Out of a Clear Sky Read online

  OUT OF A

  CLEAR SKY

  ‘An intelligent novel about a woman in a man’s world, in which Manda’s desire to belong blinds her to the danger lurking behind a shared obsession’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Anyone who has seen the competitive passion of twitchers in full cry will find this sophisticated first novel both entertaining and credible . . . Highly recommended’

  Literary Review

  ‘Crime fiction gains a new voice in Sally Hinchcliffe with her psychological thriller Out of a Clear Sky’

  Publishing News – the new names to watch

  ‘There is much to enjoy in this first novel by Sally Hinchcliffe . . . fine writing skills, her language is lush and engaging, [and] her detailed descriptions of birds elegantly written’

  Bookbag

  ‘This is a well-written book by a novelist of genuine promise. My guess is that we will hear a great deal more of Sally Hinchcliffe’

  Do You Write Under Your Own Name?

  ‘A cleverly pitched psychological thriller in which you can never tell if the narrator is to be relied upon or not . . . A compelling story and one that offers a new slant on familiar territory and delivers a gratifyingly ambiguous resolution’

  Black Static

  ‘Out of a Clear Sky is an enthralling read with some fantastic descriptions and observations that immediately transport you to the heart of the scene. 9/10’

  Peterborough Evening Telegraph

  OUT OF A

  CLEAR SKY

  Sally Hinchcliffe is in her thirties and, having graduated from Oxford with a First in PPE, has spent the last ten years working at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. She completed the MA in creative writing at Birkbeck in 2004, and has also had various short stories published. Out of a Clear Sky is her first novel.

  SALLY HINCHCLIFFE

  OUT OF A

  CLEAR SKY

  PAN BOOKS

  To Paul

  First published 2008 by Macmillan

  First published in paperback 2009 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-50809-4 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-50808-7 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-50905-3 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Sally Hinchcliffe 2008

  The right of Sally Hinchcliffe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  Contents

  Part One

  Ravens

  Kingfisher

  Ring-necked Parakeets

  Great Crested Grebes

  Dunnock

  Starling

  Firecrest

  Skylark

  Tawny Owl

  Part Two

  Wren

  Cuckoo

  Part Three

  Swifts

  Part Four

  Red Kite

  Ravens Revisited

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Julia Bell, without whose encouragement this book would never have got started. Thanks also to all at Birkbeck, and particularly the full-timers: Sue Tyley, Amanda Schiff, Lamya Al Khraisha, Rachel Wright, Cathy Sibirzeff and Alex Sartore, without whom it might never have been finished.

  Special thanks to Jake Smith-Bosanquet at Conville & Walsh for not finding a reason to reject it, and to Maria Rejt at Pan Macmillan for her insightful editing. Both of them have helped to turn my ugly duckling into a swan.

  Lastly I must thank my family – particularly my parents – and Paul for giving me the space to let my imagination take flight, and for never asking to read it until it was finished.

  My apologies to the town and people of Maidenhead for placing an entirely fictional university on its outskirts. Although Maidenhead is undeniably real, many of the places and all of the people depicted in this book are not. Only the birds are drawn from life.

  PART ONE

  RAVENS

  Corvus corax, family ‘Corvidae’

  A pair of them. They pair for life, ravens, like swans. They are generally identified by their size – much bigger than the other British corvids – but size can be tricky. Held in the circle of the binoculars, a bird’s size is difficult to judge accurately except by reference to something else: a tree, another bird, a human figure.

  These two were displaying their huge wingspan – well over a metre – as they spread and hopped awkwardly around the prone body on the ledge. Easily bigger than a rook or crow. I couldn’t see from my vantage point at the top of the corrie whether they had taken out the eyes yet with their heavy beaks. Probably. Those, and the soft belly, are where the carrion eaters attack first, if they are left a find like this by the predators. Fleece and Gore-Tex had protected the belly in this case but the eyes – the eyes are another matter. Fleece and Gore-Tex would probably long outlast the rest of the body, but what else would eat it there, caught on the ledge, if the ravens didn’t?

  Another pair came in and circled uncertainly as the first two flew up to challenge them with loud hoarse croaking calls. I watched the display fascinated and repelled, unable to tear myself away until several more birds flew in to join them and they finally settled together around the body to share the feast. That was when I withdrew behind the bothy and threw up, heaving yellow bile from an empty stomach, the convulsions continuing until even that was gone and I was retching only air.

  I leaned my head against the cool stones of the wall, thinking hard. This was one bird sighting I wouldn’t be writing down. I knew now that I must erase all traces of my presence here. I kicked dirt over the spot where I’d thrown up, smoothing the loose earth over and over until no sign remained. I went back into the bothy and surveyed his scattered belongings. It looked as though he had stayed a couple of nights before my arrival, making himself at home. I had a sudden vision of policemen crawling over the hut and his belongings, picking them clean of evidence. I took the sleeping bag out of the hut and held it open into the whipping highland wind and hoped it would scour all signs of me from it. Feeling slightly foolish, I put on my gloves to examine the contents of his backpack. A few oddments of anonymous clothing – white T-shirts and shorts, thick walking socks, a shirt worn and faded with washing. It seemed very little, spread out on the sleeping bag, a sorry assemblage of things to leave behind you. A few empty food cans – a couple of days’ worth – had been rinsed and stacked neatly in a corner but there was no more food in the bag apart from a couple of snack bars and a water canteen. I was surprised to find no binoculars or scope, no tripod, no camera. I looked around for another pack but found nothing. He must have been wearing the bins when he fell, I thought. I tried to remember but I could form no clear mental p
icture and I didn’t feel like peering down to have another look at his body. After some thought I took his bar of Kendal mint cake but left his canteen, map and, more reluctantly, his compass. Useful as it would be, it would be the sort of thing that was expected. He had to have died a lonely death. Anything else would just be complicated.

  I was about to leave when a familiar shape caught my eye. Tucked into a gap in the stones beside the door was a little field notebook, its black cover held shut by an elastic band. Curiosity made me pick it up and flip it open, unsure of what to expect. The first page I opened was headed ‘Manda’ in the fine-nibbed map-making pen a lot of birders seemed to use, double underlined. My name. Just the sight of it lifted the hairs of my scalp in a primitive ripple of horror, animal in its intensity. There was a photograph of me too, taken some time ago, a fragment, creased and faded, torn from something bigger. I was smiling uneasily, at some occasion I didn’t recall. A group shot from which the rest of the group had been excised, leaving me smiling on, alone.

  As I went reluctantly through its pages I saw just how little I had managed to evade him, how futile had been my attempts at escape. Almost every step of my journey up to these mountains had been observed and meticulously noted down, page by page, day after day, well before I’d even guessed I was being followed. There were sketch maps and map references, dates, times, almost a parody of a real field notebook, except that the quarry was different. The quarry was me.

  I tore out each sheet as I went with clumsy gloved fingers, hands shaking as I fumbled with the thin paper. My name soon blurred into meaningless scribbles with the repetition and I soon stopped reading the words and just worked back until I had emptied the book completely. I burnt the whole pile of papers right there in the bothy and crumbled their remains into dust. Charred scraps rose feather-like into the air and flew off in the biting wind, taking my name with them, the whole sorry history of the past. The photograph was the last to go and the hardest to destroy. One after another the matches broke in my fingers until finally I tore my gloves off to get a better grip. Even then my shaking hands made it hard to scratch a flame from the worn end of the box. My face – its foolish awkward smile – blackened and curled but wouldn’t catch until I blew on it, watching it warp in the flame. I dropped the last flickering corner as the heat threatened my fingers and kicked at the smoking remains, erasing the traces of fire. Then I packed everything back into his bag. I paused at the doorway to check my work. Everything seemed to be left as I had remembered it. As though I had never been there at all.

  I stepped once more out of the hut, squinting at the brightness after the gloom inside. Behind me something shifted and coughed and I whipped round to see a sheep backing slowly away from me before it turned and ran, foolishly bleating. Up on the cracked slates of the roof another raven perched and looked at me, unfazed, before taking off with heavy strokes of the wings and dropping suddenly down over the edge of the cliff. Below, the rest of them were still hopping and circling, unsure of how to unwrap their prize. Ravens have very little fear of humans, especially in these remote places. I shouted and waved but that barely shifted them from the prone figure. A volley of stones was more effective, driving them off for a short while. But they’re intelligent, and big and bold. Food was food. A prize like this, out of reach of other scavengers, was too good to miss. I gave up when the birds returned for the second time, and started to prepare instead for the long walk out.

  I wondered if it was the drop that had killed him or the exposure. Summer or no summer, the night had been a cold one up here but I had heard nothing: no cries, no pleas, nothing after that first inhuman scream when he hit the ledge to suggest he’d survived at all. I had spent the first half of the night huddled quietly in the bothy, staring at the darkening wall until at some point I was forced by the chill to crawl into his sleeping bag and curl up in its warmth. I’d never killed anyone before.

  Midsummer’s night, it had been; the shortest night of the year, just a brief interval of darkness at these latitudes. Short and endless. Even after I had got into the sleeping bag I lay there with my eyes open against the dark and played out a hundred alternatives that didn’t end with his still and broken body lying at the foot of a cliff. I saw myself managing to slip his grasp and outrun him, barring the door to the bothy. I watched us grappling round so that it was me with my back to the cliff, not him, me falling, horribly silent, through the air to hit with that terrible cry. By the time dawn came I must finally have slipped into a doze and these fantasies had merged into repeated brief and futile dreams, treading over the same worn ground. I had woken stiff and cold to the realization that dreaming them had changed nothing.

  There’s a certain cool clear light that comes when the day dawns overcast. A stealthy light. I have always woken early, from years of starts in the oh-god-hundred hours, getting up while it’s still dark, fumbling for last night’s clothes and pulling a woolly hat over last night’s hair. Leaving silently along the sodium-lit streets to await the first paling of the sky, the first tentative calls of the blackbirds. Those overcast dawns are the best, the truest light. There’s no false colour, no shadows or glare. People talk about the cold, hard light of day. There’s no escaping what you can see by it. There can be no confusing, in that early morning light, the truth with the wished-for reality of dreams. The body was still there. He was still dead.

  With the bothy cleared, and my few possessions packed up, all I could do was get myself out unseen. I started off slowly along the hillside, keeping the sharp drop of the corrie to my right, wishing I had more food, a working phone, a GPS. Ahead of me the drop was gentler, ridge after ridge of heather and scree patches, empty even of sheep. Behind me more ravens were circling over the abandoned shelter, ragged black shapes against the grey sky.

  I had walked for no more than a few minutes when the whipping wind brought in cloud that rolled down the slopes of the mountain and engulfed me in fog. One minute I was standing on the ridge looking down towards the burn that I knew would lead me back to safety, the next the world had been wiped out and I was standing in a circle no more than a few yards in diameter surrounded by whiteness. Darker shapes seemed to form and disperse in the cloud around me, disorienting me. What little I could see of the surrounding moor was uniform in all directions, as blankly uninformative as the mist. I knew I hadn’t moved from where I had stood and surveyed my route but in my mind I felt as though I had spun round to face the drop. I couldn’t shake the conviction that a few blind steps would send me stumbling downwards over the cliff edge. And all around me the ravens rose. Birds are visual navigators, and will generally avoid flying blind, but these ones were everywhere, calling, mocking, their cries surrounding me. In the fog their shapes were nightmarish shadows, advancing, retreating, enormous.

  The ravens called amongst themselves, their voices almost human, but speaking in a language I couldn’t understand. They are the dark birds of mythology, creatures of ill omen, feared and honoured, messengers of the gods, creators of the world. They circled around me, and as they turned I turned with them, keeping them always before me. We circled together, alone in a world of swirling mist. I had lost all sense of where the drop was. I turned, uncaring.

  And then as the birds rose it was as if the clouds rose with them, and I was back in the clear air. The ravens had abandoned me, vanished as though they had never been there, and the world around me was silent and still. For a moment I didn’t recognize where I was, the empty upland, the high surrounding hills. I was a child again, lost in an endless sea of savannah grass, afraid to move, afraid I’d never be found, afraid that nobody would come and look for me. My father always said, ‘Keep still, stay where you are,’ and that’s how he’d find me, rooted to the spot, hardly daring to breathe until he came.

  The illusion lasted only a moment before it passed. Then I was back on a Scottish mountainside, alone, the solid weight of my pack anchoring me to the earth, the yawning drop no closer than before. I breathed again. I f
elt the pull of the empty moorland calling, away from the path I’d taken the day before, away from people, from roads, from civilization. I was no longer waiting to be found. So I turned and walked away.

  KINGFISHER

  Alcedo atthis, family ‘Alcedinidae’

  The year had started with a very different dawn. Seven a.m. on New Year’s Day with the rest of the world asleep. It was still dark as I drove in on the Selsey road but when I stopped the car the sky was just beginning to lighten. I sat in the car park outside Church Norton feeling the deadening effects of the night before. I thought Id managed to negotiate the fine line between drinking enough to make the evening bearable and keeping sober enough to be able to make the dawn start, but there was still a black ache of hangover behind my eyes. My head was full of the flat buzz of tiredness, and shaking it did little to clear it. I got out and fumbled with the car lock, my scope awkwardly dangling from one shoulder, hands stiffening in the raw cold. There was a brief moment of longing for a warm bed and a lie in, but then the long mournful hooting of an owl recalled me to my senses.

  I stepped into the little thicket that leads down to the main hide and the harbour, scanning the trees. I was instantly alert, ears open, eyes straining against the gloom. A second call pulled me further in, off the path. It was darker under the trees, and the ground was covered in twigs and leaf litter. I paused between each step, placing my feet carefully, hardly daring to breathe. Another call, then nothing. As I stood and listened I could hear the bare murmur of the sea and the soft hiss of tyres on the nearby road as a car drove past. My own breathing. And then a different sound: dried leaf pressing against dried leaf as if under the weight of a foot. I held my breath and listened some more, turning my head slowly back towards the way I’d come. Around me, as I turned my head, the wood seemed peopled by shifting shadows. The trees coalesced in the gloom into a single shape, which then vanished. Another sharp rustle, another shadow forming between the trees. I could hear now only the pounding footsteps of the blood in my own veins. My ears pushed against the silence. There was a final sharp movement and I was galvanized.