Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘Yes, OK.’

‘I can?’

‘There’s no light down there, though. We only ever had a battery for power.’

‘That’s all right. I’ve got a good torch in my car.’

Falconer produced a set of keys and opened the padlocks on the hatch. Then he inserted a narrow rod like an Allen key into a slot on the cover and twisted it. The iron cover lifted on its levered hinge much more easily than Cooper had expected.

‘There’s a counterweight,’ said Headon.

‘So I see.’

The mechanism looked old, and rust was showing through the green paint in patches. But it worked easily enough, so someone must have done a bit of maintenance on the post in the last eighteen years.

Cooper mounted the step and looked into the shaft. A metal ladder ran vertically down for about twenty feet, and in the light from the open hatch he could see oily water glimmering at the bottom through the mesh of an iron grille set into the floor.

‘There isn’t too much water,’ said Falconer, peering over his shoulder. ‘This was always a dry post — not like some of the others. They could flood right up to the shaft if you didn’t pump them out regularly. That’s the sump you can see there. You won’t get your feet too wet.’

‘I’m not bothered.’

He clambered gingerly over the edge and found a rung of the ladder with his foot. There wasn’t much room in the shaft, and anyone overweight might have had a bit of trouble. When he’d climbed down a few feet, he looked up again at the sky, only for something heavy to hit him hard on the back of the head, making him see stars for a few seconds.

‘Oh, sh-!’

‘Sorry!’ called Headon. ‘We should have warned you to watch your head on the counterweight. If you go down in a crouch, it catches your back, and if you straighten up it gives you a crack on the skull. Are you OK?’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ said Cooper, though he felt anything but. There’d be a lump on the back of his head tomorrow morning.

He landed at the bottom of the shaft with a small splash. Falconer was right, there was only about an inch of water, not enough even to wet more than the soles of his boots.

‘Are you coming down?’

‘One of us should stay up on top, for safety,’ said Falconer. ‘We don’t want the hatch blowing shut, do we?’

There was just a moment then, as Cooper looked up at the two faces silhouetted against the sky twenty feet above him, when a small spurt of panic ran through his chest. He couldn’t make out the faces of the two men well enough to see what their expressions were, or whether they were exchanging that secretive little glance.

‘I’ll come down with you,’ said Headon. ‘I’m more appropriately dressed.’

Cooper waited at the bottom of the shaft while Headon joined him. There wasn’t much room for two people standing on the grille of the sump. The handle of a pump protruded from the wall, and Cooper shone his torch on it.

‘That hasn’t worked for years,’ said Headon. ‘None of them do, now. They always seemed to be the first thing to seize up.’

‘It worked the sump?’

‘That’s right. You filled the priming point there and pumped the handle. My God, you had to pump hard, though, if you had a wet post. There might have been three or four hours of pumping to be done on a full exercise. One of the lads reckoned once that each stroke of the pump shifted about half an egg cup of water.’

‘Well, the exercise kept you warm on a cold night,’ said Headon with a laugh over their heads.

‘Some posts suffered so much from water that their crews had to bail them out with a bucket lowered down the shaft on a rope. You can imagine how comfortable those places were.’

In a cupboard was an Elsan toilet, like a big green metal can with a plastic seat, still permeated with that distinctive odour of the thick, blue chemical. On a shelf stood a brush and a tub of Glitto — whatever that was. A ventilation louvre stood partly open over the toilet.

Headon opened a door still labelled with a ‘no smoking’ sign.

‘This is the monitoring room. And that’s it, really. A full tour of the facilities.’

The room was so low that Cooper felt he ought to duck to avoid banging his head on the ceiling. A table and some drawers stood against the side wall, with a couple of folding chairs. Cabling ran along the wall and vanished upwards, through crumbling polystyrene tiles.

‘Seven feet wide and sixteen feet long. Like a giant coffin, we used to say.’

When Cooper pointed his torch at the far wall, he saw two bunk beds, their mattresses still wrapped in damp plastic, with a second sliding ventilation panel over them. And Headon was right. That was pretty much it. Except for a smell of abandonment and neglect.

‘All the operational equipment was taken out, of course,’ said Headon. ‘On the wall there, you can see the fitting for the bomb-power indicator. The blast pipe was attached to a baffle assembly upstairs. And that hole in the table is where we had the fixed survey meter. That was the fallout radiation sensor, which measured the level of gamma radiation outside. The only other measuring equipment we had was the ground-zero indicator, and that was up top, too.’

‘What was that supposed to do?’

‘The GZI? It recorded the height and direction of a nuclear detonation, so we could report exactly where a bomb had gone off, and whether it was airburst or groundburst, which made a difference to the fallout.’

‘And that’s all you could do?’

‘It was a simple idea. The only trouble was, someone had to go outside to get the readings off it.’

Cooper realized there was some rubber sheeting on the floor, squelching as his weight squeezed out the water.

‘That’s conveyor-belt rubber. It was donated by the National Coal Board some time in the eighties. That’s all the insulation we had, apart from the polystyrene ceiling tiles.’

After only a few minutes, Cooper was glad to get back up into the daylight. He couldn’t imagine staying down there all night, with the hatch closed and nothing more than a dim six-watt bulb to see by. Let alone being trapped down there for the duration. Trapped inside for — what was it? — fourteen days, until it was considered safe to come out? You could go mad down there in fourteen days.

‘Seen enough?’ asked Falconer.

‘Yes, thanks.’

He got clear and watched Falconer re-fix the padlocks and turn the Allen key in its slot.

But even when the hatch was shut and locked again, Cooper still had the feeling that there was something he was missing.

‘Well, you finally meet a decent bloke, and he turns out to be a murderer,’ said Naomi Widdowson.

Fry looked at her. ‘There’s something wrong with the logic of that sentence.’

‘Well, what I mean is… he seemed all right, anyway.’

Naomi was being transferred from the custody suite at West Street to a cell on remand. Magistrates’ court would decide whether to bail her on Monday. She had been issued with her personal belongings at the desk and was waiting for the van to pull up in the yard.

‘He hasn’t been convicted yet,’ pointed out Fry. ‘In fact, he hasn’t even been charged.’

‘Yes, but you must be sure that he did it, right?’

‘We can’t comment on that,’ said Fry.

‘Like I said in my statement, Adrian went back to the huts when I left. I argued, but I couldn’t stop him. So if someone did Rawson in, then it must have been him, mustn’t it?’

‘It will be for a jury to decide.’

Naomi shrugged. ‘I’m cutting my losses, anyway. Time to forget about him and move on, I think. Don’t you?’

‘Aren’t you going to make even the least effort to argue that he’s innocent?’