Page 19 of Indefensible
“It could, but I bet it doesn’t,” Brody said. “If you’re right and this is where your family keeps the smuggled stuff, they want easy access. Who’s going first?”
“You,” Deryn said firmly. He would have been quite happy for Brody to go without him altogether. Birds were singing in the trees, and sunlight dappled the ground. The dark, damp passage underground was unappealing to say the least. Brody didn’t appear to share his inhibitions. He turned his headlight on, and set off into the pipe. Deryn fished out his own headlamp, put the torch in his pocket, took a last deep breath of fresh air, and followed.
The bottom of the pipe was both wet and hard on the knees. Deryn’s jeans were quickly soaked, and every two or three yards he would kneel on something sharp. He felt the skin wearing off his hands. Just ahead of him, Brody was cursing under his breath. Then Brody stopped dead.
“Fuck,” he said.
Deryn tried to look round him, but there simply wasn’t enough room. Brody wriggled forwards and was gone. Deryn followed, and understood. They had reached the tunnel proper, and it was huge. It was perhaps twenty feet high, brick lined with bays cut into the sides every few feet, revealing the bedrock through which the tunnel had been carved. The ground under their feet rippled like sand on a beach, presumably where the railway sleepers had been.
“Wow,” Deryn said. He switched on the powerful police-issue torch, but even that didn’t penetrate the darkness very far ahead.Along the left-hand side of the tunnel at about head height was a series of brackets that must have held electrical wiring, maybe for lights. Deryn could only imagine the tunnel lit from end to end. But they had more pressing concerns.
Boxes were piled haphazardly in the centre of the tunnel, loosely covered by a tarpaulin. Brody lifted the edge. “Booze,” he said, reading the labels. “Bottles of whisky and vodka.” He opened an unlabelled box. “Fuck, this is a box of money. A lot of money.” Deryn shone his torch into the box. Piles of ten- and twenty-pound notes filled most of it. He pulled at the tape on another box. More money. In total, there were five boxes of cash.
Suddenly there was a rasping noise. Both of them jumped, Deryn imagining someone coming through the tunnel entrance. But Brody was shining his torch around them and the light caught something they had missed — another tarpaulin, crumpled against the wall, in the dark a few yards away from the boxes. As they looked, the bundle resolved itself into the shape of a human figure huddled underneath a tarpaulin, and the noise into an almost silent groan.
“It’s Mason,” Brody cried, and dropped to his knees beside the body, pulling the tarpaulin away. “He’s alive. I think I can feel a pulse. You try.”
Deryn knelt beside Brody and put his hand over the pulse point on Mason’s neck. Nothing. He opened his mouth to say so, when he felt it. The tiniest flutter. “We have to get him out of here, and even then …” There was no chance of a mobile signal this deep underground, and Mason was barely clinging to life as it was.
“You go and get help,” Brody said. “I’ll stay here and try to keep him warm.”
It made sense, more sense than the two of them trying to drag Mason through the tiny pipe. He handed Brody his torch, and stripped off his fleece, handing that over as well. If they did have to bring Mason out themselves, it needed to be to a waiting ambulance.
The trip back through the pipe and past the pile of rubbish was just as vile as the trip in, but the promise of fresh air and sunshine at the end made it go much faster. And, thank all the gods, there was a mobile phone mast on the top of the hill and a signal that lit all the bars on his phone.
Deryn was able to give precise instructions to the ambulance, though the first people to arrive were members of the local cave rescue team, with a stretcher, several monster lights and a lot of rope. One of them, Deryn recognised with relief as a paramedic. His briefing to them lasted less than a minute, and the men disappeared into the concrete pipe, leaving Deryn alone in the woods to think.
Once Mason was safe, it would be time to talk to DI Glover. To snitch.
He didn’t have long to wait for the ambulance. Glimpses of flashing blue lights between the trees announced its arrival, and then noises from behind the rubbish told him that the cave rescue were bringing Mason to fresh air and safety. Deryn had never seen a childbirth, but he imagined the grunting and heaving, the calls of ‘push’ and ‘stop’ and ‘here it comes’ would be similar. Except the midwives probably didn’t wear helmets. The stretcher with Mason bundled in blankets and strapped down emerged with more grunts and shouts from the rescuers. They were followed by Brody.
“He’s probably OK, dehydrated and freezing. I’m going with him. Take the car.” Brody tossed Deryn the keys to the hire carand set off after the stretcher-bearers towards the road and the waiting ambulance.
“Phone me,” Deryn shouted after him.
There was a tree stump at the edge of the path where Deryn sat to call Glover.
“Boss, we found Mason Abruzzi, and some other things, too. A lot of money. You need to come and see.”
It didn’t take long. Glover arrived with two uniformed officers. Her usual unmemorable clothes were topped with a new-looking green Barbour jacket and matching wellingtons.What the serious detective wears for a trip to the woods.He hoped she wouldn’t decide that she needed to see inside the tunnel for herself. He stood up, his jeans cold and stiff with mud, his shoes scraped beyond repair and his hands covered in cuts and bruises. “Boss,” he said, “let me explain.”
She smiled. “I think you’d better.”
Deryn left out the conversation with his mother, allowing Glover to assume he and Brody had worked out for themselves where to look. He told her everything else: what they had found in the tunnel, about the blood in Phillip’s car, the insistence of the Scout leaders and Mason’s neighbours that he had never been alone with a child, and Brody’s speculation about why Mason was here. “I think he came to reinvent himself,” he concluded, “and then he decided to take on my brother-in-law.”
“He’s not the only one,” Glover said drily. “Information received says there’s a turf war about to start over Phillip Fromow’s nasty little empire. Getting a beating from his little brother hasn’t done his image any good, and he’ll very likely be going to jail after what you’ve found here. Nature abhors a vacuum.” She stopped and looked around. Out of sight and smell of the heap of rubbish, the trees left pools of sunlight like the one they stood in. The forestry track wound its way through thick, brambly ground cover. The chances of the tunnel being foundby accident were infinitesimal. “It’s very peaceful here,” Glover said. “It won’t be once forensics rock up, though I don’t envy them having to go through that heap of crap. This is going to do our clear up rate a very big favour. Pun not intended. You’ve earned yourself a lot of Brownie points today. Assuming you keep out of trouble from here on in.”
CHAPTER 16
DAY THREE
The phone call from his mother came as Deryn was closing his curtains against the night. He could smell his own body, a mixture of sweat and mud. He’d dried out a bit in the borrowed hire car, using a plastic supermarket bag to keep the worst of the dirt off the seat. His shoes were ruined, and he doubted there was much hope for his jeans. Brody had rung on the drive home, with the welcome news that Mason was getting better, though he would be staying in hospital for at least another day.
“I’m going to stay here with him,” Brody said.
Which was a relief, seeing as Deryn had Brody’s car, and while he would have gone to collect Brody from the hospital, he really, really just wanted a shower, something hot to eat, and to crash on the sofa in front of the TV. But the call was from his mother, and he owed her.
“Mam, how’s things?” he said.
