Thorpe coughed again. ‘Get on with it, then, Mansell.’
‘Just one more thing, and then I’ll leave you alone.’
Quinn continued to stare at the castle, watching the distant figures moving about on the walls. Two young girls ran up the spiral stairs into the keep and appeared in an arched window further up, laughing. Their voices reached across the dale.
With the back of his hand, Quinn wiped away the sweat and die flics that had settled on him as he stood among the trees. But his voice was cold, like a sudden draught of air from the caves below the limestone dale.
‘I want the other addresses,’ he said.
‘Mansell, are you sure -?’
Quinn turned then and looked down at Thorpe. ‘Have you got them or not? Did Rebecca give them to you?’
‘Yes, but … I’m not sure it’s right.’
‘What?’
Thorpe squinted up at him. ‘He has a new life now, Mansell. Why rake it all up again after so long?’
Quinn lashed out almost blindly. He ripped a branch from the nearest sycamore, snapped it in his hands and shredded the bark into strips, exposing the white flesh underneath. The wood tore under his fingers with a sound like a faint scream.
‘Everyone thinks they can just get on with their lives as if nothing happened, don’t they?’ he said. ‘They’re about to find out how wrong they are.’
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12
The red stains of ferrous oxide showed through white limestone and a coating of green algae, and water ran continuously down the face of the multi-coloured rock. The stream bed where it left Peak Cavern was almost dry at this time of the year, but the flow reappeared down the gorge, spurting from a gash at the foot of the cliff.
Ben Cooper and his nieces watched the jackdaws chattering continuously overhead.
‘Do the birds nest on the cliff ledges?’ asked Amy, who was taking an interest in wildlife at the moment.
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Cooper, looking anxiously for ducklings planning to take a suicidal dive.
Inside the cavern entrance, they found themselves on a series of wide terraces cut out of the rock. Families of rope makers had set up their workshops here centuries ago, building their houses into the floor and knocking out tiny doors and windows, so that the rope walks they worked on were also the roofs of their homes. The rock walls were stained black from the soot of their fires.
On the top terrace, a small crowd was watching a guide stretch hemp twine from winders to pulley-poles and twist it into rope using a sledge and a jack with rotating hooks.
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Amy and Josie ran down the dirt slope to a reconstruction of a ropemaker’s house. The roof was hinged up, so that visitors could look down into the living space, otherwise it would have been too dark to see anything. Inside, there was just enough room for a fireplace, a couple of chairs and some beds covered in straw, built into the wall like shelves. Suddenly, the girls laughed nervously.
‘Who’s her
‘A ropemaker, I suppose,’ said Cooper.
A stuffed figure was propped in one of the chairs near the fireplace. He was dressed in black and had a pale, shapeless face, with crudely defined eyes that stared blankly into a dim corner.
‘He’s a bit scary,’ said Amy.
‘It’s only like a Guy Fawkes.’
‘They should burn him, then.’
Cooper blinked as he watched Amy go back to join the crowd at the demonstration. Josie stayed with him, staring into the house. She was the more thoughtful of the two, and he guessed she was trying to imagine what life would have been like for the ropemakers’ families. Or at least, he hoped she was. For all he knew, her mind might be absorbed in some fantasy of flames and immolation, too. He didn’t really understand children.
He sniffed, inhaling the scent of the hemp as it moved through the guide’s hands. It smelled like wet horses’ tails.
It occurred to Cooper that earlier visitors would have been able to smell this place long before they reached it. The rope makers had kept animals in here - pack horses, cattle, goats, and even pigs for their tallow. The effluent must have gone into the stream flowing out of the cave, along with human waste. It would have been quite a culture shock for the genteel visitors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
‘Welcome to the Devil’s Arse,’ said Alistair Page, coming to stand alongside him on the terrace. ‘We’ll be able to go
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through the show cave in a moment. We had to wait for a party to come back out, so thank you for being patient.’
Page had a verbal mannerism that had caught Ben Cooper’s attention even when they’d been underground during the rescue exercise. On occasional words he emphasized a final ‘t’ with a click of his tongue against his teeth. It was audible in ‘moment’ and in ‘patient’. Cooper found it distracting and began to listen more carefully, to see if he could discern a pattern. He soon noticed that it only happened when the word fell at the end of a sentence. It produced an exaggerated emphasis, like a full stop pronounced out loud. Each time he heard it, he imagined Page spitting out an exclamation mark, ejecting it like an apple pip that had stuck between his teeth.
Cooper called the girls, and they followed the path along the wall, above the terraces. The change from warm outside air to the cooler atmosphere of the cave was noticeable as they descended wide steps into a chamber called Bell House. Of course, it was a constant nine degrees Celsius down here. Mist hung in the chamber, and steam rose from the lights where water dripped from fissures in the roof.
They entered Lumbago Walk, a low tunnel blasted from the rock. Alistair Page explained that it had been created for a visit by the young Queen Victoria. Previous visitors had been forced to enter the cavern lying flat on their backs in a shallow boat, clutching candles to their chests. The adults had had to bend double to avoid knocking
