Kitap dosya olarak indirilemez ancak uygulamamız üzerinden veya online olarak web sitemizden okunabilir.
Kitabı oku: «The Deceit», sayfa 4
8
Tahta, Middle Egypt
‘But where are we going, effendi?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I am not understanding?’
‘Please, just drive on.’
Walid shook his head, and lit a Cleopatra cigarette. The smoke filled the taxi as they drove through yet another dusty, sunlit Egyptian village, with metal shacks selling palm oil and soap powder, and minarets soaring into the dusty sky. Dark-skinned boys played naked in the canals.
The cough came again, a hacking, savage cough; Victor Sassoon saw Walid checking him, anxiously, in the rear-view mirror.
‘I sorry, effendi, I smoking, sorry, I stop.’
Walid threw his half-finished cigarette out of the taxi window, even as Victor made vague protestations: because it really didn’t matter, not any more. There were specks of blood in Victor’s handkerchief, tiny sprinkles of scarlet prettily arrayed. He quickly stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and clutched the shopping bag close to his aching chest.
Inside the bag were the Sokar documents. They were far more revelatory than he had expected; more explosively challenging, more conclusive. The first pages of Gnostic spells and curses were interesting, but the next codex in the most obscure dialect of Akhmimic Coptic was quite remarkable, and the Arab gloss, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, was astonishing. And what about the tiny concordance – that brief note in French, probably early or mid-nineteenth century – written by whom, and how, and why? It was perhaps the most killing evidence of all.
Who had hidden these documents? And who had compiled them? Seen the connection? Who had put them together? Some renegade monk? A Copt from the White Monastery? Why not then destroy them?
Sassoon’s first urge had certainly been to destroy the Hoard, to burn the books. But he just couldn’t. Burning books was the antithesis of everything his life had been about: burning books was what the Nazis did, the men who killed his mother and father, his entire family. So Victor had decided to preserve the books, and he was going to take them with him.
An hour passed. Walid smoked and then apologized for smoking. The scenery grew ever more bucolic, losing the last ugliness of urban Egypt, reprising its timeless rural beauty. A side channel of the Nile lay alongside the road, where egrets flapped and dived, dazzling white in the sun. Reeds of green and hazy gold surrounded mud houses; yoked donkeys stood patiently under African palms, drowsing in the heat.
Sassoon tapped on the glass. ‘Where are we?’
‘This next village –’ Walid pointed with a tobacco-stained finger – ‘this Nazlet, I think. End of road, into desert. Or we go on to Assyut.’
Nazlet Khater? Victor recalled a fragment of history. The earliest Egyptian skeletons were discovered here. In caves.
‘So we stop.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Here,’ Victor said. ‘This is where we must stop. I need to go and look at something.’
Walid turned and frowned. ‘Here? Is nothing here! Camel shit. Peasant people.’
‘It’s all right, Walid, I know what I am doing.’
The driver shrugged. ‘OK. I wait you here. How long?’
‘A few hours.’
Another stubborn shrug; Walid was clearly unhappy, but in a protective way. Perhaps it was because Walid was a Muslim, and Victor was, in a way, his guest; Walid’s faith demanded he look after him. Momentarily, Victor considered this paradox, the paradox of Islam – a faith capable of great violence, and yet tenderly hospitable and sweetly generous, and truly egalitarian, too. But all religions were paradoxical, more paradoxical than Victor had ever imagined.
As he walked away from the car he could sense his driver staring after him, at his old Jewish passenger, regretful and sympathetic and frustrated. Victor ignored this; flicking stones with his walking stick, he turned a corner by a scruffy little mosque and saw that the road really did end.
Two camels were tethered by a rusty lamppost at the broken edge of the pavement. The last of life. Beyond them was rock and plains and level sands and nothingness.
Victor kept on walking. The road immediately turned into desert rubble. The sun was hot. He had water and some food in his shopping bag along with the Sokar documents. He wondered how strange he must look: an old Englishman in a blazer, carrying a shopping bag, just walking out into the emptiness.
But there was no one here to see him. Victor walked and walked, with the last of his strength. He felt the sun weaken as he went, beginning to set behind the mountains of the western desert. As the true darkness ensued he sat on a boulder in the cooling shadows. An eagle wheeled in the twilight. The silence was enormous: hosannas of quiet surrounded him.
He slept in his clothes, under a ledge. The pain in his chest was so intense it was like a lover, clutching him too tight. He remembered being a student, sleeping in a tiny single bed with his first wife. Intensely uncomfortable and yet happy. Cambridge. Bicycles. His wife dying in the hospice. There was dust in his mouth. A memory of a young rose by a leaded window.
When he woke the sun was already warm and he drank the very last of his water. He had no idea where he was: just somewhere in the desert. Dirty and dishevelled and dying. But that was where he wanted to be, somewhere no one could find his body: not immediately, anyway.
Two or three more hours of shuffling across the sands brought him to an outcrop of orange-red rock, hot in the sun. Shadows of birds on the sand told him that vultures were circling above. He’d thought that only happened in movies. But it was true. The birds sensed carrion: a body. Food.
But they were going to be disappointed. Victor crept around the rocks, then down the adjoining cliff, looking for a cave. His tongue was cracked with dehydration, his eyesight was failing. But at last he found a cave, and it was dark and long and cool.
Victor got down on his aching knees and crept inside. At the very end, where it became too narrow to even crawl, he laid his head on a rock and stared into the infinite blackness of the darkness above and around. He was clutching the Sokar documents to his chest, and gazing into the darkness of deep time. Maybe one day someone would discover his corpse: another body mummified by the Egyptian desert; and with him the codices and the parchments in their plastic shopping bag.
Maybe one day someone would, therefore, recover this astonishing truth, once again. And maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t. It was right to let God decide.
If there was a God.
The wind whirred outside, at the end of the long cavern. Victor thought of his wife and of the children they never had; he thought of her on that bicycle, that holiday, a spaniel puppy, a car journey somewhere, a cottage with a well in the garden, a photo of his dead parents, snow falling on the Polish camps, and then his wavering and failing mind considered one final thought: the blessed name of Jerusalem, derived from Shalim, the Canaanite God of Night; the God of the End.
And here was that same spirit, coming into the cave like the cool desert wind: Shalim, the God of the End.
9
Zennor Hill, Cornwall, England
Cats? The cottage was full of cats: or rather the corpses of cats. Some skinned, most of them charred. Charred and burned and scorched and roasted. Piles of dead cats in one corner. Piles of dead cats in another. The stench was intolerable. They had begun to rot.
‘Jesus Christ.’
DI Sally Pascoe nodded, grimly. The white shirt of her police uniform was smeared with greasy soot. The stuff was everywhere. The burning fur and cat flesh had thickened the air and blackened the walls. The floor was actually sticky: Karen shuddered to think why that was, though she could guess – the heat must have been intense as the cats burned, so intense that the fat in their flesh had liquefied, had turned to oil or tallow, now congealing. Like candles.
These cats had been burned like candles.
She resisted the urge to vomit.
Sally pointed, and Karen followed the gesture. ‘That must have been where some of them were burned. A spit roast, but others appear to have been doused in petrol, and burned alive. We found some petrol canisters at the back, and firelighters too, used for kindling.’
‘They stink. Are you going to move them?’
Sally shrugged. ‘We don’t quite know what to do, I mean, who do we go to, Forensics, Pathology?’
‘Or a vet.’
‘Yes, maybe.’
Karen gazed around the awful scene. One cat was only half-burned: so they hadn’t all been burned at the same time. They had been torched one after the other. Ritualistically. And this ritual had not been completed.
Ritual?
Ritual.
She turned to Sally. ‘Maybe you should speak to an expert on witchcraft.’
‘Yes! That’s what I thought, some kind of terrible witchcraft. That’s one reason I asked you over, Kaz. Didn’t you handle a case in London, last year, African voodoo?’
‘Yes. A Congolese couple decided their kid was possessed, and they beat him to death.’
Sally shuddered visibly. ‘OK, OK, so this is just amateur night here, just a house full of barbecued cats.’
‘It’s quite bad enough, Sally. Properly Satanic.’ She stooped to one sticky, charred heap of corpses. Using a pen, she flipped one small corpse upside down. The mouth of the cat was open, agonized and screaming. Karen shook her head. ‘The noise must have been unbelievable. Right? Dozens of cats, being burned alive. Through the night? You know how cats yowl. I get them outside my house in London. Caterwauling. Imagine the appalling noise if you … burned them like this.’
‘Yes, that’s how we were alerted, someone heard the noise.’ Sally was backing away to the door as if she wanted to flee. Her face was pale. ‘Sorry. I’ve had enough for the moment: the smell. Can we get out, and speak in the car?’
‘Sure.’
The door was opened; the fresh air – cold and faintly drizzly – was unbelievably welcoming. Both women inhaled, greedily. Then they both laughed, very quietly.
‘Hey, I haven’t even said anything about your mum … Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Karen, I’m so, so sorry. Come here.’ She hugged her friend.
Karen welcomed the embrace: human warmth. She missed her daughter; she missed her friends; at this moment, she missed her mum most of all.
A silent constable standing at the door watched them, perhaps slightly embarrassed by their open emotion.
Karen and Sally walked to the Range Rover and got in. Sally spoke first. ‘Look at us, two important policewomen. Or one slightly important and one really important. I mean, Detective Chief Inspector at the Met? What happened to little Karen Trevithick? A DCI at thirty-two? Go girl!’
Karen waved away the compliment. ‘It’s easier for women in some ways. We have a different way of looking at things. Changes perspective.’
‘Yes I find that too … Sometimes.’
‘Hard work too though; and it’s pretty tough on Ellie.’
‘Your daughter must be, like, six?’ Sally’s smile faded. ‘The father—’
‘Still isn’t really involved. But that’s my choice.’
‘You were never one to get married and bake scones, Kaz.’
‘No. I guess not. Not like Mum.’ She looked out of the car window, at the distant, yearning sea, way down the hill, beyond Zennor. ‘You know we used to come here, to Zennor. On holidays. We’d take a picnic and sit on the cliffs. Dad would always say the same thing – the same bit of history. He loved Cornish history. You see them? Those little fields, down there?’ Karen gestured towards the intricate labyrinth of tiny, vivid green fields, surrounding the granite village. ‘You see the stone hedges dividing them? The big boulders. They’re Neolithic. My dad told me those were the oldest human artefacts in the world still being used for their original purpose.’
Sally peered down Zennor Hill. ‘OK … Not a history fanatic, how old is that? Neo … lithic?’
‘We’re talking 3000 BC – five thousand years old. The first farmers moved the huge stones they found in the fields to make hedges. And they’re still using them now.’
Sally nodded, absently. ‘I never liked it here. Penwith, I mean – this part of Cornwall. Creeps me out a bit, the tin mines and the standing stones, it’s all so brooding.’
‘Which is why people come here, right? Hippies and druids. Bohemians and artists. And Satanists. Which brings us back to the cats. You said the noise alerted someone, so you have a witness?’
Sally shook her head. ‘There was a bunch of rich kids, uni students, staying for Christmas and New Year. They rented Eagle’s Nest.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That big house down there.’
Karen stretched to see: a large handsome building, with extensive gardens, in a spectacular position hard by the highest sea-cliffs. ‘Must be rich, to rent that place. So they heard the noise? Of the cats being tortured?’
‘Yep, in the middle of the night, and they came up to have a look.’ Sally Pascoe frowned, expressively. ‘I guess they were drunk. They kicked open the door – and got way more of a fright than they expected. One of them was badly clawed by a cat, a burning cat, trying to escape. Must have been terrifying.’
‘They saw no one?’
Sally reached for a stick of Nicorette chewing gum. ‘I’ve given up for New Year,’ she explained, unwrapping. ‘So, yeah, where was I … yes, the two boys – Malcolm Harding and Freddy Saunderson – they both say they saw people running away, but it was dark. That’s all we know at the moment. No other witnesses, nothing. But it must have been those people who burned the cats.’
‘The kids aren’t involved?’
‘No.’ Sally’s negative was firm. ‘I’m convinced they have nothing to do with it.’ She chewed the gum methodically. ‘So we’re maybe looking for a gang of Satanists out on the moors of Penwith who like to torment cats by the hundred. How sweet.’
Sally’s phone rang. Karen raised a hand to say I’ll be outside and opened the Range Rover’s door. The wind was so gusty it almost slammed it shut against her fingers. Raising the collar of her raincoat, Karen walked around the cottage.
It was half-ruined. A shed of some kind, with a clear plastic roof, was attached to the rear. Most of the windows were broken. It obviously hadn’t been inhabited for many years, maybe decades. That in itself was odd, Karen thought: the cottage was spectacularly situated. It had the kind of view that you could rent to summer holidaymakers for two thousand a month. Even in winter it would attract arty types, who liked the rawness, the stern and brutal beauty of the West Penwith landscape. Why let it fall into ruin?
She turned a further corner and peered in through one of the few unbroken windows. The interior was dark, but there was still enough light to see the piles of contorted and tormented little corpses. What a ghastly thing. She shivered in the wind. Her mother had loved cats …
‘Karen, come over here!’
Stepping over tumbled bricks and shattered window-glass she saw Sally, in the Range Rover, gesturing.
‘Get in the car and shut the door. Listen to this!’
Karen obeyed. Sally could be a little bossy; she hadn’t changed all that much. But that was fine, it was actually reassuring.
‘What?’
Sally’s face was stern. She lifted up the phone, significantly, pointing it Karen’s way. ‘I just got another call, from my Detective Sergeant, Jones.’
‘And?’
‘They found a body.’
‘Where? Here? Zennor?’
‘No, down a mine, Botallack, you know that one, on the coast, over Morvah way.’
Karen’s thoughts whirled into confusion. She wondered aloud, ‘An accident? Falling down a mine shaft? I don’t see the connexion. How …?’
‘The owners found the body this morning, at the bottom of the shaft. They say it was covered in a weird grease, black soot and stuff.’
The Atlantic wind buffeted the window of the Range Rover. Karen looked at the charred and open door of Carn Cottage. It was covered with grease and soot.
10
Morvah, Cornwall, England
What was that line of poetry her father used to quote, about the West Penwith countryside?
This is a hideous and a wicked country,
Sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time,
Hollow with mine-shafts, naked with granite …
The poet was right.
DCI Trevithick steered her Toyota carefully along the narrow Penwith roads; to her left, the moors rose abruptly, scattered with enormous rocks, oddly deformed. To the right, the pounding and merciless sea, assaulting the cliffs. And in the narrow strip of flat land between, there lay the wind-battered farms and the grey mining villages. Ex-mining villages.
Just ahead was Morvah. Morvah. Karen mouthed the vowels, silently, as she slowed the car. There was another line, by some writer, her dad would quote: ‘the fearsome scenery reaches a crescendo of evil at Morvah’. It was so very true.
And yet people loved this country, too, which was why it got so many artistic visitors who adorned it with these famous quotes. Even on a raw and hostile January day, like today, it had a powerful and hypnotic quality that made you want to linger.
Who killed the cats? She had to find out. The case was starting to obsess her.
At Botallack Karen took the last turning, onto a winding, rutted track that seemed to lead past a farm, directly over the cliffs and straight down to the crushing sea three hundred feet below. But at the last moment the track veered right and opened up to a tarmacked car park at the very edge of the precipice.
And there below was Botallack Mine. Just seeing it made Karen shiver.
It was one of the oldest mines in Cornwall, three or four centuries old at least, though tin streaming and tin mining had been happening here for three thousand years. That was why the entire Penwith coast was riddled with tunnels and shafts and adits, like a honeycomb under the sea-salted grass. There were so many mine-workings that people occasionally fell down unsuspected shafts to their deaths; dogs disappeared quite frequently.
Yet within this ominous world Botallack had an especially sinister quality, not because of its age, but because of its position: right by the sea, halfway up an almost-vertical cliff. The mine had been built here to exploit the tin and copper under the ocean. The shafts were famously deep and the tunnels famously long: extending out under the Atlantic.
Imagine the life of the men who worked here every day …
Karen got out of the car and cringed from the cold fierce wind.
Yet, working here every day is precisely what her ancestors had done. Her father’s family ultimately came from St Just, and her great-great-grandfather, and no doubt the men before him, had been miners right here. At Botallack.
It must have been a horrible existence: they would have risen before dawn, often in a ferocious Atlantic gale, then walked in the wintry dark from their cottages along the coast and down the cliffside to the minehead, where they descended deep underground. In Victorian times they would have had to climb down half-mile-long ladders, deeper and deeper into the darkness. And after an hour, when they reached the bottom, they had to crawl for a mile under the sad and booming sea in terrifyingly narrow tunnels to the rockface.
Only then did their shift officially begin, hewing and drilling the vile, wet rocks to get at the precious black tin; only then did they begin to earn the pittance that paid for their families’ subsistence. When did they find the time or energy to live and pray and sing and make love to their wives? No wonder they died so young: at thirty or thirty-five. Apart from Sundays, they wouldn’t have seen the sun from October to March.
Karen locked the car, thinking. The word Sunday must have had a special resonance then. The only day they saw the sun. Sunday.
An image of her father flashed before her. They had come here once and he had told her all this mining history, trying to make her proud of her Cornish heritage. In reality, the sight of awesome Botallack had just made seven-year-old Karen rather scared.
Slowly, she made her way down the perilous cliffside path, towards the handsome stone stacks of Botallack engine house, and the small cabins surrounding it.
She was greeted by a tall dark-haired man in a yellow hard hat and hi-vis jacket. He extended a firm handshake and shouted above the buffeting sea-wind, ‘Stephen Penrose. You must be Karen Trevithick?’
She shook his hand. ‘Can we go inside?’
The peace inside the great, cold, stone-built engine house was almost a shock after the stormy noise of the wind.
‘Hell of a day! Yes, I’m DCI Trevithick, from Scotland Yard.’
The man looked her up and down. Karen didn’t know whether to feel patronized, or flattered, and didn’t particularly care either way: she was just eager to crack on. She’d had to fight for permission to be assigned to a case so far from London; indeed, she’d had to use a little emotional blackmail with her senior officer at the Yard, expend some capital. But this strange case intrigued her, and distracted her from gloomy and interior thoughts.
She was also distracted by the great void just a few metres from her walking boots. The shaft. It dominated the stone chamber. A black circle of nothingness, much bigger than she had expected: a great mouth that swallowed men daily, with a gullet that went down for miles.
‘In the old days, when they were tinning,’ Penrose said, as if he sensed her thoughts, ‘you would see steam coming out of that shaft.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Steam, from all the men, the miners breathing deep underground, the steam from their exhalations, would rise up the shaft.’
It was another jarring concept.
‘Have you ever been down a mine, Miss Trevithick?’
‘No.’
He tutted, sympathetically. ‘With a good Cornish name like Trevithick?’
‘The stories put me off,’ she said, staring at the shaft. ‘My dad would tell me stories of my family. Working in these places. One of them died when the man-engine collapsed at that mine, along the cliffs: Levant. And my great-grandmother was a bal maiden at South Crofty.’
‘Ah yes, the girls, breaking the rocks and sifting the deads, standing in the wind. What a job that must’ve been.’
‘They were tough women.’
‘Very true, Miss Trevithick, very true. Here. You’ll need this.’
She took the hard hat, put it on, strapped it under her chin and smiled briskly. ‘So, where is the body?’
‘Right at the bottom of the shaft. You’ll need this overall too. ’Tis very wet down there.’
Karen slipped on the blue nylon overalls. They covered her like a nun’s habit. Properly attired, she followed Stephen Penrose to the other side of the shaft and a metal cage suspended over the void. Once inside the cage, he slid a wire metal door, pressed a fat red button, and they began the long descent. The sensation was distractingly unpleasant. Going down underground, to the tunnels under the Atlantic. She could hear the grieving boom of the sea as they descended.
‘Who found the body?’
‘I did, yesterday.’
‘What were you doing here? Botallack has been closed for decades.’
He shrugged.
‘We’re exploring the, uh, possibility of tourism. Opening a mine museum, you see, like Geevor up the coast. We have some EU funding. We’ve just finished draining the main tunnels. That’s one of them: one of the oldest, eighteenth century.’ He pointed down a tunnel that flashed past them as they plunged further in the rattling cage. The whole mine was dimly lit with strings of electric lights: frail and exposed against the threatening dark.
It was surely a haunted place. As the cage neared the bottom of the chilly shaft, Karen remembered more stories: of the knockers – the spirits of the mine, strange poltergeists the miners would claim to hear. Auditory hallucinations, presumably, from hunger and stress.
‘OK, here it is. Watch your step.’
The body was crumpled at the bottom of the shaft, next to the enormous metal winch that controlled the cage. Beyond it was the main tunnel, a narrowing corridor that extended that long, long mile under the Atlantic Ocean. The moaning sea above them was still audible, but now muffled, stifled even: like someone in another room dreaming bad dreams.
Karen knelt and looked at the broken form. The victim was young, white, male, twenty-something, in a shredded anorak and dark jeans. Covered in blood and blackness.
Penrose spoke, his voice not quite so confident now. ‘Nasty, isn’t it? Quite gave me the frighteners when I saw it. Poor bastard. Then all that weird stuff on him … Soot and grease and … cat fur, right?’
‘How did you know it was cat fur?’
‘I didn’t. It was my boss, Jane. She came down a few minutes later, she keeps cats, she recognized these might be –’ he pointed – ‘scratches. Cat scratches. See there. On the neck and the face. Then we worked out that maybe all this stuff …’ Penrose knelt beside her. It was as if they were praying in front of the corpse. ‘This weird stuff on his clothes must be fur, burned cat fur, because she’d already heard the reports, on the radio news, the cats burned on Zennor Hill.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Penrose stood up, abruptly, as if he really didn’t like to be too near the corpse. ‘What is it, Miss Trevithick? Something to do with witchcraft? That’s what they’re saying on the internet.’ He tilted back his hard hat and scratched his head, frowning. ‘Because it’s not good for business. We don’t want people associating Botallack with anything like that, not if we’re going to make a go of this museum. And we need the jobs round here. Sorry to sound selfish, but …’
‘No, no. I quite understand.’ Karen gave the shattered body one last scrutiny in the faint damp light given out by the pitiful bulbs. ‘I’m sure it will be fine, you’d be amazed how quickly people forget. I’ve seen it all before.’
She gazed at the sad, pale, slender face of the cadaver, scratched, and badly bruised, and with one long horrible gash by the left ear. There were several other terrifying scarlet gashes distributed across the body, as if someone had attacked the man with a mighty sword. The legs were the worst: they were virtually pulped. The flesh had melted into the clothing; you could only just tell he was wearing dark indigo jeans. ‘Pathology will confirm, they’re coming here in a minute. But these injuries, they must have been from his fall.’
Penrose said nothing: he was looking in his canvas bag.
In the end, she answered her own question. ‘Yes … That makes sense. The wounds look terrible but that’s because of the enormous drop. You’d bang against the sides of the shaft on the way down. Ripping and tearing, shattering the bones.’
Karen stood and stared up. The tiny hole of light half a mile up there was the sky and the wind. She resisted the sudden urge to panic and escape this unnatural, inhuman prison, to fling herself in the cage and press every button.
Soft distant booms echoed down the tunnels. The sea was talking in its sleep, fighting a nightmare. The sea was also above them, weighing everything down: an unbearably oppressive sensation. What a place.
She turned. Penrose was holding something in his hand. It was an iPad. He spoke, as he switched it on. ‘We know the injuries are from the fall, Miss Trevithick, because we have him on CCTV. Uninjured.’
‘What?’
‘They didn’t tell you! We found it a couple of hours ago. Jane emailed it to me and to … DI Pascoe?’
‘I’ve been out of contact. My mobile is recharging. You have it?’
‘Yup. Here, look.’
He opened up the iPad and clicked on a stored email. The light given out by the computer seemed unearthly in the gloom. A magic oblong in ancient darkness.
The CCTV footage was grainy but good enough. The two of them stood in the echoing blackness, with thebaffled noise of the sea all around, and watched the silent movie.
‘There he is.’
Penrose’s indication was unnecessary. A young man in dark jeans was climbing a fence surrounding the minehead. It was dark, but the moon was full. The victim was unmistakable. And he was alone. So this was no murder?
‘That’s him all right. No injuries. Looks perfectly OK.’
The footage jerked and the scene changed. Now they were gazing at the interior of the engine house.
‘We have a CCTV camera inside as well. It’s much darker, but you can still see him.’
The ghostly image of the man moved to the shaft. What was he looking for? His movements were edgy, jerky, and odd. As if there was a problem with the film-speed, and yet there wasn’t. Where was he going? How did he accidentally fall down? Karen watched the figure climb very close to the big black hole. Why was he going so stupidly close to the shaft? She almost cried out: Stop, you’re getting too close!
Her hand went reflexively to her mouth.
He jumped.
