Kate jammed her hands to her mouth to stifle the small noises that were trying to escape. If they escaped, they would become huge, and might not ever stop. Suzie was whimpering, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ over and over.
‘Who… what kind of sick fucker would do something like this?’ said Kate.
Suzie swallowed thickly. ‘I don’t know. Let’s go. Let’s just go.’
So they just went, skirting the scene of carnage and holding their breaths against the stench of blood and shit, but Suzie stopped again a few minutes later, moaning, ‘No, no, oh please God nooo…’
There was another one. This one had some black colouration in its wool. Its tongue had also been cut out and hung below its throat. This time Kate and Suzie ran, and in a few moments they were out from the trees and downhill into the open field, following the straight line of the fence on their left towards the hedgerow where the path lay, the path that they should never have left, and they could see another butchered lamb, and then another, one every hundred yards or so, maybe a dozen of them, all with their dead eyes gazing at the pasture from which they’d been snatched. At the very bottom there was a man pulling the remains of one from the fence and throwing it into a trailer attached to a quad bike. There were already several small corpses in the trailer already. The farmer glanced at the girls as they ran past but didn’t stop them or say anything to them, obviously not caring that they were trespassing, and they saw that there were tears on his face too.
Kate and Suzie threw themselves over the wall at the other end and onto the lane. They completed the rest of their walk in shocked and trembling silence, and found the canal junction colourful with boats and laughing families. They sat at a table outside the Laughing Goose with cups of tea going cold in front of them and ducks cackling around their ankles, but if there was a joke neither of them could see the funny side.
* * *
David got back late from the hospital, chucked a frozen lasagne into the microwave and then sat on the sofa, flicking through the TV channels and wondering why he wasn’t more tired. Alice had been transferred to Birmingham Children’s Hospital, an hour’s drive away, and he’d stayed until the end of visiting hours at seven, so he should have been exhausted.
The oncologists on the Ward 18 had diagnosed an infection of staphylococcus aureus in Alice’s chemo port, which they removed, and put her on a week’s course of IV antibiotics. Yesterday they had replaced it with a new port and were planning to keep her in for another four days to monitor how her body accepted it. Nobody could tell Becky and David how the infection had got in there – it could have been a slip-up in the way her port was cleaned and her chemo administered, or it could have been a miniscule flaw in the device itself. Becky blamed herself for not looking after her little girl better, second-guessing every decision to take her outside or let her play with something that hadn’t been scrupulously disinfected first. David suspected that it was simply nature’s way of reminding them who was in charge and punishing them for having had things go so relatively smoothly with her treatment. As if any of this had been easy.
To help keep her isolated, Alice had an en-suite cubicle which had space to let one parent stay overnight, sleeping in a chair which folded out into a narrow bed. David and Becky had been taking turns, and tonight it was hers. Both the print works and the police had been as generous as ever in letting him have the time off, but it meant that when he got home he had nothing to do but brood. He called Becky to let her know that he had got home okay, said goodnight and I-love-you to his brave baby girl, and then faffed around on his phone to keep himself distracted while the microwave worked its magic.
There was an alert on the OWL about two young women who had reported that they’d seen mutilated farm animals while out walking, the day before yesterday. The regular police had gone out to check on the landowner concerned – a farmer called Turner – who told them that it had just been a fox that had taken two of his lambs, nothing had been mutilated. The incident was actually being flagged as a case of trespass; Turner didn’t want to press charges but the police put it up on OWL in case it happened again to anyone else who did. Lambing season was a sensitive time, and nobody wanted stroppy ramblers exercising their ‘right to roam’ and stressing their animals. It was done and signed off, nothing to see here folks, please move along.
But something about it nagged him.
It was the farmer’s name: Turner. He scrolled back through the last few weeks’ reports, and the name came up again. There had been a fight in the Golden Cross; Darren Turner and two of his mates had got seven colours of shit kicked out of them by Matthew Hewitson in an argument over a local girl called Lauren Jeffries. David hadn’t been volunteering that night so he hadn’t seen what happened, but he had seen the start of it at the barbecue two weeks before. Darren and his friends were no lightweights either, they were
