better if you just help us find the way in.’
The young man frowned, pushing his hair back from his face. ‘She’s family, Mr Clough. Somebody should be there for her.’
‘You can trust DI Bennett to do his best for her,’ Tommy said. ‘You know he wants this sorting as badly as you do.’
Charlie turned away, his shoulders slumped. ‘So what are we waiting for now?’ he demanded, his bravado betrayed by the break in his voice.
‘I need to get changed,’ George said. ‘I don’t know your name,’ he added to the caver.
‘I’m Barry.’ He sighed. ‘All right, we’ve got a spare suit that should fit you. You’ll need your own boots, though.’
‘I’ve got wellies in the car. Will they do?’
Barry looked contemptuous. ‘They’ll have to.’
Twenty minutes later, they made a strange procession down the dale and through the woodland where Charlie had uncovered the site of the struggle with Alison. He led the way, closely followed by George and Clough. Behind them the cavers walked in a clump, laughing, talking and smoking cheerfully as if they faced nothing more demanding than the usual Sunday exploration of some fascinating cave system.
When they reached the base of the crag, the cavers squatted on the ground under the nearest trees and waited for directions. Charlie moved slowly along the edge of the limestone, pushing back undergrowth and occasionally clambering over fallen boulders to check if they were obscuring the remains of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old palisade. George followed where he could, but left most of the quest to Charlie, constantly comparing the topography to the description in the book.
Charlie pushed through a thicket of young trees and dead ferns, then pulled himself over a group of small boulders and dropped down on the other side. He was lost from sight, but his voice carried clearly down the dale to the waiting men. ‘There’s a gap in the cliff here. Looks like…looks like there’s been a barricade, but it’s rotted away.’
‘Wait there, Charlie,’ George commanded. ‘Sergeant, come with me. We need to see if there are any signs of disturbance other than Charlie’s tracks.’
They made their difficult way to the cluster of boulders, trying to avoid being whipped in the face by overhanging small branches or tripped by the tenacious bramble suckers that criss-crossed the undergrowth. ‘It’s impossible to tell if anyone’s been here,’ Clough said, his frustration obvious. ‘You could come at it through the woods, or along the dale from the other side. As a crime scene, it’s worse than useless.’
They scrambled over the rocks and found Charlie dancing impatiently from foot to foot. ‘Look,’ he exclaimed as soon as he saw them. ‘It’s got to be this, hasn’t it, Mr Bennett?’
It was hard to reconcile what they could see with the mine entrance whose representation George had been studying all morning. Chunks of rock had fallen away from the mouth of the tunnel, leaving it an entirely different shape. The arch that simple tools had carved out of the soft limestone now looked more like a narrow triangular crack, at least twice as high as it had been. Bracken and ferns reached waist height, while an elder tree camouflaged the higher part of what looked as if it might be the way in. ‘See,’ Charlie said proudly. ‘You can see the remains of the iron spikes they hammered in to support the wooden barricade.’ He pointed to a couple of black lumps extruding from the rock at one side. ‘And down here…’ He pulled the bracken to one side to reveal the rotten remains of heavy timber. ‘I thought I knew every inch of this dale, but I never knew about this place.’
George looked around with a heavy heart. Charlie had trampled the area like a young elephant. If Alison had passed this way, alone or under restraint, there would be no traces now. He took a deep breath and called, ‘Barry? Bring your lads up here, would you?’ He turned to Clough. ‘Sergeant, I want you and Mr Lomas to go back to the caravan. I’m going to need some uniformed officers down here to cordon this area off. And not a word to the press at this stage.’
‘Right you are, sir.’ Clough clamped a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. ‘Time for us to leave it to the experts.’
‘I should be in there,’ Charlie said, pulling away and making a break for the entrance. George neatly stuck out a foot between his legs. Charlie crashed to the ground and rolled over, staring up at George with a look of injured rage.
‘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
