Dying to Sin. Stephen Booth

       1

       Thursday

      The mud was everywhere at Pity Wood Farm. It lay in deep troughs under the walls of the house, it surged in wet tides where the cattle had poached the ground into a soup. And it was all over Jamie Ward’s boots, sticky and red, like blobs of damson jam. His steel toe-caps were coated with the stuff, and smears of it had splashed halfway up his denims – long, fat splatters, as if he’d been wading in blood.

      Crouching in a corner of the yard, Jamie stared down at the mess and wondered when he’d get a chance to wipe it off. He couldn’t remember if he had a clean pair of jeans back at his parents’ house in Edendale, whether his mother had done his washing this week, or if he’d thrown his dirty clothes behind the bed again, where she wouldn’t find them. She’d been complaining for the past month about the amount of dirt he brought into the house, the number of times she had to clean the filter on the washing machine. He wondered what she’d say about this latest disaster when he got in.

      And, as he heard the first police sirens wailing up the valley, it occurred to Jamie to wonder whether he’d actually be going home tonight at all.

      ‘Damn it, boy. Why didn’t you just cover it up again? It would have been for the best all round.’

      Jamie shook his head. You couldn’t just do that, could you? No matter what anyone else said, it wasn’t right, and that was that. He’d done the only thing he possibly could, in the circumstances. He’d done the right thing, so there was nothing to regret.

      ‘Throw some dirt on it and forget it. There’s no need for all this.’

      He felt bad about it, all the same. It was bad for Nikolai and the other blokes. This was a nightmare they didn’t want, and some of them couldn’t afford. Just before Christmas, too, when they needed the money more than ever, he supposed. He was going to be popular, all right.

      Jamie felt his muscles beginning to stiffen. The longer he stayed in one spot, the more he felt as though his boots were sinking into the ground. If he stayed here long enough, perhaps the blood-tinted earth would slowly close in and swallow him. His own weight would bury him.

      Of course, he knew the mud only looked red because the soil here was clay when you got a few inches down. It was so unusual for this part of Derbyshire that he’d noticed it as soon as he started digging. Clay and mud, tons of crushed brick and corroded iron. It had been a nightmare of a job, almost impossible for his spade to deal with. Jamie’s rational mind told him that the colour was only because of the clay. And if the stuff on his boots looked too red, too dark, too wet … well, that was just his imagination, wasn’t it?

      Jamie Ward thought he had plenty of common sense. He was educated, after all – not like most of the other lads on the crew. He would never be a victim of superstition and ignorance. He wasn’t even particularly religious – he didn’t cross himself when they passed a church, or hang a statue of the Virgin Mary over the dashboard of the van, the way Nikolai did.

      But this mud was so sticky, and so smelly. It stank as though it had been rotting for centuries. Now, when Jamie finally straightened up, he saw a thick gob slide from his boot on to the ground. It formed a sort of oozing coil, like the dropping of some slimy creature that had been living on the old farm, left to itself when the owners moved out and the cattle disappeared. He pictured something that only came out at night to feed on carrion, scavenging among the ruins of pigsties before slinking back into a dark, damp corner between those abandoned silage bags.

      ‘Damned fool. Kretyn.’

      He remembered the way Nikolai’s fist had gripped his jacket, the feel of the older man’s face pushed against his, rain glistening in his thick eyebrows and on his moustache. Jamie couldn’t believe how angry Nikolai had been, not over something like this. The foreman had tolerated his bungling and his ignorance of the building trade with