Bumping Uglies

Chapter Twenty Nine

I have found several times over the course of my life, that knowing is one thing, thinking is another thing and being able to do anything about either is a horse of an altogether different colour.

We thought that Charon's boat was being stored in a tunnel. We thought that Richard was being kept on the boat. We didn't, and couldn't, know either of those things.

What's more, we had a little over twenty-four hours until our mandated meeting with the Albanian owner-operators of The Tunnel of Love. Even if we did know Richard and the boat were in the tunnel, it wasn't at all clear what we could actually do about it.

There was an animated discussion in my car as we drove back to Pebble Deeping.

Sophie was giving it her full teacher voice, waving her arms around as an expression of a passion for her subject that was limited only by the interior confines of an old Beetle, and the bodies of the other passengers. Today's lecture was pretty gloomy.

"The only tunnel on this stretch of the Dudley no. 2 Canal that is long enough and confined enough to generate soot residue on a narrowboat is the Lapal Tunnel," She explained.

"Great, let's get over there. Where the hell is Lapal?" I asked. I had been born and raised in the Black Country and I had never heard of Lapal, or its tunnel.

"It's not even remotely that simple. It can't be the Lapal Tunnel. It has been abandoned since 1917, I thought that the entrance had been sealed," Sophie wrinkled her nose in confused concentration.

"Seals can be broken," Ty said. Ty was pretty good at breaking things. That seemed to be his solution of choice for many of life's little annoyances. I guess when you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

"I need to go through my research, I need the maps and Underhill's engineering records. The Lapal Tunnel project went wrong from its early days. They hit clay and had to dig it narrow. There was no towpath, so when it was in use it was a legging tunnel," Sophie continued, lost in her own world.

"Legging?" Elira asked.

"The early boats had no motors, no propulsion. They were towed by horses along the towpath, hence the name. When they had to traverse a narrow tunnel, men would lie on their backs on the roof of a boat, or on planks laid across the hold. They would then walk their feet on the tunnel sides and roof to propel the boat beneath them along slowly."

"Jesus!" I exclaimed.

"Legging was hard and dangerous work, and leggers would often be hired just to traverse tunnels. They would leg one way in the morning, then make the return journey with a different boat in the afternoon. In a busy period or particularly enterprising leggers could pick up four trips, or legs."

"A couple of tunnels a day doesn't sound too bad," Ty muttered.

"The Lapal Tunnel was over two miles long. It took leggers over three hours to get through it," Sophie replied.

"Oh," Ty said, conceding the point.

"But Lapal was different. That tunnel got a reputation as being particularly dangerous. There were several collapses due to the soil conditions above and the subsidence below. Imagine being halfway through a two-mile-long tunnel only barely wider than a narrowboat when part of the roof collapsed..."

I imagined it. I didn't enjoy the thought.

"... that wasn't even the worst of it. When they surveyed Lapal in the 1790s they either didn't notice or didn't care that the route took them over several shallow coal mines. The tunnel was plagued with subsidence and even had a section collapse down into mine workings at one point."