Only then did their shift officially begin, hewing and drilling the vile, wet rocks to get at the precious black tin; only then did they begin to earn the pittance that paid for their families subsistence. When did they find the time or energy to live and pray and sing and make love to their wives? No wonder they died so young: at thirty or thirty-five. Apart from Sundays, they wouldnt have seen the sun from October to March.
Karen locked the car, thinking. The word Sunday must have had a special resonance then. The only day they saw the sun. Sunday.
An image of her father flashed before her. They had come here once and he had told her all this mining history, trying to make her proud of her Cornish heritage. In reality, the sight of awesome Botallack had just made seven-year-old Karen rather scared.
Slowly, she made her way down the perilous cliffside path, towards the handsome stone stacks of Botallack engine house, and the small cabins surrounding it.
She was greeted by a tall dark-haired man in a yellow hard hat and hi-vis jacket. He extended a firm handshake and shouted above the buffeting sea-wind, Stephen Penrose. You must be Karen Trevithick?
She shook his hand. Can we go inside?
The peace inside the great, cold, stone-built engine house was almost a shock after the stormy noise of the wind.
Hell of a day! Yes, Im DCI Trevithick, from Scotland Yard.
The man looked her up and down. Karen didnt know whether to feel patronized, or flattered, and didnt particularly care either way: she was just eager to crack on. Shed had to fight for permission to be assigned to a case so far from London; indeed, shed had to use a little emotional blackmail with her senior officer at the Yard, expend some capital. But this strange case intrigued her, and distracted her from gloomy and interior thoughts.
She was also distracted by the great void just a few metres from her walking boots. The shaft. It dominated the stone chamber. A black circle of nothingness, much bigger than she had expected: a great mouth that swallowed men daily, with a gullet that went down for miles.
In the old days, when they were tinning, Penrose said, as if he sensed her thoughts, you would see steam coming out of that shaft.
Sorry?
Steam, from all the men, the miners breathing deep underground, the steam from their exhalations, would rise up the shaft.
It was another jarring concept.
Have you ever been down a mine, Miss Trevithick?
No.
He tutted, sympathetically. With a good Cornish name like Trevithick?
The stories put me off, she said, staring at the shaft. My dad would tell me stories of my family. Working in these places. One of them died when the man-engine collapsed at that mine, along the cliffs: Levant. And my great-grandmother was a bal maiden at South Crofty.
Ah yes, the girls, breaking the rocks and sifting the deads, standing in the wind. What a job that mustve been.
They were tough women.
Very true, Miss Trevithick, very true. Here. Youll need this.
She took the hard hat, put it on, strapped it under her chin and smiled briskly. So, where is the body?
Right at the bottom of the shaft. Youll need this overall too. Tis very wet down there.
Karen slipped on the blue nylon overalls. They covered her like a nuns habit. Properly attired, she followed Stephen Penrose to the other side of the shaft and a metal cage suspended over the void. Once inside the cage, he slid a wire metal door, pressed a fat red button, and they began the long descent. The sensation was distractingly unpleasant. Going down underground, to the tunnels under the Atlantic. She could hear the grieving boom of the sea as they descended.
Who found the body?
I did, yesterday.
What were you doing here? Botallack has been closed for decades.
He shrugged.
Were exploring the, uh, possibility of tourism. Opening a mine museum, you see, like Geevor up the coast. We have some EU funding. Weve just finished draining the main tunnels. Thats one of them: one of the oldest, eighteenth century. He pointed down a tunnel that flashed past them as they plunged further in the rattling cage. The whole mine was dimly lit with strings of electric lights: frail and exposed against the threatening dark.
It was surely a haunted place. As the cage neared the bottom of the chilly shaft, Karen remembered more stories: of the knockers the spirits of the mine, strange poltergeists the miners would claim to hear. Auditory hallucinations, presumably, from hunger and stress.
OK, here it is. Watch your step.
The body was crumpled at the bottom of the shaft, next to the enormous metal winch that controlled the cage. Beyond it was the main tunnel, a narrowing corridor that extended that long, long mile under the Atlantic Ocean. The moaning sea above them was still audible, but now muffled, stifled even: like someone in another room dreaming bad dreams.
Karen knelt and looked at the broken form. The victim was young, white, male, twenty-something, in a shredded anorak and dark jeans. Covered in blood and blackness.
Penrose spoke, his voice not quite so confident now. Nasty, isnt it? Quite gave me the frighteners when I saw it. Poor bastard. Then all that weird stuff on him Soot and grease and cat fur, right?
How did you know it was cat fur?
I didnt. It was my boss, Jane. She came down a few minutes later, she keeps cats, she recognized these might be he pointed scratches. Cat scratches. See there. On the neck and the face. Then we worked out that maybe all this stuff Penrose knelt beside her. It was as if they were praying in front of the corpse. This weird stuff on his clothes must be fur, burned cat fur, because shed already heard the reports, on the radio news, the cats burned on Zennor Hill.
Uh-huh.
Penrose stood up, abruptly, as if he really didnt like to be too near the corpse. What is it, Miss Trevithick? Something to do with witchcraft? Thats what theyre saying on the internet. He tilted back his hard hat and scratched his head, frowning. Because its not good for business. We dont want people associating Botallack with anything like that, not if were going to make a go of this museum. And we need the jobs round here. Sorry to sound selfish, but
No, no. I quite understand. Karen gave the shattered body one last scrutiny in the faint damp light given out by the pitiful bulbs. Im sure it will be fine, youd be amazed how quickly people forget. Ive seen it all before.
She gazed at the sad, pale, slender face of the cadaver, scratched, and badly bruised, and with one long horrible gash by the left ear. There were several other terrifying scarlet gashes distributed across the body, as if someone had attacked the man with a mighty sword. The legs were the worst: they were virtually pulped. The flesh had melted into the clothing; you could only just tell he was wearing dark indigo jeans. Pathology will confirm, theyre coming here in a minute. But these injuries, they must have been from his fall.
Penrose said nothing: he was looking in his canvas bag.
In the end, she answered her own question. Yes That makes sense. The wounds look terrible but thats because of the enormous drop. Youd bang against the sides of the shaft on the way down. Ripping and tearing, shattering the bones.
Penrose said nothing: he was looking in his canvas bag.
In the end, she answered her own question. Yes That makes sense. The wounds look terrible but thats because of the enormous drop. Youd bang against the sides of the shaft on the way down. Ripping and tearing, shattering the bones.
Karen stood and stared up. The tiny hole of light half a mile up there was the sky and the wind. She resisted the sudden urge to panic and escape this unnatural, inhuman prison, to fling herself in the cage and press every button.
Soft distant booms echoed down the tunnels. The sea was talking in its sleep, fighting a nightmare. The sea was also above them, weighing everything down: an unbearably oppressive sensation. What a place.
She turned. Penrose was holding something in his hand. It was an iPad. He spoke, as he switched it on. We know the injuries are from the fall, Miss Trevithick, because we have him on CCTV. Uninjured.
What?
They didnt tell you! We found it a couple of hours ago. Jane emailed it to me and to DI Pascoe?
Ive been out of contact. My mobile is recharging. You have it?
Yup. Here, look.
He opened up the iPad and clicked on a stored email. The light given out by the computer seemed unearthly in the gloom. A magic oblong in ancient darkness.
The CCTV footage was grainy but good enough. The two of them stood in the echoing blackness, with thebaffled noise of the sea all around, and watched the silent movie.
There he is.
Penroses indication was unnecessary. A young man in dark jeans was climbing a fence surrounding the minehead. It was dark, but the moon was full. The victim was unmistakable. And he was alone. So this was no murder?
Thats him all right. No injuries. Looks perfectly OK.
The footage jerked and the scene changed. Now they were gazing at the interior of the engine house.
We have a CCTV camera inside as well. Its much darker, but you can still see him.
The ghostly image of the man moved to the shaft. What was he looking for? His movements were edgy, jerky, and odd. As if there was a problem with the film-speed, and yet there wasnt. Where was he going? How did he accidentally fall down? Karen watched the figure climb very close to the big black hole. Why was he going so stupidly close to the shaft? She almost cried out: Stop, youre getting too close!
Her hand went reflexively to her mouth.
He jumped.
11
Abydos, Egypt
It is estimated there are maybe half a billion mummies still lying in the dust of Egypt.
This was one of Ryan Harpers favourite factoids: he always wheeled it out when the students attention started to wander. Today the students remained mute, and unresponsive. Had they even heard?
I said, it is estimated there are half a billion mummies in Egypt.
He looked at the young faces before him. There were just three kids in this study group: the renewed Egyptian troubles would they ever end? had begun to scare away the students, as they had already scared away the tourists.
This was a pain. Ryan relied, very heavily, on this part-time weekend teaching to supplement his meagre income from the charity. If the teaching disappeared, he would be properly impoverished.
At last, the keenest of the trio, a bright spark from Chicago, offered a response: Half a billion? Youre joking, right?
No. Ryan stood tall, and gestured across the beige and rubbly levels of the Abydos cemeteries. Remember the eternity of Egyptian life
Just at that moment a blaring Arab pop song shrilled out from a café down by the main temple. Ryan sighed. The screeching music didnt add to the mysterious atmosphere he was trying to evoke. And this was the one thing about teaching that Ryan really enjoyed the chance to instil some mystery into these kids, to give them a glimpse of the grandeur of Egypt; to make these gum-chewing twenty-year-olds share a little of that soaring rhapsody that he had once enjoyed, in his first seasons digging at Saqqara, as he unearthed the tombs of the Apis bulls the sense that he was an historical scuba diver, floating above so much translucent and fathomless archaeology it could give you vertigo.
Mr Harper
Sorry?
It was the Chicago kid again, Tyler Neale.
Explain the figures, maybe?
Sure.
Cause I dont see it. Theres, like, no way you could bury that many mummies: theyd be turning up in your lunch.
Harper gestured across the flooded tomb of Osiris, the Oseirion, where he spent much of his working week. In a sense, you just have to do the math. But lets go through it. First, as I say, you need to appreciate the profundity of Egyptian time. Lets make a comparison. How long has America been around?
He gazed at the students. Daniel Melini seemed to be asleep standing up. The pretty girl, Jenny Lopez, was texting on her phone. And Tyler Neale, in his scruffy jeans and baseball cap, simply looked tired. Fair enough. The students had a right to be tired and maybe a little irritable: theyd spent five straight hours wandering the epic site in the endless sun, listening to him explaining styles of epigraphy in the Abydos King List and the problems of rising water tables across Middle Egypt. He liked to give them value for their money: hed probably said way too much.
Well now they could have some fun, at least for the last thirty minutes. And after that, as the sun set over the Rameses temple and the forts of Zebib, Ryan Harper could go back to his lonely bachelor apartment in the town and spend the rest of the evening smoking shisha outside the tea-house downstairs with the Arabs who somehow tolerated the slightly dishevelled, thirty-eight-year-old American with no wife and no kids, whose once-famous career had turned to humble toil.
Harper quietly cussed himself. No need for self-pity. He liked his work, the charity and the teaching. He was lucky, in a way.
Two hundred and fifty years.
He was startled by another student answering. It was the cool one with the Italian heritage, Melini.
Thats the answer, isnt it, Mr Harper? America has been a political reality, a nation, a country, almost two hundred and fifty years. Since 1776. Right?
Neale shook his head. But the Pilgrim Fathers came in 1620, so thats like, nearly four hundred. You could say America began then, no?
Lopez looked up from her smartphone. Whoa! Racist much? Youre saying America has only existed since the first Caucasians were there? Since Columbus? Where, like, did the Navajo live in 1200, then, fracking limbo?
At least this was zesty, at least they were engaging; but the argument was going entirely the wrong way. Ryan raised a hand. OK. Guys. Lets say America has been a political entity, in the European sense, for about three hundred years. Can we agree on that? Well, from beginning to end, ancient Egypt lasted approximately he paused, for effect ten times as long. Excluding more primitive cultures like the Badarian, the first true Egyptian civilisation began in 3200 BC.