Free Underworld by Reginald Hill

glad then too, glad that now neither of my men was going to be killed down that hole . . . Well, I were wrong about one of them, though God knows how . . .’
    'There's more than God knows,' interrupted her son fiercely.
    'Is that it, Col? Listen, son, he's dead, he's gone, does it matter how or why? There's nothing any of us can do will bring him back, so why waste your life boozing and fighting and causing trouble in the Club, and wandering round them old workings looking for God knows what...'
    'Who's been gabbing? That old woman Downey, is it?' Farr interrupted once more. 'Jesus Christ, it's like living in a fish tank, this place! What do you have to do to get a bit of privacy?'
    'Try living quiet, not raising hell wherever you go,' suggested his mother.
    Colin Farr pushed his plate away and stood up.
    'No one ever lived quieter than my dad and they didn't let him alone, did they?'
    'Col, don't talk like that. What do you mean? What are you trying to do? Col, please, you've no idea how it upsets me to see you this way.'
    There were tears on her cheeks. He put his arms round her shoulders and kissed them away. It was a gesture neither awkward nor theatrical. He had a natural grace in his movements which had made him stand out even as a child. He drew back and smiled at her, the smile which had so often won forgiveness instead of punishment, and complicity instead of accusation. Billy had sometimes said she was spoiling him but she knew how deep her husband's love went too.
    'I'll go soon, Mam,' he promised. 'Once I'm sure you're OK and . . . once I'm sure. Now I'd best be off to work.'
    She watched him walk away down Clay Street, marvelling as always that from Billy Farr's seed and her womb a creature of such grace and beauty could have sprung. At the corner he turned and smiled and waved his snap tin. She waved back, then went inside and began to clear the dishes.
    Colin Farr walked on, no longer smiling. The long brick terraces opening directly on to the pavement frowned back at him. They had been built a hundred years ago when Burrthorpe had suffered its first expansion from rustic hamlet to mining village. Perhaps they had looked more cheerful then. He doubted it. There had been other expansions since, most affluently in the late 'sixties and early 'seventies. The low hills to the east, the end furthest from the pit, were chequered with owner-occupied boxes. There were modern shops in the High Street (one with a new plate-glass window) plus a bank and two building societies. The Strike had hit hard, but the natives of Burrthorpe were used to taking and giving hard blows, and they would bring the good days back, if the pit survived.
    Here was the irony which Farr felt every day of his life. It was like being fed by a tyrant you hated, yet if you slew him, you would starve.
    He was in the High Street now, heading west towards the Welfare. The village was built in a blank valley running east to west. It was along the densely wooded southern ridge that the sweet infection of coal had first been detected. Here due to some geological fault the veins were broken and often near the surface, and possibly the uprooting of some ancient tree in a storm revealed the symptoms. There were records at the end of the eighteenth century of frequent disputes between the Burr estate which owned most of the land hereabouts and the locals who, delighted at having such a ready supply of fuel on their doorstep, ran drifts into the scrubby common land which abutted Lord Burr's woods, and didn't much care if they trespassed underground. At first His Lordship's care was all for his trees, the game they harboured and the income they promised. But a new lord, the first one born in the nineteenth century, caught on that industrial progress simply meant a new system of serfdom to replace the old which had run its course. He initiated a series of fairly haphazard explorations of the south ridge, ravaging much fine woodland principally on the village