Dead on Dartmoor

by Stephanie Austin

  ‘Just small amounts of some of this stuff, if it gets into groundwater …’

  He didn’t need to finish, I got the point. Acetyl Chloride, I read, Chromic Acid. Chemistry had never been an interest of mine, so I was none the wiser. Sodium Hypochlorite, I’d heard of that one. It was not stuff you wanted to breathe in or splash on your skin.

  ‘We need to prove where this stuff has come from.’ Dean’s camera flashed in the darkness. ‘We need to find a company name.’

  I wasn’t enthusiastic about getting any closer to the containers. The lids all seemed to be safely shut but there must be a leakage somewhere. My eyes were watering, my lips stinging, I was starting to cough. Then, in letters designed for a cockroach to read, I found a printed name. Dravizax.org. ‘Got it!’

  Dean came to look over my shoulder. I pointed the light at the adjacent container and picked it out again. Now that I knew where to look, I could see it written on all of them. ‘Dravizax, I remember it now.’ Dean leant in close to take pictures. I could sense his mounting excitement. ‘Their boss is pictured in a photo with Sandy Westershall,’ I told him, my voice rasping. ‘I saw it on the wall of his study …’ My lungs were burning. I was finding it difficult to breathe.

  Dean took the torch from me, grabbed my hand. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  We jogged on. I couldn’t count the number of containers we passed, some stained brown at the edges, the plastic being eaten away by whatever was held inside. From somewhere amongst them I could hear an ominous trickling.

  We didn’t speak, tried not to breathe until we’d left the stacks of plastic drums behind. Ahead of us, tiny dark objects littered the ground like shrivelled leather purses: dead bats. The poor little buggers had flown too deep into the tunnel and been poisoned by the fumes.

  Further on the air seemed to be cooling, clearing. At first, I thought we must be nearing the tunnel mouth, but Dean suddenly stopped and shone the torch beam upward over our heads. It was as if we were looking up from the bottom of a well, a stone-lined telescope with a circle of sky way above us. We could see a freckling of stars.

  ‘Ventilation shaft,’ I breathed. It would have been sunk when the mine was originally dug, to draw heat and fumes up from the rock face. It was criss-crossed by wooden rafters. Odd little pouches hung here and there, like old leaves clinging to a winter tree; sleeping bats. Disturbed by the torchlight and by our echoing whispers, they stirred and fluttered away.

  ‘They must be the late sleepers-in,’ Dean grinned. ‘The rest will have gone a-hunting.’

  We lingered for a while, breathing in cold, fresh air, gazing up at pinpricks of blessed light far above. Then we moved on, enlivened by the air, buoyed up by the evidence we had of the Westershalls’ involvement with Dravizax. Now we just needed to get out.

  The tunnel led us straight into Moorworthy shaft. It sloped down to the left, into the furthest reaches of the mine, down to the abandoned rock face. To the right it sloped upward, towards the entrance, to the way out. Our climb upward was made easier by artificially cut levels and pallets laid down to create a wooden walkway. Dean shone his torch over it. ‘This looks recent. I bet they laid this down so that they could wheel in all those drums of shit.’

  Our boots clumped noisily along it. Ahead of us the blackness was thinning. It might be night outside, but moonlight filtering through the entrance pierced the blanket of a deeper dark. A turned corner brought us our first view of the ragged rent in the rock that was the mouth of Moorworthy Pit.

  Excitement and relief drained away. Dean swore fiercely as we stood and stared. A grill blocked the entrance, an iron screen of crossbars, set wide enough apart to allow bats to flutter in and out but not wide enough for anything larger, like us. Dean rattled the grill in vain and shone the torch beam over three separate padlocks. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to have a set of lock-picks about you?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Funnily enough, they’re frowned upon in the police force.’

  ‘Well, you’re allowed to smash down doors. I’ve seen it on the telly.’

  He gave a grim laugh. We were silent then, considering our alternatives. We could go back the way we came, past all the containers, climb back out of Applecote Pit. Or we could scale the ventilation shaft.

  We looked at one another. ‘Ventilation shaft,’ we said as one.

  Climbing the shaft was just a case of stretching between the uneven rafters that criss-crossed it in a ramshackle ladder. It should not have been difficult, at least not for a long-legged creature like me; anyone shorter would have been stuffed. But the rafters creaked ominously beneath our weight and were slimy with bat shit. It was difficult to find a place for hand or foot to rest without slipping. After a few minutes we were breathless with the effort, and sweating. We rested, clinging onto our respective perches, Dean a few rafters above me.

  ‘Are we getting near the top?’ I called up to him. It didn’t seem to me we were making any progress at all.

  ‘About halfway,’ he called back. He reached up, his hand searching to find a grip on the rafter above him. His fingers locked on, he took the next step up with his boot. There was a sharp crack. I managed to dodge as the splintered halves of a falling beam barely missed my shoulder, tumbled down into the darkness, hitting the ground with a crash. Dean was hanging by his arms from the rafter above him like an ape, his legs swinging.

  ‘You OK?’ he yelled down to me.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  I heard him straining with effort as he pulled himself up by his arms until he could balance his body over the rafter above him, get a leg over it and sit up.

  I wasn’t hurt but the fallen rafter had created a gap in the ladder too long for me to bridge. I looked around at the walls of the shaft, wondering if I could edge my way over and climb up the rock instead. But it glistened, oily with bat shit and damp. It didn’t look safe.

  Dean had both legs locked around the rafter he sat on. He swung his body down, hanging underneath and stretched his arms towards me. ‘I’ll have to pull you up. It’s the only way.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ Like a trapeze artist, he’d have to take the entire weight of my body and I’m substantial to say the least.

  ‘Trust me. I trained in the circus.’

  Very funny. But I didn’t really have a choice. Muttering darkly about not dropping me, I reached up until his massive paw circled one wrist and then the other. Heaving and groaning, teeth clenched, he pulled me up until I was within clutching distance of the rafter above me, veins standing out on his forehead with the effort. As I grabbed the rafter and hauled myself up, he grasped my belt, helping to heave my body over until I could get my legs round it. I just prayed it would bear the weight of us both.

  He sat up, grinning and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. The mouth of the shaft was just a few feet above us. Dean climbed until he reached the top and stretched down an arm to haul me out. Solid ground had never felt so good. We lay on our backs in the damp grass, gasping like landed fish, heaving in the fresh air and staring up at a spangled veil of stars. I had lost all sense of time, had no idea how long we had been down in that tunnel, groping our way in the dark. It felt like days.

  After the mine and the ventilation shaft, getting over the fence with its razor-wire top seemed easy. We just scaled the nearest tree, shimmied on our bellies along a branch and dropped down on the other side. All we had to do now was to creep quietly down the drive through the grounds to the gate and we’d be out. Safe. Free. Except that I knew we wouldn’t. I’d already worked out what was coming next, knew it before Dean opened his mouth.

  ‘Sandy Westershall and the boss of Dravizax,’ he said, turning to grin at me. ‘I want that photograph.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  We watched the lights of the house from behind a screen of rhododendron bushes, hoping to see them go out, hoping that the Westershalls might go early to bed. I didn’t think it was likely myself, and all hopes were das
hed when Emma’s open-top car roared up the drive and quenched its tyres noisily in the gravel. Four people climbed out. I recognised Eddie, posh-boy drugs dealer, and Emma of course. I didn’t know the other two. All four talked at the top of their voices as they weaved their way into the house and the door slammed shut behind them. A few moments later more lights flicked on downstairs and loud music began to blare from the windows.

  Dean groaned. ‘It looks like no one will be going to bed for a while.’ We decided to work our way around the back of the house in the hope that it might be in darkness. The quickest way was to run across the garden, keeping well away from the windows and anyone who might chance to look out. The lawn was long and wide and running across it felt horribly exposed. ‘Watch out for the ha-ha,’ I warned Dean in a hoarse whisper as we scurried, almost bent double, across the wet grass.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘It’s a hidden drop. Over to our right somewhere.’

  We made it across the lawn and into the safety of the shrubbery, crawling in amongst sheltering shrubs. We stayed still for a few moments, watching and waiting. But we’d disturbed nothing except for a hunting owl, which hooted in a tree nearby, its call echoed by another, somewhere in the woods. We crept around the side of the building.

  Lights were on at the back of the house and we could hear a radio playing. We sneaked to the kitchen window and peered over the sill. Mrs Johnson was busying herself at a granite worktop, in a vast kitchen that was strangely at odds with the rest of the house: functional and modern, all white walls and stainless steel like an operating theatre. Tray after tray of canapés was lined up on the surface and she was busy covering them with plastic film. At a central island, Moss perched on a stool, reading a newspaper, a mug at his elbow. It didn’t look like either of them would be heading for Bedfordshire any time soon either. We hadn’t seen any sign of Jamie or Sandy, but presumably they were in the house somewhere.

  At Dean’s signal we tiptoed away from the window. ‘Let’s find somewhere to wait until things quieten down.’ We slipped down a path. A wooden door led us into a walled vegetable garden, and we crunched down a gravel pathway past serried ranks of cabbages. I could smell sage and fennel as we brushed past a bed of herbs. God, I was starving.

  Further on we came to a standpipe with garden hose attached, turned the tap and bathed our hands and faces in the icy gush of water, rinsing lingering traces of contamination from our bare skin and cleansing our hands of bat shit.

  We found shelter in a little wooden summer house with garden loungers stored inside; we grabbed the cushions and settled down comfortably on the floor. ‘We might as well rest up for an hour or two,’ Dean said, ‘until they’ve all gone to bed.’

  I awoke in the grey light of morning to the liquid song of a blackbird. For a moment I didn’t know where I was. I sat up, staring around, rubbing my stiff neck. Dean was fast asleep on the cushions beside me and I shook him by the shoulder, hissing at him to wake up. He snored, stirred grumpily, blinked at me, uncomprehending for a moment, and then snapped into wakefulness. ‘Christ!’ he muttered, sitting up. ‘That must be the longest I’ve slept since Alice was born!’

  I thought we must have slept away our chance, but he was already staggering to his feet, stiffly stretching. ‘C’mon.’

  ‘They’ll be getting up again soon,’ I warned him as he peered out of the summer house and around the vegetable garden.

  ‘Not if they went to bed late enough.’

  The back of the house was still and silent, windows black in the grey gloom. I held my breath as Dean tried the handle of the back door. No luck. A few feet away a pane of frosted glass was set into the wall and the narrow transom window above it was ajar. Dean was considering it, eyes narrowed, calculating its size and I realised, with a sinking in my guts, whose backside would shortly be squirming through.

  ‘I’ll give you a leg-up,’ he offered graciously.

  I snagged my hair in the window-catch as I poked my head through the window, staring down at the windowsill below me, and the toilet beneath it, stretching down to brace my hands upon the sill as I wriggled my bum through the narrow gap. There was a water pipe running down the wall beside me and I transferred one hand onto it, so that I could swivel sideways, get one leg in, stand on the windowsill, then draw the other leg in after me. It was either that or crash headfirst down the loo. I stepped on the cistern, carefully on the rim of the loo seat, and finally, thankfully, stood upon the floor.

  I opened the door and peered cautiously down the corridor. The house seemed to be sleeping, all quiet. From where I stood, I could see into the kitchen. I could also see a homely touch that had not been visible through the kitchen window the night before: a dog basket, a very large dog basket. Judging from the snores rumbling from within, it contained a grizzly bear. All I could see was a dark mound, which heaved with each snuffling breath. I crept down the corridor, my heart beating loud enough to wake it up.

  As I hesitated in the kitchen doorway, the owner of the basket raised a black, doggy snout about an inch, studied me from a drooping eye and, after considering me for a moment, thumped its plumy tail lazily.

  ‘Hello,’ I whispered, in that soppy voice we reserve for dogs and small children. ‘There’s a good boy.’ I crouched carefully, and reached out, praying I wasn’t about to get my face ripped off. The dog, a Newfoundland, allowed me to stroke his head and licked my hand in greeting.

  Just behind his basket stood an enormous fridge. I swung open the door, bathing myself in icy white light, and gazed upon shelves loaded with trays of canapés. I decided they wouldn’t miss a few, peeled back a corner of plastic film, popped a prawn vol-au-vent straight into my gob and gave one to the dog. He sat up, suddenly awake and interested, licking his chops. I grabbed another two and we shared them in the same way. ‘Now, you go back to sleep,’ I mumbled, mouth full. I crossed the kitchen, shutting the door behind me so that my new friend couldn’t follow me out, and drew back the bolts on the back door.

  ‘What the hell have you been doing?’ Dean demanded in a fierce whisper.

  I swallowed hastily. ‘Essential diplomatic negotiations,’ I told him.

  He frowned. ‘Smells fishy to me! Now, which way is it?’

  There seemed only one way to go, up a bare flight of servants’ stairs with a metal handrail. We tried to tread softly but our boots clumped on the stone steps. We considered taking them off but decided that might hamper a quick getaway and carried on, on tiptoe.

  At the top of the servants’ stairs we found ourselves at the end of the wide passage that led down the hall to the grand staircase; mercifully, the floor was carpeted, a long Persian runner deadening our noise. The double doors of the ballroom stood open to our left. A grand piano occupied the far end of it, with rows of gilded chairs lined up to face it, ready for a recital.

  We crept on until we reached the drawing room. The door was open, and I stifled a quick intake of breath. The four partygoers from last night were crashed out on the sofas, fast asleep. Eddie’s cherubic features were squashed against the floral cushions, muffling his snores; Emma’s legs, encased in black satin trousers, hung over the edge of another sofa, one silver high-heeled sandal trailing from her toes. The other couple were just a tangled heap on the carpet. Bottles lay scattered around the room and a stale smell of breathed-out booze hung heavy in the air.

  We hurried on past, crossing the hall to the door of the study, turning the handle slowly, wincing at the soft click it gave on opening and slipped inside. The heavy brocade curtains were pulled back and the tall windows overlooking the lawn showed us that the sky was swiftly lightening, a faint glow warming the clouds above the horizon. I hoped no one in the house was awake and fancying an early breakfast.

  Dean crossed swiftly to the display of framed photos on the wall. In one picture Sandy Westershall was shaking hands with the boss of Dravizax. In another, they were holding a big cheque between them, although it wasn’t clear who was giving and who wa
s receiving. Dean couldn’t suppress a low chuckle as he framed each one in the lens of his camera and began snapping away. I was feeling jittery. Photographing the pictures was taking too long. It would have been quicker to nick them off the wall. I distracted myself by trying the drawers of the mahogany desk that occupied the centre of the room. I pulled at each of the brass handles, but all the drawers were locked.

  ‘Now can we get out of here?’ I hissed, as at last he slid his phone back into his pocket.

  He didn’t answer. Sitting on the desk was a laptop. He lifted the lid and pressed a button. I groaned as the screen lit up and the blasted machine played a tinkling tune.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s a spare memory stick anywhere.’ He tried to open the top drawer, then picked up a paperknife. As he bent to insert it in the lock, I heard a click. But it wasn’t the desk drawer opening.

  Sandy Westershall stood in the doorway, dressed in pyjamas and a silk dressing gown; behind him stood Mrs Johnson, pale and grim in a hastily buttoned housecoat, and Moss, who had completed his rustic ensemble with a shotgun levelled straight at us.

  ‘Johnnie, fetch Master Jamie, will you?’ Sandy ordered calmly, without turning his head to look at her. He kept his gaze fixed on us. His skin looked yellowish and blotchy in the early light; he reminded me of a lizard watching its prey. I expected his tongue to flicker from his lips at any moment. He walked into the room; Moss and his shotgun came in after him. Instinctively, Dean and I raised our hands.

  ‘Step away from the desk,’ Sandy ordered, and we backed towards the fireplace. He drew a tiny key from his dressing gown pocket, unlocked the top drawer of the desk and brought out a pistol.

  ‘You can lower that shotgun now, Moss. I’d really sooner you didn’t fire it in here.’ He brandished the pistol in his hand. ‘This is far more suited to the purpose. The good old Navy Colt.’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘It’s amazing the things dear old Barty can lay his hands on if you ask him.’ He cocked it, and with an almost casual air, aimed it at my head. ‘I’m very disappointed in you, my dear,’ he sighed. ‘Now, who’s your friend?’