The Mushroom Man (15 page)

In the cell I said: ‘Shoelaces, please.’

‘Shoelaces?’

‘That’s right. We don’t want you making a rope ladder and escaping, do we? Or, heaven forbid, doing yourself a mischief.’

He removed the laces and thrust them towards me. ‘Right, on your feet and face the wall,’ I ordered. I went through the motions of frisking
him. ‘Better take your belt, too,’ I said. I extended my arms around his waist, skinny as a girl’s but not a zillionth as alluring, and undid his belt buckle. Before he knew what was happening I’d flicked open the top button of his jeans, hooked both thumbs over the top and yanked the lot down.

He yelled a curse and tried to turn on me, but it’s difficult with your pants round your knees. I grabbed his shoulders and pinned him against the wall.

On his arse was the distinctive tattoo with the Union flag and the number 18.

‘Seen one of those before?’ I asked the WPC.

‘No. Not since the video of the royal wedding,’ she replied.

Gilbert was a lot happier when I told him about the tattoo on Briggs’s backside, although he’d have preferred to have authorised my inspection before I committed the deed. We found several photographs of Briggs, some with little Anne-Marie. More than one officer asked me if they could have five minutes alone with him in his cell.

‘How much further do you want to take it?’ Gilbert asked. He’d called to collect me on his way out of the station. It was nearly seven o’clock.

I pulled my jacket on and made sure the drawer containing the photographs was locked. ‘I think it’s the end of the road for us,’ I replied. ‘It was important that we act fast, but now we might as well hand it over to the Porn Squad. Unfortunately we haven’t found any mailing lists or other names. Maybe they’ll have better luck.’ I’d turned off the light and was pulling the door closed when the phone rang. Gilbert didn’t put it into words, but his
look suggested that I ignore it. I couldn’t, though.

‘Inspector Priest,’ I intoned wearily.

‘Oh, thank God,’ said the voice. ‘It’s Miles Dewhurst here. I’ve just had another message.’

I waved a frantic hand at Gilbert. ‘A message from the kidnapper?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Another letter?’

‘No, a phone call.’

‘When?’

‘Just now.’

‘OK, Mr Dewhurst, now please tell me exactly what the message was.’

‘He said – it was a man – he said: “Go to Little John’s Well. There’ll be a note for you. Don’t tell the police.”‘

‘And that’s all?’

‘Yes.’

‘I take it you are at home?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, stay put and I’ll be with you in about ten minutes. We’ll go together.’

‘No, he might be watching. I’m going now.’

And he hung up.

‘Bugger!’ I exclaimed, and repeated the bits that Gilbert hadn’t heard. After a few moments’ thought I said: ‘How’s this sound, Gilbert? I’ll try to beat him to the note. If you radio Traffic they might be able to hold him up while allowing me
a few liberties with the speed limit.’

‘Yes, no problem. Then I’ll raise Sparky and Nigel and have them standing by. Once you find the note we can take it from there.’

I grabbed my book of numbers and wrote out a couple for Gilbert. After stuffing a few plastic bags into my pockets I was down the stairs faster than a lighthouse keeper with diarrhoea and an outside toilet. Twenty minutes later, cruising at a cool hundred and ten near the Castleford turn-off of the M62, I passed a Traffic BMW and a white Toyota Supra parked on the hard shoulder. So far, so good.

There were five assorted drinks cans in the well, but only one had an end cut off with a tin opener. I didn’t pick it up immediately. No tyre marks or imprints of obscure trainers announced themselves. Only crisp packets, fast food containers and a disposable nappy. I put my usual curse on my fellow men and their habits and retrieved the Coke can.

The note, printed by computer, said:

I had a book of maps in the car but I happened to know the B6275. It starts just past Scotch Corner, and was an interesting route to Scotland before the motorways were built. On the map it looks as straight as a centurion’s backbone, but the map is flat. The B6275 is the biggest switchback in the country.

Nigel was in the office when I rang on the mobile, and he said Sparky was hovering by the phone at home. I relayed the contents of the note and told them to follow me. ‘And fetch the Almanac, please. We might need it.’

Traffic was heavy, so it took me well over an hour to find the lay-by, and the light was fading fast. An elderly couple were having a picnic in a Maestro. They watched me walk to and fro as they masticated their ham sandwiches, faces devoid of expression. A miniature television was perched on the dashboard of their car – they were having a night out. Maybe they have obnoxious neighbours, I decided, struggling to justify their behaviour.

The Coke can was wedged in the branches of a hawthorn bush, five yards in front of the Maestro. I pulled an exhibit bag over my hand and retrieved it. The couple’s jaws moved up and down in unison, as implacable as a steam engine. I wrote down their registration number.

The note in the can read:

Now I had to consult the book of maps. There’d been a big fuss about a pit closing somewhere about six months ago. Last coal mine in the area. They’d held marches and meetings, and a couple of MPs had staged an underground sit-in; but it had closed
just the same. I had a feeling it had been Capstick.

I needed longer arms. Either that or a pair of spectacles. The thought dismayed me – soon it’d be the teeth. By holding the book directly under the light and squinting I could just read the index. Then I found Capstick on the map. I made a note of the road numbers, rang the other two and set off. It was right where the map said it should be. A sign at the entrance to the town told me they were twinned with a place that sounded like a bad hand at Scrabble.

The weekend starts on Thursday amongst the young. The narrow main street was alive with youths dressed in jeans and T-shirts, in spite of the drizzle, and girls in the shortest minis I’d seen in years. They were in single-sex groups of three or four. Presumably some sort of pairing-off process would be enacted throughout the evening, after the ritualistic consumption of large quantities of lager. Ah, those were the days.

I drove slowly past the curry houses and the taxi drivers dozing in their Ladas, waiting for the evening’s trade to begin. Many businesses were boarded up and there was the usual smattering of charity shops. Prosperity was reluctant to come back to the area. A level crossing marked the end of downtown Capstick. I paused in the middle and looked both ways. The rails didn’t exactly shine like silver threads in the gloom. Probably disused. Must
have run near the pit, though, once upon a time. Quarter of a mile further on I found the sign.

I turned right down a concrete road for another half a mile. The night was blacker than a mole’s armpit, the only illumination coming from the car’s headlights. Eventually they shone on a British Coal notice board at the entrance, with the manager’s name proudly displayed. Someone had scrawled an obscenity next to it. I crawled along in first gear, the tyres squelching in the thin mud that covered the road.

I reached a cluster of buildings. Away to the right a glow in the sky marked the town centre, where people would be drinking and swearing and lusting for each other’s bodies. For a lucky few their dreams would come true. The rest would find consolation in a skinful or booze, until tomorrow night brought another chance.

I wished I was with them. A feeling had come over me that I didn’t immediately recognise. I did my deep breathing exercises; always a good
stop-gap
when you’re lost for ideas. It was fear. Not for myself, but for what I might find.

At the side of the road was a big board, listing the various facilities at the mine, with arrows pointing in the appropriate directions. Lorries dashing backwards and forwards had showered it with mud, but now the rain was washing it clean again, revealing enough for me to understand. I
silently read them off: Manager’s Office, No. 1 Winder, No. 2 Winder, Stores, Stockyard, Surveyors, Weighbridge, Pithead Baths, Canteen, Electricians, Fitters, and, right at the bottom, barely visible through the streaming mud, Blacksmiths.

The arrow was still covered. I got out and wiped the mud away with my hand. It pointed straight ahead.

Most of the buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble. There was no sign of the once-proud headgears, but half of one of the giant wheels was propped against a wall. It would have been as tall as a house when it was whole. No more would its spinning be an indicator of the prosperity of the community. It had been cut down to size.

The headlights shone on a long, low building with three big sliding doors evenly spaced along the front. It was red brick, dark with age, with a slate roof and small windows, all broken. I swung the wheel slightly to the left and crept towards the first door. Outside were piles of discarded cables, some as thick as a man’s arm, heaped up like writhing serpents. As if to confirm my deduction a sign on the door read: Electricians.

The middle door was the fitters’ workshop. Pieces of rusting machinery stood outside, like dinosaurs bristling with teeth and chains and cogs. I swung the lights across until they illuminated the third door. There was no painted notice on this one,
but the language was universal. In the middle of the door, nailed to it, was a single horseshoe. The ends were pointing upwards; the way, they say, that provides a seat for the devil.

I switched off the engine and headlights and the darkness enveloped me like a magician’s cloak. It would have been easy to sit waiting for the others to catch up with me, but I didn’t. The rain had almost stopped, and the car made soft clicking and hissing noises as I found my flashlight in the boot. Picking my way through the mud and the puddles, I approached the blacksmiths’ workshop. There was a small door let into the large one, fastened with a sneck – one of those old-fashioned catches operated by your thumb. I pressed and pushed, and the door swung inwards.

Everything inside was the same colour – a greyish-red amalgam of a hundred years of oxidised iron and carbon. I swung the torch round. Along the far wall were four big hearths, where the blacksmiths had heated the metal, and next to each was an anvil. I remembered something I’d read somewhere. The gist of it was that to the man who can work steel, it can become anything he wants; to the man who can’t, it will become everything except what he wants.

I found some ancient light switches, but the cables were chopped off just above them. The beam from the torch was feeble, and a thick layer of dust
over everything softened the outlines, blurring shadows and making shapes indistinct. The door slammed shut and something inside me did a
five-point
-nine somersault.

I steered a course gingerly across the floor, which was littered with bits of metal, heavy pieces of chain and a variety of blacksmiths’ tongs that looked like instruments of torture. Once the place would have rung with the sound of hammers on iron, illuminated by dancing fires and showers of sparks. Now it smelt of corruption.

The workshop was alive with ghosts, but there was nothing there to interest the policeman in me. Except the door in the end wall. I walked towards it and shone the torch. Stencilled neatly in the middle was the word Office. Someone with a black felt-tip had added a few additional comments. He’d also had a go at the page-three girls who adorned the wall. He wasn’t very good at spelling. Or anatomy. Well, I hope he wasn’t.

The door pushed open against a spring. The office was about six feet wide and ten feet long. A high desk that looked as if it belonged in a Dickensian orphanage ran the full length of the long wall, with a bench beside it for sitting on. I let the door close behind me and shone the torch around.

More big-busted ladies adorned the walls. Underneath the bench were four plastic bin-liners,
fastened round the tops with string. I pulled the bench out of the way and dragged the first bag into the open. There was a movement and a rustle near my feet. I pointed the torch down and saw a rat run over my shoe. I let out a yell and jumped onto the bench, like a woman in a cartoon. Two rats were scurrying round the bottom of the wall. I’d heard people say they could be dangerous when cornered, but it was me that felt cornered. I reached down and pulled the door handle. It would only open a few inches, because the bench was now in the way, but it was enough. The rats ran out to terrorise someone else. This time the gymnast inside me scored straight sixes, right across the board.

When the door was firmly closed again I stepped down and repeated my deep-breathing exercises for a few seconds. There were no stabbing pains in my chest or pins and needles in my left arm, so I decided I’d survive. I shone the torch back on the bag.

The small blade on my Swiss army knife is the one I don’t use much, to keep it nice and sharp. I placed the torch on the bench so I had two free hands to work with, and sliced through the plastic.

The bag was full of books. I pulled one out. It was softbacked and damp; with a characteristic musty smell, but more powerful than I’d ever experienced before. The title on the cover read: Mines and Quarries Form no. 277; Reports of
Examinations of Winding Ropes. Each page was a separate certificate, filled in at about monthly intervals in an immaculate script, saying that everything was in safe working order. They were done with a fountain pen and proudly signed. A lesser penman had countersigned each page. All the books were the same, and must have represented countless years of conscientious endeavour. I pulled the bag to one side and dragged the next one out.

It contained more books. So did the third one. I grabbed the final bag and immediately knew it was different. For a start it was made from much less substantial plastic than the other three – household grade rather than industrial – and the contents were less angular. I held the top with my left hand, the knife poised and the shadow of the blade dancing from side to side in the torchlight. As soon as the blade was steady for a second I plunged it through the thin plastic and drew it downwards.