This was a complete waste of time, but never mind. No one knew quite what to do with him anyway. In his own view, the police service had always been excellent in the mismanagement of its human resources when it came to the proper use of age and experience. He was used to it and entirely resigned. It was years since he had wanted to be at the sharp end of anything, even a pin. Lost his bottle, see? Known for it, especially to himself. Detective Sergeant Donald Cousins, enthusiastic historian, was the perfect officer to manage paperwork rather than a riot. The pen-pushing man of non-action who liked a quiet life. He had the advantage of being unfazed by the officialdom which scared most of his contemporaries far more than a straight fight, and he was the ideal diplomatic candidate for something pointless going nowhere. Nursemaiding a judge, not even a quality judge elevated to the red robe and the trials of terrorists or murderers, simply a crown court judge who dealt with a daily diet of theft burglary and bodily harm. If the said Judge Schneider thought he was going to qualify for protection, he had another think coming.
What irked Donald Cousins, albeit slightly, was the fact that if the judge had been anyone else, his nebulous complaints would receive no attention at all. It was simply not fair, but at least the judge did himself a favour by being embarrassed. The first thing he did was apologise.
‘I’m sorry,’ he was saying. ‘I wouldn’t have said anything on the basis of this kind of evidence, except that my son lives with me. Not an ideal state of affairs, but I worry about him. Do you have children, Mr Cousins?’
‘Call me Donald, please, sir. Yes, two daughters. As grown up as they ever are. It does go on for a long time, my wife says.’
They both nodded, agreeing with each other. Parenthood was a great leveller.
‘Not long enough, in my case,’ the judge said.
Men could usually bond, or unbend a little, by mentioning their children, Donald thought, but there was no answering invitation from Judge Carl Schneider to use his Christian name. Cousins liked that: he did not mind what he was called, and preferred the anonymity of sir as a method of address to any member of the public, especially one who wore a wig. The term could easily be divorced from either endearment or respect.
‘Sam’s nineteen,’ Judge Carl said. ‘Not a particularly mature nineteen, I have to say. Public school since he was ten; now he’s a student, living with me, and he doesn’t know much about the real world. He’s clever and lazy, and vulnerable. His mother left when he was small and I’ve overprotected him. Do we ever know if we’re doing the right thing by our children? I don’t.’
The judge was nervous, talking too much. Wanting to have something in common. It established a working balance of power Donald liked. The man needed him and his approval, much more than the other way round.
‘We do the best we know how at the time,’ he said. ‘That’s all we can do. The awful thing is wanting to give them everything and not getting it right.’
Carl bent his head in acknowledgement. In the sunlight streaming through the window, Donald noticed how his hair was blond, laced with grey, in a cruelly selective process of ageing which made it look as if he had paid for streaks. Dark-haired, sallow-skinned himself, he found it slightly repellent. A woman would kill for hair like that.
There was no hurry to get on with the matter in hand; nor was this a bad place in which to waste time. They were in the judge’s office, which surprised DS Cousins with its sheer, modern austerity. Minimalist. Where he would have expected old-fashioned tradition, plenty of old wood and leatherbound volumes, here were laminate floors and furniture contrived from pale wood and black metal. The reference library was behind the flat screen of the computer, rather than in venerable books. Cousins was disappointed by the lack of the wood-panelled tradition he had associated with the chambers of a barrister. There was no sense of history, or even comfort, a single framed photograph on the wall which looked as if it had been there for a long time, forgotten, rather than chosen. The man’s home, from where he had collected him, was even worse. Not Cousins’ taste, but then he knew, with his passion for history, that his own preferences were on the old-fashioned side. His daughters said so. His wife always teased him about it. The judge had caught his not so subtle examination of the scenery. It was a small room.
‘I’m lucky to have this, since I went to the Bench. Space is at a premium. These days chambers have to be high tech. We look like any other office in the City. We could be peddling soap. Instead, we are merely people, peddling ourselves and our forensic skills. This room’s my refuge, from court and home.’
‘And the trouble started here?’
He tried to inject sympathy into his voice. So far he felt little.
‘No. It was the slashed tyres at home, in the car park, which may have nothing to do with anything. The post going missing, the rubbish bags taken apart and examined. Perhaps I have it the wrong way round, now I come to think of it. There was some … interference here, which seems to have been confined to my room. I thought at first it was … internal. One of my colleagues, looking for something. Not theft, as such, simply interference; we don’t lock doors. Someone wanting a bit of space. The use of a computer. Then I got the e-mails. A bit too erudite to ignore.’
Such a dry wit the judge had. He was drier than old bone, with his yellow-streaked hair. It was that and his expressionless face which made Cousins think not only of a hairdresser, but of someone who had been at the Botox, to redeem or improve his middle forties. As though he was so pampered with treatment, he could not afford to smile. The features of a sphinx, but then it would not do to have a judge who giggled. Maybe it was entirely natural: the youngest of Cousins’ daughters, the beautician, would know more than he could guess. He himself knew only that in previous centuries the place in which he now was had been a stew of prostitutes who preserved their blonde locks by dyeing their hair in their own piss.
‘I forwarded you the e-mails, didn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ Cousins said. ‘A mixed blessing, e-mails. I only know enough not to open any if I don’t know who sent them, let alone open anything attached. You can’t risk porn, viruses, that kind of thing. You surprise me. I would have thought …’
‘But I did know who sent the first. The first was sent from me to me. As if to prove that whoever had done it could. I have this computer and the laptop at home, you see. Sometimes I work here after court; sometimes I work there. I e-mail unfinished business to myself. So I opened it.’
Cousins was appalled.
‘But even supposing the sender of the first e-mail had got into your office here, how on earth could he log on to your computer? Don’t you have passwords? Doesn’t it turn itself off if you leave it at night? Surely there’s a firewall?’
The judge looked shamefaced.
‘Hmm, yes, there’s supposed to be, but I’m not very good at that stuff. I forget the password and things, so I leave a note of it here,’ he pointed to a worn Post-it, stuck to the desk, ‘telling me how to do it. How to get in and out, my password, my e-mail address in case I don’t remember.’
He seemed rather proud of the care he had taken.
‘I see, sir,’ Cousins said heavily. ‘You leave yourself and anyone else a clear set of instructions which a child could understand, telling them how to access your confidential information and bypass the security system. Amazing. Isn’t it a bit like leaving your house unlocked?’
He was enjoying a sense of superiority. Carl looked even more ashamed.
‘It’s simpler, you see,’ he said. ‘We lawyers aren’t necessarily clever like that.’
You lawyers are stupid, Cousins thought, but didn’t say. Wait till he told them back in his own office what idiots barristers were. His supply of sympathy shrank even further, but telling others would be fun.
‘What did the e-mail say, sir?’
‘You know. Please see attached. The same as what I say to myself when I e-mail myself with, say, a judgment. It was a drawing, of a hanged man.’ He swallowed. ‘The next was of a man drowning. About to drown. He’s tied up and being pushed over the side of a boat.’
‘And the next?’
‘A boy, drowning. And the next was a girl, chained by the neck, laid on a slab, overlaid with wooden planks and big stones. They were not from me, to me. I don’t know where they came from.’
‘Messages?’
‘Nothing specific. I want justice. You must die. Then, You will die. Almost as if I had failed to co-operate. Or the sender was puzzled. Very crude drawings.’
Cousins coughed. ‘You think so, sir? Do you know what they are?’
‘Crude little drawings.’
Cousins did not know why he was suddenly so disappointed. Had the man, a judge, for God’s sake, never studied the history of his own profession? Or looked at the illustrations of his forebears?
‘I think you’ll find, sir, that they are all illustrations of the Inquisition, I believe. Or maybe even trial by ordeal. The precursors of the modern trial. You can get such things out of a book or on a website. They were a matter of record, then, sir. This one,’ he pointed to the third, ‘is a woodcut, produced all over Europe.’ He coughed politely. ‘From Germany, I believe. A favourite method of the Inquisitors, in order to extract the truth, was to weight a body down with stones until it literally burst. Little, yes. Crude, no. They were the record of what the Inquisitors did, in secret. Protests. They regarded the confession as the last word in truth, however it was obtained. Some say the modern method of trial is no better.’
A hint of mutual dislike was percolating between them now; no way to know how far it would go, until the judge smiled.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘My fascination with the law began with my father’s fascination with Nuremberg. Didn’t trial by ordeal pre-date the inquisitorial method? Even less reliable, but still avoiding the inconvenience of the jury, invented, or at least established I think, by the English?’
Donald noticed that the picture on the wall was of swans. An old, tired photograph. ‘Someone is sending you old illustrations, sir. A well-wisher, perhaps.’
When he came to think of it, Carl looked more like a farmer than a scholar. A man who lived in a series of solid bubbles, moving from courtroom to chambers to apartment without his feet ever touching the ground. He would be very difficult to get at.
‘I suppose, with the messages, it amounts to threats to kill, although they’re usually more specific. I’m looking ahead, sir, to the matter of proof. Of intent. Have any of your colleagues received any of these?’
‘I presume not. They would have complained if they had, and they haven’t as far as I know.’
‘And they stopped when you changed your e-mail address?’
‘I didn’t change it. It’s far too much of a nuisance. Besides, I want to know what’s being sent. I haven’t received one for a week.’
Give me patience, Cousins sighed. ‘Who do you think dislikes you enough to do this?’
‘I don’t know. Judges aren’t popular people.’
‘Anyone you’re afraid of?’
Carl paused to straighten the framed photo on the wall, spoke in a judge’s voice, which reminded Donald of a lecturing priest.
‘Mr Cousins, we all have people we would prefer not to meet. People who dislike us for what we are, or for real or imagined injuries. Especially a judge in a court of law, and also, if I may suggest it, a policeman. In a court, some might imagine it is I who convict them, whereas it is not. It’s the jury. Others might also blame the judge for the failure to convict, which leaves them without redress or revenge. I do know a little history, although not as much as you. I know, for instance, that the word miasma once referred to the vapour exuded by murderers, but which also attaches itself to the one who fails to avenge the death, and poisons his life for ever. It exists, today, that obligation, in cultures older than ours, and it certainly still exists with us. So I am quite sure I am blamed and disliked for appearing to fail to punish, for failing to be that instrument of revenge in the event of acquittal. The defendant who goes to prison from my court, on the other hand, is usually prepared and ready. Since I’ve never had the onerous privilege of sentencing anyone to death, I suspect the real anger comes from the first category.’
Donald forced himself back into pragmatic police mode. Abandon miasma, although he did like the word. Only investigate the obvious. He could not investigate the obscure, however long he wanted this job to last. So, those disgruntled by a negative result were an impossible line of enquiry, unless they had announced themselves first. What he could and would do was waste time going through the records to find any of the judge’s old defendants who had made known their displeasure at their treatment and check them out. Isolating those still aggrieved, still aggressive, taking it personally, and who also had historical illustrations to hand as well as the means to send them, should keep the number small. Forget the slashed tyres. Look at the son, obfuscate the report to invite conspiracies, avoid the conclusion that the judge had colleagues who played tricks on him. He could make it last weeks. Good.
‘What worries me,’ the judge said, ‘is the order of things. Someone invaded this room here, and thus found out where I live. This room is more important than home. I keep my private life here, albeit very carelessly, as you’ve pointed out.’
At least he admitted it. Donald wanted to say he was criminally careless, but refrained.
‘Any personal enemies, sir? Family, perhaps?’
Carl shook his head. ‘There are none of those left, Donald. Few enough to begin with. My parents were both orphans of war, no uncles or aunts. There’s only my son, who studies economics, so he knows it’s hardly in his interests to do me harm.’
Cold, but interesting. Give him the usual spiel. ‘You should vary your route to work, sir. How do you usually go?’
The judge was surprised. ‘I walk. How else do I see the world?’
Oh, shit. He was beginning to like the bloke. There were worse ways to waste time.
Must get a look at the son.
Ivy had the chance of weekend work. Good money. Well-paid life modelling on Saturday, followed by a theatre shift. Look, I can’t go home this weekend. Got to settle in, got sixteen hours’ paid work, can’t do it. Got to work, got to pay for myself, got to study. Go yourself. Mother will love it, Ivy said. Mother phoned, and Mother did. Rachel could not resist.
So there she was, proceeding down the dappled lane to the house she already loved better than the farm. There would be paying guests in the pigsties, she had been told, the private kind who stay in their rooms and go to the pub to eat. Dead easy. Walkers, twitchers. I’ll have time. Ernest will have time to show you the pigs. How lovely to have you back, by yourself. We’ll go shopping. We’ll go to the sea.
It was ridiculous, Rachel thought, to be so happy with all three of them. I don’t care if it doesn’t last.
The air was musky. It was nine in the evening, still light at that time of the year when light seemed endless and summer was going to last for ever. Rachel shivered. She detoured up a side road, in pursuit of a view. This time last year she would never have detoured at all. She would have gone straight to her destination, criticising her own navigation. Following her instincts, she found Pointed Hill, a mile away from the farm, with a view of the flatter land. From the top, where the wind gusted warm and strong, she orientated herself and looked. There was the valley; there was the narrow road going through it, meandering to the village, which was nothing but a smattering of houses, a church and the pub; there was the other, shaded track which led to the farm, and there was the faint glimmer of the lake shrouded in trees. A bright red car chugged towards the village, as if seeking the company of other, parked cars. Instead of looking down, she looked across, and was surprised to spy, in the distance, separated by further dips and hollows and fields of wheat, the sea, stretched in a blue line. A full stop, where the land ran out. It only surprised her because, from the shelter of the valley, the land seemed endless and limitless. In the middle distance she could see a deserted air strip, unattached by any road, and closer to the edge of the valley, a site of low, derelict buildings, surrounded by green. How different this would have been, sixty years ago, populated by soldiers and strangers, bicycles and horses, rather than cars.
Grace was in saffron yellow, with endearing grey roots to her plum-coloured hair, bellowing welcome and rattling with different silver bracelets. ‘They’re all out! Isn’t that marvellous! You must be starving.’
Rachel was.
It was cooler in that room she already thought of as her own. A breeze through the window, the next-door room and the shared bathroom vacant.
Cold chicken. Roasted potatoes with rosemary and a crust of salt. Earthy spinach. You don’t think I grow all this, do you? Grace said. What on earth is the point of a supermarket if I did?
Darkness fell, and the kitchen exerted its charm.
‘I’ve had an excellent week,’ Grace said. ‘A couple staying, been before. Walkers. Out all day, even when it rains. Don’t want more than breakfast, and a meal midweek. Don’t want conversation, either. They spend the evening in the pub and walk home singing. You might hear them later. Would you like to try this cheese?’
‘No thanks. Tell me something: if the paying guests stay in the pigsties, where do the pigs live?’
‘Oh, I forgot, you never got round to that last time. Pigs live in barns these days. Like cows, but not like cows. The pigsties, sorry guest rooms, were stables before. Once used for horses, then pigs. They make nice little single rooms, or two adjoining. Rather dark, of course. Ernest put windows in the back walls, long before you needed planning permission for that kind of thing, of course.’
‘Were is he?’
‘Milking. Cowman’s day off, so he has to do both milkings. Which leaves us more wine. I do love this one you brought. It tastes expensive. The only time I get to drink good wine is when people bring it.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ Rachel said.
The now familiar sloth was stealing across her, the same laziness which had turned the weekend before into little more than half a tour of the farm and a lot of sitting around in the garden while Grace fed them senseless. Without Ivy, she would behave more like a tourist, who explored and asked questions.
‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am that Ivy’s moved in with you,’ Grace said in a rush, anxious to say it, but postponing it until now. ‘Pleased and grateful. What did she do to deserve you? What has she done to deserve someone who sweetly and sensitively trusts her to get used to her new abode in private? Aren’t you worried she’ll trash it?’
‘No. She’s the tidiest person I know. And it wouldn’t matter if she did.’
Grace nibbled a breadstick.
‘If I were your mother,’ she announced, ‘I’d go after that man who left you, and cut his balls off. He must have been out of his mind.’
‘Oh, I think he was totally in command of his mind. I just wish he hadn’t lasted so long. My mother would have said it was all my own fault, but I don’t have a mother any more.’
‘Yes you do,’ Grace said airily. ‘You’ve got me. Thirty-two is way too young to be without one, and I’ve always needed more children, so count me in. I’ll kill him for you.’
Rachel laced her fingers together on the warm wood of the table, looked down at them.
‘Did you feel that way about Carl? Carl the younger?’
Grace touched her fingers. The touch was rougher than the wood. ‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes. If you’re going to be my mother too, of course I really want to know.’
Grace plucked a daisy from the jug of flowers on the table. A tiny little blue jug, like the jug full of lavender Rachel had noticed in her room. Small enough to be significant.
‘Kill him? Nothing as mild as that. Getting her pregnant was forgivable, I could see he was crazy about her. Marrying her, well, who wouldn’t? You should have seen her then. I don’t think anyone could have resisted her. The passion was mutual. It was after that. He wanted to tame her, make her a respectable wife and mother. Understandable, also. She longed for city lights, that kind of life; she wanted to be what he wanted her to be. And he wasn’t bad, as husbands go. Let her enrol on the arts course, paid for it. Then, when she wanted to come back and give her children what she’d had, he didn’t like that. I could see it was threatening. I tried to understand him. I never knew what a cold monster he was.’
She put the daisy back in the jug before she could damage it in her twisting fingers, selected a piece of fern.
‘No, not then. I didn’t know him then. Ivy wasn’t going to tell me. As you’ll notice, she has her pride. I only began to detest him for his refusal to admit things. Cassie’s death was his fault. He was supposed to be looking after them both, down by the lake, on his own, for once. He always had more time for the boy. Sam was acting up, so Carl brought him home. He left her to drown. OK, an accident. It was what he did after, and has done ever since. Closed down and shut Ivy out, hugged the boy close to him for comfort. And when Ivy wailed and screamed, he hit her …’
‘No,’ Rachel said, sharply.
Grace shook her head.
‘Oh, to be fair, she was impossible. Crazy with grief and guilt, sure, but she was already into the drugs. Living the sort of student life she’d missed, only worse, because he gave her money. Drink and drugs. Didn’t go home to the nice town house to be hit again. She ran away from them. Came back. He locked the door on her. The worst thing he did was not tell us. Until she cracked and disappeared. Then he told me. I got used to tramping those London streets, I tell you. I found her in Centrepoint. It took a year. The worst year of my life.’
‘I somehow can’t see you in London, Grace.’
Grace laughed. ‘Can’t you now? I know it well. I used to go to every exhibition, but I know the less salubrious bits better. Hostels and hospitals. Of course she wouldn’t cooperate. She was shacked up with some druggie. Panhandling for dope and food. Told me to fuck off. Then she got arrested for the last time, and got shoved on a rehabilitation scheme. That, or prison. The first one didn’t work, the second did. She began to see the light. God, those people were patient, but then Ivy never lost her charm. She got better. Not a linear progress, I can tell you. And she did it all by herself. Got better. That’s when Carl did his very worst.’
‘Could he do worse?’
Grace nodded. ‘Yes, he could. To her, and to us. Much worse. He kept her from seeing her son. And his son from seeing us. He still does. Which is why,’ she added with a watery smile, ‘I have such a dearth of children. Do you know, you’re the first person Ivy has ever brought home?’
The kitchen door opened quietly. The sound of scraping. Grace turned towards it. ‘Oh, Ernest love, you late-night stop-out, you. Do you want a cup of tea?’
Ernest Wiseman came in, and struggled with his boots. He kicked them into the washing machine alcove, came into the circle of light around the table, leaving the door open. His blue eyes widened and his face opened into a smile of guileless pleasure as he looked first at Grace, then at Rachel.
‘Now here’s a sight for sore eyes,’ he said. ‘Hope you’ve brought boots for tomorrow, girl. You’re going to need them.’
From the open door they could hear singing, and the soft sound of rain. The paying guests were home.
Never was the early morning so wonderful as after rain. Ernest and Rachel, in her borrowed boots and socks, walked over the field to the cow barn. Next to it was a barren little office which housed desk, chair, filing cabinet, and the dirtiest computer screen she had ever seen. It was a civilised hour of the morning, post-breakfast, if only nine o’clock. Milking still in progress, half done. A long process, even for forty cows, with some of them back in the barn. Ernest walked her through them. They ranged free in the hugeness of the barn, and yet converged on her with wide eyes.
‘Just curious,’ Ernest said. ‘All newcomers get that. Come here every day and there’s never a flicker. Unless one’s got a calf, and you were to come in here, newer than paint, with a dog. Then she might have a go at you. Not otherwise. They’d only ever knock you over by mistake. The pigs are over there. OK to walk?’
Despite the reassurance, Rachel did not think she could bring herself to trust the cows. Stupidity, weight, and the feelings she could not doubt they had unnerved her. It was better out in the field, away from the dirty backsides of the ten-ton beasts.
‘Pigs are much cleaner,’ Farmer Wiseman said. ‘They won’t lie in their own shit, they hate it, but all the same they smell worse, whatever we feed them. I shall have to phase out the cows, never the pigs. I love ’em. P’raps because they’re not lovable at all, except sometimes.’
Certainly he loved the pigs, and gave her every detail. The pig barn was a one-storey unit with a pit beneath, with a raised wooden floor made of slats. The pigs seemed to demand little to lie on except these slats, through which faeces fell to the level beneath. Ernest explained all this. Rachel could only think of who would clear away what fell between the slats into the pit, grateful it was not her, worried that she might one day be asked to do it. In the barn there were fifteen stalls, the first two occupied by enormous sowsin-waiting. The next stalls were sows with newborn, suckling pigs; then sows with older piglets. She could see how they doubled their weight in a week. She hated them and shrank away from them, keeping to the middle of the central aisle which ran between the pens, not touching anything and hoping he would not notice.
‘You can wean these in days,’ Ernest said, pointing at a crop of almost shockingly pink piglets draining mummy dry. Mummy lay on her side, held in position by bars.
‘But only if you give them the right food,’ he added. ‘Which is very expensive. So leaving them with mum is best. Greedy little buggers, aren’t they? Don’t worry, she can always roll on to her tummy and deny them. The bars only stop her rolling over and squashing them to death. I can open the pens from the outside when they go to market. Then they try and bash down the doors.’
The somnolent sows with their sniffling, squealing feeders raised heads and slumped back. Like the cows, it was the sheer enormity of them which disturbed her. In one stall, an undersized thing, as pink as a flamingo and the size of a small cat, crawled away from brethren three times its size and lurked in a corner.
‘He won’t last,’ Ernest said.
The last pens were young pigs, squealing for food.
‘They’ll eat anything,’ Ernest said with evident admiration. ‘Problem is, we can’t feed them it.’
‘How do you clean them out?’ Rachel asked, itching to get out.
‘Sweep out the straw down the middle, let it drop through into the pit. Empty the pit every now and then. Grace won’t let me in the house after I’ve done that, not until she’s hosed me down. You don’t like them, do you?’
‘No, they scare me, to be honest.’
He laughed. ‘I won’t tell.’
He pushed a lever, which sent pellets of food into the dishes by every stall in a clatter of sound. Silence fell.
The smell: she knew the stench of them would scent her clothes. A feral, animal, acid smell which permeated everything. Eau de Cochon.
‘I love them because they haven’t any inhibitions. No manners either. When a boar mounts a sow, there’s no pleasure like it, really. His eyes roll and his feet tap, and he makes noises like I never heard, while she vibrates like a violin. They know how to have fun. They take pleasure in everything.’
Rachel found the stench made her dizzy. She was remembering a murder story, with a body fed to the pigs. They’d eat anything. Outside, she gulped for air. There were steps down from the door; Ernest stumbled and put his hand on her shoulder for support, briefly, then stood upright.
‘I’m getting old,’ he said. ‘They’re too much for me, really. Pigs and cows and fields to feed me. Makes nothing. There you go. Got a friend in Normandy makes a living out of fourteen cattle. Not here. Come on, love, I’ll show you the hay barn where me and Carl used to hide.’
It was as if she was part of a story, and he assumed she knew the rest. Ivy was like that too, but Ivy had none of the occasional vagueness she noticed in Ernest, the long-term memory so much better than the short.
The barn was vaulted beauty, the beams as old and bent as time, the roof littered with holes.
‘I’ve no duty to this,’ he said, ‘except to preserve it for ever. These days, I’m paid to preserve buildings and hedgerows, not to grow food. There’s nothing for sons and grandsons. I still keep hoping he’ll come back, though.’
She did not know what he meant. Didn’t want to know.
‘Last week,’ she said, ‘I saw the little blind cow who could not calve. Is she still here?’
‘For a while,’ he said. ‘I can’t kill her. I’ve got to call for the knacker. I can’t just kill a beast unless she’s running wild, then I get a man with a rifle to do it. No rifles on this farm; well, none anyone knows about except me. I kept Dad’s hidden. We’ve only got handguns. A handgun does, from three feet away. I can’t do it, myself, have to wait for Ivy or Grace. I’m not allowed to kill my own cattle and give them a decent burial, oh no. Not since BSE. You have to have your cattle killed for you. Different for pigs.’
She was relieved to be further away from the pigs. The stench clung to her clothes. She was glad she would never have to clean out that pit. The mud of the yard squelched beneath her feet. She could see the virtue of rubber boots. Ernest looked at hers, and his own heavy suede boots.
‘I get through a pair of these every six months,’ he said. ‘They rot. Then they can go in the incinerator. Here it is. Fired it up, especially for you. Too expensive for every day.’
They had walked away from the barn. In the yard on the other side, nearer the pigs, was a small bunker. It reminded her of an old pill box she had seen in the field, a war relic too heavy to shift. Nearer, the bunker hummed. Ernest fiddled with a thermostat on the side, and then opened the door on the front.
There was a blaze of heat and light from inside. A roar of flame. A cupboard of fire, the size of a large wardrobe. Propped at the back was the remnants of a smouldering form, and at the front the still identifiable forms of three piglets, surrounded by ash. It smelt clean. Ernest leant down, plucked something white from the front, and closed the door.
He handed it to her, beaming. ‘There you are,’ he said.
She took it gingerly. It was like a small piece of crumbling chalk.
‘Just a bit of bone. Everything in there will be pure ash by tomorrow. Magic, isn’t it?’
He looked at her pale face. ‘Time for a cup of coffee, I think. Grace wants to take you to the sea. I think that’s what she said.’
On the way back, downhill across the field, she felt she had been churlish, should have asked more questions. She pointed to a mound by the side of the path. A funny thing, looking like nothing, except for the huge manhole cover on top.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, that’s the pit. Goes down like a well shaft. Don’t know who made it. That’s where we used to put dead animals. They rot down nicely, except sheep. Can’t use it now, in case it does something to the water table. Bollocks, it never did before. Locked shut. You should be allowed to kill your own, only way to show respect. You shouldn’t be forced to send them away to die. Animals have souls. They should die at home.’
He swiped at the long grass by the side of the path with a filthy hand. ‘I wish he’d come back. Then I could cope.’
Then he patted her shoulder.
‘Sorry, lass. Shouldn’t go on, should I? Especially when I’ve lost my place. Only we’ve got this grief, see? Such grief. All of us. We’re just like those swans.’