by Knox, Tom
She turned a further corner and peered in through one of the few unbroken windows. The interior was dark, but there was still enough light to see the piles of contorted and tormented little corpses. What a ghastly thing. She shivered in the wind. Her mother had loved cats …
‘Karen, come over here!’
Stepping over tumbled bricks and shattered window-glass she saw Sally, in the Range Rover, gesturing.
‘Get in the car and shut the door. Listen to this!’
Karen obeyed. Sally could be a little bossy; she hadn’t changed all that much. But that was fine, it was actually reassuring.
‘What?’
Sally’s face was stern. She lifted up the phone, significantly, pointing it Karen’s way. ‘I just got another call, from my Detective Sergeant, Jones.’
‘And?’
‘They found a body.’
‘Where? Here? Zennor?’
‘No, down a mine, Botallack, you know that one, on the coast, over Morvah way.’
Karen’s thoughts whirled into confusion. She wondered aloud, ‘An accident? Falling down a mine shaft? I don’t see the connexion. How …?’
‘The owners found the body this morning, at the bottom of the shaft. They say it was covered in a weird grease, black soot and stuff.’
The Atlantic wind buffeted the window of the Range Rover. Karen looked at the charred and open door of Carn Cottage. It was covered with grease and soot.
10
Morvah, Cornwall, England
What was that line of poetry her father used to quote, about the West Penwith countryside?
This is a hideous and a wicked country,
Sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time,
Hollow with mine-shafts, naked with granite …
The poet was right.
DCI Trevithick steered her Toyota carefully along the narrow Penwith roads; to her left, the moors rose abruptly, scattered with enormous rocks, oddly deformed. To the right, the pounding and merciless sea, assaulting the cliffs. And in the narrow strip of flat land between, there lay the wind-battered farms and the grey mining villages. Ex-mining villages.
Just ahead was Morvah. Morvah. Karen mouthed the vowels, silently, as she slowed the car. There was another line, by some writer, her dad would quote: ‘the fearsome scenery reaches a crescendo of evil at Morvah’. It was so very true.
And yet people loved this country, too, which was why it got so many artistic visitors who adorned it with these famous quotes. Even on a raw and hostile January day, like today, it had a powerful and hypnotic quality that made you want to linger.
Who killed the cats? She had to find out. The case was starting to obsess her.
At Botallack Karen took the last turning, onto a winding, rutted track that seemed to lead past a farm, directly over the cliffs and straight down to the crushing sea three hundred feet below. But at the last moment the track veered right and opened up to a tarmacked car park at the very edge of the precipice.
And there below was Botallack Mine. Just seeing it made Karen shiver.
It was one of the oldest mines in Cornwall, three or four centuries old at least, though tin streaming and tin mining had been happening here for three thousand years. That was why the entire Penwith coast was riddled with tunnels and shafts and adits, like a honeycomb under the sea-salted grass. There were so many mine-workings that people occasionally fell down unsuspected shafts to their deaths; dogs disappeared quite frequently.
Yet within this ominous world Botallack had an especially sinister quality, not because of its age, but because of its position: right by the sea, halfway up an almost-vertical cliff. The mine had been built here to exploit the tin and copper under the ocean. The shafts were famously deep and the tunnels famously long: extending out under the Atlantic.
Imagine the life of the men who worked here every day …
Karen got out of the car and cringed from the cold fierce wind.
Yet, working here every day is precisely what her ancestors had done. Her father’s family ultimately came from St Just, and her great-great-grandfather, and no doubt the men before him, had been miners right here. At Botallack.
It must have been a horrible existence: they would have risen before dawn, often in a ferocious Atlantic gale, then walked in the wintry dark from their cottages along the coast and down the cliffside to the minehead, where they descended deep underground. In Victorian times they would have had to climb down half-mile-long ladders, deeper and deeper into the darkness. And after an hour, when they reached the bottom, they had to crawl for a mile under the sad and booming sea in terrifyingly narrow tunnels to the rockface.
Only then did their shift officially begin, hewing and drilling the vile, wet rocks to get at the precious black tin; only then did they begin to earn the pittance that paid for their families’ subsistence. When did they find the time or energy to live and pray and sing and make love to their wives? No wonder they died so young: at thirty or thirty-five. Apart from Sundays, they wouldn’t have seen the sun from October to March.
Karen locked the car, thinking. The word Sunday must have had a special resonance then. The only day they saw the sun. Sunday.
An image of her father flashed before her. They had come here once and he had told her all this mining history, trying to make her proud of her Cornish heritage. In reality, the sight of awesome Botallack had just made seven-year-old Karen rather scared.
Slowly, she made her way down the perilous cliffside path, towards the handsome stone stacks of Botallack engine house, and the small cabins surrounding it.
She was greeted by a tall dark-haired man in a yellow hard hat and hi-vis jacket. He extended a firm handshake and shouted above the buffeting sea-wind, ‘Stephen Penrose. You must be Karen Trevithick?’
She shook his hand. ‘Can we go inside?’
The peace inside the great, cold, stone-built engine house was almost a shock after the stormy noise of the wind.
‘Hell of a day! Yes, I’m DCI Trevithick, from Scotland Yard.’
The man looked her up and down. Karen didn’t know whether to feel patronized, or flattered, and didn’t particularly care either way: she was just eager to crack on. She’d had to fight for permission to be assigned to a case so far from London; indeed, she’d had to use a little emotional blackmail with her senior officer at the Yard, expend some capital. But this strange case intrigued her, and distracted her from gloomy and interior thoughts.
She was also distracted by the great void just a few metres from her walking boots. The shaft. It dominated the stone chamber. A black circle of nothingness, much bigger than she had expected: a great mouth that swallowed men daily, with a gullet that went down for miles.
‘In the old days, when they were tinning,’ Penrose said, as if he sensed her thoughts, ‘you would see steam coming out of that shaft.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Steam, from all the men, the miners breathing deep underground, the steam from their exhalations, would rise up the shaft.’
It was another jarring concept.
‘Have you ever been down a mine, Miss Trevithick?’
‘No.’
He tutted, sympathetically. ‘With a good Cornish name like Trevithick?’
‘The stories put me off,’ she said, staring at the shaft. ‘My dad would tell me stories of my family. Working in these places. One of them died when the man-engine collapsed at that mine, along the cliffs: Levant. And my great-grandmother was a bal maiden at South Crofty.’
‘Ah yes, the girls, breaking the rocks and sifting the deads, standing in the wind. What a job that must’ve been.’
‘They were tough women.’
‘Very true, Miss Trevithick, very true. Here. You’ll need this.’
She took the hard hat, put it on, strapped it under her chin and smiled briskly. ‘So, where is the body?’
‘Right at the bottom of the shaft. You’ll need this overall too. ’Tis very wet down there.’
Karen
slipped on the blue nylon overalls. They covered her like a nun’s habit. Properly attired, she followed Stephen Penrose to the other side of the shaft and a metal cage suspended over the void. Once inside the cage, he slid a wire metal door, pressed a fat red button, and they began the long descent. The sensation was distractingly unpleasant. Going down underground, to the tunnels under the Atlantic. She could hear the grieving boom of the sea as they descended.
‘Who found the body?’
‘I did, yesterday.’
‘What were you doing here? Botallack has been closed for decades.’
He shrugged.
‘We’re exploring the, uh, possibility of tourism. Opening a mine museum, you see, like Geevor up the coast. We have some EU funding. We’ve just finished draining the main tunnels. That’s one of them: one of the oldest, eighteenth century.’ He pointed down a tunnel that flashed past them as they plunged further in the rattling cage. The whole mine was dimly lit with strings of electric lights: frail and exposed against the threatening dark.
It was surely a haunted place. As the cage neared the bottom of the chilly shaft, Karen remembered more stories: of the knockers – the spirits of the mine, strange poltergeists the miners would claim to hear. Auditory hallucinations, presumably, from hunger and stress.
‘OK, here it is. Watch your step.’
The body was crumpled at the bottom of the shaft, next to the enormous metal winch that controlled the cage. Beyond it was the main tunnel, a narrowing corridor that extended that long, long mile under the Atlantic Ocean. The moaning sea above them was still audible, but now muffled, stifled even: like someone in another room dreaming bad dreams.
Karen knelt and looked at the broken form. The victim was young, white, male, twenty-something, in a shredded anorak and dark jeans. Covered in blood and blackness.
Penrose spoke, his voice not quite so confident now. ‘Nasty, isn’t it? Quite gave me the frighteners when I saw it. Poor bastard. Then all that weird stuff on him … Soot and grease and … cat fur, right?’
‘How did you know it was cat fur?’
‘I didn’t. It was my boss, Jane. She came down a few minutes later, she keeps cats, she recognized these might be –’ he pointed – ‘scratches. Cat scratches. See there. On the neck and the face. Then we worked out that maybe all this stuff …’ Penrose knelt beside her. It was as if they were praying in front of the corpse. ‘This weird stuff on his clothes must be fur, burned cat fur, because she’d already heard the reports, on the radio news, the cats burned on Zennor Hill.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Penrose stood up, abruptly, as if he really didn’t like to be too near the corpse. ‘What is it, Miss Trevithick? Something to do with witchcraft? That’s what they’re saying on the internet.’ He tilted back his hard hat and scratched his head, frowning. ‘Because it’s not good for business. We don’t want people associating Botallack with anything like that, not if we’re going to make a go of this museum. And we need the jobs round here. Sorry to sound selfish, but …’
‘No, no. I quite understand.’ Karen gave the shattered body one last scrutiny in the faint damp light given out by the pitiful bulbs. ‘I’m sure it will be fine, you’d be amazed how quickly people forget. I’ve seen it all before.’
She gazed at the sad, pale, slender face of the cadaver, scratched, and badly bruised, and with one long horrible gash by the left ear. There were several other terrifying scarlet gashes distributed across the body, as if someone had attacked the man with a mighty sword. The legs were the worst: they were virtually pulped. The flesh had melted into the clothing; you could only just tell he was wearing dark indigo jeans. ‘Pathology will confirm, they’re coming here in a minute. But these injuries, they must have been from his fall.’
Penrose said nothing: he was looking in his canvas bag.
In the end, she answered her own question. ‘Yes … That makes sense. The wounds look terrible but that’s because of the enormous drop. You’d bang against the sides of the shaft on the way down. Ripping and tearing, shattering the bones.’
Karen stood and stared up. The tiny hole of light half a mile up there was the sky and the wind. She resisted the sudden urge to panic and escape this unnatural, inhuman prison, to fling herself in the cage and press every button.
Soft distant booms echoed down the tunnels. The sea was talking in its sleep, fighting a nightmare. The sea was also above them, weighing everything down: an unbearably oppressive sensation. What a place.
She turned. Penrose was holding something in his hand. It was an iPad. He spoke, as he switched it on. ‘We know the injuries are from the fall, Miss Trevithick, because we have him on CCTV. Uninjured.’
‘What?’
‘They didn’t tell you! We found it a couple of hours ago. Jane emailed it to me and to … DI Pascoe?’
‘I’ve been out of contact. My mobile is recharging. You have it?’
‘Yup. Here, look.’
He opened up the iPad and clicked on a stored email. The light given out by the computer seemed unearthly in the gloom. A magic oblong in ancient darkness.
The CCTV footage was grainy but good enough. The two of them stood in the echoing blackness, with thebaffled noise of the sea all around, and watched the silent movie.
‘There he is.’
Penrose’s indication was unnecessary. A young man in dark jeans was climbing a fence surrounding the minehead. It was dark, but the moon was full. The victim was unmistakable. And he was alone. So this was no murder?
‘That’s him all right. No injuries. Looks perfectly OK.’
The footage jerked and the scene changed. Now they were gazing at the interior of the engine house.
‘We have a CCTV camera inside as well. It’s much darker, but you can still see him.’
The ghostly image of the man moved to the shaft. What was he looking for? His movements were edgy, jerky, and odd. As if there was a problem with the film-speed, and yet there wasn’t. Where was he going? How did he accidentally fall down? Karen watched the figure climb very close to the big black hole. Why was he going so stupidly close to the shaft? She almost cried out: Stop, you’re getting too close!
Her hand went reflexively to her mouth.
He jumped.
11
Abydos, Egypt
‘It is estimated there are maybe half a billion mummies still lying in the dust of Egypt.’
This was one of Ryan Harper’s favourite factoids: he always wheeled it out when the students’ attention started to wander. Today the students remained mute, and unresponsive. Had they even heard?
‘I said, it is estimated there are half a billion mummies in Egypt.’
He looked at the young faces before him. There were just three kids in this study group: the renewed Egyptian troubles – would they ever end? – had begun to scare away the students, as they had already scared away the tourists.
This was a pain. Ryan relied, very heavily, on this part-time weekend teaching to supplement his meagre income from the charity. If the teaching disappeared, he would be properly impoverished.
At last, the keenest of the trio, a bright spark from Chicago, offered a response: ‘Half a billion? You’re joking, right?’
‘No.’ Ryan stood tall, and gestured across the beige and rubbly levels of the Abydos cemeteries. ‘Remember the eternity of Egyptian life …’
Just at that moment a blaring Arab pop song shrilled out from a café down by the main temple. Ryan sighed. The screeching music didn’t add to the mysterious atmosphere he was trying to evoke. And this was the one thing about teaching that Ryan really enjoyed – the chance to instil some mystery into these kids, to give them a glimpse of the grandeur of Egypt; to make these gum-chewing twenty-year-olds share a little of that soaring rhapsody that he had once enjoyed, in his first season’s digging at Saqqara, as he unearthed the tombs of the Apis bulls – the sense that he was an historical scuba diver, floating above so much translucent and fathomless archaeology it could g
ive you vertigo.
‘Mr Harper—’
‘Sorry?’
It was the Chicago kid again, Tyler Neale.
‘Explain the figures, maybe?’
‘Sure.’
‘’Cause I don’t see it. There’s, like, no way you could bury that many mummies: they’d be turning up in your lunch.’
Harper gestured across the flooded tomb of Osiris, the Oseirion, where he spent much of his working week. ‘In a sense, you just have to do the math. But let’s go through it. First, as I say, you need to appreciate the profundity of Egyptian time. Let’s make a comparison. How long has America been around?’
He gazed at the students. Daniel Melini seemed to be asleep standing up. The pretty girl, Jenny Lopez, was texting on her phone. And Tyler Neale, in his scruffy jeans and baseball cap, simply looked tired. Fair enough. The students had a right to be tired and maybe a little irritable: they’d spent five straight hours wandering the epic site in the endless sun, listening to him explaining styles of epigraphy in the Abydos King List and the problems of rising water tables across Middle Egypt. He liked to give them value for their money: he’d probably said way too much.
Well now they could have some fun, at least for the last thirty minutes. And after that, as the sun set over the Rameses temple and the forts of Zebib, Ryan Harper could go back to his lonely bachelor apartment in the town and spend the rest of the evening smoking shisha outside the tea-house downstairs with the Arabs who somehow tolerated the slightly dishevelled, thirty-eight-year-old American with no wife and no kids, whose once-famous career had turned to humble toil.