Finding 7
The audit ran eleven nights and found the tunnel clean. Track geometry, drainage, walkboards, lamp certification: clean on all four. What it flagged was us.
Finding 7.3 — Non-standard behavioural practice. At possession handback, supervisory staff conduct a verbal headcount at the portal which returns one more than the number of persons logged out by the turnstile. The practice appears in no method statement, serves no recording purpose, and is to cease immediately. Supervisors to brief accordingly.
The count was older than the depot. Every gang that ever worked the March Haig tunnel walked out the same way: charge-hand at the portal, men through in single file, each man answered with a number, and the charge-hand closing one higher. Eight men, nine. Twelve men, thirteen. The extra had a name once — the spare man, old Thirteen — and lads were told on their first night that a man a yard was what that hill had cost in 1847, and that he walked every crew out. You paid him his number. That was the whole of the arrangement.
I had been through that portal four thousand times and never thought about it, the way you don’t think about a handrail. My transfer to days had sat on a supervisor’s desk for a year. The audit was the last gate on it — clear the findings, take the depot scorecard green, and I’d be home for bedtime, every night, instead of twice a month. When the auditor asked me, in front of the contract manager, whether the count had any safety basis, I said no. I signed it out of the method statement that afternoon.
Chainage 114
First possession after, nothing. Second, nothing, though the banter on the trolley was thinner than usual.
Third possession, Wullie handed his lamp in. Forty-one years on the tools, charge-hand since before I had a beard, and he didn’t work his notice — he walked out of the mess room mid-shift-cycle and drove home. I rang him that week. He said, “I’m not walking last man out of that bore with no count behind me,” and when I laughed, he rang off.
So I made a rota. That’s the honest detail of it: men had stopped putting their hand up for the rear of the file, and a supervisor solves what’s in front of him, so I laminated a rota and pinned it by the turnstile. The lads worked it without a word. Then the handlamps started going. Certified twelve hours, and dying at chainage 114, every possession, every lamp — we tested them after, full charge, no fault found, and the new ones died there too. 114 is two miles in, where the yard books say a working shaft was backfilled in 1848. The yard books also say four men left the pay roll that spring with no leaving note against their names.
In February I caught Dev and young Kev doing the count at the portal on their own time, boots crossed, numbers said soft, and I stopped it. The follow-up audit was in March. I put the count in the briefing pack as a disciplinary matter, and the lads looked at me the way you look at a man reorganising deckchairs, and nobody said Thirteen to my face again.
The 23:40
The November possession ran under the audit-approved staffing model, which is the minimum numbers that keep a patrol legal. Two men, one patrol. Dev was twenty-three, a baby girl born in June, saving for the deposit. Kev had four years in and a steady head. The rule is nobody walks alone in the bore, and two is legal, so it had never occurred to me that two men in three miles of black had always been more than two — there had always been a third you didn’t log. I signed the patrol out at 23:40 and did not count them through.
Kev gave his account at the inquest, and it has never varied a word.
There was a third set of boots. Dev’s lamp was ahead of me and the boots were behind, steady, in step, and I thought, he’s dropped back for a word. I called his name and the boots kept their pace. Then Dev’s light went out ahead, all at once, like a door shut on it. I ran the forty metres to him. The walkboard over the culvert sump was broken through, and he was in the water below, face down. The water there comes to your shin.
From the light going out to Kev reaching him was under two minutes. The coroner recorded misadventure, with a rider about fatigue and supervision, which is a sentence with my name in it somewhere. Dev could swim. The water was forty centimetres.
I asked Kev once, afterwards, what the boots did when he ran. He said he hadn’t looked. He said he’d been counting aloud the whole forty metres, and didn’t know for whom.
The Wake
Wullie came to the crematorium after all, standing at the back in his good coat, and he found me at the tea afterwards.
“You counted him out every night, and you never knew what you were paying,” he said. “Not luck, lad. Wages. The dead in that hill have been on the same book as us since the cutting — spare man to every gang that ever went in. You say his number, he takes the rear of your file, and no man of yours is ever last, or odd, or alone in the dark. It’s the only work they’ve got, and it’s good work, and they do it for a number said out loud.”
I asked him if Thirteen had taken Dev, then, out of spite.
“No.” He turned his cup a half-circle on the saucer, and turned it back. “There’s no spite in him. You didn’t offend him, son. You made him redundant.”
I must have looked like the word needed saying slower, because he said it slower.
“Spite, you can work round. Spite answers to a count, in the end. Redundant is redundant. He’ll not walk for this depot again whatever you say at that portal. He clocked off. First shortfall after that, the hill paid itself, is all. It always could. You’d just never run the account short before.”
My transfer came through in January. I do the school run now, and bedtime, every night, and the depot passed its audit in March with a green scorecard I have never once opened.
I still walk out to the portal on possession nights, off the books, and count the crews through. One extra, said aloud, the old way. The lads let me do it and think it’s for Dev. It isn’t arithmetic any more, and it isn’t wages. He clocked off; I never did.
Read to the end. Some stories shouldn't be left unfinished.