We came in from the wrong side.
Jory and I left the others in the lee of a wall, with Odalys under all our spare clothes, and walked. Two kilometres of Black Rigg in the rain. Bog to the shins. Heather to the knees. The wind came flat across the top and we had to lean on it. Neither of us spoke. Jory went in front with her head down, and I followed her boots. I'd been following somebody's boots since Thursday. I didn't know how to stop.
Thrang Pot came up out of the rain as a cluster of white vans and a blue tarpaulin flapping on poles. Men in red jackets stood round the gate of the shakehole, looking down into it. Waiting for the water to fall. Abe's van was in the lay-by where he'd left it. Somebody had put a cone in front of it.
A man in a red jacket turned round and saw us. He stared. Then he said a word, and they all turned round and stared. Two women covered in clay, walking out of the moor from the side where there isn't a cave.
They ran at us. Somebody put a foil blanket on me. Somebody put a cup in my hand and I dropped it. There was shouting into radios. A Land Rover went off across the moor toward the wall. And there was a young police constable with rain dripping off his cap and a clipboard in a plastic bag.
"Sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I need details. How many of you came out?"
"Six," said Jory.
He wrote. "And went in?"
"Eight."
He looked at his clipboard. He turned a page under the plastic. "I've got nine on the Trust's list."
"Eight," said Jory, and walked past him to the van, and sat down on the step of it in the rain with her arms round her knees, and wouldn't say anything else to anybody for an hour.
Our phones were in the van, where the Trust's rule had made us leave them. The key was in the ignition. Abe always left it there. He said nobody would steal a van that smelled like that. I got mine out of the door pocket. It had forty-one messages on it. I didn't read any of them.
Abe's was in the glove box. While I stood there it lit up and buzzed against the plastic. It stopped. It lit up again. Margaret, it said. His sister. I shut the glove box on it. I sat in the passenger seat with the door open and the rain coming in on my knees, and it buzzed in there in the dark, and nobody answered it.
They brought the others in at four. I watched from the back of an ambulance, with a drip in my arm I hadn't asked for. Ilan got out of the Land Rover on his own feet and was sick on the grass. Hana came out holding Corwin's arm. They carried Odalys to the next ambulance on a proper stretcher. A red one. A woman police officer walked beside it, holding her hand. At the ambulance doors Odalys shut her eyes and turned her face up into the rain, and they lifted her in.
DS Rhona Quayle took my statement that night in Rigg Hut. The generator was working. Every light was on. A gas fire roared in the corner, and I sat in a borrowed fleece with my hair still full of clay. I'd stood in the shower for half an hour and it hadn't come out.
She was small and tidy and about my age, with a cardboard file on the table that she didn't open for the first hour. She let me talk. I told her all of it, from the stile to the boards, and she wrote it down and didn't stop me once.
"The book," she said. "Where's the book now?"
"He burned it. On the Pulpit. It didn't burn, it's that plastic paper, it just went black and shrank up and stank." I could smell it again, sitting there. Hot plastic, and my own pencil going brown.
"So there's no book."
"There was a book. I stood on the wall and wrote it."
"But there's no book," said Quayle, not unkindly, and wrote that down as well.
"And you saw him," she said, when I'd done. "After the fall."
"His face. Going up. One second. Jory saw it too."
"In Mr Fell's lamp."
"Yes."
"Which was nearly flat."
"It was flat enough," I said. "It was a face."
She wrote that down too. Then she opened the file.
I'd have known it across a room. Inquest touching the death of Milo Hart. Six years old, and somebody had put a yellow sticky note on the front with my name on it.
"I have to ask," she said. She sounded like somebody reading a gas meter. "In 2019 you told the coroner you'd rechecked your survey before Mr Hart went in."
"Is that what you want to ask?" I said.
"It's what I'll be asked about you."
I looked at the gas fire. "Do I get a biscuit, at least? Lost two men, lost my book, lost my mind?"
She didn't smile. She wrote something down, and I'd have paid money to know what it was.
The names on my sleeve were gone. I found that out at the hut that night, when I peeled the suit off before the shower. I'd written all eight of them in Hana's wax pencil up the left sleeve in the Ballroom, and the Mere and the rope and the rain on the moor had had them off it. There was a grey smudge by the elbow that might have been the P of Pim.
Ilan was waiting in the corridor when I came out of the bathroom, in his socks, with two mugs of tea. He gave me one. He'd been crying again, or he'd not stopped.
"I want to say something," he said. "You're not mad. I want that said. You never were."
"He told me he was married to her, Ilan. Nine years."
"Yes." He looked into his tea. "And then you heard him fall. We all did."
"I heard a bag."
He didn't argue. He put his hand on my arm, quick, kind, the way he'd checked my pupils in the Pantry, and went off down the corridor in his socks. He'd forgotten his own tea. I drank it as well.
On Wednesday, Quayle drove me up to Skell Pot. There was blue tape round it now, and scaffold boards going down into the black.
"The club says it's their old dig," she said. "Choked for forty years. They say somebody's broken through."
"Somebody has."
"Yes," she said. "Somebody has."
She didn't say anything after it. We stood in the rain and looked at the hole.
On Wednesday night I took Corwin's car keys off the hook in the hut and drove to the infirmary.
I was going to shout at her. I'd decided that on the moor road. I bought grapes in the shop by the lifts, because you take grapes, and I stood in the lift with them and practised the shouting under my breath, and the man next to me moved along.
She had a side room at the end of the ward. The door was open. Her leg was up on two pillows inside a metal frame, with rods going in through the skin above and below the ankle and the skin round each one painted brown. There was a drip in the back of her hand and a jug of water on the locker. The blind was up. She was looking at the window, where the rain was running down the black glass.
"They pinned it," said Odalys. She didn't turn her head. "Six pins. Sit down if you're stopping."
I sat. I put the grapes on the blanket. Then I took them back and ate one, because my hands wanted a job.
"He's alive," I said.
"They had divers in the aven foot this morning," said Odalys. "It sumps on past where they could follow. Twenty metres. More. Nobody's surveyed it."
"You know what I mean."
She watched the rain.
"You said it on the rope," I said. "'Go ahead, love.' Same as the hut. Same breath. I heard you."
"I said a lot in that bag," said Odalys. "Ask Ilan. I talked to the dark for three days."
"He's got a trial. Four weeks. Fraud."
"Adjourned," said Odalys.
"Sixty pensioners," I said. "They gave him their deposits for bungalows, and he never built them."
"Sixty-three." She said it like a depth off a stick. "They were bungalows. Nobody died of a bungalow."
I'd had a grape in my mouth. I took it out and put it back in the bag. I don't know why I did that.
"And a policy," I said. "He told me. A trial and a policy. At the top, before he—" I couldn't find a word for what he'd done that wasn't the word they were all using. "Before."
"Rain's going off," said Odalys, to the window. "The Rigg'll drain by Friday. The Mere last. They'll have Abe out on Friday."
"Pim was twenty-six."
Her hand on the blanket went flat. That was all it did.
"I'll swear to eight," I said. "At the inquest. Hand on the book."
She turned her head then, for the first time. She didn't look at my face. She looked at about my collarbone, as if she were checking a wall for the tide mark.
"Then you're on your own," said Odalys. "The Trust's list says nine. The controller's log says nine. Hana. Ilan. Corwin. Me. That's six."
"Jory says eight."
"Jory's your sister. They'll weigh her like one." She moved her drip hand an inch on the blanket, to ease the tape. "And they'll read you your own words. Milo Hart's inquest. 'I went back over the loop, and I was satisfied with it.'"
My ears went hot. I could feel it, both of them, like I'd been slapped on each side.
"Who told you that?" I said.
"It's on the record," said Odalys. "Anybody can read a record."
I stood up. I picked the grapes up off the blanket, because they were mine and I'd paid for them.
"What time is it?" said Odalys.
I looked at my phone. "Ten to nine."
"Shut the door when you go."
I shut it.
Hana and Corwin gave their statements on Thursday morning, in Skipton, and came back to the hut at dinnertime. I was at the kitchen table with a cold tea. Hana sat down across from me with her coat still on. Corwin stood in the doorway, and then didn't.
"I told her," said Hana. "Now I'm telling you. Wednesday at the hut, before the lights went, Abe had us round this table. You were in the bunkroom with your boots on. He said, 'Teo came up with the Derbyshire lot. Don't bring it up with Sabine, let me tell her.' So we didn't."
"Then the generator went," said Corwin. He cleared his throat. "And somebody said, 'Teo's gone ahead.' So he'd gone on. With the gear. That's what we, um. That's what we all heard."
"Then it was two camps," said Hana. "Two nights. We thought he was with Abe's lot. Abe's lot thought he was with us. I packed for nine, so there were nine."
"And then you said you didn't know him," said Corwin. "In the Pantry. And we all thought, well. Milo. She can't." He was looking at the lino. "We thought we were being kind."
Hana got up and put the kettle on.
Quayle told me the rest that afternoon, in her car in the lay-by at Thrang Pot with the wipers going.
Hana had said: "He was there. I fed him."
Ilan had said: "I heard him fall."
Corwin had said: "I don't know what I saw."
His wife had said a great deal, Quayle said, most of it through crying, and all of it the same. Nine went in. He was with them from the start. At the end he helped them up the shaft and went over the edge in the dark.
"She's a very clear witness," Quayle said. "Considering."
"And Jory?"
"Your sister said eight," said Quayle. "She said it four times. I asked her if she wanted to say anything else, and she said eight."
The water dropped on Thursday. The divers went in through Thrang Pot at first light and found Pim that afternoon, at the bottom of the Toll pool, under the buttress, with the battery bag still on his back.
They found Abe on Friday, when the Mere fell, wedged in the outlet choke. Jory went to see him. I didn't. I sat in her car in the car park. A man in a hi-vis jacket was dragging a wheelie bin up a ramp and back again, over and over, as if he'd been told to and couldn't find anyone to tell him to stop.
Jory came out after forty minutes. She got into the driver's seat and put her hands on the wheel at ten to two, the way Dad taught us. She didn't start the engine.
"He's got a cut on his forehead," she said. "Here." She touched her own hairline. "That's all. You'd think he'd fallen off a ladder."
"Jory."
"I'm fine." She started the car. Then she turned it off again. She sat there with her hands on the wheel and cried with her mouth shut, not making any noise at all, looking straight ahead at the man and his wheelie bin. I kept my hands to myself. She'd have hated it. After a while she started the car again and drove us home.
On the Saturday Quayle laid the official account out for me, so I'd know what I was up against. It had come together that week like a puddle does. From all sides. Nobody pouring it.
He went in with the party. He survived the Toll and nobody knew. He sheltered high, confused by the same bad air that had dropped an experienced doctor. He helped with the last haul, and he fell into the flooded foot of the aven in the dark, and three of the party heard him go. One witness says she saw his face afterwards, for a second, in a failing lamp. A second witness, held on a ledge most of a night without food or light, agrees.
"The divers brought up the red bag," I said. "There was a rock in it."
"There's a rock in most things down there," said Quayle. "I've written it down. On its own I can't make it mean anything."
"He told me. A trial. A policy."
"Fraud have been told. They'd want a sighting or a body. They've neither."
"Pim," I said. "Abe."
"Misadventure, I'd expect. Both of them." She turned a page. "They had the old rope off the Mere wall yesterday. The sheath had worn through at the flake lip. A rub point, not a blade."
My thumb went over my fingertips.
Abe's horses were standing at the gate when Jory and I drove up on the Sunday.
Two of them, an old bay and a grey, side by side. Rain ran off their backs. Their heads hung over the top bar. The lad from the next farm was feeding them. He said they'd stood at the gate since the Thursday and he couldn't shift them.
I got out of the car and went over. The grey put its nose in my chest and blew. Its breath was warm and smelled of hay. It pushed, and I let it push me, my boots sliding in the mud.
"I'm going to say eight," I said. "At the inquest. Under oath."
Jory came and stood beside me. She put her hand on the bay's neck, and kept it there.
"They'll ask you about the other one," she said. "Milo's. What you said."
"I know."
"They'll have it on a bit of paper. Your own words. They'll read it out."
"I know what they'll read out. I know what I'll say back."
She didn't ask what. She knew me. She stood with her hand on the horse and the rain coming down on both of us. After a while she said, "Then I'll say eight after you."
"You've said it already. Four times."
"I'll say it again. I'll say it till they're sick of it."
The grey blew on me again. The lad from the next farm went past behind us with an empty bucket and didn't say anything.
The letter from the coroner's office came on the Tuesday, a week after we'd come up out of the ground. It was very polite. It said the inquest would open in February, at Northallerton, and that I would be called.