The Sleepers of Erin (24 page)

Every twenty peats I paused to climb the few yards to the rim to suss out the riders. No cars still, no new battalions. Then back to the pungent aroma below, shifting the peats one by one to clear an opening. The idea was to make a crawlway into the top of the tunnel mouth. There’d be no sense in humping the whole lot. That would only mean more backbreak replacing them when I got out.

The fall just inside the mouth should not have amazed me, though it did. Loose rock mingled with soil and a crumbly peaty stuff had tumbled into the tunnel now. No tool marks on the rock. All in all a careful job, an infilling which would in time resemble the rest of the ground, giving no hint of the tunnel beyond. And just enough rock to make authentic peat-diggers move away from the tunnel line. Good military thinking.

A thin spade thing helped. It had a sort of useless sideways wooden finger at right angles from the haft, but I was past caring by then and had chucked up the idea of carefully sussing out the lie of the land. If the murderous sods found me, well, they found me. Presumably the city officials would send a Garda along to see fair play. I hoped.

The fall was about four feet thick. I got through the top end, working on the principle it was probably easiest and looser stuff there, less compression weight. The first gust of air from inside, when the turf spade penetrated without resistance, fetched out at me foetid and stenching. It made me gag. I returned to don my jacket – no clues for the passers-by from clever old Lovejoy – took a breath of fresh rainsoaked smog and returned immediately to drag away more peaty earth and crawled inside. There had been no sign in the diggings of that lifegiving air hose and its clever little battery-driven pump so I was up the traditional creek once I tumbled headfirst into the tunnel’s gloom. What good is technology that’s out of reach to those who need it?

‘Joe?’ I called. ‘You there, Joe?’

My eyes were hardly adjusted to the brown-black gloaming before I started crawling forwards. Every few yards I paused, wondering what the hell I was up to, and shouted Joe’s name. Me being daft me as usual, I hadn’t the sense to work out distances, so my progress was judged by the deepening darkness.

Shinny’s car, besides lacking every possible amenity and utensil, had also lacked torch, rope, jemmy, crawlers, oxygen cylinders and pickaxes. Typical of a woman. They always crack on about their usefulness, God knows what for. Answers on a postcard. I was at the point where the tunnel narrowed and descended at an angle towards the wet bit, and grumbling under my breath at the stupidity of me and everyone else when I stopped crawling. I screamed then. A rock in my way had groaned, a long hoarse low moan of grief and loneliness and pain and desolation.

‘Joe? Joe? That you, Joe?’

‘Lovejoy?’ the rock groaned.

‘You frigging lunatic!’ I yelled at his head. He was trapped somehow because he wasn’t moving and other rocks and earth were piled on him, pressing his shoulders to the tunnel floor. ‘You selfish fucking pig!’ I went on screeching abuse at him till my breath gave out. ‘You frightened me to frigging death, you stupid Cockney sod! Why didn’t you let on you were in here? You silly goon!’

He whispered, ‘It’s my legs, my back, I think, Lovejoy.’

‘Do you realize the festering mess I’m in?’ I yelled at him. ‘I could be safe out of here, you stupid berk—’

‘Ta for coming back, mate.’

‘Shut your stupid teeth. Where’re you stuck?’

‘Dunno. Me length, I think.’

I felt round him as far as I could. He was partly turned on his side, face prone. Supine, and his mouth would have filled with earth and suffocated him. Did I hear a rumble of earth along the tunnel?

‘Where the hell are your arms?’

‘Pinned.’

‘Got anything, tools, ropes, light?’

‘No.’ His voice was a weak whisper. ‘Mr Heindrick said it was best not to take anything.’

‘What did he send you back for?’

‘Disconnect the air hose. I should have remembered it myself, Lovejoy. He was really great about it, didn’t lose his temper, just said to do it straight away.’ His tone became anxious. ‘You don’t think he’ll be mad because of the fall-in?’

I thought, I don’t believe this. I don’t
believe
he’s frigging real. That pair of maniacal killers had got Joe to rig the best sleeper scam in antique history, then heaved a tunnel on him, breaking his back and walling him up, burying the poor gullible sod alive – and he still spoke reverently of them?

‘Aye, Joe. Sure. Great pair,’ I said. ‘Look. No explosion or anything, just before the sky fell?’

‘Explosion?’ He honestly sounded puzzled. ‘No. Just the noise of the rockslip.’

Thank God for that. ‘I’ll scoop beside your chest and top shoulder, Joe, right? Can you move your fingers?’

‘Bit. Did Lena – Mrs Heindrick notice I wasn’t back on time?’

‘She was worried sick, Joe,’ I lied, scrabbling the dross aside and shoving it behind me like a mole, thinking, Love is simply a kind of optic atrophy. The capacity for self-deception is infinite under the stress of love.

‘I knew she would,’ the cretin said, reassured.

There were definitely rumbles now from somewhere. Frantically I clawed the stuff away from him. That wasn’t difficult. The problem was what to do with the mounds which kept accumulating between my legs and beside my thighs. The bloody stuff was everywhere. The stupid earth just stayed wherever you pushed it. What the hell did miners do, for heaven’s sake? His arm came free a million years later. That meant between us we had enough muscle to prise his weight off his lower arm.

Joe himself hit on the notion of trying to push the earth aside at the wall rather than shuffling it along towards the entrance, and him again who said the way to pull him free when the time came to try was for me to brace against the tunnel sides with my back arched and knees pressing against the opposite wall. He explained that his arms had more strength than mine, but then all Cockneys are arrogant swine. I’d be a plug against which he could pull. And he came free, sixth go, practically crippling me for life with the strain.

It was then I noticed I couldn’t see at all.

‘Joe?’ I said, nervous and getting that damp fearish feel.

‘Ta, Lovejoy,’ Joe said, ‘I can’t move me back or me legs, mate. Sorry, but you’ll have to—’

‘Joe. Can you see anything?’

‘No.’

I wondered about his eyes. Maybe pressure sends you temporarily blind. ‘No pallor past me?’

A pause, grunt of exertion as he lifted his head. ‘No.’

‘Unless it’s got dark since I came in here, something’s blocked the entrance.’

We moved on, me feet first and Joe following head first using the strength of our two pairs of arms. Something stopped me, a pole or something. Breathlessly I halted, a leg either side of the damned thing.

‘Hang on, Joe.’ I felt with a hand over my back.

Steel, vertical. It came out of the tunnel roof and into the floor. It hadn’t been there when I crawled in, couldn’t have been. I tried pushing, pulling, lifting. Not a hint of movement. I scrunged up, put my feet against it, braced my hands on Joe’s shoulders and pushed until Joe moaned with pain.

Joe, mate,’ I said at last, my teeth chattering, ‘we’re caged in. Somebody’s driven a frigging great bar through the tunnel.’

‘Vertical?’ He sounded so cool, the thick berk.

‘Of course it’s vertical, you loon! They drove it down so of
course
it’s frigging vertical. It’s half-inch steel. We’re in a dungeon with one frigging bar!’

‘The tunnel here is about a foot and a half diameter,’ he mused. ‘No way round it, eh, Lovejoy?’

‘No.’ It came out as a long moaning whine.

‘No tools,’ Joe mused. ‘Nothing. Any chance of using a piece of stone to lever it out?’

I was hysterical. ‘It’s frigging rigid, you crass berk.’

‘Hang on. You got anything, anything at all?’

‘No.’ I whimpered, practically screaming, babbling.

‘You can’t have nothing, Lovejoy,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ve got nothing because I planned to have nothing. You’re so scatterbrained, Lovejoy, you must have something. Car keys, coins, anything. Can you reach your pockets?’

‘I changed my trousers at the big house.’ And I’d left Shinny’s keys in the car. ‘A violin string, for Christ’s sake.’ So we could play the violin, if we had a violin.

‘Like that joke from the Depression, Lovejoy. If we had some bacon we could have eggs and bacon if we had some eggs.’ He was doing his best.

‘Wait.’ The trouble was the air. If two men breathed at so many breaths per minute, how long before they croak in a tunnel say, eighty yards long by eighteen inches? ‘Joe. Any loose earth against you?’

‘We’ve brought a ton.’ It had shovelled along in front of Joe as we’d manoeuvred him.

‘I need a ton. Push it here.’ I pushed it down under my belly, handful by handful, until a great wodge of soil was splayed against the metal bar.

‘What’re we doing, Lovejoy?’

‘Getting out, you ignorant Cockney nerk. Close your ears. I’m going to pee and make some mud.’ I added politely, ‘Excuse me, please.’

Five minutes later I’d made two vows. The first was to try to control my terror, keep cool and work on no matter what. The second was to donate a trillion quid to medical research so they find a way to let blokes pee in a horizontal position. It took me ages to squirt even a useful drop out. Grimacing, I ploshed my hand up and down in the loose earth bowl I’d fashioned, until the mess was thick and gruesomely squashy. Then I set to work, the E string looped round the metal bar, low down where the mud was.

‘What’s the noise, Lovejoy?’

‘Sawing. Mud saw. It’s how the ancient Han Chinese sawed jade.’ I moved the metal string slowly, making certain there was mud where the E string moved across the bar. Hurry, and the metal string would break. Go too slow and we’d asphyxiate down here. Just right, and the wet soil would erode its way through anything.
Wheem
, the metal went.

‘Mud saw? Are you kidding?’

‘The mud’s the saw, you berk. The Chinese cut opal, jade, stone, damned near anything, with a bent cane and string. But it takes time.’

A pause again. Maybe crumbs of reason were knocking about his thick skull. ‘We got enough, Lovejoy?’

‘Time?’
Wheem, wheem
.

‘Air.’

‘Fingers crossed. Keep me awake for God’s sake. Don’t let me nod off.’

‘Lovejoy.’ That reflective voice meant he was working things out, maybe for the first time. ‘You don’t trust Mr and Mrs Heindrick, do you?’

‘Trust nobody. Save your breath, gabby sod.’
Wheem, wheem
.

‘We’re going to be partners,’ Joe confessed, really quite proudly. ‘Them and me.’

‘Oh, aye?’ Such close partners that they decided to kill you, Joe, I thought, sawing away. Once Heindrick overheard me address loyal servant Kurak as Joe – as we entered the tunnel to lay the sleepers in the grave – Heindrick had decided to flop a landslip on to Joe, seal the tunnel and drive away. Oh, he wouldn’t have done every little thing himself: orders to kill at a distance are so much less disquieting. So Lovejoy’s carelessness had put Joe where he was. And, Joe, you may not realize it, but I’ll bet you too are on a series of video films for Kurt’s late-night viewing.
Wheem, wheem
.

‘Lena and me are going to—’ His voice was thick, drowsier. I felt a twinge – well, actually a wholesale cramp – of panic at the idea of being alone.

‘Hey, Joe. Remember that sleeper gig somebody pulled in Worcester a few years back? Was that you?’ More mud, and
wheem, wheem
. My forearm muscles were stiffer, worn out.

He roused, chuckled. ‘Sheffield plate? Yeah. Josh Hancock, 1755, a saucepan.’

‘Honest? You old devil! People my way said it was the Manchester men. They’re pretty good—’

‘Them?’ Awake now, he delivered a few choice opinions on the merits of the Mancunian sleeper man. ‘We cleaned up on that.’

‘And who did that cinder job over Cambridge way last summer?’

‘That was me too.’

‘You? How many pictures was it? Somebody said it was half of them—’ A plosh of mud, then pull the string across the metal.
Wheem, wheem
.

‘Lovejoy,’ he said solemnly, ‘we had the whole bloody lot copied – best repros money could buy. Then we sleepered the lot. The whole collection!’

‘Go on!’ My fingers were sore as hell, and I had to rip strips off my shirt and use them as finger loops before continuing. ‘Didn’t you burn the whole manor house?’

Joe chuckled. ‘Scared ourselves to death. The old squire’s lady – eighty-two if she was a day – was upstairs. The firemen got her out in time.’

‘So all your fakes went up in smoke, and—’

‘—And the whole collection’s been sleepered. Next year they get discovered.’

‘Congrats, Joe. Really great.’

We kept each other going, reminiscing over the great scams of the past and filling in for each other bits of news. We talked of the fake ‘originals’ in the antique postage stamp markets. We invented a guessing game, telling of the best fakers we knew and arguing over awarding points. Two for the best true story, one point for a draw and nil for losing. We covered the great Tompion clock scandal, the Tom Keating trial for his fake Samuel Palmers, the long, long story of the Louis XV giltwood console tables which those world-famous London auctioneers did over with such apparent transparent ignorance for a fortune. We cackled and joked about the phoney South London collections of Daguerreotypes. I revealed all about the set of Roman legion’s surgical instruments, on display in a Midland museum, which I’d broken my index finger making a twelvemonth ago. And the saga of Jason’s scam with the phoney
Paradise Lost
. And the best way of semi-ageing pearls so their radiance can just be rescued. And the perennial argument about how the new synthetics are doing down the trust in antique diamonds because nowadays anybody can fake an antique brooch if their fingers are nimble enough. And the stupidities of recycled glass forgeries. And how to age papers and new parchment. How the sapphire glaze can be copied on modern reproductions. How to age wood and simulate Cuban mahogany. How to . . . how to . . .