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A moment later, Joseph realizes he’ll do no such thing. At least, not tonight. Because with his first downstroke, his spade rebounds off the sun-hardened earth as if from concrete or even steel.
Ten minutes into his task, with sweat pouring down his face and his shirt clinging wet to his back – knowing it’s fruitless but persevering anyway – he’s excavated a hole barely deep enough to conceal a human head. He needs a pickaxe as well as a spade; an entire evening instead of an hour. After thirty minutes of sweating and swearing, he encounters a gorse root that stops his progress dead.
Joseph tosses down his spade. Then, unable to contain himself, he throws back his head and yells at the night. Around him, ground-nesting birds explode from the heath, cawing and flapping. Nearby, something four-legged screeches and bolts.
He sees himself as if from above, an awful silhouette inside a rising cloud of carrion feeders. Suddenly, the earth beneath his feet doesn’t feel solid or still. It feels like it’s seething, countless millions of worms and grubs convulsing with excitement at the prospect of the meal he’d intended to feed them.
Joseph’s stomach clenches. He falls to his knees and vomits up a torrent of stinking bile water. It pours into the hole he just excavated and sinks into the soil. He imagines the worms and grubs writhing more furiously, delirious in their unexpected bath. And then he’s heaving again – and again. After a while he starts to think the contractions will never end, that once his stomach is empty he’ll vomit up a liver, a pair of kidneys, a lung or even a heart, and that what will follow afterwards will be even worse, blackness without form: derelictions, resentments and betrayals.
Exhausted, purged at last, he rolls on to his back. Above him the vast dome of stars turns kaleidoscopic. For the first time since Claire’s death, he hopes she isn’t watching him from up there, that she cannot see what he’s become.
Thatthought is so terrible it forces him to his feet. He fetches his spade and fills in the vomit trench. Then he picks his way back across the stony ground to the car.
During the drive home, he finds himself addressing the dead man directly, and wonders if this is how madness starts. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I need to know the truth. Because it doesn’t make sense to me that you were walking in those woods, late at night, without a wallet or a phone. Nor that you’d be there without a car. So what was really going on? What isn’t Max telling me? What aren’tyoutelling me?’
Fortunately – for his sanity, at least – the dead man refuses to answer. Joseph parks inside his mother’s garage and cycles home. It’s five thirty a.m. Above him, the indigo sky has erased all but the most persistent stars. He tosses his bike over the Calthorpes’ back wall and scrambles after it.
Inside the house, he checks on Max. The boy is asleep, one arm slung across his face. Erin is snoring, too. Joseph showers and spritzes himself with cologne. Then he sets his alarm and crawls into bed beside his wife. She murmurs something incoherent, snuggles up to him.
Lying there, he thinks about the coming day. The dead man has now been ripening inside the Honda for thirty hours, give or take. It feels like the situation couldn’t grow any more critical. But Joseph fears it will.
And five hours later, it does.
THIRTEEN
Sunday mornings during the football season, Max is out of the front door by eight. In summer, he rises late – although not, it seems, today. Just before nine a.m., after a paltry three hours’ sleep, Joseph checks the boy’s room and finds it empty. Downstairs, he discovers Erin in the kitchen. Despite her heavy drinking at the party, she looks like she spent the previous evening alternating between meditation and yoga. Joseph, by contrast, sank one beer and feels like his head might explode.
‘He left hours ago,’ she replies, when he asks after Max.
‘Did he say where he was going?’
‘No. Maybe he was off to see you-know-who. He was out of the door before I could ask. You want some coffee? I’ll be honest, Carver – you look like you need a saline drip.’
‘I’ll get it,’ he says. Rinsing out the portafilter, he pushes it into the electric grinder’s jaws.
‘Was it a bad dream?’
‘Dream?’
‘When my alarm went off, you were thrashing about, muttering some very strange stuff indeed.’
‘Like what?’
Erin’s features pull into a leer. ‘Feed it, feed the machine,’ she says, in a witch’s voice. ‘More meat, fingers and legs, got to feed the machine.You could have been auditioning for a horror film. If it were anyone else it’d be creepy. Actually,’ she adds, ‘I’m being too generous. Itwascreepy.’
Instantly, Joseph recalls his dream. He’d been in Samsons, the butcher’s on Crompton’s high street, feeding the dead man’s body parts into a grinder. But however many limbs he pushed through it, there were always more. Soon, he was knee-deep in red mince. Then, thigh-deep.
He shudders. ‘Is that all?’
‘That’s not enough?’ She looks at him strangely, grabs her purse. ‘Right, I’m heading out – got to pick up some print work for the next fundraiser. Don’t forget I’m in the London office tomorrow. I’m updating the board on our high-value donor push. I’ll be leaving this afternoon.’
Joseph had forgotten, but the news is a relief. Tonight he needs to drive out to Black Down and succeed where last night he failed. Now, he won’t have to lie to Erin about his whereabouts. ‘What time’s your train?’
‘After lunch.’
‘When are you back?’
‘Some time tomorrow evening. I’ll make sure I’m not late.’ She touches his arm, wrinkles her nose. ‘I know – it isn’t ideal. But once this fundraiser’s wrapped up, things will settle down – at least, until the next one. I meant what I said last night. I’d really like things to get back to the way they were.’