The Depths of Solitude

by Jo Bannister

  The River Barley drained much of the Three Downs and emptied closer to Dimmock by a couple of miles. The River Windle emptied the western flank of Menner Down, never reached the same volume, lost itself among the trees of Windle Coombe and finally reached the sea on a stretch of coast unfrequented except by waders and the odd twitcher. Most people, even those who’d lived in Dimmock all their lives, didn’t know there was another river.

  Deacon found the lane where Turnbull had said; without detailed instructions he’d have missed it. It looked no more than an overgrown farm-track, but it veered off south and if Deacon’s sense of direction was true he was within a mile of the Channel. She was less than a mile away. At first he hardly eased up on the accelerator. But driving at speed down a rutted track is a good way to explore the freedom of flight, if only briefly, so he slowed down and fumed instead.

  After a few minutes, suddenly the tangle of briars and hawthorn that had made a tunnel of the lane parted and moonlight poured into the bowl of Windle Coombe, illuminating a scene both magical and oddly sinister. The lagoon he found himself driving beside was too black, too flat, the moontrack across it too steely-bright. The building ahead was too big, towering against the star-dusted sky. A sea of grass washed its walls. Sometime in recent years the abandonment of the place had ceased to be a fact and become an entity. What inhabited it now was a silence so real that for a moment he hesitated to break it, unsure what the repercussions might be.

  Then he saw the other car parked neatly by the wall and remembered why he was here and what was at stake, and he fisted his hand on the horn and slewed to a halt in the grass, his headlamps pinning two figures to the looming edifice of the wheel. One was tall and bald, the other was short and blond and raised a hand to shield his eyes from the light.

  “Daniel.” A couple of strides brought Deacon to his side. He stared up at the great wheel, hung on a beam as high as his head, and up further where the rotting clapboard, silver by moonlight, rose like a cliff above him. “Have you found her?”

  They’d been a bare minute ahead of him, hadn’t yet found a way inside. The main door was beside the wheel and had been reached by a bridge over the water-channel until it had rotted away. Mr Turnbull’s pocket-torch hadn’t yet discovered an alternative.

  In Deacon’s car was an eclectic toolkit from which he pulled, like a rabbit from a hat, a torch of an altogether more robust design, as big as a shoe-box, waterproof to five metres and capable of pin-pointing a low-flying zeppelin. He flashed it over the face of the building and then along the side where it found a ragged hole low down in the masonry.

  The estate agent remembered it now. “Some of the machinery was sold off when the mill shut. That’s how they got it out.”

  “And that’s how we’re getting in. Except you,” Deacon told Turnbull. “Stay here and wait for my team. They’re maybe ten minutes behind – unless they get lost. Tell them where we are and to look for another way in. Me and Daniel’ll start searching at this end.”

  Turnbull gave Daniel his torch. “Be careful. It’s rough in there, and the cellars can flood.”

  Daniel shivered.

  They hardly needed telling. As soon as they were inside the mill the stench hit them: stagnant, weedy, oddly sweet with the scent of rotted grain. The torches picked out timber struts as thick as trees, the massively complicated structure that harnessed the drive from the great wheel to turn stones the size of cartwheels, and elongated chutes slanting through the space like petrified sunbeams.

  The machinery that had been removed had had a value elsewhere. But all this was part of the mill: removed, it would have been just so much kindling. So it stayed where it was built, old and strong and capable of doing its job again if anyone wanted it to.

  So the water didn’t reach this level – the timbers would have rotted if it did. Around the ragged gap in the wall the stones were mossy from rain penetration but ten feet into the mill the flag floor was dry.

  “She’s lower down,” said Deacon tersely. “Somewhere the tide reaches.”

  “That’s not how it works,” objected Daniel. “The sea doesn’t come into the building. The sea fills the lagoon, the lagoon empties down the leat, the wheel turns, the water gets away down the tail-race. The sea never came into the mill.”

  “Well, maybe it didn’t used to,” snarled Deacon, “but I’ll bet my car to your telescope it does now. Hell, we got in through a hole in the wall. You’re telling me water can’t?”

  It wasn’t a bet Daniel felt safe taking. The smell alone was evidence the policeman was right. The building hadn’t been watertight for a long time.

  He looked at the great flat grindstone, cracked and broken now, picturing how it had worked. “If this is the stone floor, the meal floor’s below us and the cellars are below that, in the lowest part of the mill. The part that floods.”

  Deacon nodded. “That’s where she’ll be.”

  No stairs were obvious but there was a wooden hatch in the floor. The trapdoor, split in half with a hole in the middle for the rope, identified it as a sack-hoist. The grain that came down here by gravity returned to the storage lofts as sacks of flour.

  “That’ll do,” said Deacon, relieved, throwing open the hatch and hoping it wouldn’t be too much of a drop. “Damn!”

  After the mill stopped working some resident, tempted by the convenience of a large hole in his floor, used it to dispose of unwanted domestic goods. There was a fridge in there, an ancient washing-machine with a mangle, a rolled mattress which the rats had got at, lengths of wood which may have made up a bed, several suitcases, a mirror with a cracked glass, a model yacht with a broken mast and a wooden bench two metres long. These were only the things they could see. They rested on a whole lot of other things which they couldn’t.

  Everything that went into that hole could come out again. Even with just the two of them, they would have cleared an access to the lower floors eventually. But not in the next half hour, and after that there would be no hurry. Deacon let the hatch fall back. “There must be another way.”

  They only found it when Daniel stumbled over a length of corrugated iron and it shifted just enough to reveal the edge of an aperture. Deacon gave a muted grunt of triumph, seized the thing in both hands and yanked it aside.

  The satisfaction drained instantly from his face and voice. “Well, that’s the way he took her. I don’t know if we can follow.” The torch showed them a flight of stone steps descending into the bowels of the mill. But an iron grille had been fitted across the top of the steps. If it had been part of the original mill workings, rusted and weak, it might have yielded to a good kick. But this was new, stoutly made, bolted into the floor and secured with a padlock that would have had career cracksmen weeping into their Ovaltine.

  “Now what?” Daniel’s voice broke with despair.

  “Hacksaw,” said Deacon. He dropped the toolkit and began to rummage. But when he found what he was looking for his gaze travelled from the blade to the padlock and back and he made no attempt to use it. Daniel could see why. A hacksaw wouldn’t open that padlock, not in the time available. Semtex mightn’t.

  “We have to find another way,” gritted Deacon. “There must be another way.” The beam of his torch slatted round the wooden machinery, fracturing whenever it met an obstacle, reassembling on the other side.

  “Jack.”

  Deacon sought him with the torch. Daniel was standing beside the great beam of the axle where it pierced the wall, and his voice sounded hollow. There was another odd sound which Deacon could not immediately identify.

  When he followed Daniel’s frozen stare he realised what it was. The grindstone was starting to move. Seawater running down the leat had built up the energy necessary to turn the wheel.

  26

  He knew it mattered, he suspected it mattered a lot, but for a moment Deacon couldn’t see how. He watched the great axle slowly turn, heard the trundle-wheel groan as it meshed its wooden teeth with those of the horizontal
wheel, traced with his eyes the transfer of force across to the lantern-gear and down a short vertical shaft to the grindstones. His ears separated the wooden moans of the gear from the anguished grinding of one broken stone on the other, and still he failed to make the connection between the mill coming slowly to life and the fate of the woman captive in its depths.

  “What’s happening?” he asked suspiciously. “Who turned it on?”

  As the night deepened, the darkness continued unabated and the cold hardened its grip, Brodie slumped in a reverie of hopelessness. Nothing touched her, nothing penetrated the cocoon of her misery. Distantly, almost uncaring, without trying to make sense of it, she was aware that the faint trickling sound had altered its note, belling fuller as a head of water began to stream past her, the thickness of a wall away. If she’d heard two cars pull up at the other end of the building it would have put new life, new hope, into her. But she did not.

  The first thing she registered, that grabbed her by the heart and squeezed, was like nothing she’d ever heard before – a great grinding, creaking sound like a tree being tortured, a deep monumental groan that reached her partly as sound and partly as a thrill in the damp stones she sat on. And her first thought – curiously, given the fact that she’d been kidnapped by a man mad for vengeance and chained to a wall where she might never be found – was, “Now I’m in trouble!”

  “Who turned it on?” demanded Deacon.

  Daniel shook his head, fast. “The sluice is open. The rising tide tripped it. That’s how French could be in Dimmock - talking to you, so he thought – while the mill did his job for him. High tide triggers the sluice, the lagoon empties down the leat, the wheel turns.”

  The detective stared at him in blank astonishment. “How do you know?”

  “How do you not?” retorted Daniel with the unthinking arrogance of the scientist. “Forget the wheel, that isn’t what kills her. What kills her is water from the tail-race getting into the cellars through cracks in the wall. That whole lagoon is going to funnel through the bottom of this mill. The cellars will flood, and they won’t empty again till the tide drops. We need to get her out, now.”

  “If he went to the trouble of securing the steps it’s a safe bet he’s blocked any other way down.” It sounded as if Deacon was beaten. But he wasn’t. He was dismissing ideas that wouldn’t work to leave a clear view to something that might. There wasn’t time to waste agonising over the impossible.

  “Jack.” If anything, Daniel’s voice sounded odder than before. “Come here.”

  He was watching the stones grind together with the kinetic energy of tons of running water. Once the twin stones, each a foot thick, had been enclosed in a wooden tun that stopped the flour from flying; now they were surrounded by matchwood. Daniel played Mr Turnbull’s modest torch on the topmost stone. “There’s nothing underneath.”

  A segment had broken off the runner-stone; and when its turning lined them up there was a similar gap in both the bedstone and the floor beneath. For a brief moment every turn, torch-light shone through to the lower level.

  Daniel was running fast, incomprehensible calculations, and he was doing it aloud for the same reason Deacon theorised at Voss. “That’s the meal floor. It’s an undershot wheel so the water in the leat isn’t deep – maybe about the level of that floor. But the cellars will flood to the ceiling if enough water gets in. There’ll be a flight of steps down to the cellar. With the way down to the meal floor blocked, probably French didn’t worry about the cellar steps.”

  Deacon understood that. “But we can’t get down that far. Not without cutting equipment.”

  Daniel flicked the little torch upwards and seemed to change the subject. “Something fell from up there. Maybe a piece of machinery when they were selling it off. It shattered the tun, smashed clean through both stones and took a chunk out of the flags beneath. What used to be a small hole for the flour to fall through is now –” With his hands he hazarded the size, like an angler remembering a fish.

  Deacon couldn’t see why it mattered. “So?”

  Daniel’s unremarkable face was rigid with determination. “I can get through there.”

  Deacon looked at him, then at the stones, then back. “Don’t be stupid!”

  “I can do it, Jack. You couldn’t fit, I doubt if Brodie could, but I can. I know I can.”

  Deacon looked again. The stone wasn’t turning at milling speed but it was inexorable. Maybe he could have got through – there wasn’t a lot to him, anywhere you could poke a stick Daniel Hood could probably wriggle through - but the gaps lined up only fleetingly each turn. A ferret would have been taking its life in its paws.

  The policeman dismissed it out of hand. “It’d cut you in half.”

  “I’m not going through while it’s moving!” exclaimed Daniel. “Credit me with some sense. We have to stop it. For just a few seconds, then I’ll be through. I’ll find Brodie, cut her free, and we’ll wait on the meal-floor till you can shift that grille.”

  Deacon was looking for an off-switch. “All right. How do we stop it?”

  There never was an off-switch. There were stone-nuts engaging the runner-stone with the drive shaft. When Daniel failed to shift them Deacon tried. There was neither movement nor the promise of movement, though he strained till the muscles knotted in his shoulders and the tendons stood out in his neck and the blood-vessels at his temples. Then he stood back with a breathy curse. “It’s seized solid.”

  Daniel frowned. “That isn’t possible. If the stones had been grinding every high tide since the mill was abandoned they’d have worn away. Ah …” The answer formed behind his eyes. “They haven’t been grinding – there wasn’t enough water coming down to turn the wheel. The sluices were silted up. French dug them out. He knew from the state of the walls that once there was water in the leat again it would flood the cellars. It’s almost high tide: it won’t be long before it starts dropping again, but longer than Brodie can hold her breath.”

  Deacon didn’t care how it all worked. It was enough for him that Daniel understood. He took the younger man by the shoulders and shook him. “So what do we do? How do we stop it? Daniel, she’s dying down there! How do I stop the water?”

  Daniel nodded swiftly, his quick brain prioritising. “You need to stop it, but you can’t stop it in time. There’s too much water in the system.” He tented his fingers in front of his mouth, panting softly through them. “You have to stop the wheel. Just long enough for me to get through the stones. Then you have to find the sluice and shut it off. Follow the leat up to the lagoon. There’ll be a ratchet operating the paddles. He may have removed the handle – have you got a wrench?”

  Deacon unslung the tool-kit and extracted a wrench as long as his forearm. “So how do I stop the wheel?”

  The finger of Mr Turnbull’s torch pointed. “With that.”

  Archimedes reckoned that, given a long enough lever and somewhere to stand, he could move the world. Deacon didn’t need to move the world, only to contain the force latent in a pond of salt water trying to find its way back to the sea. For a few seconds, Daniel had said. There was no knowing if he could do it except by trying, and if he tried and failed Daniel would die. And if he didn’t try Brodie would die.

  He lifted the wooden beam from where it lay forgotten against the wall. It wasn’t clear what its purpose had been, but it was long and strong and it was all he could do to lift it. Braced against the shaft it might stop the wheel turning, if only for those few vital seconds.

  When the reality of what he was considering struck him, Deacon turned cold. “You want me to hold the machinery still while you crawl through it? If it slips it’ll crush you!”

  “I know,” said Daniel. And clearly he did because his voice shook. “Jack, we can do this. We have to do this or Brodie’s going to die. We’ve found her, but she’s still going to die if you don’t help me reach her.”

  “We don’t even know she’s down there. Not for sure.”

 
“Of course she’s there!” snapped Daniel. “You think French thought he’d do a bit of mill restoration to pass the time while he waited for his shot at you? He put a lock on the stairs because that’s the only way to reach her, and he dug out the sluices because that’s how he meant to kill her, and if we argue about this any longer it’s all going to happen just the way he planned!”

  It wasn’t that Deacon didn’t believe him. There was no other way to read it; but still. “I’m not risking your life. We’ll find another way.”

  “There isn’t time,” cried Daniel. “That whole lagoon is coming down here right now. It’ll fill the cellar to the ceiling. Brodie’s tied up down there. She’s helpless, alone in the dark with the water rising round her. Either we do this or we stand by knowing she’s drowning under our feet.

  “I know what could happen. If this goes wrong – if you can’t hold it long enough – it’s my fault, not yours. But if we don’t try we will lose her. She’s saved my life before now, and she’s saved my sanity, and I’m not going to stand here and listen to the water that’s killing her.”

  “It’s not your job to save her,” roared Deacon in an agony of indecision. “It’s mine!”

  “Then do it!” yelled Daniel. “Do your part. You can’t fit through the gap – and if you could, I couldn’t hold the wheel. Jack, if she’s going to survive this Brodie needs us both to do what we’re best at. You’re strong and I’m little. Neither of us could reach her alone. Together we have a chance.”