Would the man know someone had been here? Stephen put the box back as nearly as he could remember into the position where it had been before. He switched on his torch and blew out the candles. Perhaps the man would notice a change in the height of the candles but there was nothing Stephen could do about that. In any case, it was unlikely that he came here every day or more than, say, twice a week. He didn’t live here. It was just a camp, Stephen thought rather wistfully, a hidey-hole, an occasional refuge from the world.
He went back along the winze and took the other fork.
In a few moments it brought him to the place where the rope lay along the lower wall of the shaft. He clambered up, putting out the torch when the spot of light appeared ahead. The sun had come through and all the mist been dispersed while he was in the mine. The brilliant light blinded him and for a while he lay on the turf, shading his eyes with his hands until he became used to the sun. A sheep bleated at him as he fetched his rucksack out of the George Crane Coe. It seemed as if he had been half a day in the mine but when he looked at his watch he saw that no more than an hour had passed and it was still only ten. Dadda was coming to lunch as usual on a Sunday. He had better get back.
There wouldn’t be time to go to the police before Dadda came. Once he had been to the police, he would certainly be with them all day, answering their questions, leading them down the shaft, conducting them along the winze to the secret chamber. He repeated those words ‘secret chamber’ under his breath, relishing them. Why hadn’t he thought of making such a hiding place for himself? He envied the man for it. It would have been just the thing for him to have had such a sanctuary on the moor, in the moor. No rain could have kept him from it, no trippers have irritated him. He could have camped there, picnicked there, slept there, gone to ground in his own place like a fox.
It was too late. Someone else had thought of it first. He would go to the police when Dadda and the rest of them had gone, he would tell Malm or Manciple or whoever it was that he had gone down into the mine in the afternoon and then come straight to them. This discovery would probably lead the police quite quickly to the killer of the girls. There must be all kinds of clues among the clothes and food and equipment. It would be almost as good as being taken to the man’s home. Stephen wondered where that home was. It was even possible that he knew the man. He and Lyn knew most people in the Three Towns either to speak to or by sight or had heard of them or knew their relatives. Of course he could be a newcomer, arrived in April just before the first death, but would a newcomer know about the mines? Perhaps, when the man had been arrested and the police had taken everything they wanted out of the mine, he, Stephen, could go quietly back and use the secret chamber for himself.
Whalbys’ van was parked outside the house. Dadda had come early. While he washed and put on a clean shirt Stephen debated within himself whether to tell them about the mine and the secret chamber while they were having lunch. Or should he wait until they had all gone and then tell Lyn? He could hardly go to the police without first telling Lyn why he was going.
They sat down to roast lamb. Lyn always cooked a roast on Sundays. Both he and Dadda expected it. Stephen started to talk about the Vangmoor killer and the two dead girls as a preamble to what he had to tell them, but Dadda threw down his knife and fork and cried, ‘That’s no bloody talk for the dinner table!’
Afterwards he thought of whispering it to Lyn in the kitchen, but she was busy, running in and out. The Newmans came in the back door and then Joanne and Kevin with Trevor. Hesitantly, Stephen brought up the subject of lead mining to test how he would feel about talking of something that for years really, not just half a day, he had nursed secretly to himself.
‘Don’t talk to me about tunnels,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘I never could stand tunnels. When we’ve been in London when you girls were little I never would go in the underground, would I, Lyn? My mother was the same. She was staying with your auntie in Finchley and they got in the underground to go down to London, only it wasn’t underground there if you take my meaning, that was the trouble. When they started and your auntie said it’d be underground in a minute, Mother pulled the communication cord.’
‘It’s a handle in tube trains,’ said Joanne.
‘Well, handle or whatever they call it. They stopped the train all right and Mother never did go underground but there was a real carry-on and she got fined. I don’t know the ins and outs but she had to pay this fine. I hate tunnels myself.’
‘Some like them,’ said Trevor, ‘and we all know what that means.’
‘There’s one here as doesn’t, lad,’ said Dadda, frowning grimly.
Trevor floundered then, talking about getting back to the womb and not much liking having to explain what he meant by such expressions as ‘female principle’ and ‘a kind of opposite of the phallic’ in the presence of Dadda and the Newmans. Stephen thought about going to the police and wondered if he should phone first and whether policemen of the rank of Malm or Hook were to be found on duty on a Sunday. And when everyone had gone and it was after seven, he felt it would be too late to go to the police that evening. By the time he had got there and explained to them and they had come back together and gone by car to the nearest point on the road to the mine workings, it would be starting to get dark. He would go tomorrow.
But the next morning it seemed altogether too late, his delay beyond explanation. And then he knew he wouldn’t go at all, had perhaps never intended to go. The idea of telling the police became bizarre. How had he come ever to contemplate such a thing? Had he really intended to betray to men like Hook and Troth the location of the secret chamber?
At the moment, he was sure, only he and the killer of the girls were aware of the chamber’s existence. It began to seem to him a precious secret which it would be something like treachery to betray, though treachery to whom he couldn’t have said. And if he told the police or told anyone, even if he only told Lyn, he wouldn’t be able to go there again. The mine would be closed to him for years, perhaps for ever. He imagined them, in the name of safety, shovelling concrete into the mouth of Apsley Sough, as in the past they had blocked up the openings under the coes and the old pony level down by Knamber Foin. That would be bound to happen if he told.
Stephen felt light and free once he had decided against telling the police. What had they ever done for him that he should help them? Insulted him, called him a psychopath. When he went back to the mine he would go alone.
Lyn went into the bedroom and picked the dead shrew off the counterpane with a handful of tissues. Peach, who had accompanied her upstairs, walking beside her and chattering to her in little chirping mews to announce, perhaps, what awaited her, watched the removal of his tribute with arched back and raised tail.
‘What d’you expect me to do with it?’ Lyn said. ‘Eat it?’ She flushed the tiny velvety corpse down the lavatory. ‘I should have thought a poor little mite like that would have been beneath your dignity.’
Peach stalked into Stephen’s room and jumped up onto the table where the bust of Tace stood. Stephen didn’t like Peach in his study. Lyn went to fetch him out but was distracted by the calendar, the Echo’s ‘Moorland Views’, the Hilder at Loomlade for the month of July. Calendars, dates, the passing of time, she had become obsessed with them. For the third or fourth time that day she counted up the number of days since 24 June. It was easier, but more unrelenting and uncompromising, to do it on a calendar. Ten days. She had made it nine this morning, doing it in her head, but it was ten. Unless, of course, she had made a mistake over 24 June and it really should have been 1 July. It wouldn’t have been the first time she had made that kind of mistake, though in the past it had hardly mattered whether she made a mistake or not.