The Kill Call

by Stephen Booth

  Cooper mounted the step and looked into the shaft. A metal ladder ran vertically down for about twenty feet, and in the light from the open hatch he could see oily water glimmering at the bottom through the mesh of an iron grille set into the floor.

  ‘There isn’t too much water,’ said Falconer, peering over his shoulder. ‘This was always a dry post – not like some of the others. They could flood right up to the shaft if you didn’t pump them out regularly. That’s the sump you can see there. You won’t get your feet too wet.’

  ‘I’m not bothered.’

  He clambered gingerly over the edge and found a rung of the ladder with his foot. There wasn’t much room in the shaft, and anyone overweight might have had a bit of trouble. When he’d climbed down a few feet, he looked up again at the sky, only for something heavy to hit him hard on the back of the head, making him see stars for a few seconds.

  ‘Oh, sh—!’

  ‘Sorry!’ called Headon. ‘We should have warned you to watch your head on the counterweight. If you go down in a crouch, it catches your back, and if you straighten up it gives you a crack on the skull. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ said Cooper, though he felt anything but. There’d be a lump on the back of his head tomorrow morning.

  He landed at the bottom of the shaft with a small splash. Falconer was right, there was only about an inch of water, not enough even to wet more than the soles of his boots.

  ‘Are you coming down?’

  ‘One of us should stay up on top, for safety,’ said Falconer. ‘We don’t want the hatch blowing shut, do we?’

  There was just a moment then, as Cooper looked up at the two faces silhouetted against the sky twenty feet above him, when a small spurt of panic ran through his chest. He couldn’t make out the faces of the two men well enough to see what their expressions were, or whether they were exchanging that secretive little glance.

  ‘I’ll come down with you,’ said Headon. ‘I’m more appropriately dressed.’

  Cooper waited at the bottom of the shaft while Headon joined him. There wasn’t much room for two people standing on the grille of the sump. The handle of a pump protruded from the wall, and Cooper shone his torch on it.

  ‘That hasn’t worked for years,’ said Headon. ‘None of them do, now. They always seemed to be the first thing to seize up.’

  ‘It worked the sump?’

  ‘That’s right. You filled the priming point there and pumped the handle. My God, you had to pump hard, though, if you had a wet post. There might have been three or four hours of pumping to be done on a full exercise. One of the lads reckoned once that each stroke of the pump shifted about half an egg cup of water.’

  ‘Well, the exercise kept you warm on a cold night,’ said Headon with a laugh over their heads.

  ‘Some posts suffered so much from water that their crews had to bail them out with a bucket lowered down the shaft on a rope. You can imagine how comfortable those places were.’

  In a cupboard was an Elsan toilet, like a big green metal can with a plastic seat, still permeated with that distinctive odour of the thick, blue chemical. On a shelf stood a brush and a tub of Glitto – whatever that was. A ventilation louvre stood partly open over the toilet.

  Headon opened a door still labelled with a ‘no smoking’ sign.

  ‘This is the monitoring room. And that’s it, really. A full tour of the facilities.’

  The room was so low that Cooper felt he ought to duck to avoid banging his head on the ceiling. A table and some drawers stood against the side wall, with a couple of folding chairs. Cabling ran along the wall and vanished upwards, through crumbling polystyrene tiles.

  ‘Seven feet wide and sixteen feet long. Like a giant coffin, we used to say.’

  When Cooper pointed his torch at the far wall, he saw two bunk beds, their mattresses still wrapped in damp plastic, with a second sliding ventilation panel over them. And Headon was right. That was pretty much it. Except for a smell of abandonment and neglect.

  ‘All the operational equipment was taken out, of course,’ said Headon. ‘On the wall there, you can see the fitting for the bomb-power indicator. The blast pipe was attached to a baffle assembly upstairs. And that hole in the table is where we had the fixed survey meter. That was the fallout radiation sensor, which measured the level of gamma radiation outside. The only other measuring equipment we had was the ground-zero indicator, and that was up top, too.’

  ‘What was that supposed to do?’

  ‘The GZI? It recorded the height and direction of a nuclear detonation, so we could report exactly where a bomb had gone off, and whether it was airburst or groundburst, which made a difference to the fallout.’

  ‘And that’s all you could do?’

  ‘It was a simple idea. The only trouble was, someone had to go outside to get the readings off it.’

  Cooper realized there was some rubber sheeting on the floor, squelching as his weight squeezed out the water.

  ‘That’s conveyor-belt rubber. It was donated by the National Coal Board some time in the eighties. That’s all the insulation we had, apart from the polystyrene ceiling tiles.’

  After only a few minutes, Cooper was glad to get back up into the daylight. He couldn’t imagine staying down there all night, with the hatch closed and nothing more than a dim six-watt bulb to see by. Let alone being trapped down there for the duration. Trapped inside for – what was it? – fourteen days, until it was considered safe to come out? You could go mad down there in fourteen days.

  ‘Seen enough?’ asked Falconer.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  He got clear and watched Falconer re-fix the padlocks and turn the Allen key in its slot.

  But even when the hatch was shut and locked again, Cooper still had the feeling that there was something he was missing.

  ‘Well, you finally meet a decent bloke, and he turns out to be a murderer,’ said Naomi Widdowson.

  Fry looked at her. ‘There’s something wrong with the logic of that sentence.’

  ‘Well, what I mean is … he seemed all right, anyway.’

  Naomi was being transferred from the custody suite at West Street to a cell on remand. Magistrates’ court would decide whether to bail her on Monday. She had been issued with her personal belongings at the desk and was waiting for the van to pull up in the yard.

  ‘He hasn’t been convicted yet,’ pointed out Fry. ‘In fact, he hasn’t even been charged.’

  ‘Yes, but you must be sure that he did it, right?’

  ‘We can’t comment on that,’ said Fry.

  ‘Like I said in my statement, Adrian went back to the huts when I left. I argued, but I couldn’t stop him. So if someone did Rawson in, then it must have been him, mustn’t it?’

  ‘It will be for a jury to decide.’

  Naomi shrugged. ‘I’m cutting my losses, anyway. Time to forget about him and move on, I think. Don’t you?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to make even the least effort to argue that he’s innocent?’

  ‘What? You expect me to stand by him? Act the loyal girlfriend for the newspapers? No way. Absolutely no bloody way. He took some money to do this, didn’t he? And he never even told me. Bastard.’

  ‘Did you want a share?’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with me, do you hear? As far as I was concerned, it was all an accident.’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘I had no idea what he meant to do. He let me think he was just going along with the plan. In fact, he seemed to be really into it. Like that thing with the hunting horn. He said it would be a laugh.’ Naomi shook her head. ‘He was pretty useless at it, though. He’d only learned the one call.’

  ‘The kill call,’ said Fry.

  ‘If that’s what it was. I wouldn’t know.’

  Fry and Murfin watched in amazement as Naomi Widdowson walked away towards the van, accompanied by a prison escort officer.

  ‘Well, I’ve heard about women who care more for their
horses than they do for people,’ said Murfin. ‘And I’ve just seen one.’

  ‘I’m not a big fan of horses,’ said Fry. ‘But, even so, I know how she feels.’

  That evening, in the CID room, Fry stood by the window. It was only a few minutes after six, but darkness was falling rapidly. Heavy clouds gathered in the sky to the west. More rain was on the way.

  She had been watching the pedestrians passing by on the pavement. There was nothing unusual about any of them. They were perfectly ordinary members of the public. A young woman in a smart grey business suit, talking on her mobile; a young couple carrying rucksacks, probably early tourists; a man with a dark beard and stained jeans; two girls with magenta hair and nose studs. Ordinary, innocent passers-by.

  But were they all so innocent? How many potential murderers were out there, walking the streets of Edendale? Well, wasn’t everyone a potential murderer, in the right circumstances? Or the wrong circumstances. Push any average person into a corner and most of them would cross the line, wouldn’t they?

  Fry thought so. The vast majority of these people hurrying by her now probably couldn’t imagine what those circumstances would be. But some of them would. A few might have a specific victim in mind right now. Who knew what fantasies were going on in their heads; violent scenarios playing out, involving a partner, a boss, or a motorist who had just given them the V-sign. Only a tiny minority of them would ever follow through on their fantasies, or act out a violent thought. But there was no way of telling who those individuals were. It might be the man with the beard. But it could just as easily be the young businesswoman, who might be plotting bloody vengeance as she chatted on her phone.

  Naomi Widdowson might, or might not, have intended Patrick Rawson to die. But she certainly had no regrets that it had happened. She had badly wanted a person’s death. Deborah Rawson had gone further than that.

  Fry knew there were individuals in prison right now, serving life sentences for murder, who were every bit as ordinary as these passers-by on the streets of Edendale. She’d met some of them, and talked with them. They were people who had found themselves in the wrong circumstances, people who had crossed the line.

  She thought about what Angie had told her last night. In a smaller way, her sister had crossed a line at some time, too. But was it ever possible to cross back again?

  Cooper dropped David Headon and Keith Falconer back at the pub and bought them a drink for their time. He knew they’d enjoyed themselves, because it had been impossible to stop them talking all the way back to Edendale.

  When he left them, Cooper drove home in the dark, remembering that there would be no Randy to welcome him, and never would be again. Was that why he had subconsciously been seeking something to distract himself, an excuse to avoid going home? It was the sort of thing that he suspected of Diane Fry. But it was definitely disheartening to think that the flat would be so dark and silent, with Randy lying in his grave.

  He’d heard nothing from Fry since he left West Street, but he hoped for her sake that her interviews had led to a successful conclusion. His own interest in the Rawson enquiry had waned, and he wasn’t sure why. It was something to do with the ROC badge he’d found at Eden View, and with Michael Clay’s local connection. If Clay hadn’t been a member of the Edendale ROC post’s crew, why did he have the badge?

  As he crossed the lights and turned into Welbeck Street, Cooper thought about the stories Headon and Falconer had been telling him about the 1960s and the start of the Cold War. It was hard for him to imagine what people had gone through in those strange times. The 1960s weren’t so far in the past, yet they might as well be a chapter in a history book, for all he could understand of the world those young ROC observers had lived in.

  Come to think of it, he didn’t think it had even been covered in his Modern History lessons at school. The Cold War did get a mention, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War. But the preparations in Britain for life after a nuclear apocalypse? That had gone unremarked.

  Yet for many thousands of ordinary people it had been something right at the forefront of their lives. Any day, any night, they could have heard that rising and falling wail of the siren, following an Attack Warning Red, and know that they had only four minutes. Four minutes – to do what? To find some way to live, and to decide the way they wanted to die.

  When he thought about the present enquiry, Cooper felt as though they’d all been drawn off on a false trail, misled by a powerfully laid artificial scent. It seemed as though he and Fry had almost physically been following a trail of meat across the country, their noses close to the ground, sniffing the scent like a pack of hounds. But, like all hounds, they were easily mis-directed by a clever and experienced saboteur.

  For a moment, Cooper wondered what those big, purple steaks of horse meat that Fry had described actually smelled like.

  But he knew, of course. Like all meat, they would smell of blood.

  In their underground bunkers, the ROC observers would have been able to lock down the hatch and protect themselves against nuclear blasts and radioactive fallout. But there were some things you couldn’t close your door against. Time, death, the plague.

  The people of Eyam had done much the same thing when the Black Death hit their village, hadn’t they? Battened down the hatches, stayed indoors waiting out the storm, until the fallout cleared, emerging only to bury their dead. He imagined Mompesson’s parishioners peering out of their cottage windows, praying that it was safe, that the holocaust was finally over. But wondering, all the same, whose turn it was to die today.

  36

  Journal of 1968

  Well, then came the time for Les to die. He might have been number one, but he had to take his turn. Nature stepped in, struck him down with a heart attack. And I couldn’t say I was sorry.

  Since then, there have been some days when I would just go down there and think. For a while, we still had the folding chairs, the wooden cupboard, a set of drawers that came out of Les’s kitchen. Now and then, I would light one of the tommy cookers at the bottom of the shaft, though it would take twenty minutes to boil a kettle, the way it always did.

  For a few minutes, I’d sit and remember the foul air, the cold of the concrete that crept into flesh and bone. We wore two of everything back then, because once the cold got into your bones, you would never get warm again. There was always an icy draught across your feet as you sat there waiting for the messages, filling in the log, baling out the sump. The only thing you could do was go for a walk or run round upstairs. We were pretty numb by the end of the night.

  Of course, the pit was long since derelict and overgrown. When we were active, we were given an allowance to keep it tidy. Twenty-five pounds a year, I think it was. The grass wasn’t allowed to grow then, not a single weed or thistle was allowed.

  In the real old days, we spent our time watching the sky for rats. But it was all different when the 1960s came round. Instead of the sky, we had a concrete ceiling and a pair of metal-framed bunk beds. Some blokes sneaked in a comfy chair or two, curtains, or an office desk. Once we took down some carpet pieces. Years afterwards, they still lay there, half-rotted.

  I don’t know what would have happened if it had really all kicked off one time. I reckon it would have been a bit like musical chairs, a matter of luck who found themselves down below. We talked a lot about what would happen to our families. You wanted to be sure they were looked after, if you were one of the crew underground.

  But some of us never knew, were never entirely sure, whether we’d leave our wives and children when it came to it. Once you were down there, you might have to stay for a fortnight. Imagine waiting for the message to come – those three fatal words: Attack Warning Red. Then measuring the fireball over your own county, taking the elevation and bearing, waiting for the radioactive dust cloud to arrive. Attack Warning Black.

  And that meant the maroons. Three of them, of course. According to regulations, we were supposed to fire them, one after t
he other, to warn against nuclear fallout. Two bangs meant nothing; it was the third one that counted.

  So what about Jimmy and Les? Did they mean nothing? Was Shirley’s death the one that really mattered, the final thump and scream that changed the whole world? There are some situations where we have no regulations to follow, some questions that can only be answered from the heart.

  And here we are, forty years later … Did there have to be so many deaths to restore the balance? I thought there was just one, but I was wrong. There had to be another, and another.

  It’s funny, really funny, how everything happens in threes.

  37

  Sunday

  It had rained heavily again during the night. Below ground, the limestone caves of the White Peak would be flooding dangerously, water roaring through fissures and cracks like thunder, scouring another half a centimetre from the rock.

  Yet when the sun came out after heavy rain, the amount of colour in the landscape was stunning. On the main street of Eyam that Sunday morning, Cooper could detect a real feeling of spring in the air. He could smell it, and taste it, and even sense its warmth on his skin.

  Each year, it was becoming more difficult to judge when to expect this feeling. It seemed to come anywhere between the middle of January and April. That was climate change, he supposed. Hawthorns were in blossom in February instead of May, blackthorns had been flowering since the end of January. Once again, there had been no real winter.

  Cooper had passed an ancient lock-up garage with a collapsing roof. And here on the village green were the stocks, still intact – a reminder of the days when justice was not only harsh, but had to be publicly seen to be done.

  In this part of Eyam, there were no pavements or footpaths, doors opened directly on to the road. He could never resist peeking into the front windows that were so temptingly available to the passers-by. Didn’t other people do that?