Evil Valley (34 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

T
HE BLACK MOUTH OF
the long abandoned Eylesbarrow Tin Mine gaped at them, the silver moonlight swallowed by its hungry depths.

‘Adit,’ said Dan softly. ‘The old word for the shaft. And there was Gibson asking if I’d managed to add it all up yet. I was stupid. I should have got it sooner.’

The adit had been partly blocked up with skeletons of rotting timber and great granite boulders, glued together with earth and soil. When they’d first got here Dan had thought he’d been wrong, that the entrance was impassable. He and Adam had exchanged glances and he’d felt the freezing cold and tiredness assail him again, the despair lurking close, a last hope brutally extinguished.

It was only when they walked into the mouth of the tunnel that they saw it. There was a thin gap at the side of the barrier, a little wider than a person and about four feet high. It was why none of the search teams had thought about venturing into the old mine. The entrance was hidden until you were upon it.

Dan peered in but could make out nothing. It was the purest blackness he’d ever seen and it unnerved him. He called out, shouted hello and his words rolled around the shaft, slowly died away.

The search teams gathered at the entrance. ‘I’m under orders to wait for a caving expert,’ Adam said quietly. ‘The High Honchos tell me it’s too dangerous to go in alone. Our precious Health and Safety regulations must be obeyed. The tunnels are a hundred years old. They could collapse at any time.’

A man at the back spoke up. ‘How long before the expert gets here, sir?’

‘I was hoping you’d ask that. A few hours, maybe more.’

A brief silence, some groans and then angry swearing.

‘Quite,’ agreed Adam with a forced calm. ‘So I’m going in. No one else has to, I want to make that plain. But …’

The man at the back interrupted. ‘We’re coming. We’re all coming.’

Adam looked over the group, nodded. ‘Thank you. That’s what I thought you’d say. Right, we’ve managed a brief call to one of the Dartmoor Rescue Team who knows this place. I’m told there’ll be branches forking off at regular intervals. Gibson can’t have taken her far inside. We’ll go in teams of two. I’ll lead the way and take the first fork, the rest of you continue doing the same until we’ve covered all the forks we have people for. Just pray we find her before then. Let’s go.’

Adam ducked down and clambered into the adit, his flashlight firing blazes of reflections from its damp, granite walls. Dan paused, then followed, his feet sliding on the slippery earth, his ankle stabbing a painful rebuke. He couldn’t help but keep glancing at the roof, checking its stability. He could hear the rest of the search team climbing through the wedge of a gap behind him, the odd muttered oath echoing around the tunnel.

As soon as they were all inside the calling began. Loud voices, reverberating in the darkness. Reassuring. Comforting. Hoping.

‘Nicola … Nicola … Nicola …’

Dan had expected to have to crouch, but the shaft was tall enough to stand upright. The floor was gravelly, riddled with puddles and pools of still water, the walls jagged where the wound of the shaft had been bored into the body of the moor. It sloped slowly downwards, wide enough for a small hand cart.

Dan imagined the Victorian miners bringing their hard-won tin back to the surface, the rumble of their chatter and the creaking of the cart echoing from the rock. He remembered from his days covering the environment that the hardy Dartmoor ponies were ideal for the task of hauling the precious tin from the mine to the smelting works.

The air was still and silent, tinted with a faint hint of mustiness and damp. The cold enveloped him. Dan hobbled along behind Adam, following his dancing flashlight, glad of the torches of the men behind helping to illuminate his path. His ankle was hurting hard, an insistent, jarring pain and he kept looking down as he walked, fearful of aggravating it with a slip or glancing blow on the jutting rock. He wondered how long he’d be able to walk. The pain seemed to be stretching further up his leg and was growing ever more difficult to bear. Each step made him wince.

And all around him the voices – ‘Nicola … Nicola … Nicola …’

The tunnel turned to the left and narrowed, grew steeper in its descent. Adam stopped, shouted, ‘Hello! Nicola!’ into the blackness. He waited until the echoes had faded, tilted his head to one side, listened intently. They all did. There was nothing apart from the shallow breathing of some of the search team, the fog of their breath drifting slowly across the beams of the flashlights.

Adam walked on, but quickly came to a fork. To the left the tunnel was narrower. To the right it looked like the main route down into the heart of the mine. Adam stopped again, stared for a moment, then turned.

‘Dan and I will go left,’ he croaked. ‘The rest of you follow the main shaft. Split up and cover any other forks as we agreed.’

Dan felt a knot of fear twist his stomach. He didn’t like confined spaces, but hadn’t mentioned that to Adam. He hadn’t had the chance. No one had asked him if he was OK about venturing into the old mine.

He swallowed hard and limped after the detective, looking back over his shoulder to watch the file of men and their floating flashlights fade into the blackness, their cries following.

‘Nicola … Nicola … Nicola …’

The tunnel turned left again and narrowed further. It was just wide enough for a couple of people to walk side by side. Dan felt his fear rise, struggled to control its squeezing grip. He tried to distract himself, imagining the coming weekend, walking Rutherford, cuddling Claire, a few beers. He deserved them. He needed them.

He followed Adam’s silhouette down the track, his feet crunching on the tiny gravel of the pieces of loose rock littering the shaft floor. He studied where he was walking carefully, then lifted the leg of his jeans and stared down at his ankle. Was it his imagination, or did it look swollen under the sock? Adam stopped suddenly and Dan nearly walked into the back of him.

‘What?’ he whispered.

‘Listen.’

The two men stood in silence, listening hard. Adam took a deep breath, yelled, ‘Nicola … Nicola!’

They waited. There was a sound, faintly perceptible, but it was there. They kept waiting, kept listening. It was difficult to make out, but seemed to have a higher pitch, almost melodic. Adam walked quickly on, thirty yards or so, around another corner in the shaft. Dan hurried to keep up despite the pain in his leg. He didn’t want to be left alone in this place.

‘Nicola … Nicola …’

Again Adam stopped. Now they could definitely hear something. It sounded like a child’s voice, high and persistent, continually calling. He walked on, faster this time, Dan struggling behind.

The shaft suddenly opened out into a much larger expanse of blackness, like a small cave. The noise was closer now, but it was familiar, too familiar. Dan spun his flashlight up onto the wall and picked out a tiny stream trickling down the shining rock. It was dripping from a crag and carving a shallow bowl into the granite below, the pathetic endeavour of scores of years.

Adam closed his eyes and let out a long groan. ‘I thought it sounded like a kid crying. I thought we’d found her.’

‘I did too,’ replied Dan. ‘Wishful thinking, I suppose. We made the noise what we wanted it to be.’ He placed the flashlight on the floor, bent down to massage his aching ankle.

‘Come on,’ growled Adam. ‘We haven’t got time to stop.’

He set off again and now the tunnel closed in on them, this time sloping upwards for a few yards, then turning back down. It was narrowing too, now only wide enough for one person at a time. Dan felt himself starting to shake, but he wasn’t sure whether it was fear of the black, constricting passage or his aching tiredness. His mind taunted him with a memory of a long forgotten story he’d read at school, about a man who went looking for his missing sweetheart in a labyrinth and was never seen again.

He kept his eyes on Adam’s figure, watched the flashlight beam slide off the damp tunnel walls. His mind started to drift. Should he have got Gibson’s clues sooner? They seemed very simple now he knew the answers. How would he feel if Nicola was hurt when they found her? What if she was dead? Was he even sure she was down here at all?

She must be, he thought. She must be. The clues all made sense, didn’t they? But still the doubt nagged at him, wouldn’t let go. Could this be Gibson’s final triumph, to send them down here on a hopeless quest?

‘Nicola … Nicola … Nicola …’

Adam slowed, pressed himself against the wall of the tunnel and slid carefully around a rusting pile of jagged metal. Dan did the same, glancing at it as he passed. There were sharp angles of intersecting, reddened girders and what looked like it had once been a many-spoked wheel, propped up against the shaft wall. Some flaking bolts formed a small pile under its broken circumference.

Adam disappeared into the darkness and Dan moved faster, chasing the floating light, eager to catch up. He was sure the tunnel was narrowing again, stretched out a hand to touch its craggy edge as though wanting to hold it back. He glanced again at the roof, couldn’t stop wondering just how stable it was.

How much longer would they keep walking? How much longer could he go on? He was moving robotically, each step of his leaden legs a victory of willpower. The tiredness was washing over him, an insatiable, sapping tide.

How far were they underground? How would they know if another of the search teams had found Nicola? When would Adam decide they’d gone far enough, that she couldn’t possibly be here? He knew the answer. The detective would stop only when the passage they were following ended. When he was sure. When he would believe he’d done all he could.

The shaft turned to the right and Adam halted abruptly. Dan followed his darting flashlight and saw that a fork lay ahead. He felt another shot of fear. In the silence he could hear his heart thumping in his chest.

It was what he’d been dreading. A choice to make. Surely Adam wouldn’t expect them to split up? How would he find his way back? What if his flashlight gave out in the unrelenting darkness? And if they stayed together, what would they do if there were more forks? How would they know which ones they’d followed? They could be lost down here for days, longer even than that. How would they survive? Dan breathed deeply, tried to calm himself.

Adam hesitated, shouted, then again. ‘Nicola! Nicola!’

No response. No sound. Nothing.

The detective stared at the fork, then half turned. ‘We’ll keep going left,’ he croaked. ‘If we do that with every fork we hit, we won’t go wrong coming back. If we don’t find her down here we can check the other passages on the way back.’

I hope you’re right, thought Dan, following on. I so hope you’re right … He had no idea of any sense of direction down here, knew how easy it would be for them to get hopelessly lost. The fork to the right was roughly the same size as the tunnel they were following. How could Adam have any feeling this was the best way to go? Luck, they were hoping to pure luck they’d get it right. But the fickle goddess of luck had hardly been with them so far.

Adam stumbled over something and swore. Dan played his flashlight down on the rocky floor. He knelt, and gasped at the scream of pain from his ankle, but ignored it, fumbled for the object. It was a metal water canister, the type the military use. Adam peered at it in the torchlight.

‘It’s new,’ he said and his voice lifted in hope. ‘Not rusted. It must be Gibson’s surely?’ He didn’t wait for a reply, set off again down the twisting tunnel.

‘Nicola … Nicola … Nicola …’

Dan followed silently, resisting another assault of the tiredness that seemed to permeate every part of his body. He breathed in hard and bit at his jutting lip to try to keep himself going. The ceiling of the tunnel suddenly dropped and they had to duck to pass. Then, just as quickly, it rose again. The downward slope lessened, faded away and they were walking on a level surface. The tunnel began to open out, stretching into another cave.

Adam stopped, played the flashlight over the glistening walls. It was a bigger chamber than the last, about fifty feet or so across and the roof was high. Was this where the tin was collected, hundreds of years ago, wondered Dan? Water dripped rhythmically down one rugged wall, echoing through the chamber, leaving a thin trail of dark stain in its wake.

Around the cave’s edges were more piles of ruddy, rusting metal, tangled shapes of black, red and brown, a couple of rotting props of wood. It smelt of decay. Adam ran the flashlight over the litter of debris, scanned the ground for any signs that someone could have been here. Dan followed with his torch beam. There was nothing.

They were about to move on when Adam stopped again, focused his torch on a shadowy recess by the side of a pyramid of rotting timber. Dan’s eyes moved hypnotically with the light. There was fallen rubble, but colour as well, the first they’d seen in the monochrome mine. It was something pink, fleshy.

Adam saw it too, strode over, Dan just behind, his throbbing leg forgotten. Something was huddled in the corner, something wrapped up in folds of material. Beside it was a couple of plastic water bottles, some food wrappings.

Adam was on his knees beside the pile, rummaging into it. A small shoulder bag slipped to the rocky floor. A pink pony danced on its front.

‘Shit!’ he hissed. ‘It’s Nicola. It’s her. We’ve found her.’

He bent over, pushed the damp blankets away, exposed a pale face with a curl of golden hair lying across it. There was a cake of black, dried blood like a large inkblot on her forehead.

‘Shit,’ Adam cried, his voice trembling, bending over her. ‘She’s hurt. Shit!’

He gently shook her shoulders but the little girl was limp in his arms, her eyes still shut. Adam tapped her face lightly, then harder, then harder again, almost a slap. There was no response.

He lifted two fingers to her neck, felt for the artery.

‘Fuck,’ he moaned. ‘No pulse. No pulse.’

He rolled the pliant body onto its back, bent over and began pounding at her heart, blowing air into her mouth, trying desperately to restore her life. Dan watched, paralysed, helpless, lost, not knowing what to do, could only hold the flashlight over them, keep hoping, keep hoping.