Mud Pie
Emma Lee Bole
MUD PIE
A Tale of Rugby, Puddings and Murder
Emma Lee Bole
Copyright 2015 Emma Lee Bole
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 The Silk Road
Chapter 2 Tissett
Chapter 3 Piccadilly
Chapter 4 White Van
Chapter 5 Nan’s House
Chapter 6 Clubhouse
Chapter 7 Brasso
Chapter 8 Brocklow
Chapter 9 Ute
Chapter 10 Party
Chapter 11 Grimshaw
Chapter 12 Sock Drawer
Chapter 13 Cole
Chapter 14 Spare Room
Chapter 15 Himself
Chapter 16 KK
Chapter 17 Hugh
Chapter 18 Karl’s 18th
Chapter 19 Funeral
Chapter 20 Incident Room
Chapter 21 Michelle
Chapter 22 Foxes
Chapter 23 Cat and Fiddle
Chapter 24 Moonlight
Chapter 25 Fun
Chapter 26 Flush
Chapter 27 Charlotte
Chapter 28 Roofless
Chapter 29 Frank
Chapter 30 The Last Tea
Chapter 31 Hospital
Chapter 32 The Silk Road
About the author
MUD PIE
Chapter One
The Silk Road
I was dead meat.
Everything still worked, bodywise. My heart still pumped at 72 bpm. My lungs inflated too rapidly, if anything, as I sat hunched in the passenger seat, fingers clenched around my knees. My eyes admitted the rain-streaked images of the Silk Road that fled past the window, transferring them efficiently to my brain.
Even my brain was still working. It suggested a suitable compliment to pay to Charlotte’s zippy little Renault, and my mouth dutifully translated this into the right noises.
“It’s a good little runner,” said Charlotte with affection. She was nothing like her car, being large and horsey rather than small and chic. She was my best friend – possibly my only friend right now – and I knew I loved her, although, being dead, I couldn’t quite remember how that felt.
You’re dead meat, Herron, sneered the voice in my head. My brain was shocked into another convulsive attempt at normality.
“It’s raining very hard,” I said.
“Isn’t it just? Hope you brought your welly-boots, Lannie my girl, because according to Hugh it’s mud, mud, mud from now on,” said Charlotte cheerfully. Although I had warned her I was dead meat, she didn’t really believe me. She didn’t understand what my pursuers were like. And I hadn’t quite told her the full story.
I had no welly-boots. I had no raincoat or umbrella. I had a large hold-all, a small tent and a mildewed sleeping-bag crammed into Charlotte’s boot. Tucked between the clothes in the holdall were the only things of value I possessed: my knives. For a moment I cradled the thought of them, strong and gleaming in their soft black cloth. Stronger than I was, since they had no feelings. Ruthless. Invincible.
“Hugh says it’s a nice little pub,” said Charlotte, “nothing flash, but the landlord’s a good sort.”
“Hugh says that about everyone.” Hugh was Charlotte’s brother: like her, tall, posh and amiable, with a benign view of the world.
“Can you read out the directions?” Charlotte flipped a piece of paper at me. “I don’t know this neck of the woods.”
“I think it’s another left in about a mile.” I peered out at the rain, looking for road signs. The dual carriageway had become a dwindling single that meandered as if it had lost its memory. I checked my watch. We were still barely an hour out of Manchester. When I glanced surreptitiously in the mirror, the sleek black car that crawled behind me made my heart pound for a moment, until it overtook us in a whoosh of impatience and hurtled out of sight.
My stomach balled up unhappily. This wasn’t far enough. My first idea of fleeing to Scotland had been better, except that I’d find no work there until Christmas: and I needed work.
“It’s not really all that far,” commented Charlotte with pleased surprise. “You can easily come back and see me. I’d give you a job in the bread shop if I could, you know that, Lannie.”
“I know you would.” But I guessed that Charlotte’s hot bread shop, on the fringes of Didsbury, wasn’t breaking even yet, and Charlotte’s Daddy, who had bankrolled it, would not approve unnecessary employees. Anyway, it was too close.
“And you can always move back to Manchester once things have calmed down.”
“Yes.” I couldn’t. Things wouldn’t calm down. “Next left, I think.”
There was no sign to Tissett. That was good. I’d checked Tissett out in a road atlas at the newsagents’, and had been a little reassured when the index hadn’t heard of it. So I’d hunted it down on an O.S. map in Central Library: a tiny place, barely there, just the letters PH and two little grey squares. It was a mile from Brocklow – distinguished only by a crossroads and a phone box – which I had never heard of either, and which was two miles from Fylington, which I was fairly sure I’d heard of, which was in turn four miles from Macclesfield, which I had definitely heard of but never visited, nor knew anyone, apart from Hugh, who had.
It rained harder as we drove through Fylington – too big for a village, too small for a town, a stony rampart of grey squashed shops and weavers’ cottages.
“Hugh says house prices through the roof round here,” said Charlotte wistfully. We chugged past an inordinate number of pubs, an antique primary school, and a set of rugby posts in a deserted field of mud. Then we were out, and winding up a hill into real countryside, with cows and sheep and stone walls charcoaled by the wet.
“What’s the matter?” Charlotte asked.
I must have sighed. I’d felt stagnation dribble over me like the rain. The road crawled along wrinkles in the weather-beaten face of the land. There was nothing here.
But of course that was the point. I could hide in those wrinkles. I hadn’t been able to tell from the map if I would be living in Derbyshire or Cheshire: it might even have been Staffordshire. I was pretty damn sure that none of my pursuers would have ever heard of Brocklow, or Tissett, or the Woolpack Inn.
The thought gave me faint hope, in so far as the dead can have hope. My last week, spent cowering in Charlotte’s tiny Didsbury flat, had been almost entirely hope-free.
“Here we are!” announced Charlotte, as if we were just out for Sunday lunch.
“Pretty,” I said as we pulled into the Woolpack’s tiny car park. I lied, of course.
