Fry felt herself growing hot. She gritted her teeth and her fists clenched in her pockets. This had been a big mistake. She would have to leave the shop soon or she might regret the consequences.
‘I want you to know we’re watching you, Mr Pollitt,’ she said. ‘Just in case you had any plans for putting your ideas into action.’
‘Oh, like I’m going to let you lot know if I do.’
With a smile he watched her leave, as if he’d won the encounter. Glad to be out of the shop, Fry went to sit in her car and looked for something to distract herself. She opened the intelligence file she’d been given on Shirebrook. What sort of place was this really?
A summary of statistics showed a population density here almost three times that in Derbyshire as a whole, and a high percentage of lone pensioner households. It was the most deprived area of the county, with worrying levels of child poverty and a large proportion of adults without qualifications. Mortality rates were considerably higher than average too, with early deaths from cancer being prevalent.
Fry nodded to herself. So life expectancy was low in Shirebrook? Krystian Zalewski probably hadn’t known that. But he’d soon found out.
Also in the file was a map of the area affected by the PSPO, with the whole of the town outlined. A thick red line ran all the way around Shirebrook, taking in the town centre, the Model Village, and even the business park where the distribution centre was located.
On paper, the shape of the PSPO resembled an enormous sack, narrowing to a neck at Upper Langwith, as if all the problems could be contained within it. She sighed. Some hopes.
Twenty-six miles away Lacey Bower was standing on the trail in the depths of Lathkill Dale. She hunched her shoulders right up to her ears and shook her head at Ben Cooper.
‘I told you, I just have this vague memory,’ she said. ‘Really vague, but it’s there in my mind.’
‘Lacey, you were at school that day,’ said Cooper.
She looked completely out of place in Lathkill Dale with her pale features and her lock of black hair over her face. She’d thrown on a huge baggy sweater which hung off her shoulders. It was odd that she should look so incongruous, when this dale had been one of her mother’s favourite places.
‘I know, I know. It’s weird, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I was sure I could remember it, but when I asked Aunt Frances about it she told me it wasn’t possible. She said it couldn’t be from that day, just like you. Yet I remember being there with my father. I see it quite clearly. How can that happen?’
‘It must be a false memory,’ suggested Carol Villiers. ‘It happens sometimes after a traumatic event.’
Lacey just shook her head even more vehemently.
‘No. Do you know what I think it is? I think Dad went back there later, to the same place. And that time he took me with him.’
Cooper was watching her closely.
‘You’ve got to show us the exact spot, Lacey,’ he said.
‘I don’t think I can, though.’
‘Think carefully. Cast your mind back to that day. No matter how young you were, there must be some more detailed impressions.’
‘There was just this cave.’
‘And water pouring out of it.’
‘That’s right. I was standing with my dad, looking at the water. I’ve told you all this.’
Cooper felt frustrated. It was like trying to drag a coma patient back to consciousness with familiar objects and sounds, attempting to jolt their memories with a favourite tune. He needed to find a way of inserting a catalyst into the brain through the functioning senses.
‘Try harder, Lacey, please.’
Lacey stood on the trail and turned in a full circle, staring at her surroundings as if she was seeing the valley for the first time. Or perhaps she was re-living a distant memory that she’d thought was a dream, or a nightmare. Cooper hoped the recollections were becoming clearer, but he didn’t have any great hopes.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
It was time for a bigger prompt. Cooper gestured for her to follow him.
‘Come with me a little way up the trail.’
‘If I’ve got to.’
‘It might help.’
‘Yeah. And it might not.’
He led her a few hundred yards up the dale. She followed slowly, with Carol Villiers coming up in the rear. They reached the spot where Lathkill Head came into view.
‘Was it this cave, Lacey?’ he said.
She peered at the gaping entrance and the slabs of rock.
‘There’s no water,’ she said.
‘Sometimes there is,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s been dry, recently, but at the time your mother went missing, there would have been a lot of water flowing out of this cave. A whole river of it. Try to picture it.’
Lacey screwed up her face, stared hard at the cave, looked all around her, touched the stone wall by the entrance. At least she was trying. Cooper kept his fingers crossed.
‘No, this isn’t it,’ she said finally. ‘Definitely not. I’ve never seen this cave before in my life.’
Cooper knew he had no justification for keeping Lacey Bower any longer. She was adamant that she couldn’t remember anything more that would be useful. He went back to the rendezvous point where the DCRO were still actively engaged in a search.
A few yards from the track was the tail of a deep sough, one of the channels built for draining water out of the mine. The top of the sough must be somewhere up the hill near the ruins of the mine buildings. The route of it seemed to pass under the trail to emerge here and discharge into the goit, a long walled channel that fed into the river. Some levels of Mandale Mine had been lower than the valley bottom, though. There, water had to be pumped up to reach the sough.
Pheasants cackled in the woods and chased each other through the undergrowth. A buzzard cried plaintively overhead. As he reached the edge of the goit, a vole scuttled out of sight into a hole in the rock.
The goit alone was about three hundred and fifty yards long with walled sides. How long was the sough tunnel itself, though?
Cooper dropped down into the goit between the stone walls and entered the portal of the tunnel. As he stepped inside, something touched the top of his head. He raised a hand to brush away a cobweb, but found something more solid. He shone his torch upwards and found a small forest, tendrils of vegetation hanging from the roof, the roots of nettles and ivy that grew on the surface. They’d crawled their way between the stones looking for nutrients, only to find themselves hanging in futile darkness.
In places the stonework gleamed with moisture. Just as the tunnel turned and lost the light from the entrance, it became rougher underfoot and he found himself stumbling over stones. Ahead, the sough appeared to be blocked. As he walked carefully back to the entrance, he estimated he’d walked about eighty yards to the blockage.
Cooper pulled a strand of vegetation from his hair and found the DCRO controller standing on the trail, watching him.
‘It’s dry at the moment, but that sough flows with water in the winter,’ he said. ‘It drains water out of the mine workings.’
‘Can we get to the other end of it?’ asked Cooper. ‘There must be another section past the collapse.’
‘Yes, we can reach it from the adit. That’s a horizontal entrance into the mineshaft. Deeper in from the adit there’s a winze, a passage connecting two levels of the mine.’
‘Where is that?’
‘This way.’
He was led up on to the northern slope above the trail. To the north-west of the sough outlet was a wheelpit, built to house a large waterwheel. Mine tubs had passed above it on a leat, arched over with ashlar stonework. The remains of a rectangular engine house emerged from the gloom, a three-storey fragment of stone with an arched window opening, like the ruins of a church, standing nearly twenty feet tall among the trees.