‘Right at the bottom of the shaft. You’ll need this overall too. ’Tis very wet down there.’
Karen slipped on the blue nylon overalls. They covered her like a nun’s habit. Properly attired, she followed Stephen Penrose to the other side of the shaft and a metal cage suspended over the void. Once inside the cage, he slid a wire metal door, pressed a fat red button, and they began the long descent. The sensation was distractingly unpleasant. Going down underground, to the tunnels under the Atlantic. She could hear the grieving boom of the sea as they descended.
‘Who found the body?’
‘I did, yesterday.’
‘What were you doing here? Botallack has been closed for decades.’
He shrugged.
‘We’re exploring the, uh, possibility of tourism. Opening a mine museum, you see, like Geevor up the coast. We have some EU funding. We’ve just finished draining the main tunnels. That’s one of them: one of the oldest, eighteenth century.’ He pointed down a tunnel that flashed past them as they plunged further in the rattling cage. The whole mine was dimly lit with strings of electric lights: frail and exposed against the threatening dark.
It was surely a haunted place. As the cage neared the bottom of the chilly shaft, Karen remembered more stories: of the knockers – the spirits of the mine, strange poltergeists the miners would claim to hear. Auditory hallucinations, presumably, from hunger and stress.
‘OK, here it is. Watch your step.’
The body was crumpled at the bottom of the shaft, next to the enormous metal winch that controlled the cage. Beyond it was the main tunnel, a narrowing corridor that extended that long, long mile under the Atlantic Ocean. The moaning sea above them was still audible, but now muffled, stifled even: like someone in another room dreaming bad dreams.
Karen knelt and looked at the broken form. The victim was young, white, male, twenty-something, in a shredded anorak and dark jeans. Covered in blood and blackness.
Penrose spoke, his voice not quite so confident now. ‘Nasty, isn’t it? Quite gave me the frighteners when I saw it. Poor bastard. Then all that weird stuff on him … Soot and grease and … cat fur, right?’
‘How did you know it was cat fur?’
‘I didn’t. It was my boss, Jane. She came down a few minutes later, she keeps cats, she recognized these might be –’ he pointed – ‘scratches. Cat scratches. See there. On the neck and the face. Then we worked out that maybe all this stuff …’ Penrose knelt beside her. It was as if they were praying in front of the corpse. ‘This weird stuff on his clothes must be fur, burned cat fur, because she’d already heard the reports, on the radio news, the cats burned on Zennor Hill.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Penrose stood up, abruptly, as if he really didn’t like to be too near the corpse. ‘What is it, Miss Trevithick? Something to do with witchcraft? That’s what they’re saying on the internet.’ He tilted back his hard hat and scratched his head, frowning. ‘Because it’s not good for business. We don’t want people associating Botallack with anything like that, not if we’re going to make a go of this museum. And we need the jobs round here. Sorry to sound selfish, but …’
‘No, no. I quite understand.’ Karen gave the shattered body one last scrutiny in the faint damp light given out by the pitiful bulbs. ‘I’m sure it will be fine, you’d be amazed how quickly people forget. I’ve seen it all before.’
She gazed at the sad, pale, slender face of the cadaver, scratched, and badly bruised, and with one long horrible gash by the left ear. There were several other terrifying scarlet gashes distributed across the body, as if someone had attacked the man with a mighty sword. The legs were the worst: they were virtually pulped. The flesh had melted into the clothing; you could only just tell he was wearing dark indigo jeans. ‘Pathology will confirm, they’re coming here in a minute. But these injuries, they must have been from his fall.’
Penrose said nothing: he was looking in his canvas bag.
In the end, she answered her own question. ‘Yes … That makes sense. The wounds look terrible but that’s because of the enormous drop. You’d bang against the sides of the shaft on the way down. Ripping and tearing, shattering the bones.’
Karen stood and stared up. The tiny hole of light half a mile up there was the sky and the wind. She resisted the sudden urge to panic and escape this unnatural, inhuman prison, to fling herself in the cage and press every button.
Soft distant booms echoed down the tunnels. The sea was talking in its sleep, fighting a nightmare. The sea was also above them, weighing everything down: an unbearably oppressive sensation. What a place.
She turned. Penrose was holding something in his hand. It was an iPad. He spoke, as he switched it on. ‘We know the injuries are from the fall, Miss Trevithick, because we have him on CCTV. Uninjured.’
‘What?’
‘They didn’t tell you! We found it a couple of hours ago. Jane emailed it to me and to … DI Pascoe?’
‘I’ve been out of contact. My mobile is recharging. You have it?’
‘Yup. Here, look.’
He opened up the iPad and clicked on a stored email. The light given out by the computer seemed unearthly in the gloom. A magic oblong in ancient darkness.
The CCTV footage was grainy but good enough. The two of them stood in the echoing blackness, with thebaffled noise of the sea all around, and watched the silent movie.
‘There he is.’
Penrose’s indication was unnecessary. A young man in dark jeans was climbing a fence surrounding the minehead. It was dark, but the moon was full. The victim was unmistakable. And he was alone. So this was no murder?
‘That’s him all right. No injuries. Looks perfectly OK.’
The footage jerked and the scene changed. Now they were gazing at the interior of the engine house.
‘We have a CCTV camera inside as well. It’s much darker, but you can still see him.’
The ghostly image of the man moved to the shaft. What was he looking for? His movements were edgy, jerky, and odd. As if there was a problem with the film-speed, and yet there wasn’t. Where was he going? How did he accidentally fall down? Karen watched the figure climb very close to the big black hole. Why was he going so stupidly close to the shaft? She almost cried out: Stop, you’re getting too close!
Her hand went reflexively to her mouth.
He jumped.
‘It is estimated there are maybe half a billion mummies still lying in the dust of Egypt.’
This was one of Ryan Harper’s favourite factoids: he always wheeled it out when the students’ attention started to wander. Today the students remained mute, and unresponsive. Had they even heard?
‘I said, it is estimated there are half a billion mummies in Egypt.’
He looked at the young faces before him. There were just three kids in this study group: the renewed Egyptian troubles – would they ever end? – had begun to scare away the students, as they had already scared away the tourists.
This was a pain. Ryan relied, very heavily, on this part-time weekend teaching to supplement his meagre income from the charity. If the teaching disappeared, he would be properly impoverished.
At