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Back Dying to Sin Save as PDF
Chapters (43)
  1. Dedication
  2. Epigraph
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Chapter Twenty-One
  24. Chapter Twenty-Two
  25. Chapter Twenty-Three
  26. Chapter Twenty-Four
  27. Chapter Twenty-Five
  28. Chapter Twenty-Six
  29. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  30. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  31. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  32. Chapter Thirty
  33. Chapter Thirty-One
  34. Chapter Thirty-Two
  35. Chapter Thirty-Three
  36. Chapter Thirty-Four
  37. Chapter Thirty-Five
  38. Chapter Thirty-Six
  39. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  40. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  41. About the Author
  42. Also by Stephen Booth
  43. About the Publisher

When he saw the front of the farm, Cooper realized why the builders had gone in the back way. The main access must already have been an ocean of mud when they arrived. It looked as though the previous owners had allowed their cattle free rein. The ground was seriously poached, right up to the walls of the farmhouse. The lane from the gate past the barn would be almost impassable on foot, unless you were wearing waders.

Cooper shook his head. No one would have allowed that to happen unless they no longer cared about the farm, or had no stake in its future.

He pulled his Toyota over towards the wall and leaned on the topping stones for a while. He could see that someone had been into Pity Wood this way, and quite recently. Tyre tracks ran through the mud, where a vehicle had churned deep, wet ruts. The tracks didn’t run all the way up to the house, but stopped near the barn. If he looked a bit more closely at the ruts, then asked around to find out when cattle were last in here, he could probably have a good stab at how long it was since the vehicle had come and gone.

But it didn’t matter, did it? This crime wasn’t recent enough.

Cooper felt sure they’d be looking into the past to find the information they needed, studying that little time capsule of a kitchen, not the cement-covered building site. The answers would lie in the lives of the people who’d abandoned Pity Wood Farm to its fate.

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

At The Oaks residential care home in Edendale, Raymond Sutton was sitting in the big lounge – the one with a view of the fields at the back, where he got an occasional glimpse of cattle grazing in the distance. Holsteins, but it was better than nothing. The TV was on, of course. Some of the old girls watched it all the time, though they didn’t always know what they were seeing. Most of the stuff that was on during the day was rubbish – brainless quiz shows, old films, kiddies’ cartoons. He’d never been one for sitting indoors watching the telly. Raymond liked the news, though. Just because you were old and getting a bit stiff in the joints, it didn’t mean you should let your brain cells die.

He saw a car enter the gateway from the road and head up the drive. Thanks to his new hearing aid, he could hear the tyres crunch on the gravel. There were many sounds that he’d missed when his hearing started to fail, but the noise of cars wasn’t one of them. His home at Pity Wood had been far enough off the road to save him from traffic.