The Kill Call

when his foot slipped into a hole and his ankle doubled up underneath him, he knew he wasn’t on the path at all. For the last few hundred yards, the slope of the land had been tending upwards, not down. The ache in his calf muscles was enough to tell him that fact, but he’d been trying not to notice it.
    As he nursed his painful ankle and wiped a bloodied scratch on his hand, he knew that he was now in difficulties. He had no idea what direction he’d been walking in, or whether he’d even set off from the place he thought he had twenty minutes ago. His ankle wasn’t actually sprained, and he could still walk on it, if he was careful. But the fog was as thick as ever, and there were no lights visible, no sound of traffic from any direction. His senses detected nothing around him except muffled rustlings and coughs in the heather, sounds that he took for the presence of sheep.
    Then he reached a point where the terrain sloped towards him on all sides, rough ground calloused with rocks and grimy with dead bracken. It seemed to him that the landscape had caught him up, and now held him in its grubby palm, like an insect it meant to crush.
    On the ridge of the slope above him, a single hawthorn seemed to writhe in the fog drifting past its branches. For a few moments, Philip could do nothing but listen to the silence, his senses baffled by the absence of noise. It was as if he’d gone suddenly deaf, or someone had turned off the sound in the world around him.
    Trying to make some contact with his senses, he held his hands up to his face. The smell of Parma Violets, and a single drop of blood.
    He came to a low fence and decided to step over it, rather than casting backwards and forwards to find a gate or stile. A moment later, he was falling.

16
     
     
    Journal of 1968
    Living underground could have its advantages, I suppose. You’re away from the wind and rain, which is something to be thankful for up here in the hills. But the drawbacks can be fairly serious.
    I remember there was always a musty smell, as if something had died in there already. No matter what we tried, there wasn’t a thing we could do about the smell. Well, the ventilation was bad – just this shutter thing in the end wall, and another in the toilet. Precious little air to breathe.
    And the smell was all my fault, according to Les. Mister high-and-mighty Number One never took the damp as an excuse, or bad ventilation, or the fact I had nothing to use except what I could carry on my back.
    It was my job to haul up the bucket, too, with bright blue Elsan slopping about over my head, terrified every second that the thing would tip in the shaft and come right down on top of me. Les wouldn’t even let Jimmy help me with the bucket. He said there were three jobs, and the sanitary arrangements were my responsibility, since I was the youngest. ‘Sanitary arrangements’ – that’s the way he talked. Jimmy and me, we called it something quite different.

    Les had more important things to do, of course. He was saving the world, was Les. A big bloody hero in a hole in the ground.
    Well, we were all fighting for freedom, in our own way. It was the age of liberation, after all. Or so we were told. There wasn’t much liberation in our part of the world. Just the same old attitudes, the same instinct to condemn, the implacable willingness to destroy other people’s lives. Whatever happened to ‘ He that is without sin …?’
    I suppose those cold, damp walls were supposed to protect us. But really, they could just as easily have been a prison. And, you know what? If I’d been in prison, I might have had more luck with my cell mates.
    Even now, I always see Jimmy’s face. I see it as clear as my own reflection when I look in the mirror. There were the three of us, up on top in the daylight. And him, down there in the dark, alone. Just a single shaft of light, falling on his face, gleaming on his glasses.
    And then the falling, falling … It seemed to take so long, yet it must have been over in a second. His skull cracked like an egg.
    One down. Two to go.

17
     
     
    Thursday
    Diane Fry had never quite got used to stepping out of the real world, a world full of living, breathing people, into the cold, sterile environment of the mortuary. The postmortem room was all stainless steel and grey tiles, the smell of disinfectant barely even competing with the odour of carved flesh and exposed internal organs. Whenever she entered these doors, it was