It showed what you could get away with if a body was well enough hidden. The most sensible thing Flea could do right now was to hire a chainsaw and cut Misty into a thousand pieces. Scatter them in rivers and fields. But even this new, cold imperative of hers couldn’t look that solution in the eye. So she’d come to another frantic but rational conclusion – the only one she could think of.
She dragged her dive kit from the back seat, dumped it a few feet away and set about covering the car with sticks and branches. Then she pulled off her shoes, got into the drysuit, hauled on the buoyancy jacket and the cylinders, and gave the regulator three short breaths – one, two, three. She secured all the harness straps, deadlocked the car doors – checked again that it couldn’t be seen from the slip road – and carried her fins down to the edge of the quarry. She pulled them on, then the mask, and climbed down the rusting ladder that led into the quarry. At 1.13 a.m. exactly she slipped silently out of sight, into the dark waters of quarry number eight.
The Marley family had always dived. Mum and Dad had taught the children. They’d put them in junior Solar suits aged eleven. Most family holidays revolved around scuba- and wreck-diving: the Red Sea, Cyprus, once into Truk Lagoon half bankrupting themselves. It was how they had come together, the place they found comfort, the place they settled into something easier. Even the accident hadn’t changed that. But diving here now, alone and in the dark? It broke all the rules of danger and common sense. It was a dumb, stark invitation to death.
She sank slowly, letting out small amounts of air from the suit as she descended to fifteen metres. The divelight she held pointed downwards, its membranous beam picking out swirling particles in the pitch darkness below. The light pierced a long way down, maybe another fifteen metres, but it didn’t reach the bottom. She was in the deepest part of the quarry. There was still twenty-five metres – almost seventy-five feet – of unlit water beneath her.
Down another fifteen metres. She found the net from memory, its weed-coloured webbing faint and furred in the torchbeam. She handheld herself along it twenty feet until she could see the warning sign. The hole she’d made last week was still there, the frayed edges moving slowly like wafting sea anemones. She ducked through, twisting over as she did to stop the cylinders snagging – she didn’t want a repeat of last time. A few feet inside the net, at the place where the accident had happened, she stopped, turned around and around in the water, pointing the torchbeam into the swirling darkness.
Usually, when she did decompression stops, she’d clip herself to a rope with a carabiner and rest on her front, horizontal in the water. Tonight she wanted to stay vertical. Wanted to be able to turn, to see 360 degrees. Upping the buoyancy in her jacket, releasing a little air from her drysuit so it didn’t shoot up and gather round the neck seal, she found her neutral buoyancy, then let her arms drift out sideways. The divelight shone off to the side and she bobbed peacefully. Like a spaceman in the blackness.
She rested to start with. Eyes closed. Concentrated on emptying her head so there was nothing, no thought, no sound, just the in-out-in-out of her breathing. She’d heard once, years ago, that some seabirds have an internal compass that they use to navigate across oceans, around half the world, and always come back to the same breeding ground. The birds don’t have to think about it, they give themselves up to something ancient and miraculous – the fact that their bodies know what their heads can’t: which is north and which is south.
She tried to imagine herself as a seabird. Put her head back. Turned her face to the surface. She wanted to be told a direction. She wanted to be like a seabird and be told which way to go.
The minutes passed. Between each noisy breath her pressurized ears played tricks on her. From everywhere she was being pulled by imaginary sounds, her attention drawn first right, then left. She let them wash over her, waiting to feel where her body wanted to lean, what it wanted to do.
‘You’ve got to look after yourself…’
Her eyes flew open. The torch beam came up in front of her, seesawing against the black. She gripped it. Steadied it. Turned it from side to side, hunting out the sound.
‘Mum?’
No answer.
‘Mum?’
She sculled with her free hand, turning herself in the water. The beam of light yawed around her. It was a hallucination.
‘Mum? Are you there?’
A movement. To her left. Just outside the beam of her torch. She swung the light across. About twenty yards away she saw feet. Human feet. Swimming away from her, fast.
Amos Chipeta.
She pushed her arms out into the darkness, the Salvo divelight clenched in both hands. The beam danced crazily across nothing. The feet had gone. All the light picked up was emptiness.
Heart huge in her chest she tipped the top half of her body down and began to swim towards where the feet had been. Her instinct was to switch off the light, not wanting to give herself away to whatever was disappearing ahead of her into the darkness, but without it she was blind. Shielding it with her hand, letting a pinkish half-light filter through her fingers, she moved carefully through the water.
According to the compass whatever it was had been travelling west and slightly upwards. She reached the underwater rockface of the quarry edge, shone the torch along it and saw nothing. The other way. Nothing. She checked the depth gauge. She was still a hundred feet below the surface. Turning the light above her head, she moved it in an arc. Even going fast Chipeta should still be within the beam. When she shone it down and swung it from side to side, covering every angle, there was still nothing to see. Just the plant life on the side of the rock. Moving lazily.
Something occurred to her. It was rumoured that the quarry connected with local caves left behind by the Roman lead miners. That there were tunnels here. Wedging the torch in her buoyancy jacket she moved her hands along the slimed surface.
It jumped at her, almost as soon as she’d started looking. A cavity. A place darker than the rest of the rock. It wasn’t on the quarry schematic – she was almost sure of that. She pushed her hand into it and shone the light around the edges, then into its depths to get the measure of it. There was no end to it. The beam shone into blackness. The diameter of the hole was big too: you could fit three men through here, even if they were wearing full diving gear.
Even in diving gear. She screwed up her face. No excuses, then.
One kick propelled her up and into the opening. She kept her hands on the walls, walked her fingers along, knowing how easy it would be to come into a narrowing so fast that the ceiling ripped the cylinders off her back. People had died like that, in places like the Eagle’s Nest sinkhole, or the Yucatan cave systems, not like her parents, in a fatal freefall to the bottom, but tangled in guide lines, lodged between unforgiving rocks, trapped in water-filled sumps and crawl spaces. She thought of them struggling on and on in the lonely darkness. Until the air gauge hit critical. Until the pony cylinder was dead and lungs sucked at a vacuum. Clangtanking, they called it. The worst way to die.
The floor sloped upwards. She was entering a chimney: a narrow tube about four feet wide heading vertically. Undeviating. The beam showed it was one straight ascent, the sides smooth, almost as if they’d been machine cut. She forced herself to take a brief decompression stop – breathing slowly, picturing the nitrogen fizzing out of her muscles. The clock numbers tumbled round. Six minutes. It would have to do. She filled her jacket with air and entered, one hand raised above her.