The Depths of Solitude

by Jo Bannister

  “You could die!”

  “Yes. But if we do nothing, Brodie will die. I couldn’t bear that. Knowing I might have saved her and didn’t try. I have to try. You have to help me.”

  All Deacon’s instincts told him Daniel was right, they had to try. But it wasn’t his life at risk. It wasn’t him that could be halfway through the stones when the brake slipped. “Help can’t be more than a few minutes away. We can wait that long.”

  But Daniel shook his yellow head again, stubborn and insistent. In his own mind he was ready for this and would brook no hindrance. “She may not have a few minutes. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to find her and free her. But the water’s already pouring into the cellar, and it may not be minutes that count so much as seconds. We have to do this, and we have to do it now. She can’t wait. And I’m scared enough without having to twiddle my thumbs while you think about it!”

  There was a raised flag in the stone floor under the axle. Deacon lodged the end of the beam against it and braced it on the turning shaft. Wood growled on wood but the axle barely slowed. In desperation Daniel put his hands to the trundle-wheel, adding his strength to that of the big man.

  And the water-wheel turned, and the trundle-wheel turned, and the gap between the stones opened and closed, opened and closed. Sweat burst from Jack Deacon’s face as he pitted his strength against the weight of water in the leat. The wood protested and then screamed as the makeshift brake battled the machinery’s whole purpose in life which was to turn and turn.

  And as the two men fought it, muscles and sinews strained and cracking against the unthinking force of gravity, the trundle-wheel began to slow. The gap in the stones yawned a little longer with each turn. Two seconds - three – five.

  The wheel stopped.

  Daniel looked at Deacon. He meant to ask if the big man could hold it but one glance at his face changed his mind. The only possible answer was no. It would defeat him and he’d let it go, and the grindstone would start to move again. Deacon couldn’t say how long he could hold it. Stopping it had taken everything he had: wasting time discussing it would squander the effort before anything was gained. Deacon would hold on as long as he could: what Daniel did with that time was his decision.

  He waited no longer but levered himself up onto the stone and went for the gap headfirst.

  Gravity took over. With his shoulders through there was nothing to stop him. He felt the broken edges of the stones grip his hips but not enough to detain him. His legs, notable in most company for their brevity, had never seemed so long. Then his feet rattled over the edge and he free-fell through two metres of dusty darkness and landed in a heap.

  He could have broken his neck. But the discarded furniture piled through the nearby hatch broke his fall. He rolled down the pyramid of domestic refuse, collecting bruises but no injuries, until he reached the floor where he picked himself up and looked back the way he’d come.

  Deacon’s torch was blinking at him. When he realised what that meant his knees went to string. The grindstone was moving again.

  “Are you all right?” Deacon gasped through the occulting stones. It took him two breaths to get it out.

  “Fine,” said Daniel, coughing his voice down from an hysterical giggle to a manly gruff.

  “Catch.” At the next opportunity the big torch came sailing through the dark. “And this.” It was the kit-bag Deacon had brought from his car, minus the wrench. “To cut her free.”

  “I’ll find her,” Daniel shouted back. “You find the sluice.”

  Hefting the bag over his shoulder he shone the torch around, trying to get his bearings. He’d visited mills before but every one is different, custom-built to the preferences of the owner and the idiosyncrasies of the location. Solitude used the level where the wheel was hung as the stone-floor, rather than the one above as was more usual. It had the advantage of simplifying the construction and while the mill remained water-tight there were no disadvantages. Now, though, Daniel was acutely aware that he was already at or below water-level and was about to descend further.

  He located the cellar steps by logic alone. Everything in a mill is designed to one end: milling. Everything else is located about the stones. Immediately beneath them, on the spot where he’d landed, a hessian chute had directed milled flour into a waiting sack No further from there than a man could swing a full sack was the hoist, and against the wall on the other side were the cellar steps. There was no point a busy miller walking further than he had to.

  The steps were clear of any obstacle. The torch showed recent footprints on the dirty damp stone, at least at the top. At the bottom they were under water.

  Daniel plunged on, up to his knees in brine, wading through floating garbage. The cellars stretched endlessly ahead of him, divided by brick walls into bays. If he had to search them all he’d run out of time. The water level was rising perceptibly. If he couldn’t find her soon he’d have to turn back.

  He wasn’t turning back. He held Brodie’s life in his hands, and it mattered to him more than his own. He hadn’t known that before. He’d treasured her friendship, missed it those cold weeks it was withdrawn, but this was something else. There’s only one word for caring more about someone else than yourself, and it’s love.

  He didn’t think he was in love, though it was hard to be sure because he didn’t think he’d ever been in love. Anyway, she was with Deacon so it hardly mattered what name he put to his feelings. But their power startled him. He wasted valuable seconds just standing there, stupid with surprise, when he should have been looking for her.

  Then he pulled himself together, putting the thought to the back of his mind. If they got out of this damn sewer alive he might have to give it some more consideration, but unless he found her soon it would be immaterial. He took a deep breath and shouted her name. It echoed back at him off the damp brick-work and the oil-slick surface of the water.

  But one of the echoes didn’t say “Brodie”. It said, “Daniel?”

  27

  When she heard his voice, for a moment Brodie thought she was hallucinating. She was kneeling in water above her waist, she’d been blind since French left her hours ago, and she believed that sheer desperate need had conjured the memory of a familiar voice. It was odd to imagine Daniel’s when actually Jack Deacon would be a lot more use to her right now, but there’s no accounting for dreams. And in dreams a small friend may be as much comfort as a big one, and also as much use.

  But the echoes repeated around her, twining like ribbons on a maypole, which seemed unnecessarily detailed for a fantasy. Not believing it still, but on the basis that being wrong meant there was no one to hear her make a fool of herself, she raised her own voice in reply.

  Immediately he shouted back, his tone soaring with excitement, and then she could hear splashing as he waded towards her.

  After the darkness the light of his torch was like a blow. She gasped and turned her head away, and full of apologies and laughing with relief Daniel was there, bending over her, asking if she was all right, asking could she stand.

  She was wet through, and dirty, and bitterly cold, and her hair was a sodden mass where she hadn’t been able to keep it clear of the water. Her eyes were rimmed with red and tears were streaming down her face, and her smile kept cracking and she couldn’t speak.

  He knelt in the water beside her and held her – not for long, there wasn’t much time to spare even for this. “Thank Christ,” he kept saying, entirely forgetting he was an atheist. “Thank Christ.”

  But the water was rising too quickly for much hugging. Daniel pulled the bag off his shoulder. Searching with the torch he found a sharp knife. “Where are you tied?”

  “By my right wrist, to the wall. But it’s not a rope.”

  Already the ring-bolt to which Brodie’s arm was shackled was below the oily turgid water. Snatching a quick breath Daniel ducked beneath the surface, taking the torch with him.

  When he saw what Michael French had fashio
ned on his workbench, surrounded by his complex delicate models, Daniel gave an involuntary gasp that rose as bubbles. Brodie didn’t know what it meant; but when he reappeared, dripping, before he could get his expression under control she’d read everything in it. She sucked in a breath and held it till she could speak without screaming. “You can’t free me.”

  “Of course I can,” he stammered, hunting through the bag again in mounting desperation. “There’s a hacksaw. You can cut anything with a hacksaw.” But he went on looking, because these manacles came from the same stable as the padlock upstairs, and if Deacon didn’t reckon he could saw through the one, Daniel knew he’d never get through the other, not in the time available. Perhaps a well-judged thump with a hammer might spring the lock? But he suspected that if it was as easy as that to open manacles there would be no great point.

  Still, you don’t know what you can do till you try. They might be less strong than they looked – French may have figured that making them look unbreakable would be as effective as making them unbreakable in fact. Brodie held the torch while Daniel, armed with hammer and cold chisel, took another breath and ducked under the water. He stayed down as long as he could, hammering as hard as water-resistance would allow, and came up whooping for air. As quickly as he could he crammed his lungs and returned to the task. But even with the light squarely on the iron he couldn’t find the scratch he’d made.

  The water was still rising, a hand’s span in the time he’d been down here. Restrained as she was, unable to straighten, it was up to Brodie’s breasts. In ten minutes it would be swilling round her face. In fifteen, if Daniel couldn’t free her, she would be dead.

  He had to free her. He tried the saw. He laboured frantically for thirty seconds before he had to breathe again. Twice more he grabbed air, ducked and sawed until the pain in his chest made him stop, and only after that did he take the torch back to check his progress. It was insignificant. The iron was as thick as his thumb, the mark of the hacksaw no deeper than a fuse-wire. The task was impossible. But he couldn’t abandon it.

  The light wheeled dizzily as Brodie fastened her free hand in his collar and yanked him clear of the water – choking and gasping, uncomprehending – like landing a fish. “Go on like this,” she said with more calm than she felt, “and you’re going to drown. And if you die, I die. There has to be a better way.”

  “There isn’t.” He gulped down more air, ready to return.

  She held him fast. “Yes,” she said tersely, “there is.”

  When he understood what she wanted he shook his head, his refusal absolute. “No! I can’t.”

  “You can. You have to.”

  “Brodie – I can’t cut your hand off!”

  “Yes,” she said again, steely in her resolve, “you can. It’ll take a fraction of the time of sawing through iron. A couple of minutes max. I’ll tell you what to do. With luck they’ll be able to sew it back afterwards.”

  She was utterly serious: of that Daniel had no doubt. Horror twisted his face into a gargoyle. “I can’t! You don’t know what you’re asking. I can’t.”

  “Daniel, you have to. This is the only way I’m getting out of here. Of course I don’t want to lose my hand, but my life matters more. Not just to me. I have a daughter, Daniel. I have a five-year-old daughter, and if you can’t do this she’s going to lose her mother. I know it’s hard. But if you care about me you’ll grit your teeth and do it. I don’t want to die here.”

  Her hand loosed his collar and slipped across his chest, and for a moment she just held him to her, for all the world as if he was the one in need. His slight frame shook and he could not look at her. She couldn’t stand upright, only crouch with the water lapping her chin. The sound of the turning wheel rumbled in the stones.

  “Oh Daniel,” she murmured into his shoulder, “don’t think I’m not scared too. If there was any alternative I’d take it. But there isn’t.

  “We can do this. Together. I’ll scream and I’ll pass out, and you’ll have to control the bleeding, but I’ll wake up in Dimmock General and next week I’ll be home and the week after that I’ll have an appointment at the Prosthetic Limbs Department. I’ll get through this. I’ll be glad to be alive, and I’ll get through.”

  Finally Daniel made himself face her. His heart wrung within him. His voice was a whisper. “Brodie, do you trust me?”

  From somewhere she found a smile. The radiance of it knocked him sideways. “Absolutely.”

  “Then believe me when I say I will keep you alive. I will. I won’t let you die. And I don’t have to mutilate you to do it.”

  The smile faded. She knew he meant it. She knew he meant every word of it, would die trying to keep his promise. But by then it would be too late. Fine words wouldn’t save her: a few minutes’ work with the hacksaw would. “Oh Daniel,” she whispered brokenly. “Please. Please?”

  He shook his head, water flying from the yellow hair, and twisted out of her embrace. “I’ll find another way. Any minute now Jack’ll find the sluice-gate and the water will start to drop. I’m not going to butcher you only to have the water drop before it gets high enough to drown you.

  “Trust me, Brodie. Trust me to get you through this. I will keep you alive.” He took her wet face in his hands, staring into her soul at point-blank range. “Do you believe me?”

  She’d have given worlds to be able to say yes, for herself and for him. But it would have been a lie. “No,” she whispered desolately.

  “You will,” said Daniel.

  Daniel’s need was the greater, but parting with his torch left Deacon at a disadvantage. He returned to his car for the one he kept in his glove-compartment, which, while it lacked the bells and whistles of the police-issue equivalent, at least stopped him walking into things. He quickly updated Mr Turnbull and left instructions for the back-up he was expecting at any moment.

  In fact, as he headed for the lagoon he heard the growl of engines beyond the trees. He didn’t wait. He didn’t know that seconds counted but he didn’t know that they didn’t. And the instructions he’d left with the estate agent were plain enough: half the party to work on the grille over the steps, half to follow him to the sluice.

  A man could wander round a factory all day trying to make sense of the machinery. But a water-mill is technology at its simplest: water runs everything. The water in the leat led him to the lagoon and the powerful cataract where it gathered itself to a point to race through a metre-wide sluice. Deacon heard it first, then he saw it: a torrent of water, oily black and brilliant white in the moonlight, crashing from the height of the lagoon into the depths of the leat.

  When he saw the open sluice, and the force of the water piling through, he didn’t see how human strength could stop it. But common sense told him this whole system was geared to the strength of a man’s arm. He shone the torch up and down the sluice looking for how.

  Daniel had said, a ratchet. Deacon had no idea how he knew that. Daniel knew all sorts of useless things, though he could be stumped by what most people considered common knowledge. But if Daniel thought sluices operated on a ratchet, Deacon was looking for a ratchet.

  And he found it, a toothed metal track running up the side of the installation to a hand-crank at the top. For a second, perhaps two, he thought that shutting off the flow would be as easy as turning that wheel.

  But French had anticipated him getting this far and done something about it. With a sledgehammer by the looks of it – the crank and the top of the track were bent so far out of true that the mechanism could no longer operate. The sluices were jammed open.

  Deacon let out a roar of frustration. There may have been an obscenity in there somewhere, but mostly it was just the sound of fury.

  Heavy breathing and the hiss of people running through grass, then he was no longer alone but at the centre of a knot of men and women he knew, all anxious to help. “What can we do?” panted PC Batty.

  For reply Deacon shone the torch on the twisted metalwork.
>
  “That’s buggered,” said Batty frankly.

  Brodie held the torch and Daniel searched for something he could use to buy her more time. Two metres of garden hose was the preferred option but he was willing to compromise. Time was running out. The water was still rising steadily so that Brodie, tethered in her crouch, was already getting it in her mouth.

  While he plunged down to finger-search the floor in increasing desperation, in mounting fury she continued to berate him every time he burst to the surface.

  “If you can’t do it,” she raged, “give me the hacksaw and I’ll do it myself. You think I can’t? I can do anything that my life depends on. Are you going to make me do it? Would you rather watch than help? And if I pass out, what will you do then? Watch me bleed to death? Or drown, whichever comes first? Daniel, this is the last ditch. There’s nowhere left to fall back to. Either you do this, or you help me do it, or I die here. God damn you, Daniel, I do not want to die here!”

  Her words lacerated him, making him flinch. There wasn’t time to argue with her. He kept searching, skinning his knuckles in his haste.

  In a split second everything changed. Even before he knew what he’d found, he recognised it as what he needed. He surfaced, spluttering. “Shine the torch this way!”

  The light picked up the colour of what he had felt poking from a pile of anonymous rubbish. Not many things found in an abandoned mill are blue, but one is the polypropylene pipe used in plumbing. He snatched another breath, fastened both hands on it and pulled. It came out just before his lungs did.

  It was four feet of water-pipe left over from when the mill was converted for residential use. Not enough to be worth using elsewhere, a thing of no value – except that in these precise circumstances it might save a life.