Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness (28 page)

He retraces his steps carefully and, as he does so, he is thinking. The men who work for him are thugs and murderers. Though they might pretend to be miners, they would be as lost down here as he is himself. But there is one man who wouldn’t be—one man brought up in the village who could .find his way around below ground as easily as he could above.

And that man is Tom Yardley.

‘So then he had Tom killed, did he?’ Blackstone asked.

‘No,’ Robertson said.

‘You’re lying to me again!’

‘I swear I’m not.’

‘If Tom had really done what you say he did, Bickersdale would never have let him get away with it.’

‘You’re right,’ Robertson agreed. ‘But he wouldn’t have had him killed like that, either.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he didn’t know what Yardley had done with the money! Bickersdale’s plan was to have his men grab Yardley when he was leaving the mine and bring him up here. If Yardley had told Bickersdale where the money was right away, he’d would have been killed right away. If he hadn’t, he’d have been tortured until he did tell, and then he’d have been killed. But Yardley never did leave the mine. Before he ever came back to the surface, he blew himself up.’

Blackstone shook his head, slowly and mournfully, from side to side. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that’s what happened at all.’

Twelve

‘There were two of them—Blackstone and the drift manager—in the cage that was descending to the bottom of the Victoria Mine.

‘I don’t know what you expect to find down here,’ the drift manager told Blackstone. ‘After the explosion we searched the gallery thoroughly, just to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. So I can assure you that all Tom Yardley’s body parts—however small and however bloody—were buried with him.’

‘It must have been a messy job,’ Blackstone said.

The drift manager shuddered. ‘I like to think I’m not a squeamish man myself, but I couldn’t eat for a day after. All that raw meat! All that splintered bone! It was terrible.’

The cage bumped against the floor and they stepped out of it.

This was the second time in just a few hours he’d been in a cavern like this one, Blackstone thought, looking around at the flickering oil lights and huge salt pillars. He could only hope that this time there was no blood-letting.

The drift manager led him along the gallery to the rock face. ‘There’s not much to see,’ he said. ‘After we…After we cleared away Tom’s remains, we cleared the salt as well. We couldn’t waste it. The work of the mine has to go on, you know, in spite of personal tragedy.’

‘I can quite understand that,’ Blackstone agreed, lifting his oil lamp and studying the rock face.

There was no longer any evidence at all of the huge explosion, he thought, but then there wouldn’t have been. The excavation of the drift had probably advanced several inches—or several feet, for all he knew—since then.

He followed the wall along, and when he had almost reached the corner he saw the tunnel. ‘Where does that lead?’ he asked the drift manager.

The other man shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s been there for as long as I’ve been working here. There are dozens and dozens of tunnels under this village, you know. Some of them lead to other mines, which was why they were excavated in the first place. But others just peter out, so you’ve no idea what their original purpose was. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t really interest me. When I go back up in that cage, I like to leave all thoughts of this bloody mine behind me.’

‘I imagine you do,’ Blackstone said.

He walked over to the tunnel, and held his oil lamp up. The lamp illuminated the first few yards, but further away the walls became fainter and fainter, until there was only darkness.

‘I’d like to explore this tunnel,’ he said.

The drift manager showed no enthusiasm at all for the idea. ‘I didn’t mind bringing you down here,’ he said, ‘but like I told you, the sooner I’m out of this mine, the happier I am.’

‘I don’t want you to come with me,’ Blackstone said. ‘You can go home if you like, as long as there’s some way for me to get out of here once I’ve finished what I have to do.’

‘Oh, there’s no problem about that,’ the drift manager replied. ‘There’s a rope next the shaft. Pull on it, and it rings a bell topside. Then they’ll know that you want to be brought up.’ He paused. ‘But it’s not a good idea to go exploring on your own. That tunnel could come to a dead end in a hundred yards, or it might run for miles and connect with half a dozen other tunnels. You could get hopelessly lost.’

Blackstone pulled something out of his pocket. ‘Not if I fix one end of this to my starting point and trail it behind me as I go,’ he said.

The drift manager looked at what he was holding in his hand. ‘A ball of string!’ he said in amazement. ‘Whatever made you think to bring a ball of string with you? Did somebody tell you about this tunnel?’

‘No,’ Blackstone said. ‘But I was almost certain that it would have to be here.’

*

The tunnel forked less than fifty yards from its opening. Blackstone took the left fork, for no other reason than that it seemed a little wider than the right.

If he found nothing along it, he told himself, he would return to the junction and explore in the opposite direction. And if that didn’t work, he would search for other branch tunnels off the main ones.

He was well aware it might take him a long time, but he was quite prepared for that, because he was convinced that in the end—by patiently eliminating all other possibilities—he would blunder across what he was looking for.

It simply
had
to
be
down there.

The moment he saw the bedding, he knew he had made a lucky choice first time out. It wasn’t much—a couple of rough blankets and a pillow—but it was enough to tell him that someone had been camping out here.

There was other evidence, too—a spirit stove, a kettle, a saucepan, a cup, a drum of water and several cans of tinned food. And there was a newspaper, which was already several days old.

Blackstone picked the newspaper up, and was not surprised to find that one article in it had been ringed in red pencil.

‘Another horrendous murder!’ the headline read:

The body of a young girl, Emma Walsingholme, was discovered in a drainage ditch in Staffordshire yesterday. The murder appears to be the work of the Northern Slasher, and brings the number of his victims up to nine.

Scotland Yard has informed us that due to the temporary indisposition of Superintendent Bullock, who has investigated the previous killings, the inquiry in this case will be led by Detective Inspector Samuel Blackstone.

Blackstone flung the newspaper to the floor in disgust. It not only represented the last piece of the puzzle, it also answered several questions that had been troubling him for some time—and
should
have
been troubling him for even longer.

There was a sound of footsteps some distance away. Blackstone snuffed out his oil lamp, and waited. A light appeared out of nowhere, as whoever was carrying it turned a corner.

Blackstone did not move, and the light came closer and closer.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Blackstone called out. ‘To the latrine, I suppose. That’s your army training for you. They always taught us never to shit close to where we were camped, didn’t they?’

The light stopped, and hovered in the air like an indecisive firefly; then a voice said, ‘Sergeant Blackstone?’

‘That’s right,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Why don’t you come a bit closer; then we can talk like civilized men?’

For a moment the light did not move, then Tom Yardley began to walk towards him.

Blackstone bent down, relit his own oil lamp, and picked up the newspaper again.

‘It must have been this article that gave you the idea,’ he said, waving the newspaper at Yardley.

‘What idea was that, Sarge?’

‘How
did
you manage to fake your own death, Tom?’ Blackstone asked, ignoring the question. ‘What other poor bugger had to die so that you could go on living?’

‘I’d never kill anybody, Sarge. You know that. Not a white man, anyway.’ Yardley chuckled. ‘Remember how we fixed them nigger warriors in that cave back in Afghanistan? How I had to finish them off, because you’d gone and got yourself knocked out?’

‘I certainly remember some of that,’ Blackstone said. ‘But I’d rather talk about the question of your “death”. If you didn’t kill anyone, where
did
you get the body from?’

‘Dug him up from the graveyard,’ Tom Yardley said. ‘It wasn’t difficult. He’d only been dead for two days, and the earth hadn’t properly set.’

‘You despoiled a grave!’

‘I didn’t like doing it, Sarge. It didn’t seem right at first, an’ I almost couldn’t go through with it.’

Liar! Blackstone thought. ‘But in the end, you managed to talk yourself into it,’ he said aloud.

‘That’s right,’ Tom Yardley agreed. ‘I told myself that he was already dead, so whatever I did wouldn’t hurt him. An’ havin’ known the man as he’d been in life, I didn’t really think he was the sort of feller who would have begrudged me the opportunity to survive.’

‘And once you had the stiff, the rest of your disappearing trick was easy, wasn’t it?’

‘Pretty easy, yes.’

*

Yardley packs the rock face with explosive—far too much explosive.

‘I’m setting the fuse now, so take cover’ he says.

His crew disappear behind the closest pillars, as they normally do.

‘Not there,’ Yardley shouts. ‘This is a bloody big charge I’m usin’. I want you at the very end of the gallery.’

Tom is the blaster He knows what he’s doing. The crew obey his instructions without question.

Yardley waits until they can no longer see him, then moves quickly to the tunnel. The corpse he has left there has been dead for two days. It has started to stink, and under the overalls he has dressed it in the maggots are probably already at work.

But neither of those things will matter The overpowering stench of the cordite will easily cover the smell. And the force of the explosion will disintegrate the worms.

He carries the corpse to the rock face. This is the tricky part, because if any of his team chooses that moment to look around the pillar, the game is up. But none of them do—and why should they?

He lights two fuses—one running to the explosives on the rock face, the other to the explosives he has packed in the corpse’s overalls—and returns to the mouth of the tunnel.

‘I’m going to light the fuse now,’ he calls out, then ducks into the tunnel. And because he has timed it so perfectly, the explosion conies no more than a second later.

When the air finally clears, all his men can find is a few body parts that could easily have once belonged to Tom Yardley—but didn’t.

*

‘Clever, wasn’t I?’ Tom Yardley said.

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Blackstone told him. ‘It was certainly a very
effective
plan—but it wasn’t very original. At best, it was no more than a variation on a theme by Bickersdale.’

‘You always were a bit poetic, Sarge,’ Tom Yardley said, sounding perhaps a little hurt.

‘Bickersdale never tried to keep it secret from his men that he’d got a fortune at the bottom of his mine, did he?’ Blackstone asked.

‘He did not. He taunted us with it—the bastard! I think part of the pleasure he got from the money was knowing that we wanted it, but daren’t do anything about it.’

‘You knew how to steal it, but not how to
get
away
with stealing it. You could have run, I suppose, but if you’d taken your family with you, you’d have been easy enough to find. And you didn’t want to leave your family behind, now did you, Tom?’

‘I couldn’t have done that,’ Tom Yardley agreed. ‘I’ve got three beautiful little girls, an’ I love them to pieces.’ He reached into his overall pocket. ‘I’ve got some pictures of them, if you’d like to…’

‘It’s a pity you didn’t think about
other
little girls and
other
fathers,’ Blackstone interrupted.

‘Oh, come on, Sarge, be reasonable,’ Yardley said dismissively. ‘They were nothin’ to do with me.’

‘Your “death” solved the immediate problem of Bickersdale looking for you, but there was still the problem of how you were going to be reunited with your wife and kids,’ Blackstone said. ‘Even though you were presumed dead, your family would have had to stay in the village, because Bickersdale would have been watching them all the time—in case they knew where you’d hidden the money. And if they’d moved, he would immediately have smelled a rat.’

‘I wanted both my kids
and
the money,’ Yardley admitted. ‘That’s not unreasonable, is it?’

‘The more you thought about it, the more you realized that the only safe thing to do was get Bickersdale and his men out of the way altogether. And when you saw that article in the newspaper—the one about your old sergeant investigating the very crime that had its origins in this village—you could see just how to do it.’

‘I thought it would be good for your career if you cracked this case, Sarge.’ Yardley said.

‘There was one grain of truth in the letter that you sent to me,’ Blackstone said, ignoring the comment. ‘You really
didn’t
trust the local police. Because with that amount of money involved, how could you be entirely sure that that Bickersdale
hadn’t
got them in his pocket? But you
could
trust good old Sergeant Blackstone. You knew that he was honest, and that once he’d got his teeth into something like this he wouldn’t rest until he had a result.’

‘Like when we were in Afghanistan together and—’

‘You thought I’d be able to work out what was going on here for myself, but just in case I couldn’t, you decided to give me a few pointers. But the first one—in the letter you wrote to me while I was in Staffordshire—sent me off on completely the wrong track.’

‘Did it?’ Yardley asked, surprised. ‘Why was that? I thought I’d made it clear enough what I was on about by mentioning Fuzzy Dustman.’

‘Faisal Dostam was a diamond-smuggler.’

‘Was he?’ Tom Yardley asked. ‘I didn’t know that.’ He laughed. ‘Well, I never! What a big difference there is between what gets discussed in the sergeants’ mess an’ what the ordinary soldiers talk about between themselves.’