Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth

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       16

      The smell of the smoke was acrid and strong, like burning rubber. But it was nowhere near as strong as the other smell, which lay like an evil fog on the ramshackle buildings and overgrown paddocks of rough grass. It was the sweet, sickly stink of advanced decomposition, the odour of organic matter rotted to the point of putrefaction and the escape of fermenting gases.

      Cooper had found the three old men by using his nose. They were building a vast compost heap, well out of sight of the track to the house at Thorpe Farm. From a seat on a bale of straw, Sam Beeley was supervising the operation, while Harry Dickinson and Wilford Cutts had their jackets off and their sleeves rolled up on their white arms as they wielded two forks. Two young men were mucking out a nearby breezeblock building, producing a constant trail of wheelbarrow loads of dark, wet, strawy manure. It arrived in the barrows steaming and black, like enormous Christmas puddings. A few yards away, a pile of dry bedding was smouldering viciously, creating a blanket of thick grey smoke that drifted away from the buildings and dispersed in the bracken on the hillside. Its smell couldn’t mask the stench of the fresh manure piling up in heaps on the ground. The smell was overpowering.

      Wilford saw Cooper approaching and pointed at him with his fork, stabbing the air.

      ‘Look what’s coming! Here’s trouble, you lot.’

      ‘Nay, he’s a hero, that lad,’ said Sam. ‘He’s just come from arresting the number one suspect. Solved the case, he has.’

      ‘On his own?’

      ‘With one hand behind his back, probably.’

      ‘Happen he’s come to volunteer,’ said Harry, leaning on his fork. His shirt was open at the collar, and there was a distinct line where the tan of his neck met the bleached white skin of a throat and chest that hadn’t seen the sun for years. He looked like parts of two totally different men stuck together. Cooper thought stupidly of Frankenstein’s monster, the creature with a head sewn crudely on to someone else’s body.

      ‘Ah, grab a spare wheelbarrow then,’ said Sam. ‘Unless you know anything about making compost.’

      ‘All you do is pile it up and it rots down again,’ said Cooper, determined to stay on friendly terms. ‘Is that right?’

      ‘Oh no, not at all.’

      ‘Not at all,’ echoed Wilford. ‘There’s an art to compost. It needs nurturing, like a child.’

      One of the young men came past with another load of manure. Cooper stepped back as a lump of evil-smelling muck slipped off the barrow. He could see it consisted of wet, soiled straw and partly decomposed animal droppings in indistinguishable clumps. As soon as the manure had landed, small brown flies appeared from nowhere and settled on it, probing into the mess with their noses.

      ‘This is good stuff,’ said Wilford. ‘Take a whiff of that lot.’

      ‘You use it on your vegetable patch, I suppose.’

      ‘Vegetables now, they need a particular sort of compost.’

      ‘Blood and bone. That’s what you want for vegetables,’ said Harry.

      Sam cackled. ‘Blood and bone. Blood and bone,’ he said. ‘Oh aye.’

      There were dogs barking from a shed in the background and hens clucking. But the smallholding was quieter than Cooper remembered it from his previous visit with СКАЧАТЬ