05.One Last Breath

by Stephen Booth

‘Only the kids drank Coke. And the light was from Simon’s room. He used to draw the curtains and put the lamps on, even in broad daylight. He played U2 all the time up there, and it drove me mad. When he had it on too loud, I got angry with him. Too angry.’

  He turned his attention back to Cooper, who sank reluctantly back on his heels as the crossbow straightened up again.

  ‘I’ve been angry all my life,’ said Quinn.

  42

  When the torchlight finally became too low, Mansell Quinn reached into his rucksack with one hand and withdrew a round foil packet about eight inches long, which he opened with his teeth.

  Ben Cooper couldn’t make it out properly. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  At least Quinn had become calmer now. For a moment, Cooper had feared he’d pushed the man too far. But instead he’d withdrawn into silence again, wrapped up in his own thoughts.

  ‘Light sticks – high intensity,’ said Quinn, taking the end of one of the sticks in his teeth and removing it from the packet. ‘They last thirty minutes.’

  ‘Thirty minutes?’

  ‘It’s enough,’ said Quinn.

  Out of its foil, the light stick itself was a translucent yellow tube full of fluid, capped at one end and with a small hook at the other. Quinn bent the tube in the middle until the inner section burst with a snap. The fluid made contact with the crystals in the cap and began to glow. It threw a greenish-yellow light around the chamber that would have been bright enough for Cooper to read by if he’d held it close to his face. Its glow was almost fluorescent, and it threw complicated shadows on the walls and roof, and on the faces of the two men.

  Quinn found a level part of the floor and stood the tube upright on its cap. Lit from below, his features seemed skeletal and demonic. But Cooper thought he probably looked the same way himself.

  He gazed at the yellow glow. ‘You bought a packet of two light sticks at the outdoor shop in Hathersage.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Quinn. He didn’t seem at all surprised that Cooper should know.

  ‘Two light sticks,’ repeated Cooper.

  ‘That’s right.’ And Quinn paused. ‘The other one is for me.’

  Cooper sneaked a glance at his watch, tilting it to catch a gleam of light, wishing that it had a luminous face. It seemed important to know the exact position of the hands. In thirty minutes’ time, there would be no more light. One way or another.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ said Cooper.

  Suddenly, Quinn focused on him properly, as if he’d just been woken from a dream.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I asked what you’re waiting for. You are waiting for something, aren’t you? Or someone?’

  Quinn nodded.

  ‘A killer.’

  The pool of bright green water was a long way below. Diane Fry experienced a moment of vertigo as she looked down from the edge of the platform. She saw a scatter of white safety helmets lying on a sort of stony beach at the edge of the water, and instinctively raised a hand to hold on to her own helmet as she leaned over the iron rail.

  The colour of the pool looked garish and unnatural in the electric lights, but the guide had already explained that the green was caused by the high lead content of the water. Superstitious lead miners had named it the Bottomless Pit because the forty thousand tons of rubble they’d hurled into it from the walls of the cavern had failed to raise the level by an inch. According to the guide, the miners had concluded that it connected directly to the underworld, where the Devil was presumably unfazed by the amount of rock falling on his head.

  There was also some legend about a giant serpent that would emerge from the water and squirm its way through the caves and passages looking for anything warm and alive to eat. Fry shook her head. Those old miners must have lived in constant terror of what they would find around the next boulder.

  Most of the task force had reached the cavern ahead of them in another boat, and were now spread out on the rocky slopes above the platform, shining their lamps into the nooks and crevices. A diver’s head broke the surface; green water ran from his wetsuit and mud slid across his mask. He raised a gloved hand to wipe away the muck and clear his vision. He gave a thumbs down to a colleague on the shore.

  ‘How far is it down to the water from here?’ said Fry.

  ‘Seventy feet.’

  ‘Does anybody ever decide to take a dive off the platform?’

  ‘That would be suicide. The water is full of rocks.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  The guide shrugged. ‘There are some weirdos who say they get an irresistible urge to throw themselves off whenever they’re in a high place with a sudden drop, like this. They say it’s something inside them they can’t help, a bit like vertigo.’

  Fry drew her feet back from the edge of the platform. She’d been imagining launching herself into the air and plunging into the green pool, enjoying the feel of the cool air as she fell, and savouring the sensation of the water as it burst over her head. The rail was no barrier, if she’d wanted to do it. There was nothing to stop her at all, if the urge grew too strong.

  ‘Those people are really weird, though,’ said her guide.

  When the lead miners had blasted the last few feet of rock and emerged from the wall of the cavern, would they even have been able to see what was down there, seventy feet below? Wouldn’t it just have been a black hole disappearing into the earth? Giant serpents might easily have sprung to mind. Fry looked up. They wouldn’t have been able to see the roof of the cavern, either.

  ‘What happens when it rains heavily?’ she said.

  ‘The lake down there floods right up to where we’re standing.’

  ‘I see.’ She took another step back from the edge.

  ‘There isn’t enough rain today,’ said the guide. ‘But we get thirty-six inches a year – a million gallons of it on every acre of the hill up there.’

  ‘What’s further on?’

  ‘More canal. There used to be the remains of some old boats, though I don’t know if they’re still there. But I told you – there’s no way anyone could get in here, except down the steps.’

  Fry watched the task force officers clambering fruitlessly over the rocks and peering down into the green water. She thought of Ben Cooper, who’d gone to talk to Alistair Page and hadn’t reported back. Now Page was here at Speedwell, so where was Cooper?

  She remembered Simon Lowe leaving his aunt’s house in Castleton. Where had Simon been going? She should have asked him, but she had no power to make him tell her. Then she thought of Mansell Quinn finding somewhere to lie up like an injured animal. A dangerous animal.

  Finally, Fry recalled the moment back in the office earlier this evening, when she’d discovered that there was no Alistair Page listed among the Quinns’ neighbours back in 1990. The only fifteen-year-old, aside from Simon Quinn, was the Proctor’s son, Alan. Then she remembered Gavin Murfin joking about Cooper being in a cave.

  ‘Gavin,’ she said, ‘I think we’ve made a big mistake. We’re in the wrong place. We’ve got to get out of here.’

  Even before half an hour had passed, the glow from the light stick was beginning to fade. The blackness of the cavern was creeping back towards them, inching across the rock floor and running down the walls, like a dark tide filling the chamber.

  Soon, the roof had disappeared and the walls had receded beyond Ben Cooper’s vision. For a while, he could see only Mansell Quinn and a few feet of floor between their feet. Quinn’s face had seemed to sag, the skin slipping away from the bones as the shadows thickened and lengthened. His eyes sank into his skull, the whites turned yellow and dull. There was almost too little light to show whether he was still alive.

  Cooper was sure he must look that way to Quinn, too – like a man sitting upright, but dying slowly. And that was the way he felt. He knew that Quinn couldn’t let him live beyond the last glimmer of yellow light.

  Although he was still watching from across the chamber, Quinn
had been quiet for a long time. He seemed to be chewing something that he’d taken from his pocket. Cooper could hear the occasional crack of his teeth.

  ‘Did you say your name was Cooper?’ said Quinn at last.

  ‘Yes. I’m Detective Constable Cooper.’

  Cooper felt he was being assessed, analysed down to the soles of his boots. If this was some sort of test, he didn’t know what the right answers were, or what he should do to appease Quinn.

  But eventually Quinn simply nodded. ‘You look a lot like him.’

  ‘Who?’ said Cooper automatically. But he’d heard things like that said to him so often that he really didn’t need to ask.

  ‘Sergeant Joe Cooper. I suppose he was your dad?’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘Like father, like son. Isn’t that what they say?’

  Quinn shifted the butt of the crossbow, leaving a red imprint in the damp skin over his collar bone. Cooper couldn’t help dropping his gaze to Quinn’s right index finger, where it lay against the trigger guard. The end joint of his finger flexed a little. Had it moved a fraction closer to the trigger on the mention of Joe Cooper’s name?

  ‘I know about what happened to him,’ said Quinn. ‘He died.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was very sorry to hear about that.’

  Cooper felt as though the breath had been sucked out of him. It was the last thing he’d expected to hear.

  ‘Sorry? You were sorry?’

  ‘I didn’t know about it until I read that plaque in Edendale. I was sorry about it. Really sorry. It’s no way to die.’

  Cooper knew it must be sarcasm. Quinn was taunting him. Yet the man’s voice was flat, and Cooper could detect no emotion behind his taunt. In fact, Quinn’s words seemed to falter and die in the air of the chamber, as if they lacked enough conviction to reach the walls. They sank quietly, like carbon dioxide settling to the lowest point of the cave, and their meaning was swallowed up by the layer of silt on the floor.

  Of course, Quinn was a man who had stifled any real feelings long ago. Any feelings except that deep, consuming anger.

  Quinn tensed, watching him intently in the yellow light.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you that,’ he said.

  Against his will, Cooper closed his eyes. He knew it was going to happen now, and he didn’t want to see the look in Quinn’s eyes as he squeezed the trigger of the crossbow.

  In that moment, Cooper felt his senses heighten. He could feel his clothes sticking to his body with sweat, and the bite of the underground chill on his hands and face. He could taste the dampness of the air in his mouth. Around him were the smells of mud and rock, and water draining through layers of earth, like the odours of the grave.

  Cooper listened for the sound of breathing, but couldn’t even hear his own. He heard only the faint hissing of the light stick and the trickle water from the roof, as he waited for the thud of the bolt leaving the shaft.

  43

  By the time Diane Fry found Alistair Page’s house in Lunnen’s Back, she was feeling sick. Her spell in the cavern had built up the pressure in her head until she thought it would explode. She couldn’t blame the hay fever alone, although it had left her feeling rough for days. Now it was compounded by anxiety. Not anxiety – fear.

  When the boat had finally brought them back to the landing stage, they’d climbed the steps only to discover that Alistair Page had disappeared. And she still had no idea where Ben Cooper was.

  ‘Mr Hitchens isn’t happy,’ said Gavin Murfin as he finished a call to the West Street station. ‘He wants to know what your justification is for diverting the task force from Speedwell. He says you don’t have the authority, Diane.’

  ‘I’ll give him justification,’ said Fry. ‘Let him wait.’

  ‘Is that Page?’ said Murfin.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the corner there, just below the house. There’s somebody lurking underneath the street lamp.’

  ‘No,’ said Fry, ‘but it’s somebody I want to talk to. It’s Raymond Proctor.’

  After a few moments, Ben Cooper opened his eyes, expecting to find Mansell Quinn still there, his face yellow in the glow from the light stick. But Quinn was gone, and so was the light. Around him was darkness. Real darkness.

  Cooper stood up. It was the only thing he felt confident enough to do. Even so, he almost lost his balance. His head swam dizzily, and he had to flap his arms as he struggled to orientate himself. Without light, there was no way of knowing which way was up or down. But after a moment of panic, he calmed down. He practised standing still for a while to ease the pins and needles in his legs. The damp rock he’d been sitting on had chilled him through to the bone.

  He had no idea which direction Quinn had taken. In fact, it was impossible to tell which way the passage ran. All he could do was find the wall and feel his way along it. It would be slow going, but it was the best he could do for now. He might at least be able to work out whether he was going up or down – out of the cavern, or deeper into it. All Cooper knew was that he was in the Devil’s Dining Room. In the light from Quinn’s torch, he’d recognized the black stalactites in the roof: the Devil’s Hooks.

  He began to move in the darkness, then stopped after a few paces, feeling anxious about bumping into something hard. He waved his hands in front of his face, like a blind man. Maybe the more sensible course would have been to stay where he was and wait to be rescued. But he was wet from the cascade of water, and when he stood still he began to feel very cold. He knew hypothermia was a real danger if he was down here too long. There was no Little Dragon handy to provide warm air for him to breathe.

  He started to move again. It felt as if the darkness had diminished his powers of logic and perspective, as well as disrupting his physical senses. He tried to remember how far he was from the place where Neil Moss had died, trapped in the limestone and running out of air. It had seemed a long way into the cave system on the map, yet Moss’s presence felt suddenly very close.

  And who knew what could be around him in complete darkness? The chamber could be full of dead bodies, stacked to the roof sixteen deep, heaps of buried carnage that no one would ever see. The damp smell in his nostrils could be the stench of their bones, picked clean by pale, fat insects that had fallen off and died in the pools of ice-cold water, bloated with human flesh. If Cooper reached out a hand, his fingers might not touch stone at all, but the smoothness of a skull, the crevice of an eye socket, the dusty fragments of a young man’s hair.

  Cooper felt like a man walking through his own dreams, stumbling across a darkened, illusory landscape, where anything could be true, or everything could be false.

  He stopped when the toe of his boot hit a solid obstruction. He felt around with his foot, and stretched a hand out, moving it carefully downwards through the air to judge the height of the obstacle. It was a low boulder, no more than two feet high. If he hadn’t been moving so slowly, he would probably have tripped over it. He could feel nothing but empty air on the other side.

  It dawned on Cooper that he’d expected the cavern to be silent. Darkness and silence seemed to go to together. But he’d been wrong. The river that ran deep in the limestone was a long way below him, but he could hear its roar through the rock. And water was running through the streamways, trickling over sheets of flowstone, seeping down the walls, dripping from the roof. Water was moving constantly everywhere.

  But there was something else, too – something that he heard only if he concentrated hard. It was a more subtle sound, a gentle rhythm that might have been caused by the movement of air, or could have been inside his own head. It was the swishing and pulse of a distant tide, invisible in the endless darkness. As he stood in the depths of the cavern, deprived of sight, Cooper found the sensation oddly reassuring. The sounds he heard around him were like the liquid stirrings of a womb, and the distant beat of a mother’s heart.

  Of course, there was no such thing as silence. Not on Earth, anyway. Eve
n the movement of the atmosphere made the planet hum, made it ring like a bell at a frequency beyond the reach of human hearing. If you were able to listen closely enough, you might be able to pick up the vibration. But of course, it was never quiet enough to do that. You’d always be able to hear the wind and the movement of the trees, the beating of your heart, and the sound of your own breathing. There was no such thing as silence.

  And that meant it would be very easy to hear voices in here. There were strange echoes among the murmurings and tricklings of the water. He wondered if cavers were superstitious and populated the caves with their own ghosts and demons. He wondered if they ever thought they heard Neil Moss, calling them. Heard Neil Moss, breathing.

  Cooper could hear a voice now. It sounded a long way off, but it bounced softly off the walls, drawn towards him on the cool air.

  ‘You should never have come back. You should never have come back into my life.’

  He didn’t recognize the voice. Its resonance was distorted and flattened by the rock, and the words were overlain by echoes. Cooper turned his head from side to side, trying to locate it, to identify the direction it had come from.

  ‘But you knew that I would, one day.’

  A second voice. This one was Mansell Quinn, he was sure. In Quinn’s case, the flatness of tone wasn’t entirely due to the acoustics. It was an intonation Cooper had been listening to during the last hour – the voice of a man on the edge.

  ‘Yes. And I knew what you’d do once you were out of prison.’

  ‘Of course you knew. You’re just like me.’

  ‘Like you? The hell I am.’

  Cooper began to edge cautiously towards the voices. He mustn’t be too hasty, or it could be disastrous. If he was heading towards the entrance of the cavern, then somewhere ahead of him would be the slippery limestone floor and ice-cold pools of Roger Rain’s House. He didn’t want to die face down in water with tiny, blind shrimps in his hair.

  ‘Yes, you’re just like me. Except that you really are a killer.’

  ‘What? You’re kidding.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have let you out. They kept me inside for years, but they let you out.’