The opening loomed before them, sliced into the bank, brushed relatively clean, a narrow, erect oblong of darkness with a rounded roof and pale, red and amber jambs rooted in deep green turf. And within was empty darkness, fenced off by no more than a ridge of soil. George looked round his team, and they were all massive countrymen, well in advance of the minimum police requirements. The slightest person present, leaving out the girls, was Gus Hambro, busy pricking in on his diagram the latest minor find.
‘Care to take a look inside for us? You’re the ratling.’
‘Loan me a torch, and I’ll have a go,’ said Gus. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘Whatever you see. Structure, condition—and anything that looks out of place.’
‘Right! Hang on to this,’ he said to Bill Lawrence, and thrust the clip-board and its records at him. He shed his array of colour pencils, dropping them haphazard into the grass, hesitated whether to shed his tweed jacket, too, and then, considering its worn condition, buttoned it closely for protection instead. The dank darkness had a chill and jagged look.
‘Don’t go beyond where we can reach you,’ George warned him. ‘Six feet inside is enough. Just look it over, and memorise whatever there is to be memorised.’
‘I’ll do my endeavour. Right, give us that floodlight of yours.’
He dropped to his knees in the turf, now trampled into glistening, half dried mud, and plunged head and shoulders under the ochre tinted lintel. Torso, slim flanks and thighs, thrusting legs, vanished by silent heaves into the hollow under the slope. He was now nothing more than the neatly tapered ends of corduroy slacks, and a pair of well-worn Canadian hide moccasins. And these hung still, though alertly braced, for more than a minute, while the torch he carried ranged round the interior of the passage, and leaked little sparks of muted light into the outer day. He heaved himself six inches forward, and George laid an arresting hand on the remaining available ankle, and held fast.
‘All right, you inside there! Leave it at that!’
Indistinct sounds emerged from within the earth, deprived of sense by the complicated acoustics of the soil. There was an interlude of silence, absorbed and intent. Then, without previous movement or sound, only with a sudden gush of closed and graveyard air, the rotten surface above buckled and dimpled, lolling in sagging bubbles of turf, and sending its under-levels of soil cascading down on top of the ancient arc of bricks that upheld it. Those without heard the ceiling yield, with a muffled, sickening grinding of brick against brick and stone upon stone, and the dull, filtering trickle of soil busily winding its way between.
A hollow yell was forced out with the jettisoned air. And George Felse dived forward at the jerking ankles under the archway, felt his way forward towards the knees, and hauled strongly backwards as the roof sagged slowly and ponderously inwards on top of Gus Hambro.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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They dug him out with their bare hands, scrabbling like frantic terriers to clear the soil away from his head and shoulders; and within minutes they had him laid out like a stranded fish on one of their plastic sheets in the grass. All the internal filth of generations, cobwebs and dust and soot, had been discharged on top of him as the joints of the roof parted, but an outstretched arm had sheltered his head and face, and he was not only breathing, but spluttering out the dirt that had silted into mouth and nostrils. They had to brush away the layers before they could examine him for worse damage, George on one side of him, Barnes on the other, feeling urgently at a skull that seemed to have escaped all but the loose, light weight of the fall. They drew off his damp, soiled jacket, and felt at shoulders and arms, and could find no breakages. Everyone hovered unhappily. Little rivulets of loose soil trickled capriciously down the slope of raw earth. Somewhere on the sidelines Paviour could be heard protesting that they could not possibly proceed with this excavation in these conditions, that the risks were too great, that someone would be killed.
‘No damage,’ said Barnes, breathing gusty relief. ‘Just knocked silly. He’ll be round and as right as rain in five minutes. All that got him was the loose muck, not the bricks.’
‘I’ll fetch some brandy,’ Lesley offered eagerly. ‘And take this jacket to sponge and dry, he can’t possibly put it on again like this.’
They were two deep round him in any case, nearly a dozen people hanging on the least movement of a finger or an eyelid. She’s right, Charlotte thought, watching dubiously but compulsively like all the rest, one grain of sense is worth quite a lot of random sympathy.
‘I’ll bring one of Stephen’s coats,’ said Lesley, and set off at a light, long stepping run for the house.
Charlotte offered tissues to wipe away the trailing threads of glutinous, dirty cobweb from the victim’s eyes, for his eyelids were beginning to contract and twitch preparatory to opening. He lay for some minutes before he made the final effort, and then unfurled his improbably luxuriant lashes upon a bright, golden-brown stare of general accusation.
‘What in hell do you all think you’re doing?’ he said, none too distinctly and very ungratefully, and spat out fragments of soil with a startled grimace of distaste. ‘What happened?’
It was a fair enough question, considering how abruptly he had been obliterated from the proceedings. His exit had been brief, but absolute, while they, it seemed, were still in possession of their faculties and the facts. He sat up in the circle of George’s arm, seemed to become suddenly aware of his shirt sleeves and the late April chill, and demanded, looking violently round him: ‘Where’s my jacket?’
‘Mrs Paviour’s taken it away to clean and dry it out for you. You were taking a look inside there, and half the roof came down on you,’ said George patiently. All the victim’s limbs seemed to be in full working order, even his memory was only one jump behind.
‘Oh, blimey!’ he said weakly. ‘Was that it?’ And he leaned forward to peer at the spot where two policemen were stolidly clearing away newly-fallen rubble from the mouth of the flue, and a third, well above them on the level ground, was cautiously surveying the crater. ‘You’ll have to dig for that torch of yours,’ he said more strongly, not without a mildly vindictive satisfaction. ‘I let go of it when things started dropping on me. That chap up there had better watch his step, there was a gleam of daylight a good two yards forward from where I got to. He didn’t put one of those beetle-crushers through there while I was inside, did he?’
‘He did not,’ said George tolerantly. ‘The thing just gave. Mea culpa. I shouldn’t have let you do it.’
‘The thing just gave. Did it?’ He was coming round with remarkable aplomb now, it was with the old, knowledgeable eye that he stared at the ruin of the neat archway which had been their entrance to the flue only ten minutes ago. But all he said was: ‘You know what? Either I’m accident-prone, all of a sudden, or else somebody, somewhere, is sticking pins in a wax image of me.’
Some minutes later, when all anxiety on his behalf had ebbed away into renewed interest in the job on hand, when he was sitting hunched with Price’s sportscoat draped round his shoulders, and one of George’s cigarettes between his lips, and not a soul but George within earshot, he said, softly and with intent: ‘Watch it from now on! I’m getting clearer every minute. Somebody’d been hacking at the brickwork inside there. That wasn’t any accident.’
‘You sure?’ asked George in the same tone.
‘I’m sure. I lost your torch—and switched on, at that, you won’t get much mileage back in that battery!—but I know what I’d already seen. Fresh-broken surfaces, high in the wall. The upstream side was what I noticed. A gash in the brickwork, pale and clean. Even if you have to dig out from on top, now, with care you’ll find it. Somebody aimed to bring that flue down.’