Gone

77

The air shafts that fed the tunnel in some places reached well over a hundred feet in depth. Roughly the height of a ten-storey office block. The eighteenth-century engineers had let the waste soil accumulate around the shafts so that they’d come to resemble enormous ant hills – strange funnel shapes jutting out of the ground, holes sunk in the centre of each. Often covered with trees and foliage, they weren’t usually very remarkable. This particular air shaft, however, was far from unremarkable.

It was in a natural clearing surrounded by beech and oak trees in the last stages of the autumn drop. Crows cawed from the tops of bare branches and underfoot the ground was deep in coppery brown leaves. At the top of the slight incline the hole gaped secretively, its sides coated with the tarry black evidence of the explosion. The smuts still floated out of it, rising into the air as if on a convection column, reaching to a point above the trees where the air cooled and slowly floated them down again to land in the trees, the grass. They coated everything – even the ropeaccess team’s white Sprinter van.

More than twenty people trampled the frosty grass: plainclothes officers, some in riot gear, some in caving helmets and complex harnesses. A handler led a German shepherd, still straining on the leash, into the dog van. Caffery noticed that, whatever their duty, no one seemed to want to spend much time near the hole. The two officers who had come with cutters to remove the protective wire around it had worked fast and retreated as soon as the job was over, not meeting anyone’s eye. It wasn’t just the uneasy knowledge that the shaft plunged straight into the earth, it was the noise coming from it. Now that the HEMS helicopter had landed and switched off its rotors, the sound echoed eerily up from the yawning shaft. Made everyone uncomfortable. A faint hoarse wheezing like a trapped animal. No one seemed inclined to turn their back on the hole.

Caffery approached with five other men: the Bronze commander, a drop-cam operator – who wheeled ahead of him a stainless-steel trolley on which sat a complex tubing camera system – and Acting Sergeant Wellard, who had brought two of his men with him. No one spoke as they crunched through the frozen leaves. Everyone’s expression was closed, concentrated. At the edge of the hole they gathered in a line and peered down. The shaft was about ten feet in diameter. Traversing it was a single reinforcing beam, now almost rotted to nothing. An oak tree at the edge of the hole had spread a single root out across the beam, drawing in God only knew what moisture and nourishment from it. Caffery put his hand on the tree and leaned over. He saw a white layer of limestone. Below it, darker rock. And then nothing. Just cold shadows. And that unearthly noise again. Breathing. In and out.

The camera operator reeled out the yellow cable and fed the tiny drop-cam down into the hole. Caffery watched him unwind the electric leads and set up the monitor. It took for ever and Caffery had to stand absolutely still, a tic starting in his eye, wanting to yell at the guy, Get a fucking move on. Next to him Wellard had got himself into an abseil harness, had secured himself to another tree, and was kneeling with one hand braced on the oak’s root so he could lean out over the hole and carefully lower the gas detector on a cable. On the other side of the shaft Wellard’s men were prepping themselves: belaying kernmantle ropes off the surrounding trees and checking safety rigs, buckling harnesses, fixing self-braking descender units to their lines.

The Bronze commander watched the whole thing from a few paces away, a pinched, anxious look on his face. He, too, was unnerved by the noise. No one knew for sure what had caused the blast – whether it was accidental or whether Prody had tried to blow himself up – but no one had even begun to let themselves wonder what the hell it meant for the girls. Or Sergeant Marley. If any of them were in the tunnel too.

‘OK.’ The operator had got the camera all the way down into the shaft and was powering up the monitor on the trolley. Caffery, Wellard and the Bronze commander all gathered round to watch the image. ‘It’s a fish-eye lens, so it’s distorted. But I’d guess that those shapes you see here are the tunnel wall . . .’ He tucked his lip under his teeth in concentration and played with the focus. ‘There you are. Is that better?’

Slowly the image became clear. The spot on the camera cast a circle of jerky light illuminating whatever it came near. The first image was of a dripping wall, ancient and moss-covered. Then the camera turned slightly so the spot glinted off dark water in the canal, picking out a few submerged shapes. Everyone was silent. They all expected any of the humps to be Martha or Emily. Minutes passed as the camera trawled the canal. Five. Ten. The sun went behind clouds. A flock of crows left the branches overhead, stretching their black wings like hands across the sky. Eventually the camera operator shook his head.

‘Nothing. The place looks empty.’

‘Empty? Then, where’s that fucking noise coming from?’

‘Not the canal itself. Nothing on the floor or in the canal. It’s empty.’

‘It’s not empty.’

The operator shrugged. He toggled the camera a bit more. Zoomed it to the end of the canal, where the picture grew shadowy.

‘Like that,’ said Caffery. ‘I mean, what’s that?’

‘Dunno.’ The operator put his hand over the screen to shade it and peered at the spectral images. ‘OK,’ he said grudgingly. ‘That looks like something.’

‘What is it?’

‘A . . . I’m not sure. A hull? Of a barge maybe? Christ – look at the way that’s peeled apart. That’ll be where your explosion was.’

‘Can you get inside it?’

He stood. Eyes on the monitor, he dragged the cable spools a few yards along the edge of the shaft. He sat for a moment, his hand on the reel, his eyes locked on the LCD screen. Eventually he spoke. ‘I think . . . Yes. I’ve got something.’

He turned the screen to the men. Caffery and the Bronze commander leaned in to look, hardly breathing. The screen was unintelligible to Caffery: all he could make out was the torn metal of the barge’s hull.

The operator zoomed in. ‘There.’ He pointed at something in the muck and the grime at the bottom of the picture that was moving slightly. ‘That’s something. See it?’

Caffery strained his eyes. It looked like tarry bubbles wallowing in the canal. There was a flash, the spotlight reflecting off the canal water as whatever it was moved again. Then something in the shape became white for a moment. Darkened. Went white again. It took Caffery a moment to realize what he was looking at. A pair of eyes. Blinking. Those eyes blew straight through him like a hurricane. ‘Shit.’

‘It’s her.’ Wellard clipped the karabiner at his waist to the Petzl descender unit, shuffled backwards to the hole and leaned backwards over the lip, testing the rope, his face hard and concentrated. ‘It’s fucking her and I am going to fucking kill her for this.’

‘Hey. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ The Bronze commander stepped forward. ‘You’re not going down there yet.’

‘The gas test is clean. Whatever exploded it’s not there now. And I’m going down.’

‘But our target is down there.’

‘That’s OK.’ He patted the pockets of his body armour. ‘We’ve got tasers.’

‘And this is my operation and I’m telling you you’re not going down. We’ve got to find out what’s making that noise. That’s an order.’

Wellard locked his jaw, gave the commander a solid eye. But he took a few steps forward away from the lip of the hole, and stood in silence, unconsciously clenching and unclenching the descender handle.

‘Find the noise,’ the commander told the camera operator. ‘Find what’s making that godforsaken noise. It’s not her.’

‘Yup.’ The operator’s face was clenched. ‘I’m doing my best. I’m just having a . . . Christ!’ He leaned into the screen. ‘Christ, yes, I think this is it – this is what you wanted.’

Everyone gathered round. They were looking at something inhuman. Something tarred and burned and bloodied. Now they understood why they hadn’t seen anything in the water of the canal. Prody wasn’t anywhere on the ground. He’d been lifted by the explosion and skewered by a shard of metal high on the canal wall. Like a crucifixion. As the camera came towards him he didn’t move. All he could do was stare into the lens and gulp air, his eyes bulging.

‘Holy shit,’ the Bronze commander whispered, awestruck. ‘Holy shit. He is fucked, so fucked.’

Caffery stared at the screen, his heart pounding. He couldn’t imagine how Prody could have been so clever. He’d tricked them over and over. He’d tricked them into focusing all their efforts on this tunnel, when the girls, with hours or minutes left, were somewhere else entirely. And the ultimate trick, the ultimate finger in the force’s face, would be if he died now. Without telling the police anything.

He straightened. Turned to Wellard. ‘Get that team down now,’ he muttered. ‘And I mean now.’