‘That’s us quits now,’ George said. ‘Come on, Charlie, don’t make this harder than it is. I promise, you’ll be the first to hear if we find anything.’
Charlie stood up and picked strands of bracken out of his hair. ‘I’m going back to tell my gran what I found,’ he muttered defiantly.
But George had already turned his attention to the cavers, who swarmed over the fallen boulders as if they were mere undulations in a path. Now there was proper work to be done, they were quiet and methodical, each man checking his equipment carefully. Barry handed George a hard hat with a miner’s lamp fixed to the front. ‘Here’s how it’s going to be. You stay back at all times. We don’t know what it’s going to be like in there. Judging by the state of this, it’s not looking to be too promising. Or safe. So we go first, and you follow when I say and not before. Is that clear?’
George nodded, adjusting the strap of the hard hat. ‘But if we find anything that looks like recent disturbance, you mustn’t interfere with it. And if the girl’s in there…well, we’ll just have to come straight back out.’
Barry jerked his head towards one of his fellows. ‘Trevor’s got a special camera for taking pictures underground. We brought it, just in case.’ He looked around. ‘Right then. Des, you lead. I’ll be at the back to make sure George here does what he’s told. You heard him, lads – no messing with anything you find. Oh, and George – it’s no smoking down there. You never know what little surprises the earth has in store for you.’
It was like entering the underworld. The crack in the hillside swallowed them, depriving them of light almost as soon as they had passed through its portals. Feeble cones of yellow light splashed against streaked white walls of carboniferous limestone. Patches of quartz glittered; damp drizzles of wet flowstone gleamed momentarily; minerals striped and stippled the rock with their particular colours. George remembered a trip he and Anne had made to one of the show caverns near Castleton, but he couldn’t recall the correspondences between the strange markings and their sources. It took him all his time to figure out that he was in a narrow corridor, no more than four feet wide and five and a half feet tall. He had to walk with knees bent to avoid battering the hard hat against the strange excrescences that bloomed from the roof.
The air was damp but strangely fresh, as if it were continually renewed. There was a constant irregular series of splashes as drips from the stalactites became too weighty and their surface tension burst. The ground beneath his feet was uneven and slippery, and George had to shine the beam from his hand torch downwards to prevent tripping over one of the many fledgling stalagmites that dotted the floor of the passageway.
‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ Barry called over his shoulder, his light briefly blinding George.
‘Impressive.’
‘Leave it alone for a hundred and fifty years and it’s well on its way to becoming a show cave. I tell you, if we don’t find anything here today, we’ll be back at the weekend to have a proper explore. You know how the Scarlaston just seems to seep out of the ground? That means there’s got to be an underground cave system somewhere around here, and this mine might just be the way through to that.’ Barry’s tone of breathless excitement made George feel slightly queasy. He was far from claustrophobic, but the other man’s undisguised desire to spend hours underneath these tons of inimical rock was entirely alien to him. He loved the sun and the air on his skin too much to be attracted by this strange half-world.
Before George could reply, a cry echoed back towards them from ahead, so distorted it was impossible to decipher. He started forward, but Barry’s arm barred the way. ‘Wait,’ the caver ordered him. ‘I’ll go and see what’s what. I’ll come right back.’
George stood fretting, trying to make sense of the mutter of voices ahead of him. It felt as if he stood there for ever. But within minutes, Barry appeared before him. ‘What is it?’ George asked.
‘It’s not a body,’ Barry said quickly. ‘But there’s some clothes. Up ahead. You’d better come and take a look.’
The cavers pressed against the wall to let George pass. A few yards on, the passage widened into what had obviously been a junction of four passages. The other exits had been blocked with rocks and rubble, leaving a small cavern about ten feet across and seven feet high. On the far side, barely visible by the lights from the cavers’ lamps, it was possible to make out what looked like clothing.
‘Has anybody got a more powerful light?’ George asked.
Hands thrust a heavy lamp towards him. He switched it on and pointed its powerful beam towards the clothes. Something dark was bundled against the rocks. What had at first looked like two dark strips became identifiable as a torn pair of tights. The black cloth near them, George realized with a lurch of pain and disgust, was a ripped pair of knickers.
He forced himself to breathe deeply. ‘We’re all going to leave now. The man at the back, just turn round and head out. Everyone else, follow him. I’ll bring up the rear.’ For a moment, no one moved. ‘I said, now,’ George shouted, releasing a fraction of the pent-up tension that strung his nerves tighter than the top string of a violin.
He stood glowering at them. At last, they turned and walked back, their own sure-footedness a taunt to his stumbling pursuit. When they emerged into daylight, he felt as if they’d been inside for hours, but a glance at his watch revealed it had been less than fifteen minutes. Only now were the two uniformed officers emerging from the woodland path to keep the mine workings safe from prying eyes and destructive feet.
George cleared his throat and said, ‘Barry, I’d like your colleague Trevor to stay here with me and take some photographs. The rest of you, I’d appreciate it if you’d wait here until we’ve got the area properly secured. If you go back to the village now, the word will spread that we’ve found something and the place’ll be mobbed.’
The cavers muttered agreement. Barry fished a packet of cigarettes from a waterproof pouch slung round his neck. ‘You look like you could use one of these,’ he said.
‘Thanks.’ George turned to the two uniformed officers and said, ‘One of you, go back to the caravan and tell Sergeant Clough we’ve found some clothing and we need a full team down here to secure a possible crime scene. And for God’s sake, man, do it discreetly. If anybody asks, we have definitely not found a body. I don’t want a repeat of Friday’s newspaper story.’
One of the bobbies nodded nervously and turned on his heel, jogging back up the path towards the heart of the village. ‘Your job is to make sure nobody who isn’t a police officer comes within twenty yards of this mine entrance,’ George told the other PC before turning back to Barry. ‘That central area in there – is there any chance that any of the other passages are accessible from there?’
Barry shrugged eloquently. ‘It doesn’t look like it. But I can’t be sure without a proper good look. It’s always possible that there was a way through and somebody backfilled the passage behind them to make it look impassable. But this is a mine, not a cave system. Chances are there’s only one straightforward way in and one straightforward way out. Anybody that dug themselves into the hill is still going to be there, but they’re not very likely to be alive and kicking. I don’t think she’s in there, lad.’ He put a hand on George’s arm then turned away to squat on the rocks with his mates.
It took seven hours for a thorough search of the cave. Trevor the caver brought his camera back underground and meticulously photographed every inch of the walls and floor. There was no way in or out other than the narrow passage. None of the blocked passages showed any sign of recent interference. There was no trace of a body having been disposed of in the mine. George couldn’t decide whether that should depress or encourage him.
By mid-afternoon, a duffel coat with a missing toggle, a pair of tights ripped with such savagery that the legs were entirely separated, and a pair of navy-blue gym knickers were on their way to the county police laboratory, carefully packaged to preserve any forensic traces. But George didn’t need a scientist to tell him that the stains