Back in his office, Grey was firstly relieved to find Sarah Cobb not there, he still feeling guilty for the work she had done for him, despite having no idea she would stay to work a full night shift. He was sure though that, when he saw the request, Superintendent Rose would understand the importance of the overtime.
Secondly, he found where he had left it the ordnance survey map. It was old and dog-eared, no doubt having been knocking around the station for years. It was quite low scale, covering just the motorway junction and its sliproads and roundabouts; also the hotel, the services and their surrounds; and overlaying it in fluorescent pen were a series of arrows, dotted lines and timings, which as he studied them formed a narrative of the movements of Thomas Long and Stephen Carman on that Tuesday evening.
Cori, still shellshocked from the double-whammy of the argument she had just witnessed and the development, as announced by the Inspector, that there might now be a body to find, waited downstairs, Grey saying he had a couple of things to pick up before they left. Together they then drove from the now deserted police yard, and taking a roundabout route that avoided the town centre where the factory men had earlier congregated, they drove along small roads, past rural terraces and shut up farms, before rejoining the A-road and heading once again along the Corridor.
The journey was uneventful as the morning lost its early gleam, it remaining bright and warm but in that grey way that can keep up for days when cloud settles in a windless sky. The weather reflected the mood in the car, and little was said, bar Cori some way into the journey offering very quietly,
‘She got it right though, didn’t she, Isobel? What she said when she went?’
‘My moment of victory snatched away, you mean? Before I got to have my photo taken with our recovered runaway?’
‘It would have been nice though, eh? Just a bit of credit?’
‘Well, I may have to explain to a few people, where she went off to so soon after returning. But if a bit of embarrassment is all we have to deal with...’
Cori left it as that, although there was so much more she wanted to say. Grey too, though he was happier for now to think in silence. For Cori had been right: that Isobel had not set out to attack him personally, to bruise his ego or knock out his morale, but instead merely needed to get out of a situation she found suddenly terrifying. He had happened to be the obstacle needing to be removed.
He accepted this, so why then did he still feel so rotten? Perhaps it was another vain conceit now shown up for what it was: the idea that he, the Inspector, could keep the townsfolk feeling safe in their beds, could pull them back in when they fell off the edge of the world? Southney’s own Holden Caulfield? What a joke! Isobel’s staying unfound for three years had knocked that belief, and his not being able to keep a track of her now would knock it again – and this before he even dared to contemplate what had happened to Thomas, happening at a time when the town needed all the reassurance it could get.
But this was all fine, for he was used to these times, of operating day in, day out with no happier feeling at his core than a sense of bad faith in things, of life defaulting on its promises, but knowing that he must trudge on, that someone had to do his job.
‘It’s something for the agencies anyway,’ he offered, ‘confirmation she’s alive. Though there really will be no way to explain to her parents why she left again, or how it was I didn’t have the power to keep her.’
As they drove Grey watched the landscape as it passed them, the sky it met at the horizon hanging over them like white clay, as if to reach up to punch it would leave knuckle-marks.
‘Start at the hotel?’ asked Cori, he nodding as the quiet modern car glid again along the service road, turning off at the tarmacked lot.
‘Sarah stayed up all night you know, working this stuff out.’ Grey was pacing to and fro at the front of the hotel. ‘This is about where the big car was parked, and they went off in this direction.’
‘I wonder if the Indian summer is over?’ asked Cori as she followed the Inspector with his map.
‘So Sarah thought they must have gone down here,’ said Grey, starting for the alley that ran alongside the building, ‘but neither are seen leaving.’
‘There are a few planks missing in the fence along there,’ noted Cori, as reaching them, like Alice following the white rabbit through the little door, they squeezed their way in turn through battered fencing, and out into a different point along the edge of the services carpark.
After clearing the shrubs and bushes before them – one of the scenic interludes intended to break up the austerity of all this outspread tarmac – they were stood at the kerb that stopped the apron of grey from spilling out in this direction. With grim precision they found the next camera exactly where it was marked on the map, the pole rising above the parked cars and strips of box hedges.
Beside it was a smaller post, its sign now readable: Please place your litter in the bins provided. This was the post past which the ghostlike figure had been dashing. Grey moved to recreate the pose... and saw ahead of him the footbridge.
A breeze was getting up, and clouds were blowing over darker now, as Grey and Cori stood before the hideous structure. It was constructed of that old aluminium once used for school buildings. After many years bared to all weathers the metal had oxidised itself a silvery husk, and now gave the impression of being impervious to the elements.
After entering, the tunnel led quite steeply upwards, and was at no point along its length wider to pass through than double doors. Once finding themselves atop the stairs, the detectives were faced with the long straight walk across all six lanes of the motorway and their surrounding terrain. With its sides from waist-height up formed of yellowing Perspex, Grey fancied that the passageway resembled nothing more than a very long and elevated bus shelter.
As they spoke a family with young children walked toward and then past them, while from behind a smart couple no older than twenty excused themselves to move past and dash on ahead. Their dress suggested to Grey that this had been a necessary break on an urgent business journey. He and Cori took it slowly though, as the traffic thundered beneath them, Grey remembering how he had loved such feelings as a boy: standing back from non-stopping expresses at railway platforms; the roar of jets at an air show, he gripping his father’s hand.
‘This must have been one of the first parts of the site to be built,’ Grey mused, ‘if only here for locals to get across. It might not have changed since the Sixties.’
‘But how can somewhere with so many windows be so claustrophobic?’ asked Cori, who like a lot of younger people, if she considered the past at all, only did so with an incomprehension of how people ever got by without microwaves, mobiles and cars that started in the morning. She walked the old passageway with a mixture of awe that such an ancient-looking thing still stood and fear that it could fall down at any minute, the windows crackling in their frames with each passing juggernaut.
‘Anyway, somewhere along here is another camera.’
‘It’s getting cold in here,’ Cori mentioned as they walked.
‘Yes, and the noise is getting louder.’
‘There’s the camera anyway.’ Cori pointed up to a glass limpet tucked up in the seams of the corrugated roof, and dating from rather later than the structure itself. ‘And look, a window’s been put out.’
‘That’s it!’ Grey moved quickly to the spot, the camera now above him on one side, and on the other an empty square within the metal windowframe, through which the sky appeared its natural colour, and not tinted the same sickly gold as through the rest of the windows that ran continuously along both sides of the tunnel.
Grey raised a worried hand, bidding his Sergeant refrain from joining him where he now stood.
‘So what happened here, sir?’ she asked, he behaving as though the spot held some special power. From her holding position she watched the Inspector, as he spun on his heels, looking first one way and then the other, eyes darting, surveying the scene, muttering
to himself,
‘So the camera is there, Carman was standing here, facing this way? No, the opposite way, looking out towards...’
The scene now right in his head, he moved toward the opening; but still he baulked from getting any closer, his nose remaining an inch from where it would have met the missing Perspex.
‘This is where they fought,’ Grey summarised for Cori as she ventured nearer. ‘But it was dark, all the windows looked the same, at least to the camera.
‘Don’t touch the frame,’ he warned, as gingerly the pair of them, she mirroring his every move, leaned their heads through the yard-wide gap and looked down.
They had reached the far side of the motorway by now, and were standing above the verge that ran between the road’s hard shoulder and this side’s carpark. Cori felt the first drops of rain falling on her hair, as in unison they peered over the thin metal window-ledge. And as they looked down they saw, amongst the tall grasses and wild flowers that were swaying now in ever stronger winds, a dark and almost hidden, barely distinguishable shape; a melancholy shape, a shape without hope or future associations. Not fifteen feet away, commuters and holidaying families raced by; while even closer, in the carpark slept a salesman, smiling and oblivious in his car’s reclined front seat.
‘Call it in,’ Grey instructed, ‘and get this tunnel sealed at both ends.’
‘Who to?’ asked Cori, knowing there was hardly an officer in the county not employed at the factory dispute this morning.
‘The switchboard are still there, and Rose. We only need a couple of uniforms for now, and scenes of crime – we need a tent up, before it rains over everything.’
As Cori found her phone and started dialling, Grey disappeared down the mine-like stairwell, the day turning black before noon and time becoming of the essence. At the foot of the stairs, back out in the open, he clambered over the waist-high wooden fence that guided travellers along the path and back to their cars; and feeling something go in the fabric of his trouser leg as he did so. He traipsed over uneven, potholed ground, through wildly-grown weeds, blackberry bushes, grasses in some places as high as the fence, in an effort to get to where he estimated the unhappy form to be resting. That no one had come this way for months was evident, though in his wading through the bushes he was obliterating any way of proving that.
But then he found him – at last he could definitively say him – for here was Thomas, visible, unmistakable. His face was hardly marked for having been out in the open for two and a half days; the tall grasses perhaps having shaded him from the worst ravages of the sun, while what wildlife there was along this neglected strip must not have been large enough to have done him much damage. His back and legs though were twisted in an awful way. Grey thought of him that night, falling looking upward, not seeing the grass-cushioned, brick-strewn ground coming toward him; and now here Thomas Long was laid, his sunken eyes staring up uncomprehendingly at a blank sky, as blank as the world, as blank as his future.
Grey had no feelings here beyond the fact that life, even when faced with the huge full-stop that lay before him, kept on going; that he in his ripped clothes, Cori up on the bridge, the traffic powering past, and all the world around them were somehow still existing, were carrying on. That time could not be stopped, even by such an horrific ending as he now lay witness to, was the sum of his philosophy – at that moment he had no brighter or more optimistic thought than this.
Humans could end themselves, even end each other, but could never end life. And so what option did that leave any of us who might think to try to do so, but to get back up, and feeling slightly silly for thinking we could ever face life down, go back to whatever we were doing before, resume our paths laid out, our habits encoded? Sometimes his bleakness shocked even himself.
Ignoring every letter of the police code, kneeling now beside the body, he got his suit jacket off and placed it over Thomas Long’s head and shoulders, just as the clouds broke and the real rain began.
‘I hope you were happy,’ he said, as the first fat drops fell to darken the jacket’s fabric.
Chapter 29 – Rose Attends