The Loner, page 19
“They may be thieves, Mark; but to do what they did – stop and rob a whole train and escape with the loot – I can’t help admiring them for the cheek of it, and their luck.”
“And their organisation! The army couldn’t have planned it better!” Pablo added, returning with the drinks.
“I-I think it’s wrong to glorify a-and a-a-admire thieves,”
“Oh, come on Mark!” Bob remarked provocatively. “Why shouldn’t I admire clever robbers? Besides, think of all the other rogues who make money out of innocent people for nowt, confidence tricksters like estate agents and solicitors who do conveyancing, for instance. Aren’t they just as bad? The only difference is that they’re legal, and robbers aren’t!”
“Conveyancing i-is a r-responsible job.”
“Oh aye! That’s what all lawyers say,”
Dave decided to change the subject. He unfolded a newspaper he had brought with him. “See this,” he said. “Walton Gaol is in the headlines again.”
“I didn’t realise they’d got a train robber there,” Bob said, studying the paper.
“Nor did I,” Dave continued. “Now read on. You see, the Home Secretary’s getting quite worried about security. So they’ve locked the poor fellow up in the maximum security wing.” Dave mischievously emphasised the word “poor” just to make sure Mark heard it. Mark made no comment, but listened intently while the other continued: “And to make sure he doesn’t escape, the Home Secretary has told the House of Commons he’s had floodlights installed, and guard dogs put on patrol at night.”
Pablo took a sip of his beer, looked up, and remarked sarcastically: “A likely story!”
“What do you mean?” Sue asked, determined to join in the discussion.
“Install floodlights just like that!” He snapped his fingers abruptly. “He’s got to be joking! Government never works that fast. Too much red tape!”
By now, the seats round about them were being filled by other cavers. Dave decided to call the meeting to order.
“Well folks,” he began. “Haven’t we got a business item to discuss tonight – and it’s not about caving either. Next week’s Panto Week. Are we going to do anything for it this year? Do you want me to see if I can get us a place in the procession?”
Mark reflected on Panto Week. It was a week of student festivity, organised around a fleet of carnival floats and a vulgar magazine called Pantosphinx. It was a way of raising money for charity, and the sale of Pantosphinx provided most of the revenue. Compiled of a varied assortment of jokes ranging from the Irish dimension to details of the female anatomy, it was designed to assure the ordinary citizen that the morale of the student body was high, and that they really did care for charity – even if it also gave the misleading impression that the students were more interested in procreation than in their examinations!
Pablo shook his head at the suggestion of the hire of a float. “Too expensive,” he said.
“Then are there any other suggestions?”
“We could camp out by St.George’s Hall.”
“That’s been tried before.”
“How about a joke?” Bob suggested. “What kind of a joke?”
“Well, we’ve heard lots of stories, haven’t we? Wasn’t there the occasion students dressed up as corporation workmen, and diverted traffic in the town centre? It was hours before the police found out what was going on!”
Someone said he was not happy with getting into trouble with the Law. So the idea was dropped.
“Well then, how about something really silly? Say, organising a hundred students to pull a long rope, as if we were heaving a really heavy load – something as heavy as a gun carriage – but instead, at end of the rope, there’s just a thin piece of string – with a dinky car!”
“Sounds good, Bob, but where are we going to find a hundred students? There are only thirty of us.”
“We could rope in some of our friends!”
Pablo suddenly began to show more interest. “I’ve a better idea,” he said. “We’ll have to keep it a close secret between a few of us – else it could go badly wrong. Let me have a private discussion with you, Bob, and Dave only. The rest of you won’t mind, will you?”
Dave and Bob said they would consider this request when they knew what Pablo was going to suggest. The three retired from the gathering to good natured shouts of “Elitists” and “Snobs"!
“All right, be like that,” Paul exclaimed. “Antisocial! I don’t care; I’ll just get another drink!”
Pablo called back: “Hey, Paul, what about a pint for me? You were in my round, weren’t you?”
Paul waved his hand negatively. “You’re not in my round if you’re going to have your own private conversation,” he rejoined carelessly.
So for a while, the club divided into two distinct groups. Occasionally the larger crowd joked at the expense of the planners, and hurled witty abuse at them. The planners took no notice and were obviously enthralled at some mysterious idea, which made them roar with laughter at some moments and the others wish to share the joke. Once someone crept close, Bob spotted him and emptied the contents of his glass down the unfortunate spy’s neck. No-one found out what the plan was, and after about a quarter of an hour, Bob, Pablo, and Dave rejoined their friends. Pablo was relieved to find Paul waiting for him with another pint.
Susan was no less keen than the others to find out what the secret was, when Bob rejoined her. “Come on, lover boy,” she said. “What were you laughing about?”
“I can’t say. It’s a secret.”
Susan slowly and deliberately took the broach off her jerkin. “All right, be like that,” she said. “You can take this back too!”
“Oh no Sue! It’s yours.”
“If you want to keep the secrets of your scruffy friends from me, I’ll find someone else to go with, Bob.”
“They’re not scruffy.”
“Yes they are – a gang of uncouth youths in tatty jeans with a naive sense of humour!”
“You’re much too respectable, Sue. They’re spoiling you in that office of yours.”
“Perhaps – you could be right, Bob, but I’d still like to know...”
“All right then; if I whisper it to you, will you promise not to tell anyone? It could ruin everything if you did.”
“Promise? What do you take me for, Bob? Don’t you trust me?”
Bob whispered something in her ear. Her eyes opened wide with astonishment. The broach slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. “No!” she cried. “You mustn’t do it Bob! You’ll get yourself into such awful trouble if you’re caught.”
Bob picked up his guitar and started singing as the girl retrieved the broach; the others joined in in their usual boisterous way, and soon the potholers were in full and loud competition with the rugby club.
Mark found himself sitting next to Bob as the singing subsided.
“Are you coming with us down Bar Pot, next week?’Bob asked.
“What’s Bar Pot?”
“It’s an entrance to the Gaping Gill system. It leads to a huge chamber; it’s very impressive – two hundred feet high, five hundred feet long. York Minster could fit inside it, and it has Britain’s biggest waterfall plunging into it down an open shaft from the surface.”
Mark was impressed. “I’d like to see that,” he said.
“You’re welcome to come, Mark. I should warn you, though: to get to Main Chamber, you have to climb two pitches – a thirty five footer, and a hundred footer.”
Mark looked distinctly unhappy.
“They are easy climbs,” Bob continued.
“I’d like to see the chamber.”
“Well, come with us then.”
Bob left his friends to buy some drinks. He met Pablo at the bar and told him Mark would be going on the Bar Pot meet.
“Why ever did you ask him?” Pablo asked, with a gasp of dismay.
“It’s a beginners’ trip, Pablo. There’s plenty of room for lifelining if he needs a tight rope. So he’ll be quite safe. Let’s give him a chance; he’ll either make the grade, or he’ll get completely pissed off!”
Bob Smith could not have been more wrong.
It was the Friday of Panto Week at the Helwith Bridge Pub in the Yorkshire Dales. The Bar Pot meet was the next day. There was a bar and a lounge with a cold and draughty conservatory. A curious licensing arrangement was in force, whereby drinking hours were extended to midnight for those in the lounge, provided pies or pasties with mushy peas were also consumed on the premises. It was past eleven, and the Liverpool cavers were sitting in the conservatory, eating their pasties and peas and sipping their beer. Bob’s guitar rested idly against a wall. They had pitched their tents in a field owned by the pub by the River Ribble. Saturday was the Bar Pot meet.
Quite suddenly there was a flurry of activity, as Pablo came bursting through the lounge waving a newspaper. He was flushed with excitement, as he showed it to Bob and pointed proudly to the headlines. A beam of great satisfaction spread over Bob’s face. Others looked at the headlines and roared with laughter. The whole club was exhilarated.
Mark was on the edge of this exuberant gathering and asked someone what they were laughing at, but no-one seemed the least interested in answering his question. Eventually, he managed to squeeze into the middle of the crowd and catch sight of the newspaper. He saw somewhere the words: “Walton Gaol,” and then, immediately below the headline, a picture of a dark and dirty wall. It was the wall inside the prison. On the wall, painted in clearly legible large white capital letters, were the words: “PANTOSPHINX.’
Mark laughed. It was a good joke. “Does anyone know w-who did it?” he asked.
No-one answered, but they all continued to laugh and applaud as if he had not been there. So Mark asked a second time – and a third time.
At last Bob could withhold the truth no longer. “If I tell you,” he enquired, “will you promise never to tell anyone else?”
Mark promised.
“Well, we did it”
Mark was amazed. His jaw dropped and his mouth hung open. Then his eyes shone with admiration.
The excitement was beginning to fade. So Paul, who had clearly had no part in the escapade, asked Bob to recount how they had entered the prison. But it was Pablo who took up the story.
“It was simple really,” he explained. “You see, some of the houses outside t’prison are built against t’prison wall. So, last Wednesday night, Dave, Bob, and myself got up onto the roof of one of these houses. We took a potholing ladder with us and a can of paint.
“We waited quite some time. There were supposed to be guard dogs on patrol, but we saw none! They said that search lights had been installed, but we saw no sign of owt! We didn’t see any electric or barbed wire either. The place looked as though it hadn’t changed since the days of Queen Victoria.
“So we put t’ladder over wall. We waited a bit – just to be sure; but still we heard nowt. So I said to Dave: ‘Dave, you’re the president of the club. The glory of going down ladder first is yours!’
“No fear!” said Dave. “I prefer the known routes down the known caves. You’ve always been the hard man – in that all-weather tee-shirt of yours. You’re the best man for this distinction! The honour is yours!”
“And so we sat on roof debating who should go down into the prison. We carried on like this for quite a while, and did our best to persuade each other, while we found excuses for ourselves.
“Well, Bob got impatient and told us that, if we carried on arguing, we’d still be there at dawn, and the longer we stayed, the more likely we’d be caught. So we persuaded Bob to lead the way. So he went down t’ladder, and applied paint, while Dave and I kept watch.”
Bob Smith nodded his head sagely. “That’s right,” he said with a mocking grin. “Nobody else came down ladder. You’d both lost your bottle!”
“Anyway,” Pablo continued, without paying any attention to this interruption, “Dave went to the nearest telephone box and called the national press. I don’t know how the photographer got that picture, but he probably got to wall we’d painted before t’prison authorities had even noticed it. Walton Gaol was supposed to have all the latest top security gadgets. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there’ll be questions in Parliament!”
Pablo concluded his narration. Someone bought a round of beer to celebrate. It was now past the midnight closing hour, but it was a country pub, and the landlady was not very strict about taking last orders.
Suddenly there was a loud knock on the front door. Someone opened it, and the instant the new round had reached the conservatory, a uniformed gentleman stood framed in the lounge door, carefully and slowly scrutinising everyone in sight. He was no ordinary constable; he wore a flat hat and the markings of a rank which certainly exceeded that of sergeant.
The patrons of The Helwith Bridge did their best to act cool and show no surprise. Those who were not closest to the door, surreptitiously hid their glasses (if they were full) under the table.
Mark could not help notice the usually ruddy faces of his three heroes turn white. Bob was lucky; his chair faced away from the door. Dave and Pablo turned their faces away from the policeman, as if this was the most natural thing to do. The conversation died away.
The policeman completed his scrutiny of the room. He raised his voice and announced his reason for being there: “Have any of you lads seen a young lad called Smith?”
Bob froze and looked as though he wished he’d never been borne. Susan looked as though she was about to cry.
“His name’s John Smith. He comes from Bradford, and he’s missing.”
Bob blinked. He slumped forward, as if he was about to faint. Sue could hardly believe Bob and his friends had escaped so easily. There was silence and a general shaking of heads.
“Well, thank you very much then,” the policeman said politely. Then, to show he wasn’t taken in, he added: “I won’t keep you any longer, lads, but I have one more duty to perform.”
Bob froze again, wondering if he was in danger of imminent arrest.
The policeman continued. “I have an important announcement to make, lads; you can take your glasses out from under the table now.”
And, with that, he was gone. Sue burst into fits of tears and hysterical laughter. As the policeman’s car disappeared, the Liverpool cavers gave a loud cheer.
The storming of Walton Gaol had made Mark more determined than ever that the club should be his friends. But, as he turned into his sleeping bag that night, he could think only of the coming ordeal. He fell into a fitful sleep. He dreamed of policemen, pubs, and prisons. Then he was in a tunnel – a vertical tunnel – and he was falling in slow motion down the shaft. The shaft seemed to have no floor – to go on for ever, while Dr. Fortune stood over him, a cruel smile on his face, wielding a savage hypodermic needle, and repeating endlessly: “About one third of my patients get better; one third get worse, and one third stay the same. I’m going to prescribe some tablets... You need to grow up, Mark... You need an injection.” Then an army of tramps, led by a man carrying the eagle standard of a Roman legion and the crested helmet of a Greek soldier, crossed the road in front of him and marched into the William Brown library. But he was still falling, and he could see no light at the end of the tunnel, and the police inspector was summoning Robert Smith for trespass on government property.
The following morning, the Liverpool cavers arrived at Clapham, a village near Ingleton, in the same ancient and battered van they had hired on other occasions. As the cave was known to be spectacular, it was a large party that got out of the van and began to change on the roadside. There were Bob, Pablo, Dave, and Mark and five others. Sue was the only girl.
After changing and putting on their helmets and lights, they set off along the road until they came to a sign advertising, at a very modest fee, entry to a lake and grounds, as well as to the scenic track leading to the famous Ingleborough Show Cave.
They avoided this route and the inevitable fee, and instead, followed a farmtrack – a rutted boggy mark in the hillside; it passed through the open fields, rising and falling as it crossed the contours, while only slowly approaching the plateau behind the summit of Ingleborough. Mark saw it was the same plateau as the one he had crossed to get to Sunset Hole, but that they were on the opposite side of Ingleborough.
The task of carrying the tackle was well shared. Mark was glad that, as there were so many of them, he was one of the party who had nothing to carry. He noticed that some were carrying strange metal boxes with handles, which were slung from their shoulders on rope straps. Bob had one, and Mark asked him what it was for.
“It’s an ex-army ammo-box,” Bob explained. “It’s got a rubber seal to keep out the water, and I’ve wrapped up my camera in a towel and put it inside so it won’t get bashed about or damaged by damp.”
At length, after more than an hour’s walk, they passed a farmhouse and reached the open fell. Although it was mid-winter, the Sun shone brightly through the frozen air and provided a splendid view over the barren moorland and its dry stone walls.
They found the cave entrance. Mark looked down it.
It was a rocky depression with a scree run that sloped steeply to the bottom of a low cliff, where the opening into the cave was hidden behind a large boulder. An old stunted tree was perched at the top of the cliff immediately above the boulder. Many of its roots were exposed, and it looked as though it was clinging desperately by the tips of these sinewy fingers to the scanty soil, while its winding naked branches sought the protection of Heaven.
They dropped the tackle in a heap at the top of the depression. Then Dave suggested they had a look at Gaping Gill. So they walked a short distance across the fell, until they came to the sink of Fell Beck. Mark peered forward and shrank back as he looked into the sink, being moved by mixed impulses of fascination and fear. The Fell Beck seemed to be the biggest of the streams flowing down Ingleborough. It descended into a steep low and winding gully with several tributaries. The lowest point of the gully was the sink. The gully opened into an enormous crater, about fifty feet across. At the bottom of the crater there was a hole and a vertical natural shaft. The beck disappeared into this with the thunderous roar of a tremendous waterfall.
