The kill call bcadf-9

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Some people didn’t want underground bunkers on their land,’ said Headon. ‘It was usually the bigger landowners who refused. Farmers were a bit more co-operative. There was a little bit of money to be made out of it, but not much.’

  ‘And Edendale?’

  ‘Edendale was a master post. It had the radio set.’

  Cooper knew that Headon and Falconer were both enthusiasts, the kind who wanted to talk about their obsession. The trick was to filter out the information from the mass of reminiscence. But he was glad of the excuse to get out of the way, to interest himself in something else and let Diane Fry bring her case to a conclusion back at West Street. She didn’t need him getting under her feet. In fact, she didn’t need him at all. She’d said so herself.

  ‘The ROC was stood down in 1991, you said, David?’

  ‘That’s when the last posts were closed.’

  ‘They thought they didn’t need the Observer Corps quite so much by then?’

  ‘Right.’

  Following Headon’s directions, Cooper swung the Toyota on to a narrow single-track lane that ran uphill between high dry-stone walls. Throughout the area, wallers were hard at work repairing the ravages of the Peak District winter. They passed one waller who had an old DAF towing a small caravan. If you had a long job to do, it was easier if you could live on site, he supposed.

  ‘But do you all still keep in touch?’

  ‘Some of us,’ said Headon. ‘There’s an association, you see. We have a newsletter, a benevolent fund, social get-togethers occasionally. I think there’s even a forum on the internet.’

  ‘So what are these underground posts like?’

  ‘Pretty basic. There’s a twenty-foot vertical ladder leading down to an underground chamber, seven feet wide and sixteen feet long. That housed the observers, their bunk beds, generators, the operations desk, other equipment. Conditions were very primitive.’

  ‘No running water, or mains electricity,’ chipped in Falconer.

  ‘Yes, and the only communication with the outside world was a Tele-Talk device connected to Group HQ, and of course the warning receiver. You needed dedicated people, prepared to lock themselves away in those conditions.’

  ‘Let’s be honest. We were a bit out of the ordinary,’ said Falconer. ‘The general public reaction was “If the bomb drops, we’re all going to die anyway, so why bother?”’

  Cooper looked at him through his rear-view mirror. He was about the same age as David Headon. They were two old men, living on their memories. The further in your past a period was, the more it started to seem like the best days of your life.

  ‘There was a Peter Cook sketch once,’ said Cooper. ‘From the Footlights, maybe: “ When the four-minute warning sounds…”’

  ‘“… hold your breath and jump into a paper bag.” Yes, I remember.’

  ‘The Government’s preparations for nuclear war were ridiculed, weren’t they?’

  ‘Well, I blame the media for that,’ said Headon. ‘The public got the idea that if there was a nuclear attack, everyone would be wiped out and there’d be nothing left except some kind of radioactive wasteland. That’s why the advice sounded ludicrous. But if people took sensible precautions, most of the population would have survived an attack. You just had to make sure you stayed indoors until the fallout dispersed.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  Cooper had grown up accustomed to the idea that history was all around him — many thousands of years of history, right there, visible in the Peak District landscape. Stone circles and Iron Age hill forts were curiosities to be explored, the bumps and hollows of ancient lead mining added an intriguing feature to many parts of the county. Tudor manor houses and the vast mansion of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth were obvious historical landmarks. Eyam itself was a monument to a seventeenth century disaster.

  But more recent history was sometimes overlooked. Apart from the Dambusters museum at Derwent Reservoir, there was precious little to remind people of the events of the Second World War. And the Cold War, even less.

  Perhaps it was because those events were still within living memory for so many people. The years when the world was on the brink of extinction didn’t need a museum or visitor centre, because they were still clear and vivid in the minds of those who’d lived through them, and survived. Well, it was only true of the older generation now. Cooper couldn’t recall being taught many details about the Cold War when he was at school.

  But then he thought about the dates again. Of course, the Cold War had still been going on when he was a child, with the likes of Reagan and Thatcher rattling their sabres at the Soviets. All through the nineties, new Trident submarines were still being rolled out. What were they called? Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant. They sounded much like the names of foxhounds, really.

  In 1991, John Major had been in his first year as prime minister, and George Bush Senior was still president of the USA. The pre-Blair, pre-Clinton years. It seemed like a millennium ago.

  ‘So, 1991…’ said Cooper. ‘The Soviet Union collapsed. The Berlin Wall had come down…’

  ‘Yes, and a suddenly there was a big hole in the nation’s defences,’ said Headon. ‘That September, our Chief Observer had a letter asking him to arrange the clearance of the post, and return the equipment and keys. It was adding insult to injury. Frankly, we told them “sod that”. They could collect the stuff themselves. And that was the last we heard from the ROC.’

  Diane Fry took Deborah Rawson into a vacant interview room. The woman looked more nervous today, which was what she’d been hoping for. Nervous people were more likely to tell the truth. They found it difficult to concentrate on maintaining a lie. All she needed was one slip, one flaw in Deborah’s story.

  ‘Mrs Rawson, you said earlier in the week that you didn’t get involved in your husband’s business, you didn’t even know exactly who he dealt with.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, I have to tell you, I don’t believe that’s entirely true.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you? Well, I’m not lying.’

  ‘Why should we believe you, when you lied to us before?’

  Deborah smiled. ‘I only tell lies when I’ve got something to gain by it.’

  Fry studied her thoughtfully. She still didn’t trust Deborah Rawson, but her last answer sounded pretty much like the truth.

  ‘You must know that your husband was supplying horses to an abattoir, for meat.’

  ‘Meat.’ She pulled an expression of disgust. ‘Do people really eat horses?’

  ‘Yes, lots of them.’

  ‘Not in this country, though, I bet. It would be the French.’

  ‘Did your husband sometimes travel abroad on business?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes.’

  ‘To France?’

  She hesitated. ‘Yes. He flew to Paris from East Midlands Airport three or four times a year. Brussels, too, now and then. So he said.’

  Fry looked at her curiously, detecting a change of tone in her last comment. Watching Deborah Rawson’s face, she saw a faraway look in her eyes, as if at a memory or a recurrent, familiar thought.

  ‘Mrs Rawson, did you have any reason to think that your husband might be having an affair?’

  The woman’s eyes focused sharply on her again as she tried to rearrange her expression. ‘What makes you say that? I’ve been following your logic so far — that Patrick went up to Derbyshire to meet either a seller or buyer, and they had an argument of some kind, and Patrick got hurt. I can understand that. I can live with it. But why are you asking me this question about him having an affair? What has that got to do with anything?’

  It was the longest speech Deborah Rawson had made during Fry’s visit, by quite a long way. In relative terms, it amounted to an emotional outburst.

  ‘We have to keep our minds open to all the possibilities,’ said Fry. ‘In this case, it might not have been a business contact he was meeting. The De
rby horse sale isn’t until Saturday, yet he went up a few days early. What he was planning to do, we don’t know. You never asked your husband who he was meeting, and he never felt the need to tell you, did he?’

  ‘No.’

  Deborah regarded her stonily as she waited for Fry to explain further.

  ‘So the possibility is there. He definitely had the opportunity. In fact, you practically gave him free rein, if you showed so little interest in his movements. Are you really telling me that you never once had the slightest suspicion about those days away here and there, the trips he took to Paris…?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be human if it hadn’t crossed my mind.’

  ‘Of course. And I imagine you must have checked up on him at some time?’

  The woman sighed and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I can’t deny it, I suppose.’

  ‘What made you think your husband might be in trouble?’

  ‘Patrick? Anyone with such a short fuse was bound to end up in trouble one day.’

  ‘And he did.’

  ‘It seems so.’

  Fry let a few moments pass in silence as she read her notes, allowing Deborah Rawson to wonder what question was coming next.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘we’ve talked to Naomi Widdowson and Adrian Tarrant this afternoon. They’ve told us about the arrangement you had with them.’

  Now it was Deborah’s turn to be silent. Fry could see the mental calculation going on. It was written all over her face. Deborah was running a few scenarios through her head, deciding how much Fry knew, what the best response would be, deciding on the least incriminating thing to say. The woman wasn’t a very good actress.

  ‘They were only supposed to give Patrick a scare,’ she said finally. ‘To teach him a lesson. There was never any intention of hurting him.’

  But Fry shook her head at that. ‘No, Mrs Rawson, that won’t do. I know all about the payment you made to Adrian Tarrant. Three thousand pounds. That wasn’t just to teach your husband a lesson. That money was to make sure he died.’

  35

  The Edendale ROC post had been located in a field off a back lane running between Edendale and Calver. It didn’t look much on the surface. A square concrete structure about three feet high, green paint flaking from its surface. A few feet away stood a smaller ventilation turret with a louvred opening. And there were a few smaller protrusions here and there, whose purpose wasn’t clear. Cooper staggered as his foot hit something like a green steel mushroom lurking in the rough grass.

  ‘That’s the top of the blast pipe for the bomb power indicator,’ said Headon. ‘A lot of people trip over that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘These bunkers are still quite common — there were over fifteen hundred of them originally, all over the country, built in the late fifties and early sixties. When we were stood down in 1991, most of them were just abandoned, and a lot have been demolished. You’d never know some of them were there. Often, the only evidence you’ll see of an underground post is a couple of redundant telegraph poles on a field boundary.’

  ‘I never knew any of them were there,’ said Cooper. ‘Do people visit them?’

  ‘Sometimes. There are a few enthusiasts, or old observers. You have to be careful, though. You should always go with someone.’

  Headon pointed to a fenced section of ground with a small gate. There certainly wasn’t much to see.

  ‘On the surface, there’s the shaft, of course,’ he said. ‘That’s where the ground-zero indicator was mounted. Over there is the ventilator turret, and the mounting point for the fixed survey meter, with the top of the blast pipe near it.’

  ‘What’s left inside the bunker?’

  ‘This one still contains the bunk beds, mattresses, chairs, kettles, a few other odds and ends. We had to be self-sufficient, you know. If fallout did occur near a post, the observers could hardly pack up and go home. It could have taken a couple of weeks for the air outside to clear enough for the crew to be relieved. These posts were designed to close hatches to the outside world until the danger passed.’

  Headon stood by the hatch at the entrance to the shaft and patted the concrete with a gesture of fondness.

  ‘I was number three observer,’ he said. ‘It was one of my jobs to climb up through the hatch and sound the siren when Attack Warning Red was received.’

  ‘Attack Warning Red?’

  ‘The warning of an imminent nuclear attack. Attack Warning Black was the fallout alert. Strike command would pass a warning to the carrier control points in police stations, then it was transmitted across the network to activate the sirens.’

  ‘If the receiver hadn’t been accidentally left on and flattened the battery,’ said Falconer.

  ‘Yes, provided the circuits hadn’t been knocked out by a thunderstorm. There was absolutely no EMP protection.’

  They both laughed, sharing their hilarious memories of British incompetence in the face of a nuclear holocaust.

  ‘As number three, I also had to look after the ground-zero indicator,’ said Headon, ‘which was a sort of bread bin with four pinhole cameras. That meant coming upstairs. It would have been the most dangerous job of all, if the balloon had ever gone up.’

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘On to the surface.’

  ‘We were part of 8 Group, based in Coventry,’ added Falconer. ‘But posts were organized in clusters. Edendale was post 8/A5. We had Buxton to the west, but the other two posts in ‘A’ cluster were out at Beauchief and Wickersley.’

  ‘Those are in South Yorkshire,’ said Cooper. ‘So each cluster covered a pretty big area, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cooper thought he detected a momentary exchange of glances between the two men. But it was very brief, and he didn’t have a clue what it could mean. He’d probably imagined it, anyway.

  ‘Were there other local clusters?’

  ‘Of course. B-Cluster covered the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire border — Ashover, Whitwell, Farnsfield. There were two more clusters in the south of the county.’

  Cooper located the places mentioned on his map. Each of those other clusters had a post not too far away, but their coverage spread outwards to the east, west and south. A-Cluster looked odd, though — the three posts were pretty much in a straight line from Buxton across the southern outskirts of Sheffield and Rotherham. The line ran right through Eyam.

  ‘Just four posts in A-Cluster?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Was there anyone called Clay in your post crew?’

  They both shook their heads. ‘No, not here,’ said Headon.

  ‘Or Outram?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  Finally, Cooper showed them a copy of the photograph taken from Michael Clay’s laptop case.

  ‘Not our crew,’ said Headon.

  ‘No,’ agreed Falconer. ‘The big chap looks familiar, though.’ But then he shook his head. ‘I probably saw him at an annual camp somewhere.’

  ‘You don’t recognize the building?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Those Orlit posts are long gone. They were for aircraft recognition.’

  Disappointed, Cooper looked down at the green-painted hatch cover on top of the shaft, and the ventilator turret close beside it.

  ‘Is it possible to take a look inside the bunker?’

  There was that glance again. He was sure of it this time. Something they didn’t want him to see down there? A locked underground bunker in the middle of nowhere presented all kinds of opportunities. He was just starting to run through them in his head when Falconer nodded.

  ‘Yes, OK.’

  ‘I can?’

  ‘There’s no light down there, though. We only ever had a battery for power.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ve got a good torch in my car.’

  Falconer produced a set of keys and opened the padlocks on the hatch. Then he inserted a narrow rod like an Allen key into a slot on the cover and twisted it. The iron cover lifted
on its levered hinge much more easily than Cooper had expected.

  ‘There’s a counterweight,’ said Headon.

  ‘So I see.’

  The mechanism looked old, and rust was showing through the green paint in patches. But it worked easily enough, so someone must have done a bit of maintenance on the post in the last eighteen years.

  Cooper mounted the step and looked into the shaft. A metal ladder ran vertically down for about twenty feet, and in the light from the open hatch he could see oily water glimmering at the bottom through the mesh of an iron grille set into the floor.

  ‘There isn’t too much water,’ said Falconer, peering over his shoulder. ‘This was always a dry post — not like some of the others. They could flood right up to the shaft if you didn’t pump them out regularly. That’s the sump you can see there. You won’t get your feet too wet.’

  ‘I’m not bothered.’

  He clambered gingerly over the edge and found a rung of the ladder with his foot. There wasn’t much room in the shaft, and anyone overweight might have had a bit of trouble. When he’d climbed down a few feet, he looked up again at the sky, only for something heavy to hit him hard on the back of the head, making him see stars for a few seconds.

  ‘Oh, sh-!’

  ‘Sorry!’ called Headon. ‘We should have warned you to watch your head on the counterweight. If you go down in a crouch, it catches your back, and if you straighten up it gives you a crack on the skull. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ said Cooper, though he felt anything but. There’d be a lump on the back of his head tomorrow morning.

  He landed at the bottom of the shaft with a small splash. Falconer was right, there was only about an inch of water, not enough even to wet more than the soles of his boots.

  ‘Are you coming down?’

  ‘One of us should stay up on top, for safety,’ said Falconer. ‘We don’t want the hatch blowing shut, do we?’

  There was just a moment then, as Cooper looked up at the two faces silhouetted against the sky twenty feet above him, when a small spurt of panic ran through his chest. He couldn’t make out the faces of the two men well enough to see what their expressions were, or whether they were exchanging that secretive little glance.