Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Fat Mary JULIAN RATHBONE

It was, I suppose, a small thatched cottage, but you don’t see them like that any more — a two roomed cabin, made of mediaeval daub — a mixture of cow-dung and fine gravel, terracotta-coloured where the whitewash had peeled off. The thatch was dark brown, covered with blackish moss, roof-tree sagging. There was nothing picturesque about it at all, no briar-roses, no hollyhocks. Thin chickens squabbled over the dusty yard, a white lean rooster with a spare handful of tail feathers racketed amongst them, occasionally fucking them. The hens paid no attention, often just went on desperately pecking at the ground for a grain or seed they might have missed.

There was a shed, a barn and a stable. In the stable, in a stall too small for her, a fat old sow suckled six out of eight piglets. She had eaten the two runts along with all the afterbirths in order to have milk for the others.

There was a pond, shrunk in July, within a saucer of chocolate-coloured cracked mud, sheeted with emerald green algae and beside it a dung-heap which heaved with thin white worms.

It was all set at the top end of a narrow coombe at the end of a chalky track that threaded the three ten-acre fields she had. The steep sides of the downs were filled with beech and birch woods, but the back end was crowned with an ancient yew forest, planted by Henry VIII to provide longbows. Too late someone told him about gunpowder so the trees were never used.

We crouched in hiding on the edge of the beech wood, James and I, watched, waited and speculated. We were pupils at Minster Hill, a boarding school that claimed to be a public school. Minster Hill prided itself on its progressive approach to education so, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, we were let out to walk around the countryside at will.

We were wearing the summer uniform — grey Vyella shirts with sleeves rolled up, grey corduroy shorts, very baggy and loose, wollen stockings, sandals. The sandals were impractical, but there we were, there was nothing we could do about that. I wore a sheathed SS dagger my uncle had brought back from Germany. The hilt was wound with silver wire and there was a swastika on the centre of the cross-guard. I carried it under my shirt when we left the school buildings, but threaded the sheath on to my belt as soon as we were clear.

It was a hot sultry day. The flies were a bother. We headed into the woods and searched out rotten silver birch trees, which, we had discovered, could be pushed over. Often you had to rock them first, then they would begin to crack, and at last they’d topple. Occasionally they would break in three or four places up the trunk and concertina down around us in a flurry of soft umber shards and dust. When we couldn’t find any more trees that would go, I took out my SS knife and we practised throwing it at the trunks of the beech trees. These were grey and wrinkled and put me in mind of the giant legs of huge elephants. It wasn’t easy to make the point stick in. You could either throw it point first in one sweeping underarm movement, a method which worked over short distances. Or, over five yards or more, we held it by the point and made it turn in the air three times or more, always hoping the point would hit the tree first. Sometimes it did.

After a time, when our throats were dry and prickly and an itchy sweat was building up inside the Vyella shirts, we sat awkwardly on the ground, undid our buttoned flies and pulled our pricks into the warm air. We did it to ourselves, not to each other. There was no passion in this, not even much friendliness. Indeed, back at school James and I were in different forms, different dormitories, kept away from each other, though occasionally we exchanged expressionless, unblinking glances when we met.

James was a dark, saturnine lad, pretty in a sort of Spanish or Levantine way, with olive skin and a mop of black hair. He said little, seemed to live in a world of his own.

When we’d done that we pushed on down the hill, through the trees, to the electric fence that bounded the highest of Fat Mary’s fields. And while we waited for her to appear (something which did not always happen) we rehearsed the myths that surrounded her, adding our own embellishments and speculations, and listened to the five second pulse on her wire — enough to keep her three Jersey cows in and the deer out.

‘She weighs sixteen stone.’

‘More like twenty.’

‘The hair on her chin is bristly.’

‘So is the hair between her legs.’

‘Her bosoms are great fat sacks of pink blancmange.’

‘With giant strawberries for nipples.’

In those days even to say words like ‘bosoms’ and ‘nipples’ was a thrill, a frisson, at any rate.

‘Her bottom is huge. Bigger than the two biggest melons you ever saw. ’

‘Far bigger. And her bum-hole is a black pit.’

‘Her feet are rotting and smell like over-ripe Camembert. ’

But we weren’t that interested in her feet.

‘On very hot days she takes off all her clothes and walks around with nothing on.’

‘On one very very hot day she made Smithson-Haig go into her bedroom and do it to her.’

‘So he says.’

‘Don’t you believe him?’

‘Not really.’

‘Nor do I.’

I pulled a long succulent stalk of milky barley grass, easing it from its cellulose sheath. I sucked it, then chewed.

‘Would you?’ I asked. ‘Would you go into her house if she asked you?’

‘Yes. If you came too.’

‘And do it to her?’

‘I don’t know about that.’

The distant chug and rattle of a pre-war bull-nosed Morris had us looking back down the track. Changes in the note and speed of the engine and we knew that just out of sight, around the corner of the woods, Fat Mary had got out of the car, opened her five-bar gate, driven through, and closed it behind her. And here she came, driving between the fences, leaving a thin slipstream of chalk dust mingling with the black of her exhaust. A second fence and a second gate, then she half-circled the foetid pond and came to a standstill outside her tumble-down lattice-work porch. Hens and rooster scurried away towards the barn, the cows looked up from their pasture above her, a very large and mangy ginger tom woke up from wherever he had been sleeping and pushed his chin and cheek against the rough lisle of her stockings.

She was huge. And in spite of the July heat she was wearing a tweed suit, the heavy skirt cut long below her knees, the jacket mannish, very sensible shoes on her feet, and a sort of battered felt trilby on her head. She had gingery straw-coloured hair which was probably quite long since it was always bound up in a large bun above her neck, beneath the trilby. Her shoulders were broad and heavy, her back a rounded wall beneath the tweed. Her bosoms, behind a not over-clean white blouse and a structured bra or corset, forced the lapels of the jacket apart above one strained button. Her hands were like dinner plates with pink uncooked sausages for fingers.

Although we could scarcely make out her face, we had seen her in Sherborne on market days and knew that it was broad, once fair, now red with weather, with broken capillaries on the cheeks, small pale blue eyes widely spaced but almost lost beneath heavy lids, a spread stubby nose, a big mouth with rubbery lips and discoloured but otherwise large and healthy teeth. She had a large mole beneath the corner of her mouth, and yes, it did nourish bristly hair. Her voice was deep, as mannish as her jacket and shoes, the accent touched with Dorset, but not incomprehensibly broad.

She got out of the car, went round to the boot and hoisted a sack from it, feed of some sort, perhaps, or fertilizer, certainly a hundredweight. Grasping it around its waistless middle she carried it, not with ease but certainly without much difficulty, into the barn. Then she came back, wiping her hands down the sides of her massive hams, and plucked wicker baskets filled with brown-paper-wrapped or bagged shopping out of the back of the car. She put most of it on her doorstep, then reached to a ledge inside the porch for a big iron key and let herself into the cottage.

I batted flies off my forehead, eased my knees away from the coarse grass that had imprinted a network of ridges into them, and ran my tongue across my top lip.

‘Come on,’ I said, and stood up. ‘Show’s over.’

James looked back at me, up over his shoulder.

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Follow me.’

And, bent double, he scouted along the fence and back into the wood. I followed him, but made a less than elaborate attempt to keep hidden. He pushed on, always near the fence to the meadow, and round to the top of the coombe and so into the edge of the yew forest. This was very different from the wood and I wasn’t too happy about going into it.

In the first place it was dark and gloomy and cool — after the heat, almost chilly. Almost nothing grew beneath the low heavy branches, leaving exposed a steep slope of dusty earth, flint stones and chalk. Amongst the dark oily green of the needles yew berries hung like drops of blood. These were obscene — first because they were notoriously very poisonous, but also because of their form. Each was a tiny succulent cup of red flesh nursing inside it a seed. At one and the same time they suggested to the adolescent mind the glans and foreskin of a nearly tumescent penis and some hazy speculative idea of what the parts of a girl might be like. If you squeezed the flesh they exuded a colourless ichor, balanced somewhere between stickiness and slime, which matched exactly the tiny drop of fluid that could hang on the end of your prick when it lost tumescence without ejaculation.

You must remember that all this took place fifty years ago when, for an adolescent boy in a boarding school, anything to do with sex was cloaked in ignorance and imbued with compulsively attractive feelings of deep, dark guilt.

But there was a second reason why the yew forest was a place of very ill omen. Twice, four years and two years previously, boys from Minster Hill had been found hanging from their belts from one of those dark, seamed boughs. The forensic details of their deaths had not been made public, though in both cases it was rumoured that sexual activity had preceded death and verdicts of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed were returned by a bemused and horrified jury. On both occasions the school Chaplain had used his sermon on the Sunday following the inquests to attack, in coded terms, the practice of masturbation, dwelling on the feelings of shame that could follow, a shame intense enough to make a young lad take his own life.

None of this seemed to bother James though he did keep to the lower edge of the forest. Presently he edged forward again as far as the fence that overlooked the meadow and, this time, the rear of Fat Mary’s smallholding. We were much closer than we had been before, not much more than a hundred yards away, and looking down on a graveyard of agricultural machinery.

An old tractor rotted away on huge flat tyres, the multiple tines of an ancient harrow looked like the ribs of a giant dead fish, the rust-red discs of a plough like saurian vertebrae. Grass and brambles grew through them, willow herb too, in spikes of dark pink bloom, and sorrel already brown and crusted with friable seeds. Long ago Fat Mary’s father and brothers had ploughed two of the fields each year and grown rape and flax, barley and oats. The brothers died in Burma, in the forgotten army, Mother hanged herself, Daddy died of drink. Fat Mary survived on and by the animals she reared and let the fields return to pasture.

There was also an ancient pump mounted on a fluted cast-iron column — the only water supply she had. And just then, as we settled down to watch again, the back door opened and she came out.

She had taken off all her clothes.

She went to the pump, worked the long handle, filled a bucket, tipped it over her head. Then she did the same again. Next, she scrubbed herself all over with a huge bar of green Fairy soap, before washing the suds away with a third bucketful. The fourth she took to the lean-to toilet shed at the end of the building. We fancied we could hear her pissing. Then she went back indoors. All in all she had been visible to us for about five minutes.

She was magnificent. In the bright, hot July sun her body glowed pearl and rose and a deeper red where her clothes had been too tight. Her neck was an ivory tree-trunk, her shoulders were like fat rounded hams. As she worked the pump, her huge breasts swung like sacks of cream netted in blue veins and nippled with discs like saucers. Once, while pumping, she straightened and used her wrist to wipe the sweat from her brow which was streaked with her coarse, gingery hair and for a moment, upright, with her huge torso tilted back a little, she was a goddess.

When she tipped the flashing water over herself it slid through the suds, driving them down, and the acres of her skin looked sleek and strong like a whale’s. Her huge dimpled buttocks were so pressed together that the cleft was not obvious, until she put her hand between to soap inside, and when she turned her stomach hung like a stuffed hammock and all but buried in shadow the multiple creases beneath and the flattened triangle of straw.

But for all the flabbiness of her body, torso, breasts and buttocks, her limbs, though massive, were strong and round and firm, dimpled again at knees and elbows, but structured by the muscle and sinew deep beneath, the power house that could carry not only her own weight but made nothing or not much of an extra hundredweight, or split the massive logs that were stacked against the wall of her cabin.

The long and the short of it was — I fell in love.

Well, what’s your definition of that miserable state?

I had never before seen female naked flesh beyond what the pre-bikini swimming costumes of the late nineteen forties (which included hideous rubber bathing caps) allowed. I had no, or hardly any, preconceptions of what constitutes female beauty or what in a female body might stimulate sexual desire. Even the air-brushed or eclectically posed women in Health and Efficiency were plump by today’s standards. I had, moreover, been taken to the National Gallery where a visit to Dutch maritime paintings, de Cuyp cows and trompe-l’ceil interiors, all deemed to be aesthetically uplifting, could not be undertaken without a hurried passage through the Rubens rooms. And Fat Mary was not that much fatter than the Goddesses poor Paris had to choose between. So, there was no reason to be repelled by her size.

And the attraction? Fantasy made flesh and dwelling, if not amongst us, then little more than three miles away. As soon as the plank door closed behind her I knew I had to see her again. The summer holidays came and that image haunted me. Surreptitiously I drew crude pictures of her and hid them from my parents. I willed dreams of her and sometimes was visited by her in unwilled dreams. By September, when we returned to school, I was obsessed. I haunted the market and caught glimpses of her in her tweeds, which, perhaps oddly, did nothing to put me off. I just stood in front of her, gawped, turned bright crimson, and imagined what I knew lay beneath. Only one thing bothered me and I pushed that away as an absurd irrelevance — I knew she must be at least twenty years older than me, possibly as much as twenty-five. You cannot now imagine how the repression and ignorance of anything concerning sex and the female body poisoned our minds in those days and led to such deep and foetid infatuations.

The weather turned chill, the leaves turned and dropped, and I shivered on the edge of the yew forest whenever I was allowed out and sometimes when I was not, filled with despair because I knew that even if I caught a glimpse of her, I stood no chance at all of seeing her undressed. I came on my own now, though once or twice I fancied James was maybe behind me in the woods. In school we saw even less of each other than before — with the new school year timetables had been changed, and hierarchies redrawn following the summer end-of-term exams. He was now in the Remove, would be sixteen before he took School Certificate and did woodwork instead of Latin. I had sold or bartered my SS dagger in the way boys do, but I had heard that it had passed on two or three more times and that James now owned it.

But none of this was important. What kept me awake at nights and patrolling those fences even when the frosts came and the pond below froze was the obsession, the overwhelming desire to see Fat Mary naked again, and. And what? I hardly dared imagine. Yet believe it or not it was not until December, late December, just three days before Minster Hill broke up, that I remembered that day in July, how we had seen her let herself in with a big iron key taken from a high ledge in the porch. It was a Saturday morning again, first light and that cold greyness in the high sash windows that told you it had snowed in the night even before you looked out. I lay there on my back with my eyes open listening to the grumbles of my companions as they too woke up, and then their exclamations of delight as they saw the snow, and all I could say to myself, over and over again was — ‘I can get in, I can get in whenever I want.’

My footsteps squeaked in the bright cold snow as I tramped up her track, between the fences. The only other marks were the tyre treads from where she had driven out. The sun was no more than a red disc in a mauve-grey sky. Everything was still and silent but for the sound of my footsteps and breathing. Not even the rooks cackled above the beech trees, nor did the rooster call from Fat Mary’s yard. It had been a heavy fall, covering the patch of sprouts to the left of her door so they looked like dwarfs or munchkins. It lay thick on the thatch of her roof though a thin wisp of white smoke rose from the one stove-pipe chimney. Icicles hung by the wall and from the eaves of her outbuildings. I was cold, desperately cold — a raincoat, a jacket and shoes instead of sandals, were the only concessions to winter that we were allowed. We even remained in short trousers. Of course, clothes rationing was still in force.

Inside the porch I reached up to the ledge that ran along the side just where the plank roof met the trellis sides and yes, there it was. Suddenly I realized that part of me had hoped all along that it would not be there. You know how they say ‘his heart was in his mouth’? Mine was. And my knees had turned to jelly. Almost I hoped the key, black, six inches long, would not work, or jam, or something. But no, it turned, quite smoothly, no problem. And yes, the door did creak, indeed, resisted for a moment before its corner squealed across stone flags.

The first thing that hit me was the warmth, and the second was the smell. The first was welcome. I was not so sure about the second. It was a heavy concoction of different things, though predominant at first was pork fat, sour, heavy, insistent. It seemed to be in everything. Indeed on almost all the surfaces there was a hazy greasy slime, yellowish in colour, that seemed to be the essence of cooked or rendered pig. But it was undercut by other odours — baking, cooked greens, hot metal, tom cat, all almost as bad, but lavender, stored apples, and warm old age as well, breathed out from the ancient dark furniture. There was no electricity of course, but Fat Mary had left an oil lamp on the large kitchen table — turned low, but to eyes coming out of the encroaching winter gloom, bright enough.

The one room was divided by a beam in the ceiling with heavy brown velvet curtains hanging from it, left three-quarters open. The first room was kitchen and living-room combined. Against the end wall beneath the stove-pipe a full kitchen range whose fire glowed behind the ventilation flues in its door was set back in a big alcove that once must have been a fireplace, with another huge black old beam as its mantle. The tick of its ancient clock was marked by a cut-out boat set in the dial in which stood a cowled Death. His scythe swung back and forth with each double tick-tock.

On either side of the range there were cupboards and shelves, and more shelves along the back wall, with a dresser too. Impossible to take in all that I could see, but what stood out were huge greasy jars containing bottled or pickled pig trotters, and, in the largest, a pig’s head — boned so it looked like a deflated football. Yet it had eyelashes, and sight seemed to gleam through the dark slits between its lids.

Backing away I found myself in the bedroom which was almost filled by the hugest bed I had ever seen, together with a massive wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a full length mirror on a swivel, its glass clouded and blackened where the silvering had dropped away. But it was the bed that I could not take my eyes off. It must have been six feet by six feet at least, piled with blankets, old eiderdowns and grey sheets with a heap of pillows and bolsters against the wall at the far end. Above it, clinging to the rough-cast wall beneath a ceiling of planks, swathes of blackened cobwebs hung like the tied-back drapes of a Princess’s bed.

I did, still do, suffer from severe arachnophobia.

At that moment I heard the noise of her motor.

She knew I was there of course — first the footprints in the snow, going one way only, then of course the door, closed as I had left it, yes, but with the big key still in the key-hole. I heard the door slam, the meow of the cat, the crunch of her galoshes in the snow. And suddenly I was faced with a question which had loomed like a thundercloud on the horizon, but which I had refused to face, ever since I had left the school buildings: What was I there for? Why had I come? To see her. To see her with no clothes on, as I had seen her in the summer. And?

There was only one place to go. I dived on to the bed and burrowed my way in like a worm burrowing into sand, in amongst those heavy quilts, damp but warm sheets, mountainous bolsters. At this point I should say I was small for my age and very thin and I fancy that before she was properly in I was invisible. I could hear her moving about, putting down bags and so forth, and presently I lifted a corner of the foetid mound I was under and managed to peep out.

She had already turned up the wick of the lamp and lit a couple of candles too. She had her back to me, was in front of a wall mirror to the side of the range, drawing a long hat pin out of her hat and hair. As she lifted the hat off her head her hair tumbled down to the shoulders of her rubberized mackintosh. She set hat and pin to one side on a dresser then filled a kettle from a tall jug, enamelled iron, the enamel chipped, and set it on the hob.

‘I know you’re there,’ she said. Of course she did. ‘In the bed are you? I’ll be with you presently.’ And slowly, deliberately, she began to undress.

First the rubberized mackintosh, then a long tartan scarf. Next the tweed jacket, then a moth-damaged woolly that had once been purple. She released the bottom of her blouse from the skirt band, undid the buttons, shrugged out of it. I could now see her massive freckled shoulders criss-crossed with straps and some of her back above a voluminous slip or petticoat. Reaching behind those sausage-like fingers neatly unhooked and unbuttoned (no zips) the fastenings of her skirt. She stepped out of it, then shrugged and pushed at the straps of the slip (which was made of some shiny material, satin perhaps, though stained and grubby) and stepped out of that. She was now clad only in a flesh coloured corset, bloomers, and thick stockings whose tops disappeared beneath the bloomers.

The kettle boiled, she reached up for a tin caddy, made tea. She poured out two mugfuls, topped them up with condensed milk from an already opened tin, and added a good slurp of brown cooking brandy to each. She carried them towards the bed and put them down on the chest of drawers then, with one swift movement pulled back the covers and looked down at me.

‘You might,’ she said, ‘have taken your shoes off.’

I was shivering, not with cold but fright.

‘Here. Drink this.’

It should have been foul, but it was very sweet. The brandy fumes made my head swim even before I tasted it.

‘Drink it all’

I did as I was told.

‘Take your clothes off.’

I removed the coats and shoes, then she pushed me on to my back. Her fingers danced like elephants over my shirt and trouser buttons. Finally she unthreaded my belt and put it to one side.

‘What a thin little shrimp you are!’

Did she mean all of me or just my not fully mature prick?

And that was all she said. From then on she just grunted or sighed as she pushed me about, got me into the positions she wanted, so she could play out what I soon realized was her fantasy, not mine.

When I was naked, and clutching my genitals out of terrible embarrassment, she pulled me into the middle of the bed, turned me on to my back with my head in the middle of the bed but facing into the room, then heaped the heavy odoriferous covers over me so I was in a heavy black cave of damp warmth. A moment or two later she crawled in at the far end and I could feel her burrowing over me, on hands and knees, her hands on either side of my body moving up towards my head, her knees following her hands. She too was naked now and I could feel the huge softness of her flesh, her great swinging breasts, the floppy folds of her stomach, then the rich farmy odours of her lower parts as they all travelled up over me in the dark until my head was between her knees and then her shins.

She adjusted the covers and for a moment I caught a shadowy glimpse of her mountainous buttocks upside down as it were above my head, then her hands came back between her spread legs and caught hold of my head. And she began to pull. She began to drag me through the narrow gap between her thighs. I thought she was going to pull my head off.

This may seem funny to read, but it was not at all funny at the time. I was terrified, and suddenly in some pain. My shoulders snagged against the backs of her legs, I was suffocating. I pushed my body up and along following my neck and head, using a scrabbling sort of motion with my feet, and then had the sense to twist on to my side so my shoulders could follow my head. I squeezed one hand through that narrow but soft quivering gap, beneath her private parts, and for a moment I could feel the hair, moist, wet even, and breathing honeyed, soured odours, as it rubbed along my cheek and neck.

All this time she was moaning and groaning, puffing and panting. Of course I can see now what she was doing, but I had no idea at the time, no idea at all that she was simulating child-birth.

With my head and shoulders through she straightened somewhat and the covers fell even more away. She got her hands in my armpits, and pushing her knees apart, with one last enormous sigh, pulled me through as far as my waist, leaving only my pelvis and legs still in the gap beneath her. She now had me sitting, with her arms round my back in a huge bear-hug, her bottom spread on either side of my thighs and my face buried in her stomach beneath her breasts so I still had to struggle for breath through all that flesh, and for a moment we stayed like that, and she rocked us both a little from side to side. Her groans and moans had now become cooing sighs which I could hear rumble purringly deep in her chest. By now I was terrified. I cannot say how terrified I was.

With her feet on the floor at the end of the bed she now lifted herself and with one more heave had me free enough to haul my legs out and on to her lap. Gathering her great wrinkled, floppy, vein-laced breast in one hand she thrust a plate-like nipple into my face. Some primaeval if forgotten urge made me suck. There was, of course, no milk, but there was comfort in the floppy saltiness of it which presently hardened a little between my teeth. She pressed my still snorting nose into it with one ham of a hand while the other ran over my head, down my neck and fondled, and squeezed my ribs until I felt they would crack.

And for a moment, perhaps even for a minute or two or more, my fear fell away and I felt warm, happy, secure..

Then, the sow that eats its farrow, she began to strangle me.

She retrieved my belt and with one hand threaded a noose through the buckle. She slipped it over my head, gave the end a twist or two to get a good grip on it, while with the other arm she wrapped me in a bear-hug which pinned my arms to my sides. Then she tightened the noose, slowly.

The first effect was to impede the flow of blood to and from my head and the second was to make me terribly aware of my prick. Until then the experience had not been for me an overtly sexual one. Now it very definitely was. The tumescence felt like a great throbbing hard… I don’t know, cucumber or something. And then, as the darkness filled my head, and my lungs at last began to feel they’d burst, something gave and I let myself go in an orgasm the like of which I had never experienced until then. Or since. And with it everything fell apart. Her arms dropped from the killing embrace and I felt, beneath all the fat, how her muscles suddenly tautened into a terrible convulsion. They relaxed as swiftly as they had tensed and a great gout of warm liquid splashed over my head and shoulders before she toppled backwards, taking me with her.

Somehow I knew — from the smell, the iron taste of it, the viscosity, that she was drenching me in blood, her own blood, and that if only I could loosen the belt I might live.

I tried to struggle but she did too, and I could see now the hilt of what had been my SS dagger, which now belonged to James, protruding from her neck. But though the blood was pulsing up around it she still had strength and will and was ready to fight on, but at that moment a dark shadow seemed to flit across the room and there was James himself. He plucked the knife from her neck before she could and rammed it again and again into her neck and breasts until the flow of blood ceased to throb, became a sluggish stream, and stopped.

At last I loosened the belt. Or James did. I can’t remember which. I sat up and looked down and across her. She was on her back, half propped up on all those heavy covers and eiderdowns, her arms still twitching convulsively in front of her tortured, fear-filled face, the fingers groping towards the dagger which was again stuck in the crimson tide that flowed across her chest and into the wide valley between her breasts, which were now flopped outwards. For a moment she stared at the two of us, first one then the other, her small blue eyes baleful, filled with hate. Then she pulled in one last huge breath, let it out and blood bubbled with it from her mouth. She gave a long shudder which ended on a croaking sigh, her legs flopped apart and she was gone, as dead as the pigs whose throats she cut each autumn, whose fat she rendered down and whose joints she carved, baked, cured and pickled.

Later the post mortem report said that one only of the many wounds had killed her. The upward thrust of the dagger, whether thrown from close to or administered with a stab, had neatly passed between the central column of oesophagus and wind pipe and the sinew to the side, finding and severing the carotid artery, draining the blood from her brain.

James loosened the belt and I managed at last to get to my feet. He handed me a large threadbare towel and I began to wipe myself. The big ginger tom appeared from under the bed and began to rub up against Fat Mary’s shin. The door, which James had only managed to pull to behind him, flew open and a flurry of icy snow whirled round the room, hissed on the range. Tom disappeared under the bed again.

‘We’d better get back to school,’ said James. He pulled the knife out of Fat Mary’s throat, wiped it on a sheet. I suppose he’s still got it. If he’s still around. It all happened fifty years ago, half a century.

‘You should wash up as well as you can so no blood gets on your clothes,’ he went on. ‘There’s no reason for anyone to know we were here.’

He was right. It was two days before she was found — the first to call was a gamekeeper drawn by the lowing of cows that had not been milked and the bellows of a sow that had not been fed and whose litter was, by then, too big to eat.