The Kill Call

had to pump hard, though, if you had a wet post. There might have been three or four hours of pumping to be done on a full exercise. One of the lads reckoned once that each stroke of the pump shifted about half an egg cup of water.’
    ‘Well, the exercise kept you warm on a cold night,’ said Headon with a laugh over their heads.
    ‘Some posts suffered so much from water that their crews had to bail them out with a bucket lowered down the shaft on a rope. You can imagine how comfortable those places were.’
    In a cupboard was an Elsan toilet, like a big green metal can with a plastic seat, still permeated with that distinctive odour of the thick, blue chemical. On a shelf stood a brush and a tub of Glitto – whatever that was. A ventilation louvre stood partly open over the toilet.
    Headon opened a door still labelled with a ‘no smoking’ sign.
    ‘This is the monitoring room. And that’s it, really. A full tour of the facilities.’
    The room was so low that Cooper felt he ought to duck to avoid banging his head on the ceiling. A table and some drawers stood against the side wall, with a couple of folding chairs. Cabling ran along the wall and vanished upwards, through crumbling polystyrene tiles.
    ‘Seven feet wide and sixteen feet long. Like a giant coffin, we used to say.’
    When Cooper pointed his torch at the far wall, he saw two bunk beds, their mattresses still wrapped in damp plastic, with a second sliding ventilation panel over them. And Headon was right. That was pretty much it. Except for a smell of abandonment and neglect.
    ‘All the operational equipment was taken out, of course,’ said Headon. ‘On the wall there, you can see the fitting for the bomb-power indicator. The blast pipe was attached to a baffle assembly upstairs. And that hole in the table is where we had the fixed survey meter. That was the fallout radiation sensor, which measured the level of gamma radiation outside. The only other measuring equipment we had was the ground-zero indicator, and that was up top, too.’
    ‘What was that supposed to do?’
    ‘The GZI? It recorded the height and direction of a nuclear detonation, so we could report exactly where a bomb had gone off, and whether it was airburst or groundburst, which made a difference to the fallout.’
    ‘And that’s all you could do?’
    ‘It was a simple idea. The only trouble was, someone had to go outside to get the readings off it.’
    Cooper realized there was some rubber sheeting on the floor, squelching as his weight squeezed out the water.
    ‘That’s conveyor-belt rubber. It was donated by the National Coal Board some time in the eighties. That’s all the insulation we had, apart from the polystyrene ceiling tiles.’
    After only a few minutes, Cooper was glad to get back up into the daylight. He couldn’t imagine staying down there all night, with the hatch closed and nothing more than a dim six-watt bulb to see by. Let alone being trapped down there for the duration. Trapped inside for – what was it? – fourteen days, until it was considered safe to come out? You could go mad down there in fourteen days.
    ‘Seen enough?’ asked Falconer.
    ‘Yes, thanks.’
    He got clear and watched Falconer re-fix the padlocks and turn the Allen key in its slot.
    But even when the hatch was shut and locked again, Cooper still had the feeling that there was something he was missing.
       
    ‘Well, you finally meet a decent bloke, and he turns out to be a murderer,’ said Naomi Widdowson.
    Fry looked at her. ‘There’s something wrong with the logic of that sentence.’
    ‘Well, what I mean is … he seemed all right, anyway.’
    Naomi was being transferred from the custody suite at West Street to a cell on remand. Magistrates’ court would decide whether to bail her on Monday. She had been issued with her personal belongings at the desk and was waiting for the van to pull up in the yard.
    ‘He hasn’t been convicted yet,’ pointed out Fry. ‘In fact, he hasn’t even been charged.’
    ‘Yes, but you must be sure that he did it, right?’
    ‘We can’t comment on that,’ said Fry.
    ‘Like I said in my statement, Adrian went back to the huts when I left. I argued, but I couldn’t stop him. So if someone did Rawson in, then it must have been him, mustn’t it?’
    ‘It will be for a jury to decide.’
    Naomi shrugged. ‘I’m cutting my losses, anyway. Time to forget about him and move on, I think. Don’t you?’
    ‘Aren’t you going to