Gone Read Free Page B

for my wall.’

3
    The cement works in the Mendip Hills hadn’t been used for sixteen years and the owners had installed a security gate to stop people coming in and joyriding round the flooded quarry. Flea Marley left her car about a hundred yards from the gates on the edge of the track among some gorse. She broke off a couple of branches from a nearby tree and placed them so that the car would be hidden from the main road. No one ever came down here but it didn’t hurt to be cautious.
    It had been cold all day. Grey clouds off the Atlantic blanketed the sky. It was windy too, so Flea wore a cagoule and a beanie. The chalk bag and the bundle of climber’s cams, the knee and elbow pads were in the rucksack on her back. Her Boreal ‘sticky’ boots at a glance could look like hiking boots. If she encountered anyone she was a walker, strayed off the footpath.
    She squeezed herself through a gap in the perimeter fence and went down the track. The weather was getting worse. By the time she got to the water’s edge a squall had come up. Under the white cloud canopy, smaller, darker clouds stuttered along in regular squadrons: fast as flocks of birds. No one would be out on a day like this. She kept her head down anyway and walked fast.
    The rock face was on the far side, out of sight of the quarry. She paused at the bottom and gave a last glance over her shoulder to check she was alone and ducked behind the rock. She found the place she wanted, dropped her rucksack and pulled out the fewthings she wanted. The key was speed and determination. Don’t think, just do. Get it over with.
    She rammed the first cam into the limestone. Her father, long dead now, had been an all-round adventurer. A
Boy’s Own
hero – a diver, a caver, a climber. The adventure thing had rubbed off on her, but the climbing part had never come second nature. She wasn’t like one of the climbing dudes who could do pull-ups on two fingers. This limestone was supposed to be easy to climb, with its vertical and horizontal cracks, but she found it a bastard – always got her hands in the wrong places – and now the crevices were full of the congealed chalk she’d used in the past. As she climbed she paused every few feet to rake the handfuls of white muck out of the fissures. Leaving tracks didn’t work. Ever.
    Flea was small, but she was as strong as a monkey. When you lived a life where you never knew what was coming round the corner at you, it paid to keep yourself hard so she worked out every day. At least two hours. Jogged, lifted weights. She was at her peak. In spite of her lousy climbing technique, the scramble up the rock took less than ten minutes. She wasn’t even breathing hard when she reached the top.
    This high up the wind howled around and flattened the cagoule against her frame. It whipped her hair into her eyes. She dug in her fingers, turned her head and looked back down into the rainswept valley. Most of the rock was hidden except for this small section, which could, if her luck was really out, be seen by passing motorists. But the road was virtually empty: just one or two cars going by with their headlights and wipers on. Even so, she kept herself tight against the rock, making sure she presented less of a profile.
    She dug her toes in, shifted her torso slightly to the left until she found the place, then gripped the scrappy roots of a gorse bush in both hands and wrenched them apart. She hesitated for a moment, not wanting to do it. Then she pushed her face in. Took a deep breath. Held it. Tasted it.
    She let out the air with a long, hoarse cough, let go of thebushes, turned away and pressed the back of her hand to her nose, her chest heaving.
    The corpse was still there. She could smell it. The bitter, gagging stench of decay told her all she needed to know. Overwhelming, but it was weaker than it had been. Fainter, which meant the body was doing what it should. During the summer the smell had been bad, really bad. There had