Reginald Hill: Under World

‘It were an accident …’

Then silence. It lasted two days in real time but only a few seconds on the tape before the next voice alerted its sensors.

‘Oh Downey, you bastard.’

Colin Farr. Running from the police simply because he scorned to run with them. Had he suspected Downey before the man attacked him at the White Rock? Or had he perhaps disliked the man too much to suspect him? But now as he flitted easily through these dark galleries, his mind must have been working, working, till his feet brought him here where he had found Jacko’s bones, and there was Boyle stretched out like a confession on a charge-room table …

‘So we meet at last.’

Who was that? The voice had startled him almost more than anything else he had heard. Not Farr. Not Downey. He’d know their voices anywhere. This was a stranger. Who else had been down here? Who else had spoken in that narrow corpse-chamber to alert this hidden witness? A phantom …? A spirit …?

‘And I don’t believe in ghosts!’

And now Pascoe smiled.

It was himself of course. Speaking before he plucked the recorder from Boyle’s waistcoat and thrust it into his pocket where it remained muffled till he took it out a few minutes ago.

He had come full circle and met himself. In folklore, the shock of that strange meeting always brought death.

He lay back now and closed his eyes. There seemed to be less pain now. Soon it would be gone altogether. And with it, hate and jealousy and striving; touch, taste and sight, and scent, and sound.

Already the passions had died and now the senses were fading too. Another hour would have probably set him completely free.

As it was, he didn’t hear the noise of the men digging down to rescue him and he couldn’t feel the gentle touch of their rough hands as they bound him to a stretcher.

But he never lost the taste of wet cresses from his mouth. And eventually the scent of a soft night breeze caught at his heart and stirred the slow blood in his veins.

And when he opened his eyes, he saw the stars again.

After the ambulance had borne Pascoe away, with Ellie grey from worry at his side, and Dalziel a-glow from whisky at his head, the men of the Mine Rescue Service descended once more into the old workings.

Monty Boyle they brought up first, to be laid with reverence beneath the headlines of his own exclusive. Then Arthur Downey they dragged from his lair back to a world which had patted his head and scratched his ears but never let him into its living-room.

Finally they bore Colin Farr’s body and Tracey Pedley’s bones into the clear night air, softly scented by the westerly breeze sighing through the golden-leaved, owl-haunted trees of Gratterley Wood, where the little girl had played with her forgotten and forgetting friends, and where the young man had first tasted and given love, and the world had seemed to promise both that all manner of things would be well.

Beyond the wood on the next rise, blocking out the bright slant of the northern stars, loomed the pit-head. The Wheel turned, the Cage descended, the conveyor clacked endlessly, the trucks were filled, the spoil heap grew.

An alien spirit or a simple child watching from Gratterley Wood might have thought that the process consisted of pouring men into a dark pit where by some strange sorcery they were changed into dust and coal, and so returned to the surface.

The spirit or the child might have been right.