Dalziel 10 UnderWorld

by Reginald Hill

  And Pascoe knew at last why Monty Boyle had proved so elusive over the past couple of days.

  He went down on one knee by the body, motivated neither by piety nor professionalism, but merely by a weariness which had little to do with muscular fatigue. Everyone had limits and he suspected that he had come a body too far. Touch nothing, was the rule and he felt little incentive to break it, but that cassette recorder, Monty Boyle's trade mark, might tell what the Man Who Knew Too Much had known.

  He stretched out his hand to take it. Then froze as the horrors which he had thought to have climaxed, resumed. The darkness beyond, which he had taken for the gallery's dead end, shifted, took shape, became distinct, advanced. And Dali's cathedral had its resident angel.

  'So we meet at last,' said Pascoe inanely for the sake of hearing his voice.

  But Colin Farr returned no words, though his face spoke for him as his young fair features contorted in rage and hate from guardian angel to avenging demon.

  What have I done to inspire this? Pascoe wondered in terror. Then the young man launched himself forward. But the name he was screaming was not Pascoe's but 'Downey!' He was past in a single bound. Pascoe twisted round to see the deputy standing at the entry to the side passage. He must have come back to see what was holding Pascoe up.

  He only had time to retreat a half-step before Farr was on him driving him backwards by the force of his attack into the main tunnel.

  His paralysis broken, Pascoe followed. Somehow Downey had broken loose. Pascoe seized Farr by the shoulder and cried, 'For God's sake, the roof!' But the young man hurled him away with incredible power for so slight a figure and flung himself on Downey with a brute force that drove him against the wall. Pascoe had fetched up against a prop which he distinctly felt give. On the other side he saw a couple more snap like matchsticks as Farr and Downey crashed against them. And overhead he heard the roof start to groan and creak like an old windmill straining into life. Neil Wardle's words sounded mockingly in his head. Ever been a thousand feet under and heard the timbers cracking over your head?'

  'Peter! Get out of there!'

  It was Dalziel's voice behind a torch beam which seemed a half-mile away. He looked at the struggling figures locked together like a pair of lovers for whom the earth is about to move. There was a noise like an explosion. Then he was running towards the voice and the light through a hail of earth and stone with chaos on his heels. The light seemed as far as yesterday and as dim as lost love, but he still thought that, by running faster and striving harder, he might make it. Pebbles hit him like bird-shot, a larger rock clipped the back of his head; he stumbled, half fell, half recovered; then something much bigger and heavier crashed against the back of his legs, forcing him to the ground and pinning him there with pain and pressure till the darkness of the pit rushed in to take away pressure and pain together.

  Chapter 8

  'Hold on,' said Dalziel. 'Give us that torch. There's a foot here. By Christ, I've reached a foot. Question is, whose is it, and is it still attached? Answer is . . .'

  He gently rocked the foot from side to side. Pascoe screamed.

  'I reckon it's thine,' said Dalziel judiciously. 'Right, let's clear away a bit more of this rubbish and mebbe the dog can see the rabbit.'

  Pascoe had long since ceased to register the passing of time in any normal mensural way but Dalziel had numbered every crawling second of the hour that had elapsed since the roof fall. He had no way of knowing precisely how long it would be before the roof immediately over their heads came down too, but that it would come he did not doubt. He had not trodden the rocky path to his present modest eminence without developing a keen scent for disaster.

  At last his bloodied fingers had carefully picked the debris away from both Pascoe's legs. The left he judged was merely severely bruised and lacerated, but the right was undoubtedly broken. He touched it with infinite care. The tibia had snapped and penetrated the skin. The fibula had probably gone too but he couldn't be sure. The recommended course would be to leave him alone till a doctor could get there with morphine and a stretcher. Dalziel was not a man who'd ever found recommended courses much help, and with a roof groaning above him like a junior officer half way through a staff college lecture, he saw no reason to be converted now.

  Various sections of timber unearthed during his digging he'd set to one side. Selecting a thick splinter from a collapsed prop, he trimmed its edges with the boy scout's knife he always carried. Another piece got the same treatment. Then he pulled off his shirt and tore it into strips.

  'Peter,' he said. 'Even allowing that this shirt cost me twenty quid, this could hurt you more than it hurts me.'

  The pain brought Pascoe momentarily out of the timeless mists into the black present before it cut off consciousness altogether. When he came round again, he was over Dalziel's shoulder and his bound and splinted leg was being gently steadied by the fat man's huge paw to prevent it from swinging as he was carried along.

  'Where are we going?' he croaked after three dry runs at it.

  'Is that you, lad, or am I being followed by a frog?' said Dalziel.

  'Where are we going?'

  'I'm not sure but I know where we're coming from. Listen.'

  Behind them in the darkness there was a grinding, cracking sound which crescendoed into a discord of rushing earth and crashing rock as another section of roof came down. Pascoe felt a blast of air against his face, then he was coughing again as the tidal bore of dust projected by the fall swept by them.

  Carefully Dalziel lowered him to the ground.

  'We'll rest here a while,' he spluttered. 'Till this lot clears a bit.'

  'You should have left me,' said Pascoe.

  'That's the kind of thing they say in movies,' reproved

  Dalziel. 'Your missus always said you watched too many movies.'

  'Did she? At least you know where you are with a movie.'

  'Paying to sit in the dark and be frightened, you mean? We're getting all that free, gratis and for bugger-all, here,' said Dalziel.

  'What's my leg like?' asked Pascoe, after a timeless excursion into the misty hinterland of his mind.

  'Well, you'll be hard pushed to play full back for England unless you've got an uncle on the selectors,' said Dalziel. 'But I dare say you'll be able to turn out for the Chief Inspectors' darts team, if selected.'

  'Chief Inspector . . . ?'

  'You're not that far gone, then? Aye. Congratulations. Not official yet, but it'll be posted next week.'

  'But I thought. . .'

  '. . . thought that being in my company so much had likely scuppered your chances? Nay, lad, I've got influence where it matters. I used the threat of resignation to make 'em take notice.'

  Even through his pain, Pascoe was dumbfounded.

  'You threatened to resign if I didn't get my promotion? But. . .'

  He couldn't say it, not even in these confessional circumstances; he couldn't say: But why didn't they jump at the chance of getting rid of you?

  Dalziel coughed a laugh.

  'I think mebbe you've got things wrong,' he said kindly. 'I didn't tell 'em I were going to resign if you didn't get promoted. I told 'em I'd not even think of retirement until you had been promoted! That must have made the buggers take notice. So you can see, I've got a big investment in you, Peter. If you snuff it, they'll never learn what verbal understandings are really worth, will they? So come on, let's find our way out of here.'

  'Is there a way out?' asked Pascoe faintly.

  'There's still plenty of air, isn't there? I'm sure I can feel a draught on my face,' said Dalziel as once again he lifted Pascoe and draped him over his shoulder. 'Any road, I don't think yon wild bugger, Farr, was daft enough to go running into a dead end, do you?'

  The renewal of pain made it impossible for Pascoe to give this a considered answer. He closed his eyes and tried to will the darkness to blank him out once more, but just as success seemed close, Dalziel halted and lowered him to the
ground again.

  'I think you've come to the end of the road, lad,' he said. 'What?'

  'No, I don't mean euthanasia, I just mean I reckon this might be the exit, only I don't think I'm going to be able to get you through there without help.'

  He shone the now very faint beam of his torch ahead. The tunnel began to slope sharply up and the ground was covered with debris. A few yards on the debris was piled high to the roof and at first glance it seemed as if the way must be blocked. But high up the pile, almost at roof level, there was the dark circle of a smaller tunnel as if someone had burrowed their way through. More significantly, there was now an unmistakable draught of air blowing towards them.

  'I'll not be long,' said Dalziel. 'You'll be all right?' Pascoe nodded. He looked longingly at the torch but knew that it would be ridiculous to ask if he could keep it when Dalziel's need was so manifestly the greater. But to lie here alone in the dark . . .

  'I'll be off, then,' said the fat man.

  Pascoe's mind was searching feverishly for some excuse to delay Dalziel's departure.

  'There was no food at the White Rock,' he gasped. 'Did you notice? And the knife ... if Mycroft helped Farr to get out of the hospital, he'd not have needed a knife . . .'

  'That's right, lad,' said Dalziel. 'That's good. Funny how it takes a leg dropping off to get some people thinking like a Chief Inspector. Pity you hadn't thought about it earlier, though. Mind you, neither did I. But I'm excused on account of being uneducated and nearly senile. Take care, lad. And don't move from here, promise?'

  He watched the pale cone of torchlight zigzag slowly up the slope.

  Then the maw of the secondary tunnel swallowed it up as Dalziel wriggled his surprisingly flexible bulk into the gap and sent the darkness pouring down on Pascoe in a mighty torrent.

  He lay in that flood and tried for unconsciousness but the best he could manage was to drift outside of time. Pictures formed on the shifting surface of the dark, and when he closed his eyes they were on the inside of his eyelids too. He saw Downey, dog-like, wolf-like, drowning in darkness; he saw a young girl with long blonde hair drift by on the stream of the dark with a posy of dog-rose and bramble leaves clutched at her breast; and he saw a young man moving gracefully through the dark like an Arcadian shepherd boy splashing through the shallows of Alpheus and laughing at the silky naiads as they tried to draw him down. It seemed to Pascoe that the youth stooped over him and applied sweet damp cresses to his parching lips and that as he turned and loped gracefully away, his head was framed by a sky of Dorian blue.

  Then the darkness surged upwards and the boy disappeared, and towards him, wading chin deep, came a full-faced man with a ragged moustache, talking incessantly into a cassette recorder which he held to his desperate lips. He seemed to see Pascoe and reached out to him as the dark came bubbling up, then fell forward and vanished from sight. But his outstretched hands grasped desperately at Pascoe's waist and took a firm grip on his jacket and he screamed as he felt himself also being dragged down beneath the darkness.

  Then he awoke and found that the darkness and the terror at least were no dream. He shifted his position uneasily. The pain was still hot in his leg. But his mouth no longer felt so cracked and dry. The power of auto- suggestion, he told himself. There was something digging into his side.

  A body in pain often finds the smaller discomfort a greater distraction and he set about removing this lump of stone he had settled upon. Except that it wasn't a lump of stone, it was something actually in his jacket pocket. He reached in, pulled it out. He couldn't see it but his fingers told him what it was.

  Monty Boyle's cassette recorder.

  Then he was back in the side gallery finding Boyle's body. Now he remembered everything so clearly that he knew why he had wanted to forget.

  Except that he couldn't remember pocketing the recorder.

  In fact he would have sworn that in that moment of terror at Farr's appearance, he had let it fall back on the dead man's chest. But here it was.

  'And I don't believe in ghosts,' he said out loud.

  And shrieked as a little red eye winked at him and the cassette vibrated gently in his hand.

  It was of course voice-operated, tuned and directed so that even in a crowded pub it would pick up the conversation between Boyle and the man directly in front of him without admitting enough peripheral noise to mask the words.

  The Japanese were truly marvellous, thought Pascoe, not least for creating something sturdy enough to survive what he'd been through. And what Boyle had been through too, of course, poor bastard. Ike Ogilby got value for money out of his reporters. Recently Pascoe had helped get one of them jailed. Now here was another getting himself murdered. In-house scoops, impregnable exclusives. Lucky old Ike.

  As his mind wandered idly, his fingers were moving to more purpose. They had found the button to run the tape back. When it stopped, he pressed the next button. And suddenly he was no longer alone. There were voices with him in the darkness and as he lay there and listened, his mind's eye gave them form and substance also.

  'Christ, you scared me!'

  Monty Boyle. But he didn't sound scared. He'd probably heard someone coming and gone towards him, preferring for some reason to meet him out of that horrible side gallery.

  'Did I?'

  Downey. Always sneaking up on people, Downey. A bad habit.

  'You surely did. What are you doing down here, Mr Downey?'

  'Same as you, likely.'

  'I was watching the Farr boy. I saw him go down this hole, so when he came back out again, I thought I'd take a look.'

  'Me too'

  'To tell the truth, I'm pleased to see you. I've marked my way back, but I'm not used to crawling around like a mole, so it's good to have an expert along. '

  'What have you found, Mr Boyle?'

  'Sweet f.a. I reckon I've ruined a good suit for nothing. Come on, let's get back topside and I'll buy us both a stiff drink. I don't know about you but I'm gasping for one. '

  'How far did you go, Mr Boyle?'

  'Just a bit further. Not much. I thought: This is pointless. And dangerous. So I just turned round and...'

  'You didn't go down that gallery?'

  'What? That side passage, you mean? No, I didn't like the look of that. Come on. . .'

  'Your marks turn in there. '

  'Do they? Surely not. I mean, I may have taken a glance but. . ..'

  'You're a liar! You've been in there! Why are you lying to me?'

  There was a pause. Classic interrogation technique, thought Pascoe with professional detachment. Test a good story with total disbelief. Make the suspect budge an inch and you had him. The best never budged. But perhaps Boyle was more used to asking questions than answering them ... He waited. It was quite suspenseful, even though he knew the outcome.

  'I'm sorry. You're right. Look, I can tell you. I did find something. A child's bones. You see what this means, Mr Downey? I didn't want to distress you, but it means your friend, Billy Farr, must have hidden the girl there after he . . . after it happened. Look, I've been thinking, maybe there's no need for this to go any further. What can the police do now? What can anyone do? Maybe it's best just left forgotten. Let's get out of here and talk about it over that drink, shall we?'

  Boyle knew, thought Pascoe. Perhaps he was sharper than the rest of us and had his suspicions already. And I should have had mine too! He recalled Downey's face when they'd confronted Mrs Farr with the dog's bones. Pale and trembling. Memory of a lost friend, they'd thought. But it had been the shock of realization just how close to the truth Colin Farr must be getting. And when he got Ellie's message and guessed that Farr was proposing to hide down here, he knew that discovery was getting ever closer.

  I was slow! Pascoe told himself in anguish. When I saw that Downey hadn't brought any food . . . when I saw that knife ... if I'd stopped to think, I could have stopped all this. They could still have been alive, Downey . . . and Colin Farr . . .

&
nbsp; 'Billy'd not do that! You didn't know Billy. He was my friend, he'd not harm a fly let alone that lass . . . Never!'

  Well, if it wasn't Billy, it must have been Pickford after all. Killed her and brought her down here. That's what I'll write in my paper. You'll be able to read all about it next Sunday.'

  Poor Monty. The Man Who Knows Too Much. The man with an answer for everything. Monty Boyle, confidant of cops and robbers alike, equally at home in the corridors of law and the alleys of the underworld. Except that now he'd found himself in an underworld whose geography was beyond his plotting, facing a mind whose workings were dark and twisting beyond his understanding. And now The Man Who Knows Too Much knew everything ... or nothing.

  'That's what you''ll write, is it? Not the truth? You wouldn't rather write the truth?'

  Downey's voice no longer strident, but teasing, wheedling. The suspect ready to cough, eager to cough, just requiring his audience to be grateful, attentive, sympathetic . . . Leave it, Boyle! Walk away from it! Show no interest. You can still survive . . . could still. . .

  'Yes, indeed, Mr Downey. I'd very much like to write the truth. Why don't you tell it to me?'

  So there it was. In the end poor old Monty Boyle had died of journalism. He gave up any chance he had of talking his way above ground because he could not resist a good story, an exclusive, a scoop . . .

  'I saw them that day, Billy and Tracey. I were lying up above the White Rock, watching. . . you get a grand view up there, all sorts of things. The tricks some of these young uns'll get up to! Not just the young uns either, I were watching Harold Satterthwaite that day. Christ, he were really giving it to her! She were young enough to be his daughter too, and he's older than me . . . was ... it makes you think ... it made me think: Why'm I up here watching and he's down there . . . never mind. I saw Billy go back down the path with the girl, and a bit later Harold and Stella got dressed and went straight down through the woods towards the road. I started scrambling down the side of the White Rock and I got up a bit of speed, you know the way you do when your legs are nigh on running away with you! And I came down the last bit to the path right fast. Well, Tracey were there again. She must have come back up by herself. She were dead scared when she saw me. It's understandable, someone bursting out of the bushes like that. She just turned and started to run. And I set off running after her. All I wanted was to tell her it were all right, it was only me and I meant her no harm. But when you start chasing someone. . . have you ever chased someone, Mr Boyle?'