‘Hey, Ben,’ said Murfin, ‘did you know you can still travel between Woodhead and Dunford Bridge by rail through one of these tunnels?’
‘Really?’
There’s a little railway line in this tunnel for maintenance work.’
‘It’s just a two-foot gauge,’ said Norton. ‘It’s the quickest way for the engineers to get access to the middle of the tunnel. They have a battery electric locomotive shedded here.’
‘My brother-in-law would be down here like a shot, if he knew,’ said Murfin. ‘He’s a big railway nut.’
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‘Don’t tell me that/ said Norton. ‘They’re always coming here, trying to find some way of getting in.’
Cooper drew Murfin aside. ‘What are you doing here, Gavin?’ ‘I’ve been given an hour off jankers.’
‘How come?’
‘For some reason, Miss has gone to the PM.’
‘The Neil Granger postmortem?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But I didn’t think she was working on that enquiry. I mean you are talking about Diane Fry, Gavin?’
“Course I am. Who else? We’re working on the Emma Renshaw case, but Diane is proper put out that she lost a witness before she could get to him. There’s no way she’s going to accept anybody else’s opinion about whether there’s a connection or not.’
‘She wants to prove it one way or the other for herself.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, I can understand that.’
‘So I’ve been catching up on some other enquiries at the office, and now I’m supposed to meet her at the Renshaws. I noticed the guys working down here and thought I’d take a look at the tunnels.’
‘The air shaft where Neil Granger was killed must lead down into here somewhere.’
‘I suppose so.’
Cooper turned back to the maintenance man.
‘I’ve just come down from Withens/ he said. ‘Do you know it?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Do you ever get the kids from the village hanging around down here?’
‘I know the ones you mean. They ride around here on their bikes sometimes. They’re a bit cheeky, but I’ve not had any real bother with them personally.’
‘What are the chances of anyone getting into the tunnels?’ said Cooper.
‘We never let anyone in,’ said Norton. ‘Safety reasons.’
Cooper could see the National Grid had been careful with their security. He stood in front of the 1950s tunnel and looked up at the top of the steel-mesh fencing. There wasn’t even enough of a gap for a small child to get through.
The reason for the security was obvious. The Longdendale Trail was right behind him. It ended at the old station platforms, and
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would be thronged with walkers and cyclists at the weekends, and in the summer. All kinds of people would get into the tunnels, if they could.
The surface of the trail had been created by pouring smooth sand over the line of the railway tracks. The sand probably made the going quite difficult when it was wet - in fact, Cooper thought it would be a trail to avoid in bad weather, because it was so open to the elements. A few yards away, in the middle of the trail, lay a dead hare. The skin of its head had been eaten down to the skull, and long, black insects were swarming around its throat, where a wound had been inflicted by a larger animal.
Norton followed his gaze. ‘Rats are getting a big problem/ he said. ‘Especially in this middle tunnel.’
‘But it isn’t used for anything now, is it?’
‘Not at all. Not for a long time.’
‘I can see that rats must have thrived in the tunnels when they were being built. With a lot of workmen around, there must have been a plentiful food supply.’
‘I should say. They say there were nearly fifteen hundred men working here at the height of the tunnel project. They would have taken food in with them to where they were working. I expect there would have been plenty left on the floor for the rats.’
‘It reminds me of a story that a coal miner told me after the strike back in ‘84-85,’ said Cooper. ‘He said there had always been lots of mice underground in the mines. He saw them all the time, hundreds of them, right down at the coalface. But the men were on strike for a year. And when they went back to work, there were no mice at all. They had all died. That was because they had relied on the presence of the miners for their food supply - without the crumbs of bread and pastry, and bits of fruit and chocolate that had dropped from the miners’ snap boxes, the mice starved.’
‘Arthur Scargill killed our mice,’ said Murfin. ‘Bastard.’
Cooper remembered Scargill, too. He had been the miners’ leader during their turbulent strike in the 1980s. The strike had resulted in many bloody pitched battles between police and pickets, and it wouldn’t be easily forgotten in Derbyshire.
