rock.
Together we tugged at the ferns, carefully peeling them off the cave wall.
The SOCO took a step back. ‘Ugh. What’s that?’
We pulled away more foliage and the full carving came into view. My chest tightened and it felt hard to draw the cold cave air into my lungs. It was an image of The Grim Reaper – hooded, with a grinning skull and skeletal body, its scythe held high above its head. The image was simply drawn with just a few lines cut into the rock, but it seemed all the more sinister for that. It stood over the dead man as if it had attacked him.
‘Hold on a sec,’ the SOCO said. ‘There’s some writing under the image. Is it a date?’ He gently tore away more ferns.
I crouched and directed my torch at the lettering in the rock. A prickling crept up my spine to the base of my neck. ‘Not a date,’ I said.
The SOCO leant closer to the rock, and then froze. ‘How can that be? That carving must be a good hundred years old – the writing the same – and covered up for years before we cut the foliage back.’ His voice was loud in the still air, but I heard the tremor in it. ‘I don’t understand… The dead man’s initials?’
I didn’t understand either. I stepped away from the cave wall and wiped my face with my green-stained gloves.
Carved into the stone below the Grim Reaper image were the words, ‘Coming for PHH’.
I emerged and climbed down from the cave, backwards, trying not to slip on the worn stone. Relieved to be outside, I jumped awkwardly down the final few steps and enjoyed the smell of damp trees and the feel of solid ground and daylight.
Ben sidled up. ‘What do you think?’
What did I think? I had no idea. ‘The dead man’s initials are cut into the cave wall,’ I blurted. ‘But they look like they’ve been there for decades.’
Ben jerked his head back and wiped his forehead. ‘No. It can’t be.’
I felt a shiver of unease. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s…’ Ben took a step sideways. ‘I don’t like to talk about it.’
‘Well, if it might be relevant to our body, you’d better talk about it.’
‘You know the Labyrinth? On the other side of the valley.’
I shook my head. ‘What about it?’
Ben opened his mouth and paused. ‘Okay. It’s a vast cave system below the Devil’s Dice, you know, the rock formation. It’s not a good place. The tunnels go for miles and miles. Some of it’s underwater. And there’s a noose in a cavern deep inside. Teenagers go there to commit suicide.’
I felt a flush of adrenaline, hot then cold. Why was he telling me this? I didn’t want to know.
Ben continued. ‘The rumour is – if you can’t find the noose, it’s your sign you should live.’
I stared at the light filtering through the trees, feeling the familiar thickness in my throat. I couldn’t let it get to me. I was over all that now. Reinvented. I firmed up my stomach. ‘And the relevance of this?’
‘So, the point is, if you can find the noose, they say you find your initials have already been cut into the cave wall behind it.’
‘Cut into the wall by someone?’
‘They’re said to appear on their own.’
‘Have you been there?’
Ben hesitated, then licked his lips and nodded. ‘We tried to save a girl. We were too late. I’m a caver – I should have got to her quicker.’ He looked clammy and kind of avocado coloured. He pressed his hands against his stomach. ‘I could never go back there. Never.’
I tried to stop myself picturing the noose hanging still and straight, deep inside a cavern. My hands clenched into fists, nails digging into palms. ‘And the initials?’
‘Well, there were initials engraved into the cave wall. Lots of them. They looked old. We didn’t check for our girl’s.’
‘So it’s not a recent thing?’
‘It started in the times of the witch trials, apparently. If a girl was suspected of being a witch, she’d be led into the Labyrinth. If they could find the noose, then her initials would already be on the wall behind, and she’d be forced to hang herself. If they couldn’t find the noose, she was innocent, but she had to find her own way out.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know. So then in Victorian times, there was a spate of girls going in to commit suicide.’
‘And this one more recently?’
He shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Yes. It was about ten years ago.’
I imagined the cave wall, covered with the initials of dead people. ‘If people kept hanging themselves, why didn’t someone get rid of the damn noose?’
‘They put bars across the cave entrance after… that girl. But you can still get in from above, if you know how.’
*
Two hours later, fully prepped and preened, DCI Richard Atkins and I walked into the incident room back at the Station. The large quantity of cops crammed into a small space had given the room the fugginess of damp trainers and wet dogs, but the electricity of a suspicious death zapped around underneath.
A board at one end was covered with photographs of the dead man and his surroundings. I stepped forward to take a closer look while Richard bustled to and fro pinning names and assignments onto a grey board opposite. Low tech, but at least it wouldn’t crash.
DS Craig Cooper was peering at the photos and invading my personal space. Craig had worked his way up in the traditional manner and seemed to be the worst kind of old-fashioned police bloke – casually homophobic, with a fifty-inch TV, a subscription to Sky Sports, and a plastic-headed wife. I suspected he felt entitled to the job I’d been given, and I didn’t know how to handle him. I folded my arms into a defensive position.
‘Okay!’ Richard strode to the front of the room. He’d removed his jacket, and dark marks stained his armpits. His face glistened. I slid into what I judged was an appropriate second-in-command spot.
‘We have a male in his thirties, Peter Hamilton, found today in a cave house fifteen foot up a cliff face in Eldercliffe quarry.’ Richard looked at his notes. ‘Time of death around the middle of the day. We’re waiting on lab results and the post mortem but early suggestions are he was killed by cyanide poisoning.’
A rumble of voices filled the room. They liked the cyanide, with its hints of Agatha Christie.
‘In a cave house?’ DS Jai Sanghera squinted his surprise. ‘Fifteen foot up a cliff face?’
Jai
