The Kill Call

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Ben, what on earth are you doing?’ said Fry in horror.

  ‘Going down.’

  ‘We have to wait. This is a specialist job.’

  ‘Saving a man’s life?’

  ‘We don’t know he’s still alive.’

  ‘We don’t know he’s dead, either. The water might not be up to the top yet. He could have found an air pocket. We can’t just stand here while he drowns.’

  When they pulled the hatch open, the water was halfway up the ladder. The stink of foul air and dank concrete rose to meet them – a true miasma, so thick that they could almost touch it and feel it. Rain splattered the surface of the water, shattering their own reflections as they stared down into the bunker. For a moment, Cooper experienced that curious illusion of looking at something twice as far away as it really was, because he was looking at his own reflection. And not just looking at himself, but at the grey sky far above his head. It was like staring into the infinite depths, dark clouds like blind sea creatures lurking on the ocean bottom.

  Cooper remembered Peter Massey’s description of his friend’s eyes, looking back up at him like dark pebbles under water, in the last moment before he died. But beyond the surface reflection there were no eyes, no floating body, nothing visible at all in the dark, oily liquid filling the bottom half of the shaft.

  Fry drew back from the opening, covering her nose and mouth against the stench.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ she said.

  But Cooper ignored her, concentrating on climbing over the slimy edge of the hatch and feeling for the top rungs of the ladder. As he clambered carefully down, the counterweight for the hatch bumped against his back, tap-tapping like a heavy hand on his spine, on his shoulders, and touching the back of his head as his feet touched the water. Then he looked up again at the light, saw Fry silhouetted against the sky, her coat and hair filmed with rain.

  ‘I know the layout. I’ll be OK.’

  ‘How can you know it?’

  ‘They’re all the same. A standard design.’

  ‘You don’t know what else might be down there.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Famous last bloody words. You’re mad.’

  Cooper summoned his recollection of the Edendale post. Beneath him was the bottom of the shaft, behind him an overhang and a wooden door – the chemical toilet and generator room. To the left would be the other doorway, into the monitoring room. He could see the top of the frame, was relieved to see that the door stood open.

  If he had been Michael Clay, trapped down here with the water rising, where would he have made his way to? Where would have been the best place to eke out the last bit of remaining air? The shaft itself, surely? There was a good six feet of space above the water line.

  But he touched the walls and felt how wet they were. Slippery with a foul-smelling sheen of mud and mould. So the level of the water was actually falling. At its peak last night, or in the early hours of the morning, the shaft must have been flooded right up to the top, only the locked hatch preventing water from seeping out on to the surface.

  So if Michael Clay had known the layout of an ROC bunker, what else would he have done? He would have gone for a ventilation outlet. Of course. Cooper pictured a rusty louvred steel opening in the far wall of the monitoring room. And somewhere in the ceiling was the lower end of the blast pipe, wide enough to detect the pressure from a fireburst explosion, so it must allow the passage a bit of air, too.

  Cooper sucked in a long breath and ducked his head under water, pulling himself towards the open doorway. Moving into pitch darkness, he was blinded by the sudden contrast with the light in the shaft and its splintered reflections on the surface of the water. He was so disorientated that he had to break the surface and take a new breath, panicking for a moment that he wasn’t going to be able to do it, at the thought that he would have to admit defeat and go back up to the surface, just sit and wait for the experts with their wet suits and oxygen tanks, which could take forever.

  He shook his head and clutched at the walls to orientate himself again, feeling the handle of the pump tangle in his legs until he kicked away. The cold was already creeping into his bones and turning his fingers and toes numb. He didn’t have very long to do this. It had to be now, or never.

  Cooper’s head went under again, and then he was in the doorway, pushing against the wooden frame. It was too dark to see anything in front of him. But he could hear David Headon’s voice in his head, telling him that the monitoring room was only sixteen feet long. He remembered thinking that it was a small space for three men to spend so many hours in. Seven feet wide and sixteen feet long, like a giant coffin. He could reach the end of it in two strokes.

  His violent movements stirred up silt and debris from the concrete floor. Floating objects bumped against him as he kicked forward, like invisible creatures swimming around him in the black water. A plastic bucket, a jerry can that spun away when he cracked his elbow against it. And something rough and fibrous that flapped slowly towards the floor.

  Then a long, loosely jointed shape swung into his face. A familiar shape. A human arm. His lungs aching, Cooper grabbed at a sleeve and began to kick backwards towards the door. For a long second, he felt something holding him down, the door getting in his way as he confused the direction of the ladder. In a gleam of light from above, he saw a white face turning slowly towards him, a floating blank-eyed face, staring and staring.

  Then his foot found the grille at the base of the shaft, and a rung of the ladder, and he was finally pushing upwards to the light. As he gulped air, he felt hands reach down towards him. Someone had lowered a rope. Voices came down from the sky that he almost couldn’t make out.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  But he didn’t know the answer to either question.

  42

  Tuesday

  Juliana van Doon hovered over the body of Michael Clay, laid out on the mortuary table in Edendale. The body exuded an almost palpable aura of cold, the blue tinge to his skin strange and alien in the mortuary lights.

  ‘No, he didn’t drown,’ she said. ‘There was no water in his lungs. But he suffocated all the same.’

  Fry shivered involuntarily. A visit to the mortuary wasn’t her idea of the best way to start the day. But today it seemed somehow appropriate.

  ‘Suffocated?’ she said. ‘How can that be?’

  ‘Oxygen deprivation.’

  Tensing, Fry waited for the patronizing remark, but it didn’t come. Instead, the pathologist looked down at the body, and wouldn’t even meet her eye. Mrs van Doon seemed awkward with her this morning, almost as if she’d heard something that had changed her attitude. Fry told herself she must be imagining things. Yet still the pathologist looked away as she continued to explain.

  ‘He has cyanosis, look – the bluish discolouration of the fingers, toes and ears, and around the mouth. That’s caused by a dramatic drop in the oxygen content of the blood circulating through the body. Blood poor in oxygen is purple, rather than red.’

  ‘But he was found in a flooded bunker,’ said Fry. ‘I assumed …’

  Mrs van Doon shook her head. ‘If this bunker of yours regularly gets wet and dries out again, I imagine there was a certain amount of rusted metal around.’

  ‘Yes, there was.’

  The pathologist hadn’t even picked up on her slip, her use of the word ‘assumed’. Never assume, it makes an ass …

  ‘Oxidized metal produces carbon dioxide, and that’s lethal in a confined space,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘Even without the hatch being closed, the victim was at serious risk. He could have passed out fairly quickly, especially if he was panicking, and exerting himself physically.’

  Fry looked at Michael Clay’s blue-tinged fingers. ‘He would have been running up the ladder, trying to force the hatch open. Shouting for help.’

  ‘Of course. No ventilation either, I suppose?’

  ‘A coupl
e of sliding vents, but they were rusted shut.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if they’d been open,’ said the pathologist. ‘Carbon dioxide is heavier than air. Without a pump to replenish the atmosphere, he wouldn’t have survived very long. As things went downhill, he would have become confused and disoriented, losing co-ordination. His breathing would have progressively weakened, like a fish out of water, and then he would have lost consciousness. Sometimes, people die from cardiac arrhythmia before the asphyxia.’

  ‘So he was already dead when the bunker started to flood?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Mmm.’ Mrs van Doon tapped a scalpel thoughtfully against a stainless-steel dish, a habit that Fry normally found irritating. Today, it didn’t seem to matter. ‘Perhaps not when it started to flood. It would have taken time.’

  ‘So he would have lived long enough to see the water coming in?’

  ‘I think so. It’s all a bit academic, perhaps.’

  ‘I bet it didn’t feel academic to Mr Clay,’ said Fry, trying half-heartedly to get a reaction.

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘More like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story.’

  ‘Poe?’

  ‘He was the writer obsessed with premature burial.’

  ‘I don’t remember that particular story,’ said the pathologist mildly. ‘I was always scared by the one that had the walls gradually closing in. That used to give me serious nightmares.’

  Fry shook her head. ‘For me, it’s drowning slowly, as the water gets higher and higher. Trying to get one more gasp of air, but feeling the water reach your mouth. As far as I’m concerned, it would be a blessing to pass out from lack of oxygen first.’

  Then the other woman met her eye properly for the first time. Fry felt a physical shock from the contact. Was there sympathy in her expression? Surely not pity? God, please don’t let the pathologist be feeling pity for her.

  ‘We all have to be thankful for our blessings,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘However small they may be.’

  Cooper knew from personal experience that Fry’s smile was worse than any verbal threat she might have made. It sometimes reminded him of a snake opening its mouth to reveal the poison on its fangs. Perhaps it was lucky that E Division hadn’t introduced video cameras into the interview rooms yet. Those whirring tapes caught the words being spoken, but not the gestures or the facial expressions.

  ‘So, Mr Massey,’ she said. ‘Do you still say you don’t know whether you meant to kill Mr Clay?’

  Massey was very composed now. All that he had bottled up inside him had come out, and he was facing everything that happened to him now with a quiet resignation.

  ‘I thought about it a time or two over the next few days,’ he said calmly. ‘I wondered whether to go and let him out. I even walked towards the post a couple of times. But it was so quiet, I just turned round and walked away again. I might have let him out, but I didn’t know what to say to him, how to explain it. And as time passed, it became more difficult to explain. After a while, I knew I would never be able to explain it to anyone. I don’t suppose you understand what I’m saying, even now?’

  ‘It’s hard for us to put ourselves in your position, Mr Massey.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. It’s hard for me too.’ He looked from Fry to Cooper. ‘I’m not a killer, you know. Not really. It was, well … sort of circumstances that just came together. The kind of thing I never thought would happen. You just react without thinking when it does happen. It was almost as if I’d been trained for it, had it drilled into me what to do in that situation. I really didn’t think about it. I never thought, “I’m going to kill him.” So I don’t think you can say that I had the intention. Can you?’

  ‘That will be for a court to decide, Mr Massey.’

  ‘I suppose so. What happens now?’

  ‘We’re going to have to charge you.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Why did you hate him so much?’ asked Cooper. ‘Was it to do with the death of Jimmy Hind?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Massey. ‘Les had brought his son to the post that night. He was a new observer, learning the ropes. Strictly speaking, there was only supposed to be a crew of three on duty. Les told me not to mention it. But then, a few days later, I saw Shirley. And I saw who she was with. It was Stuart.’

  They both stared at him for a moment, thinking they’d misheard.

  ‘Stuart?’ said Fry.

  Massey nodded. ‘Like I said, Stuart wasn’t supposed to be there. But it was him I saw with Shirley a few days later. And I realized he’d been after her all that time. He was Jimmy’s rival. It was him that left the loose knot on the siren, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Stuart? Did you say Stuart?’

  ‘Yes, Stuart Clay, Les’s son.’

  Fry stared at him. ‘Mr Massey, Stuart Clay died last year. He had pancreatic cancer.’

  Massey looked completely uncomprehending. ‘That’s not possible. He was there on Wednesday.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was Stuart Clay, Les Clay’s son. I knew him – he was with us at the post that night. He killed Jimmy.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘DS Fry is right, Mr Massey. Stuart Clay died nearly a year ago. The man who visited you was his younger brother, Michael. Here’s a photo of him –’

  ‘That’s him: Stuart.’

  ‘No, it’s Michael. He was eight years younger than Stuart. Stuart would have been your age now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Michael had to deal with his brother’s affairs when he died,’ said Cooper. ‘We think that it was when he cleared out Stuart’s papers that he first came across references to the ROC and the post at Birchlow. Then he found other things – there was a cap badge, a photograph of the crew. And, above all, there were a lot of newspaper cuttings relating to the death of Jimmy Hind. That was why Michael came to have a look at the post while he was in Derbyshire. It was part of the process of putting his older brother’s memory to rest.’

  But Massey still wasn’t convinced. It was obvious from the stubborn expression on his face, the distant, unconnected look in his pale, blue eyes.

  For one last time, Cooper produced the photograph of the crew of the Birchlow observer post, Post 4 Romeo. He was confident that he was finally showing it to the right person.

  ‘Mr Massey, do you remember this photo?’

  Massey screwed up his eyes, and held the photograph to the light.

  ‘That’s us, in the 1960s sometime. There’s me and Jimmy. The big bloke is Les Clay. And there’s Stuart Clay, Shirley Outram. I know all of them. They’re just as I remember them.’

  In the photo, Jimmy Hind was wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses, like John Lennon’s. He was the only one in glasses, though Peter Massey had also been squinting a little as he looked at the camera.

  ‘Do you normally wear glasses, Mr Massey?’

  ‘Only when I need them.’

  ‘Are you short sighted, or long sighted?’

  ‘Short sighted, I suppose.’

  ‘If I left the room now, would you be able to describe my face to someone? Would you know me again if you saw me in forty years’ time?’

  ‘Why would I need to?’

  Cooper lowered his head, no longer able to look Massey in the eye. He was thinking of the man who’d died in the underground bunker, starved of oxygen as the flood water crept higher around him.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘So that you don’t make a mistake about someone’s identity again.’

  ‘He’s hopeless without his glasses,’ said Cooper later, when he and Fry had concluded the interview. ‘He says he doesn’t need to wear them around the farm. He doesn’t miss anything that he wants to see. But there are some things he doesn’t want to see too clearly, anyway.’

  ‘Like people?’ suggested Fry.

  ‘Yes, people. He knew me, but he wouldn’t be able to describe my face. When he saw Michael Clay, his memories were of a voice, an outline, a way of walking, a series o
f gestures or mannerisms. The sort of thing that brothers have in common, or fathers and sons. People say that Matt and I have a lot of similar mannerisms, though we don’t really look alike.’

  Fry seemed distant and detached this morning, as if a great weight was on her mind that prevented her from focusing properly.

  ‘I don’t understand why Peter Massey did it,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think he understands either,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Well, that’s not good enough.’

  Her tone was suddenly sharp, almost vicious. But Cooper could understand her annoyance. He just didn’t know quite how much of it was directed at himself.

  Cooper had wanted to see Fry bring her case to a successful conclusion. But somehow he’d managed to take the credit for himself, without intending to. This morning, a congratulatory memo had been emailed to everyone in CID from Superintendent Branagh, singling out the actions of DC Cooper for particular praise. That would do his hopes for promotion no harm at all. The trouble was, he didn’t know whether Fry had read the memo yet, since she’d come straight from the mortuary to the interview with Massey. Certainly, no one had dared to mention it in front of her so far.

  ‘I suppose it’s in the nature of the job that we always want motives,’ he said. ‘But people often do things they can’t explain the reasons for, even to themselves. We’re wasting our time trying to make them give a reason for it, something neat and logical that we can write down and present to a judge and jury.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Fry. ‘Being obliged to explain to another person why you did something can clarify the reasons in your own mind. It’s the same principle that lies behind a lot of psychotherapy. If you’re never forced to explain yourself, you can just carry on wallowing in denial.’

  Cooper thought of some of the real killers he’d seen – the social predators, people with the glint of cruelty in their eyes. But Peter Massey wasn’t one of those. In his own way, he probably thought of himself as being just as noble as William Mompesson, sacrificing his own future to rid the world of a pestilence. A large number of murderers were convinced they were doing the right thing at the time. It often came as a surprise that society didn’t agree with them.