyone.

Genetics had gone rogue in the McKechnie family – Fraser seemed to have received all David’s genes and none of Linda’s, and Kirsty vice versa, although Kirsty would probably tell him that wasn’t possible.

Both the kids, thank God, also favoured Linda. Her greying hair had once been as dark as theirs and her features were delicate, her sightless eyes a striking green, her nose rather long and very elegant, if a nose could ever be described as such. Linda had been a premature baby, and the extra oxygen she’d received in the incubator had resulted in the retinal blood vessels growing abnormally. Retinopathy of prematurity, her type of blindness was called. Bram thought she was pretty amazing, the way she lived a normal life and had brought up two kids despite not being able to see a thing, not even light and dark, although he’d never come out and said so in case it came across as patronising.

‘Phoebe and Max don’t want to hear this,’ Linda said now.

‘Local farmer probably thought he was doing you a favour,’ David continued regardless, pushing more quiche onto his fork. ‘Keeping them off your vegetables – let’s face it, you need all the help you can get.’

Bram had shown them the withered vegetables. A mistake, maybe, but it had been a distraction, he’d thought, from the dead crow. Typical of David to use it now in an attempt to deflect the women’s ire. Attack was the best form of defence. But at least it was a change of topic.

‘That sort of help we can do without,’ said Kirsty, as Bram resumed his seat. ‘Bram’s green fingers are a bit rusty, that’s all.’

Max smiled. ‘That’s some mixed metaphor, Mum.’

‘Mixed metaphor!’ David repeated in a silly high voice. ‘Someone swallowed a dictionary? That a metaphor too, is it?’

It was pathetic, the way David made digs at Max for being a nerd, as if having a super-bright grandson was something to be ashamed of. Bram saw Kirsty tense, and Linda turned her head slightly towards her daughter in what Bram interpreted as a gesture of solidarity but also a plea for forbearance, as if to say Never mind your father, we all know what he’s like, just ignore the idiot. David pushed everyone’s buttons, but particularly Kirsty’s, and two months of close proximity seemed not to have done their relationship much good.

Since Max had arrived last week, things had, inevitably, got worse, Max being something of a bone of contention between his parents and grandfather. Bram was only too well aware that David regarded him as a terrible role model for Max, and Bram returned the favour. He was fine with David teaching Max DIY skills and buying him weights for his birthday last month to improve his strength – ever since David had beaten his grandson in an arm-wrestling contest, he’d been going on about how Max had worse muscle tone than a pensioner. But he was less keen on David’s other efforts to get Max to ‘man up’ – his attempts to teach him martial arts and boxing, and his gifts of books about the SAS and violent video games for Christmas, although, to Bram and Kirsty’s satisfaction, Max hadn’t even taken the shrink-wrap off Call of Duty: Warzone.

No wonder Kirsty had been so desperate to get them all moved out of her parents’ house and into Woodside. David was, let’s face it, a nightmare. Bram had made it crystal clear that they didn’t want to talk about the dead crow over lunch, so what did David do?

Talk about the dead crow.

Kirsty met Bram’s gaze with a grimace, and he gave her a reassuring smile. Kirsty was always