She heard splashing. ‘I’m going to take the light off you now, okay? But I’m not going anywhere. I’m just trying to find my way down to you.’
‘Okay!’ he shouted back.
And slowly, slipping on rocks and banging both hip and head twice, she managed to find a route that took her down to the water’s edge.
‘Here, Cam, swim towards me.’ She shone the light to show him the way. She would have gone into the water herself, but she wasn’t sure that they’d both be able to make it out. There was still a drop from the edge she’d found into the water, and it was black and as slippery as glass. But he swam to her, and then he reached for her, and she was able to hook her right foot under a rock and to lean over the edge, to grasp his wrists, and to pull him out. She hugged him tight as soon as she had him, and he hugged her back, shivering, and they held on to each other for a long moment, both of them glad to be alive.
‘Why did you do it?’ Judith asked.
‘She would have killed me,’ he said, his voice muffled as it was pressed against her shoulder. ‘She wanted to kill me. She told me that. I think she only waited because she wanted you to watch.’
Judith hugged him tighter. Her leg throbbed. With the fear and the adrenaline, the pain from the bullet wound had receded. Now it was back. She took off her jacket and wrapped it around him.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said. She let Cameron go. She got to her feet, and he did too. ‘It’s a tricky climb back up,’ she said. ‘But we can do it.’
‘I know we can.’ Cameron was shivering, but he sounded eager.
‘I’ll shine the torch for you, you climb a section. Then I’ll hand it up to you and you do the same for me. We do one small section at a time. That way we don’t make any mistakes. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
They started to climb. As blood soaked through the leg of Judith’s pants, they made their way carefully upwards. It was much slower going up than it had been going down.
‘My dad,’ Cameron said. ‘He’s going to be okay now, isn’t he? Celine did it all. Right? She was the one. So now they really will have to let him go. Everything’s going to be okay.’ He sounded giddy.
‘That’s right, Cam. That’s exactly right. Everything’s going to be okay.’
They reached the top, the ledge that lay at the beginning of the tunnel that led the way out. Judith hesitated. The tunnel had a sand floor and might very well flood when the tide rose, but that elevated ledge should be safe. She’d hit Ruth Hall very hard. Ruth needed medical attention. Could she survive here, on that ledge, until the tide receded again and paramedics and cops could reach her, if they couldn’t get there quickly?
‘Just give me one second,’ Judith said. She didn’t think she could carry Ruth out. She definitely couldn’t carry her up those steps, but she would check on her, make sure she was breathing, put her in the recovery position, and then they would go. That was the right thing to do, which meant it was the only thing to do.
She hurried back up the narrow ledge path, to where she had left Ruth handcuffed. But Ruth was gone. There was no body, Just a small pool of dark blood.
Quickly Judith shone her torch to where she’d slid Steve Gifford’s gun, and felt a lurch of relief when she located it. She picked it up. One last time, she shone the torch around. In the corner, deep in the shadows, she saw a small pile of rucksacks and a backpack, damp and rotting. She froze for a moment, the horror of what she was seeing striking her hard, the realisation of what had happened here truly hitting her for the first time. She forced herself to move. Wondered briefly if there was another, easier way out that Ruth had taken. She couldn’t take the risk of looking for it. There were too many little nooks and crannies. Too many tunnels to be investigated. They could get lost here, or get caught by the rising tide. And she had a boy to get home safely to his father.
It was time to go.
She made her way back to Cameron. He grabbed her arm as soon as she got close enough, clutched it and held on tight. She shouldn’t have left him. He had no light, no weapon and he was ten years old. She handed him the torch.
‘You hold on to that with your left hand,’ she said. ’And you hold on to me with your right. Got it?’
He took the torch and nodded seriously. Judith took his hand. With her right, she still held the gun. Just in case.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ she said.
As she limped from the cave, hand in hand with Cameron Miller, the tears for Katy finally came.
Epilogue
Katy survived.
Judith, who had no great faith in a higher power, thought it must be some kind of miracle, though she later learned that Katy wasn’t the first to fall beneath the wheels of a train and walk away.
Well, not walk away.
What saved her was that she fellbetweenthe tracks. She hit her head in the fall, and she’d been unconscious when the train had gone over her. The wheels hadn’t touched her, but parts of the train undercarriage hung too low for Katy to come out unscathed. She had suffered a fractured skull and three fractured ribs, lacerations to her chest that required one hundred and twenty stiches to close, and a ruptured spleen. It had taken only fourteen minutes for the emergency teams to converge on the station, but it was another twenty-two minutes before they’d managed to get her out from under the train.
She’d been so close to death. In the hospital, they’d stabilised her and sent her up to surgery, where her spleen was removed and her lacerations closed. The doctors said her chances of survival were low. But after forty-eight hours in the ICU, the same doctors decided she was well enough to be moved to the ward, and ten days after Katy was carried into the hospital, she was wheeled out of it and sent home.