"Yeah," I say, trying to sound cheerful and unconcerned. "A swim." I look at my hands, all scraped and dirty. There's some blood on them. They're still shaking. "Good idea."
We crawl out of the undergrowth into the bright day.
There are a few minutes, perhaps not more than three or four, when I exist in a bewildering storm of hope, joy, incomprehension and dread, when they don't find the body at the bottom of the shaft.
We walked here through the gardens and the woods, past the hill where Andy and I lay in the sunlight all those summers ago, into the little glen, then up through the bushes and the dead auburn wreckage of the ferns, to the trees at the summit of the small hill. A damp wind blew from the west, shaking drips off the high, bare trees and taking the sound of the main road away.
There are about twenty of us altogether, including half a dozen constables carrying the gear. I'm still very much attached to Sergeant Flavell. I'd naively thought they could mount some low-profile operation to catch Andy watching his own funeral; I'd imagined cops slinking through the undergrowth, whispering into radios, gradually closing in. Instead we're here mob-handed, crashing through the undergrowth towards a dead body.
Except it isn't there. I tell them it is; I tell them there's a man's body at the bottom of the air shaft and they believe me. It takes them long enough to cut a way through to the chimney of the air shaft, sawing through the rhodie branches and tearing away the brambles and other undergrowth; then they lever off the iron grating over the shaft without any difficulty, and one of the younger cops, in an overall and a hard hat, wraps the rope around himself — proper climbing rope they had in the back of one of the Range Rovers — and abseils down into the darkness.
McDunn's listening on a little radio handset.
It crackles. "Lot of branches," the cop on the end of the rope says. Then: "Down, on the bottom."
The helicopter clatters overhead. I'm wondering where Andy is by now when I hear the guy in the shaft say, "Nothing here."
What?
"Just a load of branches and stuff," the cop says.
McDunn doesn't react. I do; I stare at the radio. What's he talking about? I feel dizzy. It did happen. I remember it. I've lived with it ever since, had it at the back of my head ever since. I know it happened. I feel like the woods are revolving around me; maybe if I wasn't still handcuffed to the sergeant, I'd fall over. (And I remember the man saying, can remember his voice perfectly, hear him again as he says, "I'm a policeman!)
Some of the other cops gathered round the air shaft are wearing knowing looks.
"Wait a minute," the cop in the tunnel says. My heart thuds. What has he found? I don't know if I want him to find him — it — or not.
"There's a rucksack here," the voice on the radio says. "Large day-pack size, brown… looks full. Fairly old."
"Nothing else?" McDunn asks.
"Just the branches… can't see to the end of the tunnel in either direction. Patch of light in the distance… eastwards."
"That's the other air shaft," I tell McDunn. "Back that way." I point.
"Want me to have a look round, sir?"
McDunn looks at the Tayside chief, who nods. "Yes," McDunn says. "If you're sure it's safe."
"Safe enough, I think, sir. Untying."
McDunn looks at me. He sucks his teeth. I avoid the eyes of the other cops. McDunn's eyebrows rise a little.
"He was there," I tell him. "It was Andy and I. This guy attacked us; abused Andy. We hit him with a log. I swear."
McDunn looks unconvinced. He peers over the edge of the stonework, down into the shaft.
I'm still feeling dizzy. I put a hand out to the stones of the air-shaft chimney, to steady myself. At least the rucksack's there. It did happen, for Christ's sake; it wasn't an hallucination. The guy was probably dead when we tipped him into the shaft — we just assumed he was at the time though the older I got the less sure of that I was — but even if wasn't, he must have been killed when he hit the bottom; it's thirty metres at least.
Could Andy have decided since that the body wasn't well enough concealed, and come back and removed it; hauled it up, taken it away and buried it? We'd never talked about that day, and we never again came near this old air shaft; I don't know what he might have done since but I'd always assumed he was like me and just tried to forget about it, pretend it never happened.
Denial. Hell, sometimes it's best.
"— ear me yet?" the radio crackles.
"Yes?" McDunn says.
"Found him."
It will take a while to get the body out; they have to get more guys down there, take photographs; the usual shit. Most of us return to the house. I don't know what the hell to feel. It's finally over, it's out, people know, other people know; the police know, it's no longer just between me and Andy, it's public. I do feel some relief, no matter what happens now, but I still feel I have betrayed Andy, regardless of what he's done.
The man's body was under the other air shaft. The poor fuck must have crawled all that way, a hundred metres or more to that second patch of light; our bright idea of putting the branches down after him to cover him up was pointless; for all these years it would only have needed some more kids to have come along with torches or bits of burning paper to discover the body. They reckon there was a load of fallen branches lying under the air shaft before we pushed the guy down it; according to the young cop who first went down it looked like he'd crawled out from the middle of the pile. Even so, I don't know how he survived that fall; God knows what he broke, how he suffered, how long he took to crawl there to the other slightly brighter patch of light; how long he took to die.
Part of me feels sorry for him, despite what he tried to do, what he did do. God knows, maybe he'd have ended up killing Andy, killing both of us, but nobody deserves to die like that.
On the other hand there's a part of me that rejoices, that is glad he paid the way he did, that for once the world worked the way it's supposed to, punishing the wrongdoer… and that saddens and sickens me too, because I think that this must be the way Andy feels all the time.
It's strange to be in Strathspeld, to be in the house and not have seen Mr and Mrs Gould. Some of the cops have gone; there are only ten cars and vans on the gravel drive now. The chopper went to refuel, came back and buzzed around some more and then returned to Glasgow. Apparently they had road blocks and patrols on roads all over the area, and they searched the grounds of the house. Fat chance.
Back at the house, in the library, I tell a DI from Tayside all that happened that day, twenty years ago. McDunn sits in, too. It isn't as painful as I thought it would be. I tell it just as it happened, from where we ran up the hill almost straight into the man; I leave out what Andy and I were doing just before, and the man's line about dirty, perverted things. I can't tell that with McDunn sitting there; it would be like telling my father. Actually, I guess I wouldn't want to tell it to anybody, not so much because I'm ashamed (I tell myself) as because it's private; one last thing I can hide that's between me and Andy only, so letting me feel that there is one thing at least in which I've not betrayed him utterly.
Sergeant Flavell has been released from me to take notes; I'm attached to myself now, wrists cuffed together. The aged, respectable leather-bound tomes of the Gould family library look down upon the nasty tale I have to tell with musty distaste. Outside, it's dark.
"Think I'll be charged?" I ask the two DIs. I already know there's no time limit between committing a murder and being charged with it.
"Not for me to say, Mr Colley," the Tayside guy says, gathering up his notebook and tape recorder.
McDunn's mouth twists down at the edges; he sucks through his teeth, and for some reason I feel encouraged.