Gar’s heavy hand clapped him on the back, and there was that feeling of pride again. Matt looked at the small grey corpse in his hands. Snares were one thing, it was like fixing a punctured bicycle tyre or rolling a spliff, but he hadn’t been sure that when it came to it he could actually kill another living creature.
Turned out he could.
‘Cool,’ he said.
* * *
Later that day, Everett showed him how to use the tractor’s back-hoe to dig a trench behind the big tool shed. He assumed it was for burying rubbish, and Everett said, ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’ It was a lot fiddlier than making a snare, as there were levers and gears to deal with, and he nearly took out a fence by mistake. It was only a short trench, a little over two metres long by half a metre wide, and he saw that one had already been dug and refilled nearby. The long mound of earth looked weirdly like a grave.
‘Hey, who are we burying?’ he joked.
Everett smiled and said, ‘Haven’t decided yet.’
* * *
‘Is everything set for Torelli?’ asked Ardwyn, a week before the second tusk moon.
‘All set,’ said the deserter. ‘I still think it’s a shame, though. I quite liked him.’
He’d chatted with Ben Torelli a few times at the allotments. Torelli grew things that didn’t need an awful lot of looking after, like spinach and chillies, and his plot seemed to be mostly an excuse for him to sit out on clear evenings smoking dope. Everett had joined him once or twice out of politeness, but also as a way of sounding out how useful Torelli might be to the Farrow; he’d been at the barbecue and eaten the first flesh, and thus was hallowed. The discovery that he was also ex-army had led Everett to feel that there might have been the possibility of a connection based on shared experiences, albeit within reason. Anecdotes about the Great War were obviously off-limits, and Everett’s own apparent age meant that he probably didn’t look old enough to have served in anything much before Iraq, Bosnia at a push. He also knew that a confrontation with the authorities was inevitable at some stage and fighters were always useful.
But Torelli was another loner like Overton, and the fact that he was unlikely to be missed was more useful to Mother, it seemed.
Torelli rented a small flat in a new housing development on the western edge of the village, which had been built on the site of an old colliery. Thirty years after the miners’ strike had killed the industry it had been sold off and the pits back-filled with concrete, but there were still areas that surveyors had marked as too unstable to build on and so these had been left to grow wild – not open countryside, not park, but edgeland; a loosely connected archipelago of untamed places known locally as the Links and used by dog-walkers, teenagers, courting couples and residents like Torelli taking a shortcut between the village high street and home.
He worked driving forklifts for a distribution warehouse near Lichfield, and his habit, rain or shine, was to get home from his shift, head out to the allotments for a peaceful spliff where there was less chance of nosy neighbours causing trouble, and then saunter home again, usually via one of the village’s fast-food places to pick up something for his dinner.
On the day of the tusk moon Moccus blessed them again with rain, because it made it so much easier for the deserter to pull up beside Torelli as he was walking home, head down and hood up against the weather, water streaming from the plastic carrier bag that swung at his side. Everett had timed it so that he caught the man on an empty stretch of narrow lane running through the Links overshadowed by trees; another few yards one way or the other and Torelli would have been on a footpath and Gar would have had to get out for him, making things potentially a lot more complicated.
He slowed and wound down the passenger window.
‘Ben!’ he called. ‘Hey, Ben!’
Torelli looked up, and his face lit with recognition.
‘Give you a lift? It’s pissing down.’
‘Really?’ Torelli replied drily. ‘Hadn’t noticed. Cheers, mate.’ He opened the door and climbed up into the van, bringing with him the smell of doner kebab and marijuana. ‘You’re a life saver.’
‘You’d better believe it. Where do you live?’
‘I’ll direct you.’
He had no intention of doing this on an open road, no matter how narrow, where anybody might happen along. For the first ‘wrong’ turn he was able to claim driver error. For the second, that he knew a quicker way to correct the first mistake. By the time he’d taken a third wrong turning he could tell that Torelli was becoming suspicious. The vessel was no fool, no slow-witted beast like Overton, and the deserter found himself beginning to enjoy this. Torelli might actually prove to be a challenge. There was a wire fence and a gate that they’d cut the chain from earlier in the day, which led into a wide, derelict area of old gravel piles overgrown with weeds, between which ran the long-rusted rails of a narrow-gauge track that had once been something to do with the old colliery.
Torelli didn’t express surprise or confusion, and he didn’t demand to know what the fuck was going on. If he had, which was what Everett and Gar were expecting, the whole thing would have been over quicker and with a lot less mess. As it was, Torelli simply ripped the passenger door open and legged it.
The deserter grinned. ‘Gar!’
But Gar was already moving.
He burst from the back of the van like a bull at a rodeo, and powered after Torelli who
