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<h2>14</h2>
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<p><em>June:</em></p>
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<p>In the dark he could hear his own breathing, a watery snuffle. He could feel wet on his cheek and the dull throb that told him he'd been cut, but as yet there was no pain there. Not for now. The memory of pain hovered close in the darkness, but it was hard to remember anything else.</p>
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<p>He'd been with Crawford and Derek. No, not Derek; <em>he'd</em> gone back on the other side of the fence, gone back to school. Crawford had been there. Where was he now?</p>
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<p>He tried to think, but it was difficult. The dark wavered and broke up into small spangles of light when the numb dizziness came swirling in on him again. Going fishing. Taking the day off to cast a spinner in the river and test that big run of sea trout. Down the path, teasing the dogs, then through the corrugated sheet fence and past the tall weeds. The door had squealed open and he'd looked in and something had - <em>a man</em> - grabbed him. Hit him. It had happened so quickly that he hadn't even had time to react. Crawford had said something. The noise had come from the shadows. An image of balloon-like breasts hovered there on the wall and then the looming shape coming out of the dark.</p>
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<p>The pain had been unbelievable. The shadow had slashed out and hit him right on the side of the head and the whole world had exploded into a fountain of whirling sparks. The pain had punched from one side of his skull to the other as his head smacked against the wooden planks. Another explosion, more fiery, more volcanic than the first, blossomed in a burst of heat and hurt.</p>
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<p>"Look at the ti..." Crawford had said and then he'd stopped. To Don he had sounded suddenly far away in the distance.</p>
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<p>Something had him by the neck but there were sparks bursting in front of his eyes and he couldn't see. All he could feel was the pain in his head and the rolling nausea bubbling up inside him. There was a pressure on his neck and he was flying into the air. He could remember his eyes, blind with the whirling lights, bulging in their sockets and he recalled the collapsing sensation of his windpipe.</p>
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<p>The pain in his throat was coming back now and his head was throbbing. The metallic smell of blood was in his mouth and his nose and when he tried to cry out he found he couldn't make a sound.</p>
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<p>Where was Crawford? Had something happened to him?</p>
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<p>He tried to move but his shoulder screeched with pain so badly that the little lights started orbiting in the dark again. Outside, out there beyond the door, the angry sound of dogs barking started up. Somebody yelled and another boy laughed.</p>
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<p><em>Crawford</em>? Was he and Derek coming back? He turned and smeared a trail of blood on the floor.</p>
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<p>Somebody rattled a stick along a taut wire, making it jangle. The greyhounds started up their hysterical barking once more.</p>
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<p>"Skinny big buggers," a boy's voice bawled. Another boy sniggered again. Not Crawford, not Derek. A metal sound, like a tin can banged against something hard, rang out tunelessly. The dogs went into a frenzy. He could hear the thud of running feet and the whoops of schoolboys, sounding just like himself and his pals, but they were out there, running up the track he had come down. They were heading back to school and he was, he was...</p>
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<p>The bit bull terrier roared savagely and he could hear the protesting squeal of wire as it slammed against the fence, followed by the jeering laughter of the boys going up the hill. He tried to call out again but all he managed was a gurgle in the back of his throat.</p>
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<p>He shivered involuntarily, smearing blood against the floor again and a bubble swelled at his nostril before bursting silently. Far off in the distance, he could hear the clamour of kids up on the hill behind the school, like the squalling of wheeling gulls, faint but clear. Here and there he could make out an individual hoarse cry, a higher yell. Somebody screamed like a girl. All the normal noises of school at lunch time.</p>
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<p>The scream came again, high and wavering, distant, but closer than the school sounds. A moment later the bell rang, to tell everyone to line up and get ready for the afternoon classes. Crawford had disappeared. Don tried to think but he couldn't remember. Had he run away? He must have. He must have seen what had happened. He would be up there at the school getting help, getting a doctor, calling for an ambulance. Help would be here soon.</p>
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<p>He tried to stop shivering, but he couldn't find a way and the heel of his black school shoe drummed an uneven rap on the hard floor. His throat spasmed and a sudden dread overtook him that it would lock shut and he would choke on the blood. He coughed and a saw-blade of hurt rasped into his shoulder. Of a sudden, Don Whalen's mind cleared enough to let him realise that he was in awful danger. Very slowly he got a hand to the floor. He could smell the blood and the dismal reek of human shit and he couldn't tell whether it was his own.</p>
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<p>Crawford had gone to get help. That was for sure. Wasn't it? He eased his hand down. It pressed into a wet puddle that could have been anything, and then he gingerly levered himself up from the floor, one millimetre at a time, breath rasping, head pounding, shoulder screeching in protest. He got to a sitting position, still in the dark. The school sounds had faded, though they would have been hard to hear over the laboured rasp of his breath. Don pulled himself to the corner, where he thought the door would be and he raised his hand to press it against the planking.</p>
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<p>His fingers left an almost perfect hand print. It was the full stop at the end of his tortuous two-yard crawl. Another smudge of dried blood showed where the sickness and pain and exhaustion had caused him to slip to the floor. Some time later, he couldn't tell how long, thudding footsteps roused him out of the dizzy stupor.</p>
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<p>Don Whalen came almost awake when the door opened and a slender column of light widened to a thick pillar before being cut off again. The floor and the walls of the rail-wagon shuddered as the door rolled back on its casters and slammed shut with an awful finality. He still had not seen anything except the brief flash of light.</p>
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<p>In the dark he could hear the rough sound of breathing, overlaying his own rasping breath and he knew he was not alone.</p>
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<p>"Crawford?" he tried to say, though he somehow knew it was not his friend. He lay there, frozen in the sudden clench of fear. The breathing continued for a while, ragged and effortful, dreadfully close in the dark. Then a footstep shivered the floor and the breathing got louder.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>Derek Milne had turned back from the fence, got half-way to the wall and then stopped and turned back again. He'd an essay to hand in to Matt Bryson the English teacher, one which should have gone in two days ago, but which he had pretended to have forgotten, though in truth he hadn't even written it. His two friends had gone down the track and in half an hour, he knew they'd be at the Pulpit Pool on the river, casting for sea-trout.</p>
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<p>Indecision stopped him in his tracks. It was a good June day, late for a run of trout, but last week's rain had raised the river level enough to give a decent head of water and bring fish in from the estuary. The afternoon stretched dismally ahead of him. A dull period of maths and another two, even duller, of English. He walked ten yards, stopped, looked back at the fence. Beyond there, he could hear the yapping of the greyhounds and the deeper growl of another dog and he knew his friends would be at the bottom of the track by now, heading past the quarry to get the fishing rods from Crawford's garden hut.</p>
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<p>He turned back to the fence, swithered some more, torn between the desire to go fishing and the sense of self preservation which demanded he get down to school and write the essay for Matt Bryson. Derek even put his hands on the fence, ready to limbo under the bottom bar, when he changed his mind again and ruefully turned back, heading up the hill towards the Hump. He got over the rise and saw the milling crowd that had swelled to three or four times what it had been when he and the others had gone up the hill together. As soon as he crested the shoulder of the hill the noise had hit him like a physical force. Boys and girls too, were in the crowd, crushed together in a swarm. In the nucleus, from his height advantage, he could see a fist rise up and fall again. The crowd growled, like a single entity, a strange and eerily fierce sound, a mixture of alarm and primitive hunger.</p>
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<p>"What's going on?" a man's voice bellowed. Mr Doyle, the junior maths teacher came hurrying up the slope on short, sturdy legs.</p>
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<p>"Stop that this minute," he shouted, quite ineffectually. Nobody heard him. In the milling crowd, everybody was trying to get a ringside view of the two combatants. Derek made his way down the hill just as Mr Doyle was coming up. He got to the edge of the crowd as it swelled and contracted with a life all of its own, feeling the strange infection of excitement reach and invade him.</p>
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<p>"All of you, move back from there," the teacher snapped, peeved at the lack of response. His face was red with effort as he came up the hill at a trot. A few of the girls closest to him peeled away from the crowd. One of them had lost a shoe and was hopping about trying to keep her white ankle-sock off the ground.</p>
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<p>Another fist flew and a sound like a mallet-strike cracked in the air. The mob let out a collective groan of appreciation. A boy yelled, high and vicious. Another cried out, angry but also frightened.</p>
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<p>Mr Doyle waded into the crowd, pulling bodies by the scruff of their blazers and the hoods of their anoraks, shoving them aside as he thrust his way to the nucleus. In a few seconds he was up to his shoulders in the press of pupils, as much part of the crowd as they were, jostled left and right by the wheeling mass. Finally he reached the centre. Derek Milne saw him duck down. He was almost knocked off his feet but he managed to steady himself and when he came up again, he had a boy in each hand, fingers clenched on their collars.</p>
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<p>The crowd sighed its disappointment and immediately began to fragment as if some physical attractant had been switched off. Derek Milne strolled down the hill past the scattering clumps of pupils. The two boys were still charged up with anger and adrenaline and despite the dire warnings from the young teacher they were still trying to aim kicks at each other. Both of them had bloodied noses and their clothes were slick with mud. The taller of the two had a black eye swollen and closed over. The stockier one had a thin trail of blood leaking from his ear.</p>
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<p>Derek moved past them, feeling the hot and somehow dangerous elation drain away from him, and walked down, bag swinging on his hip, towards the school.</p>
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<p>Just as he reached the wall a girl screeched from the top of the Hump, up beyond where the fight had been. He turned and saw that Mr Doyle had stopped. The girl screamed again, but from the distance, Derek couldn't make out what she said. Mr Doyle let the boys go and went up the hill. They made good their escape before he had got ten yards. Derek grinned and turned into the doorway just as the bell rang shrill, heading for the maths class where, with some luck, he could sit at the back and write his essay. It was not until the middle of the afternoon that he heard the news.</p>
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<p>"Rankine's fell off the quarry."</p>
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<p>Derek stopped in his tracks. He was just coming out of the maths class and about to go up the stairs to Matt Bryson's room to present his delayed and hastily scrawled work when he heard a boy tell another with obvious shuddery relish:</p>
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<p>"Broke his neck, so he did. There's blood all over the place, I heard."</p>
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<p>"What's that?" Derek asked, more curious, not sure of what he had heard.</p>
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<p>"Didn't you hear? Your pal Rankine fell of the quarry. Took a header."</p>
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<p>"Nah," Derek said, "he couldn't have. He was nowhere near the quarry..." he stopped again. Crawford and Don had gone down the track to the back road. They would only have been yards away from the old quarry entrance.</p>
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<p>"It's true, honest. Brian Grittan and big Brenda Fortucci saw him. They were up on the other side of the fence. She's down at the nurse screaming her head off."</p>
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<p>"When did..." Derek started. "I mean..?"</p>
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<p>The other boys looked at him. Everybody was buzzing with the news, the little horror that had happened to somebody else, all the more shivery and exciting because it had happened to somebody they knew. He got to the top of the stairs where the rest of the class were lined up outside the English room. Everybody was looking at him expectantly.</p>
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<p>"Didn't you and Don go up to the fence with Craw?" somebody asked. Matt Bryson popped his head out of the doorway. Derek just turned round and ran down the steps.</p>
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<p>"Milne, get yourself back here boy!" the teacher bellowed. "And you'd better have that essay."</p>
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<p>Derek threw himself down the stairs and along the corridor, pushing smaller kids out of the way. He got to the east exit and went out, running hard now and by the time he got to the top of the Hump, he was gasping for breath. On the other side of the fence, the janitor and two of the teachers were standing close to the drop off. Beyond the tip, Derek could see nothing, but the blue winking light of an ambulance reflected repetitively from the damp stone face on the other side.</p>
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<p>"Sir," he called out. One of the teachers turned round. "Sir, who was it got hurt?"</p>
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<p>"Shouldn't you be in class?" Mr Doyle asked.</p>
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<p>"Yes sir, but you have to tell me. Who was it?"</p>
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<p>The teacher looked at him, considering. The boy was clearly agitated. He have a little shrug which conveyed kindly intent more than anything else.</p>
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<p>"Crawford Rankine. Is he a friend of..."</p>
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<p>"Sir is he dead?"</p>
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<p>"That I can't tell you, sonny," Mr Doyle replied. Derek backed away from the fence, hot tears beginning to swim and blur his vision.</p>
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<p>______</p>
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<p>Robert Doyle, known to the pupils as Wee Bob, had reacted very quickly when he'd got to the top of the hill. The two combatants escaped and ran away and he forgot all about them when he saw the prostrate girl on the other side of the fence. He scaled it with surprising agility and when he dropped to the far side where the boy was kneeling over the girl, he smelt the sour stink of vomit.</p>
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<p>"What happened?" he asked. "Come on Brian, she's been sick. Has she eaten something? Drunk something?" The boy mumbled and then he threw up again. For a few seconds Bob Doyle thought they'd both been sick. But the boy wiped his mouth.</p>
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<p>"No sir, she's fainted." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "It's the boy. He's dead."</p>
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<p>The teacher looked at him, brows knitted together in puzzlement. On the grass the girl moaned. A couple of her buttons had loosened and a large white breast, marbled with blue veins, was trying to pop out under the pressure of its own weight. Bob Doyle drew his eyes away.</p>
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<p>"Over there sir. He fell off the quarry." The boy's face contorted and his mouth spasmed in a wide retching gape, but he managed to contain it this time. "Brenda fainted. There's blood all over the place," he added.</p>
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<p>Just as he said that, the girl's eyes fluttered open and she pushed herself upright. She took one look at Brian and fell back against the grass again. Mr Doyle got to the edge of the quarry and looked down. There was nothing to be seen down there. The base of the old diggings was far below, hidden in the shade and the clumps of brambles and tangled dog roses. The massive blocks of stone heaped on each other in a series of giant steps leading to the bottom. There was nobody down at the quarry bed, no bloody and broken body.</p>
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<p>Brian Grittan came stumbling over to join him and the teacher grabbed the boy by the elbow, wondering if perhaps he and the girl had been drinking. He began to lean inwards to smell the boy's breath when the lad pointed down and to the left where the thick ivy rooted in a crevice. Bob Doyle followed the pointed finger. The flat surface of a block of red sandstone lay close to the vertical wall. He blinked and everything jumped into focus. It was no red sandstone. It was a red splash on the stone. The body lay spread-eagled close to the edge. Palms up, white face tilted to the blue sky.</p>
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<p>"Oh my god," the teacher whispered.</p>
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<p>He stared at the blood and at the still body for a few moments longer. Then he turned, grabbed the boy by the arm and walked him back to the fence. He told him to stay with the girl and not to let her near the edge, fearful that she might wake up and stumble over the precipice. That done, he clambered over the fence and ran down the hill and into the school. The ambulance got to the quarry in thirteen minutes and by the time the crew reached the flat rock, Father O'Connor, the school chaplain who had been giving a religious talk on the need for chastity in these devilish times, had clambered down with Bob Doyle and Jake Dennink the physical education teacher The priest was anointing the boy's bloodied head, hoping to speed his soul through the searing, unavoidable cleansing fires of purgatory.</p>
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<p>As it happened, Crawford Rankine was not dead. He was one of the few people who had come in contact with the man with the twitchy eyes and survived. He lost four pints of blood and had a dreadful depressed fracture in his skull. His pelvis and both elbows were shattered and needed twenty seven pins in an operation described at the time as 'pioneering'. But he was not dead.</p>
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<p>It was a surprise to the police that he woke up two days later and was able, despite his injury, to tell them what had happened, up to the point of climbing up the quarry with the man hot on his heels. After that, he could not remember anything. Neither did he know what had happened to his friend Don Whalen. He thought the man had hit him.</p>
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<p>Derek Milne ran all the way to Crawford's place, still unable to believe what had happened, that his friend had been killed in the quarry. He sneaked in through the old wooden gate, hunching down out of sight behind the trimmed privet hedge, and round to the garden hut, knowing that the teacher had got it wrong, and that the rods would be gone, and somebody else, somebody he didn't really know, would be lying dead at the bottom of the cliff.</p>
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<p>But the old Greenheart spinning rod and the even older split-cane wand were angled in the corner of the shed.</p>
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<p>By now Derek was badly frightened. He hadn't waited around to ask what had happened to Don, but if he had been with Crawford in the quarry, then he was probably hurt as well. No matter what had happened, he himself, was in big trouble, because he knew they were dodging off school to go fishing. He had condoned it. If he had stopped them, Crawford would still be alive. (And if he'd gone with them, he too could be smashed on a rock in the quarry) He went round to Don's place and hung about, scared and guilty. His friend's young sister came home after four and got the key on the string inside the letterbox. She let herself in. Don waited for an hour. Mrs Whalen came come, carrying two bags of groceries. Later, Don's father came in, hands still black from the foundry. Derek went home and his mother, who had been on the verge of calling the police, demanded to know where he'd been. It was at this point that Derek burst into real tears and he told his mother that his friend had been killed.</p>
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<p>At eight o'clock that night, Sergeant McNicol knocked on the door. The big uniformed policeman who was with him accepted a cup of tea and dwarfed Derek's father as they sat round the kitchen table, with Derek's pale face between them.</p>
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<p>Angus McNicol's face visibly brightened when he heard Derek's story. It was bad, but it could have been worse.</p>
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<p>"So the boys were going fishing and you turned back?"</p>
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<p>Derek nodded.</p>
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<p>"But they must have come back as well, taking the short cut to school," Angus prompted and the boy nodded again. "So with a bit of luck, then the other boy could still be in the quarry?"</p>
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<p>Angus slapped the boy on the shoulder. He was grinning from ear to ear because as soon as he heard a boy had gone missing, he had feared the worst. Now there was a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation. Both boys had scaled the face of the quarry. If one had fallen, it was a fair assumption that the other had been with him. He could have tumbled, fallen into a crevice and if that was true, the chances were that he'd be hurt too, but possibly still alive. Even if he was dead, McNicol thought pragmatically, it would be better for all, better for the town if he'd fallen off a cliff and died, rather than been killed by the maniac who had taken the lives of Neil Hopkirk and little Lucy Saunders. Most likely, Angus thought to himself, as he admitted many years later, Don Whalen had got such a scare, seeing his pal crash onto the rock, that he'd simply run away and was hiding somewhere, probably still in a state of shock. He'd turn up.</p>
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<p>"I've got good news, sonny," he told the pale and snivelling lad. "Young Crawford's hurt pretty sore, but he's still alive. You did the right thing not dodging school, especially with this bad fellow around the town, but I hope you've learned a lesson. You've got to stay with your mates, stay close, and don't be bunking off anywhere out of sight. This man's a nasty piece of work."</p>
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<p>"Don't worry sergeant," Derek's father said. "He certainly has learned a lesson."</p>
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<p>The police set up floodlights on the top of the quarry and angled them down, bathing the whole workings in silvery light and sending harsh shadows behind every bush and clump of ivy. The lights glistened from the damp sheen on the vertical faces. They brought the dogs in to search all over and a team of divers from the navy base came down in a big blue truck and searched all night in the narrow shafts that were filled with water. They found the carcass of a black Labrador dog that had fallen in and was now bloated with gas. At the bottom of one shaft they found a human foot, now bare bones, inside a remarkably well preserved boot and at first the police thought they had another murder hunt on their hands until it was proven to be fifty years old. It's former owner, a seventy five-year-old retired quarrier who stayed with his daughter in the far end of town, had lost it in a blasting accident just after the first world war and the foot had never been discovered until now.</p>
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<p>There was no sign at all of Don Whalen.</p>
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<p>Two days later, Crawford Rankine woke up and told the police about the man who had chased him. A tall man with dark eyes and thick black hair hanging below his collar and Hector Kelso, who was in charge of the murder hunt knew the man with the twitchy eyes had struck again.</p>
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<p>"We're looking for a body," he told the team.</p>
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<p>They did not find it for ten days.</p>
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<p>Police Superintendent Kelso, using his genius for reconstructing the scene, worked out what had happened. The door of the railway truck was wide open, letting in the bright sunlight. He'd put down folded newspapers where he wanted to put his feet, even after the place had been sampled and dusted by the forensics team. He pointed out where the boy had been knocked against the wood, and where his shoe had hit the other side, leaving a scuff of mud.</p>
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<p>"My guess is that the man came back pretty quickly," Kelso had said. "Maybe if the boy had more time, even just a couple of minutes, he'd have found the door, but I don't think he'd have opened it. But he was moving on his own all right. These prints are clean, not smeared, and you can see where he's been pushing himself along. He was hurt, but not dead. You can rely on that." Kelso looked around at the rest of them. "But I won't take any bets that he's alive now."</p>
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