Money Never Sleeps

by Whitelaw, Stella

  ‘Thank goodness,’ said Fancy. ‘Bless you, some poor, hungry child.’

  The meagre light cast strange shadows. She was in a tunnel, low ceiling, hewn walls, rough and hacked at by miners from long ago. She could only move along it, hoping there was some other way out. She found another alcove and another candle stump. She put the stump in her plastic bag and licked at the condensation on the walls. She knew the bag would come in useful.

  Or she could retrace her steps. Except that they would have taken the boat back to the steps they’d brought her down and there would be no way out for her, except to swim in the underground canal and climb those hundreds of steps in the dark.

  More stumps, which Fancy collected, saved, relit, each time her current candle flickered and threatened to extinguish.

  It was a juggling act. Candle and flame. Her bad hands again, nearly burning. She found a loose lump of rock and set the next candle on it, pushing it firmly into the last warm stump. She didn’t want another accident.

  The path was leading upwards; she could feel the incline. But the archway was getting lower and smaller. Soon she would be back on her knees. No more children in alcoves. It was petering out. The miners had lost the seam, stopped working it.

  She was already very weak. The blow on the head had not helped. No Jack Reacher-sized skull to ward off the blow. They had knocked her out. They meant to kill her this time. Eventually. She was struggling. The tunnel was getting smaller.

  Soon she would be totally unable to move forward.

  She was down on her knees, crawling. Rough-hewn rock scraped against her shoulders, bumped her head. This couldn’t be the way out. Exit for a mouse, perhaps. Nor could she feel any fresh air. It was just a tunnel leading deeper and deeper into the rock.

  It grew narrower, closing down on her. She could not move an inch further forward. She creened for a glimpse of light ahead but there was nothing. If there was a way out then she couldn’t see it, nor could she reach it. There had either been a rock fall or the tunnel simply petered out.

  She turned her head and hit her face against a jagged jut in the rock face. She felt a tell-tale wetness dropping from her nose. Now she was bleeding. On her favourite white beaded top.

  NINETEEN

  Later on Thursday Evening

  The nosebleed continued for several agonizing minutes. She had no tissue to stench the flow. She could only pinch her nostrils and hope that it worked. Blood trickled down her top, inside her bra. No time to grieve about best top, best Wonderbra.

  In a vampire novel, she would have cupped her hands and drunk her own blood. No such extreme measure now.

  She dared not move until the bleeding had slowed, had started to congeal, to form a scab over the broken membrane. There was no other sound, only the slow drip of her own blood and her breathing. The quietness was eerie. She waited till it had slowed and she felt safe to move.

  She began to slowly shuffle backwards along the way she had come. No room to turn round. It was slow and laborious, painful. Her jeans were ripped at the knees by now and her skin scraped.

  She had no sense of time, no clock in her head; beyond tears. Surely someone would have missed her at the dregs party by now? Officer Dorothy Richmond, perhaps, with a second glass of good red wine? Or Jed, when he returned from his mysterious errand. He would have appeared by now, to enjoy the last night’s festivities – the entertainment, revue, pantomime, or whatever it was they had been rehearsing in secret for days. Surely he would want to take her for a last drink in the bar, if their friendship meant anything to him? Surely he would be looking for her?

  Fancy had no idea. He was an enigma. A man she hardly knew.

  The brain was getting confused. Had she been conked on the head? Not enough to knock her out for good, but long enough to remove her from the dregs party and bundle her into the boot of a car. Dorothy had brought her the drink. Or had it actually been Dorothy? Fancy couldn’t remember now. She had not looked round. Only a voice and a hand offering her a glass. It could have been anyone.

  She’d give anything for a glass of rock-bottom, the pits, any leftover, only-good-for-gravy wine, right now. She was so thirsty. Her lips felt cracked. Rainwater vintage would be the tops. A Scottish burn, a tumbling waterfall.

  She moulded half-warm stumps of old candle into usable lumps, with torn threads from her scarf as wicks. Women of old used to make their own candles. Now she had a constant flickering light. It was cheering, less intimidating. She was in a mining tunnel with long dark shadows. She could see axe marks on the walls. Men had worked here, hacking out the mineral. Somehow their spirits were around her, cheering her on.

  The tunnel grew larger, wider. Now she could sit thankfully, rest with her back against a rough wall. Now she could stand, walk unsteadily, one hand on the wall to guide her. Walking took the edge off her fear.

  She was back on a flat platform of rock. It was a vast cavern, with soaring walls of darkness in all directions, glistening with running water. She dared not look down. There was no need to look down. Again, she licked the walls.

  The canal ended here, the murky water blocked by a man-made dam. There was no boat because her captors, whoever they were, had taken the boat back to the entrance. A chill rose from the dark water.

  If she called out there might be an echo. But they might hear her and return.

  Fancy took the crumpled wire out of her pocket, straightened it out and tied a small rock to the end. She would use it to test the depth of the water. She did not fancy a swim in those cold, dark depths, especially as she would lose the light from her life-saving candle stumps. She needed light.

  It was not more than three feet deep. Her wrist went into the water, holding the wire. It did not need to be any deeper to transport the lead back to the exit of the mine in the shallow boat. Three feet was up to her thighs. But what would be on the floor of the canal – centuries of sludge, debris, the bones of long-dead children?

  She was only wearing little slip-on, ballet-style shoes. She bound one foot up with the same wire to make sure the shoe stayed on and gave her more grip. She used her stylish scarf to bind the other shoe. It would have to do, though it would soon become soaked and slide off. Goodbye, scarf. She added a Roman-type twist round her ankle in the hope that it would stay on longer.

  Then she stepped cautiously into the water, levering herself down over the side, holding the candle stump aloft. She gasped aloud. It was freezing, dark and ominous. She tried not to think about what she was treading on. It was slippery with moving stones. The water almost came up to her waist, shocking her with its intense cold. She kept her free hand on the left-side wall, as the boat people had, when using their arms and feet to propel the boat along.

  Fancy tried to remember how long she had been in the boat but her memory was playing tricks. Had it been five minutes? Ten minutes? A real detective should have been keeping track of the journey. Jack Reacher would have instant recall.

  She waded carefully along the canal, not hurrying. A fall would be disastrous.

  She had to find that entrance, those hundreds of uneven steps leading to the surface and air. The candlelight wavered with every step she took, casting shadows on the wall.

  She felt a change of direction, the canal she was in began veering to the left. Ahead in the murky darkness, she glimpsed another canal leading off to the right, to another mine seam. Which one? Which one had they come along? How could she possibly tell which canal led to the steps?

  She decided to keep to where she was, feeling the wall along her left side. If she was wrong, she would have to come back. No way could she find her way over towards that right canal without something to hold onto midstream.

  It felt right, this direction. Something told her. There were more of the alcoves in the rock face where children stood with candles for sixpence a week. The canal washed against her body, centuries-old water, surges of wet and cold. It had never been renewed. Perhaps some rain had washed down, but essentially it wa
s the same water that had been transporting lead since the Victorian times.

  Fancy kept going. Her spirit was determined to keep alive. She was not going to die yet. She had books to write, characters to bring alive, plots to evolve and solve. Maybe even a brood of children to conceive. It was not impossible. There was still time. She never knew who she might meet one day around a corner, across a crowded room. If only she could see someone, waiting for her.

  She could hardly believe it when she bumped into the end of a moored boat. It looked like the same one she’d travelled in. She had reached the end of the canal. She had made it. She had walked the water. She hung onto the end of the boat, gasping for breath, letting out a long sob of relief, releasing the emotion.

  Her candle was flickering in its last moments of life. She crushed the hot wax into her hand, thanking the God of Candles for giving her light this far. She would have to do without light now. There were steps to climb. She could do it. The Pink Pen Detective could do it.

  The pinpricks of light along the wall of the long rise of steps were still on. They had forgotten to switch them off in their hurry to leave. Perhaps they, whoever they were, had to get back to the dregs party before they were missed.

  She hauled herself up out of the canal water, muck and dirt draining off her, frozen legs refusing to move. She had to move them by hand, like an old lady with severe arthritis. The pinprick lights beckoned her.

  Fancy sat at the bottom of the steps, breathing hard, regaining a moment of strength. She was exhausted, black and blue, her clothes torn and bloodied. Everywhere hurt. But she refused to give up and die. She was going to get out.

  She made herself crawl towards the steps and start climbing. It was a hundred or more steps, wasn’t it? She couldn’t remember. Each step was painful, dragged out, excruciating. She developed a pattern. She crawled on her hands and knees up five steps, and then she allowed herself to stop and rest.

  Breathing deeply, she regularly allowed her muscles to relax and regain some normal strength, before forcing them again into this relentless climb. How many times five was it going to be? Mental arithmetic had never been a strong point.

  ‘More, more,’ she urged herself. ‘Five, four, three, two, one. Well done, girl! Now we can rest. Rest, rest, rest … breathe deeply.’

  There was no way of knowing how long it took Fancy to drag herself up to the top of the lead mine. Hours had diminished. Time was no longer relevant. Everything was divided into slots of five.

  When she reached the top, finally feeling that there were no more steps ahead, she collapsed on the floor, spread eagled, her breath coming in short gasps. Every aching muscle protesting. Every painful joint crying for rest and sleep. Her brain acknowledging that somehow she had survived this hurdle, but knowing there were more ahead. She still had to get out, get away.

  She did not know how long she lay on the floor of the lead mine office. It could have been hours, it could have been minutes. Eventually, she made herself grasp at something solid, a desk or a chair, and haul herself upright. She could see light through a small window, pale moonlight in a black sky, blinking stars.

  There was nothing inside the office, anywhere. No ancient bottle of water. No forgotten ale or cider. Nothing to drink. No torch, no matches. It had been cleared out with relentless efficiency.

  There was no trouble opening the door from the inside. The rush of night air was like nectar. Its sweetness flowed over her. Moorland, gorse, peat, heather. But outside the door was a bowl for thirsty dogs, full of rainwater.

  Fancy drank it as eagerly as if she was a prize winner at Crufts.

  Fancy felt sure she was on Mam Tor in the High Peak. It was a famous peak in the district, with a cairn of stones on the top. She understood why it was sometimes called the Shivering Mountain because she could hear the wind moving the shale on the slopes. Yes, it must be Mam Tor; she knew it had disused lead mines.

  The wind was howling like a banshee. She couldn’t see the vast, panoramic view but she could feel the space. After the terrors of the mine tunnel and the canal, the fresh air felt like freedom.

  She remembered doing some research on the Tor for a book, years ago. All she could remember was that it was about 1,600 feet high and was the second oldest Iron Age fortress remains in England. A huge earthenware ditch surrounded it somewhere. She hoped she wouldn’t fall down it in the dark. No idea of the time.

  Carefully she checked that there was no parked car nearby, watching or waiting. There was no one there. They had gone.

  The yard outside the mine office was the usual chaos of abandoned equipment and unwanted stuff. She needed a walking stick to help her down the path. Her shoes were sodden lumps of detritus but she dared not abandon them in favour of bare feet. She felt around until she found a gnarled piece of wood, broken from a tree, the right height and the right dimension. She tore off the unwanted branches till she had a reasonable stick and a protruding knob made a convenient handhold.

  Before leaving the abandoned mine office she hunted round in case there was anything useful. She found a couple more plastic bags, a wodge of what looked like old receipts and a roll of Sellotape. She put her finds in the original plastic bag, which was wet now, and hung it from her jeans belt. She needed her hands free.

  Now she had to walk to her freedom.

  The path down from Mam Tor was a well-worn route for Peak walkers. There was starlight and occasionally the cloud drifted away from the moon’s face so Fancy could see the path. It ran along a ridge with a steep fall either side, but she kept her eyes firmly on the path and nowhere else. No looking down.

  ‘My trusty stick,’ she said, planting it down with each step. It was a third leg. It took her weight, it upheld her tired body. She had taken to talking to herself.

  She was no longer a writer, a published author. It all meant nothing. A million words scattered randomly across paper. Books on shelves were meaningless. Words on tapes echoed in the air. She was a woman fighting for survival, determined to beat whoever had left her down that mine to die.

  At least she was not scrambling down the shifting side of the Shivering Mountain; she had a recognized walkers’ path to follow. It would lead somewhere eventually. But there was a chill wind and her clothes were soaked. Soon she was also shivering.

  Her walking took on a similar pattern as climbing the steps up from the mine: walk for twenty paces, then stop and lean on the stick for several deep breaths. Then start again, another twenty paces. Rest, pace. Rest, pace. Keep the circulation going.

  She had several gates to go through and she took advantage of them to lean and stretch her aching back. Her spine was on fire with pain. The last gate led her into a car park. No cars. But the terrain was flat, tarmac, bliss for her torn feet. The sodden shoes had fallen off by degrees.

  She sat down, back against a post, legs outstretched and gazed up at the stars in the dark night. It was so beautiful. She wondered if they were looking down at her, pitying her plight, wondering what on earth (her earth) this mortal was up to.

  She brushed dried and caked debris off her feet, tried to massage some life back into them. Where was that expensive pedicure now, the soak in warm suds, the Russian Red varnish, the nourishing foot cream?

  Iron Age men and women fashioned footwear from skins and fur. Catching and skinning a rabbit was not on Fancy’s current agenda, though she thought she had seen dozens of tiny creatures hopping away from the path.

  She divided the pile of receipts equally, smoothing out the paper. She put one pile into a plastic bag, placed her foot on top of the paper, then wrapped the bag round and round her foot, tying the handle ends on top.

  As always, it was a struggle to find where the Sellotape roll began. It was a ploy on the part of the manufacturer so that you would throw the roll away in frustration. Organized people folded over the end. Fancy always marked it with a paperclip.

  But she had patience and perseverance. She found the end eventually and peeled off several stri
ps. The stickiness was not good – too ancient – but she wound it round and round her foot, pressing it down, hoping some of it would stick.

  Then she did the same for the other foot, wedge of paper, plastic bag and Sellotape. She had shoes.

  ‘Not exactly Jimmy Choo,’ she said to her feet. ‘But he would be proud of me.’

  Her toes began to thaw inside the plastic bags. She got up and searched round the car park. She found another abandoned plastic bag, shook out the food container debris and wrapped her frozen hand in the bag. Not a perfect glove, but warm enough. She began changing hands with the plastic bag, to get warmth back into both of them. Plastic bags had a hundred uses. She would write a book on a hundred and one uses for plastic bags.

  There was nothing else in the car park. No abandoned picnic basket with the remains of a game pie and an opened bottle of champagne. Only crumpled crisp packets and sweet wrappers. She found some broken crisps left in a bag and ate them, licked out the salt granules. The salt was euphoric.

  It took determination to start walking again. She could have easily curled up in the car park and waited for dawn, for the first visitor to arrive with a car. That was if she survived the plunging temperature of the night, frozen and wet as she was.

  It was straightforward to find the gate out of the car park and the walkers’ path that led down to some small dale village. There was even a sign which kindly said Footpath. The narrow, gravel-shod path had to lead downwards.

  Somewhere in the vast distance below she could see tiny, twinkling lights, mere blinks in the blanket of darkness. They spelled civilization, houses, roads, street lighting, water and pints and pints of hot coffee.

  TWENTY

  Castleton

  ‘Twenty paces, now rest for twenty.’

  Fancy continued the same pattern, battling against a high wind that flattened her wet clothes. The Japanese platform shoes needed some getting used to. It was like walking on stilts but they protected her torn feet to some extent. The trusty stick took on magical properties. Harry Potter would have been proud of her.