Malkin smiled then, a sheepish, embarrassed smile. ‘You won’t believe me.’
‘Try us. We’ve heard all sorts of things that people waste their money on. Foreign holidays? Women? Did you gamble it away?’
‘None oi those things.’
‘What, then?’
‘I didn’t spend it at all. I’ve still got it.’
Cooper stared at him. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘I said you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘You found yourself suddenly in possession of a fortune, and you’re telling me that you just put it in the bank and saved it up for a rainy day? You didn’t spend any of it?’
‘No, I didn’t. But I didn’t put it in the bank either.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘I’m going to have to show you,’ said Malkin.
George Malkin led Cooper and Fry up to the top of his garden, through a gate and across a snowcovered paddock. They had to lean into the wind and lift their feet high out of the snow
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to make progress. But Malkin seemed almost unaware of it. He ploughed across the field like a carthorse, with his head down and his shoulders hunched forward inside his overcoat.
At the far side of the field was a stile huilt into the drystone wall. They crossed it carefully, and found themselves floundering waist-deep in a drift that had keen blown up against the other side. When they had struggled out of it, they were panting with the effort. In front of them was another field, hut this one sloped gently up to the rocky base of the hill, and the snow became less deep as they crossed the last few yards.
It was only when they were standing at the foot of the hill that they saw they had reached the entrance to an old mine. It
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was no more than a cleft in the rock face, about as wide as a man’s shoulders not wide enough, in fact, for George Malkin, who had to slide through it sideways. A fine layer of snow had blown a foot or two into the entrance, but beyond that the rock floor was only damp, so that it gleamed in the light of an old bicycle lamp that Malkin took from his pocket.
‘We should have brought a Dragon light from the car,’ said Fry. ‘I can hardlv see a thing.’
‘We’ll manage,’ said Malkin. ‘We’ll not be doing much reading or anything.’
Like all caves or mines, even the smallest and most insignificant, there were unidentifiable noises and echoes in its darkest corners, and angles of rock that made sudden black fists in the edges of the shadows. The smell was of wet sand, and the dampness was as heavy as a blanket, as if they had stepped below the level of the water table.
George Malkin used the wavery beam of the bicycle lamp to locate a deep crack in the wall. He lifted a foot- wide boulder clear and fumbled inside with one hand until he drew out a length of baling twine. The twine was bright blue, and it seemed to be the only flicker of colour in the gloom. At first, there seemed to be no weight on the end of it, but then a small rope appeared, knotted to the twine.
‘Maybe you could help me pull,’ said Malkin.
Cooper took hold of the rope and they pulled on it together, while Fry held the lamp over them. The light failed momentarily
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and left them completely in the dark until she shook it, rattling the battery inside the casing to restore the corroded connection. Cooper could hear a dragging sound deep inside the rock. He could feel the resistance on the rope of something heavy that snagged on every bump. They seemed to he pulling at about a forty-five degree angle.
‘It’s a leather bag of some kind,’ said Fry, peering over the shoulders of the two men into the hole. ‘No, two bags - there’s another one tied behind it.
‘Aye, there were two/ said Malkin as the bags appeared over the lip of rock. ‘We managed one each, just about. Of course, in those days, I was only a little lad. 1 was small enough to slide right down into that hole. It levels out at the bottom, like a shelf. Ted sent me down there and passed the bags to me. I remember they blocked the way at first, and they were so heavy I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to get out again. But Ted was there. I knew he would rescue me if I got stuck.’
Malkin grabbed a leather strap as Cooper took the weight on the rope. ‘It was totally dark down there,’ he said. ‘I hated the dark, always have. I’ve been scared of it since I was tiny. Darkness and deep water — those are the things that frighten me. I always had nightmares of being trapped somewhere with water coming in. You’d think you would grow out of that when you’re not a nipper any more. But it just got worse after Ted was killed. I reckon it was because I knew he wouldn’t be there any more to rescue me.’
They set the bags on the floor. Fry crouched over them with the lamp, rattling it every now and then to keep its beam alive. ‘We really should have brought some more light, she said. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘Let’s have a quick look, then we’ll take them up to the house,’ said Cooper.
‘It won’t take you long to sec what it is,’ said Malkin. He was standing above them, and his voice sounded unnaturally distant and echoey, as if he were back in the hole that his brother had sent him into as a child.
Cooper’s fingers were clumsy in his gloves, and the straps of the first bag had stiffened and cracked, so that he had difficulty
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pulling them through the buckles. Finally, the Hap Fell open, and he saw it was a sort of saddlebag like those carried by Wells Fargo riders in Westerns. Inside, it was packed with something solid and white. Cooper couldn’t believe what he was looking at. ‘Bring the light closer.’ he said.
c* c* ‘
Fry crouched alongside him. He could hear her breathing in his car, and he could sec a cloud of her breath drifting through the beam of light from the lamp. He tugged at the contents of the bag, and a lump of the white
