48.

About a year after Mark was killed, Mum bought us a dog. I say bought, but he came from a rescue home. Still, the donation she made to the charity that ran the home was bigger than they were expecting, so in a way she bought him. The dog was a nine-month-old mixed breed – part whippet, part sheepdog – called Chester. When Mum arrived home with him she made the mistake of saying he might help cheer us up. Dad put his coffee down and walked out of the kitchen when she said that. To be honest, I felt the same way. A dog, instead of my dead brother: what was she thinking? I knew she didn’t mean it that way, but when I looked at Chester that morning, I hated him.

Although Dad has never really warmed to Chester – it’s nothing personal, he says, he’s just not really a dog person – I couldn’t help it. A week or so after we’d got him I realised it was pointless blaming an accident I’d caused on a dog who hadn’t even been born when it happened. Also, he had this way of following us around with his head low and a worried look in eyes, as if apologising for wanting to be with us, which was both pathetic and impossible to ignore. I took him out running beside my bike. He loved that immediately and still does, keeps up effortlessly and has an amazing knack of staying dead close without getting in the way. So Mum was right, he did cheer me up, I suppose. What really made me want to take care of him properly though was when I heard how he’d ended up in that home. His previous owners were done for neglect. They’d left Chester and their two other dogs in the back of a car while they went to the cinema. In the daytime. In June. They’d opened the windows a crack and parked in the shade, but – surprise – the sun moved. The dogs got overheated and the other two died. Chester only just survived.

Locked in that container, I couldn’t get his ordeal out of my mind, for obvious reasons. Amelia kept asking Marcel if he knew what was happening, but he clearly knew no more than us, and the meditative trance he’d decided to go into didn’t reassure me much. He sat fixed as a tree stump, the occasional bead of sweat dripping from his nose.

I called Langdon again and left a message this time, trying to convey the seriousness of the situation but keep the panic from my voice so as not to alarm Amelia. Then, for want of anything else to do, I put my eye to the best peephole and left it there. Nothing had changed about the scene, and nothing much did. It got marginally worse at one point when a flatbed truck carrying concrete tubes parked up near the Portakabin thing, blocking out the grey scree. I was passing the time counting the concrete tubes when something beneath the truck, or on the other side of it, rather, made me switch eyes: a flicker of lime green, jerking along beneath some legs, supporting a person I couldn’t see because of the damned truck, moving from left to right. I whipped out my camera and zoomed in as far as the telephoto lens would go.

‘Really? You’re still thinking about your photo-journalism thing? Now?’ said Amelia.

‘I can’t believe it. That has to be him,’ I said, and banged on the wall of the container as hard as I could with my free hand.

The shoes kept walking. Just before they disappeared from view, I clicked the shutter. They were still only tiny on the display screen, but I knew Amelia would recognise Caleb’s stupid boots. As soon as I tilted the screen her way, she did.

‘Why didn’t I think of him earlier?’ she said.

‘It’s no use,’ I muttered. ‘He can’t hear us.’

She looked at me with a spark of the usual are-you-actually-an-idiot glinting in her eye. I was genuinely relieved to see it, as it generally means she’s thought of some clever idea. This solution was actually simple enough to make me feel stupid. Amelia pulled her phone from its case and called Caleb’s number.

It’s idiotic, but the fact that he was already stored in her contacts made me shiver, despite the ridiculous heat.

‘Hey, Caleb,’ she said beside me. If there had been panic in her voice a moment ago, she now sounded ridiculously matter-of-fact. ‘Are you wearing your very green boots?’

I was still pressed up against the drill hole with my camera, so couldn’t hear his reply.

‘Cool. And are you at work,’ she went on, ‘doing whatever they’ve got you doing at your father’s mine?’

The truck hadn’t moved, and neither had anything beneath or beyond it.

‘Cool,’ she said again. ‘Because we’re here too and we could sort of use some help.’

Cool? Sort of? She wasn’t just trying to be matter-of-fact, I realised. She was trying to sound off-hand! ‘If you give that to me, I’ll talk him to us,’ I said as levelly as I could, reaching for the phone. I pretty much had to prise the thing from her fingers.

‘Yeah, hi, Caleb, it’s me. We’re locked in a container. It’s the third one of four in a row along the inside of the northern perimeter fence, on the left as you come through the main entrance to this mine-complex place. I just saw you, through a tiny hole in the metal wall. You were walking away from us, behind that truck with all the concrete tubes on it, heading east. If you could –’

‘You’re locked where?’ he cut in.

As patiently as I could, I said, ‘Just retrace your steps, quickly, please. We’re melting in here, seriously.’

I was still looking through the hole. When his shoes appeared again, tiny ticks of lime-green hope, I let out a breath. ‘Stop,’ I said. The shoes stopped. ‘Turn left, towards the main entrance.’ Astonishingly the shoes turned right, heading for the hut. ‘Left!’ I said. ‘Round the back of the truck.’ The whole of him, phone held out like a little tray in front of his chin, the way idiots use them in the street sometimes, came into view. ‘That’s it. Now look to the north. You’ll see the containers.’

To be fair to him, he broke into a trot once he got himself orientated up the hill, and although I lost sight of him he was quickly outside the door, fighting to open it. The lock defeated him at first, but having shouted that he’d be back immediately with help, he summoned a key quickly too, and I could hear him giving whoever he’d got hold of a hard time: ‘Quick, you moron. When my father hears about this, the fool who thought it was a good idea will regret it.’

Marcel didn’t break from his statue-like trance until the key turned in the lock. I’ve never been so happy to see a door open. The rush of air felt positively cool compared to our little oven. The first thing I saw was Caleb pushing the security guy away, hard. That was surprising enough, but nothing compared to the expression on his face when he turned back to greet us. In the few days we’d been apart, it seemed the stuffing had been sucked out of my cousin. He looked gaunt, bloodlessly pale. Also, the shape of him had changed. Gone was the puffed-out chest and high chin; in its place was a stooped, rounded thing. He couldn’t meet my eye.

‘Guys,’ he said, inspecting the dirt between our feet. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Why?’ said Amelia. ‘You didn’t lock us in here. You got us out.’

‘I know but …’ he petered out.

‘Without you we’d probably have cooked in fact,’ Amelia went on, desperate to cheer him up. ‘So you’ve literally saved our lives.’

‘Someone else would have come eventually,’ he said.

‘Maybe, but nobody had until now. I’m not sure how much longer we’d have lasted.’

Caleb was shaking his head, eyes still fixed on the floor. The penny dropped for Amelia. She changed tack. ‘Oh, so the sorry isn’t about your father’s security detail locking us in here. Well, at least that makes sense. But what else do you have to apologise for?’

A horrible thought flashed through me: did he know something about Mum and Dad? I opened my mouth to ask, but before I could get the question out Caleb glanced up at Marcel, shook his head and said two words: ‘For Innocent.’

I’m ashamed to say it, but instead of sadness in that moment I felt relief. If this new hollowed-out version of Caleb meant that he actually felt guilty about Innocent’s death, then good. It was what he deserved.

‘But that was an accident!’ Amelia said a bit too loudly. She meant to reassure him, but the false brightness in her voice made it obvious she knew the ‘accident’ could have been prevented. Nevertheless, she stepped forward and put an arm around Caleb’s hunched shoulders to comfort him.

It seemed to work; his mouth twitched in a pitiful half-smile. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he said.

I told him why we’d come. I so wanted him to give me news about my parents that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for it directly. To his credit, as I was rambling on about our motorbike journey he cut in. ‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ he said. ‘If they were here, I’d know. Either they’d have arrived with a fanfare, or security would have picked them up: the place is pretty much a fortress, as you guys found out.’ He paused, then went on tentatively, ‘I can help you look for them though. If they’re touring the … er … less professional mines in the area, someone here is bound to know.’

‘What do you mean by less professional?’ Amelia asked.

‘Let’s get you some water,’ he replied, ‘and I’ll explain.’