Gone

28

The USU men had knocked off at six. They’d showered, changed and cleaned their gear then gone, en masse, to the pub. They’d have made a spectacle, seven men in black warm-up trousers and Karrimor fleeces, arguing at the bar about who was going to buy the round. Flea didn’t join them. She’d had enough of pubs for the day. She locked up the offices on her own and drove home with the radio switched off. It was almost eight when she got there.

She parked the car nose out to the valley, switched off the engine and sat listening to the click-click of the engine cooling. Earlier this afternoon, when she’d got back to the offices after the pub, the inspector had come in to see her again. He’d done the same routine as yesterday, put his hands on the desk and leaned over, his face close to hers, holding her eyes. But this time when she said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Nothing,’ she knew it was a bad nothing, not a good one. He’d heard about the morning at the Sapperton tunnel.

She rested her chin on the steering-wheel and gazed at the sky above the valley. It was clear but wispy cirrus mare’s tails slipped across the moon. The earlier rainclouds – a towering bank of cumulonimbus – marched like an army into the east, gleaming orange on the underside as they passed over cities. Dad had loved the clouds. He’d taught Flea all the names: the altostratus, the stratocumulus, the ‘mackerel sky’ cirrocumulus. They would sit here, in this spot, on weekend mornings – Dad with his coffee and Flea with her bowl of Rice Krispies – quizzing each other on the different forms. Dad would suck his teeth if she said she didn’t know, if she tried to give up. ‘No, no, no. We don’t give up in this family. It’s against the Marley code. Ancient belief system. Bad things happen when you do – it’s like flying in the face of nature.’

She took the keys out of the ignition, then pulled her kit off the back seat. It still bothered her that she was missing something about the Sapperton tunnel but however much she peered and scrutinized, she couldn’t quite catch the thought and examine it properly.

We don’t give up in this family. It will come . . . She could almost hear him saying it, smiling at her across his cup of coffee. It will come …