Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

For a moment, he had seen two figures that were so alike they could have been mirror images distorted by the rain. They both looked lonely and isolated, and both stood with their shoulders stiff with tension and readiness for a fight. From twenty feet apart, they stared at each other. But the moment couldn’t last.

Cooper couldn’t bear to wait to see what would happen; he knew it was something he shouldn’t be observing. It wasn’t his business. All he wanted to do was reach his car and get out of the rain. Get out of Withens.

But while he was still within earshot, he heard someone speak. He wasn’t sure whose voice he heard, and it was only one short word.

‘Sis?’

The tough black plastic that Ivan Matley’s silage bales were wrapped in was practically indestructible. No biodegradable rubbish. It could be pierced by the steel spike on his tractor, but not by much else. So Matley was puzzled by the holes in the bag he had just lifted from the stack that afternoon. Rats? Foxes? Vandals? But the bag didn’t really look as though it had been bitten or ripped. It looked more as if acid had eaten through the plastic, rotting it into small, ragged holes and causing discoloured streaks in the shiny black surface.

Matley climbed down from the cab of his tractor to take a closer look, in case the inner bag had been punctured and the silage inside had rotted. It had been standing here for years, and he wouldn’t ever have expected to use it if the weather hadn’t been so bad earlier on.

You could always tell good silage by the smell. But when he sniffed, he thought there was something about this bag that wasn’t right. Perhaps air had got in through the holes and ruined it. Ivan Matley had smelled silage that had gone off before, and this was certainly foul enough.

The rest of the bales were lined up against the drystone wall, stacked three high. From this side, they looked in perfectly good condition — their outer bags nice and shiny, and tight. That was why he had never noticed anything wrong, though he had driven past them in the field many times. But the damage on the bale he had lifted seemed to have been at the back.

‘Damn fly-tippers,’ he said.

Matley felt sure that people using the track on the other side of the wall must have thrown something into his field. And to have damaged the plastic like that, it would have to have been something pretty toxic. Battery acid was his guess. If he looked down the back of the silage stack, between the bales and the wall, he reckoned he would find at least one old car battery that somebody had dumped because they couldn’t be bothered to dispose of it properly. It wouldn’t have mattered a bit to them if there had been livestock in the field, either. Cows were inquisitive — they might have licked at an abandoned battery and burned themselves on the spilled acid.

Matley walked round the end of the stack and tried to see behind it, but found the gap between the bales and the wall was too narrow for him to squeeze into. Now that he had passed fifty, he wasn’t quite as slim as he used to be — as his wife kept reminding him.

But he could see more small, ragged holes in the black plastic near the centre of the bottom row. Yes, he was sure it was battery acid. What else would be corrosive enough to eat through his silage bags like that? And what else would smell quite so bad?

Puffing a bit, Matley climbed on to the top of the wall and balanced precariously on the toppings. It was the sort of trick he would have played hell about, if he had caught anyone else doing it. Once the toppings had been dislodged by people climbing over them, the rest of the wall would lose its stability and soon fall down. Then motorists would be complaining to the police because his cows were out on the lane again. He couldn’t win.

‘Why do I waste my bloody time?’ he said.

But there was no one on the track this morning to hear him. He could see wheel ruts on the verge the other side of the wall, where someone had backed a car or van in from the lane. He wondered what else they might have fly-tipped. But he couldn’t see anything in the grass or in the deep banks of whinberry between the wall and the track. Why should they bother dumping stuff on the track when they could chuck it over his wall? Out of sight, out of mind. And leave the poor old farmer to clear up the mess, as usual.

Matley edged gingerly along the wall, supporting himself on the stack of bales. The smooth surface of the bags felt cold and slightly damp to the touch. But beneath the plastic, the silage itself gave a little under the pressure of his hands and released a surge of warmth. His fingers left indentations in the plastic as he pushed himself along to a position where he could see what had been thrown over his wall. Rank grass was growing in the narrow space, but it didn’t get much sun behind the silage stack, and it looked pale and sickly.

‘And what the bloody hell’s that ?’ he said.

In the Old Rectory, the Renshaws’ phone rang. Sarah Renshaw looked up at the clock in her sitting room. It was 3.45 p.m. precisely.