This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  “Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Effie, as Mormal tried to follow Oliver.

  “I’m coming with you, of course.”

  “I don’t think so, buster.” There was a flash of silver in her hand, and Mormal found his wrist suddenly encircled in metal, one loop of a pair of handcuffs. Effie looked around and then snapped the other end to the cast-iron bed frame.

  “Won’t you need them if we manage to intercept Davina?” Toby asked, admiring Effie’s professional technique.

  “Those aren’t mine,” she told him. “I’m off duty. I just got them from a box in the bottom of Eric’s wardrobe.”

  “Hey, I don’t have keys!” Mormal shouted, tugging at the handcuffs.

  “Then I’ll tell Sergeant Culpepper to bring bolt-cutters,” Effie called from the doorway, pushing Toby ahead of her. She came back into the room, pulled something shiny from her pocket, and placed it delicately on Mormal’s pillow. It was a piece of chocolate, wrapped in foil.

  “Here, compliments of the management.”

  She blew a kiss to the camera and ran out.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Saturday evening (continued)

  The hole was the size of an open grave, opaque in the dusk. Toby pointed his flashlight down into the opening. Its round beam reflected off a layer of still, black water.

  “How deep is it?” Oliver asked.

  “Only a few inches,” said Toby. He dropped to his haunches, steadying himself on an aluminum ladder, which led down into the cellar.

  “But if the tunnel collapsed, wouldn’t the water be level with the river by now?” Effie asked.

  “If the tunnel filled with earth, it would act like a plug.”

  Oliver looked around. A few patches of flagstone and some dusty shards of broken blue tiles remained to show where the river-island cottage had once stood. The old trees surrounded the clearing, waiting impatiently to move in. He could hear the constant roar of the Stratford Weir, a few yards downstream.

  “Where’s all the equipment?” he asked.

  Toby pointed toward a dim pile at the edge of the clearing. “What’s left is over there. We had to get the big stuff—pumps, generator, lights—out of the cellar before we set off the charges. Some of it’s already been carted away. No time to lick our wounds. That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  “I got this flashlight from a portable locker, where we keep the more valuable tools. I just realized it wasn’t locked.”

  Effie walked toward the stack of wheelbarrows, buckets, lengths of rope, and the battered locker, scanning the ground in the fading light.

  “Toby, give me some light,” she called.

  Toby pointed the flashlight in her direction, making the object she held glitter and sparkle. A long pin with a diamond-covered head in the shape of a letter D.

  “She picked the lock,” Effie said.

  “Probably trying to see if we’d stashed the only surviving copy of Cardenio in a Portakabin for the night,” Toby said. “She’ll be disappointed.”

  “Has anything been taken?”

  Toby inspected the open locker. “There were six of these expensive flashlights. I’ve got one. One’s missing.”

  Oliver and Effie both turned and looked solemnly toward the hole. Then they looked back at each other. Oliver nodded.

  The water in the cellar was cold around his feet and ankles, and was already soaking into his rolled-up trouser-legs. He shone his flashlight around the small chamber, scattering wild reflections off the glossy tiles and rippling water. The air was dank, thick with the smell of mold.

  Effie came down the ladder, clutching another flashlight under her arm. Toby stood at the top, shining his own bright beam directly down into the cellar, silhouetting Effie’s wild curls. She stopped on the rung above the water’s surface.

  “You don’t have to come,” Oliver said.

  “And what if she needs help?” Effie asked. She reached behind her back, undid the zip on her dress, and, balancing with difficulty on her bare feet, hauled it over her head. That answers that one, thought Oliver. He’d already removed his jacket and left it by the locker above, beside his shoes and socks.

  Effie passed the dress up the ladder to Toby. His beam of light seemed to tremble.

  “Oh, calm down,” she sighed. “Haven’t you seen a woman in her bra and pants before?”

  “He probably hasn’t,” said Oliver, wading toward the dark entrance to the tunnel in the middle of the cellar wall, his voice echoing off the tiles. He trod on what he thought was a python but made himself think better of it.

  The opening was about a yard in diameter, more or less circular but slightly flatter on the bottom. A steady trickle of water dribbled over the rim, leaving a brownish-green stain on the wall. The inner surface of the tunnel was covered with the same glazed tiles, like the passages in the London Underground, but Oliver’s flashlight beam showed that they stopped after a few yards, and the bore beyond was lined with pale, sweating concrete. The tunnel stretched away, perfectly straight. There was still no sign of Davina.

  Oliver looked up at Toby, shutting his eyes to the bright, white light. “It doesn’t look like it’s collapsed,” he called.

  “You wouldn’t see it from here. We only covered up our own tracks.”

  “How far in is that?”

  “The old tunnel goes in about a hundred feet. We dug out another two hundred.”

  “I wonder why the first diggers stopped?” said Effie, peering into the gloom.

  “Perhaps the Shakespeare curse got them,” Oliver muttered.

  “Our extension was narrower,” Toby continued, “and not so high, held up with timber. We didn’t hit any serious rock, so we managed about fifteen to twenty feet a day—about a grave’s worth of dirt. We’re below the level of the riverbed, but the gravel’s very porous, it was like sitting in a stream while we—”

  “Shut up!” hissed Effie. “What was that?”

  They listened carefully. Small waves slapped against the cellar walls. The weirs could still be heard, faintly. There was no other sound.

  “Turn your torch off,” Effie said. Oliver pressed the button. Only Toby’s column of light behind them held off the suffocating blackness. They waited for the after-images to fade.

  They both saw it. A pinprick of light, far down the tunnel. And a faint, exhausted cry.

  “I’ll get her,” said Oliver, snapping the flashlight on again. It flickered for a second.

  “I should go. I’m the cop.”

  “Once again, Effie, you’re underdressed for a Bennet family social occasion.”

  He started to climb into the tunnel entrance.

  “Wait!” she cried and splashed back to the base of the ladder. “Toby!” she shouted up into the light. “Bring me some rope.”

  “Are you planning to tie her up?” Oliver asked.

  “I want to put a safety line on you.”

  Toby reappeared, passing down a length of rope. Effie tied one end firmly around Oliver’s waist.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “It’s only Davina.”

  “She’s a killer.”

  “She’s still only Davina.”

  She kissed him and pushed him into the tunnel.

  Oliver tried to move in a low, loping crouch, but his back scraped against the roof. He dropped to his hands and knees, tucked the flashlight into his waistband, and scrabbled forward at a slower pace. The rope was getting heavier as he dragged more of it with him, soaking in the shallow channel of water that ran along the tunnel floor. Breathing was hard.

  A hundred feet. The lined passageway ended abruptly, as if the Victorian engineers had lost interest. Or was this all the work of one single, fanatical, Bard-obsessed digger, who had grown too old or sick or mad to continue? Oliver stopped
, gasping for fresh air that wasn’t there. Behind him, he could see the disc of Effie’s flashlight, bright enough to be visible but not bright enough to give any illumination, like the stars on a moonless night. Could she still see him or just a skein of rope vanishing into the darkness?

  He clambered on, into Toby’s bore, which was square and narrower, with no room to turn around. The walls now were dark compacted earth, cold and damp to the touch, shored up every few feet with timber props.

  Which were still standing.

  He crawled now across wet dirt, like a commando. The rope was still following. But what if Effie came to its end before he reached Davina? Would she hold it to stop him going any further? Or would she let it be dragged out of her hands and into the blackness of the tunnel? Had that already happened? Damn it, they hadn’t arranged any signals.

  His flashlight flickered again.

  Oliver shook it. It went out. Darkness. He shook it harder. It struck a prop on the side of the tunnel and bounced out of his hands. He groped around sightlessly, feeling only loose, wet earth.

  He tried to sit up, but hit his head on the unseen planks above him and fell back onto his hands and knees again. He could still see nothing ahead of him in the darkness. Should he leave her to heaven? What the hell is the point of going on?

  Oliver went on, reaching ahead, trying to find his way without his eyes. His hand closed on something that was clearly not his flashlight. It was a human foot.

  He let his hand continue over the well-toned calf and a short way along a slim thigh until it ran into something other than skin—the hem of a dress. He dragged himself forward into the tight gap between the body and the wall, until he was level with the girl’s head.

  “Davina.” He shook what he hoped was her shoulder. She groaned in the darkness, and he knew her face was only inches from his. He could feel and smell her breath. She shifted slightly. Then he was blinded.

  “Oh, hello, Ollie, darling,” she said huskily. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  Reaching into the red world beyond his eyelids, he covered her hot flashlight with his hand and prized it from her grip, turning it away from his face and back along her body. She was on her stomach, with her left arm raised and holding on to a wooden prop. She was wet and filthy, and there were several streaks of blood on her bare legs. The expensive dress in which she’d strutted into the theater an hour earlier was torn in several places, and on the opposite side to him had ridden up almost to her hip. She wore no underwear, at least below the waist.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No, dear. I’m stuck.”

  She shook her left arm. He trained the flashlight on it. It seemed to be attached to a damaged prop. He needed a closer look. With a curt apology, he shifted himself onto her back. She exhaled noisily.

  A long tapering spike of the splintered prop had caught in the gap between Davina’s wrist and her wristwatch. Her skin was uncut, but shards of wood had impaled the links on the steel bracelet.

  “Take your watch off,” he ordered.

  “I can’t,” she gasped. His weight was pushing her down into the sodden earth. “It’s a Cartier Tank Americaine.”

  “You’d rather stay here and die than be parted from your fancy wristwatch?”

  “No, silly. It has a folding clasp, which goes on over my hand. I’m trapped.”

  Oliver propped the flashlight against her neck. He wrenched away the sharp splinters that had pinioned the clasp and gently slid Davina’s hand out of the luxurious manacle, oddly taking care not to scrape the healing burn she’d attributed to an ironing mishap at that dinner party, a century ago. He rolled off her. She raised herself up on her elbows, rubbing her wrist.

  “A minute longer and you’d have to marry me.”

  Oliver wasn’t listening. He trained the light again on the fractured prop, noticing the charring and the traces of gaffer tape. This had to be the prop that was rigged to collapse, the first domino to be toppled. The small explosive charge had gone off, although it hadn’t severed the wood completely. But it couldn’t last much longer. Davina’s struggles to free herself, his tearing away the wooden shards—had they hastened the process?

  “Davvy, we have to get out. Quickly. You’ll have to trust me that there was nothing in the grave.”

  “I know.”

  “What? How?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  The dress riding up. The impaled watch bracelet. Davina had been crawling backwards, blindly returning along the narrow tunnel that offered no turning space. And this was after she’d made it to the end while dressed for a night at the theater, a trek Toby had only managed with protective clothing and breathing equipment. They breed those Bennets tough. It wasn’t so hard to imagine her garroting an old man, a pointless murder, as she’d just discovered. That burn on her hand wasn’t from an iron, he now knew. It was torn there by Alice Liddell’s skipping rope, pulled taut around Breedlove’s throat.

  He slithered down her body and set off backwards along the tunnel on knees and elbows, holding the flashlight in one hand and gathering the wet rope under his chest with the other. Davina began to move, too, the grimy, cracked soles of her bare feet in his face. Loose earth dropped from the walls as they brushed past.

  The floor of the tunnel became hard again, and he knew he was back in the older section, at least a foot wider and higher. He pressed himself against the side wall and let Davina back out into the space beside him.

  “You can turn around here,” he told her, noticing that she was cradling something in one arm, close to her stomach. It was her pantyhose. She slumped against the side of the tunnel facing him, trying to fill her lungs with air that was only marginally fresher. Scraped, dirty limbs protruding further from her ruined dress than its designer ever intended, sweaty face, tangled hair. And those feral eyes in their shadowed sockets, assessing him warily. In the narrow beam of the flashlight, she looked like the hideous gamine figure of Want in A Christmas Carol, grown to terrifying womanhood. What was it Clarissa had said about Davina’s vanity? She’d sooner die than be caught with a hair out of place.

  “How did you know the grave was empty?” she asked.

  “Toby got there this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon? That fucking prole Eric Mormal sent me here an hour ago.”

  “And he speaks so highly of you. He didn’t know that they’d made it all the way to the end.”

  “He just can’t get anything right. You do know that it was Eric who killed Dennis Breedlove?”

  “Save it for the police. We need to get to safety.”

  He untied the rope. It would be easier to move without it. He shifted into position to lead the way out, but Davina stayed sitting, watching him.

  “So he shopped me, as your little lady-friend might have put it?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Oliver said, but wondered if it was. “The word ‘love’ came up.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. As if.” She looked away.

  “We have to go,” he said.

  Davina sighed noisily.

  Another noise, alarmingly unlike an echo, answered her from the darkness—like a firecracker, followed by a soft rain of dirt.

  Domino?

  “Now, Davvy!” He grabbed her bony arm and pushed her ahead of him. They began to crawl toward the dim circle of light a hundred feet ahead of them, each moving on three limbs, Oliver playing the flashlight’s beam low along the floor, Davina still clutching the bundled pantyhose. Their tortured breathing bounced off the concrete walls, filling his ears. He looked down at the rope, lying in the central channel of muddy water.

  Effie was at the other end of that rope. He’d never wanted to see her more.

  The channel deepened, rapidly. A wave of cleaner water overtook them, pushing ahead in the race for the tunnel’s outlet, spreading across the width of the tunnel floor.
His knees and hands were now splashing in cold water. And louder than their breathing, sounds from behind them, a halting bass rumble, the treble counterpoint of sudden, high-pressure streams of liquid.

  He trained the flashlight back along the dark tunnel. Its beam hit a flailing curtain of water, racing toward them, the Avon leaping and careening inside its newfound escape route. He flung himself onto Davina, locking his arms around her waist.

  The river wrapped them before he could warn her, tearing off his glasses and wrenching the flashlight from his grip. His knuckles grazed across the harsh concrete. Davina whimpered, but was silenced when the water filled her mouth.

  Once chance. The bitter cold water was already deep enough to cover them. Oliver dived and began to swim, sightlessly, working his legs frantically, still clutching Davina. He was sure the flow was moving him, but it was also buffeting him against the concrete walls. He raised his head for another breath, but the water had reached the roof.

  His chest muscles began to pump instinctively, craving new supplies of air. How much further? There was a searing pain behind his eyes now. He flailed on sightlessly, disoriented. In five seconds, he would have to breathe out.

  His hand closed around something moving underneath him. The rope. The rope that Effie thought was still tied to him, that was now being hauled in faster than he could swim, that might be pulled beyond his reach at any second.

  He held on, still moving his legs, trying to keep away from the abrasive tunnel walls. And then he gave in to his reflexes and filled his lungs with half a pint of the Avon.

  Ten seconds later, Oliver and Davina tipped out of the tunnel’s mouth into the dimly lit cellar. Effie and Toby dropped the rope and dragged them away from the cataract of river water. Oliver struggled to his feet, coughing and gulping the fetid air.

  “Get up the ladder,” Effie commanded. “The water’s rising fast.”

  Oliver started to obey, but the cellar was a blur. He could only vaguely register the shape of Davina rising out of the dark pool near him, shivering and still hunched over. He reached out to steady her, his hand brushing the pantyhose. She still hadn’t let go. Was this some atavistic urge to restore a degree of decency as soon as she was out of the tunnel?