The Finisher

19

Diamond’s guide forced a path through a clump of waist-high bracken and stopped.

“Are we there?” Diamond asked. He was eager to get underground. If the drone was still at work and located him, there would be questions to answer. Although daylight was coming to an end, he was conscious how much he stood out in the caving gear, a borrowed yellow oversuit, hard hat, boots and knee and elbow pads.

The animal-loving young man called Stanley was more interested in his mobile phone than anything Diamond was saying. He’d scarcely spoken a word except to confirm that he’d accept the twenty-pound fee. Privately Diamond already had him down as Stroppy Stan.

“I said, are we there?”

“Yep.” Stanley stooped to unfasten the padlock on the grille.

“Wait,” Diamond said. He wanted to check for any sign that the ironwork had been tampered with.

He found nothing obvious.

“Okay. Carry on.”

The grille was not much larger than a manhole cover. The hinge groaned like a soul in torment when it was lifted and bits of rust and dirt dropped off, confirming nobody had moved it in recent weeks. If Belinda’s body had been hidden in Patch Quarry, this was not the shaft the killer had used.

But it was the only known way to get in.

Stanley unfixed a rolled-up rope ladder from his backpack.

Diamond gave it a look of distrust. “That’s how we get down?”

“Unless you want to jump.”

To be fair, the ladder looked well-built, with rigid metal rungs and wire rope sides.

“Is this what the miners used?”

“Quarrymen.”

To hell with the terminology. “I’m saying they wouldn’t go down on a rope ladder.”

“Wouldn’t go down here at all.”

“That’s why I asked.”

“Ain’t the entrance.”

“I know that. It’s for ventilation, or light, or something. I was expecting a more solid ladder.”

“You was wrong, then.” Stanley rigged the eyelets of the ladder to the grille and let the rest of it clatter into the void. “Want to go first?”

“Maybe I should.”

“Turn on your light.”

They both had LED lights attached to their helmets. Diamond switched his on, knelt over the space and put a tentative foot on a rung.

“You’ll be arse over tip if you do that,” Stanley told him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Grip the sides and reach down lower with your foot, as low as you bleeding can.”

He tried what was suggested and was suspended over space for a few alarming seconds while he jiggled his foot against the loosely swinging ladder, trying to feel for a rung. Once he’d made contact and trusted the alloy with his weight, he was grateful for the walls of the shaft stopping the ladder from swinging out of control. Fully committed now, he gripped the rung close to his chest and was more in control. Hand under hand he descended, trying to ignore the cobwebs he was disturbing. He was starting to think he would survive this when a worrying thought intruded.

“Does it reach right to the ground?”

An unsympathetic answer came from above. “Dunno, mate. You’ll find out soon.”

Maybe Stanley had a grudge against the police.

Diamond hadn’t wanted to look down. He took a deep breath, gripped the rungs harder and lowered his head until his lamp showed what was beneath him, mercifully only a short space between the bottom rung and the floor. He was shaking when he stepped off, grateful for the firmness of the stone. “Made it.”

His guide followed almost at the speed of gravity.

They were standing where Patch the terrier had spent a painful night, in a large cubic space cut symmetrically from the limestone. By mining standards, they were still uncomfortably close to the surface. Only about six metres of solid material was above their heads. How much of that was earth, clay and sandstone and how much solid stone was a calculation he preferred not to make at this stage.

“Which way?” Stanley said.

“I was hoping you’d tell me. Have you been down here since you rescued Patch?”

“No.”

A fine guide he was.

A choice of three tunnels, two of which would involve some stooping. The other had a rail track partially covered by dust and fine rubble.

“The main one,” Diamond decided.

They started along it, adjusting their strides to the positioning of the sleepers, Diamond leading, his boots crunching fine particles of limestone and creating an echo. “How far do the tunnels usually run?”

“Mile or more.”

Not what he’d wanted to hear. He’d pictured something on a small scale where they could make a thorough search.

“And these rails were for trucks to shift the stone, right?”

“Obvious, innit?”

They hadn’t walked for more than three minutes when the tunnel opened to a space as big as a village hall, the roof supported by massive columns of the original bedrock. You could have seated a hundred people here. Amazing to think it had been created by extracting numerous blocks of stone using basic hand tools of the sort in Seymour’s cottage. In fact, there was still a heap of chain lying at one end with a saw beside it unlike any Diamond had ever handled, almost two metres long with a vertical pole handle. Propped against the wall was a crowbar similar in size. Tools on that scale wouldn’t be taken to the surface each day. Their presence after probably a hundred and fifty years was humbling, a privileged link with the quarrymen who had toiled down here all their lives.

“Frigbob.”

Diamond gave Stanley a glare. “What did you say?”

“The saw. Stone-cutters called them frigbobs.” This was the first unsolicited information the young man had provided.

“Got you. It looks frigging hard to use, for sure.”

“The weight of it helped to make the cut. That and water from a drip can.”

“I noticed some timber props holding up the roof back there. Tree trunks basically.”

“Wasn’t so scientific in them days,” Stanley said.

“There must have been accidents.”

“Plenty.”

Diamond approached one of the columns and peered at some names and dates scraped into the stone. “Graffiti.”

“That’s nothing.”

“I’d call this one something. ‘1858. Elvis.’”

Stanley’s lip curled. “Says who?” He came closer and shone his lamp on the carved lettering. “Ellis.”

“If that’s Ellis, he did a poor job on the second L.”

They moved on down the main tunnel, with Diamond increasingly aware that even if Belinda’s body was down here the odds against finding it were heavily loaded. “I’m looking for more shafts. They’ll only be found above the really big spaces like the one we just came through, I suppose?”

“Rooms,” Stanley said.

Seymour had talked about rooms and Diamond hadn’t fully understood. “So I’m thinking we’re doing the right thing following the rail tracks. Let’s go as far as this main tunnel takes us. The smaller ones don’t interest me. What was that?” His head lamp had flickered as if it was on the blink, literally. Troubling. He didn’t want to lose his light source. “There it goes again.”

“Bats.”

“Are they common underground?”

“Thousands.”

He thought about bats and their feeding habits. “They live on flying insects, don’t they? They must know ways out of this place.” He didn’t get an answer, so he continued thinking aloud. “They wouldn’t be here if there weren’t ways up to the surface. They’ll know shafts nobody has mapped.”

“No use to thee or me,” Stanley said. Giving encouragement wasn’t included in his fee.

“There must be shafts up ahead. I haven’t noticed any except the one we came down.” Diamond quickened his step, hoping they’d come to another room. The tunnel had been straight up to now, but it curved to the left a short way ahead.

Disappointment awaited. They rounded the bend and were confronted with a huge heap of rubble that had covered the rails and blocked the tunnel.

“Hold it,” Stanley said. “Could be a roof collapse.”

Diamond halted. They both turned their beams upwards and examined the surface above them for tell-tale cracks. There was nothing obvious.

“Don’t move from here,” Stanley said, taking charge. He edged along the right-hand wall towards the obstruction. Most pieces of the displaced stone weren’t large. He picked some up and held it in his palm. “Spoil.”

“Too small to be of use?”

A nod.

The rubble wasn’t from a rock fall. It was unwanted pieces of stone dumped in the most inconvenient place.

Diamond swore and said, “Why here, in the main tunnel?”

Stanley stepped up to the pile and started skirting it, using his hands as well as his feet, and squeezed between the loose stone and the wall until he was out of sight. Presently he called out, “Gully.”

“What?” Diamond called back.

“Dead end. They hit a gully. Quarryman’s bleeding nightmare.”

The seam of oolitic limestone had come to an end because a ravine lay across the intended route of the tunnellers. The action of water over millions of years had penetrated the beds of clay and ruptured the Jurassic layer.

Stanley wriggled back into view. “They couldn’t get no further, so they used this end as a spoil heap.”

“We came all this way for nothing?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Got no choice.” Frustrated, Diamond fell into Stanley’s laconic style of speech. He turned and trudged back the way they had come.

This expedition seemed to be ill-fated. The scale of the task was massively bigger than he had imagined. He was unused to the clothes, uneasy with the environment and he had small confidence in his companion.

“I’ve lost my bearings,” he said to Stanley. “Do you have a sense of where we got to?”

“Dunno what you’re on about.”

“What’s above us now?”

“Woods and fields.”

“Still south of the village?”

“Maybe.”

“We’re going which way — eastwards?”

“I’m not a bleeding compass.”

“Anyhow,” Diamond said. “We’ll soon be back where we started.” And after a few more minutes of walking they returned to the open area Stanley had called a room.

They stood in silence while Diamond considered the limited options.

One of the lower tunnels led off at an angle to the one they’d explored. “I wonder where this goes.”

“How would I know?” Stanley said.

“I’m thinking it might link up with another truckway.”

“You tell me.”

Diamond had heard enough of this negative stuff. “What’s your problem, Stanley? Everything I’ve had from you since we started is a downer.”

“Waste of time, innit?”

“You’ll be paid. Lighten up, man.”

There was no reply.

“I’m going to see where this one leads,” Diamond said. “Are you coming?”

A shrug.

“I’m going to have a go.”

“Your choice.”

Stanley had made it obvious he wasn’t keen. He didn’t say whether there were dangers, or he simply considered it a waste of energy.

Diamond wasn’t being put off by a stroppy teenager. “Come on, then. I’ll go first.”

Stanley’s face was a mask of indifference.

Diamond dipped his head and stepped inside.

They soon had to bend their backs and watch for projecting stone. The cut-through wasn’t as smooth as in the main tunnel.

“Is it my imagination or is there some movement of air?”

He got no answer from behind. Only the crunch of Stanley’s boots told him anyone else was with him.

The posture was a strain, not only on his back but on knees and thighs. It came as a relief when the gap ahead narrowed so much that they were forced to go on hands and knees. He’d needed some convincing earlier to wear the knee and elbow pads. “I don’t know how far I can go like this.”

The narrow sides had one good effect: his headlamp lit up the cream-coloured stone with dazzling intensity. He didn’t like to think about the view Stanley was getting behind him. It was unlikely to make misery-guts any more companionable.

“I’m going to pause a moment,” Diamond said. “This is hard work.” He squirmed into a position where he could sit with his knees up and give Stanley a change of view. “I would say there’s definitely some cooler air coming towards us. There must be a reason why they cut this tunnel. Surely it wasn’t just for the stone.”

“Crawl space,” Stanley said, still insisting on the quarrymen’s jargon.

“Crawl space to where?”

He hadn’t expected an answer and he didn’t get one. His hand touched a small object with a smooth curved surface. He picked it up. “Hey, a candle stub. Seymour told me about these. Imagine working down here by candlelight. How long ago since this was last alight? A hundred years? Two hundred, more like.”

Stanley was unmoved.

They sat for some seconds in silence.

“Seymour has an iron candlestick he showed me,” Diamond said. “It had a spike where they hammered it into the stone where they were working.”

More seconds passed.

“Must have been a bind having to change them each time they burned through.”

Stanley unzipped the front of his oversuit and took out a phone.

“You’re an optimist,” Diamond said. “You won’t get a signal down here.”

The young man stared at the blank screen as if it was a comforter. Or a way of blocking out Diamond.

“Better move on, hadn’t we, before our headlamp batteries run out?” Diamond said. “The ghosts of the old quarrymen would enjoy that.”

On hands and knees again, and some of the way on elbows, they progressed by stages. He could definitely feel a draught against his face, giving hope of connecting with a full-sized tunnel ahead. He still felt responsible for Belinda, promising himself the least he could do was to find her body. Rational thinking should have told him he was blameless, but the psyche doesn’t operate rationally.

And gradually the sides got wider and forward movement was easier. “We’re getting somewhere, Stanley.”

Aching in every sinew, but encouraged, he continued to crawl and squirm until — thank Christ! — he saw an opening ahead. “We’ve made it, Stanley. There’s a big space. I can see a room with rail track running through it.”

The beam from his lamp revealed more as he got closer: two huge pillars supporting the roof; a hand crane with the chain and hook dangling; some blocks of stone with lewis pins attached, ready to be hoisted; and, on the rails, a flatbed trolley that had waited to be loaded for at least a century and a half.

Howard Carter could not have felt better than this the day he unsealed Tutankhamun’s burial chamber.

Diamond rested on chest and belly for a moment and gathered strength for the last few seconds of moving like a lizard. A short way ahead was space to crouch and beyond that the bliss of being fully upright.

“Still with me, sunshine?”

No reply, which was what he expected from Stanley.

He looked over his shoulder for the glow of his companion’s lamp. Stanley wasn’t far behind.

He wriggled some more, got to his haunches, paused, braced and straightened.

Too much. His hard hat clunked against the roof and gave him a moment of dizziness, no more. Without head protection he could have injured himself and it would have been his own fault for misjudging the height.

He was telling himself it was a lucky escape when there was a grating sound from above and a section of the roof detached itself and dropped in front of him, raising dust. He stepped back, but not enough to avoid a second fall, a boulder the size of a football that bounced off the other debris and onto his right boot.

First, his foot registered only numbness and then the pain stabbed in, pain more severe than anything he could remember.

He passed out.