‘Do I get to find out who the member of the public is?’
Blake pursed his lips. ‘Sorry. They’re on witness protection. You know how this works, Diane.’
‘Yes. They’re putting themselves at serious risk to testify. You must have done some pretty smooth talking, sir.’
‘You know, I don’t like to hear you call me “sir”, Diane. It was always “Gareth”, wasn’t it?’
‘It was, but…’
Fry stopped, realizing that she didn’t quite know how to put into words what she was feeling at this moment. Blake was trying to be friendly, of course. But his insistence on his first name was the way he would talk to a nervous defendant he wanted to put at ease.
It was a clear signal that their relationship wasn’t going to be a professional one. They weren’t to be considered a DS and a DI working together, no longer colleagues who could safely share information fully with each other. From this moment, from the second she called him ‘Gareth’, she wouldn’t be a police officer any more. She’d be the victim.
Now Blake changed tack, thinking that she was on side. Hit her with the bad news.
‘I’m afraid the conviction rate in rape cases is still very low in this country.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
Blake tilted his head in acknowledgement. ‘Of course you do. And I’m sure you’re aware, too, that there’s a lot of pressure to improve conviction rates.’
‘Absolutely. The inference from the poor figures being that the police don’t take rape allegations seriously enough.’
‘Well, that’s a perception the public might take away from the statistics. We know it isn’t true, though, don’t we? Generally speaking. There are lots of other factors that make convictions difficult to achieve, especially in cases where the defendant is known to the victim.’
‘Like the fact that it’s impossible to provide objective evidence on whether consent was given.’
‘Exactly. It always comes down to one person’s word against another. And juries don’t like that. They want to be presented with evidence. We’re handicapped by those old-fashioned notions of people being innocent until proven guilty, and having to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. When it’s just a question of “ he says, she says ”, there’s always going to be room for reasonable doubt. It would take a piss-poor barrister not to ram that point firmly into the heads of a jury.’
‘Or a defendant who’s not very convincing on the stand?’
Blake smiled. ‘Ah, yes. There are some people who just look so guilty that jurors will convict them whatever the evidence. But that’s the chance you take in a jury system, isn’t it?’
‘Have you lost many convictions turned over as unsound?’
‘Through prejudiced juries?’
‘Yes.’
‘One or two. The information age is a killer.’
The information age. Fry knew what he meant. For many decades, newspapers had been subject to restrictions on what they could publish during a trial without being guilty of contempt of court and prejudicing a jury. But the internet had changed all that. There were archives of news stories from the time of an offence being committed, or from a suspect’s arrest, which could be accessed at the click of a key. For many jurors, it was too much of a temptation not to do a bit of research for themselves. The Court of Appeal had quashed convictions as unsound on those grounds alone. Too much information. A real twenty-first-century curse.
She realized that everyone in the room was looking at her again. Had she been asked a question? She would be a hopeless witness on the stand if her attention wandered from the question so easily.
‘So what do you say, Diane?’ asked Blake.
‘I need time.’
‘Of course. All the time you want.’
Fry looked at Superintendent Branagh, and thought she might have detected a tiny hint of sympathy in her eyes. She thought of all the times she’d observed the behaviour of victims and felt a twinge of contempt at their weakness, wanted to tell them that it wasn’t so bad as all that, for God’s sake, have a bit of backbone and do what you have to do.
And Fry had so often seen people going into court to confront their past. She knew the worst part was waiting in the witness room, and the long walk down the corridor to take the stand. She’d watched people taking that walk. It might only be a few yards, but when you were going to face your own demons, it could seem like a million lonely miles.
For herself, Fry knew that the long walk down that corridor would be the most difficult thing she’d ever done in her life.
41
As Cooper drove through Birchlow towards Rough Side Farm, he noticed that there was now just one car parked behind the village hall. He almost missed it through his rain-streaked window, but for a brief flash of bright metallic blue, which made him stop and reverse a few yards to take a better look. A blue Mercedes. Had the same car been there on Wednesday? He had no idea.
Cooper drew into a lay-by just past the church and called the office.
‘Gavin, what sort of car does Michael Clay drive? Isn’t it a Mercedes?’
‘Yes. Do you want the reg?’
‘Please.’
Murfin read the registration number to him, spelling it out in the standard phonetic alphabet.
‘Romeo, Echo, Zero, Eight…’
Even before he’d finished, Cooper knew he had the right car. And he knew he had the answer to another mystery as well.
‘Is Diane around, Gavin?’
‘She’s just come down from upstairs. But you don’t want to talk to her, Ben.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Take my advice, mate. I’ve just seen her face, and you do not want to talk to her.’
‘Gavin, put her on, please.’
Murfin sighed. ‘Stand by for the nuclear fallout, then. I gave you the four-minute warning. I just hope you’ve got your tin hat on.’
A moment later, Fry came on the phone. ‘Yes, what’s happening?’
Well, all or nothing, supposed Cooper.
‘Diane, can you come out and meet me at Birchlow, to visit Rough Side Farm?’
‘Is that the Massey place?’
‘Yes. I think it could be important. I’m sorry if it’s a bad time, but there’s something — ’
‘Anything,’ said Fry. ‘Anything. I’ll be straight there.’
Peter Massey wanted so much to talk. It was impossible to tell what had held him back before. Some instinct to put off the moment, a hope that the whole thing might be forgotten? Who could tell? But as soon as Cooper asked the right question, the words poured out of him as if the act of talking made him feel a lot better.
‘Mr Massey, did someone else come to visit you last week?’ said Cooper when Fry had arrived and they’d fetched the farmer out of his workshop. ‘Perhaps to ask about the old ROC post — 4 Romeo?’
‘Yes, he was here,’ said Massey, not even bothering to ask who they meant. ‘Wednesday, it was. I was out in the fields, mending a bit of wall that had collapsed. Too much rain. It washes away the footings.’
‘Mr Clay?’
‘Yes, Clay. Him.’
He spoke so quickly that there was almost no form to some of his sentences. They broke down into mere fragments of sound — part confession, part recollection, interspersed with snatches of narrated conversation, so that Cooper got Michael Clay’s words as well as Massey’s own. It was a spasmodic, convulsive purge, as if Massey was being physically sick, vomiting up the guilt and fear.
Fry tried to persuade him to go into the house, but he ignored her, a stubborn expression on his face. Instead, he sat down on an old, blackened bale of straw, removing his cap and turning his face up to the rain.
‘I recognized him then,’ he said. ‘Even after all that time, I knew him as well as I knew myself. His hair was grey, he’d put on weight, but I knew him all right. You don’t change the way you move, the way you speak, the way you hold your head. Just looking at him brought back all tho
se memories.’
‘ Do you want to have a look inside?’ I said.
A delighted expression came over his face. ‘May I? The hatch is padlocked.’
‘ Yes, but I’ve got the key.’
‘ Do you own it, then? ’
‘ It’s on my land, so I suppose I do. No one else wants the thing, anyway. Not any more.’
‘To be honest, I was surprised that he didn’t know me, the way I’d recognized him,’ said Massey. ‘But maybe he’d never taken much notice of me at the time. Yes, I suppose that’s what it was. He hadn’t studied me the way I’d studied him for all those weeks. He thought I was just some fool in the background, not worth bothering about. Well, that was his mistake.’
‘So you opened the hatch?’ said Cooper.
‘Yes. It hadn’t been used for quite a while, but luckily it’s never been vandalized, unlike some of the other posts, and the hinges are good. There’s a bit of water standing in the bottom, though. That’s as you might expect — it leaches through the ground and gets in through any cracks it can find. The floor is solid concrete, you see, so there’s no way for it to drain off. I told him that, but he said he had waterproof boots on. He was really keen to go inside.’
‘So you intended…?’
‘I don’t know what I intended, I honestly don’t. I watched him get into the hatch and start to climb down the ladder, and I wasn’t really thinking about anything, except how funny it was he should turn up like that, out of the blue, after all those years. I even told him to mind his head on the counter balance. It can give you a nasty crack, if you’re not used to it.’
‘Did he say anything?’
‘Oh, yes. He could hardly stop yattering.’
‘ You’re right, it is a bit wet down here. There’s no light in the monitoring room, of course. It’s lucky I’ve got a torch.’
‘I could hear him splashing about at the bottom of the ladder. I could see him, too, for a while, poking about at the bottom of the shaft. He was standing on the grille over the sump. He tried the pump handle, but it hadn’t worked for a long time. It’s supposed to drain the water out through the sump, and I suppose he remembered that. I lost sight of him when he went through the door into the monitoring room. But, as he was getting his torch out, he looked up at me.’
‘ Aren’t you coming down yourself? ’
‘ No. It’s best if one of us stays up here. Just in case. We don’t want any accidents.’
‘I think there was just a split second then, when he almost knew who I was. Almost. He looked at me a bit funny, as though he was thinking about it, the way you do when you’re trying to catch hold of some memory that’s just out of reach. I reckon he wouldn’t have been able to see my face at all at that point. He was looking up at me from the bottom of the shaft, so I’d be against the light. Just a figure on the surface, a silhouette against the sky. Anonymous. A vague shape he didn’t recognize, the way I’d always been. Maybe it was my voice that sounded familiar. But, whatever it was, he looked at me strange, not too sure whether I was joking with him, or what.’
‘ All right. That’s sensible. I won’t be long.’
‘And when he was out of sight, you closed the hatch,’ said Cooper.
‘Not right away. I didn’t close the hatch until he was out of sight in the monitoring room. I couldn’t even see his torchlight then. It was a bit funny, really. It was as if he’d disappeared, stepped back into the darkness, back into the past. Like he’d never been there at all. I don’t mind telling you, there was a moment when I wasn’t sure whether I’d just imagined him. I suppose I might gave been going a bit mad. I stood on the side of that hatch, and I was completely alone, looking down into a dark hole, with that musty smell rising up towards me. That smell seemed to carry all the memories from the past, memories that I’d kept shut up for forty years.’
Massey looked at them, regarding even Cooper as a complete stranger, intruders he’d never set eyes on before.
‘Do you understand? I was looking into a yawning pit. It was like staring inside my own head. It was black and stinking, and I wanted nothing else except to close the door on it again. Slam it shut, before anything got out.’
‘You convinced yourself Mr Clay hadn’t been there?’ said Cooper. ‘Just in those few seconds when he was out of sight?’
‘I don’t know how long it took. I remember thinking that I must look such an idiot standing there with the hatch open, staring down into the hole. So I looked around me. And of course there was no one in sight, not in that spot. There wasn’t a soul out walking across the moor, not a car nearer than the road, and that was half a mile away.
‘“Well, I’m on my own out here,” I said to myself. And then I shut the hatch. Just like that, without looking down again or saying another word. I just shut it, made sure it fit tight, and I put the padlock back on and shoved the keys in my pocket. And then I walked away.’
‘You left him down there. With no way of opening the hatch, and no hope of anyone coming along to let him out.’
‘Aye.’
‘He had a mobile phone — ’
Massey shook his head. ‘Those things don’t work when you’re down inside a concrete bunker. A post like this was built to withstand the blast wave from a nuclear bomb.’
Looking at the man, so calm and matter-of-fact, Cooper wondered for a moment whether they would actually find anyone in the abandoned ROC post, or if this was all just a figment of Massey’s imagination. Was he entirely sane? Had the old man gone quietly over the edge at some point in the last few years, and imagined the whole incident? Clay’s sudden appearance did have a suggestion of wishful thinking — the result of a decades-long desire for vengeance, a hatred so powerful that its object had materialized in the form of a vivid hallucination. They would only know for sure when that hatch was opened.
‘We need to get over there,’ said Cooper.
‘Where is it?’ asked Fry.
Cooper pointed across the fields along the edge of the moor, to the raised area with its line of disused telephone poles. The Toyota’s four-wheel drive came in useful now as they drove round the edge of the empty field to reach the gateway above Badger’s Way.
‘It’s funny,’ said Massey, when he got out and stood by the site. ‘If only there’d been someone out on Black Harry Lane, walking their dog or something, it would never have happened. But I suppose the weather was too bad.’
‘Does this bunker flood?’ asked Cooper suddenly.
‘Oh, yes. It was always a very wet post. We had to pump it out all the time. Now it floods right up into the shaft in really bad weather.’
Cooper wiped the rain from his face. ‘Like now, you mean?’
Massey seemed to consider the rain, as if he hadn’t noticed the continuing deluge until now.
‘Aye. Could be.’
With a sense of despair, Cooper looked at Fry, and she began making calls. While she did it, Massey stared at the sky, as if watching for better weather to come riding over the hills to the north.
‘I shut my memories away,’ he said. ‘They’re down there in the dark, with the hatch locked tight.’
Then Cooper had a terrible thought. He’d been here at Rough Side Farm himself on Wednesday, around the same time that Michael Clay’s phone had gone off the network. While he’d been talking to Peter Massey that first time, he’d noticed the raised area of ground, but hadn’t recognized it for what it was. And he’d been here yesterday, too. Had Clay already been shut inside the flooding bunker then? Had he been calling for help, his shouts going completely unheard as Cooper stood around and chatted to Massey about horses and foxes?
He seemed to hear his brother Matt’s voice again inside his head: ‘ I can tell you, Dad would never have done that. He would never have hung back if he thought he might save someone’s life.’
Urgently, Cooper took hold of Massey’s arm.
‘Quick — have you got the key with you?’
‘Yes.’
&
nbsp; ‘Get that damned hatch open, then.’
Cooper was pulling off his jacket, unlacing his boots, shivering in anticipation as the rain began to soak his shirt.
‘Ben, what on earth are you doing?’ said Fry in horror.
‘Going down.’
‘We have to wait. This is a specialist job.’
‘Saving a man’s life?’
‘We don’t know he’s still alive.’
‘We don’t know he’s dead, either. The water might not be up to the top yet. He could have found an air pocket. We can’t just stand here while he drowns.’
When they pulled the hatch open, the water was halfway up the ladder. The stink of foul air and dank concrete rose to meet them — a true miasma, so thick that they could almost touch it and feel it. Rain splattered the surface of the water, shattering their own reflections as they stared down into the bunker. For a moment, Cooper experienced that curious illusion of looking at something twice as far away as it really was, because he was looking at his own reflection. And not just looking at himself, but at the grey sky far above his head. It was like staring into the infinite depths, dark clouds like blind sea creatures lurking on the ocean bottom.
Cooper remembered Peter Massey’s description of his friend’s eyes, looking back up at him like dark pebbles under water, in the last moment before he died. But beyond the surface reflection there were no eyes, no floating body, nothing visible at all in the dark, oily liquid filling the bottom half of the shaft.
Fry drew back from the opening, covering her nose and mouth against the stench.
‘You can’t do this,’ she said.
But Cooper ignored her, concentrating on climbing over the slimy edge of the hatch and feeling for the top rungs of the ladder. As he clambered carefully down, the counterweight for the hatch bumped against his back, tap-tapping like a heavy hand on his spine, on his shoulders, and touching the back of his head as his feet touched the water. Then he looked up again at the light, saw Fry silhouetted against the sky, her coat and hair filmed with rain.
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