by Jane Jesmond
‘So it was you,’ he said slowly.
‘What do you mean?’
He was silent and, when I looked round, his eyes were fixed on the teabag he was squeezing into my mug.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How do you know about it? Did someone call the police?’
My thoughts tried to grip and form a chain, but my brain was too soft and slippery. I put my head into my hands and tried to press the tiredness away. When I looked up, Talan was stirring the tea and closing the cupboard door.
‘Talan?’
‘It was you with Crawford.’ he said. ‘You who picked him up on the road.’
I nodded and took the second cup of tea. The local police must have been informed when Nick had rung his boss to say he was coming in.
‘But why? Why didn’t you leave well alone?’
‘I happened to be driving by when he came out onto the road. I couldn’t…’
I thought back to the strangeness of the meeting. Nick running through the rain and the dark. Mindlessly. Desperately. Hopelessly. Away from the men who’d beaten him.
‘He’s a police officer – like you, Talan. But undercover. Here in Craighston. Who’d have thought it! Apparently we’re the centre of a huge people-trafficking operation. I’m probably not supposed to tell anyone because the police, Nick’s lot, I mean, they’re trying to pick them all up now but of course I can tell you.’
‘You can tell me,’ he said and patted my hand. I took a gulp of tea, hoping its familiar taste would clear my brain. ‘Drink your tea. Relax for a moment, and then you can tell me everything.’
He went into the front room. I was safe, I thought. It was a wonderful feeling. I let my tiredness run free. Swallowed my tea. Drained the cup dry. Looked around for somewhere to put it before it fell out of my hands. I made one last effort and pushed myself up and put the cup in the sink. A cork board on the wall caught my eye. It was covered with scraps of paper with phone numbers written on them, scribbled reminders of appointments and photos. The old ones, their corners bent, were half hidden under the more recent stuff: a clipping from a newspaper about the open day at the mine and flyers from nearby takeaways. I wondered if I’d find a photo of me and Talan together if I excavated far enough. There was a programme from Kelly’s first performance in London and a clipping from the local paper when she came on tour to Plymouth, numerous photos of her dancing and a few of her with friends.
And beneath a flyer for a window-cleaner – a strip of photos from a booth. The kind of booth supermarkets used to have for taking passport photos that you now only see at wedding receptions and parties. Four snaps of two people kissing against a psychedelic background of swirling pinks and greens. My legs gave way and I grabbed the sink. All my ideas about Friday night shot up into the air; when they fluttered back down to land, they had a completely different shape.
Talan’s voice slipped through the door in snatches. He was on the phone, trying to speak quietly, but his words were staccato and carrying. I caught Nick’s name, and then escaped. Picked up. Pause. Not safe. Pause. No, she’s here. Pause. OK. Pause. OK.
I made myself stand up.
Who was he talking to?
Something wasn’t safe. I wanted to know what it was.
I staggered into the little front room, furnished with an old-fashioned, wooden-armed sofa and chairs with antimacassars on their tops. Talan was still on the phone, putting his boots back on with the other hand. He didn’t see me.
‘You’ve got to hurry,’ he said and his voice was panicked. ‘Get them off the road before –’ Whoever was on the other end interrupted him and he listened, doing his boot laces up with the phone clenched between chin and shoulder. ‘I’ll sort that,’ he said. ‘I’ll dump her and then come over to you. No. Give it a couple of minutes and she’ll be out for the count.’
I wondered who ‘she’ was. The one who’d be out for the count in a few minutes. My legs felt as though they were made of rubber and I grabbed the door frame to stop myself falling. Talan heard me.
‘I’ll have to go. Speak later.’
I understood then that it was me who would soon be out for the count. The floppiness wasn’t merely tiredness. He’d put something in my tea. If I didn’t get out, something very bad was going to happen.
‘Kelly,’ I gasped.
‘She’s not here. She’s working.’
Of course she was. She was at Freda’s.
The sofa between us protected me but the strength was seeping from my body. I needed to be quick. A brass fire set squatted on the hearth. I lunged as though to go for the door but, as he moved to cut me off, turned and reached for the poker. Reached and stumbled. My legs no longer did what I wanted. I reached again and half fell against a chair. He was on me in a moment, his weight pinning me down, his breath hot and savoury on my face.
‘You stupid bint. Why couldn’t you leave it alone? It was all under control. Crawford would have disappeared and no one would have been any wiser.’
My hand touched the cold metal of the poker and with a last effort of will, I lifted it ready to smash it into his head. But my grasp was loose and it fell through my hand and clattered onto the floor, banging his forehead as it went. He grabbed my arms and pinned them to my waist.
‘It was you, you know, who gave him away,’ he said. ‘Your precious Mr Crawford. All the things you said about his website and address being fake. Made me wonder. Made me check up on him. Wasn’t hard to work it out.’
His face, red and puckered like an old balloon that had lost most of its air, wavered in the steam filling the room. He needed to turn the kettle off. I tried to tell him. Except it wasn’t steam, it was his voice filling the room and drowning my vision. He was sorry. He kept on saying it. What he was doing was for my own good. He’d take me somewhere safe. Until he could think what to do.
I fought to hold onto his words but they melted into each other and slipped away. I tumbled a long way down into nothingness but gravity was gentle, cradling me as I floated. Talan’s voice reached me, faint and thin. I couldn’t quite make it out but I thought he was saying, ‘You’ll be mine. You’ll be mine.’
Twenty-Six
Consciousness returned. Slowly, but not smoothly. In fits and starts. I knew where I was early on, as my brain made sense of Talan’s last words. I was in the mine. The fear took a while to return, though. There were long moments of dreamy peace that I wanted to cuddle into; then little nudges to my brain to wake up. When the last dregs of the sedative wore off, panic hit me. I flung my arms out wide into solid rock all around me. I was buried in the dark. I was a tiny kernel surrounded by layer after layer of pitch-black, flint-hard rock. My hands battered it, looking for a way out as it encircled me, pulling tighter and tighter. I screamed until the effort of it hurt my lungs and made me gasp for breath. And then I screwed myself into a tight ball, desperate to avoid the rough knuckles of the rock poking into my body.
I dredged through my memories for all the calming words I’d ever heard and told myself the rock wasn’t closing round me. Told myself I could breathe. In the end, the words worked. The trembling stopped. I unfolded and welcomed the air flowing into my lungs. And opened my eyes.
It wasn’t utterly black.
I breathed.
I was at the dark end of a passage. A small, narrow hole of a passage. However, silvery remnants of tin ore gleamed along the edges of the rock. Daylight was getting in somewhere. Follow the light. I took a deep breath and crawled towards it until the passage grew wider, with enough space for me to stand and stretch my arms.
Pain woke in my body. I felt my legs. They were sore but only bruised. My hands ran over a rectangular shape in my pocket.
My phone. Talan hadn’t checked my pockets. I pulled it out, praying it would have some battery left. It did. But no signal. Of course not. I was buried deep underground. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
But I had missed calls and two texts. All from Kit. They must have arrived while I was unconscious but still above ground.
The first: WTF? It’s 7 and U not back. Ma is. Told U. Call me.
The second, longer and less irritable: Call me, please. Your phone is switched off. Ma is packing! Won’t talk to me. Have you gone to London? Call me. Please.
After that, nothing. I wondered what was going on at Tregonna, but only briefly. There were other, more urgent things to think about.
Talan was involved with the traffickers. Nothing else made sense. Nick had said they needed local people. How much better if one of those locals was a police officer, able to tip them off whenever the police were getting close? No wonder Nick and his colleagues never found the places where the boats landed.
Shit! I’d told Talan about Nick; I was the one who’d given him away with my talk about fake websites and falsified addresses. He was safe now, though. Thank God I’d stopped my car and picked him up. He’d be dead otherwise and it would have been my fault.
Why hadn’t Talan killed me? I guessed he couldn’t face it. He’d left me here instead. For someone else to deal with? Or just to die in the dark? I slithered down the wall and sat, willing myself to stay calm. Someone would look for me. Eventually. They’d come across the car, smashed on the moor, and think I’d wandered off. There’d be a hunt but no one would be surprised when they couldn’t find me. The moor was littered with old mine workings. Sheep disappeared every year. One day, I guessed, Talan would take my body and drop it down an old shaft. And that would be that.
My phone was no use as a phone but OK as a torch. I checked the time. A few minutes after nine. I hadn’t been out for as long as I’d thought. Maybe, just maybe, Talan had missed something. I pushed myself up. Time to explore. Anything was better than sitting in the black and imagining my flesh darkening and drying on my bones. Ahead the passage split in two. The right-hand side led to light and the left to a dark entrance into a cave of sorts. With a door. An open door. Thick and wooden, with a square hole with bars to look through and a lock. The door wasn’t old; neither was the lock. Someone wanted to keep something very safe. I went inside.
Torn mattresses and grubby sleeping bags, stubs of candles and old crates lay on the floor along with empty food packets and plastic bottles, discarded clothing and, worst of all, items that must have been treasured by someone once. A cutting from a newspaper in a script I didn’t recognise, soft and worn, splitting where it had been folded. A photo of two men standing in the shade of a tree, the blue of the sky and the bareness of the field around them revealing it had been taken somewhere foreign and hot. The elder had his arm over the younger one’s shoulder. Father and son?
A pungent smell rose from a bucket in the far corner. I pulled my T-shirt over my nose. I didn’t need to look. I knew what it was.
And I knew what the cave was used for. Obvious, really. Nick had said the slaves disappeared as soon as they landed and they’d never found any trace of them on the roads out of Cornwall. That would be because they didn’t leave Cornwall immediately. Maybe not for days, or even weeks. No. Instead, men, women and, I realised upon picking up a small crocheted blanket and a plastic bag of Lego, children were kept here in the mine until it was safe to move them.
The prison cave was a storage facility. And if I needed confirmation that the people who stayed here did so against their will, it was present in the large coil of rope just outside the door, with a pile of shorter lengths already cut. A point must come when even the most trusting of passengers realised their transporters meant them no good.
I left the dark, cramped prison cave and walked into the light. The passage opened into a round pool of space: a stope, teardrop-shaped, with smooth walls gleaming in the dim grey light coming through a hole in the roof three metres or so above me. A raise, I remembered Talan calling it, axed out by the early miners following a vein of tin down from the moor. I must be in the old part of the mine, I realised. The part nearest the surface.
I stood underneath the raise and breathed. I couldn’t see the sky because the tunnel twisted out of view a short way up and probably turned a few more times before reaching the moor but the light and the nearness of the outdoors made me feel better.
Two passages ran off the stope. Three, if you counted the one high above me. There was the one I’d come from which was the smallest and darkest and, at a right angle to it, a far larger passage blocked by bars. Someone had drilled great bolts into the rock to hold them in place. The middle section formed a door with a chain wound round it and fastened with a padlock. I smacked the bars with my hands and shoved the door with my body but it stood firm. This must be the way out. I was sure it led to the upper entrance, the one I’d gone a short way down while waiting for Talan. I remembered him locking the doors behind him and wondered how many lay between me and daylight. I slammed my hands against the bars again, this time in hopeless frustration. I wasn’t going to get out and no one was going to rescue me. No one was even looking for me. Not yet. Maybe later on today someone would start to wonder where I was. Kit would call again. And my phone wouldn’t ring because the fucking thing was useless all these metres below the surface. It was nothing but an expensive torch, already starting to fade.
Unless… Unless I could climb out. The shaft above me led upwards. To the surface. Hope fluttered its wings in my chest. The shaft was narrow but I could squeeze through. The problem was getting up to it. It punched through the roof of the stope high above me and the walls were smooth, with little in the way of holds. I paced around under it, stroking the rock, willing my hands to find cracks and ridges my eyes couldn’t see in the dim light but they slid unhindered over the surface.
The most uneven and most climbable bit of wall was in the darkest corner. Water seeped in from somewhere above and, oozing down over years, had coated the rock with a marble-like deposit, rounding the protrusions and filling the cracks I would need to climb. But it was the best surface by far. I thought I could drive myself up the first few feet by sheer momentum then hope that somewhere up there in the dark shadow, out of reach of my hands and eyes, the rock would roughen its face and let me climb.
I lost count of the number of times I tried. Running and leaping up the rock, arms flailing for a grip until gravity unpeeled me and flung me back down. It became automatic. Fall to ground. Stand up. Pace back. Run at rock and up. Once, my fingers grazed the bottom of a ledge and I tried again and again to propel my body far enough up to grab it. Enough to pull myself further up and grasp it with my other hand.
I got tired. And thirsty. I ran a finger over the wetness on the rock. It smelt bitter and, when I licked my finger, the taste was harsh.
Time to stop hurling myself blindly at the rock. In my last few tries, I’d not made it as high as before, as if my body knew it wasn’t going to succeed and was conserving its energy.
Then I swore at my own idiocy.
I went back to the prison cave and dragged a pile of crates through. Piling them up under the hole, I stood back to look. From the top, if they didn’t topple, I could reach the tunnel.
A flicker of movement caught my eye. A pale gleam in the midst of the black through the other side of the bars. It resolved into a face. A silent figure, dressed in black, watching me. My skin crackled. It was Kelly. We stared at each other. A long silence, full of thoughts clattering around inside my head.
Another noise rattled down the mine from behind her. The sound of chains falling to the ground and voices, staccato and hard-edged. Kelly slipped back into the dark and disappeared. I had no time to think what her presence might mean. I had to disappear, too. Fast.
I clambered up the crates and balanced on the top. The noises down the passage grew closer. I kicked down with my feet and leaped into the void, thrusting my body towards the raise. My hands outstretched to grab. They hit the rock inside the opening and scrabbled. My right
hand grasped a ledge, solid and flat, but my left found only a sharp edge. I had no choice. I crimped my fingers hard over it, seized the last scrap of momentum and hauled my body up. The sharp edge sliced into my flesh and I clenched my mouth shut over the gasp of pain. It was enough. My body moved far enough into the raise for my knees to meet the rock and wedge me tight. I squirmed up until my feet rested on the first ledge. I was clear of the stope.
I looked down. The pile of crates had collapsed with the force of my kick and looked like random discards. No one would guess what they’d been used for. Anyway, with my body crammed in the shaft, it was dark in the stope. I’d have to keep still because every movement threw changing shadows onto the ground below. I heard the key unlock the chain on the bars and the grind of the door opening. The noise of trudging feet and murmuring interspersed with shouts rose up the shaft. Torchlight bounced around beneath me. I peered down through the gap between the rock and my legs. The talk became louder and I realised it wasn’t English. This must be the delivery Nick had talked about. Coming to be stored in a hiding place he had been so close to discovering until I gave him away.
Louder voices pierced the chatter. They shouted orders. Move along. Down here. Keep going. The tops of heads came into sight. The traffickers were out of view, leaning against the walls of the stope, their torches picking out odd details of the figures traipsing through. A hand clutching the damp T-shirt of the person in front. The grey, curly hair of an older man limping with his head bent over and fixed on the uneven floor. The scarfed head of a woman stabbing panicked glances around her and clutching a blanket to her chest. One of the few to stand upright. The muttering faded as they moved towards the prison cave and then grew again. They clearly didn’t want to go in, and who could blame them? Some must have tried to resist because a couple of sickening slaps echoed out, the thwacks made by something hard hitting flesh. Then quiet.