Part 18 (2/2)

Perhaps they had wors.h.i.+pped by candlelight. Draughts would have caught the feeble flames and made them flicker in the gloom as they listened to their spiritual leader, the gaunt tallow-lit silhouette before them filling them with foreboding as he recited sermons fuelled by fire and brimstone in a voice made strong by years of barking maritime commands to scurrying tars aboard his s.h.i.+p.

He looked at Kale and the ex-cop, La.s.siter and the shapely psychic and the priest, who was looking at the church with a frown of what seemed to be puzzled dismay. He risked a glance at Jane Chambers, who was wearing an expression he couldn't read. Lucy Church smoked. He could see them all because no one had ventured off on their own. It was too unnerving, at first. The instinct, and he felt it strongly himself, was to stay in a protective huddle.

This was not a happy place. It didn't take Alice Lang's alleged gift of second sight to discern that. It was bleak and ruined and this high up the wind withered and sang through the abandoned buildings shrilly. It felt remote and lonely and somehow hopeless. He saw the security guy, Napier and walked across to him a.s.suming that this was more familiar ground to him than for any of the rest of them, just because it was so surprisingly strange in life.

'Come here often?' he said, feeling the urge on this forbidding spot to attempt to lighten the tone. He spoke quietly, not wanting the rest of them to overhear him.

'Never, until now,' Napier said. 'We were under strict instructions not to contaminate the site. This is the first time I've been up here.'

'What do you make of it?'

Napier shrugged. 'You're the expert, Mr Cooper. You'd have more idea than I would. It's why you're here, after all.'

'Karl, please. And I'm asking you. I watched you, watching us, when we disembarked. You strike me as a man who doesn't miss much. I already know what Jane and Kale and Degrelle think.'

'And Ms Lang?'

Cooper raised his eyes skywards and then levelled them again and smiled. 'I'm not a great believer in psychic phenomena. Nothing has ever gone b.u.mp in my night. I'll take your first impressions over hers, Sergeant Napier.'

Napier exhaled a slow breath. He nodded towards the cl.u.s.ter of dwellings. 'They were prepared to live in hovels,' he said. 'But they lavished all that stone and toil on building an eight foot wall. That's not a boundary, Karl, it's a fortification. I don't know what happened to the New Hope community and I wouldn't even want to try to guess, because I don't feel I'm remotely qualified to do so. But they were scared of something, I'll tell you that. I think it's safe to say that something was going b.u.mp in their night. They were scared of that something and they were trying to keep it out.'

He waited for Emma Foot to peddle off before climbing over the gate. The gate was iron and about twelve feet high and it looked a tricky climb and he knew he would be painfully conspicuous to any pa.s.ser-by while engaged in the act of scaling it. But there were no pa.s.sers-by. It was a derelict site and remote-seeming despite its relative proximity to the town of Barnsley. It was accessed by road, but that was a by-road he thought owed its continuing existence to tradition, rather than need. No one came there and it did not look like anyone had for years.

Regardless of all this, getting over the gate looked an easier proposition than getting over the fence. That was only half the height of the gate, but offered little in the way of obvious hand and foot holds and was topped by a coil of rusted barbed wire. Fortescue could not remember whether he was due a teta.n.u.s booster jab. He was absolutely sure, though, that he didn't want to find out whether he was or he wasn't the hard way.

He was not, in truth, a very physical person. He could negotiate kerbs and other natural hazards when he walked around and he had pa.s.sed his driving test at the second attempt but he would have been the first to admit that he was not action hero material. The gate was a formidable obstacle for him and beyond that, he could see the blocked-up south shaft, under a gaunt and frankly daunting tower of cold-riveted cast iron that had once housed a pulley.

If the gate was formidable, the shaft itself was terrifying. They had sunk it to a depth of only fifteen metres, but there was an iron plate welded over the entrance he would have to get through and old industrial sites were not playgrounds. They were full of hazards that were heavy and jagged and filthy and sharp.

The thing was that he really felt he had no choice. He was honour bound to help Edith Chambers. He had made her a promise and did not make them lightly or ever knowingly break one.

Then there was his curiosity. A fascination with the maritime past had made him a nautical historian. He thought he might be on the brink of discovering an important doc.u.ment that would shed light on a murky trade. It wasn't just a doc.u.ment, it was a source. It was a first-hand account that would likely prove as genuinely compelling as any memoir he had ever read.

Finally, there was fate. He really did believe he was fulfilling a duty made inevitably on the memorable day he tried to inventory the contents of Seamus Ballantyne's sea chest. If that moment had not occurred, he would never have come to believe in ghosts. But it had and he did. And he trusted that the ghost indirectly responsible for luring him to this place, had done so for a reason both important and urgent.

He was resigned to getting dirty. He thought that he might emerge from this experience bruised and grazed and would quite likely sustain the odd cut. Philip Fortecue tried not to think about the possibility of becoming trapped. The risk was there. Obviously it was. He was venturing underground and had told no one where he intended to go or what he intended to do. But there was no point dwelling on that, was there?

It took him forever, in his own mind, to clamber over the gate. He hadn't climbed since childhood and had not done all that much of it then. His arms seemed much less strong now and his body seemed to weigh much more so that he could not haul himself up with his hands as he had as a kid. He had to find secure purchase for his feet to ascend. It was like climbing a ladder with no rungs and it was hard.

He got stuck at the top. One of his belt loops snagged on the tip of one of the gate's vertical bars and it took him ages to free himself; anxious moments in which he thought a police car might hove into view and a couple of patrolling officers park up and observe his ridiculous plight with amused expressions through their windscreen. But the patrol car didn't come and eventually he shrugged himself loose and over, scrambling and then falling the last few feet onto a carpet of coal dust still gleaming on the ground, crystalline after the morning's rain.

There was a gap where the iron hatch met the lip of the shaft. Soil erosion or subsidence had created it. He looked through it and saw beneath him iron rungs hammered into the shaft wall descending into blackness and remembered that he didn't have a torch or a rope or a whistle to signal alarm or anything else that even a schoolboy would have equipped himself with for a mission as hazardous as this.

His eyes would adjust, he thought, squirming through the gap feet-first, holding the cold and slippery edge of the hatch and committing the weight of his legs to one of the rungs. His eyes would adjust, because they would have to. He'd be blind down there otherwise and would find nothing.

Good sense or his instinct for self-preservation caused him to pause when he reached the bottom of the shaft. Before him would be what they called the gallery. And beyond that, was the tunnel which would dead-end at the point where the tunnel's access to the seam had become exhausted. Gallery was a grand sounding name, but it was a s.p.a.ce not tall enough for a man to stand upright in. And the tunnel would be very narrow. Men had hacked at the seam on their backs, p.r.o.ne rather than upright.

There was a reason for this. The smaller the dimensions of the tunnel, the less the risk of collapse, ran the theory. So at least Emma Foot had told him in his crash-course on early 19th century mining practice on the way to the Elsinore Pit.

He waited for his eyes to adjust. It was late afternoon. There was still plenty of light in the sky above the shaft. He just had to wait to become aware of the bit of it that penetrated this far through the gap he had squeezed through above him.

There was no water down there. At least, there was none around where he stood. He couldn't hear it dripping. There were no puddles. This was both good and bad. A dry atmosphere was encouraging for the survival of a doc.u.ment written on paper or parchment. But drainage meant sink holes or subsidence to enable any rain water penetrating the shaft to escape, which was very bad if he happened to blunder somewhere where there was no longer solid ground beneath his feet.

He could not smell methane. That was another encouraging thing. He could smell only coal dust and the stale odour of undisturbed air signalling a century or more of abandonment.

Fortescue waited. He was in no hurry. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the scant light leaking into the shaft from the afternoon sky above. He hummed to himself. He hummed The Recruited Collier. And then he sang a bit of it. And then he stopped singing because it sounded as though someone was singing softly along with him and that was an unpleasant thought down there in the lonely darkness beneath the earth in a place far from home or safety or the kind of company he might welcome and not be made afraid by.

He was afraid. He was honest enough with himself to admit that. He thought that only a fool would be unafraid in such circ.u.mstances. But his eyes grew sensitive at last to the limited light and he was able to see quite clearly in a monochromatic sort of way both the contours of the gallery and its shrinking, after twenty feet or so, to the black maw of the tunnel proper.

He thought that he would find what he was looking for in the tunnel. It would not be lying there in the gallery on a handy shelf or in a presentation tray. Life was not supposed to be easy. Everything was a trial. Everything worthwhile was difficult to accomplish. He had been brought up by his mother to believe that and it was a good belief because it never left you open to disappointment.

He took off his jacket. It was warm under the earth. His hands were already filthy and one of them was sticky with blood from his wrestle with the gate-top where he thought from the throb of pain that he might have lost a fingernail. He got down on his hands and knees. He crawled like that towards the tunnel mouth.

It was not necessary to see in the tunnel. It wasn't wide or high enough for him to lose his way in. He could feel the iron rails to either side of his hands and knees. The trolley wheels had worn them smooth as the trolley's laden weight of coal was pulled back into the gallery by the men working behind the cutter at the face.

They had toiled through 18 hour s.h.i.+fts, sweating and grimy in their grim and hazardous work. But there was no sense now, of all that industrious toil. Two centuries of silence and absence has stilled the place utterly.

He crawled. He crawled for what seemed a long time until he was fully immersedin blackness and silence, the blackness so complete and silence so profound that only his sense of touch anch.o.r.ed him any longer to the earth.

And then he b.u.mped up against the trolley itself and its wheels creaked stiffly with lack of lubrication on the rails. And when he reached with a hand there was some cargo contained within the trolley, wrapped in what felt under his fingers, like oilskin. And he gripped and in the cramped black s.p.a.ce hefted the stiff flat rectangle of something written long ago and stored there in dark secrecy.

Chapter Ten.

By the time they realised he was missing, the weather had deteriorated to an extent that made searching for James Carrick a practical impossibility. The wind rose and strengthened on their descent from the heights and the settlement. The cloud lowered and thickened and the rain began to needle into their faces. It scoured off the vast Atlantic, propelled by a chilly Westerly wind. They reached the encampment cold and wet and tired, a bedraggled bunch of people collectively dismayed by the atmosphere of the place they had left and collectively defeated by the raw, dwarfing fury of the elements.

That was Lucy's impression, anyway. Kale and Cooper looked suddenly like their men-of-action images were far more cosmetic than real. Jane and Alice looked as p.i.s.sed-off and soaked through as she felt herself. Even La.s.siter looked like a man who'd welcome a blue lamp signalling his local station and a mug of cocoa made by his old desk sergeant with something akin to relief.

It took them well over an hour to get back over the boggy exposure of the island terrain and only Paul Napier and the priest seemed unmoved by the ferocious violence of the still-gathering storm.

They a.s.sumed Carrick was in his room until La.s.siter rallied knowing it was his turn first on their roster to prepare their evening meal. When he was ready to serve it, Lucy went and knocked on Carrick's door, cursing him as a lazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d for missing the inaugural trip to the settlement and snoozing on the job.

He wasn't there. He had left his computer switched on. Lucy noticed his screensaver, a picture of woman who wasn't his wife pretending to read a book and smiling rather sardonically. She switched it off.

They could not find him in the compound. La.s.siter asked her was it in character for him to wander off independently without leaving some indication of where he'd gone. She said she couldn't imagine anyone less likely to do that than Carrick. He'd put on his McIntyre branded foul weather gear before climbing aboard the chopper confiding to her that it was his first practical encounter with Velcro. He was someone who thought of a round of golf as a wilderness experience.

La.s.siter served up their food because if he hadn't, it would have spoiled. Then without eating his own, the ex-policeman went and fetched Paul Napier from the security team's camp. That was the moment, seeing the look on La.s.siter's face as he pulled on a cagoule with his own dinner plate untouched and ventured back into the storm to fetch Napier, that Lucy knew with a sick churn in her stomach that the disappearance was probably going to turn out to be serious.

It was just after eight by the time La.s.siter returned with Napier and Davis, who seemed to be the security head's nominal second-in-command. Everyone was a.s.sembled in the recreation suite. Everyone was asked by La.s.siter when they'd last seen the man from the Chron. There was still over two hours of daylight left then, but the wind was so strong it was making the encampment buildings shudder and ripple with its force and the rain was a driven deluge and Lucy already had a very bad feeling.

Napier said the weather would prevent a proper search. The conditions were too severe. Visibility was poor and movement on foot around the island impractical and even dangerous. He said any search would be voluntary and of necessity, incomplete.

Then he went and fetched his man Walker. He told Walker and Kale and Cooper to sit tight and keep everyone together and remain vigilant. Then he volunteered himself and went out with Davis and Degrelle and La.s.siter, who also volunteered, and they did all the looking they could practically do, searching in the obvious places and waving their flashlights and bellowing into the gale without response.

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