Stephen Booth - Dying to Sin

He found the owner of the house in a garage workshop, where he had a petrol-driven lawnmower in pieces on the concrete floor. Other lawn-mowers stood against the breeze-block wall awaiting attention, along with a strimmer and a chain saw. The smell of petrol and oil was almost overpowering, but Farnham had left the garage door open to disperse the fumes. The first few feet inside the door were wet with the rain that blew in, but it was better than suffocating in petrol fumes.

‘Yes, I worked with the Sutton brothers for a few years,’ said Farnham, wiping a small component with grease. ‘Until the business started going to pieces, that is. No one with any sense stays in a failing enterprise unless they’re really tied to it, like the Suttons were. I knew when it was time to get out.’

‘It sounds a bit like a rat leaving a sinking ship, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir.’

Farnham was unruffled. ‘Well, I wasn’t the captain, so I wasn’t about to go down with my vessel, if you know what I mean. I looked around for the nearest lifeboat. Tom Farnham is no fool.’

‘You say you worked “with” the Suttons,’ said Cooper. ‘What was your role at Pity Wood, exactly?’

‘I was a sort of farm manager, you might say. But one of my main tasks was to introduce new ventures, diversify, anything to keep the business going. It never worked, though. Nothing I tried worked, in the end.’

Racks of tools lined the wall of the garage, and the work bench was scarred and stained with oil from previous jobs. It looked as though Mr Farnham was the practical type, handy to have around a farm when machinery needed running repairs.

‘So you were employed by the Suttons, sir?’

‘Mmm. Not quite. The thing is, I actually put some of my own money into Pity Wood, so I was more in the nature of a partner than an employee.’

‘You must have had confidence in your ability to turn the fortunes of the business round, if you invested your own money.’

‘Oh, I did. And it could have worked. It ought to have worked.’

‘What sort of diversification schemes did you try?’

Farnham pulled a sour expression. ‘All kinds of things. Some of them were my projects, but others … well, Raymond and Derek had their own ideas. To be honest with you, one or two of them were plain mad.’

Cooper’s ears had pricked up when he heard the phrase ‘to be honest’. It was almost invariably an indication that a person was about to lie. He wondered whether the really mad ideas had actually been Farnham’s own. No harm in passing the blame to the brothers now, was there? One of them was dead, and the other in a home.

It was the second signal he’d picked up from Tom Farnham. Referring to yourself in the third person was a sure sign of evasion. Tom Farnham is no fool .

‘The body we’ve found was buried on a bit of spare ground in the eastern corner of the property,’ said Cooper. ‘Not far from the house.’

‘Spare ground?’ Farnham frowned. ‘Can you show me where you mean?’

Cooper took the piece of paper offered to him and drew a rough map. He was no Leonardo, but it would do for the job.

‘We used to park trailers and other pieces of equipment on that bit of land,’ said Farnham. ‘I can’t imagine how anybody would dig a grave there, even if they wanted to. The soil must have been pretty solidly compacted.’

‘It wasn’t easy to dig out again either, by all accounts.’

‘Well, the grave must have been there a long time, then. Since before I went in with Raymond and Derek. The old boys must have used that patch of land for something else, back in the past.’

Cooper didn’t respond to Farnham’s invitation to put the body well outside his own time at Pity Wood. Instead, he looked at his map, noticing how the swirls he’d made looked more like a lake than a farmyard. And very appropriate it was, too, in the present weather.

‘Wasn’t this one of the areas considered for a reservoir some years ago?’ he asked.

‘Oh, that would be way back in the sixties or early seventies,’ said Farnham.

‘If there was a possibility this valley would be flooded, the value of properties must have crashed.’

‘Yes, for a while. Blighted by the spectre of compulsory purchase, eh? The fate of the little man steamrollered by governments and local authorities.’

‘So there would have been no chance of selling Pity Wood Farm during that time. If the Suttons had wanted to move on, they couldn’t have done. They must have thought they were cursed.’

‘But it didn’t last for ever. Carsington was chosen for the reservoir instead.’ Farnham laughed. ‘The curse moved on to someone else, then.’

‘There were protests, I think?’ asked Cooper.

‘Small-scale stuff. A bunch of farmers from the Carsington area got together. They never stood much chance, in my opinion.’

Cooper had sympathy for protesters, provided they stayed within the law. If it hadn’t been for vigorous campaigning, there’d have been housing and industrial developments in Winnats Pass and a motor-racing circuit in the dales around Hartington. The Peak District would have been cut in half by a motorway.

He imagined the feelings of the Sutton family, watching the fate of farmers across the hill as they fought in vain to save their land. Schadenfreude . That would have been the only word for it. There but for the grace of God.

Cooper watched Farnham working on the lawnmower for a moment. Strong, capable hands slotted a rotor blade back into place.

‘Can you think who the victim might be, Mr Farnham?’

‘Victim?’

‘The body we found at Pity Wood. The body of a woman.’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘Please think carefully. Anything you can remember might help us with an identification. A woman who disappeared around twelve months ago?’

Farnham didn’t even look up from his task. ‘No, sorry.’

‘I understand there were a number of itinerant workers employed at Pity Wood Farm. Would that be during your time, sir?’

This was a fact that could be checked, so a lie would soon be caught. Cooper saw Farnham working that out for himself before answering. He took a little too long fitting parts of the motor back together.

‘Yes, it would. Like I said, we tried out quite a few diversification schemes. Horticulture, poultry … Some of them needed labour at certain times of the year. Often casual labour. So, yes — we had itinerant workers, if you want to call them that.’

‘Well, we’ll need records. Details of the workers employed at Pity Wood during the last couple of years. You were a sort of farm manager, so …?’

‘Ah, well. Records.’ Farnham straightened up, wiping his hands on a rag. ‘Those will be at the farm, such as they are. I left the farm accounts with Raymond. They weren’t the best at record keeping, you know. They didn’t believe all the bureaucracy and paperwork was necessary. But anything there is, you’ll find it at Pity Wood.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Oh, if the builders haven’t thrown them out already,’ said Farnham, as if the possibility had just occurred to him. But his air of innocence wasn’t convincing Cooper.

It was cold in the workshop. And where it wasn’t wet, it was oily. Farnham had a battered white Subaru pick-up with mud-caked hub caps, but it stood outside on the drive to provide more room in the garage.

‘Do you spend much time out here?’ asked Cooper.

‘As much time as I like,’ said Farnham. ‘I’m a widower, you see.’

As he drove away from Farnham’s house, Cooper looked afresh at the landscape. An ideal reservoir site should have a ring of hills to reduce the amount of dam building required. Rakedale had that. It also had the necessary clay soil, which stopped the water seeping through and provided material for dam construction. That was why the limestone areas had avoided reservoir building. Much too porous, limestone. If they’d built the reservoirs a few miles further north, Manchester would be suffering a permanent drought.