The Sluice

We did not go onto the bog that night. It was the one thing Ronan Varley did in the whole of that fortnight that I did not understand at the time and that I have since thought about with enormous respect, and it saved the lives of two of the four people standing in that office.

Deputy Marshal Ozer wanted to go. She had a prisoner at large, an abduction, a homicide, a woman in chains and a body already on the ground, and she was, as she said, eleven miles from a judge and four hours from a helicopter, and her argument was that a man who is pumping water in the dark on a peat bog cannot be left at it until morning. Varley let her argue the whole of it out — it took four minutes and she was impressive — and then he said the thing that turned the night.

"Everything that man has done in this county has been done by making the ground look like something it is not," he said. "The dog was painted. The letters were cut out. A coat was hung on the wrong man. This is a man whose single art is that the eye cannot be trusted. Now you propose to walk out onto nine feet of moss on top of water, in fog, at one in the morning, following a lamp, in order to arrest the one man in this county who knows exactly where the holes in the clay are, and who has spent the last four years being paid by the state to map them." He put his hand flat on the desk. "You will not find him. He will find you. And when they pull you out of the cut in three days, the finding will be read out at your inquest by the same county that has been reading this family's deaths out of that bog for a hundred and forty years."

At seven minutes past midnight, Ozer telephoned the county and had the shore road closed at both ends, and at half past one a state patrol unit reported that a flatbed trailer carrying a pump and a reel of hose was standing on the verge of the shore road at the northern end of the Drumble, unhitched, with the tow vehicle gone, which meant that the vehicle was on the far side of the closure and that the man on the bog had no way out of it that did not involve four miles of walking on a public road under a roadblock.

At six in the morning, with the fog as thick as it had been at midnight, four of us went out along Emmett Scully's own line of peat flags: Ozer and a sergeant from the county, Varley, and me. Cole Vandermeer was not there. He had spent the night at Harrow Reach with Dr. Cray sitting in a chair in his room with a book she was not reading, and when he heard the plan in the morning he asked to come and Varley said no, in terms I have never heard him use with anybody, and Cole — who is, as I have said, an engineer — looked at the flags and the fog and the pumping equipment and agreed with him.

You can walk out on those flags in fog by counting. Scully had laid them in a line of nine hundred and forty, and I counted them myself, having nothing better to do with my mind, and I counted to six hundred and eighty-one before we came to the cut, and then we stopped, because there was a lamp burning.

It was standing on the stone crossing at the mid-point of the cut, on the top course, a good paraffin lamp with a tin reflector, and it had been burning since about eight o'clock the previous evening and was still drawing, and it had been set there deliberately, at the middle of the whole structure, to light the work.

The work was on the northern half of the cut, and the whole of it was water. The pump was on the trailer on the road behind us, and its hose came over the moss for two hundred yards like a black spine and went down into the trench at the far end, and the cut was empty. That is the thing I have to write down twice, because my hand does not want to write it: the cut — two hundred yards of trench, twenty feet wide, nine feet deep in the middle, half full of black water for a hundred and fifteen years — was empty. The pump had taken it down to the clay, and the clay was showing, and sticking out of the clay at the bottom of the northern half were the sleepers of the railway of 1903, and one length of rail, and the whole bed of the thing had a sheen on it in the lamplight like a wet road at night, and the air over it was cold and smelled of iron and of rotten moss and, underneath that, of something sweet and chemical that Varley recognised at once and that I have since smelled in a laboratory in Sacramento.

The man was in the middle of it, twenty feet from where I stood, lying on his face in the clay with his arms out, in a canvas coat and rubber boots and a flat cap, and he had one glove on and the glove was closed around the end of the hose.

"And that," said Ronan Varley, after a long silence, "is what a man looks like when the ground he was standing on decides to answer him."

What had happened was simple, and it happened while we were standing in a warm room arguing about a way to arrest him. He stepped off the stone crossing onto the western lip of the cut — the lip he had spent four years mapping, in the dark he had spent a lifetime preferring, with the entire northern half of the trench pumped dry at his feet and nine feet of blue clay under a foot of water at the bottom of it. The western lip of a drained peat cutting is the most dangerous ground in Mercy County, and it took him the way it has taken men since 1906, and what it takes it holds.

We went down to him at first light, and I was one of the four men who stood in that trench and pulled, and I am not going to write out what that material does to a body, because I have written it once before in another place and it was no use to anybody then either. The boots came off in the clay and were never found. It was two hours before we had him out. He had gone down on his left side and the arm was broken in two places from being pulled at, and the sludge in his throat was consistent with drowning, and the pump had run dry and burnt itself out at about four in the morning. The sergeant who wrote it up stood at the lip with his notebook and said, to nobody in particular: "This is a state of recent and deliberate preparation," and then he wrote that down, and I have never in my life heard a truer sentence spoken over a body.

They worked that ground for two days and I stood in it for both of them, and I am not going to write it out as an inventory, because what I remember is not a list. I remember the pump above the cut, still warm. I remember nine hundred feet of hose laid along the flags like something that had grown there. I remember a sergeant holding up a five-gallon can and reading the label aloud to the marshal, twice, and then saying, quietly, the sentence that nobody else said in that bog that night: "Somebody ordered this." And I remember the bag he left behind, which is the part of it that was meant for us: four keys, a wallet with two hundred and eighty dollars and no cards, a plan of the drainage of Harrow Reach drawn in pencil on the back of a feed bill, and six envelopes, each with a name on it in block capitals cut out of a magazine, five of which had been used.

What we did not find took the sheriff's men another three weeks, and it is the only part of this that Cole Vandermeer ever asked me to put in writing: no spade, no rope, no container, no vehicle that would hold anything, and no sign anywhere on that ground that the man who had spent four years planning it had ever planned to leave it.

The sixth was addressed to C O L E V A N D E R M E E R, and the message inside it read: THE OLD CUTTING, SUNDAY, TEN O'CLOCK. TELL NOBODY AND COME ALONE, and the paper had the same smell as the clay. It had never been sent. Varley read it twice, and then said, without any expression at all: "He wrote this for the Sunday. He killed a man on the Friday and he meant to have you on the Sunday, and the second letter was for the night he expected to have nothing left to do but walk down to the cut and look at the water."