Dying to Sin

the mud, as usual.

10

Cooper dropped Fry and Murfin off at Pity Wood Farm and consulted the Ordnance Survey map again for his next call. To the south of Rakedale were the remains of Pity Wood itself, and a mound shown on the map as Soldier’s Knoll. Some of the fields and hillsides had evocative names, too — Godfrey’s Rough, Limbersitch, Biggin Hey, Callow Gore. They included a lot of leas, royds and haggs, all names for clearings in the woods. There must have been many more trees here at one time.

Tom Farnham lived near to the village of Newhaven, on the other side of the wood. There was no direct route, so Cooper turned the Toyota towards the A515.

He passed a farm called Organ Ground, where there was an even larger mountain of silage bags than at Pity Wood, though these were mostly white. Was there some significance to the different colours? Cooper searched his memory of farming practices, as he’d picked them up piecemeal during the last thirty years, but found he hadn’t the faintest idea. If he’d ever known, it was gone now. He’d have to ask Matt some time.

A little red Bowers bus turned the corner ahead of him. On the way towards Newhaven, he remembered that there was no mobile phone signal in this area. The display on his phone read ‘SOS calls only’. What a joke.

The transition between limestone and clay was obvious in the houses that you passed on this road. In the south of the county, the main building material was red brick, with clay tile roofs instead of stone. Many of the farms had converted their old buildings into holiday cottages. No farmworkers lived on the premises any more, and at some times of the year, temporary visitors would far outnumber the resident population.

Near the Newhaven brickworks, a small herd of black-and-white cattle bunched together round their water trough, standing in a sea of mud. Where a tractor had entered the field, the ground was completely liquefied. When one of the cows moved, its hooves splashed with a noise like a fish leaping in a river, and the legs and bellies of the animals were thick with semi-dried mud. The ubiquitous mire made Cooper long for the clean swell of the scree- scattered hills further north.

Here, the air was full of the hot smell of kilns. The clay and sand for the brickworks had all been quarried locally at one time. Even the ganister for making silica bricks had come from a quarry fifteen miles across the county at Wessington. But now all the materials used at Newhaven were imported.

Farnham’s house was sheltered from the road by a belt of trees, and Cooper might have driven past without seeing it, but for a curl of smoke from the chimney and a glint of rain on a steel cattle grid protecting Mr Farnham’s gateway from marauding livestock.

He found the owner of the house in a garage workshop, where he had a petrol-driven lawnmower in pieces on the concrete floor. Other lawn-mowers stood against the breeze-block wall awaiting attention, along with a strimmer and a chain saw. The smell of petrol and oil was almost overpowering, but Farnham had left the garage door open to disperse the fumes. The first few feet inside the door were wet with the rain that blew in, but it was better than suffocating in petrol fumes.

‘Yes, I worked with the Sutton brothers for a few years,’ said Farnham, wiping a small component with grease. ‘Until the business started going to pieces, that is. No one with any sense stays in a failing enterprise unless they’re really tied to it, like the Suttons were. I knew when it was time to get out.’

‘It sounds a bit like a rat leaving a sinking ship, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir.’

Farnham was unruffled. ‘Well, I wasn’t the captain, so I wasn’t about to go down with my vessel, if you know what I mean. I looked around for the nearest lifeboat. Tom Farnham is no fool.’

‘You say you worked “with” the Suttons,’ said Cooper. ‘What was your role at Pity Wood, exactly?’

‘I was a sort of farm manager, you might say. But one of my main tasks was to introduce new ventures, diversify, anything to keep the business going. It never worked, though. Nothing I tried worked, in the end.’

Racks of tools lined the wall of the garage, and the work bench was scarred and stained with oil from previous jobs. It looked as though Mr Farnham was the practical type, handy to have around a farm when machinery needed running repairs.

‘So you were employed by the Suttons, sir?’

‘Mmm. Not quite. The thing is, I actually put some of my own money into Pity Wood, so I was more in the nature of a partner than an employee.’

‘You must have had confidence in your ability to turn the fortunes of the business round, if you invested your own money.’

‘Oh, I did. And it could have worked. It ought to have worked.’

‘What sort of diversification schemes did you try?’

Farnham pulled a sour expression. ‘All kinds of things. Some of them were my projects, but others … well, Raymond and Derek had their own ideas. To be honest with you, one or two of them were plain mad.’

Cooper’s ears had pricked up when he heard the phrase ‘to be honest’. It was almost invariably an indication that a person was about to lie. He wondered whether the really mad ideas had actually been Farnham’s own. No harm in passing the blame to the brothers now, was there? One of them was dead, and the other in a home.

It was the second signal he’d picked up from Tom Farnham. Referring to yourself in the third person was a sure sign of evasion. Tom Farnham is no fool.

‘The body we’ve found was buried on a bit of spare ground in the eastern corner of the property,’ said Cooper. ‘Not far from the house.’

‘Spare ground?’ Farnham frowned. ‘Can you show me where you mean?’

Cooper took the piece of paper offered to him and drew a rough map. He was no Leonardo, but it would do for the job.

‘We used to park trailers and other pieces of equipment on that bit of land,’ said Farnham. ‘I can’t imagine how anybody would dig a grave there, even if they wanted to. The soil must have been pretty solidly compacted.’

‘It wasn’t easy to dig out again either, by all accounts.’

‘Well, the grave must have been there a long time, then. Since before I went in with Raymond and Derek. The old boys must have used that patch of land for something else, back in the past.’

Cooper didn’t respond to Farnham’s invitation to put the body well outside his own time at Pity Wood. Instead, he looked at his map, noticing how the swirls he’d made looked more like a lake than a farmyard. And very appropriate it was, too, in the present weather.

‘Wasn’t this one of the areas considered for a reservoir some years ago?’ he asked.

‘Oh, that would be way back in the sixties or early seventies,’ said Farnham.

‘If there was a possibility this valley would be flooded, the value of properties must have crashed.’

‘Yes, for a while. Blighted by the spectre of compulsory purchase, eh? The fate of the little man steamrollered by governments and local authorities.’

‘So there would have been no chance of selling Pity Wood Farm during that time. If the Suttons had wanted to move on, they couldn’t have done. They must have thought they were cursed.’

‘But it didn’t last for ever. Carsington was chosen for the reservoir instead.’ Farnham laughed. ‘The curse moved on to someone else, then.’

‘There were protests, I think?’ asked Cooper.

‘Small-scale stuff. A bunch of farmers from the Carsington area got together. They never stood much chance, in my opinion.’

Cooper had sympathy for protesters, provided they stayed within the law. If it hadn’t been for vigorous campaigning, there’d have been housing and industrial developments in Winnats Pass and a motor-racing circuit in the dales around Hartington. The Peak District would have been cut in half by a motorway.

He imagined the feelings of the Sutton family, watching the fate of farmers across the hill as they fought in vain to save their land. Schadenfreude. That would have been the only word for it. There but for the grace of God.

Cooper watched Farnham working on the lawnmower for a moment. Strong, capable hands slotted a rotor blade back into place.