out, moving it carefully downwards through the air to judge the height of the obstacle. It was a low boulder, no more than two feet high. If he hadn ‘t been moving so slowly, he would probably have tripped over it. He could feel nothing but empty air on the other side.
It dawned on Cooper that he’d expected the cavern to be silent. Darkness and silence seemed to go to together. But he’d been wrong. Tlie river that ran deep in the limestone was a long way below him, but he could hear its roar through the rock. And water was running through the streamways, trickling over sheets of flowstone, seeping down the walls, dripping frotm the roof. Water was moving constantly everywhere.
But there was something else, too - something that he heard only if he concentrated hard. It was a more subtle sound, a gentle rhythm that might have been caused by the movement of air, or could have been inside his own head. It was the swishing and pulse of a distant tide, invisible in the
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endless darkness. As he stood in the depths of the cavern, deprived of sight, Cooper found the sensation oddly reassuring. The sounds he heard around him were like the liquid stirrings of a womb, and the distant beat of a mother’s heart.
Of course, there was no such thing as silence. Not on Earth, anyway. Even the movement of the atmosphere made the planet hum, made it ring like a bell at a frequency beyond the reach of human hearing. If you were able to listen closely enough, you might be able to pick up the vibration. But of course, it was never quiet enough to do that. You’d always be able to hear the wind and the movement of the trees, the beating of your heart, and the sound of your own breathing. There was no such thing as silence.
And that meant it would be very easy to hear voices in here. There were strange echoes among the murmurings and tricklings of the water. He wondered if cavers were superstitious and populated the caves with their own ghosts and demons. He wondered if they ever thought they heard Neil Moss, calling them. Heard Neil Moss, breathing.
Cooper could hear a voice now. It sounded a long way off, but it bounced softly off the walls, drawn towards him on the cool air.
‘You should never have come back. You should never have come back into my life.’
He didn’t recognize the voice. Its resonance was distorted and flattened by the rock, and the words were overlain by echoes. Cooper turned his head from side to side, trying to locate it, to identify the direction it had come from.
‘But you knew that I would, one day.’
A second voice. This one was Mansell Quinn, he was sure. In Quinn’s case, the flatness of tone wasn’t entirely due to the acoustics. It was an intonation Cooper had been listening to during the last hour - the voice of a man on the edge.
‘Yes. And I knew what you’d do once you were out of prison.’
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‘Of course you knew. You’re just like me.’
‘Like you? The hell I am.’
Cooper began to edge cautiously towards the voices. He mustn’t be too hasty, or it could be disastrous. If he was heading towards the entrance of the cavern, then somewhere ahead of him would be the slippery limestone floor and ice-cold pools of Roger Rain’s I louse. He didn’t want to die face down in water with tiny, blind shrimps in his hair.
‘Yes, you’re just like me. Except that you really are a killer.’
‘What? You’re kidding.’
‘They shouldn’t have let you out. They kept me inside for years, but they let you out.’
‘A few months in that place was enough for me. There’s no way I’m going to end up like you, Quinn. I’m not going to spend half of my life inside, the way you did.’
‘Not much chance of that, Alan. You aren’t going to live that long.’
The voices were louder now. Cooper couldn’t tell if it was because he was closer to them, or because the two men were getting angry, or both. Groping his way round an angle of rock, he felt the first spatter of water in his face. Damn the sheep urine. This time it felt good - it meant he knew where he was at last.
Then Cooper’s foot slipped on the wet surface, and he hit the ground hard. He felt his ankle twist, and his knee cracked against the sharp point of a rock. He lay still, winded for a moment. In total darkness, the fact that he was lying on his back made almost no difference to how he felt. Except for the pain in his leg.
‘Are you threatening me, Quinn? You’re an old man now. Prison has destroyed you. I can see that in your eyes. You’re frightened - terrified of your own shadow. Why else would you be hiding down here? Hiding away from the light.’
And suddenly Cooper recognized the second voice. It was the last word that did it - that final’t’ spat out like an audible
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exclamation mark. As if there were always an apple pip stuck between his teeth.
Diane Fry had pinned Raymond Proctor against the wall of one of the cottages. A couple of vehicles went past her towards the cavern, lights flashing and engines groaning in low gear up the slope.
‘Alistair Page -‘ said Fry ‘- is your son, Alan. He changed his name, didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ said Proctor.
‘I suppose he didn’t want people reminding him of his mother’s murder all the time? Understandable, considering he was responsible for it.’
Proctor said nothing. He wasn’t paying full attention to her. She could see his eyes wandering towards the cavern entrance and the activity around it.
‘Ten years ago,’ said Fry. ‘It was ten years ago that Mansell Quinn started telling the prison authorities and his fellow prisoners that he wasn’t guilty after all. That was a stupid thing to do - it could have been a factor in his parole hearing. Suddenly, a third of the way through his life sentence, Quinn was in denial. You see, it’s usually the other way around - when prisoners change their story, it’s to admit their guilt. Showing remorse helps them get parole.’
The know all that,’ said Proctor.
