Stephen Booth - One Last Breath

‘And how far does this canal thing run?’ Fry asked the guide.

‘Over half a mile. The old lead miners cut southwards from here to intersect the veins that run east to west through this hill. Some of the veins are still visible in the tunnel we’ll go through.’

‘We’re not here for the tour, by the way.’

‘Fair enough.’

When they reached the landing stage at the bottom, two members of the task force dressed in boots and overalls were already sitting in a long punt-type boat. In front of them was the mouth of a tunnel cut through the rock. Once they entered it, they would find their heads only an inch or two below the roof.

‘There isn’t much weight in this boat, so it’s going to ride a bit high in the water, I’m afraid,’ said their guide. ‘You’ll have to duck as we go through the tunnel. Also, it might go a bit too fast for me to control properly. But don’t worry — it’s perfectly safe.’

He switched on an electric motor and the boat began to move. The low hum of the motor was no louder than the splash of water and the bump of the hull against the walls. They ducked their heads to avoid the roof, but couldn’t avoid the occasional scrape of a helmet on rock. Around them was the smell of cold, wet stone. And the tunnel was dead straight. All Fry could see ahead were two rows of lights fixed to the walls, reflecting in the slowly moving water like elongated candles. They made the tunnel seem endless, and the entrance to the cavern unreachably far away.

Ben Cooper watched Mansell Quinn closely for a clue to his intentions. He knew he was trying to look for humanity in a face hardened by despair. The creases at the corners of Quinn’s eyes hadn’t been there in the old photographs, and his hairline had receded a little from his forehead. But his hair was still much the same colour — still that sandy blond, like desert camouflage.

Quinn was very lean, but the muscles in his shoulders were well defined. Apart from his hands and face, he had remarkably fine, translucent skin. He’d taken off his shirt, and his ribs and collarbones were visible, their fragile shapes like scaffolding under plastic sheeting. Blue veins snaked across his shoulders and along the insides of his arms, and gathered in clusters in the crooks of his elbows. Above his left hip was an angry wound, about three inches across, that wept trickles of blood.

‘I’m Detective Constable Cooper, Edendale Police. Please put the weapon down, sir.’

Quinn didn’t respond. His torso was wet, as if he’d been washing, perhaps trying to clean the wound. He was standing a few yards away on one of the terraces where the ropemakers’ sledges and winders stood abandoned. Cooper guessed he’d been down to the stream in the bottom of the cavern.

The crossbow was pointing steadily at Cooper’s chest. Quinn nodded towards the interior of the cavern.

‘Walk straight ahead on to the path.’

‘This isn’t a good idea, Mr Quinn. Put the weapon down.’

‘Don’t tell me what is and isn’t a good idea.’

Cooper hesitated. The usual advice was to keep the subject talking in a situation like this. But he saw Quinn’s reaction and remembered his reputation for violence and a quick temper. It might be best to co-operate, or seem to.

‘It is Mr Quinn, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Walk straight ahead. Don’t step off the path. And don’t stop until I tell you.’

‘I’ll need the torch,’ said Cooper, gesturing at his feet. ‘The lights are off in there.’

‘No. There’ll be all the light we need. Just move.’

Cooper looked at the crossbow in Quinn’s hands. The bolt was about eighteen inches long, with a wickedly sharp point. A draw of a hundred and fifty pounds, and a hunting range of forty yards. The statistics had seemed academic at the time. But not now.

Cooper turned towards the path, and walked into the darkness.

‘There’s Poor Vein, then Pocket Holes,’ said the guide. ‘They found blocks of lead ore in there weighing several pounds, buried in yellow clay. We’re four hundred and fifty feet below the surface now.’

‘I did say — ’

‘I know you did. But I thought it might help if I keep talking.’

Diane Fry silently cursed the man for noticing that she was having a problem. Once they’d entered the tunnel, she’d begun to feel the rock closing around her. She knew without the guide telling her that they were getting deeper, the weight pressing down harder and harder as they slid through the water.

The darkness ahead was unnerving, too. Despite the lights, she couldn’t see an end to the tunnel. The walls converged slowly, but vanished in the distance before they met. There was still a long way to go before she could get out of the boat. Fry looked down into the water.

‘How deep is it?’

‘Only three feet.’

Enough for her to drown in, if she had a panic attack and went over the side of the boat. She didn’t have much hope of Gavin Murfin saving her, if that happened. Fry looked at Murfin on the next seat. His shoulders were hunched and his head was down. He was very quiet.

‘Enjoying it, Gavin?’ she said.

He shook his head, squinting at the sides of the tunnel. The bow swung to the right and hit the wall with a bang, shuddering the planks in the bottom. The guide pushed against the rock face to get it back into the centre. But with no more than a few inches’ clearance, the boat bounced off the opposite wall almost immediately.

The guide looked back into the boat at his passengers.

‘There’s no way anybody could get in here. You can see that.’

‘We have to check,’ said Fry.

He shrugged. ‘Just here is Halfway House — it’s a branch canal, made so that two boats can pass in the tunnel. It’s only a few yards long.’

Fry dipped her hand in the water. They’d been told the temperature down here was a constant nine Celsius, but the water itself was a few degrees colder.

‘How does it stay full of water?’ said Murfin.

‘There’s a dam up ahead in Far Canal.’

‘Another canal?’

‘It’s more of a continuation of this one, further into the hillside. But we don’t go as far as that. We stop at the Bottomless Pit.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Murfin. ‘I think.’

The cavern system was full of flowstone curtains, delicate calcite dams, and little gour pools holding crystal-clear water. Irregular fragile growths hung on the passage walls, while stalactites and stalagmites grew from the roof and floor, forming drip by drip from the evaporation of dissolved calcium.

But Ben Cooper saw none of it. Mansell Quinn had the only torch, and he kept it pointed at the floor so they could see where they were putting their feet on the uneven flights of steps and slippery patches of wet limestone. The light didn’t seem very strong to Cooper. He wondered how long Quinn had been using the battery. A torch wasn’t on the list of items he’d bought at Out and About, so where had he got it? Was it something his mother had kept in a kitchen drawer in case of emergencies? Cooper prayed that Quinn at least had a spare set of batteries. Peak Cavern wasn’t a place to be without a source of light.

And it was clear that they were heading deeper into the cavern. They had bent double as they passed through Lumbago Walk and into the Great Cave. The dome-like avens in the roof far above had gone by unseen as Cooper tried to listen for the echoes that identified the acoustics of the Orchestra Gallery. But the familiar cascade of water still caught him by surprise, and he was unable to turn his head away in time to avoid it. Roger Rain’s House.

In a flicker of Quinn’s torch, Cooper saw the moss around a fibre-optic light on the wall, growing from spores that had been carried into the cavern on visitors’ clothes, or that had drifted in on the air.