Mo Hayder: Gone

It had been cold all day. Grey clouds off the Atlantic blanketed the sky. It was windy too, so Flea wore a cagoule and a beanie. The chalk bag and the bundle of climber’s cams, the knee and elbow pads were in the rucksack on her back. Her Boreal ‘sticky’ boots at a glance could look like hiking boots. If she encountered anyone she was a walker, strayed off the footpath.

She squeezed herself through a gap in the perimeter fence and went down the track. The weather was getting worse. By the time she got to the water’s edge a squall had come up. Under the white cloud canopy, smaller, darker clouds stuttered along in regular squadrons: fast as flocks of birds. No one would be out on a day like this. She kept her head down anyway and walked fast.

The rock face was on the far side, out of sight of the quarry. She paused at the bottom and gave a last glance over her shoulder to check she was alone and ducked behind the rock. She found the place she wanted, dropped her rucksack and pulled out the few things she wanted. The key was speed and determination. Don’t think, just do. Get it over with.

She rammed the first cam into the limestone. Her father, long dead now, had been an all-round adventurer. A Boy’s Own hero – a diver, a caver, a climber. The adventure thing had rubbed off on her, but the climbing part had never come second nature. She wasn’t like one of the climbing dudes who could do pull-ups on two fingers. This limestone was supposed to be easy to climb, with its vertical and horizontal cracks, but she found it a bastard – always got her hands in the wrong places – and now the crevices were full of the congealed chalk she’d used in the past. As she climbed she paused every few feet to rake the handfuls of white muck out of the fissures. Leaving tracks didn’t work. Ever.

Flea was small, but she was as strong as a monkey. When you lived a life where you never knew what was coming round the corner at you, it paid to keep yourself hard so she worked out every day. At least two hours. Jogged, lifted weights. She was at her peak. In spite of her lousy climbing technique, the scramble up the rock took less than ten minutes. She wasn’t even breathing hard when she reached the top.

This high up the wind howled around and flattened the cagoule against her frame. It whipped her hair into her eyes. She dug in her fingers, turned her head and looked back down into the rainswept valley. Most of the rock was hidden except for this small section, which could, if her luck was really out, be seen by passing motorists. But the road was virtually empty: just one or two cars going by with their headlights and wipers on. Even so, she kept herself tight against the rock, making sure she presented less of a profile.

She dug her toes in, shifted her torso slightly to the left until she found the place, then gripped the scrappy roots of a gorse bush in both hands and wrenched them apart. She hesitated for a moment, not wanting to do it. Then she pushed her face in. Took a deep breath. Held it. Tasted it.

She let out the air with a long, hoarse cough, let go of the bushes, turned away and pressed the back of her hand to her nose, her chest heaving.

The corpse was still there. She could smell it. The bitter, gagging stench of decay told her all she needed to know. Overwhelming, but it was weaker than it had been. Fainter, which meant the body was doing what it should. During the summer the smell had been bad, really bad. There had been days she’d come up here and caught the odour down on the footpath, where even a casual passer-by could have smelt it. This level was better. Much better. It meant the woman’s corpse was disintegrating.

The tiny gap Flea had put her nose to led to a crevice that snaked away back into the rock. Deep, deep down, almost eight metres below her, there was a cave. The cave had only one entrance and that was from under the water. The route was virtually impossible to find without specialist diving equipment and an encyclopedic knowledge of the quarry contours. She’d done it, dived down and entered the cave twice in the last six months that the body had been there, just to reassure herself that no one had found it. Now it was crammed into a hole in the floor, covered with rocks. No one would know it was there. The only clue to what Flea had done was the unmistakable stench working its way through the cave’s natural ventilation system, through unseen fissures, to expel itself here, high up on the rock face.

A noise came from the other side of the quarry: the security gates were opening. She spread her arms and legs and let herself slither down fast, scraping her knees, getting a long orange line of soil on the front of her waterproofs. She ended up at the bottom in a crouch, hands out, ears trained on the quarry. In the wind and the rain it was hard to be sure, but she thought she could hear a car.

Stealthily, she crept to the edge of the rock. Poked her head round. Jerked it back again.

A car. Headlights on. Making its way leisurely down from the gates in the rain. And worse than that. She turned her head against the wet rock and peeped out again. Yes. It was a cop car.

Ho-ho. What now, smartarse?

Quickly she pulled off the knee pads, the chalk bag, the gloves. The cams higher up the rock face she couldn’t get to – but the nearer ones she quickly released. She snapped them out and, with her discarded clothing, jammed them into a space under the gorse that grew at her feet. She dropped to her haunches and did a crab walk, out from the rock, shielded by the gorse bushes, until she reached another rock where she could straighten up and peer round.

The cop car had stopped at the far side of the quarry where all the discarded stripping material had been piled by the cement company. Its headlights were splashed with mud. Maybe he’d pulled in for a pee. Or to make a phone call. Or have a sandwich. He cut the engine and opened the window, put his head out and squinted up into the rain, then leaned over on to the passenger seat. Rummaged for something.

A sandwich? Make it a sandwich, for Christ’s sake. A phone?

No. It was a torch. Shit.

He opened the door. The rain and the clouds had dropped the daylight so much that the beam was strong enough to pick up the raindrops. It flashed off the car as he stood, pulling on a waterproof. It stuttered across the trees at the edge of the track. He slammed the door, went to the water’s edge and shone the torch on to the surface of the quarry. Watched the water bounce and boil in the hammering rain. Beyond the gates, further up the track, one of the branches she’d used to conceal her car had been pulled away. The cop knew someone was in here.

That’s you, then, she thought, knee deep in the proverbial.

He turned suddenly as if he’d heard a noise and aimed the torch at the place she stood. She shrank back into the lee of the rock, standing side on, the wind making her eyes water. Her heart was hammering. The cop took a few steps, his feet crunching on the gravel. One, two, three, four. Then more purposeful. Five, six, seven. Heading towards her.

She took a breath, pulled her hood off her head, stepped out into the beam. He stopped a few feet away, with the torch thrust out, rain dripping off the hood of his coat. ‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello.’

He ran the torch up and down her. ‘You know this is private property? Belongs to the cement company.’

‘I do.’

‘You a quarryman, are you?’

She gave him a half-smile. ‘You’ve not been doing this long, have you? The police thing?’

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what do the words “private property” mean to you? Private property ?’

‘Means I shouldn’t be here? Not without authorization.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Nice. You’re getting the hang of this.’ He shone the torch back up the track. ‘Is that your car? Up there on the lane?’