Gone

50

Dawn broke over the tiny hamlet of Coates. It was a half-hearted, wintry dawn with no orange or speckled skies, just a featureless, ashen light that lifted listlessly over the roofs, past the tower of the neighbourhood church, across the heads of the trees and came down like mist on a tiny clearing deep in a forest on the Bathurst estate. In a grass-choked air shaft, a hundred feet above the canal, the black border between day and night crept slowly down. Heading for the bowels of the earth, it reached a cavern formed by two rockfalls at either end of a short space of tunnel. The swarmy, diffuse light found the black water, formed a shadow under the kitbag that hung motionless at the end of the rope and settled on the humped rocks and debris.

On the other side of one rockfall, Flea Marley knew nothing about the dawn. She knew nothing except the cold and the old, stale silence of the cavern. She lay on a rough ledge at the foot of the fall. Curled in a ball, like an ammonite fossil, she kept her head tucked in, her hands shoved inside her armpits in an effort to keep warm. She was half asleep, her thoughts flat and exhausted. The darkness pressed on her eyelids, like fingers. Something complex in the optical pathways lit up with dancing lights, with strange and pastel images.

No caving lights for now. The big torch and her little head lamp were all that had survived the rockfall. She kept them switched off, rationing the batteries, before she had to turn to Dad’s old carbide lamp. There was nothing to see anyway. She knew what a torch beam would pick out: the yawning hole in the ceiling where tons of earth and rock had been dislodged. The debris had brought the floor level up about three feet in some places and covered the original screes at either end of the tunnel section in earth and stone. Both her escape routes had vanished. This time digging by hand wasn’t enough. She’d tried. And exhausted herself. Only a pneumatic drill and earth movers would tunnel through those barriers. If the jacker came back, he’d never get to her now. But that hardly mattered because for her there was no going back. She was trapped.

Still, she was learning a lot down here. She’d learned that just when you thought you couldn’t get any colder, you could. She’d learned that even in the early-morning hours trains ran along the Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway. Goods trains, she imagined. Every fifteen minutes one would thunder along, rattling the ground like a dragon in the night, shaking out a few stones from invisible recesses in the tunnel. Between trains she slept, fitful, dozing, and woke, shivering and electric with fear and cold. On her wrist her waterproof Citizen clicked through the minutes, marking off the increments of her life.

A picture of Jack Caffery was in her head. Not Jack Caffery yelling at her, but Jack Caffery talking to her quietly. The hand he’d once put on her shoulder – it had been warm through her shirt. They’d been sitting in a car and at the time she’d thought he’d touched her because she was standing at an open door, ready to step through into a completely new world. But life ducked and wove and the only ones who weren’t thrown every now and then were the strongest and most capable. Then Misty Kitson’s face came to her, smiling out from the front pages of newspapers, and Flea thought that maybe this was the big catch: that because she and Thom had got away with concealing what had happened to Misty, something higher than them had decided they had to pay. Ironic she’d end up paying by being entombed the same way Misty’s corpse was.

Now she stirred. She pulled her freezing hands out from her armpits and touched the mobile phone in the waterproof pocket of her immersion suit. No signal. Not a chance. She knew from the schematics roughly where she was. She’d punched out scores of texts in rapid fire with approximate co-ordinates and sent them to everyone she could think of. But the texts all sat there in the outbox, the ‘resend scheduled’ icon hovering over them. In the end, scared she’d lose the battery, she’d switched the phone off and tucked it back into its plastic wrapper. Eleven o’clock, she’d told Prody. That was seven hours ago. Something had gone wrong. He hadn’t got the message. And if he hadn’t got the message then God’s harsh truth was this: the caving line was in the entrance to the tunnel. She’d left the car at the very edge of the village green, where it wouldn’t get reversed into. It could be days before someone noticed either and drew any conclusions about where she was.

Painfully she uncurled herself. She shifted, opened her feet wider, and slid down the last few inches of the landslide. The splosh of her boots echoed around the chamber as she landed in the water. She couldn’t see anything, but she knew rubbish was floating in it. Rubbish that must have been dropped down the shaft before the rock fall that had sealed off the chamber, then been driven by the wind to where she stood now. She took her gloves off, bent over, scooped a little of the water into her freezing, chapped hands and sniffed it. It didn’t smell of oil. It smelt of earth. Of roots and leaves and sunlit glades. She tested it with her tongue. It was slightly metallic.

Something opaque rested in the corner of her eye. She let the water slip from her hands and turned stiffly to her left.

About ten feet away there was a faint, cone-shaped glow. The dimmest, most spectral of lights. She twisted and fell against the rockfall, scrabbling for her rucksack, and dragged out her cave light. She put her hands over her eyes and fired it up. The cavern whoomped into light. Everything was outlined in a fizzing blue-white: too big, the edges too defined. She dropped her hand and trained her eyes on where the light had been. The hull of the abandoned barge.

She clicked off the light and kept looking at the hull. Slowly the shapes and burn marks in her retinas faded. Her pupils dilated. And this time there was no mistake. Daylight was coming through the barge from the other side of the rockfall.

She turned the cave light back on and jammed it into the clay, illuminating the edge of the fall while she repacked her kit. She pulled her gloves on, slung the rucksack on to her back and waded to the barge, crouched and pushed the light inside, shining it around. The barge extended under the rockfall, its bows protruding into the section of tunnel where the shaft was. It would have been made more than a hundred years ago – the hull and deck were sheets of iron riveted together. Good engineers, the Victorians, she thought, peering up at the underside of the deck: in spite of the weight of the rockfall it hadn’t bowed. Instead the entire barge had been driven down into the soft mud, tilted backwards a little, so that, in the next cavern along, its bows were higher. Here in the stern the water level was less than a foot from the underside of the deck – but the tilt made the deck slope upwards so that head space increased further forward into the hull.

About eight feet in, the big beam picked out a bulkhead blocking her way to the bows. She shone the light around the rest of the hull, looking for an exit. It threw the rivets and the drooping cobwebs of the ceiling into sharp relief, picked out odds and ends of floating rubbish: carrier bags, Coke cans. Something that looked furred. A bloated rat probably. But no hatches or exit points in here. She clicked off the lamp and this time her eyes didn’t need time to get used to the change. Immediately she saw where the daylight was coming from: there was the outline of a rectangle in the bulkhead. She let out all her breath. ‘You fucking lovely bastard thing.’

A hatch in the bulkhead, half submerged in the water. Probably for moving the coal between compartments. There was absolutely no reason for it to be locked. The carjacker hadn’t been in the next section of tunnel earlier, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t come back in the last few hours. Still, her choice was clear – get through the barge and face him, or die, trapped down here.

From the rucksack she rummaged out her old Swiss Army knife, and the mooring spike she’d found the other night, and shoved them both into the little waterproof tackle bag with the drawstring she carried on her wrist.

She strapped on the elasticated head torch and knelt down in the muck, letting herself sink slowly until the water was up to her chest. She went into the hull on her knees, hands stretched out under the water, sweeping for any obstacles, head brushing the rust-crusted cobwebs, chin up, keeping her mouth out the water. If he was in the next section of tunnel, she wasn’t concerned about him seeing the beam of her torch bouncing around, it would be too bright on the other side for it to be visible, but he might be able to hear her. She let her fingers graze across the mooring spike, making sure it was at the ready.

She moved carefully, breathing through her mouth, the bitter whiff of her breath coming back to her in the tiny space. The smell of a night of fear and no food, mingled with the faint tarry scent of coal from inside the hull.

She got to the bulkhead and found that at least two feet of the hatch were under water. She could feel most of it through her gloves. The rest she had to guess at with the numb clumpy toes of her boots. She found a latch halfway down the seam: open. The only thing holding the hatch closed as far as she could tell was decades of rust. There’d be no pressure in the water on either side. As long as she cleared this side, it shouldn’t be impossible to open. The trick was to open it as low down as possible.

Tongue between her teeth she slid the blade of the Swiss Army knife into where the door met the bulkhead, and quietly levered away the rust. The silt at the bottom of the hull she cleared with her feet. She didn’t dare take her gloves off – her fingers were clumpy and painful as she wedged them behind the lip of the hatch. She lifted one heavy foot so she had purchase against the bulkhead and pushed all her energy into her fingers, gritting her teeth and pulling. The pop was sudden and loud. A little spray of rust confettied down on her and a rush of warmer water snaked through the hatch around her stomach.

The noise of the hatch popping felt like a hand punching inside her ear. Too loud, and for the first time in ages she lost her nerve. She found she couldn’t move. She just stayed exactly where she was, crouched, half-submerged, eyes wide, waiting for an answering noise from the other side of the hatch.