Stephen Booth - The kill call

‘We don’t know he’s still alive.’

‘We don’t know he’s dead, either. The water might not be up to the top yet. He could have found an air pocket. We can’t just stand here while he drowns.’

When they pulled the hatch open, the water was halfway up the ladder. The stink of foul air and dank concrete rose to meet them — a true miasma, so thick that they could almost touch it and feel it. Rain splattered the surface of the water, shattering their own reflections as they stared down into the bunker. For a moment, Cooper experienced that curious illusion of looking at something twice as far away as it really was, because he was looking at his own reflection. And not just looking at himself, but at the grey sky far above his head. It was like staring into the infinite depths, dark clouds like blind sea creatures lurking on the ocean bottom.

Cooper remembered Peter Massey’s description of his friend’s eyes, looking back up at him like dark pebbles under water, in the last moment before he died. But beyond the surface reflection there were no eyes, no floating body, nothing visible at all in the dark, oily liquid filling the bottom half of the shaft.

Fry drew back from the opening, covering her nose and mouth against the stench.

‘You can’t do this,’ she said.

But Cooper ignored her, concentrating on climbing over the slimy edge of the hatch and feeling for the top rungs of the ladder. As he clambered carefully down, the counterweight for the hatch bumped against his back, tap-tapping like a heavy hand on his spine, on his shoulders, and touching the back of his head as his feet touched the water. Then he looked up again at the light, saw Fry silhouetted against the sky, her coat and hair filmed with rain.

‘I know the layout. I’ll be OK.’

‘How can you know it?’

‘They’re all the same. A standard design.’

‘You don’t know what else might be down there.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ said Cooper.

‘Famous last bloody words. You’re mad.’

Cooper summoned his recollection of the Edendale post. Beneath him was the bottom of the shaft, behind him an overhang and a wooden door — the chemical toilet and generator room. To the left would be the other doorway, into the monitoring room. He could see the top of the frame, was relieved to see that the door stood open.

If he had been Michael Clay, trapped down here with the water rising, where would he have made his way to? Where would have been the best place to eke out the last bit of remaining air? The shaft itself, surely? There was a good six feet of space above the water line.

But he touched the walls and felt how wet they were. Slippery with a foul-smelling sheen of mud and mould. So the level of the water was actually falling. At its peak last night, or in the early hours of the morning, the shaft must have been flooded right up to the top, only the locked hatch preventing water from seeping out on to the surface.

So if Michael Clay had known the layout of an ROC bunker, what else would he have done? He would have gone for a ventilation outlet. Of course. Cooper pictured a rusty louvred steel opening in the far wall of the monitoring room. And somewhere in the ceiling was the lower end of the blast pipe, wide enough to detect the pressure from a fireburst explosion, so it must allow the passage a bit of air, too.

Cooper sucked in a long breath and ducked his head under water, pulling himself towards the open doorway. Moving into pitch darkness, he was blinded by the sudden contrast with the light in the shaft and its splintered reflections on the surface of the water. He was so disorientated that he had to break the surface and take a new breath, panicking for a moment that he wasn’t going to be able to do it, at the thought that he would have to admit defeat and go back up to the surface, just sit and wait for the experts with their wet suits and oxygen tanks, which could take forever.

He shook his head and clutched at the walls to orientate himself again, feeling the handle of the pump tangle in his legs until he kicked away. The cold was already creeping into his bones and turning his fingers and toes numb. He didn’t have very long to do this. It had to be now, or never.

Cooper’s head went under again, and then he was in the doorway, pushing against the wooden frame. It was too dark to see anything in front of him. But he could hear David Headon’s voice in his head, telling him that the monitoring room was only sixteen feet long. He remembered thinking that it was a small space for three men to spend so many hours in. Seven feet wide and sixteen feet long, like a giant coffin. He could reach the end of it in two strokes.

His violent movements stirred up silt and debris from the concrete floor. Floating objects bumped against him as he kicked forward, like invisible creatures swimming around him in the black water. A plastic bucket, a jerry can that spun away when he cracked his elbow against it. And something rough and fibrous that flapped slowly towards the floor.

Then a long, loosely jointed shape swung into his face. A familiar shape. A human arm. His lungs aching, Cooper grabbed at a sleeve and began to kick backwards towards the door. For a long second, he felt something holding him down, the door getting in his way as he confused the direction of the ladder. In a gleam of light from above, he saw a white face turning slowly towards him, a floating blank-eyed face, staring and staring.

Then his foot found the grille at the base of the shaft, and a rung of the ladder, and he was finally pushing upwards to the light. As he gulped air, he felt hands reach down towards him. Someone had lowered a rope. Voices came down from the sky that he almost couldn’t make out.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Are you all right?’

But he didn’t know the answer to either question.

Tuesday

Juliana van Doon hovered over the body of Michael Clay, laid out on the mortuary table in Edendale. The body exuded an almost palpable aura of cold, the blue tinge to his skin strange and alien in the mortuary lights.

‘No, he didn’t drown,’ she said. ‘There was no water in his lungs. But he suffocated all the same.’

Fry shivered involuntarily. A visit to the mortuary wasn’t her idea of the best way to start the day. But today it seemed somehow appropriate.

‘Suffocated?’ she said. ‘How can that be?’

‘Oxygen deprivation.’

Tensing, Fry waited for the patronizing remark, but it didn’t come. Instead, the pathologist looked down at the body, and wouldn’t even meet her eye. Mrs van Doon seemed awkward with her this morning, almost as if she’d heard something that had changed her attitude. Fry told herself she must be imagining things. Yet still the pathologist looked away as she continued to explain.

‘He has cyanosis, look — the bluish discolouration of the fingers, toes and ears, and around the mouth. That’s caused by a dramatic drop in the oxygen content of the blood circulating through the body. Blood poor in oxygen is purple, rather than red.’

‘But he was found in a flooded bunker,’ said Fry. ‘I assumed…’

Mrs van Doon shook her head. ‘If this bunker of yours regularly gets wet and dries out again, I imagine there was a certain amount of rusted metal around.’

‘Yes, there was.’

The pathologist hadn’t even picked up on her slip, her use of the word ‘assumed’. Never assume, it makes an ass…

‘Oxidized metal produces carbon dioxide, and that’s lethal in a confined space,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘Even without the hatch being closed, the victim was at serious risk. He could have passed out fairly quickly, especially if he was panicking, and exerting himself physically.’

Fry looked at Michael Clay’s blue-tinged fingers. ‘He would have been running up the ladder, trying to force the hatch open. Shouting for help.’