Hell's Mouth

by BATEMAN, A P

  “Mitchell has something to hide. That’s why he took the shots. Nothing’s going to halt someone’s progress like a couple of three-oh-eight bullets at their feet.” Ogilvy reached for a tumbler and the decanter of amber liquid. O’Bryan supposed it was brandy. It seemed like the drink to have in one’s study. “I take it you won’t be joining me?” He smiled as O’Bryan shook his head. “If I know Mitchell, it’ll be alcohol and tobacco. Cigarettes without the duty. Marvellous, all I need is attention from HM Revenue and Customs. What with my aversion to VAT and taxes…”

  “I’ll stop you there…” O’Bryan interrupted. “I have reason to believe that Pete Mitchell has brought illegal immigrants into the country, using your smuggling cave as a place to imprison them, culminating in them being exploited in either modern-day slavery or used in the sex slave trade…”

  “He wouldn’t!” Ogilvy blurted. He stared at O’Bryan for a moment, then shook his head and picked up his drink. He swilled the contents down, drained them in one gulp. He screwed up his face as the liquid burned its way down. “Oh, for God’s sake…”

  “You know it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination, don’t you?”

  He nodded, though somewhat reluctantly. “And you think Clive Gowndry and John Pascoe are involved as well?”

  “It would appear so,” answered O’Bryan.

  Ogilvy seemed to flop in his chair, like the stuffing had been knocked out of him. “Then I’m bloody doomed,” he said. “It will all come out… The police and HMRC will look into all my dealings…”

  O’Bryan nodded. “Oh, they certainly will. But you deserve it. You deserve to be investigated, you deserve to be fined, to have your properties seized and go to prison for a long, long time.” O’Bryan turned and walked to the door. He looked back at the man behind the desk. He was a shadow of his former self, broken. “You almost had me. I almost felt you were okay. I mean, a posh twat with a dodgy past and a certain flair for skirting the law, but okay nonetheless. But you never thought to ask who Mitchell trafficked, or how many people. You never thought to ask from where, nor what has become of them. You and Mitchell are two peas in a pod. One has money and privilege, the other has come from nowhere, but I’m sure he has accumulated a great deal from other people’s misery. You both have. You, Mitchell, Gowndry and Pascoe are all one in the same. They just moved on without you, left the deadwood behind so to speak.” O’Bryan opened the door and left. Ogilvy said nothing and remained motionless behind the desk, staring at the floor.

  32

  O’Bryan took out his iPhone and switched off the recording function. He readied it again and slipped it back into his pocket. Two for two. Both Gowndry’s and Ogilvy’s confessions. He suspected that neither would be permissible in a court of law, but difficult to ignore, especially depending on how the evidence was either used or leaked. He looked for Sarah on his way out. He checked the corridor and the great hall. The gathering was well underway and the sound was of chatter and clinking glasses, punctuated by hoots of laughter, some sincere, some not. He walked on, checked the self-service bar. There were people in here, but this room was quieter. Business talk, or assignations. A room where privacy had been sought away from the boisterousness of the main event. He couldn’t see any sign of Sarah, and in her red dress with flowing red hair around her shoulders, she would be difficult to miss. He checked beside the bar, but noticed that Gowndry had gone. He would have come round with a headache and a little worse for wear. But they had been clean punches, bruising and a split lip. The money shot had been delivered to the point of the man’s chin. A real lights-out punch, but no broken teeth or shattered eye sockets. He knew the man would not be making an official complaint. There was too much for the him to lose. Clive Gowndry was in as deep as he could get.

  Lucinda Ogilvy was no longer taking the tickets, the night was in full swing and it looked like the great and the good were in attendance. The table was empty, except for an arrangement of gift bags which had been put out after the last guests had been admitted. O’Bryan had paid a total of four-hundred pounds for both his and Sarah’s tickets, so he swiped two of the bags on the way out. He glanced inside as he walked down the steps and across the gravelled driveway. The spotlights pointed on the house gave enough ambient light for him to see by, and he saw vouchers for spa days, a selection of locally made chocolates, a voucher for a meal at a local restaurant and some sort of scented candle with a sticker of a tin mine on the base, so he guessed this was some sort of advertising loss-leader for a local candle maker. He was sure that Sarah would enjoy both bags. They reminded him of children’s party bags. His wife had always had them waiting for her guests as they left Chloe’s birthday parties. He smiled. In his day it had been a slice of cake and a balloon if you were lucky.

  When he reached his car he opened the boot and put the two bags into the cubby, then took out the torch and a pair of heavy duty bolt-croppers that had set him back eighty-pounds from a local hardware and home store chain. Among other things, he had bought a sixteen-ounce claw hammer as well. He wasn’t a practical man, in that he lived in a rented apartment and seldom needed to do DIY, but he figured he knew the fundamentals to getting those wrought iron gates open.

  O’Bryan set out across the lawn to the side of the house, switched on the beam of the torch and shone it out across the rear lawns. He saw the ground slope down beyond and saw lights in the distance, which he took to be those of Point Geddon. Downhill was the right direction, so he struck out, keeping the beam on its lowest setting to avoid being too conspicuous. The torch was an internet special he had owned for several years, a SWAT/special forces model that claimed to be the most powerful hand-held model on the market. Whether that was true or not, he knew he hadn’t seen many brighter.

  A barrier of stock fencing separated the lawns from the open field. It was a three-rung iron fence around five-feet high and designed to keep the deer or farm animals off the two-tone striped lawn. He climbed over and dropped lightly onto the ground. He instantly felt the unevenness of the ground underfoot, the grass was longer as well. The terrain became rougher and steeper, and he started to slip on early dew forming on the grass, his shoes were more suited to bars and great halls than to rambling. He turned the light setting up and twisted the aperture to get a narrower, but more concentrated beam. The light shone powerfully out to three-hundred metres and on the edge of that lay the woodland he could see from the other side of the creek at Barlooe.

  O’Bryan reached the fringe of the woods and switched off the torch. He remained still for a good five minutes, taking in his surroundings and listening for the night sounds. His ears became more accustomed, as did his eyes, but he would need the torch again in a moment and that would render his night vision useless once more. He could pick out the sound of early fallen leaves rustling on the ground, the noise of small rodents or perhaps a fox breaking through the undergrowth. The occasional screeches, he put down to owls or foxes, he wasn’t sure which. But he did know that in the countryside at night, there was always sounds of the hunters and the hunted. The food chain in constant motion.

  When he switched the torch on again, he used the low-power setting and widened the beam. He also kept it low, searching the ground in front of him for the huge granite boulders that would tell him he was near. The woods looked different at night, and from this approach, he wasn’t sure he was on track. He could see lights across the river, this time he figured, or at least hoped, it was Barlooe. This meant he was also nearing the other end of the woods. He swept the torch in wider arcs, switched up the power and closed the width of the beam down. He caught sight of the first granite boulder, the size of a small hatchback, and looked down for the trail. After a few minutes he was on it and he turned around and headed back up hill, following the trail around on a loose parallel with the creek. He made his way through the boulders, feeling a little uneasy at being hemmed in, and thoroughly relieved when he came out into the opening and saw the entrance to the cave.

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sp; He played the light on the gates, took advantage of illuminating the entire mouth of the cave, but noticed it veered sharply to the left. He used the bolt-croppers to snap the hasp of the padlock, surprised at how easy it had been. The bolt-croppers were pneumatic, giving tension a hundred times what O’Bryan could have mustered alone. He threaded the chain through the bars and let them drop to the dry earth. There was no needed for the hammer, which he had tucked into his waistband, but he did not know whether he would need the bolt-croppers again, so kept them with him as he set off down the tunnel.

  33

  O’Bryan could hear them before he saw them. There was the sound of muffled voices and crying. But it was more than that. There was an air of misery. He couldn’t think what it was, but as he rounded another bend in the tunnel, which had been gradually tapering smaller in overall dimension, he could feel the depression in the atmosphere.

  The walls of the tunnel were a mixture of solid rock with pick-marks and drill holes where dynamite or black powder charges would once have been used to cut through the rock. In places the tunnel was boarded with rotten-looking planks. Sure enough, in these areas, a fine dust of rock debris and dried soil rained between the planks lining the ceiling. Just a fine and occasional sprinkling, like shaking icing sugar over a cake. O’Bryan looked at the ceiling ominously. Ahead of him the roof had been haphazardly propped with four-by-four posts. These looked more like rotten wood than freshly milled timber. This section of the tunnel was some two-feet lower than the previous section and looked to have sunk over time. At just over six-feet tall, he came close to scraping his head on the rafters.

  He played the beam across the walls and ceiling, hesitated when he saw the build-up of debris on the floor, but the voices spurred him onwards. He could hear the suffering, the fear, the uncertainty. He was no fan of enclosed spaces, had suffered and panicked in the boot of his car, but he needed to keep moving forwards.

  O’Bryan spread the beam of the torch so that it illuminated the entire tunnel in front and to each side of him. The light was clear and blue-white. It turned the tunnel into daylight, but when he glanced over his shoulder, the tunnel was a black hole of total darkness. He decided right there and then that he would not add caving to his bucket list of activities. He could hear more voices now, and then, as he rounded the next bend, he could see movement ahead. The voices ceased and there was a sense of panic in the air. Hushed tones, quickly spoken sentences which sounded rushed and reciprocated. Another few paces and the light picked out bars on both sides of the tunnel where recesses had been dug or blasted out of the rock. These would have been stores for rum and tobacco and other goods brought in to avoid the customs officers over two-hundred years ago. A time when Malforth Manor would have been more than just a businessman’s residence, but the centre of commerce and employment to the surrounding villages. This cave and stores would have either been constructed right under the Lord of the Manor’s nose without his knowledge, by the very workers he employed, or was perhaps the reason for the manor owner’s increasing wealth. A secret venture to keep the locals onside and in cheap alcohol and tobacco. O’Bryan would hazard a guess that this storage cavern was indeed directly under the manor house itself. In which case, there was most likely a route into the manor, if it hadn’t been sealed at some point over the years. Otherwise, there seemed little point in excavating so far.

  O’Bryan shone the torch around him. There was no bounty in these dugouts. Not unless you counted humans as commodity. He lowered the torch from the blinking faces and switched to the lowest power setting. Three women, O’Bryan guessed to be anywhere from their late-teens to their early-twenties, stood at the bars to the cell on his right. He looked at the cell to his left. A man and a woman stood huddled together. They were attempting to shield a child of around nine or ten. O’Bryan couldn’t see for sure, but he’d bet anything that it was a little girl. The same little girl who had lost her teddy bear three nights earlier.

  “I’m here to help,” he said quietly, slowly. “Does anybody speak English?”

  The man nodded. “Little Engleesh…” he replied even more slowly. “I am Abdul…”

  “I speak English. Who are you?” a voice behind echoed out confidently from the other cell.

  O’Bryan turned around, saw one of the young women standing slightly further forward than the other two. He raised the torch, not intrusively, just enough to highlight her features. He could see dried blood on her face, her clothes filthy and ripped. There was an overwhelming fetid smell, an overpowering stench of both sweat and urine and faeces. It reminded O’Bryan of a trip he once had with Chloe to the zoo on a hot day. The domestic farmyard petting enclosure of goats in particular. He tried not to wrinkle his nose. He could see that the women had used a corner of their cell as a toilet. Near the bars, on the other side of the cell, cases of bottled water and an outer box of ready to eat camping/trekking meals in foil bags had been broken into, empty packets lay strewn next to the box. There were candles burning, but he hadn’t noticed them at first due to the power of his torch. It was a medieval prison. Horrifyingly basic and would have been terrifying in the silent darkness of the tunnel.

  “I am a policeman, a detective. I am a senior ranking officer,” he said reassuringly. “My name is Ross O’Bryan. You can call all me Ross…”

  “I’ll call you Mohammed, Buddha or Jesus Christ almighty if you get us the hell out of here…” she said sharply. Her accent was middle-east meets Disney and she had a spark in her eye and a look of defiance on her face. She looked at the bolt-croppers in his hand. “Are you going to use those, or what?”

  O’Bryan snapped to and searched for the padlock on the chain securing the cell bars. He put the handle of the torch in his mouth and used both hands to operate the bolt-croppers. This padlock was stronger than the one securing the entrance and O’Bryan had to take several attempts, but eventually it pinged off and the chain separated and the woman stepped forwards together and grabbed the bars. O’Bryan pulled and they pushed and the bars opened. Two of the women rushed across the tunnel and flung themselves at the bars of the other cell. There were kisses and hugging, as best they could and the woman who had done the talking hugged O’Bryan in a way he’d never felt before. A total and complete show of gratitude with a sincerity he was barely able to comprehend. She let go and joined the others, who were by now looking expectantly at him to get the padlock off. He wasted no more time, worked on the bolt and had it cut cleanly within a minute. The man pushed the door out and hugged the three young women, his eyes closed as he savoured ever particle of them, as if every second of the moment was regaining an hour stolen from him.

  The man hugged O’Bryan and he dropped the bolt-croppers, taken by surprise and shaken at the power of the hug. He tapped the man on the back and the man released him, his wife was already in an embrace with her four daughters.

  “Thank you, thank you,” the man said.

  O’Bryan was about to tell him it was alright, but the sudden illumination of the cavern startled him, and everyone else. The torch was bright, but the complete white light from the half-dozen one-hundred watt bulbs overhead was incomparable. He looked around him, noted that the cavern was indeed the end of the line. The rest of the tunnel was sealed with concrete blocks and mortar. They had been cut neatly into the curvature of the tunnel walls. He watched the tunnel, a sense of foreboding and indecision upon him all at once.

  Clive Gowndry rounded the bend. He carried a shotgun. Ornate and shining in the bright light. O’Bryan wondered if Ogilvy’s display fan of shotguns on the wall had a missing space. As the man neared he could see he had bound his middle finger to his ring finger with a makeshift bandage of what looked like a strip of linen napkin. It made the way he held the weapon look somewhat awkward, but his trigger finger was unaffected and wrapped around the forward trigger.

  “Oh, isn’t that touching…” he said, smiling. “A family reunion. Well, it won’t last long. There are plans for this lot.”
r />   O’Bryan stared at him as he approached. He shook his head. “Like the others?”

  “Hopefully not,” he said. “They were quite a handful, the Elmaleh’s, or whatever the hell they were called…”

  “Qasim, a forty-five-year-old doctor. Yara also a doctor, thirty-nine,” O’Bryan paused. “Amira, aged Twelve, Fatima aged Eleven and Mohammed, aged ten…” he spat at him. “And you killed them. You could at least remember their names…”

  Gowndry shook his head. “I didn’t kill anyone… That was Pascoe and Mitchell. But the trouble was, I don’t think we softened them up enough before putting them to work,” he added.

  “Meaning? Is this what this is about?” he asked, waving a hand towards the cell. “Dehumanising them? Making them want more and appreciating it when they got it?”

  “Sort of,” Gowndry smiled. “These girls will be pleased for a hot meal and a shower and clean clothes. Having to fuck a dozen different men a day won’t seem such a hardship when they know how tough things can be.”

  O’Bryan shook his head. “You are all idiots. I don’t know about these people, but the Elmaleh family endured years of hardship in Syria. Little food, no clean water, hardly any medical attention. No heating in the harsh winters and no respite in the hot, dusty summers. Then they set out to trek across Turkey and Europe to get here. Month upon month on the trail, roads and in the back of lorries. They only knew hardship. That’s why you couldn’t break them down.”

  “No, they were a handful alright. But we’ve learned. The woman was a good fuck, she got the message. She seemed to catch on to what was best for her family. But the husband…” he shrugged. “We just couldn’t get through to him.”

  “And…” O’Bryan wasn’t sure he wanted the answer, but he asked anyway. It was the detective in him. “…the children?”