but Timothy came back with the message that all they required was more Coke, and Jane went whizzing up to the shop for it. Then, quite suddenly, the gateway was clear of stone again, and they were gone, and she hadn’t got to worry about their jeans falling down any more, and Mr. Gotobed was back to his hedge-laying, whistling to himself like a man with a job well done. Rose went to inspect the new rockery, tactfully, since he had made no attempt to show it to her. She had to admit they had made the best of a bad job. The pieces of concrete were towards the back, turned cunningly so that soil covered the twisting, rusted reinforcement wires. The big blocks of sandstone had been set on edge, so their corners jutted up like minute mountains. The smaller round stones had been wedged tightly between, not leaving an inch of soil exposed. The whole effect was of a decaying bit of Hitler’s West Wall, in miniature. With tank-traps. Rose told herself it was the kind thought that mattered . . .
By the time he went home, Mr. Gotobed had nearly finished the hedge-laying. The only bit of hedge untouched was the bit that overshadowed the tank-traps. But in his erratic way, he had left it, in the last half-hour of work, and turned his attention again to weeding the front garden. Rose told herself to be charitable. It would be awkward to lay that bit of hedge now, swinging the billhook standing on tiny pinnacles of sandstone. Of course, he should have thought of that before he made the damned rockery! But then, she didn’t think he could be all that bright . . .
The children were oddly troubled over supper. She kept on looking up from the Cornish pasties heated in the oven of the range, and peas and potatoes boiled on the open fire, to see them exchanging looks, nods and shrugs. Which they stopped, as soon as they saw her watching.
She looked down at her plate, carefully slicing off a triangular corner of pasty as neatly as a surgeon, and said suddenly, ‘All right, what’s going on?’
‘You tell her.’
‘No, you!’
After quite a lot of this, Timothy said, ‘Mr. Gotobed’s set snares for rabbits in the garden. They’re very cunning – you can hardly see them cos he’s wrapped grass round them – but I wondered what he was fiddling with so much, and after he’d gone, I looked.’
‘Snares?’ Rose’s blood was up in a second. ‘Do you know how snares work? Do you know how cruel they are? The rabbit’s neck goes through the loop, when it’s running along a path, and the rabbit struggles to get out and the noose tightens and tightens, until the rabbit slowly chokes to death. If it doesn’t choke on its own blood. Where are these snares?’
Timothy had gone a bit white. ‘I’ll show you, Mum. There’s three . . .’ He led the small and shocked procession out of doors.
The first was not far from the front gate. It was right against the hedge, opposite a small hole in the bottom of the hawthorns, where some small creature seemed to have worn a path in the long grass.
‘The rabbit comes running through there,’ said Rose. ‘And,’ she thrust her hand and wrist along the tiny faint path, and a noose of plaited grass closed tightly round her wrist; tightly enough to crease her pale flesh. And inside the plait of grass was the glint of plaited copper wire. And on the end of the loop of wire, a length of strong dull-brown cord. And then she heaved, and a big soily peg like a tent-peg came out of the ground with a flurry of earth. ‘That’s how a snare works!’ She added, ‘I’m going to throw it in the trash can.’
‘There isn’t one, Mum,’ said Jane thoughtfully.
‘Mr. Gotobed takes all the rubbish away,’ said Timothy.
‘They are his snares,’ said Jane. ‘They look like they cost quite a lot of money . . .’ Her voice was slightly shocked.
‘Whose side are you on?’ demanded Rose. Then she said, ‘I shall speak to him, in the morning. Go and fetch the other two snares, Tim. And make sure you don’t hurt yourself . . .’
But Tim seemed to have seen something in the surrounding grass.
‘Here’s one of the rabbit’s hairs,’ he said. ‘It’s very dark, for a rabbit.’
‘You get black rabbits,’ said Jane. ‘Witches used to keep black rabbits