James Long - Sixth Column

She turned on her heel and began to walk off and he found himself speaking in a new voice.

‘Wait,’ he said, ‘come with me. We’ll settle this right now.’

She stopped and looked back at him, startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I gave away your plan. That was just a piece of paper, Heather. I’m going to put that right – put it beyond all doubt. I want you to meet me on the moor in… let’s see, what’s the time now?’

It took him two hours with Yellow Pages, a street map and a credit card but at the end of that time a pick-up truck carrying a heavy load hidden under a tarpaulin was bumping along a rough track on Blubberhouses Moor. Every lurch sent little jabs of pain through Johnny’s chest as he squinted out of the windscreen at the bulk of the Raven Stones tower. He saw Heather’s little Citroën ahead and pulled up next to it.

‘Here?’ he said, winding down the window.

She looked in and it was like a stranger’s gaze – the curiosity there but still swamped by the anger. ‘Fifty yards ahead.’

He drove on a little further and she followed on foot.

He got out, looked at the ground in front and squinted back the way he’d come then he knelt, inspected the marks on the mossy grass and nodded.

Heather walked up behind and stood silently.

‘This is it,’ he said, ‘I’ll unload.’

He went round to the back of the truck, undid the ties and took the cover off the little Kubota excavator sitting in the back on its miniature tracks. Letting down the tailboard, he pulled heavy metal ramps out and set them in position, then swung himself up and sat in the driving seat with more assurance than he felt and pressed the starter.

The digger inched its way down the ramp. The instructions he’d been given at the hire centre had been basic and it took him a few minutes to get the hang of the hydraulic controls. All the time, he kept one eye on the track behind them and the loom of the Stray’s domes in the distance, expecting at any moment to see a line of police vans, blue lights flashing, coming to stop him. His ribs were hurting like hell.

He was now beyond all reason. He wanted to settle the matter for its own sake. What Heather thought of it all became almost irrelevant. He tugged the lever and the shovel bit down into the turf. He registered in a detached way that there were no surveillance cameras on the tower. Come to that there was no official reason for the Americans to be interested in the tower and if they turned up out of the blue it would be a bit of a give-away.

In fifteen minutes, he had dug a ragged cross trench stretching twenty yards at right angles to the invisible line connecting the tower and the Stray, as near as they could judge to the spot where Heather had first seen the other digger. It was, for the most part, about a yard wide and four feet deep. He couldn’t go any deeper than that – the bucket of the digger was scraping on solid rock.

He switched off and the clatter of the Kubota’s engine was replaced by the singing of a lark.

‘There’s nothing there,’ he said, ‘after all that, there’s bloody well nothing there.’ He climbed out and his ribs grated so that he gasped for breath. ‘It was just some bloody fantasy, wasn’t it?’ He realized he was shouting.

‘Stop it,’ said Heather.

‘There’s no cable,’ he went on. ‘BTRS? By-pass bloody Trunk Reserve or whatever the man said. Just bloody fantasy.’ His chest hurt so badly that he sank down to his knees, almost pitching forward into the trench. His head was down, close to the edge of the ditch. She said something else but it was just a vague far-off backdrop to the hammering in his head and the pain in his chest.

Then he saw it.

In the exposed side of the ditch was a square patch of a different colour, measuring about three feet by three feet. He reached in and pulled at it. It was looser and there were bits of root and stalk all torn up and mixed into it. It was the cross section of another trench, a trench that had been filled-in.

‘Heather,’ he said, ‘look.’

There was no answer.

He clambered to his feet, looked round, all too slowly, just in time to see, fifty yards off, the door of her Citroën close and a blue haze curl up from the exhaust as she started the engine.

‘Heather!’ he yelled but it was too late. The car was bumping and swaying off down the track.

Driven by fury and despair, he started the digger again and went back to work at right angles to his first effort. It was easier. This time there were no tough roots to snare the bucket. In a quarter of an hour, he’d dug fifteen yards, making a giant cross on the moor, scooping out the loose in-fill of this earlier trench.

When he finished he looked along its rifle barrel length, pointing straight at the white domes of the Stray. Turning to look the other way, he saw it line up perfectly on the base of the tower.

‘It was here,’ he said aloud but there was no one but the larks to hear him. ‘They must have been taking it out.’

The plan. They’d wanted it back so it must have meant something. There had been a link. There must still be a link but it wasn’t one you could dig up.

Mackeson’s voice came back to him. ‘Don’t be neolithic,’ he said, ‘we got technology you wouldn’t believe.’

He left the open trench to mark the spot – and painfully, he took the digger back. Then he drove south because there was nowhere else to drive to. The old man in Southampton Hospital was all he had left from the wreckage of his old life and the frost-nipped bud of the new one.

He drove badly, impeded by grief and by the physical pain in his chest, which in the end forced him to stop at an anonymous Traveller’s Lodge Motel, gulp aspirin and lie miserably in bed until low-grade hot-headed sleep crept up on him.

In the morning his chest was stiff and red all down one side and he felt as woebegone as he could ever remember, looking ahead at darkness where a bright future had seemed to beckon. He drove on slowly, uncomfortable even when he changed gear. The Ml seemed rougher than usual. The M25 was a tedious nightmare and in his mind, many hours clocked up before he was on the M3.

At Southampton Hospital, they looked at him as if he was a candidate for the emergency room.

‘I’ve come to see Sir Michael Parry,’ he said, leaning on the desk.

‘Are you all right?’ said the woman facing him, concerned.

‘Oh… yes.’

She phoned, spoke then put her hand over the receiver and turned to him. ‘Who shall I say it is?’

‘I’m his son.’

‘You can go up.’

His father looked much better, smiling at him as he went in and then showing a sudden expression of deep concern.

‘John! You’re as white as a sheet.’

He sat down in the chair next to the bed. ‘I’m OK. I got a few bruises yesterday in court. I don’t know if you heard?’

‘The whole thing. It’s been on all the news and in the papers. Isn’t it marvellous?’

‘Well, up to a point.’

Sir Michael looked at him understandingly. ‘Tell me.’

‘Heather.’

‘Go on.’

‘She’s… she won’t have anything to do with me. I fixed it with the Americans. I didn’t have a choice. There wasn’t any other way of getting her off. I thought they’d just drop charges but they gave Hayter that Rage stuff. That’s why he did what he did.’

‘I know. I had a call or two about it.’

‘The stuff works, for God’s sake. All we’ve succeeded in doing is helping Sir Greville sell it to the Americans.’

‘Up to a point.’ He seemed to be suppressing a laugh.

‘What do you mean?’