Rowan watches her as she turns away. Momentarily alone again, his mouth feels dry.
The thing in the bare brick room: the shape on the wall. They’ve unsettled him. He feels somehow unclean, as if his skin were rimed with some greasy lotion: big oily smears of bacon-fat streaking the vulnerable flesh beneath his drenched clothes.
He follows her down the path, and with each step further from the locked door and its unnerving contents, he feels the chill within him begin to thaw.
Turning away from a harsh gust of rain-filled wind, his eyes fall upon the small strip of untended flowerbed beneath the downstairs windows. He turns his back on the wind, narrowing his eyes. Wordlessly, he pulls out the phone, a fresh new crack glistening on the display, and takes a couple of quick shots. He inspects the images. The footprint is clear: a perfect impression in the wet mud. Five oval hollows and the deeper print of the arch and heel of a bare foot. Somebody has stood here recently, gazing in.
Rowan stares through the glass into the dark room: an explorer gazing into the untold wonders and mysteries of an unopened tomb. It feels as though millipedes and scarab beetles and are scuttling and wriggling upon his skin.
He turns away. Follows Rosie towards the light
18
Tuesday, November 14, 1988
Shell Farm, Borrowdale
1.04pm
This cold, dank air carries a trace of smoke; the memory of flame. It is not enough to disguise the putrid reek beneath. This is the smell of a wasted year; the obnoxious stench of a thousand bales of hay turning black and decaying: putrefying back into the earth after a season of endless rain.
DS Evelyn Cater knows the smell. She grew up in a small Yorkshire market town. Daddy always told her she should marry a farmer, if he could find one willing to put up with a lass who couldn’t resist asking questions and who looked like somebody had dressed a piglet in a pinafore dress. Always had a way with words, did Daddy. He said she’d never go hungry if she did. Said she should marry somebody who thought they were getting better value for money the fatter their livestock became. She hadn’t taken his advice. Never did. Became a copper back when women police constables were about as popular as an uninvited house-guest with chronic diarrhea. She’s done well at it too. The lads rate her highly. She’s put bad people behind bars. She can punch her weight and never backs down from a ruck. Some of the old boys even forget that she’s female – neglecting to shout ‘ladies present’ whenever some foul language spews forth from a beery lip, or a colleague raises an ample buttock off the barstool and blasts a gust of methane into the smoky air. She feels comfortable in most environments now. Even here. She certainly didn’t have to marry a farmer to get to understand the ways of the countryside. She’s been here a year now, a member of the briskly efficient CID team based at Whitehaven nick, and she’s getting good at reading the skies for signs of impending trouble. There will be violence tonight, she has no doubt. She can read the mood in the valley as clearly as she can foretell a storm from the pricking in her fingertips. Temper hangs in the air like a cloud of gas and she has no doubt that it will ignite before the dawn.
It’s been a Hellish summer. The torrent didn’t let up from June through to August, turning the sun-bleached fields of golden hay into mile after mile of ruined earth. A whole year’s harvest has been destroyed and the rivers have swollen so high that there is talk of redrawing maps. A farmer in the Eden valley reported maggots eating into the living flesh of a whole herd of Swaledales; the meat beneath the wool as rancid as the ground on which they feed. In times gone by, the farmers in Borrowdale might have bunched their fists at the heavens, demanding mercy after the ceaseless onslaught. Earlier still, there might have been sacrifices. Ceremonies with bone-handle knives and virgins dressed in white. Eve knows there will be violence tonight. Farmers have burned their crops – bundles the green-topped bales of useless hay into stinking feathery oblongs and thrown petrol and flame upon the whole fetid lot.
“Will it never dry out?” asks Eve, sitting on the shallow stone step at the back of Slater Farm: a squat, mucky white building that seems to be sinking into the khaki-and-coffee fell side, half a mile up from the Wast Water. She doesn’t understand how anybody can farm here – it’s all sheer rocks and scree. “I mean, can’t they stick it in a barn and see what happens? Does it need to be burned?”
Gordon Shell leans against the mud-clogged wheel of the old tractor, booth feet planted in a puddle rainbowed with spilled oil. He talks without removing the cigarette from his lips. “It rots in on itsel’,” he explains. “Can go off like a fertilizer bomb. Fire’s the only way.”
“Must be a kick in the teeth,” says Eve, sympathetically.
He nods, a tired irritability creasing his mucky, lined features. “Worst summer I can remember. That’s the worst of this life – those days when you work knowing you’re killing yourself for nowt. Breaking your back stacking bales that are going to go up in smoke. It’s not even like you can move on. There’ll be ugly great rectangles in the fields until Christmas, patterns on the new grass, showing just how bad it’s been. It’ll take a year or more to grow back.” He spits the tip of his cigarette on the ground. “1988 can fuck off, as far as I’m concerned, if you’ll pardon my French.”
Eve listens. Files the information away. Looks up at the smudge of grey clouds and can’t help wondering whether she could ever have tolerated a life like this. She reckons she could probably still play the role of farmer’s wife – she has the strong forearms and the round, red cheeks that she associates with cartoon caricature version of the role. She just isn’t sure about the making jam and the beating eggs and making packed-lunches for some taciturn husband. Can’t see herself rubbing blood and afterbirth off a new lamb with a fistful of damp straw. Can’t imagine tweezing white hairs from the black face of a champion tup. She’d rather just get on with what she’s good at. Get on with being a copper; a thief-taker. Not that her single-mindedness hasn’t cost her dear. Her last three lovers have all told her she’s too much like hard work. She’s felt sorrow at the end of each relationship but she has never felt regret. She’s 29, a Detective Sergeant, a respected copper with a record that shows more commendations than black marks. She had to move to this little corner of England to take a step up the career ladder but she doesn’t view it as a sacrifice. She’s learning to love it here, in this dull brown blob in the top left hand corner of the map. It’s only 40 miles from one side to the other but the variety is such that on any given day she could be called to locations as different in character as the sun and the moon. Cottages; castle; urban sink estates glaring out into the sea. She’d thought that all mountains looked the same. Now she feels able to recognize the different fells from description alone. She favours the wilder lands; the rugged mountaintops with their serrated edges and hidden hazards; sudden drops and concealed mine-shafts; waterfalls that pound the rocks with a cold, endless fury. She’s starting to fit in.
“You’ve given up on him, then,” says Shell, without rancor. He’s a red-faced, knotty specimen; middle-aged but with the sun-slapped, wind-whipped look of abandoned patio furniture.