‘Captain Chuck fucking Maxwell.’

‘Hah.’ Amos raised his pick high, brought it crashing down into the earth and levered up a good-sized rock. ‘That’d be right. Just like that peckerwood to do a shit thing like that.’

‘Yeah.’ Kasey kept labouring away with his own pick, although not as effectively as Amos. ‘Maxwell ripped up the book all right.’ Another blow with the pick followed by a telling pause for effect. ‘And then he killed Ant.’

The big man abruptly came to a halt. Standing straight and tall, all six-and-a-half feet of him, he looked Kasey in the eye. ‘You sayin’ what?’ he asked.

Kasey met his gaze directly, although he had to look up quite a bit. ‘I’m saying Maxwell murdered Ant. We can’t prove it, mind, but we know it for a fact, and that’s the truth, I swear.’

‘You two lazy niggers move your asses,’ Stowers’ voice rang out from some distance off. ‘You ain’t here to chat.’

Amos and Kasey got back to work as ordered, but it didn’t stop their further muttering.

‘We reckon on him being in on it, too,’ Kasey added with a jerk of his head in Stowers’ direction. ‘We reckon it was Stowers dumped Ant’s body, made it look like an accident.’

‘Yeah, makes sense,’ Amos agreed, ‘that nigger would shit on command if Maxwell told him to.’

‘Like I say, we can’t prove it, but pass the word on down the line,’ Kasey said, ‘tell everyone Ant’s death weren’t no accident, that Maxwell murdered him. The guys got the right to know the truth.’

‘They sure have, Kase, they sure as hell have. Don’t you worry, me and my buddies, we’ll get the word out there.’

As big Amos Cole, now stern-faced and purposeful, worked his way towards his tent buddies only a few paces from him, Kasey felt satisfied that the wheels had been successfully set in motion.

Over the next two days, it certainly appeared he was right. By Friday morning, word had spread surreptitiously throughout the camp and men were talking of little else. The subject of Anthony Hill’s murder at the hands of Chuck Maxwell was discussed with as much furtive fervour as the closure of the club and the deprivation of liberty. In fact, these topics were by now so intertwined as to become one in the eyes of men whose anger seemed to grow hourly.

Although the troops were careful to keep their whispers to themselves, well away from those with any form of rank, word of the rumour that was spreading reached the ears of Rupert Barrett. Men tended to be a little slack around Rupe, who, despite his seniority, always seemed ‘one of them’. He confronted Kasey at the canteen tent early Friday morning.

‘A word with you, Kase,’ he said pleasantly enough while forcefully hauling him from the queue that was lined up for breakfast.