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‘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.
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