Poppet (18 page)

Quarry number eight sits at the end of the chain of quarries. Situated deep in the woods, it is largely forgotten and rarely visited. There is no public road leading down here – only a rutted and potholed limestone track so seldom used that wildlife have adopted it as their own. Tonight, however, they scurry into the shadows as a car appears, its headlights bumping and flashing off the undersides of the overhanging trees. It’s a small car – a Renault Clio – a city runabout, designed for metalled roads and tight parking spaces, not for off-roading. The branches squeal as they scrape over its roof. It jerks out of the lane and on to the track that circles the quarry. Near the base of a towering mound of hewn rock cubes – abandoned here for so long that trees are growing in their crevices – the car stops. The engine dies. The headlights dwindle to twin glow-worms reflected in the water.

Flea Marley opens a window and sticks her head out – listening for any sign of movement: a cough, a shuffle of feet, a tell-tale patter of stones tumbling from the rock face. The quarry is silent. It’s bitterly cold out here – freezing. She uses her binoculars to scan the horseshoe-shaped amphitheatre of rock. At the distant end of the quarry mounds of powdered limestone seem to give off their own faint glow. The stars and the clouds reflect in the motionless water.

Over forty-five metres below this surface – an unimaginable depth, equivalent to a twelve-storey tower block – in the lightless, frozen water, there exists an unmarked and unrecorded hole in the cliff face. It does not feature on any of the quarry schematics; this opening can be found by memory and blind instinct alone. Once entered, it leads to a passage that travels three metres into the sheer rock then dog-legs back upwards – a natural, water-filled bore hole. One metre wide, the tube ascends forty-six metres vertically – opening into caves that cannot be accessed any other way. Part natural, part burrowed into by ancient Roman workings, the caves are unstable and impenetrable – except by this one clandestine entry route. For a diver inside the rock chimney there are only two directions to go – up or down. It’s too narrow to change your mind and jack-knife back – once you’ve decided to go you’re committed. With the immense water pressure, you have to be extremely skilled to ascend safely.

Caffery can’t dive. And he hasn’t got Flea’s connections. All he knows is that Misty is somewhere here. He’s been patient so far, but he’s a determined bastard when he gets the bit between his teeth, and it’s not beyond him to mount some insane diving job – maybe privately, maybe with a unit from another force. He’s senior enough to be able to work it if he wanted – he’d only have to come up with the flimsiest of pretexts. Flea can’t afford to take that chance.

She wears an ordinary fleece on her upper half; on her lower half is a dry suit – rolled down to her waist. She gets out now, drags her kitbag from the back seat and closes the door gently. The click, which in most settings would be virtually inaudible, seems to echo like a gunshot over the silent water. She unzips the bag and begins to dress. This is the part she hates. In the water she’s fine – it doesn’t matter how big or small she is – but out of the water she is at a disadvantage. She struggles to carry all the equipment – the cylinders, the weight belt.

At the edge of the quarry she sits and pulls on her fins. From this point a rusted ladder leads into the water which she scans again, looking for some ripple or change in the mirrored surface. There is only one other person in the world who knows about this place – only one person skilled enough to enter, and he is long gone, Flea has no idea where. He won’t give the secret away – she can be sure of that. He was one of the shadow people – on the wrong side of this country – and it’s no surprise he didn’t stick around. Maybe he’s dead. She’s been back several times to check; the place has been deserted for months. She is on her own.

She makes her final checks. Weights, releases, air. That jaw-aching bite of rubber as the regulator goes in her mouth – the sudden Darth Vader suck and whistle of breath. The entrance to the cave is far beyond the safe fifty metres authorized by British diving safety associations. It’s not something to be attempted on compressed air – let alone by a diver who’s yet to be signed off as fit by the barotrauma experts. Flea’s ear is the weak point – her left ear. The signs she’s got to look out for are nausea and a pain that radiates across the side of the face. Vertigo and confusion can come at around the time the eardrum shatters. She can’t afford for that to happen. If she bursts the eardrum again, this will be her last dive. Ever.

She places one hand flat against the regulator to pin it to her face for the descent, in the other she holds the inflator tube for her buoyancy vest. Then she plops, straight into the water, dropping through the dark.

Jam-Making Season

AJ TRAILS THOUGHTFULLY
back to his car. He drives home with the radio turned off because he wants to keep his head clear. The business cards of the cops who were at that conference are in the big folder in Melanie’s office – but AJ doesn’t need their names. If he wanted to, he could just bell the unit they work for: the Major Crime Investigation Team, if he remembers rightly. It can’t be that hard to find. If he was sure his suspicions about Handel were justified, he might do it. Yeah right, he thinks, as he turns into the rutted track to Eden Hole, like it’s entirely because you’re not one hundred per cent certain. And absolutely nothing to do with the fact you’d upset Melanie if you did. Coward.

He gets out and stands for a moment in the cold, his back to the car. From here the land rises up to a plateau that runs across the top of an escarpment at the beginning of the Cotswolds. The escarpment is bleak and wind-blasted, with skeleton trees dotted along the summit.

Upton Farm is less than four miles away, on the other side of the escarpment. He’s never been there, but he knows where it is, because people locally whisper the name. Until now, with his usual philosophy of seeking only necessary information and nothing more, AJ hasn’t wanted to know what went on there. Or what Isaac did that weirded Jane Potter out so much.

Inside, the cottage is warm, with a fire lit and good smells coming from the kitchen. It’s jam-making season, which means the kitchen’s overrun by a constant succession of bubbling cauldrons, spoonfuls of jam smeared on frozen plates in the freezer and sticky jam thermometers on every surface. Patience mocks AJ for his wassailing, tree-hugging ways, but when he comes home from a walk laden with blackberries from the hedgerow and the pink-streaked Kingston Black apples that fall in the abandoned orchard at the end of the forest, she’s delighted. She rolls up her sleeves and starts sterilizing jars.

Today she has an apron on and is clucking around the place with skimmers and piles of sealing discs. Breakfast is set – banana fritters and toast and coffee and one of the Forager’s Fayre jars he bought her. He takes off his jacket and greets Stewart, then he sits and butters toast, spreads some jam on it. Stewart watches him from his bed next to the Aga.

‘Turns out your dog was born under a wandering star,’ Patience says tightly. ‘Maybe he’s like his daddy – got himself a lady friend.’

‘Why? Where’s he been?’

‘I dunno – sowing his wild seed, I guess.’

‘He’s neutered, Patience.’

‘Doesn’t stop him disappearing. Maybe we should neuter you too.’

There’s a little barb in there, and AJ wonders whether to explain to Patience where he was last night and where he’s going tonight. He decides not to. She’s a grown woman, she can work it out. He butters another piece of toast.

‘Have you ever been up past that orchard?’ he asks. ‘The one I get the Kingston Black apples from. It’s up in The Wilds. Between the church and Raymond Athey’s land.’

‘I know where it is, thank you. But you won’t catch me up there. The place on the other side of it is haunted.’

‘Haunted?’

‘Things happen up there.’

‘Upton Farm, you mean?’

Patience doesn’t answer. Her mouth forms an irritated moue as she busies herself, clattering around with the jam pots, lining them up on the table where he’s eating.

AJ’s not ready to let it go though. ‘We were living here fifteen years ago. Something happened at Upton Farm. Do you remember what?’

‘I remember a boy went mad – killed his parents. Is there more I need to know?’

‘Killed his parents?’

‘That’s what I said.’

AJ’s been in the mental-health system so long nothing should shock him any more – he’s known serial killers who’ve had a far higher body count than two. Even so he still can’t quite imagine Isaac Handel doing it. And so nearby too.

‘Why’re we talking about it?’ Patience says. ‘Hey, Stewart, your dad’s come home, but instead of walking you he’s sitting around eating and talking about ghosts. What do you think about that?’

AJ shakes his head resignedly. He finishes his toast then takes his cup and plate to the sink, washes them and sets them on the draining rack.

Imagine – little pudding-basin-hair Handel killing two people. How does it work that someone can do things like that and there’s no sign of it left on their faces for the world to see?

AJ gets his coat and the dog lead. ‘Come on, Stewie. Let’s get some fresh air, eh?’

Outside, it soon becomes obvious that, although Patience might be in a strop, she is at least right on one count: there’s definitely something odd about Stewart. AJ stands in the rain, hood up, throwing a stick into the field, but Stewart is hesitant to run after it – as if he’s suddenly grown cautious about his surroundings.

‘Go on, boy, go on,’ AJ urges.

Eventually the dog goes into the field, but AJ knows something is wrong. Sure enough, Stewart doesn’t pick up the stick but wanders around sniffing. Then he trots to the edge of the field where a stile leads into a patch of woodland.

‘What’re you doing? Come here.’

Stewart is reluctant to come back. He turns in a little circle, then sits. When AJ approaches with the lead, he begins to whine.

‘Stewart, you headcase – what’s up?’

The stile where Stewart has stopped is a single slab of stone with a crossbar above it. AJ leans over and glances left and right into the wood. A path leads away from the stile, meandering off into the trees. A faint mist hangs in the air. He can’t see what’s bothering Stewart. In all the years he’s lived here and with all the rambling he’s done he can count on his fingers the number of times he’s been along that path – there are far nicer and easier paths to take. He can’t quite recall its exact route, but he does know it leads up to the edge of the plateau. And he knows that if you followed it far enough it would drop down on the other side, down through the place they call The Wilds, and ultimately, if you let it, it would lead to Upton Farm.

Isaac, he thinks. You killed your mum and dad in that farm.

He glances down at Stewart. He wouldn’t put anything past this dog. It’s not hard to believe that Stewart picks up on people’s silent preoccupations, but to the point of being psychic?

‘Not even you are that special, Stew. Sorry, mate – there’s nothing there. Now come on – let’s get you home. Your dadda’s got a hot date.’

Diving Beyond Qualifications

IT IS COLDER
than the Arctic. So cold Flea’s lungs are pressed by it and she has to concentrate hard on keeping her ribs lifting and lowering. She descends, like a stone, down down down into the blackness. This is the way Mum and Dad died, nearly four years ago. Except they probably went head first. No one is sure how much of it they were conscious for.

She checks her wrist. The dive computer she has strapped there is her private, clandestine unit – it is kept under lock and key when she’s not using it. If it got into the wrong hands the records of the illicit dives she’s logged on it could cause serious trouble.

She gets to the first milestone – the fifty-metre mark, and dabs a little compressed air into the vest to slow the descent. Get her neutral buoyancy back and level out. Her ear is good. So far at least.

It takes a bit of searching with her underwater torch to find the gateway. A net emblazoned with warning signs:
DEPTHS EXCEEDING 50 METRES. DO NOT DIVE BEYOND YOUR QUALIFICATIONS AND CAPABILITIES
. Set there to discourage recreational divers from pushing into uncharted depths. This is the threshold. The doorway to hell. You cannot and must not predict what happens past here.

The cold is going to slow her thinking, so she works methodically, rigidly adhering to the routine, taking her time: using a torch to check depth, air supply, duration – comparing it religiously to her dive plan. There’s the slightest pain in her ear, spreading over her temples into her eye. It might just be the tightness of the mask, which hasn’t been used in months, but if the pain gets any worse she’ll have to head to the surface. There’s no nausea yet, and that has to be a good sign.

Two short snaps on the valve. Automatic. Then she tips herself forward until she is prone, suspended in mid-water, one hand on the net to steady herself. She pushes it aside, squirms her legs over it, and lets herself sink even further, feet first, her hands at her sides.

The rock face comes at her suddenly out of the gloom. She grabs on to it and, rotating ninety degrees, so her body is flat against the rock, feels her way, crab-like, down the quarry, examining the rock wall with one gloved hand, skimming over the moss and lichen.

Below her the quarry continues to drop. What she’s looking for is halfway between here and the quarry floor. Every metre she must descend, the greater the pressure on her ear – the more the chance of disaster.

At sixty metres she stops. There’s just blackness and the magnified sound of her own breathing. You never think about the amount of water overhead – if you did, you’d go mad. The entrance is somewhere here. She hangs on tightly, keeping those breaths steady. She studies everything in the beam of her torch, trying to recall the secret striations and signature formations. Her heart is thumping but she slows her breathing wilfully. Panic is the prime reason people die at depths such as this. Breathing consistently is everything.