Still I waited as the rain pelted onto the empty landscape. I had a flask of cold tea and a great slab of fruitcake that I consumed as a second breakfast while I watched the old workings for any signs of life. I was soaked and chilled to the bone, yet I endured the discomfort for a full hour, seeing neither man nor beast. The only oddity, apart from the fact that the quarry and its buildings existed at all, was a tractor that was parked beside one of the ramshackle sheds, but even with the binoculars it was impossible to tell whether the machine had been abandoned fifty years before or just left there a few hours ago. After a further half hour, during which I became increasingly certain that the limestone works were deserted, I picked up my gun and bag and walked down the right-hand edge of the quarry.
It should have been a moment of heightened apprehension, even drama. For years I had dreamed of finding my daughter, and now, miraculously, half a world away from home, I was carrying a gun into the heart of von Rellsteb’s mad empire. Nicole might be just a mile away from me, and, even if she was at sea, I still hoped that I would find some evidence that she was innocent of anything worse than a fanatical desire to cleanse the planet. I tried to buoy up my anticipation, to tell myself that I was on the brink of a dream’s fulfillment, but I was too wet and too cold and too aching and too tired to feel the proper apprehension.
So, numbed by cold, I stumbled downhill. I splashed through peaty streams and tripped on thick tussocks of springy grass. My throat was sore and I prayed that it was not the first symptom of a cold. There was still no movement by the huge sheds, which, as I came closer, appeared more and more dilapidated. Whole roof sheets of corrugated iron had been ripped away by the winds to leave rotten holes, in which only the beams were left exposed. Other iron sheets, half loosened by the storms, creaked and flapped in the wind. Rainwater poured off the sloping roofs, cascading through the broken sheets into the shadowed shed interiors. Where there was paint on window frames or doors it was peeling and cracked. The place looked as miserable and deserted as an abandoned whaling station on a remote Antarctic island.
I stopped a quarter mile from the rusted sheds and again examined them through my binoculars, but still I saw nothing to worry me. I gazed for a long, long time, but saw no one move across the sodden quarry floor or past one of the windows. The quarry, and its old works, seemed as empty as the backside of the moon.
I reached the bottom of the hill. Now I was just a hundred yards from the sheds. Still nothing threatened me. If an ambush had been set, then the ambushers were being as silent as the grave, but I felt no instinctive apprehension of danger. I only felt the anticipation of disappointment, for it seemed ridiculous that I might find anything of value in this rusted, derelict place. I looked at my watch and reckoned I had time to search for three or four hours and still be back at the fjord long before dusk, and the thought of returning to Stormchild made me long to sit in front of her saloon heater with a hot whiskey-toddy. That tantalizing vision made me wonder whether Stormchild would be waiting when I returned. The rain was falling more heavily and the wind blowing more strongly than it had at dawn; the gale David feared might be swirling its way toward the coast and David might already have taken Stormchild to safety on the last of the morning’s ebb tide. I hoped he would be there nonetheless, for I was soaked through, the rain was leaking down the collar of my coat, and the temptation of Stormchild’s spartan comforts was a torment as I paused once more to search the quarry buildings with the binoculars. No one moved there, nothing threatened, and so, throwing caution to the wind, I splashed through puddles made milk-white by limestone dust to push open the nearest door that hung ajar off ancient rusted hinges.
I found myself in an old stable, a reminder that these limestone workings must once have been powered by ponies or mules. No one waited for me. No one shouted a warning. I seemed utterly alone as I walked past the old stalls and under the cacophony of the metal roof being tortured by the rising wind. Water dripped and trickled onto the cobbled floor. Some of the stalls still had their iron feeding baskets, while in a couple there were even frayed head ropes hanging.
Next to the stables, and in equal disrepair, were the bunkrooms where the quarrymen had slept. The windows were broken and the old wooden floor was rotted and covered with bird droppings. A faded calendar was tacked to one wall. I gingerly crossed the room, treading only where nail heads betrayed the existence of joists under the decaying floorboards, and I saw that the yellowing calendar was for the month of Dezember, 1931. The script was a big, black, ornate German gothic. There was a photograph, faded almost to invisibility, that showed a tram in front of a big stone building, while two uniformed men, presumably the vehicle’s proud crew, stood with chests thrust out by the tram’s steps.
I walked through a door on which the faded word Waschraum was painted in the same black-letter as the calendar. The washroom consisted of lavatory stalls and two zinc-lined troughs. The lavatories were blackened and broken, while the troughs had collapsed under a welter of old water pipes. The roof of this room was almost entirely missing and the rain poured in to make a huge puddle on the decayed floor. Moss and weeds grew thick in some of the broken lavatories, while the stalls still bore their pre-war graffiti, mute witnesses to the lonely frustrations of breaking limestone from this quarry at the world’s bitter end.
I went through another door and edged carefully down a passage from which a number of small rooms opened to my right. Some of the rooms still held the rusted metal frames of old cot beds, and I assumed that the quarry’s managers had once slept here. The windows offered fine views of the Desolate Straits’ blind end where the deceptive waterway widened into an immense and sheltered pool and in which a great ship could easily have turned its full length before docking beside the quarry’s pier. Berenice had told us how Genesis had begun using this anchorage because it was so much more sheltered than the bay at the settlement, and I could see the sense of that decision, for this great sea pool had to be one of the most secure anchorages I had ever seen. It was also an empty anchorage, unless I counted a half-sunken rusted barge that lay at the seaward end of the old pier. On the southern side of the bay was a stone quay which was backed by a row of low stone buildings. Beside the quay was a slipway up which two steel rails ran, evidence that boats could, as Berenice had said, be drawn safely out of the water in this place, but there was no sign of any activity on the quay or on the slipway. There were no yachts or dinghies in sight, just the wet wind, the cold rain, and the empty straits.
The absence of any boats disappointed and relaxed me. I was disappointed because their absence surely meant that Nicole was not here, but it also meant that no one else from Genesis waited in this dreadful spot, and that, therefore, I could not possibly be in any danger. I decided my enemies must have sailed northward, gone to intercept Stormchild off Cape Raper.
I went through another door and stopped in sheer amazement. I was also overcome with sudden fear because I found myself standing on a rickety wooden platform high above a machinery floor. The timbers under my feet creaked ominously, and it seemed as if one more step would splinter the old wood and tumble me forty feet down to the floor.
I had entered the largest of all the quarry’s buildings, the tall gaunt shed, which I now saw had been built above and around an excavated pit, and it was in that huge stone pit, shadowed dark beneath me, that the quarry’s old machinery rusted into powder.