Lloyd says, ‘OK, roll over onto your back. Keep your mouth and nose in the airway. Don’t splash too much, or you’ll scare yourself. You won’t be able to see where you’re going, but just keep going anyway.’
I trust myself to his words.
The air in the cave isn’t warm – a near-constant nine or ten degrees, Lloyd told us earlier – but the water feels colder. Instantly penetrating my outersuit. Turning my furry inner into a wetly sodden mat. The chill of the water and the cold stare of rock an inch above my eyes does scare me and, sure enough, I move too fast, inhale a mouthful of water, metallic and sharp, and scare myself again as I jerk my head up, looking for air, and succeeding only in rapping my helmet on the roof.
Slow down. Calm down.
Steady breathing and steady movement.
‘Easy does it,’ says Lloyd, ‘Easy does it.’
And, not-easily doing it, I pass on through.
Lloyd follows easily behind. A sputter of self-reassuring swearwords from the rear says that Burnett is also through. The number of grey pies and questionable pastries to have descended that Carmathenshire gullet won’t have made that last little experience much fun for him.
On we go. The roof starts to lift. I’m on hands and knees now, exhilarated by the sudden freedom of movement.
And then – I’m crawling along and the roof vanishes. Soars away above my head. My torch beam, so close and constricted in its bluish brightness, suddenly cuts a long swath through the inky dark. I stumble to my feet, feeling that odd gravitational shift, the way you do when you clamber out of the pool after swimming a long time. The chamber we’re in isn’t vast by the standards of vast. It’s perhaps twice the length, height and width of that common room at Penwyllt, but it feels cathedral-like to me. Lofty and aerial.
I sit on a hunk of rock and wait for Lloyd (grinning) and Burnett (muttering) to appear. We congratulate each other. Learn to keep our torch beams angled slightly away from each other’s eyes, so we can see each other without dazzling ourselves.
Water pools in places on the floor, but is nowhere more than a few inches deep. Somewhere there’s a drip of water against rock. A faint draught.
Burnett sits next to me, mixing blasphemy and old-fashioned cursing in a way that is both dully conventional but also pleasingly heartfelt and direct.
Lloyd bounces round like a puppy. Splashes to the end of the chamber. Points out that the passage continues on from there. Pokes around a rubble of loose rock along the chamber’s right hand edge, muttering to himself.
When he’s done, he trots back.
‘OK? OK? You both all right? You’ve done well. That was a good crawl. Not as good as Ogof Daren Cilau, but still a good ’un. A really good ’un. Now, OK, take a break. Have a rest. I’ll get the sacks and we’ll set up base camp.’
He gives us instructions not to leave the chamber. Not to fool around with the loose rock. Tells us to sit still and be good, basically, an order which neither Burnett nor I feel inclined to disobey.
Lloyd crawls off in the direction we just came from.
Burnett looks at me.
Says, ‘Fuck.’
Says, ‘It’s all right for you. You’re not old and fat.’
Says, ‘You honestly still think they came here? Did all that?’
I don’t answer that. It’s a silly question. We know Roberts was a caver. We know he took Bethan Williams to a pond that was really a cave. That she vanished from under the eyes of one of the best surveillance teams in the entire world. What else could have happened?
I grope around in my dry bag. Find my tobacco tin. Offer Burnett a ciggy – a regular tobacco one – and we light up.
In the silence between our low conversation and stiff nylony movements, we hear nothing except the drip of water and, just occasionally, the sound of Lloyd receding.
Minutes pass.
I say, ‘Are you cold? I’m freezing.’
‘Well, not freezing exactly, but . . .’
We tell each other that next time we’ll come in wetsuits, but both hope there won’t ever be a next time.
My own watch isn’t particularly waterproof, so I left it in Penwyllt. Burnett wears one of those chunky masculine things, all dials and knobs and pointlessly excessive chrome, and he checks it every few minutes.
‘He’s been half an hour,’ he says.
‘He was a bit more than that last time. And he’s got those bags to deal with.’
Ten more minutes.
Burnett says, ‘Our last CID briefing in Carmarthen. You know, one of those where everybody’s there.’
Those don’t seem like questions to me, or even sentences, but I say ‘Yes’ anyway.
‘I gave you a good old plug. Said how much you’d done to get us this far.’
I stare at him. Or sort of stare. Keeping the torch beam angled up over his helmet. Catching his face in the periphery of my beam.
I say, ‘Thanks,’ but don’t mean it.
He shrugs. ‘These things get back.’
Meaning that his bosses will speak to my bosses. Meaning that he’ll look after my promotion chances if I look after his.
I don’t tell him that I don’t want to be promoted. Didn’t want the elevation to sergeant.
I say, ‘It’s better to keep this quiet. Everything. Loose talk costs lives, and all that.’
He shrugs in a have-it-your-paranoid-South-Wales-way sort of way, but I don’t think I’m paranoid.
Another ten minutes.
I say, ‘Your media thing on Tuesday. How many journalists were there?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, six or seven.’
‘And you knew who they were, yes? I mean they had credentials?’
Burnett shrugs. ‘Why wouldn’t they? I mean, who turns up to one of these things if they’re not running a story?’
I stare at him.
No one. That’s the answer. No one turns up to these things except journalists. Journalists and just possibly criminals seeking direct access to the officer leading the investigation.
Burnett, following my line of thought, shifts uncomfortably.
‘It’s not like I gave them anything that wasn’t pre-planned. I stuck to our agreed disclosures. I answered nothing that went beyond that list.’
He means, he said nothing about this cave. Nothing about the nature of our new leads on the Bethan Williams case.
I say, carefully, trying to be every inch the model junior officer, ‘And this cave itself. The entrance. There was nothing that would have indicated . . .’
‘No.’ Burnett’s face is grimacing, though, and he soon corrects that answer to, ‘I mean, I gave instructions . . .’
‘Sir?’
‘I didn’t want anyone fooling around with that cave. I wanted a man in a car down below, doing nothing, just reading a paper, but keeping an eye on things.’
And, in Dyfed-Powys, with its tiny rural force, its general absence of major crime, its limited CID resources, that instruction might very well end up being executed by a uniformed officer.
I stare at Burnett.
He says, ‘Look, as soon as I got away from that media thing, and saw that we had one of our damn patrol cars on the job, I got things changed around. I put a man in plain clothes, in an unmarked vehicle there instead.’
‘The patrol car, sir. How long was it there for?’
Burnett nods. An ‘all that morning’ kind of nod.
We stare at each other.
Burnett says the same thing as I’m thinking. ‘Where the fuck is Lloyd?’
He goes to the mouth of the tunnel and yells down it. ‘Rhydwyn? Rhydwyn, man, are you there?’
The sound booms and echoes around our little sarcophagus. It presumably travels some way down the passage too, but we hear nothing back.
I don’t think that means much. If Lloyd is pushing one tackle bag ahead of him and dragging another one behind him, and if he’s in any of the more constricted points in the tunnel, I don’t think he’d hear anyth
ing much beyond his own breath, the struggle of boot against rock.
On the other hand, I’m not at all keen to be here now. We entered this cave quietly, without a wall of police protection around our entry, because we were pretty sure that we were entering it undetected, unwatched. All of a sudden, I’m no longer so certain.
More minutes pass by. Glue-footed. Leaden.
‘How long has he been?’
Burnett checks his watch. ‘Fifty minutes. Maybe a bit more.’
‘Sorry, sir, would you mind calling him again? You’ve got a louder voice.’
Burnett looks at me, almost more disturbed by my quiet ‘sorry, sir’, than he would have been by my normal knotty awkwardness. But he’s thinking what I’m thinking. He goes to the mouth of the tunnel and yells. Really yells. Gets nothing back.
Too much nothing.
Much too much.
‘Sir, I think maybe we should fuck off out of here. I think we should do it now and I think we should do it as fast as we possibly can.’
Burnett looks at me. A swift, hard, appraising look. In normal police situations, we’d discuss things. Balance odds, form strategies. We’d do those things, then the senior officer – Burnett – would make the final call.
This isn’t one of those times. He just nods. ‘OK. Let’s do it. I’ll go first. You follow. If we meet Lloyd, we re-appraise. OK?’
That sounds good. We hurl ourselves back into the tunnel.
Burnett has the fear about him now – perhaps I do too – and we move faster than we did before. Even when we get to the duck – when we’re on our backs sucking that flimsy inch or two of air – we move fast. Don’t even care when we splash ourselves, those drowning mouthfuls. I stay close to Burnett. Close enough that a couple of times I get a faceful of his boot, and find it almost comforting: a reminder of human presence.
Only then we get close to the choke, that place of tumbled boulders.
Those suspended rocks, a collapse running in slo-mo geological time.
And only there does the darkness of this nightmare truly start to close.
Lost in that wicked tangle of stone, I hear Burnett saying, ‘Rhydwyn? Rhydwyn? Are you OK, man?’
I can’t see, not really. There’s not enough room to look. But Burnett mutters a commentary. ‘Fuck, he’s hurt. He’s . . .’ I think Burnett’s initial assumption is that Lloyd has been injured by one of those rocks, something fallen from the unstable mass above. An injury in this place would be bad enough, but as Burnett gets closer in, his tone changes, darkens. ‘Christ, Fiona, there’s blood here. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. He’s had his throat cut. Somebody’s come and killed Lloyd.’
Burnett’s first thought is flight.
Get out. Get out. Get out. Get out.
That’s my first thought too, but I’ve a different idea about the direction of travel.
As Burnett lunges forward, I grab his ankle.
‘The other way, sir. It’s not safe.’
‘What the fuck do you mean, it’s not safe? Of course it isn’t. Let’s just get the hell out of here.’
‘Not that way.’
Burnett is plenty stronger than me, but he can’t move forward with me hanging onto his ankle.
I plead. ‘Look, just come back a way. We’ll make a plan. Let’s not panic. Let’s not rush things.’
That logic works with Burnett. Calms him down a bit. Maybe calms me too. We work our way slowly backwards, until we get to a temporary bulge in the passage. A place where we can just turn about and kneel, albeit still with that awful lowered head.
‘Sir, we need to get all the way back to the main chamber. I need you to trust me on this.’
A moment’s hesitation. His panic against my insistence. My flat, unyielding face.
‘OK.’ He says, ‘OK,’ and we track back. Fast, scared, unhappy.
We’re most of the way there. Done the hard yards, the long ones, when our world detonates. A flat boom, without tone or pitch. A blast of air and flying particles. The crump of rock crashing behind us. Air hardened and dense.
Something moving hard and fast hits my helmet, but doesn’t split it.
Then a too-silent silence that leaves our ears ringing with the echo.
That silence doesn’t last long. A few moments later, dimly, there’s a second hard thump. Much fainter. No blast of baking air. No rush of wind.
Two blasts. The first one nearer, the second one further. The two together blocking our exit completely. Somewhere, close to us, there’s the soft tinkle of settling rock. The faint thickening of loosened dust.
Then, for a long and awful moment, everything is completely still.
I roll around trying to check myself for injuries. That’s always harder than it sounds: shock deprives people of fine sensation and I find physical dissociation much too easy at the best of times. But stuck on my face and belly as I am, I can’t see myself. Can’t make a visual check. Can’t bend most of my joints.
I think I’m OK, but it’s an unconfident thinking.
Shout back, ‘Are you OK?’
Burnett says, in a voice that’s weirdly tight, ‘Let’s just keep going.’
We keep going.
No more blasts, or none that we hear. The air is strangely, uncomfortably still. My face is gritty. Dust crunches between my teeth.
We move on.
At one point my torch cuts out. It’s a moment of terror, almost worse than the blast. The abrupt movement into darkness that would be total, except for the shreds of light from Burnett’s torch behind.
I jiggle the battery pack on the back of my helmet and the light comes back on, but goes off twice more on the journey back.
When we emerge into the main chamber, I see that Burnett’s face is strained and white. Streaked with lines of pain as well as fear. When the roof heights allow us to stand, I do and he doesn’t.
‘I took a knock,’ he explains. ‘Probably need to rest a bit.’
‘Arms and legs? You can move everything fine?’
‘Yes. I just need . . .’
‘And breathing. You can breathe OK?’
He makes a gesture with his hand, which says, ‘What do you think?’
I’m reserving judgement on what I think, but what I say is, ‘Is there blood? Can you find any blood?’
He just lies there, turned on his side. He’s in shock, for sure. So am I. But still, police training says look for blood. Close any wounds. Stanch the flow.
Burnett doesn’t answer my question, but the hell with it. I’m an investigator. I’ll investigate.
With a quiet, ‘Sorry, sir,’ I shift his position just enough that I can reach the zip of his nylon outer suit. Pull it all the way open. Then do the same with the inner suit. His face is pulled tautly away from me the entire time. Something much too rigid in the pull of his neck.
When I get the inner suit open, I find the fall of Burnett’s belly. White Welsh skin and a scramble of hair.
No major wound. No blood to speak of. But already a vast discolouration. A purple-black mottling all down his left side.
‘I’m going to palpate, sir. Let me know if—’
If it hurts. That’s what I was going to say. If it hurts.
But I only just start my palpation, the heel of my hand exploring the base of his ribcage, when he lets out a bellow of pain, a bellow that only causes more pain. His body stiffens and his breaths shorten as he tries to manage the rush of sensation.
Once he’s somewhat under control again, I murmur, ‘Sorry, sir, but I think we need to know.’
I continue my exploration. As gently as I can. Soft hands.
Get no more bellows of pain, but only because Burnett is virtually biting down on rock to keep himself from yelling out. The ribcage on his left hand side is pretty much staved in. I don’t know if there’s a single rib there which isn’t cracked or outright broken. That in itself isn’t life-threatening. Plenty of rib injuries are managed by doing nothing at all. The sheath of muscle all around acts as it
s own natural sling, and bones can be naturally reset without need for surgical intervention.
But the ribs aren’t the problem. If there’s internal bleeding on any scale, we just don’t know what the consequences may be. If there’s bleeding plus a punctured lung, then Burnett may, even now, be starting to drown in his own blood.
He needs a hospital and he needs it fast and we have nothing at all, not even a first aid kit, because the stupid tin box with first aid stuff in it was in the haul bags that Lloyd was going to collect when someone slit his throat and mined the tunnel.
I put my ear to Burnett’s chest. Want to see if I can hear the bubble of air rising through blood. I can’t, but my ear’s not a stethoscope, Burnett’s chest carries more insulation than is ideal, and I don’t really know if punctured lungs bubble or not.
Burnett: that could have been me, I realise. If I’d gone down that passage first. If I hadn’t had Burnett’s ample body in between me and the blast.
Burnett says, ‘They dynamited the fucking passage. Killed Lloyd and then they dynamited the fucking passage.’
I nod. Don’t even have the words to agree.
‘Our Disaster Alert message . . .’ says Burnett.
‘Is fucked,’ I say.
A whiteboard and an envelope. We couldn’t have made it much easier to erase or destroy those things. Our DAP plan was made on the basis that no criminal gang could have known what we were up to. Our plan was to enter quietly, leave quietly, keep our movements as private as possible.
But since Burnett and his police force, in a forgivable-except-unfortunately-lethal oversight, sent a massive visual warning to any bad guys – ‘Yoo-hoo, guys! We’re watching something in this deserted location in this quiet-looking valley. Bet you can’t guess what it is!’ – and since, additionally, any bad guy exploring the hill above that police car would have seen an extremely recent excavation and a tunnel winding back into the hill beyond, I think the plan we chose was quite possibly the shittest possible plan we could have come up with.
I’ve more than a suspicion that Rhydwyn Lloyd’s soon-to-be-grieving family will come to agree with that assessment.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 23