The Kill Call

any more .’
    ‘To be honest, I was surprised that he didn’t know me, the way I’d recognized him,’ said Massey. ‘But maybe he’d never taken much notice of me at the time. Yes, I suppose that’s what it was. He hadn’t studied me the way I’d studied him for all those weeks. He thought I was just some fool in the background, not worth bothering about. Well, that was his mistake.’
    ‘So you opened the hatch?’ said Cooper.
    ‘Yes. It hadn’t been used for quite a while, but luckily it’s never been vandalized, unlike some of the other posts, and the hinges are good. There’s a bit of water standing in the bottom, though. That’s as you might expect – it leaches through the ground and gets in through any cracks it can find. The floor is solid concrete, you see, so there’s no way for it to drain off. I told him that, but he said he had waterproof boots on. He was really keen to go inside.’
    ‘So you intended …?’
    ‘I don’t know what I intended, I honestly don’t. I watched him get into the hatch and start to climb down the ladder, and I wasn’t really thinking about anything, except how funny it was he should turn up like that, out of the blue, after all those years. I even told him to mind his head on the counter balance. It can give you a nasty crack, if you’re not used to it.’
    ‘Did he say anything?’
    ‘Oh, yes. He could hardly stop yattering.’
    ‘ You’re right, it is a bit wet down here. There’s no light in the monitoring room, of course. It’s lucky I’ve got a torch .’
    ‘I could hear him splashing about at the bottom of the ladder. I could see him, too, for a while, poking about at the bottom of the shaft. He was standing on the grille over the sump. He tried the pump handle, but it hadn’t worked for a long time. It’s supposed to drain the water out through the sump, and I suppose he remembered that. I lost sight of him when he went through the door into the monitoring room. But, as he was getting his torch out, he looked up at me.’
    ‘ Aren’t you coming down yourself? ’
    ‘ No. It’s best if one of us stays up here. Just in case. We don’t want any accidents .’
    ‘I think there was just a split second then, when he almost knew who I was. Almost. He looked at me a bit funny, as though he was thinking about it, the way you do when you’re trying to catch hold of some memory that’s just out of reach. I reckon he wouldn’t have been able to see my face at all at that point. He was looking up at me from the bottom of the shaft, so I’d be against the light. Just a figure on the surface, a silhouette against the sky. Anonymous. A vague shape he didn’t recognize, the way I’d always been. Maybe it was my voice that sounded familiar. But, whatever it was, he looked at me strange, not too sure whether I was joking with him, or what.’
    ‘ All right. That’s sensible. I won’t be long .’
    ‘And when he was out of sight, you closed the hatch,’ said Cooper.
    ‘Not right away. I didn’t close the hatch until he was out of sight in the monitoring room. I couldn’t even see his torchlight then. It was a bit funny, really. It was as if he’d disappeared, stepped back into the darkness, back into the past. Like he’d never been there at all. I don’t mind telling you, there was a moment when I wasn’t sure whether I’d just imagined him. I suppose I might gave been going a bit mad. I stood on the side of that hatch, and I was completely alone, looking down into a dark hole, with that musty smell rising up towards me. That smell seemed to carry all the memories from the past, memories that I’d kept shut up for forty years.’
    Massey looked at them, regarding even Cooper as a complete stranger, intruders he’d never set eyes on before.
    ‘Do you understand? I was looking into a yawning pit. It was like staring inside my own head. It was black and stinking, and I wanted nothing else except to close the door on it again. Slam it shut, before anything got out.’
    ‘You convinced yourself Mr Clay hadn’t been there?’ said Cooper. ‘Just in those few seconds when he was out of sight?’
    ‘I don’t know how long it took. I remember thinking that I must look such an idiot standing there with the hatch open, staring down into the hole. So I looked around me. And of course there was no one in sight, not in that spot. There wasn’t a soul out walking across the moor, not a car nearer than the road, and that was half a mile