Reginald Hill - Under World

Various sections of timber unearthed during his digging he’d set to one side. Selecting a thick splinter from a collapsed prop, he trimmed its edges with the boy scout’s knife he always carried. Another piece got the same treatment. Then he pulled off his shirt and tore it into strips.

‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Even allowing that this shirt cost me twenty quid, this could hurt you more than it hurts me.’

The pain brought Pascoe momentarily out of the timeless mists into the black present before it cut off consciousness altogether. When he came round again, he was over Dalziel’s shoulder and his bound and splinted leg was being gently steadied by the fat man’s huge paw to prevent it from swinging as he was carried along.

‘Where are we going?’ he croaked after three dry runs at it.

‘Is that you, lad, or am I being followed by a frog?’ said Dalziel.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m not sure but I know where we’re coming from. Listen.’

Behind them in the darkness there was a grinding, cracking sound which crescendoed into a discord of rushing earth and crashing rock as another section of roof came down. Pascoe felt a blast of air against his face, then he was coughing again as the tidal bore of dust projected by the fall swept by them.

Carefully Dalziel lowered him to the ground.

‘We’ll rest here a while,’ he spluttered. ‘Till this lot clears a bit.’

‘You should have left me,’ said Pascoe.

‘That’s the kind of thing they say in movies,’ reproved Dalziel. ‘Your missus always said you watched too many movies.’

‘Did she? At least you know where you are with a movie.’

‘Paying to sit in the dark and be frightened, you mean? We’re getting all that free, gratis and for bugger-all, here,’ said Dalziel.

‘What’s my leg like?’ asked Pascoe, after a timeless excursion into the misty hinterland of his mind.

‘Well, you’ll be hard pushed to play full back for England unless you’ve got an uncle on the selectors,’ said Dalziel. ‘But I dare say you’ll be able to turn out for the Chief Inspectors’ darts team, if selected.’

‘Chief Inspector …?’

‘You’re not that far gone, then? Aye. Congratulations. Not official yet, but it’ll be posted next week.’

‘But I thought …’

‘… thought that being in my company so much had likely scuppered your chances? Nay, lad, I’ve got influence where it matters. I used the threat of resignation to make ’em take notice.’

Even through his pain, Pascoe was dumbfounded.

‘You threatened to resign if I didn’t get my promotion? But …’

He couldn’t say it, not even in these confessional circumstances; he couldn’t say: But why didn’t they jump at the chance of getting rid of you?

Dalziel coughed a laugh.

‘I think mebbe you’ve got things wrong,’ he said kindly. ‘I didn’t tell ’em I were going to resign if you didn’t get promoted. I told ’em I’d not even think of retirement until you had been promoted! That must have made the buggers take notice. So you can see, I’ve got a big investment in you, Peter. If you snuff it, they’ll never learn what verbal understandings are really worth, will they? So come on, let’s find our way out of here.’

‘Is there a way out?’ asked Pascoe faintly.

‘There’s still plenty of air, isn’t there? I’m sure I can feel a draught on my face,’ said Dalziel as once again he lifted Pascoe and draped him over his shoulder. ‘Any road, I don’t think yon wild bugger, Farr, was daft enough to go running into a dead end, do you?’

The renewal of pain made it impossible for Pascoe to give this a considered answer. He closed his eyes and tried to will the darkness to blank him out once more, but just as success seemed close, Dalziel halted and lowered him to the ground again.

‘I think you’ve come to the end of the road, lad,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘No, I don’t mean euthanasia, I just mean I reckon this might be the exit, only I don’t think I’m going to be able to get you through there without help.’

He shone the now very faint beam of his torch ahead. The tunnel began to slope sharply up and the ground was covered with debris. A few yards on the debris was piled high to the roof and at first glance it seemed as if the way must be blocked. But high up the pile, almost at roof level, there was the dark circle of a smaller tunnel as if someone had burrowed their way through. More significantly, there was now an unmistakable draught of air blowing towards them.

‘I’ll not be long,’ said Dalziel. ‘You’ll be all right?’

Pascoe nodded. He looked longingly at the torch but knew that it would be ridiculous to ask if he could keep it when Dalziel’s need was so manifestly the greater. But to lie here alone in the dark …

‘I’ll be off, then,’ said the fat man.

Pascoe’s mind was searching feverishly for some excuse to delay Dalziel’s departure.

‘There was no food at the White Rock,’ he gasped. ‘Did you notice? And the knife … if Mycroft helped Farr to get out of the hospital, he’d not have needed a knife …’

‘That’s right, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘That’s good. Funny how it takes a leg dropping off to get some people thinking like a Chief Inspector. Pity you hadn’t thought about it earlier, though. Mind you, neither did I. But I’m excused on account of being uneducated and nearly senile. Take care, lad. And don’t move from here, promise?’

He watched the pale cone of torchlight zigzag slowly up the slope.

Then the maw of the secondary tunnel swallowed it up as Dalziel wriggled his surprisingly flexible bulk into the gap and sent the darkness pouring down on Pascoe in a mighty torrent.

He lay in that flood and tried for unconsciousness but the best he could manage was to drift outside of time. Pictures formed on the shifting surface of the dark, and when he closed his eyes they were on the inside of his eyelids too. He saw Downey, dog-like, wolf-like, drowning in darkness; he saw a young girl with long blonde hair drift by on the stream of the dark with a posy of dog-rose and bramble leaves clutched at her breast; and he saw a young man moving gracefully through the dark like an Arcadian shepherd boy splashing through the shallows of Alpheus and laughing at the silky naiads as they tried to draw him down. It seemed to Pascoe that the youth stooped over him and applied sweet damp cresses to his parching lips and that as he turned and loped gracefully away, his head was framed by a sky of Dorian blue.

Then the darkness surged upwards and the boy disappeared, and towards him, wading chin deep, came a full-faced man with a ragged moustache, talking incessantly into a cassette recorder which he held to his desperate lips. He seemed to see Pascoe and reached out to him as the dark came bubbling up, then fell forward and vanished from sight. But his outstretched hands grasped desperately at Pascoe’s waist and took a firm grip on his jacket and he screamed as he felt himself also being dragged down beneath the darkness.

Then he awoke and found that the darkness and the terror at least were no dream. He shifted his position uneasily. The pain was still hot in his leg. But his mouth no longer felt so cracked and dry. The power of autosuggestion, he told himself. There was something digging into his side.

A body in pain often finds the smaller discomfort a greater distraction and he set about removing this lump of stone he had settled upon. Except that it wasn’t a lump of stone, it was something actually in his jacket pocket. He reached in, pulled it out. He couldn’t see it but his fingers told him what it was.

Monty Boyle’s cassette recorder.

Then he was back in the side gallery finding Boyle’s body. Now he remembered everything so clearly that he knew why he had wanted to forget.