‘He got out.’
Leverthal conceded the point with a murmur. ‘He wasn’t especially bright, but he was cunning. I wasn’t altogether surprised when he went missing. The few weeks before his escape he’d really sunk into himself. I couldn’t get anything out of him, and up until then he’d been quite talkative.’
‘And Lacey?’
‘Under his thumb. It often happens. Younger boy idolizes an older, more experienced individual. Lacey had a very unsettled family background.’
Neat, thought Redman. So neat he didn’t believe a word of it. Minds weren’t pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of influence, one marked ‘Cunning’, the next, ‘Impressionable’. They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.
And little boy Lacey? He was written on water.
Classes began the next day, in a heat so oppressive it turned the workshop into an oven by eleven. But the boys responded quickly to Redman’s straight dealing. They recognized in him a man they could respect without liking. They expected no favours, and received none. It was a stable arrangement.
Redman found the staff on the whole less communicative than the boys. An odd-ball bunch, all in all. Not a strong heart amongst them he decided. The routine of Tetherdowne, its rituals of classification, of humiliation, seemed to grind them into a common gravel. Increasingly he found himself avoiding conversation with his peers. The workshop became a sanctuary, a home from home, smelling of newly cut wood and bodies.
It was not until the following Monday that one of the boys mentioned the farm.
Nobody had told him there was a farm in the grounds of the Centre, and the idea struck Redman as absurd.
‘Nobody much goes down there,’ said Creeley, one of the worst woodworkers on God’s earth. ‘It stinks.’
General laughter.
‘All right, lads, settle down.’
The laughter subsided, laced with a few whispered jibes.
‘Where is this farm, Creeley?’
‘It’s not even a farm really, sir,’ said Creeley, chewing his tongue (an incessant routine). ‘It’s just a few huts. Stink, they do sir. Especially now.’
He pointed out of the window to the wilderness beyond the playing field. Since he’d last looked out at the sight, that first day with Leverthal, the wasteland had ripened in the sweaty heat, ranker with weeds than ever. Creeley pointed out a distant brick wall, all but hidden behind a shield of shrubs.
‘See it, sir?’
‘Yes, I see it.’
‘That’s the sty, sir.’
Another round of sniggers.
‘What’s so funny?’ he wheeled on the class. A dozen heads snapped down to their work.
‘I wouldn’t go down there sir. It’s high as a fucking kite.’
Creeley wasn’t exaggerating. Even in the relative cool of the late afternoon the smell wafting off the farm was stomach turning. Redman just followed his nose across the field and past the out-houses. The buildings he glimpsed from the workshop window were coming out of hiding. A few ramshackle huts thrown up out of corrugated iron and rotting wood, a chicken run, and the brick-built sty were all the farm could offer. As Creeley had said, it wasn’t really a farm at all. It was a tiny domesticated Dachau; filthy and forlorn. Somebody obviously fed the few prisoners: the hens, the half dozen geese, the pigs, but nobody seemed bothered to clean them out. Hence that rotten smell. The pigs particularly were living in a bed of their own ordure, islands of dung cooked to perfection in the sun, peopled with thousands of flies.
The sty itself was divided into two separate compartments, divided by a high brick wall. In the forecourt of one a small, mottled pig lay on its side in the filth, its flank alive with ticks and bugs. Another, smaller, pig could be glimpsed in the gloom of the interior, lying on shit-thick straw. Neither showed any interest in Redman.
The other compartment seemed empty.
There was no excrement in the forecourt, and far fewer flies amongst the straw. The accumulated smell of old faecal matter was no less acute, however, and Redman was about to turn away when there was a noise from inside, and a great bulk righted itself. He leaned over the padlocked wooden gate, blotting out the stench by an act of will, and peered through the doorway of the sty.