It was difficult to know what to say to her. So Cooper just kept quiet, and drove on.
Diane Fry was appalled by Harrop. It was like an outpost of the Wild West, without the cowboys. For a start, there didn’t seem to be any roads, only potholcd tracks, some of them barely wide enough for the car. There were no street lamps and no facilities of any kind. Nothing. Not a pub or a shop or a school, no village post office. Not even a phone box, as far as she could see. Just a few clusters of houses made of blackened stone, sheltering behind high walls.
The back of Irontongue Hill loomed over the village like the carcase of a dead whale, the outcrops of gritstone like patches of barnacles encrusted on its sides. Around Harrop, there was still deep snow lying in the fields, getting deeper as the grazing land deteriorated into open stretches of heather and dead bracken. The space between the houses and the rocky hillside was crammed with sheds and outbuildings, barns and derelict hen huts. In some cases, the supply of stone must have
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run out, because their builders had improvised with breeze-block and corrugated iron.
It was so desolate up here. Uninhabited and uninhabitable. But at least Fry had been able to see Manchester from further up the hill - a rare indication that civilization wasn’t all that far away, after all. Down in the city, there would be restaurants and theatres and anonymous crowds, and concrete and tarmac instead of the relentless cold wind snatching at her clothes in this isolated moorland landscape. She had never felt so exposed in her life.
‘We have to turn right and go up the hill a bit,’ said Cooper.
‘Up the hill? Aren’t we high enough yet?’
‘Hollow Shaw is the top farm, on the brow of the hill there.’
‘I see it.’
Amazingly, the road got even worse as they approached Malkin’s home. At one point, a ragged sheep stood in the roadway, chewing at a branch of a tree growing in a gateway. The animal turned and looked at the car as the headlights hit it. The light reflected from its eyes as if they were mirrors. Reluctantly, the sheep trotted away, its hooves slipping on the compacted snow.
‘Do you know, if you’d told me what it was like, this is the last place 1 would have wanted to come in the dark,’ said Fry.
“I expect it looks a bit better in the daylight,’ said Cooper.
‘You mean it Joe.s get light here sometimes?’
When George Malkin answered the door, he had his sleeves rolled up to reveal strong forearms, the hair on them stained with what looked like streaks of blood. He had taken his boots off in the house, but was wearing thick socks, as well as a brown sweater full of holes and plastic over-trousers on top of his blue boiler suit. His clothes were wet and sticky.
Cooper could sense Fry staring at Malkin’s stained forearms, ready to jump to some wild conclusion from the man’s appearance. But he could smell that unique odour of blood and birth
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fluids, both fruity and metallic at the same time the scent of new life.
‘Have you got some early lambs?’ he said.
‘Aye, I’m helping out Rod Whittaker — he’s the lad who owns the land here now. He’s got fifty head of ewes indoors/
‘We’ve a few routine questions, sir,’ said Fry, who had learned to ignore agricultural conversations that she didn’t understand.
‘Oh, ave?’ said Malkin. ‘You’ll have to come to the lambing
shed with me, then.’
‘Where?’
‘This way. I can’t leave ‘em for long/
They followed Malkin round the side of the house, through a gate and past a large steel shed with sliding doors that had been left open on their runners. Inside, there was a big articulated DAP lorry, parked next to a powerful Renault tractor with a snowplough blade attachment on the front.
“I take it that’s your friend’s truck/ said Cooper.
‘Aye, he keeps the wagon here/
‘And the tractor?’
‘Rod has to get work where he can - when it snows like this, he can’t run the big wagon, but the council pays him to clear the roads around here, so he doesn’t lose out. He can’t afford not to have any money coming in — he has a family to keep. Contract haulage is almost as dodgy as farming, but he’ll make
o ov o?
a go of it/
Behind the shed, they walked across a farmyard towards another building.
‘Rod grazes his flock on these fields here. That grass comes up in the spring like little green rockets. He can afford to lamb the ewes early - he gets a good start with them/
‘You’ve split up the farm and kept the farmhouse for yourself,’ said Cooper. ‘So where does Mr Whittaker live?’
‘Up the far end of the village,’ said Malkin. ‘It was my dad who sold off the land, when he couldn’t keep the farm going any more. You could get a good price for land then, and it was enough. Rod has the land and these buildings here. Of course, he has the contract haulage business as well. That’s why he can’t be here to see to the ewes all the
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time. But he can’t afford to pay for hired help, and he knows I don’t mind.’
‘You’ll have lambed a tew in your time, I bet,’ said Cooper.
‘Aye, a fair few.’
They entered the shed. It was much warmer than outside, and it was half-full of steel pens containing black-
