Читать книгу Crow Stone - Jenni Mills - Страница 11

Chapter Five

When Gary Bennett comes over to me, the first thing he sees is my arse. I’m bending over lacing my boots. First impressions count. Now he’ll probably always file me under ‘buttocks’.

As I straighten up, trying not to show how shaken I am by hearing his name, he’s taking off his hard-hat as if he were doffing it to a lady. I recognize him immediately. He must be in his forties now, but he still has the same Roman-statue face, firm jaw and carved mouth, a bump in the middle of his nose and the same half-humorous expression that tells you he doesn’t take the world too seriously. There are deep lines etched into his cheeks either side of that mouth, and the hair is different, clipped very short and silver-grey. It suits him, though I miss those lovely dark-blond curls.

He doesn’t recognize me, thank God. Why should he, anyway? The name’s different and so am I. In those days I wore long hair in a curtain round my face, and rarely had the nerve to meet anyone’s eyes. Besides, I doubt he ever looked as hard at me as I did at him, across the street when he didn’t know I was watching. I could have mapped those features as accurately as I had traced the Somerset coalfield from my geography textbook. I knew the contours of his bare chest even better.

It looks as if he’s filled out a bit since then, though it’s hard to tell under the big yellow jacket. His legs are sturdy, in mud-spattered jeans, and I can’t help noticing he’s shrunk. No: I reckon I’ve grown. I thought of him as tall and long-limbed, but he was actually no more than average height. There’s a small pimple on one side of his chin, pushing through the late-afternoon bristles.

He holds out his hand to shake mine. ‘Come on over to the meeting room,’ he says. ‘Kettle’s on.’

No, not a glimmer of recognition in those weathered blue eyes. If you’d been where you were supposed to be, all those years ago, everything would have been different.

‘Good journey? Come far?’ he goes on, waiting politely for me to finish lacing the second boot. When I straighten up, he’s gazing at me with just the faintest shadow of worry in his face. ‘I’ll take you underground on Monday. We won’t rush you. There’s a lot to get through this afternoon–nearly the full team will be at the meeting. It won’t be too technical.’

Is he patronizing me? Surely he realizes I understand technical, maybe even better than he does–that’s my job. But there’s no point in making an issue of it and seeming arrogant on my first day, even if I don’t want Gary Bennett to treat me like some token bimbo. I’m already alarmed by the way he doffed his hard-hat. To make a point, I reach back into the car and pull out my own, setting it firmly on my head before we set out for the site office.

He leads the way across the hardcore, past piles of wooden pallets, steel and timber struts, to the nearest and biggest of the metal-sided cabins. In spite of all the gear, not much is happening. The project is still waiting for the official nod from the government that will release the funding. Until then all that can happen is emergency work, to shore up the most immediately dangerous places underground.

Narrow steps rise to an open door. There’s a kitchenette at one end of the cabin, and a man in a grey sweater is topping up his mug from a big urn of hot water. He turns and gives me a thin smile. ‘Coffee or tea?’

‘Rupert,’ says Gary, ‘this is Mrs Parry, our new mining engineer. Rupert’s our bat man.’

His hair is the same shade of grey as his sweater, and dishevelled above a long face. He looks as if he doesn’t see enough sunshine, and his hand when he extends it is dry and papery. I almost expect him to rustle.

‘You’re up and about a bit early,’ I say. Oops, misjudged that one. Along with my coffee he gives me a frosty look. ‘Sorry,’ I add. ‘I expect the last mining engineer made the same remark. The profession’s noted for its sparkling humour.’

‘I respect the work you’ve come to do, Mrs Parry,’ he says. He has a high, penetrating, plummy voice that makes everyone look round. ‘Just remember that the law requires you to respect the bat colonies.’

The mines are home to several species of bat, all protected, some extremely rare, and at this time of year, all tucked up and hibernating. Rupert must take his job seriously indeed if he turns up for midwinter planning meetings. Gary takes my elbow and steers me firmly past into the main conference room. ‘Don’t worry,’ he murmurs. ‘He’s obsessive. Treats us all like that.’

Just as firmly, I dislodge Gary’s hand from my elbow by the simple expedient of handing him my coffee so I can take off my jacket. As I do so, on the opposite side of the table, a guy with long stringy hair and a nose like a camel’s looks up. His eyes get stuck somewhere around chest level.

The meeting room is more luxurious than I’d expected. A space heater blows out warm air, display boards show maps and photographs of the work in progress, and even the chairs and table aren’t tattooed with as many coffee-rings as usual. There’s a white projection screen on one wall. About fifteen people are milling around, hanging fleeces and high-vis jackets on the back of chairs. The bloke in the corner unfolding the laptop could be the hydro-geologist, getting ready to show off his charts and diagrams of how water flows through the caverns–one of several specialist consultants. Long Stringy Hair is probably the archaeologist; archaeologists usually look a mess. Everyone in the room is male, which is hardly a surprise.

I have never got used to first days, trying to work out who might be on your side, and who thinks you have no place in the team. When I did my postgrad training at the Camborne School of Mines, I was the only woman in my class. You don’t get many girls saying, ‘I want to be a miner when I grow up’. Nor so many boys, now we hardly have a national mining industry. Most of the British jobs are like this one, making safe long-disused workings; the real career opportunities lie abroad. My predecessor in this job got a much more glamorous offer, and swanned off to Congo last week, at twice the money I’ll be getting.

Usually I know at least one person on the team when I start a new job, but that isn’t so today–unless you count Gary Bennett, and he doesn’t know I know him. So what are they all thinking? Just our luck to get a bloody woman? Or God, she must be tough? I’d prefer something along the lines of She looks like she knows her job, because the truth is I do. Today I just have to keep reminding myself of that.

A big, heavy man comes over as I’m pulling out a chair. He’s got a moustache that looks like someone slapped it on his face at a seventies fancy-dress party and he forgot to take it off. My head just about reaches the RockDek logo on his navy fleece jacket.

‘Brendan,’ he says, with a slight Scottish accent. ‘McGill.’ He separates the names as if I should know who he is. ‘Mine manager,’ he supplies helpfully, when I fail to react.

I have to get a grip. Finding Gary here has thrown me. I’m behaving like the kind of fluffhead who polishes her hard-hat every night, instead of a woman with more than ten years’ experience in propping up big holes in the ground.

‘Gary looking after you?’ asks Brendan.

‘Er–yes. Fine.’

‘Don’t know what we’d do without him.’ Brendan gives Gary a friendly, masculine biff on the shoulder. ‘He’s the only one of us who comes from these parts, and worked in the quarries over Corsham way. Mind, I like to think I know a thing or two about limestone myself …’

‘Of course,’ I say, brain at last heaving back into action. ‘Didn’t you work on the Gilmerton collapse?’

He looks relieved. The woman isn’t a fluffhead, after all. ‘With Roy Bailey. He speaks very highly of you.’

He wouldn’t if he could see the way I’m behaving this afternoon.

‘I heard it was Roy who worked out the collapse wasn’t going to stop at Ferniehill.’

‘Let’s just hope nothing like that happens here,’ says Brendan. He has soft toffee-coloured eyes that are good at looking concerned. ‘There are six hundred homes on top of this lot.’

Gilmerton’s notorious. It was an old limestone mine like this one, under some sixties-built housing estates to the south of Edinburgh. One chilly November morning the residents of Ferniehill began to notice cracks in their cosy little bungalows. Within a few days it became apparent that the whole street was sinking slowly into the ground. The council had to evacuate about five hundred people, and knock down a load of houses and flats.

‘Scary,’ I say.

‘Especially if you’re underground when it happens.’

‘Nobody was, though, at Gilmerton?’

‘Only one fatality. A goldfish that one of the evacuating families left outside in a bucket of water. Froze solid.’

Gary and I both laugh. But I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor old goldfish.

‘Anyway,’ says Brendan smugly, ‘we should be safe as houses with my hi-tech canaries.’

One of the purposes of this meeting is to assess how the new type of underground alarm system Brendan’s installing here is working out. A network of ground-movement monitors is supposed to send back messages based on microseismic analysis, the tiniest movements in the rock that can warn of an imminent collapse. Gary hasn’t so much as frowned but I can tell by his suddenly bland, polite expression that he isn’t entirely convinced.

‘Roy said when he first phoned you about this job you weren’t very keen on taking it,’ says Brendan, soft toffee eyes suddenly not so soft and boring into me like drill bits. ‘What changed your mind?’

‘The money, of course.’

Brendan grins. ‘I like a woman with a sense of humour. And not superstitious, I see.’

‘Superstitious?’

‘Starting a job on a Friday. Maybe that only means something north of the border. Miners in Lanarkshire where I grew up would never start a new stope on a Friday.’

The raven swoops across the clearing and lands in a clatter of wings. Miners won’t go underground if they see a bird at the entrance of the mine: it heralds a collapse.

‘I’m not superstitious,’ I say. As if to prove me wrong, there’s a flash of colour at the corner of my eye, making me jump. On the other side of the room, someone has just Power-Pointed a map of the workings on to the screen. It looks as complicated as the London tube map, in nearly as many colours; the tunnels go on and on, riddling the whole hillside. Brendan catches my shock, and misinterprets it.

‘And these are just the ones we know about,’ he says. ‘Could be lots more. This area’s been quarried since Roman times.’

The consultant is checking that the mouse works; the pointer spirals indecisively then begins to creep across the map from north-west to south-east. My heart has started to race and my chest feels tight. Crow Stone …

‘And we’re going to fill the lot?’ I say, desperate to say anything, needing to distract myself, just as everybody else stops talking. It’s come out all wrong: ditzy, as if I haven’t done my homework.

Everybody laughs. As we all sit down and Brendan begins the introductions, I can still see amusement in their eyes. I want to believe it was a kind laugh, but maybe it wasn’t, because I should know as well as they do that ahead of us are years of constructing steel frames and pumping concrete, until the underground voids are solid and stable.

Bury them and all the secrets they hold, for ever, ever, ever …

One of the consultants–I missed his name, worrying about what a tit I’m making of myself–has launched into the main business of the afternoon. The project is a collaboration between a number of different partners. This guy’s from Garamond, the engineering firm who devised the overall strategy; Brendan’s site team, including me, work for RockDek, a mining company sub-contracted to carry out the stabilization. The wall-screen now shows a street plan of Green Down superimposed on the underground map.

‘Weight restrictions on the main road and into Stonefield Avenue?’ says Brendan. The seventies moustache droops with disapproval. ‘That’s going to mean diverting the bus route. We’ve got another public meeting in a couple of weeks’ time, and nobody’s going to be happy when we tell them they’re going to have to walk an extra half a mile to the bus stop. Or they can’t have their new cooker delivered because we won’t allow big lorries down the high street. Are you saying the risk of the quarries collapsing is greater than you previously thought?’

Brendan and Gary, I’ve noticed, are the only ones to refer punctiliously to the underground workings as quarries. Everyone else calls them mines, though technically, they’re not. From what I remember hearing of Brendan that would be typical: he has the reputation of being a manager who thinks detail is important. That’s why people employ him. He has one of the best safety records in the business, even when he worked abroad, where sometimes hazard assessment is not so much relaxed as non-existent.

‘The load limit’s just a precaution,’ says the consultant. ‘Factoring in new thinking about possible frost damage. Anyway, I heard you had a bit of a panic last week when some of the alarms registered movement in the rock.’

‘We’re getting a lot of false positives on the geophones,’ says Gary. ‘The alarms would be going off all the time if we didn’t set the threshold artificially high.’

‘Then what’s the point of the system?’ asks the consultant.

‘Trouble is, we’re so close to the surface that every time a woman with a pram walks over the top, it trips the sensors. I’m exaggerating but …’

‘You’re exaggerating,’ says Brendan, with the calm but slightly desperate tone of one who knows he is right and everyone else is wrong. ‘We’ll see the benefits when the full network’s in place. Of course there are teething troubles before we calibrate the system.’

‘Mrs Parry?’ says the consultant. ‘You’ve worked with these alarm systems before?’

‘They’re not very common in this country,’ I say, with the unnerving sense that this is another test I’m going to fail. ‘This one’s from Australia, isn’t it?’

‘Where it goes off every time a fucking kangaroo hops along,’ mutters someone else. Brendan shoots Gary a look.

‘Brendan’s right,’ Gary says, Mr Loyalty. ‘Teething troubles, that’s all. It could save lives in the long run, and that’s got to be worth it.’

Rupert pipes up irrelevantly, in his high, sharp voice, complaining about the possibility of constant alarms disturbing the bats while they hibernate. The warm room is making me dozy, and my eyes drift towards the darkening window overlooking the recreation ground. The little footballers must be having trouble seeing the ball by now. Their running feet thump on a thin crust of soil, beneath which is a honeycomb of galleries and pillars, muddy underground trackways the quarrymen call roads, heaps of waste stone, mile after mile …

Someone’s watching me.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see the stringy-haired archaeologist staring, his mouth set in a hard line. He’s in his early thirties, I’d guess, younger than me, with cavernous red-rimmed nostrils and a face on the slide, like an unstable slope. He looks down at his papers quickly when he realizes I’ve caught his gaze. My eyes shift focus and, over his shoulder, catch a shadowy, slight, dark-haired woman in a red fleece staring back at me from the glass of the window. From this distance she might be in her early thirties too, though close up that pale skin will betray her. Her eyes are secretive and sad. I rub a hand across my face and she does the same, brushing a spiky-cut fringe back from a high forehead. It looks like she’s waving, and I wonder if she knows what I’m doing here. Katie, Katie …

I have to wrench my concentration back to the room. But even while I’m trying to fix in my head the names of the different areas of the workings they’re discussing–Stonefield, Mare’s Hill, Paradise Woods, Chog Lane–I keep catching my reflection’s reproachful gaze. What’s wrong with you? You’ve done a dozen jobs like this, Kit, you should know what you’re doing by now.

The meeting breaks up an hour later. Gary escorts me back to my car, in case I’m too dim to find it myself. He’s probably right. It wouldn’t surprise me this afternoon if I managed to fall down the hole in the middle of the site: a vertical shaft, our main access to the quarry workings. Fortunately they’ve planned for idiots and floodlit the area. In spite of the lights, darkness seems to well up from the shaft entrance.

‘Where are you staying?’ Gary asks, polite as ever. I can’t see his eyes, deep in shadow under the brim of his hard-hat.

‘Bathford, for the moment. A hotel I found on the Internet.’ I may not be making Africa money, but I don’t do so badly that I have to stay in B-and-Bs. ‘I’m going house-hunting this weekend. The estate agents told me there’s plenty of properties to rent.’

‘Do you have any plans for dinner tonight?’

Uh-oh.

‘I’ve got the OK to take you out on expenses,’ he goes on, quickly.

I’m instantly embarrassed. Why should I assume he fancies me? He must have read my wary expression, and decided to make clear that this is an official duty, not a come-on. Still … a leisurely bath and a quiet evening by myself was what I’d had in mind for tonight.

But quiet evenings leave too much time for introspection. And although this is Gary Bennett, a part of my past though he doesn’t know it, surely I can encase him safely in ice, like Gilmerton’s goldfish. We’re colleagues. We’re going to have to work together for months, maybe years, and I may as well get used to it. So I make myself smile. ‘That would be very pleasant.’ Behind him I can see a sleek black car bumping over the hardcore towards us. ‘I’d better go and check in at the hotel first, though. I’ve got some calls to make.’ If he wants to think they’re to a husband and family, that’s fine by me.

Gary grabs my arm, just a moment too late. I’m drenched as the black car hits a puddle beside me. ‘Wally,’ I snarl. The bastard could easily have avoided it. ‘Who was that?’

‘Dickon,’ says Gary. ‘The archaeologist.’

‘Pity he can’t drive.’ I pluck at my sopping trouser leg.

‘I’ll pick you up about seven thirty, then?’ Gary asks. ‘Is it the hotel by the weir?’

‘Yes.’ Frankly, I’ve no idea, but it’s called the Weir House, which suggests it almost certainly is. I give him my mobile number, in case I’m wrong.

As I drive across the site, I see him in my rear-view mirror, looking after me. Then he turns and heads towards a 4x4, so mud-covered it looks like it climbed out of the ground. I indicate left out of the site entrance and hope to hell that’s the right direction for the hotel. The way I’ve been behaving all afternoon, I doubt it.