Under World

by Reginald Hill

  He proved right. Deep beneath the northern ridge rich new seams were found, running north and west. The pitheads which rose here were completely invisible from His Lordship’s house, and the remnants of Gratterley Wood still crowned the southern ridge to provide a nice bit of rough shooting for a couple of chaps on a morning stroll.

  But that was long ago, aye, ages long ago, thought Colin Farr as he approached the Welfare Club. The mine belonged to the people now, the Burr estates had contracted, and you could walk freely through Gratterley Wood with more risk of having your head blown off by some poaching miner than an angry gamekeeper. Even the Burr mansion had declined to the clubhouse of the Burr golf club (miners welcome to join the Artisan Section), and all was well with the world.

  Except that he was still walking up the long hill to clock on for his shift.

  He needed a drink. He glanced at his watch. There was plenty of time for a leisurely pint in the Club, but he wished now that he’d come on his bike instead of walking so that he would have had the option of going to a pub outside the village.

  Then, annoyed with himself for his weakness, he turned up the steps of the Welfare.

  Pedro Pedley watched him enter the bar with a studiously neutral expression. Farr smiled with all his charm and said, ‘Pedro, I’m sorry if I were a bit obstreperous last night.’

  Before the steward could reply, another voice said, ‘You’re not obstreperous, Farr. You’re just not fit to be around decent people. Peter, I thought this trouble-maker were banned.’

  It was Harold Satterthwaite who spoke. He was sitting close to the bar in company with a dark-suited, red-faced man, with a ragged moustache and an alderman’s belly. Farr turned to face them as Pedley said, ‘I decide who’s banned in this bar, Harold. What is it, Col? A pint?’

  ‘In a minute, Pedro. I just want a word with these decent people.’

  He strolled towards the two men with a friendly grin on his face.

  ‘Hello, Mr Satterthwaite, sir,’ he said. ‘And I know you too, don’t I? You’re that journalist I dumped through the shop window.’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Farr. Monty Boyle’s the name,’ said the stout man, returning the grin. ‘Let me buy you a drink to show there are no hard feelings.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr Boyle, but no, thanks. I think I was right about you first time we met. You come near me or my mam asking any of your nasty little questions and it’ll be a brick wall I throw you through next time.’

  ‘You hear that, Peter? Do you still say he shouldn’t be banned, threatening members’ guests like that?’ demanded Satterthwaite.

  Pedley, who’d come from behind the bar, put a restraining hand on the young man’s arm. He shook it off and said, ‘No sweat, Pedro, I’m not threatening this gent, just giving him some local colour, that’s what newspapers like, isn’t it? As for you, Mr Satterthwaite, sir. I’d not dream of threatening you because I just don’t have the time to wait in the queue. But I’ll tell you this for nothing. Sure as eggs, you’ll be standing on your ownsome deep in-bye some shift, with nothing but the mice for company, or so you’ll think, only someone will be creeping up behind you with a shovel to bash your thick skull in and toss you into the gob with all the rest of the shit!’

  ‘You heard that?’ exclaimed Satterthwaite looking round. ‘All of you here heard that: By God, you’ll not get away with threats like that, Farr!’

  ‘Threats? Who’s making threats?’ said Farr all injured. ‘I went out of my way to say I weren’t threatening you, didn’t I? No, it’s all right, Pedro, I’m just going. Mustn’t be late for shift, must I? Best sup up, Mr Satterthwaite, sir. Up to you important officials to set an example in timekeeping.’

  Shaking himself loose from Pedley’s renewed grip, he turned and walked out of the bar.

  In the fresh air he took several deep breaths. Ahead stretched the road which led up to the top of the valley and the pit. There were men walking along it to clock on. He didn’t feel ready for company and on impulse he turned off the road into the unmetalled driveway which ran up the side of the Welfare. This was the nearest way from the village up into Gratterley Wood. It was up this driveway, which became a lane and then a track, that Billy Farr and Tracey Pedley and Billy’s dog, Jacko, had walked to go brambling that bright autumn afternoon.

  And presumably too it was up here that Billy Farr had made his own last journey, that crisp Boxing Day morning three months later. The ridge was honeycombed with workings, their entrances sealed off by anxious man and heartless nature. There’d been many accidents over the years, the last during the Strike when shortage of fuel (and the irony was that the striking miners were the only people in the country short of fuel that winter) had led a team of youths to open an old drift. There’d been a roof fall which had almost killed one of them and for the rest of the Strike the ridge and woods had been more sternly policed than they had since the eighteenth century. Such was progress.

  The subsequent sealing-off process had been declared comprehensive and foolproof. But there still remained entrances to that dark world which childhood memory and adult ingenuity made accessible, and Colin Farr’s ramblings, which so disturbed his mother, had not been all overground.

  But today it was peace and oblivion he sought. Soon after the lane became a track, it unravelled into half a dozen green paths and he chose the one which led him into the heart of the wood. Here there was a large outcrop of creamy limestone, known simply as the White Rock. It had been a popular trysting-place long before the locals penetrated the earth any further than a ploughshare’s depth, and the surrounding area provided any number of nooks and dells where a man and a maid could lie, safe from casual gaze.

  Colin Farr settled beneath the White Rock and recalled those days when, a schoolboy still, he had first come here hand in hand with a girl. He’d felt little of the usual adolescent awkwardness in his relationship with girls. In fact, all of life had seemd easy in those days. You did what you wanted and if you wanted to do something else, you did that instead. No one made your choices for you. It was only later that he began to realize how much ignoring other people’s choices limited your own.

  He pushed the darkening thought away from him and tried to focus on brighter things. Mrs Pascoe, for instance. He couldn’t make his mind up how he felt about her. It was different being with her, that was certain, she made him feel livelier somehow, sent bubbles streaming through his imagination. But at the same time she made him feel uncertain of himself, as if that adolescent awkwardness he’d never experienced had merely been lying in wait for him. He didn’t like that. He found he was scowling again.

  ‘Stupid cow,’ he said out loud in an attempt to exorcize the image.

  Suddenly he sat up. He had a feeling that he had been heard, as if someone stealthy enough to stalk him unobserved had been startled into movement by his unexpected outburst. And now he felt watched also, but his eyes gave him no support for the feeling.

  He rose. It was time to go anyway. He set off along the crest of the ridge so that he remained in the world of trees and leaves and earth and sky for as long as possible, but all too soon he emerged at the head of the valley where the ground fell away to the road, then rose up again to the north ridge. Here they were, graffiti on the blue sky, the dark tower of the winding gear, the conveyor like a ramp into the bowels of a convict ship, the scatter of low sullen buildings all squatting amid mounds of their own waste. The pit-head, whose ugliness only hinted at the vileness of the organism beneath.

  One of these buildings was the Deployment Centre where men coming on shift went to report for work. It was still impossible for Colin Farr to come in here and not see his father. This was where Billy had been put after his accident. This was the last place they had seen each other at the end of the young merchant seaman’s final leave.

  They’d said goodbye the previous night as Billy would have to be up at five to go on shift, but after breakfast Colin had been overcome by an urge to see his father again and had made his
way up to the Deployment Centre. Spotting his father through one of the hatches, he called, ‘Hey, mister, can you set a young lad on?’

  His father had looked up anxiously and said, ‘Is something wrong at home?’

  ‘No. I just thought I’d see if this place had improved with age.’

  ‘You needn’t have bothered. It’ll improve wi’ nowt short of bombing.’

  ‘Well, I’ll say cheerio, then.’

  ‘Right. Take care of yourself, son.’

  ‘You too, Dad.’

  They’d regarded each other for a moment, then turned away in unison. As he strode back down the hill he was full of anger with himself. He was far from clear what he’d hoped to do by going up to the pit, but he knew he hadn’t done it.

  Four months later as his ship wallowed in the Bay of Biscay against a Force Five which had stopped them from getting home for Christmas, the news had come over the ship’s radio. His father was dead.

  It was his last voyage. The pressures to stay in Burrthorpe were great. His mother was breaking under the strain. He was engaged to Stella Gibson. Neil Wardle had told him he’d got management agreement that Farr’s old job would be available. Good will, it was called. Guilt, was what Farr called it. So he stayed. Within weeks his engagement was off. Within months his mother was improving and his pay was stopped for the duration of the Strike. But still he stayed, and still whenever he collected his ‘checks’, the metal discs with his number stamped on, he saw his father, framed in the hatch of the Centre and in his mind for ever.

  ‘Come on, dreamer,’ said Tommy Dickinson. ‘Last as usual. Anyone’d think you didn’t enjoy coming to this place!’

  Together they went into the ‘clean lockers’ where they stripped and hung up their clothes. Then naked they walked through into the ‘dirty lockers’ where the miners kept their working clothes known as ‘pit-black’. It was no misnomer, thought Colin Farr as he took out the trousers, waistcoat and football shirt which he were underground. Their original colour was beyond detection. Dampened by sweat and pit-water, smeared with oil and grease, impregnated with coal dust, to put them on was an act as symbolic in its way as the priest’s assumption of the chasuble, the novice’s of her veil. Only, what these stiff and stinking garments signalled was no embracing of a higher will, no movement to a higher plane, but the exchange of light for darkness, fresh air for foul, sky for earth. Their clammy touch was the embrace of the pit itself.

  ‘You all right, Col? I’m not keen on working with buggers so hung-over they’re only half conscious.’

  Neil Wardle was sitting next to him, struggling into a pair of boots which had set like concrete since his last shift.

  ‘I’m grand,’ said Farr. ‘You know me. Naturally quiet.’

  ‘That’s not what Satterthwaite says. He says you’ve been threatening him,’ said Wardle. ‘He’d like you out, Col. Permanent.’

  They rose together and made for the lamp room.

  Farr halted at the turnstile and turned to face the other.

  ‘And what did you say?’ he asked.

  ‘I said bloody good riddance, what do you think?’

  Colin Farr grinned.

  ‘Thanks, Neil.’

  ‘Aye but watch him, Col. He’s after your blood.’

  ‘Is that all? He can have that any time he likes.’

  Farr went through the turnstile into the lamp room, so called because here the lamps were ranged in racks to be recharged during shifts. Each lamp had a numbered check on a hook above it. The safest way of passing a message to a miner was to hang it with his check. A man could ride the pit without many things, but never without his lamp.

  There was a piece of paper hanging on his hook. He pulled it off, unfolded it, read it.

  Crudely printed in block capitals, it read:

  SG LOVES HS. TRUE. POOR YOU.

  ‘Love-letter, is it?’ asked Tommy Dickinson, coming up behind him.

  Farr crumpled the paper in his fist, then tore it into little pieces and scattered them on the floor.

  ‘Sort of,’ he said. And went to ride the pit.

  Chapter 10

  It was Sunday morning. The ten churches were almost empty, the cells not much fuller. But when Dalziel addressed his one-man congregation, it was with a passionate sincerity which seemed capable of ameliorating both deficiences.

  ‘I swear to God I’ll murder the bastard,’ he said.

  Pascoe lowered the Challenger and asked politely, ‘Don’t you want to hear this, sir?’

  ‘Not as much as you do,’ said Dalziel malevolently. ‘Don’t think I’m not noticing how well you control yourself every time I get insulted.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ admitted Pascoe.

  He was reading from the trailer to ex-DCC Watmough’s memoirs in which Ace Crime Reporter, Monty Boyle (The Man Who Knows Too Much) was promising a feast of sex, violence, blood, guts, and Amazing Revelations. Nowhere was Dalziel mentioned by name, but Pascoe couldn’t feel his boss was being unduly sensitive.

  He had just read: ‘… Nev Watmough told me that after his South Yorks triumph, returning to Mid-Yorks was like travelling back from the Twenty-first Century to the Dark Ages. “The South was forward-looking, eager to keep pace with the technological revolution,” he said nostalgically. “In Mid-Yorks they still preferred to fly by the seats of their broad and often very shiny pants. I’ve always believed that trouble starts at the top. And that’s certainly where I found it in my efforts to drag my new command screaming and kicking into the Twentieth Century.” …’

  ‘Get on with it,’ commanded Dalziel through gritted teeth.

  ‘There’s not much more,’ edited Pascoe. ‘Like we thought, he’s starting with a bang on the Pickford case next Sunday. And in future editions we’re promised such treats as The Kassell Drug Ring – The Royal Connection? Who Killed Dandy Dick? and The Choker: Cock-up or Cover-up?’

  ‘Jesus! What did he have to do with any of them cases? What’s he ever had to do with real police work? When he were a sprog constable, he couldn’t write a report without stapling his tie in with it …’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ said Pascoe provocatively. ‘He’s probably not writing much of his stuff either, not with Monty Boyle at his side. It’ll all be ghosted …’

  ‘Ghosted!’ exclaimed Dalziel. ‘I’ll make a ghost of that moth-eaten string vest if ever I get my hands on him!’

  He rehearsed the act in the air. His intention was apparently to strangle Watmough while at the same time gouging out his eyes. Pascoe felt that even with hands like Dalziel’s, this was going to be a formidable task.

  He said, ‘Can he really get away with stuff like this? Isn’t there a regulation? Something he signed?’

  Dalziel considered, then shook his head. ‘No, I’m sure Ike Ogilby’s wide-boy lawyers will have covered that. But hang on! Mebbe he took some stuff out of the files that he shouldn’t have, copies of records, statements, that sort of thing. I wonder if Trimble would cough up a warrant? It’s time that little Cornish pixie started paying his debts.’

  The Cornish pixie was Dan Trimble, Mid-Yorks’ new Chief Constable. The debt was for Dalziel’s assistance in getting him the job, or rather in blocking Watmough’s selection. The principal obstacle to repayment was that Trimble didn’t have the faintest idea that he owed Dalziel anything, but as Pascoe knew from long experience, ignorance in such cases was no defence.

  He said, ‘I don’t really think Mr Trimble’s going to let you kick Watmough’s door down, sir. Look, why make a fuss when there’s other folk will make it for you? Digging up old cases always upsets a lot of people, relatives of victims, that kind of thing. He’s obviously going to be dwelling on his Pickford triumph for a couple of weeks at least. There’s nothing there to harm us. And by the time he gets himself back to Mid-Yorks, either someone will have slapped an injunction on him or Ike Ogilby will realize that our Nev’s driving the punters back to their beds in droves on Sunday mornings, and spike the rema
ining episodes.’

  Pascoe expressed himself thus cynically because he felt that at the moment the way to Dalziel’s heart was through his bile. But besides his natural concern for the reputation of the police, he felt a genuine repugnance at this savaging of people’s sensibilities for the sake of mere sensationalism. When he got home just before one, he found that he was not alone in his views.

  He entered expecting congratulations that he’d slipped away from Dalziel and actually got back in time for Sunday lunch. But Ellie’s expression as she met him in the hall was far from congratulatory.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ she demanded.

  ‘What? The light? The spider? What?’

  ‘This rag!’

  The object she brandished looked anything but rag-like. He recognized it by instinct rather than eyesight as the Challenger compressed apparently by main force into papier-mâché. Producing his own copy, he flourished it and said, ‘On guard.’