Cold in the Earth by Aline Templeton

checked in he would be making a couple of calls on one or two people who wouldn’t be expecting a personalised waking-up service. They weren’t early risers and he wasn’t in any hurry.
    He lit up a cigarette – the first of the day was always the best – and on an impulse strolled off down the gravel drive which led to the fields, the smoke and his breath making clouds of vapour on the chill air. It was a habit with all the Mason men when they had something on their mind to go and – well, if not exactly talk to the animals, then contemplate their problems in their presence. And he had a lot on his mind.
    He ought to have been feeling pretty good. The Super had been seriously chuffed with him and even Big Marge had been forced to grit her teeth and give him a pat on the head for his triumph over the burglaries. It had cost him, of course – there was no way his ‘squeak’ would have coughed for the measly £50 he was authorised to offer – and he’d had to find another £50 to get himself off the hook.
    That was all it had done, though, and the euphoria had quickly worn off. Even though he’d shown them what a good man could do, even if he slogged his guts out passing exams, promoted posts as DI were few and far between. Big Marge had the job he wanted, and she wouldn’t be going anywhere. He drew fiercely on his cigarette and expelled the smoke through tightened nostrils. Women! He was balked at every turn by bloody women.
    And this foot-and-mouth business – it was a crisis rapidly being converted to a major catastrophe by the bungling idiots in charge. Well, ‘in charge’, as long as you’d use the term to describe someone clinging to a juggernaut. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach about it: the epidemic was spreading like wildfire and the Chief Constable, no less, was pulling in police from all over the district to address them on it this afternoon.
    His feet crunched on the gravel as he walked on past the straggly eyesore of the old maze and the open gates of the stockyard. No one was about: the stockman they had at the moment was a lazy sod and the curtains of his flat above the pens were still drawn. There was a housekeeper’s flat there too but it was empty at the moment. Thanks to Jake being too mean to pay proper wages and his mother’s incurable habit of detailing any failings with more energy than tact, no one stayed long and the house got dirtier and the food more disgusting with every passing year.
    Living at home was getting to him more and more. He felt stifled by it, imprisoned as if he were locked into a bad marriage. If his mother found out he had a girlfriend, however casual, she behaved like a betrayed wife. If he took a holiday, other than the traditional one to Pamplona each year in homage to her bloody father, who’d been an evil old sod, she made him pay for it with sulks, tantrums and a multitude of personal inconveniences like forgotten messages and ruined laundry. Everything she did now affected him like fingernails being scraped across a blackboard and she manipulated the purse-strings like a puppeteer jerking around a marionette. It was lucky he’d decided seven years ago to bail out of the farm; at least he had his police wages, even if they came nowhere near to giving him the standard of living he was entitled to expect. If he’d stayed he’d have been forced to exist on what his uncle chose to pay him – minimum wage, probably, mean old bastard – and what Conrad could wheedle out of his mother.
    He daren’t leave home, though. If he did make his escape, he had little doubt that she would cut him off in rage and spite and he’d have to kiss goodbye to any chance of getting his hands on the farm, which he lusted after with a passion. He’d never met a woman yet who inspired anything approaching what he felt for the vast upland acres in this quiet, beautiful countryside, and he loved the great black beasts they bred which were such a part of his