Learning Curve Read online

  Kate Booth said reflectively, ‘We thought that there must have been something beyond that squeeze even if it was just another cave, you understand. We just didn’t know exactly what and we wanted to find out.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan, who wasn’t sure that he did.

  ‘We knew that there had to be a space of sorts,’ she went on, ‘because the water going through the Bite had to go somewhere.’

  ‘It always does,’ said Crosby, sitting back.

  Sloan knew that water always found its own level, too, but did not feel it necessary to say so.

  ‘There was this little streamway running through the Bite, you see, but we couldn’t hear anything beyond.’ She looked at both policemen. ‘You understand that if there was a decent fall of water at the other side of the Bite there would be the sound of splashing?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. Crosby looked bored.

  She carried on. ‘Of course the Bite might have gone on so long that we wouldn’t have been able to hear anything anyway – we didn’t even know that much about it. We couldn’t see very far with a torch either because there was a bit of a dog-leg quite soon.’ The telephone on her desk began to ring but she didn’t answer it, her mind clearly back in the past. ‘And there could either have been a lake beyond,’ she opened her fingers in a gesture, ‘or, as it says in Kubla Khan, there could have been “caverns measureless to man” running “down to a sunless sea”.’

  ‘So …?’ said Sloan.

  ‘So we decided we’d have a crack at it that Saturday.’

  ‘Who decided?’

  ‘I can’t remember – Simon Thornycroft, I think it was, or it might have been Edmund Leaton. They were both really keen to find out what was there – we all were, actually. Had been for ages.’ She looked at Sloan and grinned for the first time. ‘I can’t really remember who it was who suggested that we should tackle it when we did – it was one of those decisions you take together in the nearest pub at the end of a day’s caving. You know how it happens.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan didn’t. Important decisions at the police station either took themselves in real emergencies or were debated for days before any action was taken – and for days afterwards sometimes. Unfortunately the correctness of the decisions taken in either manner were accountable and stood to be argued over for months by legislators anxious to appear even-handed in the eternal battle between the actions of lesser mortals and those of the forces of law and order.

  The telephone had stopped ringing.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘We chose the day – it was a Saturday, of course, because we were all working otherwise. And then we agreed the order we would tackle it in. There were four of us. Edmund was the slimmest and so he was to go first, then Simon, who was really the most experienced but a bit tubbier, then poor Derek …’ she sighed ‘and in the event it was poor Edmund, too, that day. I was just a beginner at that time and so I brought up the rear.’

  ‘Tail-end Charlie,’ put in Crosby, much attached to war films.

  ‘Not exactly. I had been due to go third but the men changed the order at the last minute.’ Kate Booth’s gaze drifted towards the window and the sky. ‘We had to choose a fine day in case there was flooding, which is the most dangerous thing about caving. Rain up top is always something to worry about. There was a good forecast for that Saturday, though, which is why we settled on it.’

  ‘Of course,’ murmured Sloan. ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’d had to rappel down – the cave was quite deep at that point – when we went in it for the first time but we’d fixed some ladders for the proper attempt after that to make access easier. We had to watch out when we got to the cave floor because there were lots of speleothems about.’

  ‘Come again?’ interrupted Crosby.

  Kate Booth explained. ‘Stalactites and stalagmites.’

  ‘The tights come down and the mites climb up,’ chanted Crosby joyously.

  ‘What we had to do,’ said the young accountant seriously, ‘was keep well clear of them. Not done, you know, to break ’em off. We had to be careful anyway because there were a lot of big stones and rubble on the cave floor too. There must have been an earlier roof fall there at some time or other. No idea when, naturally.’

  The telephone started ringing again but she still didn’t answer it, her mind a long way away in the past.

  ‘Edmund got into the Bite all right and was making good progress, although you could see that the way was getting a bit tight at this point because of the dog-leg beginning. We saw his light disappearing round it and then …’ She stopped abruptly, an unhappy grimace overtaking her face as memory flooded back.

  ‘And then?’ prompted Sloan gently.

  ‘And then,’ she said, ‘Simon’s headlight went out and it went a bit dark.’

  ‘Like that canary in the coal mine,’ said Crosby, ‘that snuffed it when things went wrong.’

  Kate Booth ignored this. ‘Simon fiddled about with it for a bit and then he called back over his shoulder to Derek and me to tell us to stop where we were while he crawled back to Derek to get a light from his torch so he could put a new battery in. He’d just got back to us when there was this great big bang and the roof of the Bite came down, crushing Edmund.’ Her eyes dimmed with tears. ‘Derek pushed past Simon because he’d got a light and Simon hadn’t, of course, and started to scrabble at the roof fall but it was hopeless. Quite hopeless.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, having read the newspaper report of the inquest, nodded that he understood.

  ‘There was just a solid wall of fallen rock in front of us,’ she said tearfully. ‘Simon followed in Derek’s light and tried to help clear a way, too, but it was no good. No good at all.’

  ‘And dangerous,’ said Sloan.

  ‘I don’t think any of us thought about that at first,’ she said frankly, ‘but what did get dangerous quite soon after the roof fall happened was the Bite getting blocked. The stream started to build up pretty quickly in front of the roof fall and we knew we would all drown if we didn’t get out pronto.’ Her face crumpled. ‘So we had to leave poor Edmund buried there and back out to higher ground fast.’

  ‘Or you’d have been goners, too,’ observed Crosby matter-of-factly.

  She started to cry. ‘The last I saw of Edmund,’ she gulped, ‘was the soles of his boots going into the Bite and I haven’t been able to get the memory of them out of my mind ever since.’ She shivered. ‘There was a funny smell about, too, like marzipan and whenever I smell that now it brings it all back. Silly, isn’t it?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There was no doubt about it, Detective Constable Crosby fancied himself in a hard white hat. Happily, wearing one had been the first requirement of stepping on-site at the bridgeworks at North Caughton Marsh. That was long before they found anyone who was prepared to direct the two policemen to where Simon Thornycroft might be found.

  The constable wore his hard hat tilted at an angle that could only be described as jaunty and clearly saw it as an improvement on any other head gear that he had ever worn. Simon Thornycroft was wearing one, too, but his was set squarely on his head, while both his arms were extended as he clasped a partially unrolled plan between his hands. The plan was proving unruly in the wind and hard to hold. He was standing in white overalls considering a half-built caisson on the north bank of the River Calle when the two policemen reached him.

  A girl in a mobile office had directed them to the civil engineer. ‘He’s pretty busy,’ she had said dubiously. ‘He doesn’t like being disturbed while he’s working. And,’ she added, ‘if you hear a maroon go off, watch out for blasting.’

  Simon Thornycroft, though, was amiable enough when they got to him, starting to roll up the plan as they approached. ‘Police? What can I do for you, gentlemen?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, his own hard hat perched uncomfortably over a full head of hair, launched smoothly into a spiel about checking up on some old cases,
including that of the death of Edmund Leaton.

  ‘Edmund Leaton?’ echoed Thornycroft, clearly puzzled. He rolled the map up. ‘That was a long time ago, Inspector.’

  ‘Five or six years or more, sir,’ agreed Sloan easily. ‘As you will know, the inquest was adjourned sine die.’

  Thornycroft looked quite startled. ‘His body hasn’t been found surely? Not under all that limestone. Or has there been another rockfall?’

  ‘No, sir. The matter came up again because it was mentioned at Derek Tridgell’s funeral.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course.’ He nodded and said ‘Indeed, I talked about it myself. Well, I can tell you that Derek did a damn good job that day.’ He sighed. ‘Not that it did any good.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Sloan.

  Thornycroft, having rolled up the plan, tucked it under his arm, naval fashion, and said, ‘Getting through that squeeze – the Baggles Bite, it’s called in the club – would have been a real speleological prize for us and we’d all been itching to have a go at it for a long while.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan could readily understand the attraction of this and said so: there were famous unsolved criminal cases whose solutions were dangling somewhere just out of police reach. Feathers waiting to be pinned to caps was how he thought of them. And he didn’t only mean the famous William Herbert Wallace case.

  ‘And one evening in the pub,’ went on Thornycroft, ‘when we were sitting around chatting, we decided to have a try at it the following weekend. We’d put some ladders in for when we made our proper attempt.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Edmund, Derek, a young girl called Kate Booth – it was her first big venture – and myself. Edmund was leading because he was on the skinny side and a dab hand at getting through tight spots, me following, and then Derek, with Kate bringing up the rear.’

  ‘Ladies last,’ observed Crosby, once brought to task by female Police Sergeant Perkins for holding a door open for her. She was perfectly capable, she had barked, of opening the door for herself.

  ‘Kate was a bit of a rock chick even in those days, but still quite inexperienced, though she’s got pretty good since,’ went on Thornycroft. ‘Anyway we got down to the cave floor and then went down quite a lot further, short step.’

  ‘Short step?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Inspector. It’s an army term for marching downhill.’

  Sloan, Head of the Criminal Investigation Department, nodded. The uniformed branch of the police, white gloves and all, marched when civic occasion demanded it. Detectives didn’t.

  ‘There was quite a slope downwards to begin with, Inspector, and there was a great deal of breakdown there to cover before we got to the Bite …’

  ‘Breakdown?’

  ‘Lots of odd rocks – some pretty big ones and some small – that had fallen down from the roof onto the cave floor. The trouble is that that particular breakdown could have been fifty thousand years ago or last week and if you’re a caver you don’t always know which.’

  ‘You mean it could happen again?’ asked Crosby, wide-eyed.

  ‘Any time,’ said Thornycroft soberly. ‘And it did, of course, further on in the cave and a bit later that day. It’s one of the dangers of caving. Not the only one, of course.’

  ‘Was the roof known to be in a dangerous condition, sir?’

  ‘Not that we knew about at the time,’ said Thornycroft frankly. ‘We’d never got beyond the dog-leg before which is what made it such an interesting proposition. And,’ he added, ‘if we’d known the roof was unstable we’d never have gone in there in the first place.’

  ‘And then?’ prompted Sloan.

  ‘Edmund went into the squeeze first and he was making good progress – the last we saw of him were the soles of his boots as he inched his way forwards into the Bite and round the dog-leg. Then the light in my headlamp went out just before I was going to follow him in. I called back to Derek Tridgell to tell him to stop where he was while I went back to get Derek to help me load a new battery. It’s very difficult to do it without any light at all down there, you understand.’

  ‘I can imagine it would be,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, who realised he actually knew nothing about the depths of Stygian gloom to be found in a deep cave without any light.

  ‘And I couldn’t risk dropping the new battery in the water, you see. Oh, did I tell you there was a little stream running through the squeeze? We’d already tried putting a whole lot of fluorescein in it …’

  ‘Fluorescein?’ asked Sloan, who had a deep-rooted objection to the use of words that he wasn’t likely to know by other people.

  ‘Sorry, Inspector. It’s a dye. We really wanted to see first exactly where the stream came out of the caves and made its way to the river Calle and the sea – if it ever surfaced anywhere at all, that is.’

  Something stirred in Detective Inspector Sloan’s memory at the combined mention of rocks, dye and the sea. It was a line heard in his schooldays and one that had made the class of boys laugh – he remembered that much. He searched his mind now, only giving Simon Thornycroft’s account half an ear.

  Smooth Adonis – that was the image that had had the class so tickled. And it came from John Milton’s Paradise Lost which had amused them even more. The schoolmaster had explained that in legend Adonis was a beautiful boy and would have been naked – smooth – and therefore purple with cold when he ran into the sea, hence the line ‘Smooth Adonis from his native rock/Ran purple to the sea’. Perhaps, thought Sloan, the fluorescein had run purple to the sea, too.

  Either way, he was prepared to bet that it was the only line any of the class – including him – still remembered. An older, sadder, wiser and more experienced Christopher Dennis Sloan, police officer, was ready to worry now more about the way in which the schoolmaster had dwelt overlong on the image of a beautiful naked boy running into the sea. Where Milton came in, he didn’t know.

  ‘But,’ Simon Thornycroft was continuing, ‘the dye doesn’t always surface and, in this case, it didn’t.’

  ‘What goes down must come up,’ pronounced Crosby, rather pleased with himself.

  ‘Not if the stream is in a phreatic tube,’ responded Thornycroft, hastily going on to explain that that meant that it could be running along below the water table and not come out anywhere where it could be seen, what was called ‘secret water’. ‘The limestone over there’s riddled with caves – it’s a hard rock but permeable, you see. There’s fourteen miles of them down there under the crags – and no end of streams.’

  Sloan hauled the man back to his narrative. ‘Edmund Leaton …’

  ‘Edmund just disappeared mostly out of sight round the dog-leg in the squeeze, Inspector, like I told you, when there was a sudden whoosh and the roof of the Bite – heaven alone knows how much of it – collapsed on him. We couldn’t see Edmund at all then, not even his boots. Derek crawled straight past me – he had a light, you see – and started to pull away at the rock with his bare hands but it was hopeless.’ He shook his head. ‘Quite hopeless. I came up behind him but I couldn’t do anything either. And then …’ he broke off and fell silent.

  ‘And then,’ prompted Sloan.

  ‘And then, Inspector, we suddenly started to get very wet. Kate shouted to us that we needed to get out fast. The rockfall had blocked the stream, you see, and the water was backing up in front of it quite quickly as that part of the cave flooded. We turned round and scrambled back towards the higher ground as quickly as we could.’ Thornycroft shook himself as if to rid his mind of the memory. ‘It was quite worrying but eventually we got back up the ladders to the ledge above and then out to daylight but it took time. There was nothing left to do except call the police, and,’ he added bleakly, ‘go and tell poor Amelia.’

  ‘Amelia?’

  ‘His wife.’ He winced. ‘God, I can tell you, Inspector, that was quite awful … I’ve never forgotten it.’

  ‘Sorry to drag you all round here after work,’ said Paul Tridgell to the oth
er two men who had convened in the living room of Elizabeth Shelford’s bungalow. ‘Not all actually,’ he explained, ‘because I haven’t asked Danny Saville to join us. That’s because he doesn’t really know us.’

  ‘Luckily for him,’ muttered Tim Cullen, one of the four there. ‘I bet he wishes he’d never set eyes on any of us.’

  ‘I’m sure he does. After all, it was really dark when he got in the car that night and he’s been quite out of it since the accident,’ agreed Paul.

  ‘He isn’t the only one,’ said Trevor Skewis sourly. ‘I swear my head’s not right yet.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘Count yourself very lucky that it’s still on your shoulders, Trevor. It nearly mightn’t have been.’

  ‘Sorry, Liz,’ he apologised to her. ‘I should have thought before I opened my big mouth.’

  Elizabeth, old before her time now, thought that applied to almost everyone who had spoken to her after the accident but she held her peace. That was something else she had learnt to do the hard way.

  ‘That’s what we all need to do,’ insisted Paul urgently. He turned to Trevor Skewis. ‘Not open our big mouths, I mean. It’s all a matter of keeping our heads and thinking before we speak. One word out of turn and one of us here could go to prison for up to fourteen years. You do realise that, don’t you all?’

  A little silence descended on the quartet. Presently Paul broke it by asking if anyone had had the police round lately.

  Trevor Skewis and Tim Cullen both shook their heads.

  ‘Well, you will,’ forecast Paul. ‘And very soon, probably. They’ve already been to see me and Elizabeth.’

  She nodded. ‘Two of them came here, wanting to know about the accident all over again. They said they were detectives.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Trevor. ‘I mean, why now? And why detectives?’

  ‘I thought that it was all over bar the shouting,’ Tim Cullen caught sight of a bleak look in Elizabeth’s eye and hastily amended this to, ‘I meant to say when all was done and dusted.’ He realised that this was hardly more tactful and blushed to the roots of his hair.