by J. R. Ellis
He put his ear near to the rock surface. At first nothing, but then, just faintly, he did hear something. It was as if the rock was carrying a sound. He heard a gentle rushing noise. It was far away, but surely it was the sound of running water.
‘Sir, over here, I can hear something.’
Oldroyd came over. ‘What, Andy?’
‘Listen here, sir. Put your ear near to the rock. It sounds like water in the distance.’
Oldroyd followed the instruction.
‘Yes, I can hear it.’ Carter could hear the excitement in his voice.
Alan Williams had also come over. Oldroyd turned to him.
‘What do you make of it?’
Williams listened, drew back from the rock and looked up.
‘Yes, there is something, it’s coming from up there.’ He suddenly exploded into action. ‘Bloody hell! Barry! Keith! Over here!’
The shouts echoed around the chamber.
‘What is it?’ asked Carter.
‘It is the sound of running water. I’d say quite a powerful force, but not here. You get these peculiar effects with sound down underground; it seems to get carried distances through the rock.’ He turned to Oldroyd, looking very animated. ‘I think that old bloke was right. There must be a way through up there to Jingling Pot. What we can hear is the stream in that system.’
Oldroyd pulled out the map and looked at it with Williams.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but we’re about here, so a link would bring us to here.’
Williams considered the map.
‘My God. You’re right, Inspector: Sump Passage!’
Oldroyd turned to Carter and Steph with an expression mingling satisfaction and relief.
‘Where the body was found.’
Williams and the others were scaling the rocks in front of them with the eagerness of those about to put their hands on the greatest prize in caving: not just a new passageway but a new link between two systems. They stopped at the ledge and, as the detectives watched, one of the cavers edged around into the shadows and disappeared. Suddenly they heard his voice.
‘Alan, here!’
The others moved round to join him and they all disappeared from sight, leaving the detectives tense and waiting.
After a while, Williams reappeared and climbed down quickly, jumping the last few feet to the floor of the chamber.
‘There’s definitely a passage up there. It’s round a twist in the rocks in the shadows, impossible to see from here, and someone’s been up there before us. There are some anchor bolts in the rocks so they’ve been using ropes. They’ve put the bolts in in quite a clever way so that you’d never notice them from down here.’
Oldroyd nodded. ‘That’s probably from when they hauled the body up there.’
‘They must have used a harness and they must have been strong, whoever they were. But the other thing is, the passage is nearly blocked off; you can’t get through at the moment. It’s what we call a boulder choke.’
‘Yes, the murderers will have tried to block it off after they dumped the body as an extra precaution. I don’t think that boulder choke happened naturally.’
‘Right, well, I’m off back to the surface to get some tools. I think we can knock a little of the rock away and make a hole big enough to crawl through.’
Oldroyd, Steph and Andy sat on the floor of the chamber and waited. Above them, they could hear assorted bangings and scrapings as the cavers worked to create a way through.
Carter spoke. ‘So the body was brought down through where we’ve walked, then through that tunnel up there into Jingling Pot?’
‘Yes, this way the much shorter distance makes it possible. They could have done it in an hour or so.’ Oldroyd looked around. ‘But I’ll bet it was still a terrible struggle to get the body up there.’
‘Worth it though, sir,’ said Steph. ‘It’s an unbelievable hiding place.’
‘Yes,’ said Carter, ‘but aren’t we forgetting something? The body was found in the middle of that Sump Passage. Geoff Whitaker walked into it. It wasn’t exactly hidden, was it?’
‘No,’ replied Oldroyd, ‘but I have a good idea how it came to be there. I’m just waiting to confirm my theory.’
‘You like to keep us guessing, sir,’ said Steph.
‘Well, it’s all part of the training; use your brains to work it out yourself. I’m not going to spoon feed you. You’ve seen all the evidence I’ve seen.’
At that moment there was a call.
‘OK, come on up here, we’re through.’
After scrambling up the side of the chamber, Carter found himself squeezing through a small hole between a boulder and the rock wall. As he puffed and panted, he again lamented his lack of fitness.
At the other side, he stood next to Oldroyd and Steph.
‘Be careful,’ warned Oldroyd. ‘Don’t forget that phrase “stay afee’ard”; I’m convinced there’s some danger here. “The Devil’s Passage” he calls this, don’t forget.’
Carter moved his helmet lamp around. They were in a narrow tunnel and would have to crawl forwards. What danger could there be? This wasn’t Lord of the Rings; there couldn’t be trolls, orcs or dragons. As he crawled along, Carter noticed that the sides of the tunnel were streaming with water; he was crawling and splashing through watery mud. Also, the roof and walls looked less solid, as if there could be a rock fall at any moment.
The sound of water was getting louder and louder. Water dripped on to Carter’s head; the passage widened slightly and he slipped on the muddy stones and lurched to the left. He banged his head on a huge boulder and his lamp was dislodged.
‘Shit!’
His hand scraped painfully on the rock and as he steadied himself, it slid down to the base of the boulder. With a shock, he felt something strange. Surely it was fabric, material? He adjusted his helmet and shone the light down. What he saw shocked even the experienced copper from the hard streets of inner-city London: it was a human arm partly covered with very frayed and tattered material. The arm itself was dried and wizened like an Egyptian mummy and it ended in a bony claw. It was sticking out from under the boulder.
‘Sir! Down here!’ Carter called to Oldroyd, but he was further down with no possibility of turning round. Steph, however, was behind him.
‘Look at this!’
She looked down and her eyes widened. ‘God, what is it?’
‘I don’t know; it looks human.’
‘Barely. It’s like something out of The Mummy. This whole bloody place gives me the creeps. We’ll have to move on and tell Sir when we catch up.’ She moved on past him.
Carter took a last look at the arm and further down the side of the boulder he caught sight of something white that looked like part of a rib cage.
He went on, feeling shaken by the fall and by what he’d seen. But worse was to follow. Steph was crawling on just in front of him as the sound of the water grew louder. The others were now some distance ahead. The tunnel twisted and turned sharply and all the time the roaring sound was getting nearer, louder and more menacing. This section was even wetter; water was pouring from the roof and the floor was virtually a stream. Carter was crawling over muddy rocks and slopping through the wetness. He saw Steph grasp an outcrop of rock to pull herself along but the rock seemed to move away from her. She fell away to her left and out of view.
For a moment, Carter was too stunned to react. The whole thing had happened so quickly and was almost bizarrely comic, as if she had fallen off the side of a stage in a comedy sketch.
Then he heard her shouting frantically. ‘Andy!’
He launched himself down the tunnel. When he reached the point where she’d disappeared, he saw that a section of the tunnel wall had collapsed, revealing a black hole. In the light from his helmet, Carter could see water dripping down, but could hear nothing landing anywhere. Steph was clinging on to a rock with her legs dangling into the blackness.
‘OK, hang on, I’ll get you.’
>
He looked into Steph’s terrified face and, reaching over, he gripped her around the arm near the shoulder and heaved. Steph gave a muffled scream, but pushed herself up on the rock with the other arm. Stones disappeared into the hole as she was dragged to safety. She lay shivering with shock and Carter put his arms around her. They were silent until they heard a voice calling down the passage.
‘We’d better move on; the boss’ll wonder where we are. I’ll go first this time.’
‘OK. And thank you,’ said Steph, giving him a warm smile.
They carried on down as the passage continued to twist. Carter turned a corner and almost crashed into Oldroyd and the three cavers who were crouched together on a ledge. The narrow tunnel had entered a much larger passage.
‘Steady,’ warned Oldroyd, ‘or you’ll fall into that.’ He nodded over the ledge. Carter looked over and his lamp shone on a fearsome sight. A deep black torrent of water was swirling at terrifying speed through the larger passageway below. The deafening roar echoed around the chamber. Steph joined the group and gasped as she looked down.
‘My God! You’d never get out of there alive.’
‘You’re right,’ replied Williams. They were all virtually having to shout in order to be heard.
‘But, sir, if your theory is right, isn’t this the place the body was found?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how? This is an underground river; you couldn’t walk through there at all, never mind find a body.’
‘It’s completely flooded now,’ replied Oldroyd, ‘but I think Alan here will confirm that normally this is a passage with a shallow stream running through it.’
Williams turned to Carter.
‘What you’ve got to remember is that the water levels change a lot in these systems and they can change very quickly, that’s why they’re so dangerous. It’s one of the greatest hazards we face. You never go down a deep system which is known to flood if rain is forecast. Once it starts to rain, the water can rise in minutes, flooding the system and cutting you off. The number of times we’ve had to rescue people trapped like that.’ He shook his head. ‘Some of them haven’t made it and we’ve had to pull out the drowned bodies.’
‘It was raining all last night and that’s what caused this torrent. It’s a good job too, otherwise we wouldn’t have heard the water back in Winter’s Gill,’ said Oldroyd.
Steph turned to him.
‘So, sir, you think the murderers brought the body down that passage we’ve come through and left it there somewhere?’
‘Yes, as you said: what an amazing hiding place.’
‘But in that case how did it get down there?’ She pointed down into the flooded Sump Passage. ‘Surely the body would have been left back up here; the whole point was to conceal it in a passage no one knew was there.’
Oldroyd nodded.
‘Yes, you’re right. Do you remember me saying, Andy, that I didn’t think we were meant to find the body where we did?’
‘Yes, sir, but who moved it then?’
Oldroyd gave a wry smile. ‘Nobody moved it.’
‘What? You’ve completely lost me, sir.’ He shook his head. ‘I remember you also saying that we’re detectives who don’t believe in magic.’
‘We don’t,’ continued Oldroyd. ‘I remember Tim Groves saying to me that the body got there somehow. And I realised we’d been assuming that someone moved it, but in fact something moved it.’
Steph exclaimed and pointed to the torrent.
‘You mean the water! That’s powerful enough to move a body.’
Carter frowned.
‘Yes, but it’s below our level, it’s not high enough.’
‘It’s not high enough now, but remember how it rained and rained over the weekend before the body was found. The water level in here must have been even higher, and the force even stronger, and it would have got up to where we are now and into the tunnel we’ve come through.’
He glanced solemnly at the underground river as if acknowledging its awesome power.
‘The body of David Atkins would have been picked up like a straw doll, swilled down into the main passage and then, of course, it got stuck further down where the passageway narrows. And that was where it was found when the water had subsided.
‘It was water, the thing that moves and changes everything in these caves. There’s no other force down here. It was listening to Schubert’s Trout Quintet that gave me the idea. I could hear the water coming down the stream and suddenly I realised what the answer might be.’
There was silence except for the roar of the water.
‘But sir . . .’
Oldroyd smiled. ‘Go on, Andy, good on you, keep pressing me.’
‘Well, how come the water was so low when Geoff Whitaker and his party came through not long after?’
‘That’s not difficult. The water subsides almost as quickly as it builds up. Once it’s not being fed by heavy rains, it quickly returns to normal levels. Whitaker would have monitored the weather situation and after a couple of dry days he would have known that the water would have been down and that Sump Passage was passable.’
Steph turned to Oldroyd. ‘Another thing, sir: you knew how the body had been moved down there, didn’t you, before we came down here?’
‘I was pretty sure. Remember the photographs taken by the CSIs? They were standing down there and some of the shots took in the whole passage up to the roof. Shine your helmet lamps up there.’
The beams of light moved up like searchlights raking the sky and they halted on the rocky roof of Sump Passage.
‘What can you see up there?’
The roof was cut with fissures and stalactites hung from the dripping rocks. Then Carter’s lamp illuminated something weird jammed into one of the cracks.
‘Up there – it looks like a log, a piece of wood.’
‘Yes,’ said Oldroyd, ‘and around it there’s a brownish foam stuck on the roof. That means that the water can sometimes reach to the very top of the passage. At some time or other that bit of branch or something has been brought down and it’s got caught up there.’
‘Very good, Chief Inspector,’ said Williams. ‘You’re right. It looks like this passage gets completely submerged when the weather is really wet. We knew this passage was impassable after heavy rain, but obviously no one’s ever seen just how high the water rises. We’ve found things like that in the roofs of other tunnels, sometimes quite high ones: the volume of water which passes through must be tremendous.’
‘Do you remember also,’ continued Oldroyd, ‘that John Baxter had been looking at the weather records on his computer just before he was murdered. I think he’d come to the same conclusion that we have and was checking on the rainfall in that crucial time before the body was discovered.’
‘So he knew about this passage?’
‘Most probably, and that was why he was killed. He must have rediscovered it with someone else and for some reason they’d kept quiet about it. He worked out how the body got into Sump Passage and so he knew who the murderer must be.’
‘That other person.’
Oldroyd nodded.
Carter was silent in admiration.
‘There’s something back here you need to take a look at, sir,’ said Steph.
Carter had been so mesmerised by the dark horror of the river and the unveiled truth of what had happened to Atkins that he’d forgotten what they’d discovered in the Devil’s Passage and Steph’s narrow escape.
Steph led the way back. Oldroyd and Williams examined the gruesome remains.
‘Poor bastard,’ said Williams, ‘but he’s been here a long time, I can tell you that.’
‘How long, do you think?’ asked Steph.
‘Difficult to tell,’ said Oldroyd. ‘It’s weird down here. Tim Groves told me that things don’t rot in the same way in this cold and dark, they go like mummies, you know, all wizened up. There’s not much left on him. He could have been here a very long time; ov
er a hundred years even. We’ll get a team down here to take this away for analysis. We may not be able to prove it, but I think we’re looking at the body of either Alfred Walker or Harold Lazenby, and I dare say the body of the other one is nearby.’
‘Who were they, sir?’ asked Steph.
‘Cavers from the time of Haverthwaite, the man who wrote that poem. Sir William Ingleby refers to them in his book. Walker and Lazenby were killed in the Devil’s Passage and then Haverthwaite and his friends abandoned exploration of it.’
‘Now we know why this was named the Devil’s Passage,’ said Williams. ‘It’s one of the most dangerous tunnels I’ve ever seen; it’s streaming with water everywhere and that’s made everything loose and liable to fall anytime. There’s shafts underneath it too, by the look of that one that’s just opened up; if you don’t get crushed by rock falls you could fall to your death.’
‘And with two bodies in here, there’s no wonder the tradition came down that this place is haunted. Now that is interesting.’ Oldroyd was crawling down the side of the boulder that had obviously crushed the unfortunate victim.
‘Steady on, sir.’ Carter was behind his boss, who was straining to reach something. After Steph’s experience, he was terrified of another hole opening up in this treacherous place.
‘I can see the remains of an old coat or something, Carter. I just want to feel around inside it and . . . Yes!’ Oldroyd shouted in triumph and reversed out of the narrow crevice.
The triumphant smile was on his face again and he held something up.
‘Hold that, Carter. I think we’ll find it’s very similar to this.’
He felt in his pocket and brought out the plastic bag he had been carrying around with him since the first day of the investigation. Inside was the rusty iron hook and Carter held up the other, almost a replica.
