Gordon Reece - Mice

As Mum flicked through the medical reports that lunchtime, she’d been reminded of another case she’d had not long after she joined Everson’s. Another twelve-year-old boy had badly fractured his left ankle in a fall, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember the boy’s name or the circumstances of the accident. She would have liked to check through the old file to compare the doctor’s prognosis and see how much the case had settled for, but she knew Everson’s would have destroyed it years ago.

It was only later that day, while she was taking instructions from a new client in the interview room, that it suddenly all came back to her. Pugh. Thomas Pugh. A smiling, tubby little boy with a butter-blond fringe. He’d been on a camping holiday with his family in the Morsely National Park and had decided to go exploring early one morning with his younger brother while their parents were still asleep. They’d come across some wooden structures in the forest that they’d taken to be an assault course and they’d been racing each other to them when Thomas had suddenly disappeared into thin air. His little brother’s first thought was that Thomas had been zapped by an alien death ray. In fact, he’d fallen into one of the abandoned copper mines that honeycomb the national park’s mountains. The wooden structures were all that was left of the old pithead.

And that’s when Mum had the inspiration: the abandoned mines were the perfect place to get rid of the pile of incriminating evidence in the spare room.

She made an excuse to slip out of the office and went across town to the public records office, deep in the basement of the grandiose council building that dominated the town square. There she requested copies of the National Park Authority’s plans of all the old copper mines in the Morsely National Park. Half an hour later five A3 sheets were handed over to her.

‘It’s absolutely perfect!’ Mum exclaimed excitedly that night as we sat in the lounge after dinner. ‘The mine shafts are deep inside the national park and they’re fenced off to the general public now. The authority was forced to do that after the Pugh case. Some of the shafts are extremely deep — the one I’ve got in mind is over one thousand feet . Tommy Pugh only fell into an eight-foot service shaft — if he’d fallen into one of the main shafts he’d never have been seen again.’

‘But how will you find it, Mum?’ I asked. ‘The national park’s vast.’

‘I’ve been there before,’ she said, leaning towards me, right on the very edge of her seat, her coffee cup hanging loosely in her large hands. ‘During the Pugh case I made a site visit to the mines. I was there all day. The park rangers took me all over the mountain in their Jeep. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m sure it’ll all come back to me when I’m up there — and I’ve got the maps, don’t forget. They show everything — every main shaft, ventilation shaft, every adit, every stope.’

I still wanted to grill her about her new plan; I still wanted to find some flaw that hadn’t occurred to her, probably for the simple reason that she’d rejected all my suggestions so brusquely.

‘What if they decide to reopen the mines in the future as some sort of tourist attraction? They’ll find everything then.’

Mum was clearly delighted I’d asked this question. ‘They won’t be opening these mines to tourists, I can promise you that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re poisoned, Shelley. That’s the reason they abandoned the mines back in the 1840s — naturally occurring hydrogen sulphide. In the twenty years the mines were open, more than fifty miners died from exposure to the gas. Their relatives tried to bring an action against the mining company — and failed, needless to say. The mines are a death trap!’

I had to admit I liked the sound of this plan much more than anything else we’d come up with, and it was infinitely preferable to burying everything in the garden. With Paul Hannigan’s corpse mouldering under the oval rose bed, I felt the garden was already harbouring enough of our secret history.

Mum didn’t want me to go with her to the national park; it was already nine by the time she was ready to leave and she said she had no idea what time she’d get back. The park was about an hour and a half’s drive away and she then had to find the specific shaft she was looking for, armed only with the five maps and the torch.

I helped her carry the bin bags out to the car. We couldn’t fit all of them in the boot and I had to put three on the back seat of the Escort.

‘Be careful,’ I begged, taking her by the hands.

I hated the thought of Mum in that immense forest in the middle of the night with just the feeble light of the torch to guide her. I’d seen for myself how bad her eyes were in the dark. I kept imagining the ground suddenly giving way beneath her feet, the terrifying fall into one of those poisoned mine shafts.

What would I do then? What would I do then?

‘Please, please, be careful, Mum.’

She hugged me tightly and told me not to worry, she’d be OK.

I watched her drive slowly away, her face set in grim determination, the torch and the roll of maps beside her on the passenger seat. I hurried back into the house, keeping my eyes fixed firmly on the ground before me so that I wouldn’t catch even an accidental sight of the oval rose bed.

I sat at the dining-room table and tried to catch up on all the homework I was falling horribly behind with. I’d only just finished the essay on the First World War that Roger had set me, and there was already another piece of history coursework due, plus two English essays and a geography question, not to mention the maths revision papers Mrs Harris had been setting.

Since the night we’d killed Paul Hannigan, my concentration had been pathetic — shattered every ten minutes or so by flashbacks that dragged me into that kitchen-turned-charnel-house and forced me to dance the dance of death with the burglar all over again. When I came around I hardly knew where I was, as if I’d just snapped out of a hypnotic trance. Interrupted again and again in this way, an essay that would have taken me two hours to write before was now taking me four or five.

I started to plan out one of Roger’s English essays ( Macbeth goes from a man ‘too full o’ the milk of human kindness’ to a ‘butcher’ and ‘tyrant’ in five Acts. How? ), but even though I drank almost a whole pot of coffee, I only managed to write one side in an hour, and even then I knew what I’d written wasn’t very good. My mind kept wandering from my dog-eared paperback copy of Macbeth to Mum. Where was she? What was she doing right at that moment? I prayed that she’d be OK. I prayed that she’d get back safely.

Eventually I pushed the essay to one side (it really was rubbish — ‘Macbeth is a good man when the play starts. .’) and began doodling idly on a scrap of paper. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I drew the Escort winding its way up through the mountains, jagged pine forests on either side, its headlights sending out two elongated teardrops of light into the surrounding darkness. A strange groan came from somewhere upstairs and I stopped drawing and looked up. I remembered the nightmare where Paul Hannigan’s ruined face had suddenly appeared at the window. I quickly went into the lounge and drew the curtains, fussing until I was absolutely sure that every gap was closed and no one could see in from outside.

I poured myself a glass of wine (there was always wine in the house now) and sat on the sofa to try to read, but the house was alive with ambiguous sounds: the floorboards upstairs creaked arthritically as though someone were moving stealthily around in the spare room; there were intermittent rustlings just beyond the lounge window that could have been footsteps or merely the breeze scuffing fallen twigs across the gravel.