Specimen

Chapter One: The Cliff at Rathmore

The wind came off the sea in long grey pushes, and Kirsty Rawle lay flat in the wet grass and let it come.

She had been in the same position for fifty minutes. Her elbows were numb, her chin was on the back of her left hand, and her right eye was pressed to the viewfinder of a camera that had cost more than her car. Two hundred feet below her, the sea worried at the base of the cliff. Above her, at eye level almost, on a ledge of red sandstone with a white stain of droppings beneath it, sat a female peregrine falcon.

The bird had been there twelve minutes. She had not moved except to turn her head, and each turn was so quick and so complete that it looked less like an animal moving than a machine indexing to the next position. Slate back. Barred chest. A dark hood over the face like a helmet.

Kirsty did not breathe out until the falcon looked away.

This was the whole of her job, and she loved it the way other people loved a religion: hours of stillness in bad weather for four seconds of something that mattered. She had photographed otters on the Tamar and choughs in Cornwall and a badger sett in a Bristol back garden, and none of it had made her a living. She had thirty-one years behind her, eleven of them freelance, and an overdraft that arrived every month like weather.

And then, eight days ago, Sonia Bligh from Wild Isles Quarterly had rung her.

A long-form commission. Eight thousand words of somebody else's text and up to twenty of Kirsty's photographs, a full portfolio spread, print and digital, a year of following one pair of peregrines through a nesting cycle on the south Devon coast. The fee alone would have been enough. The credit would be worth more than the fee.

"There's a catch," Sonia had said. "The site we want is on private land. We can't get access. Three of my people have tried."

"Whose land?"

"An estate called Rathmore. The owner doesn't answer letters."

Kirsty had laughed. "So you want me because I'm cheap and stubborn."

"I want you because your seal pictures made me cry on a Tuesday morning," Sonia said. "But yes. Also cheap and stubborn."

Now the falcon dropped off the ledge.

She did not flap. She simply left, tipping forward into the wind, and the wind took her along the cliff face at a speed that made Kirsty's chest tighten. Kirsty tracked her, shutter chattering, and watched the bird flick up over the lip of the headland and vanish inland above the black line of trees.

Beyond those trees stood the roof of a house.

Kirsty rolled onto her back, wiped the drizzle off the lens hood with a cloth from her sleeve, and lay looking at the sky for a moment. It was the fourth of November. The light would be gone by half past four and it was nearly three.

She got up, and her knees complained, and she walked back along the coast path towards the stile.

The boundary of the Rathmore estate ran for almost half a mile beside the path — first a wall of red stone with ferns growing out of its joints, then iron railings, then wall again. Halfway along there was a gate that had not been opened in years, held shut by a chain and a padlock the size of a fist. A sign was screwed to it, enamelled, old-fashioned, the letters black on cream:

RATHMORE. PRIVATE. NO ADMITTANCE.

The nesting ledge was inside that boundary. That was the problem. From the public path she could see the ledge only at an angle, and only in flat, useless side-light. From the estate's own cliff meadow — thirty yards of grass on the other side of the wall — she would have the birds in profile with the sea behind them, and the morning sun coming over her right shoulder from November through to June.

She stopped at the gate and looked through the bars, the way she had already done twice that week.

A gravel drive curved up between clipped yew. Not neglected yew — clipped. Each shape was a cone or a dome, and each one matched its partner on the far side of the drive with an exactness that was almost uncomfortable, as if the garden had been drawn on graph paper. Beyond, the house showed grey: three storeys of Victorian stone, tall windows, a slate roof steep enough to shed the weather. One chimney smoking. Every curtain in the place hung open at precisely the same width.

Kirsty had grown up in a house where nothing matched. She found herself staring.

Then she felt it. The small crawl at the base of the skull that ten years of hides and lying in ditches had taught her to trust: the feeling of being looked at.

She turned her head slowly, the way she would have turned it if a deer had come into a clearing.

At the top of the drive, half in the shadow of the yews, a man stood. He was about sixty yards away. He wore a dark waxed jacket. He was holding a pair of binoculars, and the binoculars were pointed at her.

Kirsty raised a hand. Not a wave exactly — an acknowledgement.

The man lowered the binoculars. For perhaps two seconds he was simply a man on his own drive, upright, unhurried. Then he stepped back into the yews and was gone.

She waited for a moment to see if he would come down to the gate. He did not. There was only the shifting of the trees and, from somewhere behind the house, the flat call of a rook.

Kirsty walked on. By the time she reached the stile she had made a decision, and by the time she got to the lay-by where the car was parked with rain beading on the windscreen, she had rehearsed it three times.

Sonia's people had written letters. Letters were easy to ignore.

She sat in the car with the heater on and her hands around a thermos cup and looked back along the wall to where the Rathmore chimneys stood up above the trees, a single thread of smoke bending east.

He had been watching her. Which meant he was interested in what happened on his boundary, and interested people could be talked to.

She would knock on the door.

On the drive home, the lanes narrowed until the hedges brushed both mirrors, and she thought about the peregrine going over the treeline — the way it had not so much flown as poured itself through the air.

A thing that fast, she thought, doesn't need luck. It just needs a place to stand.

She had a place to ask for, and she was going to ask.