Gone

43

It was raining again, a light drizzle. Even though it was dark the clouds had a brooding quality, low and damp – as if they were pressing the night air down on to the ground. Flea was at home, in her all-weather Berghaus jacket, the hood up. She was lugging her father’s caving gear out of the garage to the car.

She had no idea how she’d overlooked the air shafts. It was as if there’d been a block in her head. The tunnel was supplied by twenty-three shafts dropping directly from the surface. Four dropped into the landslide, leaving nineteen in the open sections. She and Wellard had passed under eighteen: two coming from near the pub on the easterly entry and sixteen on the longer, westerly entry. So where was the nineteenth? Maybe she’d assumed that the last shaft entered the tunnel somewhere in the quartermile rockfall. But the detailed paperwork the trustees had given her made it clear: the stretch of canal under all but the four air shafts was free of debris for at least twenty yards in each direction. So, the last shaft was somewhere outside the rockfall.

Which meant only one thing: that the last wall she’d come to after squeezing through the tiny gap, the fall that had almost covered the old barge, wasn’t the end of the long blockage. It was an intermediary fall. Beyond it there must be another, hidden, section with another air shaft. And, as far as she was concerned, the USU couldn’t claim to have cleared the tunnel out until that lost area had been searched. They couldn’t say with certainty that the jacker hadn’t put Martha – or her body – into the tunnel.

She was going alone, which sounded insane, but after all the derision and criticism that’d been heaped on her over the tunnel affair, the self-preservation route was to keep it to herself until she had a result. She pushed her rucksack into the boot of the car, threw in a pair of caver’s wellies, then took down the immersion suit that hung from the garage rafters. She paused. On top of an old refrigerator was a sagging cardboard box full of oddments. She went to it and peered inside. Old diving masks, a pair of fins, a regulator with the rubber perished by salt water. A glass jar of sun-bleached shells. A dead sea anemone. And an oldfashioned caver’s lamp, brass carbide with a battered glass reflector.

She pulled it out and unscrewed it. Inside was a small compartment: the generator, the place explosive acetylene gas was produced and fed to a small reflector, where it was ignited to produce a powerful light. She screwed it back together and rummaged inside in the box again until she found a grey-white lump about the size of her fist, wrapped inside an old Co-op carrier bag. Calcium carbide. The crucial ingredient.

Be careful, Flea. Her father’s voice came to her across the years. Be careful with that. It’s not a sweetie. Don’t touch it now. And, whatever you do, don’t get it wet. That’s what releases the gas.

Dad. The adventurer. The madman. The climber, the diver, the caver. Hated most modern sports equipment, jerry-rigged his way through life – and would never have let her go into the tunnel without something to pick up the pieces when the ‘overengineered modern shit’ pooped out. Thanks, Dad. She rested the calcium carbide and the lamp on top of the immersion suit and carried it all out to the car, put it in the boot, slammed the lid and got in, rain dripping off the Berghaus.

She pulled off the hood, got out her phone and scrolled through the numbers, pausing at Caffery’s name. Not a chance. There would be a lecture the size of a cow if she dared mention the subject of Sapperton tunnel. ‘Prody’ rolled past. She stopped, went back to it, considered it for a moment or two, thought, Oh, sod it, and dialled the number.

It went into answerphone. His voice was nice. Calming. It almost made her smile. He was at work, maybe in a meeting about the jacker. She moved her thumb to hang up, then remembered the number of times she’d diverted incoming calls to her voicemail because she was in a meeting and how it pissed her off later when she found people hadn’t left a message. ‘Hi, Paul. Look, you’re going to think I’m nuts, but I remembered what I was missing about the tunnel. There’s another air shaft – about a third of a mile from the eastern entrance.’ She checked her watch. ‘It’s six thirty now, and I’m going back for a look. I’ll go in the same way I went yesterday because I’m not an abseiler and those air shafts are more dangerous than the tunnel itself, whatever the trust says. Just for the record, I’m not doing it on the firm’s time – I’m off duty. I’ll call you at eleven tonight to tell you what happened. And, Paul . . .’ She looked through the rainy kitchen windows, where she’d left a light on inside. The warm yellow glow. She wasn’t going to be long. Not long at all. ‘Paul, you don’t need to call me about this. Really. I’m going to do it anyway.’