Malice in Cornwall (20 page)

Powell walked over to the engine house. It was remarkably well preserved and largely intact. Roofless, the building itself and the lower two-thirds of the cylindrical chimney were built of gray granite stone, the upper part of red brick. He peered into the gloom. The opening of the shaft work appeared to be boarded over, for safety reasons he presumed.

He spent the next half hour looking around the mine site. He could hear the occasional car passing by on the road. There was a variety of rusting machine parts strewn about the site whose precise origin and function were the subjects of considerable speculation on his part. And there were numerous shallow depressions in the ground, spaced randomly as far as he could tell, each about ten feet in diameter and choked with gorse and brambles. Some were marked with faded
DANGER
signs, some not. These marked the location, he guessed, of old shafts. He
though about Ruth Trevenney. He wondered which one of the depressions concealed the tunnel that opened to the sea in the cliffs near Mawgawan Beach. He realized now that he should have asked Butts for more specific directions, although locating the exact spot where Ruth's body-had been hidden seemed a bit academic three decades after the fact. He thought about it for a moment. Many of the shafts, if not all of them, were presumably drained by the same adit system. Drop something down any one of them and it might well end up in the sea eventually.

He sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. He looked at the sky. Dark and ominous. If he didn't shift he was going to get wet. A raw, gusty wind had picked up, and he felt the first drops of rain. He got to his feet and turned up his collar. Just as he was about to start back for his car. he noticed a larger patch of brush just beyond the engine house. He decided to investigate.

It was really more of an overgrown swale about thirty feet in diameter with gently sloping sides covered in brambles and gorse bushes that were nearly as tall as a man on the bottom. The ground was slightly mounded around the perimeter of the depression, with the exception of the uphill side, where periodic runoff from the hillside above had eroded a channel. Could it be? Powell wondered. One could easily imagine the opening of a shaft beneath the tangle of brush. Starting in from the edge, Powell picked his way carefully through the brambles. The depression had a gravelly bed sloping slightly inward toward the center. The wind was moaning steadily now, driving the rain in dark sheets across the hillside.

Stumbling slightly, he felt something catch his leg, then the tearing of cloth and skin against a thorny branch.

He looked at his trousers and swore; he'd only just bought the bloody things a month ago. He bent down to inspect the damage. Had he not been so fastidious, he might have noticed the slight movement behind him. As it was, the blow caught him on the back of the head just as he started to look around. He fell forward, arms flailing amongst the branches.

As unconsciousness filled his head like an expanding cloud of black ink, he experienced the curious sensation of not stopping where the ground should have been.

The next thing Powell was aware of was an excruciating pain in his right knee and a pounding in his head. He lay on his right side on a bed that was hard as rock. He could hear the hollow sound of water trickling in the darkness and there was a salty taste in his mouth. He held his hand up in front of his face. Nothing. He suppressed a rush of panic. Perhaps he was only dreaming. He turned his head painfully. There was a suggestion of something above him. He blinked slowly. A diffuse smudge of brightness on the ceiling like a moonlit skylight and faint streaks of reflected light down dark, shiny walls. Where am I? he wondered groggily. He closed his eyes and tried to think. His head whirled and he could hear the blood roaring in his ears amidst a hundred jumbled associations. He opened his eyes again and attempted to get his bearings. He stared at the fuzzy light above him, imagining that it was bathing his pineal gland with revitalizing rays—or was it the pituitary gland? He slowly began to remember. Driving to the mine that morning, smoking a cigarette in the rain, thrashing through the thorn bushes,
and then falling … He supposed he must have tripped on something. Suddenly, the sobering certainty of it, dashing any remaining hopes that he might simply be having a nightmare. Good Christ, he realized, I've fallen down a bloody mine shaft!

Breathing deeply, he took a moment to take stock. He decided that he'd better not try anything rash, like moving more than an inch. He felt light-headed, and the whimsical thought occurred to him that he could already be in purgatory, in which case he might just as well pop over the edge to check out the next level of the Inferno. Best not to jump to conclusions, though. Besides, it was too bloody cold—no fire and brimstone within a hundred miles. He slowly straightened his legs. A stab of pain in his right knee induced an involuntary grunt, the sound reverberating eerily in the gloom. He'd twisted something, all right. He groped with his left arm behind his back. There was a smooth rock wall, cold and damp. Then he felt around in front of him. There was an impression of another wall, too far away to reach. His vision was slightly blurred. He blinked several times, but it didn't help. He touched the rock on which he lay. It had a gritty texture. He slid his hand slowly away from him, stretching his arm out. The rock ended abruptly about two and a half feet away; there was just a rough edge and then nothing. He shifted position slightly so that he could reach down with his forearm over the edge. A vertical wall like the one behind him. Not daring to think about what it meant, he felt around for a pebble but could find nothing large enough. He reached into his trouser pocket and extracted a coin. He held his breath and dropped it
over the edge. Silence for a few seconds and then a faint tinkle far below.

It was pretty clear he was in the soup. For all practical purposes, a bottomless pit below, a sheer rock wall above, and him marooned on a narrow ledge, perhaps four feet wide if he was lucky. His own little world perched between Heaven and Hell. The question was, How precisely had he got there? He surmised that he must have broken through the overgrown opening of the shaft and fallen some distance before ending up in his present location. So far so good. But he couldn't have fallen very far or he wouldn't have been in any condition to be contemplating the problem. Using his right arm. he levered himself painfully over onto his back. He tried to relax his cramping muscles.

His eyes were growing accustomed to the attenuated light, and he was able to get some impression of the rock wall above him. Illuminated faintly from above, the face gleamed dully. He could see occasional darker striations that looked like cracks or shallow fissures. The light source was obviously the sky behind the screen of branches that covered the mouth of the shaft. It was difficult to say whether the opening was fifteen or fifty feet above him. Closer to the former, he reckoned, considering the fact that he had survived the fall more or less intact. He suddenly realized what a close call it had been. To have hit the ledge in the first place, and then to have remained there, was something of a minor miracle.

He thought about what to do next. He didn't see that he had much choice in the matter other than to sit tight. Thank God he had told Jane he was going to the mine; they would undoubtedly come looking for him. He held
his wrist close to his eyes. He searched the inscrutable face of his watch and then felt the broken crystal with his fingers. He guessed it was sometime in the midafternoon. He thought about Marion and the boys—quickly calculating the time difference—who were no doubt still happily tucked into their beds at the Chateau Whistler. Just as well they were away and wouldn't have to worry. Might as well get comfortable, he thought. He pushed himself into a sitting position with his back against the rock and his legs slightly bent. He winced as he touched his swollen knee.

He closed his eyes and waited, his head aching fiercely, lulled by the pervasive murmur of running water. He didn't think anything of it until he felt the first cold trickle running down his neck. He shifted position only to find himself sitting in a puddle. He swore and struggled painfully to his feet. He looked up. The rock looked different now, shimmering in the gloom with a shiny glaze. He reached up and touched the wall. He could feel water running over his fingers and down his sleeve. He could hear it splashing on the ledge. He tried to think. It had been raining, he remembered; he could visualize the low berm of earth around the depression in the ground and the signs of erosion on the slope above. The berm had obviously been intended to divert runoff around the opening of the shaft, but since the upper side had been breached, any runoff from the hillside above would tend to collect in the depression and then flow down the shaft.

He began to consider the potential implications of this and was at the point of wondering just how bad it could get when the trickle suddenly became a torrent. A sheet of water splashed down the wall, and although he moved
as close to the edge of the ledge as he dared, he was soon drenched to the bone. He began to shiver convulsively. He would bloody well die of exposure at this rate. For the first time he noticed that the ledge was curved, about ten feet long and petering out at both ends. He knew that in the old days the miners had used long ladders to descend into and ascend from the mines each day. Strangely detached, he wondered if the ledge had something to do with ladders. He stared down into the blackness. It was the snakes that had him worried. His head was spinning. He knew now that he had to get out, that he couldn't afford to wait any longer. But he couldn't remember why. The idea had entered his mind fully formed, as it were, and when he tried to analyze it, the reasons eluded him. He just knew that he had to move.

Facing the wall, and steadying himself with his right hand, he shuffled stiffly to his left, stopping a pace away from where the ledge, now only about two feet wide, ended abruptly. He pressed closely against the rock. He was no longer being showered with cold spray, and the curve of wall to his left looked dry. It appeared that the water was only flowing down the side of the shaft on which the ledge was situated—the uphill side in relation to the topography aboveground, presumably. Just beyond the end of the ledge there was a thin shadow—it looked like a crack or fault in the shaft wall—that ascended vertically for several feet before veering off to the right. The upper few feet of the crack were indistinct in the wash of light immediately below the opening of the shaft, but it appeared to continue right to the top.

One more careful step to the left and he could reach out with his left hand to feel the crack. His fingers curled
around the edge. Three to four inches wide and just about as deep. He reached up as far as he could. It seemed fairly uniform. He ran his hand over the wall between him and the crack. Rough with the occasional small nubbin to serve as a hold. He felt slightly giddy but, once again, without being able to think about it rationally, he knew what he had to do. Right foot on the end of the ledge, left hand grasping the edge of the crack at about head height, straddle the intervening section of wall with his left leg and then jam his foot in the crack. Pull himself over, get his right hand in quickly above his left and his right foot above the left one”. Should be a piece of cake, he thought illogically.

The problem was somewhat reminiscent of the Moonlight Sonata on Scafell, a climb he had pioneered with his mates in the Cambridge Mountaineering Club. Not as difficult as it looked—a “Hard Very Severe” at most—but very exposed, and accomplished at night after having consumed considerably more beer than was prudent under the circumstances. It did not, however, seem to occur to him that his knee was an unknown quantity, that brogues were not the most suitable footwear for rock climbing, and that he would have no rope to stop him should he fall.

He again reached out with his left hand and grasped the edge of the crack. He swung his left leg out with a painful grunt, taking all of his weight on his right leg. Could be worse, he thought grimly. Gritting his teeth, he somehow managed to wedge his shoe into the crack. His heart was racing and he was breathing rapidly. He was committed now, spread-eagled on the face between the crack and the ledge, the abyss below. The next move would be the tricky one. It is a maxim in rock climbing
that one endeavors at all times to maintain three points of contact with the rock; that is, one only moves one hand or foot at a time. Then if one of the three holds fails, the climber still has two points of contact to prevent a fall. In this instance, he had to move his right hand and right foot over to the crack more or less simultaneously, pulling himself over with his left hand and taking most of his weight on his left foot.

He made an effort to concentrate on his breathing, trying not to think about the drop below him. He exhaled sharply, then with a decisive movement swung himself over, jamming his right hand into the crack. He cried out, desperately scrabbling with his right foot to obtain purchase. Eventually he was able to lodge it in the crack, and he clung to the rock, gasping convulsively. With a sudden clarity of mind, he grasped the extent of his predicament. He didn't have the strength to hold himself in the crack indefinitely—his left leg had begun to twitch spasmodically (“sewing machine leg,” in the climber's vernacular) and he could no longer feel his fingers. Basically, he had two choices: get up quickly or fall.

He looked up. He thought he had about ten feet more to climb before the crack curved off to the right, at which point he thought he might be able to reach the lip of the shaft, or possibly grab on to a branch and hoist himself up. The climbing itself looked fairly straightforward, but in light of his rapidly hemorrhaging strength, he reckoned his chances were fifty-fifty at best. He resisted the temptation to wallow in either noble or maudlin sentiments. He couldn't afford to waste the energy.

He began to move up mechanically, grunting in pain with each movement of his right leg. Left foot, right
hand, right foot, left hand. Tears filling his eyes. Don't think about it, keep the rhythm going, blood streaming from his knuckles now, muscles screaming. The crack slanting off to the right, he was able to stand on the lower edge now, cold spray on his face, the rock wet to touch. Reach up swimming against the current, need to breathe, his dead fingers curling over a tiny crumbling edge, shoes scraping against slimy rock, falling back. Branches breaking above, his wrist suddenly caught in a firm grip, pulling him up.