After entering, the tunnel led quite steeply upwards, and was at no point along its length wider to pass through than double doors. Once finding themselves atop the stairs, the detectives were faced with the long straight walk across all six lanes of the motorway and their surrounding terrain. With its sides from waist-height up formed of yellowing Perspex, Grey fancied that the passageway resembled nothing more than a very long and elevated bus shelter.
As they spoke a family with young children walked toward and then past them, while from behind a smart couple no older than twenty excused themselves to move past and dash on ahead. Their dress suggested to Grey that this had been a necessary break on an urgent business journey. He and Cori took it slowly though, as the traffic thundered beneath them, Grey remembering how he had loved such feelings as a boy: standing back from non- stopping expresses at railway platforms; the roar of jets at an air show, he gripping his father’s hand.
‘This must have been one of the first parts of the site to be built,’ Grey mused, ‘if only here for locals to get across. It might not have changed since the Sixties.’
‘But how can somewhere with so many windows be so claustrophobic?’ asked Cori, who like a lot of younger people, if she considered the past at all, only did so with an incomprehension of how people ever got by without microwaves, mobiles and cars that started in the morning. She walked the old passageway with a mixture of awe that such an ancient-looking thing still stood and fear that it could fall down at any minute, the windows crackling in their frames with each passing juggernaut.
‘Anyway, somewhere along here is another camera.’
‘It’s getting cold in here,’ Cori mentioned as they walked.
‘Yes, and the noise is getting louder.’
‘There’s the camera anyway.’ Cori pointed up to a glass limpet tucked up in the seams of the corrugated roof, and dating from rather later than the structure itself. ‘And look, a window’s been put out.’
‘That’s it!’ Grey moved quickly to the spot, the camera now above him on one side, and on the other an empty square within the metal windowframe, through which the sky appeared its natural colour, and not tinted the same sickly gold as through the rest of the windows that ran continuously along both sides of the tunnel.
Grey raised a worried hand, bidding his Sergeant refrain from joining him where he now stood.
‘So what happened here, sir?’ she asked, he behaving as though the spot held some special power. From her holding position she watched the Inspector, as he spun on his heels, looking first one way and then the other, eyes darting, surveying the scene, muttering to himself,
‘So the camera is there, Carman was standing here, facing this way? No, the opposite way, looking out towards…’
The scene now right in his head, he moved toward the opening; but still he baulked from getting any closer, his nose remaining an inch from where it would have met the missing Perspex.
‘This is where they fought,’ Grey summarised for Cori as she ventured nearer. ‘But it was dark, all the windows looked the same, at least to the camera.
‘Don’t touch the frame,’ he warned, as gingerly the pair of them, she mirroring his every move, leaned their heads through the yard-wide gap and looked down.
They had reached the far side of the motorway by now, and were standing above the verge that ran between the road’s hard shoulder and this side’s carpark. Cori felt the first drops of rain falling on her hair, as in unison they peered over the thin metal window-ledge. And as they looked down they saw, amongst the tall grasses and wild flowers that were swaying now in ever stronger winds, a dark and almost hidden, barely distinguishable shape; a melancholy shape, a shape without hope or future associations. Not fifteen feet away, commuters and holidaying families raced by; while even closer, in the carpark slept a salesman, smiling and oblivious in his car’s reclined front seat.
‘Call it in,’ Grey instructed, ‘and get this tunnel sealed at both ends.’
‘Who to?’ asked Cori, knowing there was hardly an officer in the county not employed at the factory dispute this morning.
‘The switchboard are still there, and Rose. We only need a couple of uniforms for now, and scenes of crime — we need a tent up, before it rains over everything.’
As Cori found her phone and started dialling, Grey disappeared down the mine-like stairwell, the day turning black before noon and time becoming of the essence. At the foot of the stairs, back out in the open, he clambered over the waist-high wooden fence that guided travellers along the path and back to their cars; and feeling something go in the fabric of his trouser leg as he did so. He traipsed over uneven, potholed ground, through wildly-grown weeds, blackberry bushes, grasses in some places as high as the fence, in an effort to get to where he estimated the unhappy form to be resting. That no one had come this way for months was evident, though in his wading through the bushes he was obliterating any way of proving that.
But then he found him — at last he could definitively say him — for here was Thomas, visible, unmistakable. His face was hardly marked for having been out in the open for two and a half days; the tall grasses perhaps having shaded him from the worst ravages of the sun, while what wildlife there was along this neglected strip must not have been large enough to have done him much damage. His back and legs though were twisted in an awful way. Grey thought of him that night, falling looking upward, not seeing the grass-cushioned, brick-strewn ground coming toward him; and now here Thomas Long was laid, his sunken eyes staring up uncomprehendingly at a blank sky, as blank as the world, as blank as his future.
Grey had no feelings here beyond the fact that life, even when faced with the huge full-stop that lay before him, kept on going; that he in his ripped clothes, Cori up on the bridge, the traffic powering past, and all the world around them were somehow still existing, were carrying on. That time could not be stopped, even by such an horrific ending as he now lay witness to, was the sum of his philosophy — at that moment he had no brighter or more optimistic thought than this.
Humans could end themselves, even end each other, but could never end life. And so what option did that leave any of us who might think to try to do so, but to get back up, and feeling slightly silly for thinking we could ever face life down, go back to whatever we were doing before, resume our paths laid out, our habits encoded? Sometimes his bleakness shocked even himself.
Ignoring every letter of the police code, kneeling now beside the body, he got his suit jacket off and placed it over Thomas Long’s head and shoulders, just as the clouds broke and the real rain began.
‘I hope you were happy,’ he said, as the first fat drops fell to darken the jacket’s fabric.
Chapter 29 — Rose Attends
An hour later, in the shelter of a three-sided hut used for storing traffic cones and road warning signs, stood Superintendent Rose. He had on a waxed jacket, still dripping with rain from the short walk from his car to this vantage point. From here he watched the gallant effort of the few Constables he could spare — aided brilliantly by two pairs of motorway patrolmen, arriving in their Range Rovers after picking up the call — as they sealed off the tunnel, and in the drowning rain erected the familiar white forensics tent, beneath which he knew nothing good ever occurred. Nearby, sheltering by their own van, scenes of crime officers were dressing up in head-to-foot overalls, preparing to scour the tunnel and the ground around the body for clues. Across the carpark a takeaway van was parked, its warm hatch thrown open invitingly, as if its very purpose were in offering golden light and hot steam to the dismal afternoon, and was finding some takers.
Beside Rose in the shelter was Grey, a blanket around his shoulders, his shirt soaked to his skin. He had been like this when, mid-downpour, the first of the officers to hear the call had found kneeling beside the body, as if to guard against it being washed away in the flood.
‘I don’t want the family knowing until he’s fit to be identified,’ offered Rose needlessly, just for something to say. ‘We can spare them the wait at the mortuary at least.’ The reciting of procedure and tradecraft could be comforting at such moments, in this case both to the Superintendent and his listener. They had been talking in this vein for five or ten minutes now.
‘So, he’s been out here for over two days,’ asked the Superintendent rhetorically, getting the chain of events right in his head. ‘They fought, you say, and the window gave way?’
‘We’ll never know for certain,’ Grey intoned robotically, his body deprived of sleep and food and even the will
