Reginald Hill - Under World

Of course he could always unravel his pullover, but Ellie wouldn’t like that. Her mother had knitted it for him and though Ellie herself would rather do hard labour on the Gulag than practise such a female submissive craft, she was fearsomely defensive of her mother’s artefacts.

Ellie. He wished he hadn’t thought of Ellie for now this thought turned naturally to Colin Farr and the relationship between them. What it was, he didn’t know. That it was intense he’d had plenty of evidence. It might not be sexual but that didn’t matter all that much. There are other kinds of jealousy just as corrosive.

He’d stopped walking. His mind might go wandering in search of mental escape routes but his stay-at-home eyes, directed perhaps by his roaming thoughts, had spotted something on the wall. He beamed his torch sideways. It was unmistakable. A rough arrowhead scratched on the crumbling wall behind the line of wooden props. And another. Someone else had recently been this way, beset by fears of unreturning.

He let his torch beam move onward and upward. The unknown trailblazer had been wise to carve his traffic signs on wall rather than wood. The roof must have been particularly troublesome along this stretch. Props of warped and rotting timber bowed like the ribs of an ancient wreck under sagging cross beams. If Dali had painted the aisle of some ancient cathedral it might have come out looking like this.

We’re mad to be down here! thought Pascoe. Yet it had a strange fascination. A man could get used even to this. He had to breathe deep now to remind himself of just how rotten the atmosphere stank! God, it must be like this in a charnel house. Bones and blood and decaying flesh …

He flashed his torch ahead, fearful that he’d lost contact with the others, but there they were. They’d stopped still and he hurried to catch up with them.

He saw the reason for their hesitation. There was another side passage. Dalziel was peering into it but Downey was shaking his head.

‘No, he’ll not have gone down there. It’s a dead end down there. And the roof’s really rotten round here, we don’t want to hang around, just look at the state of it.’

Pascoe raised his torch beam. The roof indeed looked bad but little worse than it had for the past many yards. Dalziel grunted and said, ‘All right, you’re the boss down here,’ without much conviction, but he did resume his progress down the main tunnel with Downey at his side. Pascoe was about to follow when his peripheral vision caught something he’d rather have missed. It was one of those lightly scratched arrows turning into the side passage.

He could ignore it. He could call the others back. The one thing he couldn’t do was go down there by himself. Why then were his feet moving slowly, inexorably, into the passage?

The air here was thicker, the stench of decay intensified. He took another couple of steps. The torch beam oozed ahead and touched something bulky, something still beyond mineral stillness. Tiny paws scuttered away. The torch rose slowly in his hand, involuntary as a diviner’s wand, tracing a crumple of dark-trousered legs; a swelling paunch; a broad chest on which lay like a tribute a narrow cassette recorder; two chins; a gaping mouth, a ragged moustache; eyes — one staring and one which something had begun to eat — a forehead laid open like a pathological model to show the brain beneath.

And Pascoe knew at last why Monty Boyle had proved so elusive over the past couple of days.

He went down on one knee by the body, motivated neither by piety nor professionalism, but merely by a weariness which had little to do with muscular fatigue. Everyone had limits and he suspected that he had come a body too far. Touch nothing, was the rule and he felt little incentive to break it, but that cassette recorder, Monty Boyle’s trade mark, might tell what the Man Who Knew Too Much had known.

He stretched out his hand to take it. Then froze as the horrors which he had thought to have climaxed, resumed. The darkness beyond, which he had taken for the gallery’s dead end, shifted, took shape, became distinct, advanced. And Dali’s cathedral had its resident angel.

‘So we meet at last,’ said Pascoe inanely for the sake of hearing his voice.

But Colin Farr returned no words, though his face spoke for him as his young fair features contorted in rage and hate from guardian angel to avenging demon.

What have I done to inspire this? Pascoe wondered in terror. Then the young man launched himself forward. But the name he was screaming was not Pascoe’s but ‘Downey!’ He was past in a single bound. Pascoe twisted round to see the deputy standing at the entry to the side passage. He must have come back to see what was holding Pascoe up.

He only had time to retreat a half-step before Farr was on him driving him backwards by the force of his attack into the main tunnel.

His paralysis broken, Pascoe followed. Somehow Downey had broken loose. Pascoe seized Farr by the shoulder and cried, ‘For God’s sake, the roof!’ But the young man hurled him away with incredible power for so slight a figure and flung himself on Downey with a brute force that drove him against the wall. Pascoe had fetched up against a prop which he distinctly felt give. On the other side he saw a couple more snap like matchsticks as Farr and Downey crashed against them. And overhead he heard the roof start to groan and creak like an old windmill straining into life. Neil Wardle’s words sounded mockingly in his head. ‘Ever been a thousand feet under and heard the timbers cracking over your head?’

‘Peter! Get out of there!’

It was Dalziel’s voice behind a torch beam which seemed a half-mile away. He looked at the struggling figures locked together like a pair of lovers for whom the earth is about to move. There was a noise like an explosion. Then he was running towards the voice and the light through a hail of earth and stone with chaos on his heels. The light seemed as far as yesterday and as dim as lost love, but he still thought that, by running faster and striving harder, he might make it. Pebbles hit him like bird-shot, a larger rock clipped the back of his head; he stumbled, half fell, half recovered; then something much bigger and heavier crashed against the back of his legs, forcing him to the ground and pinning him there with pain and pressure till the darkness of the pit rushed in to take away pressure and pain together.

‘Hold on,’ said Dalziel. ‘Give us that torch. There’s a foot here. By Christ, I’ve reached a foot. Question is, whose is it, and is it still attached? Answer is …’

He gently rocked the foot from side to side. Pascoe screamed.

‘I reckon it’s thine,’ said Dalziel judiciously. ‘Right, let’s clear away a bit more of this rubbish and mebbe the dog can see the rabbit.’

Pascoe had long since ceased to register the passing of time in any normal mensural way but Dalziel had numbered every crawling second of the hour that had elapsed since the roof fall. He had no way of knowing precisely how long it would be before the roof immediately over their heads came down too, but that it would come he did not doubt. He had not trodden the rocky path to his present modest eminence without developing a keen scent for disaster.

At last his bloodied fingers had carefully picked the debris away from both Pascoe’s legs. The left he judged was merely severely bruised and lacerated, but the right was undoubtedly broken. He touched it with infinite care. The tibia had snapped and penetrated the skin. The fibula had probably gone too but he couldn’t be sure. The recommended course would be to leave him alone till a doctor could get there with morphine and a stretcher. Dalziel was not a man who’d ever found recommended courses much help, and with a roof groaning above him like a junior officer half way through a staff college lecture, he saw no reason to be converted now.