1
Thursday
The mud was everywhere at Pity Wood Farm. It lay in deep troughs under the walls of the house, it surged in wet tides where the cattle had poached the ground into a soup. And it was all over Jamie Wardâs boots, sticky and red, like blobs of damson jam. His steel toe-caps were coated with the stuff, and smears of it had splashed halfway up his denims â long, fat splatters, as if heâd been wading in blood.
Crouching in a corner of the yard, Jamie stared down at the mess and wondered when heâd get a chance to wipe it off. He couldnât remember if he had a clean pair of jeans back at his parentsâ house in Edendale, whether his mother had done his washing this week, or if heâd thrown his dirty clothes behind the bed again, where she wouldnât find them. Sheâd been complaining for the past month about the amount of dirt he brought into the house, the number of times she had to clean the filter on the washing machine. He wondered what sheâd say about this latest disaster when he got in.
And, as he heard the first police sirens wailing up the valley, it occurred to Jamie to wonder whether heâd actually be going home tonight at all.
âDamn it, boy. Why didnât you just cover it up again? It would have been for the best all round.â
Jamie shook his head. You couldnât just do that, could you? No matter what anyone else said, it wasnât right, and that was that. Heâd done the only thing he possibly could, in the circumstances. Heâd done the right thing, so there was nothing to regret.
âThrow some dirt on it and forget it. Thereâs no need for all this.â
He felt bad about it, all the same. It was bad for Nikolai and the other blokes. This was a nightmare they didnât want, and some of them couldnât afford. Just before Christmas, too, when they needed the money more than ever, he supposed. He was going to be popular, all right.
Jamie felt his muscles beginning to stiffen. The longer he stayed in one spot, the more he felt as though his boots were sinking into the ground. If he stayed here long enough, perhaps the blood-tinted earth would slowly close in and swallow him. His own weight would bury him.
Of course, he knew the mud only looked red because the soil here was clay when you got a few inches down. It was so unusual for this part of Derbyshire that heâd noticed it as soon as he started digging. Clay and mud, tons of crushed brick and corroded iron. It had been a nightmare of a job, almost impossible for his spade to deal with. Jamieâs rational mind told him that the colour was only because of the clay. And if the stuff on his boots looked too red, too dark, too wet ⦠well, that was just his imagination, wasnât it?
Jamie Ward thought he had plenty of common sense. He was educated, after all â not like most of the other lads on the crew. He would never be a victim of superstition and ignorance. He wasnât even particularly religious â he didnât cross himself when they passed a church, or hang a statue of the Virgin Mary over the dashboard of the van, the way Nikolai did.
But this mud was so sticky, and so smelly. It stank as though it had been rotting for centuries. Now, when Jamie finally straightened up, he saw a thick gob slide from his boot on to the ground. It formed a sort of oozing coil, like the dropping of some slimy creature that had been living on the old farm, left to itself when the owners moved out and the cattle disappeared. He pictured something that only came out at night to feed on carrion, scavenging among the ruins of pigsties before slinking back into a dark, damp corner between those abandoned silage bags.
âDamned fool. Kretyn.â
He remembered the way Nikolaiâs fist had gripped his jacket, the feel of the older manâs face pushed against his, rain glistening in his thick eyebrows and on his moustache. Jamie couldnât believe how angry Nikolai had been, not over something like this. The foreman had tolerated his bungling and his ignorance of the building trade with raucous good humour â until now. Yet suddenly this morning heâd been a different man, a wild thing, dangerously on the verge of violence. And all over a muddy hole.