I’ve more than a suspicion that Burnett, with his shattered ribs and anguished breathing, would concur.
Game, set, match to the bad guys.
Or, in older language, we’re fuckety-fuckety-fucked.
Burnett says, ‘An ordinary tunnel collapse. That’s what it’ll look like. Stupid coppers barking up the wrong tree. Too dangerous to pursue that line of inquiry any further.’
I nod.
And yes: if our colleagues dig the whole damn tunnel out, they’d sooner or later find traces of explosive. But who would authorise that dig? Who would authorise it in circumstances where two officers and one civilian have already died and where the whole damn tunnel will now be acutely unstable? It’ll be one of those cases where, at best, there’ll be a few days of mostly-for-show rescue work, before a grave-faced emergency worker announces that efforts have had to be abandoned.
That wouldn’t even be the wrong thing to do. I’d make the same call myself. No point in jeopardising further lives.
And it’s a Friday morning, the weekend before Christmas. We’re unlikely even to be missed until Monday, and then perhaps only in a knowing must-have-pulled-a-sickie sort of way.
Burnett does the same maths. His sums add to the same bitter conclusion.
‘They’ve blocked our fucking exit,’ he says. ‘They’ve blocked our fucking exit and they’re leaving us here to die.’
33
First things first and second things second.
Although the chamber here is high enough, the floor is broken and wet. A bad place to lie. Just twenty yards from us, there’s an area of floor of gently sloping mud, almost cushiony in its comfort.
‘Can you get over there?’ I ask.
He nods. Does so.
As his shock wears away, the pain will be starting to come full force. It’s actually painful watching him move. The difficulty he has with even minor movements. The gasps that self-release when he can’t block them.
But he gets there. In the dry. Comfortable enough.
That done, I say, ‘Alun, I’ve got a tin of cigarettes with me. Do you want one?’
He says yes.
I open my tin and explain, ‘These ones contain tobacco only. These ones contain certain herbal additives which may not be strictly legal under the law of England and Wales.’
‘You came here with some joints?’
‘You never know when you might need one.’
‘Well, fucking hell, I need one.’
We light up. I breathe my smoke out. Watching it hang and slowly dissipate in the unmoving air.
Burnett says, ‘Those Chilean miners. They got them out.’
‘They had food. Not much, but some.’
And the people on the surface knew where the mine was. They knew where to look. We’re, what?, maybe half a kilometre into a mountain and no one has any idea where we might be. You could drill thirty holes, a hundred, without managing to find us.
Also: that Chilean mine was warm, I don’t know why. All the TV shots were of miners bare-chested in the heat. Our dank little hole sits under a Welsh mountain. We’re soaked through and the cold is already chilling. It’s not lack of food that will kill us, it’s the cold.
I sit with my helmet on my legs. Burnett shines a light on it. The plastic battery pack is split. Not about-to-fall-apart split, but loose enough that the battery connections have become uncertain. Burnett’s helmet is too big for me, even with the headband tightened to the max, and the battery packs are integrated into the helmet.
‘Oh piss,’ I say, and Burnett doesn’t disagree. I turn my torch off. Spare the batteries.
We smoke.
The sweet, sweet weed of Pentwyn. Cardiff’s finest.
‘Where did you get these?’ says Burnett.
‘I made them. I grow the stuff at home.’
He looks at me like I must be joking, then realises I’m not. Gives me a you-South-Walesers headshake but goes on puffing.
I move fairly fast onto a second joint. Offer another to Burnett but he just shakes his head.
We smoke, or I do, in silence.
When I’m halfway into my second joint, something loosens. The shock of that blast dissipates a bit. The shock and the fear.
I look at Burnett. His face is mostly dark under the rim of his helmet, but he looks drawn, wrung out, as though he’s been crying.
He says, ‘What a place to die, eh? What a place to fucking end it.’
I don’t say anything.
He says, ‘Thanks for getting us out of that tunnel. I mean, thanks, I think. I’m not sure which would have been worse.’
I realise – stupidly, belatedly – that he hasn’t got it. Hasn’t really understood any of it. I’d assumed that all his ‘leaving us here to die’ stuff was simply the rhetoric of a frightened man. A rhetoric I could more than understand, more than sympathise with.
I say, ‘Why do you think we’re here?’
‘Looking for Bethan Williams, I suppose.’
‘Really? What did you think we’d find – a corpse? A pile of bones?’
‘Don’t know. But we had to look.’
‘No, don’t you see? We’ve found exactly what we expected to find. I mean, exactly.’
‘We haven’t found anything.’
I rub my face with my hands.
I wish I wasn’t so cold. I wish I wasn’t already achey and tired. And, most of all, I wish Burnett was uninjured and intact, as I really, really don’t want to do this next part alone.
‘Look, we’ve found a cave system. Not a small one. Not just a little passage running into the hill. But some major system that could even be as extensive as one of the real monsters around here. We’ve got all that and, so far, no Bethan.’
Burnett stares. Stares directly enough that I have to close up my eyes against his torch.
‘Now watch this.’
I show him my joint, make him observe it, pay attention to it, then take a deep puff of the good weed. Hold the breath long enough to get the best of it, then blow it slowly out, a long tube of smoke.
‘What do you see?’ I ask.
‘I see a possession offence, minimum.’
‘You see smoke, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Moving or not moving?’
‘Not moving.’
The smoke dissipates, but doesn’t rise, isn’t pulled to one side or the other. It just slowly spreads out, fading to black.
I say, ‘Before they blew up that tunnel, there was a draught in here. A wind. You must have felt it on your face. Now, when I first felt that wind, I assumed it must be blowing through the tunnel. From one entrance point to another, an exit point somewhere else completely. But I don’t know caves. I don’t know how these things normally work. Maybe they have their own air currents. Only then, they blocked one entrance. The one we came in at. And the draught ceased. I mean, from the moment the tunnel was blocked, the draught stopped.’
I stare at Burnett. Because he’s now wearing the only light, I can’t see his face well, but under the dark rim of his helmet, his lips move silently in shadow.
I whisper, ‘So that proves it. The wind was blowing through the tunnel. There was an entrance and an exit. Our job now is to find the exit.’
‘Bloody hell, woman. You find me that exit and I won’t bust you for growing weed.’
I grin at him.
He grins back.
Deal. We’ve got a deal.
‘And you’re saying that Bethan Williams has already been out that way? That Roberts took her out of the valley right under the noses of the SAS?’
‘Yes.’
That ‘under the noses’ thing is a weary old cliché, of course, but in this case you can’t beat it for accuracy.
‘And who would do that?’ Burnett continues. ‘I mean, who would leave their mother and father, make a new life under a new name? And who would do those things like this? A teenage girl, crawling through that bloody tunnel . . .’
‘Who would
do it? Someone who had very, very strong reasons. Someone who feared for her life. A very brave girl under one hell of a lot of pressure.’
‘She found out about the kidnapping? Was scared they were on to her.’
‘Or something like that. I’m not psychic.’
I’m a bit snappy because I’ve got to the end of my second joint and am not quite feeling cooked through. Stupid, really. I made the joints quite weak, because I was worried I wouldn’t get the chance to smoke them next to a detective inspector, and brought some tobacco-only ciggies in case I had to share them. Now here I am, sharing my joints and wishing I’d brought a bloody great lump of resin to juice them up.
Burnett is staring at me.
‘Rhayader. That van in a barn in the hills above Rhayader. The one that was burned out with a corpse inside it.’
I don’t say anything. More of those non-sentences and non-questions. I don’t know how these people expect to get a conversation going.
Burnett says, ‘You. You were involved, weren’t you?’
I make a face. Wave my hands. We’re buried alive under the Brecon Beacons and he wants to know my backstory.
He says, ‘Bloody hell, and Nia Lewis. There was South Wales involvement in both of those.’
I pick up his roll-up. Inspect the stub. He didn’t smoke it right down to the cardboard the way I do, but there’s not enough juice there to be worth relighting.
I say, ‘I’m going to need your batteries.’
‘What’s your plan?’
‘I don’t have a plan. My plan was kind of fucked when the tunnel came down.’ I stand up. ‘And your watch.’
‘My watch?’
‘Yes.’
He gives me his watch, which is just stupid-big on my wrist, but which fits OK if I wear it over my various caving things.
I turn my light back on.
It’s hard for him giving me his batteries, but he can see why I need them. He takes them out of his helmet and his light goes dark.
I listen to his chest again. It sounds OK.
I ask him to breathe in as far as he can. It’s painful for him that. Pretty much any movement is painful. But when I ask whether he feels short of breath, whether his breaths feel shallower than normal, he shakes his head. ‘No. I’m just a fat bugger who should take more exercise.’
But I don’t know what that means, not really. Do people about to drown in their own blood know that’s what’s happening? Is it one of those things that either happens fast or not at all? I don’t know. Nor does Burnett. And the questions are theoretical only. Nothing we do here can make a difference. Nothing except getting the hell out.
I say, ‘Make your Christmas lists. People you haven’t got presents for yet. It’s what I do.’
‘Wife does all that.’
‘Well, I don’t know. Christmas cards you ought to send and never do. Something to keep your mind away from all this.’
He gives me a grin. An I’ll-be-fine number. Big, bright and shiny. But his task will be to wait here, in this cold and total darkness, with a chest smashed to buggery, and no way of knowing where I am or how I’m getting on. Not easy. Not fun.
Burnett gestures at his dry bag with a finger. ‘There’s food in there. Take it.’
I’m about to demur, but he’s right. I’ll need the energy more than him. He’ll get out of here only if I do.
I take the food. A sandwich, a chocolate bar, a banana.
‘Thanks.’
‘Ogof Draenen. How long did you say that extended underground?’
‘Who cares? It’s just a big stupid hole.’
The truthful answer is seventy kilometres, but I don’t see that Burnett’s life will improve if I tell him so.
I’m cold, achey and scared, but as ready as I’ll ever be. Food and batteries in my dry bag. A messed-up torch on my head.
A last check of the cavern. There’s one entrance, one snaking exit.
I point to the exit. The only tunnel that isn’t blocked.
‘I think I’ll go thataway,’ I say.
And do.
34
Thataway.
Walk through this dark cavern to a passage, even more emphatic in its blackness. An angled cleft which presses me over to almost forty-five degrees. Brown minerals chalk the wall, like the runes of a forgotten people. I squeeze along, face pointing upwards at the swell of the mountain above. I have this crazy feeling that the mountain is alive. That a sudden out-breath from it, a sudden flexing of these rocky arteries, will squeeze me to a pulp, unremarked and unnoticed. A little flesh-and-nylon footnote to a much older story.
To start with I focus on making progress, then remember I need also to be looking for any passages forking off from this one. Not only left and right, either, but above and below. Anywhere that could lead to new rooms, new passages.
A labyrinth, yes, but one built crookedly, and in three dimensions.
Knowing that makes my progress stupidly slow at times. Once, for example, I see a dark hole looming, somewhat beyond the reach of my torch, perhaps twelve or fifteen feet overhead. I don’t want to scramble up there. I want to move on, but I also know that Len Roberts wouldn’t have left that kind of gap unexplored, so I kick my way upwards – curling my body like a comma, jamming up against these tilted walls, moving my legs and feet to a new position, then fighting on up. I get there. Reach the damn hole, but its dark mouth retreats only a few feet, the stone fractured, hanging and lethal. I slip-slide my way back down.
A dead end, but one that was costly to reach in terms of time and energy, and I’m short of both those good commodities, dammit.
Continue.
Get to a proper fork.
A larger tunnel continuing with the line of the rock strata, heading right and slightly down. Another tunnel, much smaller, like the gurgling head of an old streamway coming in from the left.
Eeny-meeny-miny-mo.
I take the larger tunnel.
Flowstone, or something like that. Tubes of brown and beige and a calcified pale white. Minerals laid down over the centuries. Bulgy and alien in the damp.
Even where the tunnel is broad enough and even enough to allow something like an ordinary walking movement, I have to inspect every inch of it as I go. The inky shadows at the base of a wall might hide a tunnel, an exit, the thing I’m looking to find.
I do what I can. Inspect as much as I can while continuing my forward progress. It’s hard work. Physically demanding. I’m always bending, twisting, stooping, crawling, slithering, climbing. Shifting loose rock and double-checking tunnel walls.
Hard work. Relentless.
Work that will kill me if I get it wrong.
Onward.
Another cavern, water pooling to the side.
An awkward, small, constricting passage writhes up and to the left. One whose muddy slopes and dark shadows retreat beyond the reach of my lamp. Another tunnel, one of those smooth whale-flanked crawls, takes a stony path twisting and down. My torch fails a couple of times as I explore, but always comes back on when I jiggle it.
I do realise, though, that, give or take the odd bit of flowstone, the occasional unusual formation, these passages look all alike. The next black and watery cavern blurring into the one before, the one after.
When I try to picture the route back to Burnett, I’m already pushed to do it.
Which tunnel? Which rocky, uncertain path?
I don’t know. I’ve a moment of sheer terror when I see how this plays out. Me, with a failing torch, crawling around. A blind beetle in this buried labyrinth. Crawling slower and slower, colder and colder, until my limbs no longer function.
A bad way to end.
A stupid way to go.
So I stop. Three joints smoked. Seven joints left. I light up, lying back against the cavern wall.
The jolt of my head on rock kills the light again and I leave it dead. Nothing in here but rock, darkness, water and the sweet red glow of my roll-up.
Stupid, stu
pid.
Crawling around like this, no plan, no vision.
The stupidest thing of all: doing this like I’m a regular sort of person. Doing this the way Burnett would. Not that there’s anything wrong with him, or his natural process. Just – I’m me. I need to do this my way.
I think: I need to commit this cave to memory. Map it. Figure it out.
I’m not particularly good with spatial things. Give me a book of criminal law or a list of vehicle registrations to memorise and I’m your girl. Ask me to steer my way from one part of a shopping centre to another and I’m your classic female incompetent, saved only by my magical womanly ability to ask directions.
There’s no one to ask in here, no maps, no GPS.
But – play to my strengths – I do happen to be familiar with the story of Simonides of Ceos, a poet of ancient Greece. It’s told that Simonides happened to exit a crowded banqueting hall shortly before it collapsed, killing all the remaining guests. Afterwards, Simonides was able to recall the name of every stricken guest by calling to mind their original seating position and finding the face associated with that position. His method – making associations between places and the things to be memorised – became known as the method of loci and is still the primary tool used by memory champions today.
I realise I need to apply that method to my own situation. A modern memory champion places objects in a mental map: perhaps the rooms of their house, or their walk in to work. My issue is almost the opposite one. I have the places – these caverns, these walls – but I need to find a way of making them memorable, one from another.
Make a map. A mind map. A picture of this maze.
That’s what I need to do and I start to relax. Partly with the joint, but mostly with the sense that this thing is doable. That I have a manageable task to perform.
I start with the choke where Lloyd’s corpse lies buried, exploded, and slit-throated. Think of the tumble of rocks that is even now squeezing him out like a sponge.
I give Lloyd that crush of rock. Let his soul inhabit that space. Spend long enough with his squeezed-out corpse that I feel it, feel him, feel the press of that little dark tunnel.
Once those things are firmly in memory, I move on to the cavern where I left Burnett. Him with his broken rib cage, his shattered chest
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 24