'Jesus,' she said, when they'd backed off upwind, out of the reek,'wish I'd no' had that bacon buttie now.' She shuddered, then lit another cigarette, holding the smoke deep in her lungs, as if trying to fumigate them. 'Well, don't just stand there,' she pointed at the carcass,'off you go and get it shifted.' 'Are you out of your--' 'You never read books, Laz? Reginald Hill? Dalziel and Pascoe? No?' She shook her head, obviously disappointed.'Suppose you've got a deid body to get rid of - where better to stick it than under a rotting sheep? Who'd go looking underneath that?' 'Oh, come off it! That's not--' 'Sooner you do it, the sooner it's done.' She smiled at him. 'Chop, chop.'
It became something of a mantra:'Fucking Steel and her fucking, rotting, bastarding son of a bitching fuck ... fuck ...' mumbled over and over under his breath as Logan took one look at the mouldering sheep, decided there was no way in hell he was going to touch it with his bare hands and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. He looked up at Alec, filming away, face wrinkled in disgust. 'You want to put that down and give me a hand here?' Alec shook his head. 'Fly on the wall. Remember? Not supposed to interfere. Besides ...' He shifted from one foot to the other, peering into the long grass and thickets of weeds. 'What if there's rats?' Swearing, Logan grabbed the animal's hind legs and pulled. There was a moment's resistance ... and then both back legs came off with a sickening wet noise and a roiling carpet of maggots. Logan's stomach lurched. The inspector shouted at him from a safe distance:'Stop sodding about! It's not going to bite you.' Logan's mantra started up again. He fought his way through the weeds to the mouldering shed and raked through the rusting contents until he found a garden fork. It only had two of its four tines left, but it was better than nothing. He dragged it back to the sheep, took a deep breath, held it, jammed the fork under the sheep and heaved the thing over onto its back. Where it promptly burst. He said goodbye to his pie. 'Well?' Steel shouted, when he'd finished vomiting,'Anything?' He scowled at her. 'No.' 'You didn't dig about where the sheep was, could be a shallow grave in there.' Logan said 'Fuck' a lot, then poked his new-found fork in the ground. Trying to ignore the filthy yellow-brown liquid that crawled with wriggling white flecks. 'There's nothing here!' 'Ah, well. Worth a try.' Steel stuck her hands in her pockets and sauntered over to the back door. 'You coming then?'
The place was a mess: peeling wallpaper, holes in the ceiling, lath visible through crumbling plaster. The kitchen was blanketed with spiders' webs and dust, all the appliances torn out, the window boarded-up, the room shrouded in darkness. The bathroom was even worse. Everything downstairs stank of mildew and neglect. Upstairs wasn't much better. It must have been a large farmhouse at some point, but when the council turned it into a halfway house for the mentally disturbed they'd subdivided the first floor into tiny bedrooms. Just big enough for a single bed, a bedside cabinet and a wardrobe. Most of the furniture was gone, but a couple of pieces - too nasty, cheap and knackered to be worth anything - had been left behind to rot like the sheep. There were
