High Island Blues by Ann Cleeves Read Free Book Online

was already on his feet, rounding up the members of the party with the enthusiasm of a sheep dog, harrying them until they were all ready to go.
    When Rob had come to High Island the year before there had been a young woman in the group. He couldn’t remember her name now. She hadn’t been his type. But she had called Boy Scout Wood ‘The Secret Garden’ and for him the name had stuck. It was very small and compact, hardly more than a garden, so you could wander out of it quite easily and find yourself in the yard of a neighbouring house. And the tangle of trees came as a surprise. You turned off an ordinary street of tidy houses and found yourself in a wilderness.
    The street was full of birders’ cars. They were covered with stickers, some with distinctive birders’ licence plates. Rob ignored the queue at the information booth and set his group up at Purkey’s Pond, the only permanent surface water in the wooded part of the reserve. There was a gallery of tiered benches, overlooking the water. It was crammed with people leaning forward, binoculars focused. There were Dutch birders and Swedish birders and birders from all over the States. But most of all there were British birders and Rob waved to people he had last seen at Cley, in Norfolk, or shared a beer with in the observatory on Fair Isle.
    ‘What have you got?’ Rob asked an obese American. He had a backside which sagged either side of the bench.
    The man chewed on a piece of gum. ‘A couple of yellow billed cuckoos,’ he said, then paused before adding, ‘Nice enough, but I guess by the end of the day there’ll be too many birds to count.’
    Rob set up his telescope so he could show the more inexperienced members of the group the birds. He was beginning to know his party as individuals now. There were the dreadful Lovegroves, the middle-aged, spinster sisters, who bickered like a married couple on the brink of divorce. There was a seventy-five-year-old retired doctor from Inverness who had the build of a mountaineer and a bigger world list than Rob. And there was Ray, an ex-miner from Nottingham who was determined to see as many birds as he could until his redundancy money ran out.
    Connie seemed worried about Ray. Although it hadn’t started raining she was wearing a transparent plastic raincoat and a rainhood of a design Rob had not seen since his childhood. She might have been at a Mother’s Union picnic at Weston-Super-Mare.
    ‘Haven’t you got family then, my dear?’ she asked the miner.
    ‘Bugger the family,’ Ray said. ‘They’ve lived off me long enough. I don’t doubt they’ll still be there when I get back.’
    And Connie had given an odd little laugh as if she were not shocked, but confused.
    All morning the sky grew darker. Still the rain did not come. Rob thought he would be let down again and prepared himself for another anti-climax. He became tense and anxious and bummed a cigarette, although he had given up smoking months before.
    When Mick and Oliver didn’t arrive, he worried that there was a rarity in Smith Oaks. He convinced himself that he was missing out. But when he asked the other birders who swept in a tide between the two reserves, they said no, it wasn’t very different at Smith Oaks. It seemed that everyone was waiting for the migrants to fall from the sky.
    Once he thought he saw Mick and Laurie standing hand in hand at the end of a trail but there were so many people that he could not be sure. There was no sign of Oliver.
    The rain started when they were in a clearing in the woodland called the Cathedral, though it was more the size of a small chapel and not so much the shape of a nave but of a boat, with a wooden bench running around the edge as if round a deck rail. From the boardwalk it was possible to look right up into the tops of the trees.
    The rain started slowly, with heavy individual drops, but then became a downpour. And with the rain came the birds. Suddenly there were twenty rose-breasted grosbeaks