‘And if he’s in there he’s outnumbered.’
‘And this isn’t a late-night movie.’
They went in.
Inside they stood quietly in the dark and sensed the space around them. Their torch beams barely touched the joists fifty feet above – like Blitz-time searchlights rifling the clouds. James Watt’s great steam engine took up the lower two-thirds of the void. The giant machinery glimmered dully with the polish applied by a thousand steam enthusiasts. To one side sat a squat diesel engine, a metallic Swiss-roll of beaten panels, which had replaced Watt’s engine finally in the 1940s – only for it to be made redundant by the electricity pumping station further up river.
The machinery creaked as the various metals cooled at different rates with the chill of the night.
‘Let’s stick together.’
Dryden considered this redundant sentence. ‘Oh all right then.’ He indicated a flight of brick steps leading down to the cellars.
‘Can’t we stick together up here?’ Humph’s euphoria was dissipating. Besides, he knew Dryden well and there was nothing as foolhardy as a dedicated coward.
Dryden led the way. One of the cellars was being used as a storeroom by builders preparing the engine house for its first season as a tourist attraction. They’d constructed wooden handrails for the stairs and begun building a tearoom in one of the coal cellars, which was bathed in the moonlight from a row of freshly cleaned skylights. Plumbing gear littered the floor in another, where the porcelain kit for a set of toilets had been stored.
Rats, Dryden thought, and he adopted a peculiar skipping walk designed to keep his feet off the ground as much as possible. They returned gratefully to the main floor and played their torch beams on the single metal corkscrew stairway which led up to the loft: fifty feet of cast iron tortured into a spiral.
‘You stay here – I won’t be a sec.’ Dryden knew with sickening self-knowledge that his bravery was the product of a tremendous desire to show off. He took the stairs two at a time in a desperate attempt to postpone the onset of vertigo. Unfortunately he ran out of breath first, halfway up, and had to cling to the fragile metal banister for support. Below he could see Humph waiting like a pocket diving bell in an underwater movie, his torch beam sweeping the ocean floor around him.
He made the trapdoor to the loft in one more unbroken run, pushed it open with surprising ease, and tripped over the wooden lip in his hurry to find safety. He fell to the floor, producing a plume of dust which hung in the stale air.
When his breathing stilled he cast the torchlight around the loft. Unlike the floor below this was cluttered with Victorian flotsam: wooden buckets, coal shovels, winches, tackle, ropes, and pulleys. The walls were lined with storage cupboards – vertical lockers for the workforce which must have once been needed to keep the great engine pumping twenty-four hours a day. They were wooden with brass locks and hinges and looked like a row of vertical coffins.
A workbench ran one length of the room – its G-clamps, vices, and loose tools covered in a sedimentary layer of white dust. The floor was uneven, punctured by several closed trapdoors. Dryden guessed that these were used to raise and lower machinery for repairing and maintaining the engine directly below.
He stopped to examine the silence. He could hear Humph’s nervous cough and nothing else. An owl hooted and he laughed without conviction. In the silence that followed he hoped to hear nothing but instead, from one of the lockers, he thought he imagined the shuffle of a foot. Before fear immobilized his muscles he walked noisily across the loft and pulled it open, his heartbeat crashing in his ears. A pair of moth-eaten overalls hung from a single nail and for a second he saw, by way of hallucination, a body inside it with the bloody snapped neck of the Lark victim.
The flood of relief when he realized his nerves had betrayed him had the effect of a swiftly administered malt whisky. He felt a flood of goodwill and laughed, this time making a decent job of it. A tarpaulin hung from the beams at the far end of the loft and he pulled it back with bravado to complete the search. It took at least a second to realize that this time he was looking at a real human face. Or rather a human head. The features, other than the eyes, were obscured by a black woollen balaclava. He saw the eyes and the fear in them. Then a crowbar caught him in the crotch. Fireworks went off in his eyes and a pain so pure seared his spine that for a second he was able to admire it before it shut down the rest of his nervous system.
He came to within a minute. The air sang with the echo of something. He was on his feet before he realized it was a gunshot, and at the trapdoor when he heard the second. At the foot of the stairs he could see Humph’s body, sprawled flat on the stone-flagged floor.