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  The guide looked back into the boat at his passengers.

  ‘There’s no way anybody could get in here. You can see that.’

  ‘We have to check,’ said Fry.

  He shrugged. ‘Just here is Halfway House - it’s a branch canal, made so that two boats can pass in the tunnel. It’s only a few yards long.’

  Fry dipped her hand in the water. They’d been told the temperature down here was a constant nine Celsius, but the water itself was a few degrees colder.

  ‘How does it stay full of water?’ said Murfin.

  ‘There’s a dam up ahead in Far Canal.’

  ‘Another canal?’

  ‘It’s more of a continuation of this one, further into the hillside. But we don’t go as far as that. We stop at the Bottomless Pit.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Murfin. ‘I think.’

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  The cavern system was full of flowstone curtains, delicate calcite dams, and little gour pools holding crystal-clear water. Irregular fragile growths hung on the passage walls, while stalactites and stalagmites grew from the roof and floor, forming drip by drip from the evaporation of dissolved calcium.

  But Ben Cooper saw none of it. Mansell Quinn had the only torch, and he kept it pointed at the floor so they could see where they were putting their feet on the uneven flights of steps and slippery patches of wet limestone. The light didn’t seem very strong to Cooper. He wondered how long Quinn had been using the battery. A torch wasn’t on the list of items he’d bought at Out and About, so where had he got it? Was it something his mother had kept in a kitchen drawer in case of emergencies? Cooper prayed that Quinn at least had a spare set of batteries. Peak Cavern wasn’t a place to be without a source of light.

  And it was clear that they were heading deeper into the cavern. They had bent double as they passed through Lumbago Walk and into the Great Cave. The dome-like avens in the roof far above had gone by unseen as Cooper tried to listen for the echoes that identified the acoustics of the Orchestra Gallery. But the familiar cascade of water still caught him by surprise, and he was unable to turn his head away in time to avoid it. Roger Rain’s House.

  In a flicker of Quinn’s torch, Cooper saw the moss around a fibre-optic light on the wall, growing from spores that had been carried into the cavern on visitors’ clothes, or that had drifted in on the air.

  ‘OK, stop,’ said Quinn a few minutes later.

  Another second of light, and Cooper saw the yellowish white calcite sheets glistening on the walls, and tiny black hooks hanging from the roof. Then the torch turned away, and there was only darkness around him again. The surface was four hundred feet away now, through solid rock.

  Cooper realized that his skin was tingling in the cool air.

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  All his attempts to engage Quinn in conversation had failed so far. Maybe he could think of something that would force him to answer.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Quinn. He pointed with the torch. ‘On the floor.’

  Quinn had the torch in his left hand, on his injured side. But the crossbow was gripped firmly in his right, his index finger curled close to the trigger. Cooper sat cross-legged on the floor, immediately feeling the chill of the damp rock through his trousers. He hadn’t come dressed for this. In fact, he hadn’t come equipped for it, either. Like the most foolhardy of amateur cave explorers, he had no equipment, no proper clothing, no food or water, and now no light of his own. And he hadn’t told anybody where he was going. What an idiot. Alistair Page was the only person who might think of looking for him in the cavern.

  Quinn sat on a boulder across the chamber, at a safe distance and above Cooper’s level. He was taking no chances. But Cooper saw that Quinn hadn’t put his shirt back on. It would be difficult for him to do that now without losing control of the crossbow or the torch, or both. His body had dried, but he must be feeling the cold.

  ‘Why did you confess to killing Carol Proctor?’ said Cooper.

  His voice jarred the silence. He’d never heard himself sound so small and tinny. As the cavern swallowed the sound of his words, he was overwhelmed with a sense of his own insignificance in the vastness of the cave system.

  But at least it had worked.

  ‘Because I was guilty,’ said Quinn.

  ‘That’s not what you said at first.’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Why?’

  The torchlight flickered. Quinn put the torch down on the boulder next to him, flexed his left arm and gripped the shaft of the crossbow to steady it. Cooper saw that he was shivering.

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  ‘Why did you change your mind? Was it because your friends let you down, didn’t give you an alibi for the right time? Without that, your defence wouldn’t stand up, would it?’

  Quinn didn’t answer. So Cooper tried again - he had to keep him talking.

  ‘Or was it because of what you remembered during the police interviews, Mr Quinn?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Cooper leaned forward and talked a little more quickly and insistently, focusing Quinn’s attention on him.

  ‘I think it must have been very traumatic going into your own house and finding your lover dying on the floor. The shock would’ve driven everything else out of your mind. You couldn’t think properly, could you? I can see that’s how it must have been. But some things came back later, didn’t they? Details, impressions. They came back when the detectives asked you questions.’

  Quinn stared at him. The don’t understand how you can know that. You weren’t there.’

  ‘I’ve read the transcripts, Mr Quinn. I think I could tell where it happened - where the memories came back to you.’

  ‘You can’t know something like that. You’re making it up.’

  Quinn shifted the butt of the crossbow a little. It must be very uncomfortable, pressed against his naked shoulder like that.

  Cooper leaned an inch or two closer. The torchlight was definitely failing now, but Quinn didn’t seem to notice. The gradual fading of light could be indiscernible, until it was too late. Until you realized it was already too dark to see.

  ‘What was it you saw that day?’ said Cooper. ‘You noticed something in the room, something that surprised you. It shouldn’t have been there. What did you remember seeing?’

  Quinn’s eyes were drifting away, and he was losing concentration. The nose of the crossbow dipped a little. Cooper

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  realized that Quinn must be exhausted. He’d been sleeping rough for the past few nights, and constantly on the move during the day, always looking over his shoulder for a police car or a CCTV camera. It was almost over for him now; he was drawing on his last reserves of energy.

  ‘The Coke bottle,’ said Quinn, as if talking in his sleep. ‘I smelled it first. There was a Coca Cola bottle on the table. It wasn’t quite empty.’

  ‘What was wrong with the Coke bottle being there?’

  ‘Carol didn’t drink Coke. She hated it. The bottle shouldn’t have been there.’

  ‘And what else?’

  But Cooper couldn’t get out the next question before Quinn cut across him.

  ‘And there was a light - a light from upstairs. Carol wouldn’t have gone upstairs. She wouldn’t go near the bedroom, not even to pass it on the way to the loo.’

  Cooper wanted to hold his breath, so as not to disturb Quinn’s recall. But he needed to ask one more thing.

  ‘There was something you heard?’

  ‘Music. There was music in the house.’

  Cooper hadn’t expected that. A voice, a footstep, the sound of a door closing, perhaps.

  ‘Music? What music?’

  The knew it,’ said Quinn. ‘Not at the time. But later, I recognized it. It was U2.’

  ‘U2?’ Cooper closed his eyes. It had been there in the transcript of the interview, after all. But he hadn’t understood it. Nor had the interviewers. As far as they were concerned, Mansell Quinn had said, �
��You, too.’

  ‘Somebody else had been in the house before you arrived,’ said Cooper. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘Only the kids drank Coke. And the light was from Simon’s room. He used to draw the curtains and put the lamps on, even in broad daylight. He played U2 all the time up there,

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  and it drove me mad. When he had it on too loud, I got angry with him. Too angry.’

  He turned his attention back to Cooper, who sank reluctantly back on his heels as the crossbow straightened up again.

  ‘I’ve been angry all my life,’ said Quinn.

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  When the torchlight finally became too low, Mansell Quinn reached into his rucksack with one hand and withdrew a round foil packet about eight inches long, which he opened with his teeth.

  Ben Cooper couldn’t make it out properly. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  At least Quinn had become calmer now. For a moment, Cooper had feared he’d pushed the man too far. But instead he’d withdrawn into silence again, wrapped up in his own thoughts.

  ‘Light sticks - high intensity,’ said Quinn, taking the end of one of the sticks in his teeth and removing it from the packet. ‘They last thirty minutes.’

  ‘Thirty minutes?’

  ‘It’s enough,’ said Quinn.

  Out of its foil, the light stick itself was a translucent yellow tube full of fluid, capped at one end and with a small hook at the other. Quinn bent the tube in the middle until the inner section burst with a snap. The fluid made contact with the crystals in the cap and began to glow. It threw a greenish yellow light around the chamber that would have been bright enough for Cooper to read by if he’d held it close to his face.

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  Its glow was almost fluorescent, and it threw complicated shadows on the walls and roof, and on the faces of the two men.

  Quinn found a level part of the floor and stood the tube upright on its cap. Lit from below, his features seemed skeletal and demonic. But Cooper thought he probably looked the same way himself.

  He gazed at the yellow glow. ‘You bought a packet of two light sticks at the outdoor shop in Hathersage.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Quinn. He didn’t seem at all surprised that Cooper should know.

  ‘Two light sticks,’ repeated Cooper.

  ‘That’s right.’ And Quinn paused. ‘The other one is for me.’

  Cooper sneaked a glance at his watch, tilting it to catch a gleam of light, wishing that it had a luminous face. It seemed important to know the exact position of the hands. In thirty minutes’ time, there would be no more light. One way or another.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ said Cooper.

  Suddenly, Quinn focused on him properly, as if he’d just been woken from a dream.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I asked what you’re waiting for. You are waiting for something, aren’t you? Or someone?’

  Quinn nodded.

  ‘A killer.’

  The pool of bright green water was a long way below. Diane Fry experienced a moment of vertigo as she looked down from the edge of the platform. She saw a scatter of white safety helmets lying on a sort of stony beach at the edge of the water, and instinctively raised a hand to hold on to her own helmet as she leaned over the iron rail.

  The colour of the pool looked garish and unnatural in the

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  electric lights, but the guide had already explained that the green was caused by the high lead content of the water. Superstitious lead miners had named it the Bottomless Pit because the forty thousand tons of rubble they’d hurled into it from the walls of the cavern had failed to raise the level by an inch. According to the guide, the miners had concluded that it connected directly to the underworld, where the Devil was presumably unfazed by the amount of rock falling on his head.

  There was also some legend about a giant serpent that would emerge from the water and squirm its way through the caves and passages looking for anything warm and alive to eat. Fry shook her head. Those old miners must have lived in constant terror of what they would find around the next boulder.

  Most of the task force had reached the cavern ahead of them in another boat, and were now spread out on the rocky slopes above the platform, shining their lamps into the nooks and crevices. A diver’s head broke the surface; green water ran from his wetsuit and mud slid across his mask. He raised a gloved hand to wipe away the muck and clear his vision. He gave a thumbs down to a colleague on the shore.

  ‘How far is it down to the water from here?’ said Fry.

  ‘Seventy feet.’

  ‘Does anybody ever decide to take a dive off the platform?’

  ‘That would be suicide. The water is full of rocks.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  The guide shrugged. ‘There are some weirdos who say they get an irresistible urge to throw themselves off whenever they’re in a high place with a sudden drop, like this. They say it’s something inside them they can’t help, a bit like vertigo.’

  Fry drew her feet back from the edge of the platform. She’d been imagining launching herself into the air and plunging into the green pool, enjoying the feel of the cool air as she

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  fell, and savouring the sensation of the water as it burst over her head. The rail was no barrier, if she’d wanted to do it. There was nothing to stop her at all, if the urge grew too strong.

  ‘Those people are really weird, though,’ said her guide.

  When the lead miners had blasted the last few feet of rock and emerged from the wall of the cavern, would they even have been able to see what was down there, seventy feet below? Wouldn’t it just have been a black hole disappearing into the earth? Giant serpents might easily have sprung to mind. Fry looked up. They wouldn’t have been able to see the roof of the cavern, either.

  ‘What happens when it rains heavily?’ she said. ‘The lake down there floods right up to where we’re standing.’

  ‘I see.’ She took another step back from the edge.

  ‘There isn’t enough rain today,’ said the guide. ‘But we get thirty-six inches a year - a million gallons of it on every acre of the hill up there.’

  ‘What’s further on?’

  ‘More canal. There used to be the remains of some old boats, though I don’t know if they’re still there. But I told you - there’s no way anyone could get in here, except down the steps.’

  Fry watched the task force officers clambering fruitlessly over the rocks and peering down into the green water. She thought of Ben Cooper, who’d gone to talk to Alistair Page and hadn’t reported back. Now Page was here at Speedwell, so where was Cooper?

  She remembered Simon Lowe leaving his aunt’s house in Castleton. Where had Simon been going? She should have asked him, but she had no power to make him tell her. Then she thought of Mansell Quinn finding somewhere to lie up like an injured animal. A dangerous animal.

  Finally, Fry recalled the moment back in the office earlier

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  this evening, when she’d discovered that there was no Alistair Page listed among the Quinns’ neighbours back in 1990. The only fifteen-year-old, aside from Simon Quinn, was the Proctor’s son, Alan. Then she remembered Gavin Murfin joking about Cooper being in a cave.

  ‘Gavin,’ she said, ‘I think we’ve made a big mistake. We’re in the wrong place. We’ve got to get out of here/

  Even before half an hour had passed, the glow from the light stick was beginning to fade. The blackness of the cavern was creeping back towards them, inching across the rock floor and running down the walls, like a dark tide filling the chamber.

  Soon, the roof had disappeared and the walls had receded beyond Ben Cooper’s vision. For a while, he could see only Mansell Quinn and a few feet of floor between their feet. Quinn’s face had seemed to sag, the skin slipping away from the bones as the shadows thickened and lengthened. His eyes sank into his s
kull, the whites turned yellow and dull. There was almost too little light to show whether he was still alive.

  Cooper was sure he must look that way to Quinn, too like a man sitting upright, but dying slowly. And that was the way he felt. He knew that Quinn couldn’t let him live beyond the last glimmer of yellow light.

  Although he was still watching from across the chamber, Quinn had been quiet for a long time. He seemed to be chewing something that he’d taken from his pocket. Cooper could hear the occasional crack of his teeth.

  ‘Did you say your name was Cooper?’ said Quinn at last.

  ‘Yes. I’m Detective Constable Cooper.’

  Cooper felt he was being assessed, analysed down to the soles of his boots. If this was some sort of test, he didn’t know what the right answers were, or what he should do to appease Quinn.

  But eventually Quinn simply nodded. ‘You look a lot like him.’

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  ‘Who?’ said Cooper automatically. But he’d heard things like that said to him so often that he really didn’t need to ask.

  ‘Sergeant Joe Cooper. I suppose he was your dad?’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘Like father, like son. Isn’t that what they say?’

  Quinn shifted the butt of the crossbow, leaving a red imprint in the damp skin over his collar bone. Cooper couldn’t help dropping his gaze to Quinn’s right index finger, where it lay against the trigger guard. The end joint of his finger flexed a little. Had it moved a fraction closer to the trigger on the mention of Joe Cooper’s name?

  ‘I know about what happened to him,’ said Quinn. ‘He died.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was very sorry to hear about that.’

  Cooper felt as though the breath had been sucked out of him. It was the last thing he’d expected to hear.

  ‘Sorry? You were sorry?’

  ‘I didn’t know about it until I read that plaque in Edendale. I was sorry about it. Really sorry. It’s no way to die.’