Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘So you opened the hatch?’ said Cooper.

‘Yes. It hadn’t been used for quite a while, but luckily it’s never been vandalized, unlike some of the other posts, and the hinges are good. There’s a bit of water standing in the bottom, though. That’s as you might expect — it leaches through the ground and gets in through any cracks it can find. The floor is solid concrete, you see, so there’s no way for it to drain off. I told him that, but he said he had waterproof boots on. He was really keen to go inside.’

‘So you intended…?’

‘I don’t know what I intended, I honestly don’t. I watched him get into the hatch and start to climb down the ladder, and I wasn’t really thinking about anything, except how funny it was he should turn up like that, out of the blue, after all those years. I even told him to mind his head on the counter balance. It can give you a nasty crack, if you’re not used to it.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘Oh, yes. He could hardly stop yattering.’

‘ You’re right, it is a bit wet down here. There’s no light in the monitoring room, of course. It’s lucky I’ve got a torch.’

‘I could hear him splashing about at the bottom of the ladder. I could see him, too, for a while, poking about at the bottom of the shaft. He was standing on the grille over the sump. He tried the pump handle, but it hadn’t worked for a long time. It’s supposed to drain the water out through the sump, and I suppose he remembered that. I lost sight of him when he went through the door into the monitoring room. But, as he was getting his torch out, he looked up at me.’

‘ Aren’t you coming down yourself? ’

‘ No. It’s best if one of us stays up here. Just in case. We don’t want any accidents.’

‘I think there was just a split second then, when he almost knew who I was. Almost. He looked at me a bit funny, as though he was thinking about it, the way you do when you’re trying to catch hold of some memory that’s just out of reach. I reckon he wouldn’t have been able to see my face at all at that point. He was looking up at me from the bottom of the shaft, so I’d be against the light. Just a figure on the surface, a silhouette against the sky. Anonymous. A vague shape he didn’t recognize, the way I’d always been. Maybe it was my voice that sounded familiar. But, whatever it was, he looked at me strange, not too sure whether I was joking with him, or what.’

‘ All right. That’s sensible. I won’t be long.’

‘And when he was out of sight, you closed the hatch,’ said Cooper.

‘Not right away. I didn’t close the hatch until he was out of sight in the monitoring room. I couldn’t even see his torchlight then. It was a bit funny, really. It was as if he’d disappeared, stepped back into the darkness, back into the past. Like he’d never been there at all. I don’t mind telling you, there was a moment when I wasn’t sure whether I’d just imagined him. I suppose I might gave been going a bit mad. I stood on the side of that hatch, and I was completely alone, looking down into a dark hole, with that musty smell rising up towards me. That smell seemed to carry all the memories from the past, memories that I’d kept shut up for forty years.’

Massey looked at them, regarding even Cooper as a complete stranger, intruders he’d never set eyes on before.

‘Do you understand? I was looking into a yawning pit. It was like staring inside my own head. It was black and stinking, and I wanted nothing else except to close the door on it again. Slam it shut, before anything got out.’

‘You convinced yourself Mr Clay hadn’t been there?’ said Cooper. ‘Just in those few seconds when he was out of sight?’

‘I don’t know how long it took. I remember thinking that I must look such an idiot standing there with the hatch open, staring down into the hole. So I looked around me. And of course there was no one in sight, not in that spot. There wasn’t a soul out walking across the moor, not a car nearer than the road, and that was half a mile away.

‘“Well, I’m on my own out here,” I said to myself. And then I shut the hatch. Just like that, without looking down again or saying another word. I just shut it, made sure it fit tight, and I put the padlock back on and shoved the keys in my pocket. And then I walked away.’

‘You left him down there. With no way of opening the hatch, and no hope of anyone coming along to let him out.’

‘Aye.’

‘He had a mobile phone — ’

Massey shook his head. ‘Those things don’t work when you’re down inside a concrete bunker. A post like this was built to withstand the blast wave from a nuclear bomb.’

Looking at the man, so calm and matter-of-fact, Cooper wondered for a moment whether they would actually find anyone in the abandoned ROC post, or if this was all just a figment of Massey’s imagination. Was he entirely sane? Had the old man gone quietly over the edge at some point in the last few years, and imagined the whole incident? Clay’s sudden appearance did have a suggestion of wishful thinking — the result of a decades-long desire for vengeance, a hatred so powerful that its object had materialized in the form of a vivid hallucination. They would only know for sure when that hatch was opened.

‘We need to get over there,’ said Cooper.

‘Where is it?’ asked Fry.

Cooper pointed across the fields along the edge of the moor, to the raised area with its line of disused telephone poles. The Toyota’s four-wheel drive came in useful now as they drove round the edge of the empty field to reach the gateway above Badger’s Way.

‘It’s funny,’ said Massey, when he got out and stood by the site. ‘If only there’d been someone out on Black Harry Lane, walking their dog or something, it would never have happened. But I suppose the weather was too bad.’

‘Does this bunker flood?’ asked Cooper suddenly.

‘Oh, yes. It was always a very wet post. We had to pump it out all the time. Now it floods right up into the shaft in really bad weather.’

Cooper wiped the rain from his face. ‘Like now, you mean?’

Massey seemed to consider the rain, as if he hadn’t noticed the continuing deluge until now.

‘Aye. Could be.’

With a sense of despair, Cooper looked at Fry, and she began making calls. While she did it, Massey stared at the sky, as if watching for better weather to come riding over the hills to the north.

‘I shut my memories away,’ he said. ‘They’re down there in the dark, with the hatch locked tight.’

Then Cooper had a terrible thought. He’d been here at Rough Side Farm himself on Wednesday, around the same time that Michael Clay’s phone had gone off the network. While he’d been talking to Peter Massey that first time, he’d noticed the raised area of ground, but hadn’t recognized it for what it was. And he’d been here yesterday, too. Had Clay already been shut inside the flooding bunker then? Had he been calling for help, his shouts going completely unheard as Cooper stood around and chatted to Massey about horses and foxes?

He seemed to hear his brother Matt’s voice again inside his head: ‘ I can tell you, Dad would never have done that. He would never have hung back if he thought he might save someone’s life.’

Urgently, Cooper took hold of Massey’s arm.

‘Quick — have you got the key with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get that damned hatch open, then.’

Cooper was pulling off his jacket, unlacing his boots, shivering in anticipation as the rain began to soak his shirt.

‘Ben, what on earth are you doing?’ said Fry in horror.

‘Going down.’

‘We have to wait. This is a specialist job.’

‘Saving a man’s life?’