The Depths of Solitude (24 page)

Read The Depths of Solitude Online

Authors: Jo Bannister

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: The Depths of Solitude
10.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“She’s lower down,” said Deacon tersely. “Somewhere the tide reaches.”
“That’s not how it works,” objected Daniel. “The sea doesn’t come into the building. The sea fills the lagoon, the lagoon empties down the leat, the wheel turns, the
water gets away down the tail-race. The sea never came into the mill.”
“Well, maybe it didn’t used to,” snarled Deacon, “but I’ll bet my car to your telescope it does now. Hell,
we
got in through a hole in the wall. You’re telling me water can’t?”
It wasn’t a bet Daniel felt safe taking. The smell alone was evidence the policeman was right. The building hadn’t been watertight for a long time.
He looked at the great flat grindstone, cracked and broken now, picturing how it had worked. “If this is the stone floor, the meal floor’s below us and the cellars are below that, in the lowest part of the mill. The part that floods.”
Deacon nodded. “That’s where she’ll be.”
No stairs were obvious but there was a wooden hatch in the floor. The trapdoor, split in half with a hole in the middle for the rope, identified it as a sack-hoist. The grain that came down here by gravity returned to the storage lofts as sacks of flour.
“That’ll do,” said Deacon, relieved, throwing open the hatch and hoping it wouldn’t be too much of a drop. “Damn!”
After the mill stopped working some resident, tempted by the convenience of a large hole in his floor, used it to dispose of unwanted domestic goods. There was a fridge in there, an ancient washing-machine with a mangle, a rolled mattress which the rats had got at, lengths of wood which may have made up a bed, several suitcases, a mirror with a cracked glass, a model yacht with a broken mast and a wooden bench two metres long. These were only the things they could see. They rested on a whole lot of other things which they couldn’t.
Everything that went into that hole could come out
again. Even with just the two of them, they would have cleared an access to the lower floors eventually. But not in the next half hour, and after that there would be no hurry. Deacon let the hatch fall back. “There must be another way.”
They only found it when Daniel stumbled over a length of corrugated iron and it shifted just enough to reveal the edge of an aperture. Deacon gave a muted grunt of triumph, seized the thing in both hands and yanked it aside.
The satisfaction drained instantly from his face and voice. “Well, that’s the way he took her. I don’t know if we can follow.” The torch showed them a flight of stone steps descending into the bowels of the mill. But an iron grille had been fitted across the top of the steps. If it had been part of the original mill workings, rusted and weak, it might have yielded to a good kick. But this was new, stoutly made, bolted into the floor and secured with a padlock that would have had career cracksmen weeping into their Ovaltine.
“Now what?” Daniel’s voice broke with despair.
“Hacksaw,” said Deacon. He dropped the toolkit and began to rummage. But when he found what he was looking for his gaze travelled from the blade to the padlock and back and he made no attempt to use it. Daniel could see why. A hacksaw wouldn’t open that padlock, not in the time available. Semtex mightn’t.
“We have to find another way,” gritted Deacon. “There must be another way.” The beam of his torch slatted round the wooden machinery, fracturing whenever it met an obstacle, reassembling on the other side.
“Jack.”
Deacon sought him with the torch. Daniel was standing beside the great beam of the axle where it pierced the wall, and his voice sounded hollow. There was
another odd sound which Deacon could not immediately identify.
When he followed Daniel’s frozen stare he realised what it was. The grindstone was starting to move. Seawater running down the leat had built up the energy necessary to turn the wheel.
He knew it mattered, he suspected it mattered a lot, but for a moment Deacon couldn’t see how. He watched the great axle slowly turn, heard the trundle-wheel groan as it meshed its wooden teeth with those of the horizontal wheel, traced with his eyes the transfer of force across to the lantern-gear and down a short vertical shaft to the grindstones. His ears separated the wooden moans of the gear from the anguished grinding of one broken stone on the other, and still he failed to make the connection between the mill coming slowly to life and the fate of the woman captive in its depths.
“What’s happening?” he asked suspiciously. “Who turned it on?”
 
As the night deepened, the darkness continued unabated and the cold hardened its grip, Brodie slumped in a reverie of hopelessness. Nothing touched her, nothing penetrated the cocoon of her misery. Distantly, almost uncaring, without trying to make sense of it, she was aware that the faint trickling sound had altered its note, belling fuller as a head of water began to stream past her, the thickness of a wall away. If she’d heard two cars pull up at the other end of the building it would have put new life, new hope, into her. But she did not.
The first thing she registered, that grabbed her by the heart and squeezed, was like nothing she’d ever heard before – a great grinding, creaking sound like a tree being tortured, a deep monumental groan that reached her partly as sound and partly as a thrill in the damp stones she sat on. And her first thought – curiously, given the fact
that she’d been kidnapped by a man mad for vengeance and chained to a wall where she might never be found – was, “Now I’m in trouble!”
 
“Who turned it on?” demanded Deacon.
Daniel shook his head, fast. “The sluice is open. The rising tide tripped it. That’s how French could be in Dimmock - talking to you, so he thought – while the mill did his job for him. High tide triggers the sluice, the lagoon empties down the leat, the wheel turns.”
The detective stared at him in blank astonishment. “How do you
know
?”
“How do you
no
t?
”
retorted Daniel with the unthinking arrogance of the scientist. “Forget the wheel, that isn’t what kills her. What kills her is water from the tail-race getting into the cellars through cracks in the wall. That whole lagoon is going to funnel through the bottom of this mill. The cellars will flood, and they won’t empty again till the tide drops. We need to get her out, now.”
“If he went to the trouble of securing the steps it’s a safe bet he’s blocked any other way down.” It sounded as if Deacon was beaten. But he wasn’t. He was dismissing ideas that wouldn’t work to leave a clear view to something that might. There wasn’t time to waste agonising over the impossible.
“Jack.” If anything, Daniel’s voice sounded odder than before. “Come here.”
He was watching the stones grind together with the kinetic energy of tons of running water. Once the twin stones, each a foot thick, had been enclosed in a wooden tun that stopped the flour from flying; now they were surrounded by matchwood. Daniel played Mr Turnbull’s modest torch on the topmost stone. “There’s nothing underneath.”
A segment had broken off the runner-stone; and when its turning lined them up there was a similar gap in both the bedstone and the floor beneath. For a brief moment every turn, torch-light shone through to the lower level.
Daniel was running fast, incomprehensible calculations, and he was doing it aloud for the same reason Deacon theorised at Voss. “That’s the meal floor. It’s an undershot wheel so the water in the leat isn’t deep – maybe about the level of that floor. But the cellars will flood to the ceiling if enough water gets in. There’ll be a flight of steps down to the cellar. With the way down to the meal floor blocked, probably French didn’t worry about the cellar steps.”
Deacon understood that. “But we can’t get down that far. Not without cutting equipment.”
Daniel flicked the little torch upwards and seemed to change the subject. “Something fell from up there. Maybe a piece of machinery when they were selling it off. It shattered the tun, smashed clean through both stones and took a chunk out of the flags beneath. What used to be a small hole for the flour to fall through is now –” With his hands he hazarded the size, like an angler remembering a fish.
Deacon couldn’t see why it mattered. “So?”
Daniel’s unremarkable face was rigid with determination. “I can get through there.”
Deacon looked at him, then at the stones, then back. “Don’t be stupid!”
“I can do it, Jack. You couldn’t fit, I doubt if Brodie could, but I can. I know I can.”
Deacon looked again. The stone wasn’t turning at milling speed but it was inexorable. Maybe he could have got through – there wasn’t a lot to him, anywhere you could poke a stick Daniel Hood could probably wriggle through
- but the gaps lined up only fleetingly each turn. A ferret would have been taking its life in its paws.
The policeman dismissed it out of hand. “It’d cut you in half.”
“I’m not going through while it’s moving!” exclaimed Daniel. “Credit me with some sense. We have to stop it. For just a few seconds, then I’ll be through. I’ll find Brodie, cut her free, and we’ll wait on the meal-floor till you can shift that grille.”
Deacon was looking for an off-switch. “All right. How do we stop it?”
There never was an off-switch. There were stone-nuts engaging the runner-stone with the drive shaft. When Daniel failed to shift them Deacon tried. There was neither movement nor the promise of movement, though he strained till the muscles knotted in his shoulders and the tendons stood out in his neck and the blood-vessels at his temples. Then he stood back with a breathy curse. “It’s seized solid.”
Daniel frowned. “That isn’t possible. If the stones had been grinding every high tide since the mill was abandoned they’d have worn away. Ah …” The answer formed behind his eyes. “They haven’t been grinding – there wasn’t enough water coming down to turn the wheel. The sluices were silted up. French dug them out. He knew from the state of the walls that once there was water in the leat again it would flood the cellars. It’s almost high tide: it won’t be long before it starts dropping again, but longer than Brodie can hold her breath.”
Deacon didn’t care how it all worked. It was enough for him that Daniel understood. He took the younger man by the shoulders and shook him. “So what do we do? How do we stop it? Daniel, she’s dying down there! How do I stop the water?”
Daniel nodded swiftly, his quick brain prioritising. “You need to stop it, but you can’t stop it in time. There’s too much water in the system.” He tented his fingers in front of his mouth, panting softly through them. “You have to stop the wheel. Just long enough for me to get through the stones. Then you have to find the sluice and shut it off. Follow the leat up to the lagoon. There’ll be a ratchet operating the paddles. He may have removed the handle – have you got a wrench?”
Deacon unslung the tool-kit and extracted a wrench as long as his forearm. “So how do I stop the wheel?”
The finger of Mr Turnbull’s torch pointed. “With that.”
Archimedes reckoned that, given a long enough lever and somewhere to stand, he could move the world. Deacon didn’t need to move the world, only to contain the force latent in a pond of salt water trying to find its way back to the sea. For a few seconds, Daniel had said. There was no knowing if he could do it except by trying, and if he tried and failed Daniel would die. And if he didn’t try Brodie would die.
He lifted the wooden beam from where it lay forgotten against the wall. It wasn’t clear what its purpose had been, but it was long and strong and it was all he could do to lift it. Braced against the shaft it might stop the wheel turning, if only for those few vital seconds.
When the reality of what he was considering struck him, Deacon turned cold. “You want me to hold the machinery still while you crawl through it? If it slips it’ll crush you!”
“I know,” said Daniel. And clearly he did because his voice shook. “Jack, we can do this. We
have
to do this or Brodie’s going to die. We’ve found her, but she’s still going to die if you don’t help me reach her.”
“We don’t even know she’s down there. Not for sure.”
“Of course she’s there!” snapped Daniel. “You think French thought he’d do a bit of mill restoration to pass the time while he waited for his shot at you? He put a lock on the stairs because that’s the only way to reach her, and he dug out the sluices because that’s how he meant to kill her, and if we argue about this any longer it’s all going to happen just the way he planned!”
It wasn’t that Deacon didn’t believe him. There was no other way to read it; but still. “I’m not risking your life. We’ll find another way.”
“There isn’t
time,”
cried Daniel. “That whole lagoon is coming down here right now. It’ll fill the cellar to the ceiling. Brodie’s tied up down there. She’s helpless, alone in the dark with the water rising round her. Either we do this or we stand by knowing she’s drowning under our feet.
“I know what could happen. If this goes wrong – if you can’t hold it long enough – it’s my fault, not yours. But if we don’t try we will lose her. She’s saved my life before now, and she’s saved my sanity, and I’m not going to stand here and listen to the water that’s killing her.”
“It’s not your job to save her,” roared Deacon in an agony of indecision. “It’s mine!”
“Then do it!” yelled Daniel. “Do your part. You can’t fit through the gap – and if you could, I couldn’t hold the wheel. Jack, if she’s going to survive this Brodie needs us both to do what we’re best at. You’re strong and I’m little. Neither of us could reach her alone. Together we have a chance.”
“You could die!”
“Yes. But if we do nothing, Brodie
will
die. I couldn’t bear that. Knowing I might have saved her and didn’t try. I have to try. You have to help me.”
All Deacon’s instincts told him Daniel was right, they
had to try. But it wasn’t his life at risk. It wasn’t him that could be halfway through the stones when the brake slipped. “Help can’t be more than a few minutes away. We can wait that long.”
But Daniel shook his yellow head again, stubborn and insistent. In his own mind he was ready for this and would brook no hindrance. “She may not have a few minutes. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to find her and free her. But the water’s already pouring into the cellar, and it may not be minutes that count so much as seconds. We have to do this, and we have to do it now. She can’t wait. And I’m scared enough without having to twiddle my thumbs while you think about it!”
There was a raised flag in the stone floor under the axle. Deacon lodged the end of the beam against it and braced it on the turning shaft. Wood growled on wood but the axle barely slowed. In desperation Daniel put his hands to the trundle-wheel, adding his strength to that of the big man.
And the water-wheel turned, and the trundle-wheel turned, and the gap between the stones opened and closed, opened and closed. Sweat burst from Jack Deacon’s face as he pitted his strength against the weight of water in the leat. The wood protested and then screamed as the makeshift brake battled the machinery’s whole purpose in life which was to turn and turn.
And as the two men fought it, muscles and sinews strained and cracking against the unthinking force of gravity, the trundle-wheel began to slow. The gap in the stones yawned a little longer with each turn. Two seconds - three – five.
The wheel stopped.
Daniel looked at Deacon. He meant to ask if the big man could hold it but one glance at his face changed his
mind. The only possible answer was no. It would defeat him and he’d let it go, and the grindstone would start to move again. Deacon couldn’t say how long he could hold it. Stopping it had taken everything he had: wasting time discussing it would squander the effort before anything was gained. Deacon would hold on as long as he could: what Daniel did with that time was his decision.
He waited no longer but levered himself up onto the stone and went for the gap headfirst.
Gravity took over. With his shoulders through there was nothing to stop him. He felt the broken edges of the stones grip his hips but not enough to detain him. His legs, notable in most company for their brevity, had never seemed so long. Then his feet rattled over the edge and he free-fell through two metres of dusty darkness and landed in a heap.
He could have broken his neck. But the discarded furniture piled through the nearby hatch broke his fall. He rolled down the pyramid of domestic refuse, collecting bruises but no injuries, until he reached the floor where he picked himself up and looked back the way he’d come.
Deacon’s torch was blinking at him. When he realised what that meant his knees went to string. The grindstone was moving again.
“Are you all right?” Deacon gasped through the occulting stones. It took him two breaths to get it out.
“Fine,” said Daniel, coughing his voice down from an hysterical giggle to a manly gruff.
“Catch.” At the next opportunity the big torch came sailing through the dark. “And this.” It was the kit-bag Deacon had brought from his car, minus the wrench. “To cut her free.”

Other books

Read It and Weep! by P.J. Night
How to Be Brave by E. Katherine Kottaras
Gently Continental by Alan Hunter
Sweet Ride by Moores, Maegan Lynn
The Best Bride by Susan Mallery
Smoke & Whispers by Mick Herron