Crow Stone. Jenni Mills
Fine.’
‘Don’t know what we’d do without him.’ Brendan gives Gary a friendly, masculine biff on the shoulder. ‘He’s the only one of us who comes from these parts, and worked in the quarries over Corsham way. Mind, I like to think I know a thing or two about limestone myself …’
‘Of course,’ I say, brain at last heaving back into action. ‘Didn’t you work on the Gilmerton collapse?’
He looks relieved. The woman isn’t a fluffhead, after all. ‘With Roy Bailey. He speaks very highly of you.’
He wouldn’t if he could see the way I’m behaving this afternoon.
‘I heard it was Roy who worked out the collapse wasn’t going to stop at Ferniehill.’
‘Let’s just hope nothing like that happens here,’ says Brendan. He has soft toffee-coloured eyes that are good at looking concerned. ‘There are six hundred homes on top of this lot.’
Gilmerton’s notorious. It was an old limestone mine like this one, under some sixties-built housing estates to the south of Edinburgh. One chilly November morning the residents of Ferniehill began to notice cracks in their cosy little bungalows. Within a few days it became apparent that the whole street was sinking slowly into the ground. The council had to evacuate about five hundred people, and knock down a load of houses and flats.
‘Scary,’ I say.
‘Especially if you’re underground when it happens.’
‘Nobody was, though, at Gilmerton?’
‘Only one fatality. A goldfish that one of the evacuating families left outside in a bucket of water. Froze solid.’
Gary and I both laugh. But I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor old goldfish.
‘Anyway,’ says Brendan smugly, ‘we should be safe as houses with my hi-tech canaries.’
One of the purposes of this meeting is to assess how the new type of underground alarm system Brendan’s installing here is working out. A network of ground-movement monitors is supposed to send back messages based on microseismic analysis, the tiniest movements in the rock that can warn of an imminent collapse. Gary hasn’t so much as frowned but I can tell by his suddenly bland, polite expression that he isn’t entirely convinced.
‘Roy said when he first phoned you about this job you weren’t very keen on taking it,’ says Brendan, soft toffee eyes suddenly not so soft and boring into me like drill bits. ‘What changed your mind?’
‘The money, of course.’
Brendan grins. ‘I like a woman with a sense of humour. And not superstitious, I see.’
‘Superstitious?’
‘Starting a job on a Friday. Maybe that only means something north of the border. Miners in Lanarkshire where I grew up would never start a new stope on a Friday.’
The raven swoops across the clearing and lands in a clatter of wings. Miners won’t go underground if they see a bird at the entrance of the mine: it heralds a collapse.
‘I’m not superstitious,’ I say. As if to prove me wrong, there’s a flash of colour at the corner of my eye, making me jump. On the other side of the room, someone has just Power-Pointed a map of the workings on to the screen. It looks as complicated as the London tube map, in nearly as many colours; the tunnels go on and on, riddling the whole hillside. Brendan catches my shock, and misinterprets it.
‘And these are just the ones we know about,’ he says. ‘Could be lots more. This area’s been quarried since Roman times.’
The consultant is checking that the mouse works; the pointer spirals indecisively then begins to creep across the map from north-west to south-east. My heart has started to race and my chest feels tight. Crow Stone …
‘And we’re going to fill the lot?’ I say, desperate to say anything, needing to distract myself, just as everybody else stops talking. It’s come out all wrong: ditzy, as if I haven’t done my homework.
Everybody laughs. As we all sit down and Brendan begins the introductions, I can still see amusement in their eyes. I want to believe it was a kind laugh, but maybe it wasn’t, because I should know as well as they do that ahead of us are years of constructing steel frames and pumping concrete, until the underground voids are solid and stable.
Bury them and all the secrets they hold, for ever, ever, ever …
One of the consultants–I missed his name, worrying about what a tit I’m making of myself–has launched into the main business of the afternoon. The project is a collaboration between a number of different partners. This guy’s from Garamond, the engineering firm who devised the overall strategy; Brendan’s site team, including me, work for RockDek, a mining company sub-contracted to carry out the stabilization. The wall-screen now shows a street plan of Green Down superimposed on the underground map.
‘Weight restrictions on the main road and into Stonefield Avenue?’ says Brendan. The seventies moustache droops with disapproval. ‘That’s going to mean diverting the bus route. We’ve got another public meeting in a couple of weeks’ time, and nobody’s going to be happy when we tell them they’re going to have to walk an extra half a mile to the bus stop. Or they can’t have their new cooker delivered because we won’t allow big lorries down the high street. Are you saying the risk of the quarries collapsing is greater than you previously thought?’
Brendan and Gary, I’ve noticed, are the only ones to refer punctiliously to the underground workings as quarries. Everyone else calls them mines, though technically, they’re not. From what I remember hearing of Brendan that would be typical: he has the reputation of being a manager who thinks detail is important. That’s why people employ him. He has one of the best safety records in the business, even when he worked abroad, where sometimes hazard assessment is not so much relaxed as non-existent.
‘The load limit’s just a precaution,’ says the consultant. ‘Factoring in new thinking about possible frost damage. Anyway, I heard you had a bit of a panic last week when some of the alarms registered movement in the rock.’
‘We’re getting a lot of false positives on the geophones,’ says Gary. ‘The alarms would be going off all the time if we didn’t set the threshold artificially high.’
‘Then what’s the point of the system?’ asks the consultant.
‘Trouble is, we’re so close to the surface that every time a woman with a pram walks over the top, it trips the sensors. I’m exaggerating but …’
‘You’re exaggerating,’ says Brendan, with the calm but slightly desperate tone of one who knows he is right and everyone else is wrong. ‘We’ll see the benefits when the full network’s in place. Of course there are teething troubles before we calibrate the system.’
‘Mrs Parry?’ says the consultant. ‘You’ve worked with these alarm systems before?’
‘They’re not very common in this country,’ I say, with the unnerving sense that this is another test I’m going to fail. ‘This one’s from Australia, isn’t it?’
‘Where it goes off every time a fucking kangaroo hops along,’ mutters someone else. Brendan shoots Gary a look.
‘Brendan’s right,’ Gary says, Mr Loyalty. ‘Teething troubles, that’s all. It could save lives in the long run, and that’s got to be worth it.’
Rupert pipes up irrelevantly, in his high, sharp voice, complaining about the possibility of constant alarms disturbing the bats while they hibernate. The warm room is making me dozy, and my eyes drift towards the darkening window overlooking the recreation ground. The little footballers must be having trouble seeing the ball by now. Their running feet thump on a thin crust of soil, beneath which is a honeycomb of galleries and pillars, muddy underground trackways the quarrymen