The Finisher

22

“He’s coming in,” Halliwell told the team at Concorde House. “He persuaded them he’s fit to leave hospital and he’ll be in first thing tomorrow. He wants us all here.”

After a stunned silence, DI John Leaman said, “I bet they were glad to be shot of him.”

“He can’t drive with an injured foot,” Ingeborg said. “How’s he getting here?”

“Paloma.”

“He might listen to her. She’ll tell him it’s too soon.”

“He’s dead set on it.”

“Why? What’s on his mind?”

Halliwell shared Diamond’s story of the body in the quarry and Leaman said it was unlikely and probably wishful thinking. “He’s obsessed with this idea that the woman is down in the stone mine. They’ll have given him some kind of anaesthetic for the operation and he’ll have imagined it.”

Some of the others agreed. One of the civilian staff spoke about the anaesthetic-induced fantasy she’d once experienced of finding Satan in her bed. “It was horribly real at the time. I can still picture it and now I never get into bed without putting on the light first.”

To the credit of Bath CID, no one followed up with a lewd comment.

“Getting back to the boss, whatever it was, he’s convinced it happened and he wants action,” Halliwell said, doing his duty as deputy.

“Sending some of us down the mine so we all end up in hospital? Count me out,” Leaman said.

“It’s blocked. The roof fell in,” Paul Gilbert said.

“He’ll think of something. He always does.”

“And he’s usually right,” Ingeborg said. “I say we should take him seriously.”

Diamond’s entrance on crutches at 8:30 next morning was watched with misgivings by the team. His office chair had been wheeled into the CID room. Helped by Paloma, and clearly awkward with the crutches on the shiny floor, he came to rest on the padded seat with a thump and a swear word while Halliwell held the back to stop him from rolling. If anyone had expected the big man to look pale after his ordeal, they were mistaken. He was rosebud pink from the effort.

A second chair was supplied as a foot rest.

In the circumstances, a round of applause might have been nice. It didn’t happen. They were all too suspicious about what he was planning.

Paloma said something to him and left.

He cleared his throat. “I told you we were looking for Belinda’s body when we last met. And now I know where it is — down the quarry where I copped my broken foot.” He paused as if to check whether anyone was smiling at his misfortune. They weren’t, so he grinned instead. “And now someone has to go down and deal with it.”

All that could be heard was the faint hum of car tyres on the motorway to the north.

“I’ve given plenty of thought to this. God knows, I’ve had time to think.”

John Leaman was rash enough to interrupt. He, too, had had time to think, and it wasn’t in his nature to hold back when something unwelcome was in prospect. “Isn’t this a job for the professionals, guv?”

“Who do you mean?”

“Cavers. If any of us tried, we’d do no better than you.” Leaman sometimes spoke good sense and today he was speaking for the team, but he was incapable of being tactful.

Diamond grasped the chair arms as if he was about to stand up. On finding he couldn’t, he said with menace, “Where did I go wrong, then? Tell me, John. We’re all listening.”

Leaman eyed the surgical boot. “Causing a roof fall and getting injured.”

“If I’d left it to the professionals, we wouldn’t know Belinda was down there.”

“Can we be certain she is?”

Everyone except Leaman winced. Some looked down to avoid eye contact.

Diamond said, “You’ve got my word she’s there.”

“I’m not calling you a liar.”

Mercifully, this went unheard by Diamond. He talked through Leaman’s words. He was down in the quarry again. “We crawled through this small connecting tunnel and it opened up to reveal a room, a quarryman’s term for a really large space where they loaded the stone onto trucks. I didn’t get in there because of what happened, but before my foot was crushed I caught sight of her legs. Flat to the floor. She was mostly concealed by a pillar, but her shins and feet were visible and she was definitely wearing trainers, modern running shoes with the Adidas logo. Is that good enough for you?”

Not for Leaman. It turned him into counsel for the prosecution. “What if you imagined it?”

“I didn’t imagine anything. I saw for myself.”

“Before you came in, some of us were saying anaesthetics can do strange things to the brain. Really vivid images.”

“This was the day before I had the bloody anaesthetic. I was down the tunnel.”

“When the rock landed on your foot, did you pass out?”

“Momentarily. It doesn’t alter anything.”

“It does if it affected your memory.”

“I was conscious again almost at once.”

“And what did you say to the guy who was with you?”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“He’s the only independent witness. Did you tell him you’d just spotted a body?”

“Listen, I was in extreme pain. I was thinking I could die down there.”

“So you didn’t?”

Diamond was being skewered by one of his own team.

Ingeborg said, “Get real, John. The boss was in agony.”

Leaman wouldn’t be deflected. “What was his name? You remember that?”

“Of course I bloody do. He was Stanley.”

“Did Stanley see anything for himself?”

“My arse,” Diamond said and stopped Leaman in his tracks. The words were literally meant, but they came out as a rebuke.

The team waited for a second eruption, but it didn’t come.

“He was behind me. And, no, we didn’t discuss it while we were struggling back to the shaft. Even if I’d been out of pain, Stanley isn’t the sort you share your discoveries with. I’m not sure I’d want to share anything with him, but he saved my life. And now, if you’ve had your say, John, we’ll move on.”

Shot to bits, Leaman nodded and went silent.

“The problem is this,” Diamond said to everyone, back in charge. “The only way we know is where I went, down a ventilation shaft in a spinney southeast of the village, along a main tunnel with a rail track for a few hundred yards, no more, and then on hands and knees through a smaller one that is now blocked.”

“And dangerous,” Ingeborg said.

“True. But it led to a room in another main tunnel. The distances wouldn’t be huge above ground. If I can work out the direction we travelled we might be able to pinpoint the position.”

“Didn’t you have a compass?” Halliwell asked.

He shook his head. “Stanley had his phone, of course, being a teenager. No use at all underground. With hindsight, a compass would have been sensible, but I didn’t think of it.”

“How would this have helped?” Ingeborg asked.

“Pinpointing the position above ground? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it, how the body got down there?”

“Through a shaft?”

“All these tunnels needed light or ventilation or a means of extracting the stone. Find the right shaft and we’ve got our crime scene.”

She picked up her mobile and started scrolling.

“You won’t find it there,” Halliwell said. “Patch Quarry is unmapped, isn’t that right, guv?”

“Yes,” Diamond said. “But I’m thinking we may have linked up with another quarry.”

“Is there one nearby?”

“Seymour, the local expert, talked about one called Jackdaw.”

His memory was functioning well enough.

Ingeborg said without looking up from her screen, “The approximate area is southeast of Combe Down, above Midford and Tucking Mill, right?”

“Correct.”

“There’s a steep-sided valley to the south called Horsecombe Vale, so there can’t be any underground workings there. Where’s the entrance to Patch Quarry, guv?”

“In a wooded area below Summer Lane. It’s just a hole in the ground with a grille over it.”

“Jackdaw isn’t far off.”

“I’m trying to recall what Seymour told me about Jackdaw. He knew of a blocked-up entrance in a field — Kingham Field — a proper arched entrance, suggesting it was a major quarry that you walked into rather than using a ladder, but no one seems to have kept a record. Some workmen drilling foundations in the late 1980s some distance away broke through to a section they thought must be a part of Jackdaw.”

“The Brow,” Ingeborg said, still using her phone. “The work was going on near a Grade Two listed Victorian building called the Brow. It will have been filled in, surely.”

“But not the entire workings, if they extended some way,” Diamond said.

“Should we go back to Seymour?”

“He told me as much as he knew, and no one is better informed.” He sat back in the chair and folded his arms. “There’s no ducking it. This calls for another search.”

You could have filled a removal van with the unease in the room.

“Above ground?” Halliwell said.

“Of course.” This eased the tension appreciably. “Didn’t I make that clear? We want to find a shaft down to Jackdaw Quarry. We’ll get help from uniform again.”

“Will the ACC play ball?” Halliwell asked. “She wasn’t too pleased the last time we borrowed some bobbies.”

“Because I didn’t consult her,” Diamond said. “It’s all about protocol and her self-esteem. I’ll do it by the book this time.”

He insisted on being driven to Combe Down to supervise the search. “I’m not missing the action,” he told Ingeborg when she said that crutches wouldn’t work well in a field. “Besides, I promised Georgina I’d make sure the extra men were used properly.” By toeing the line he’d lulled his reluctant boss into parting with fifteen bobbies and a vanload of search and rescue equipment.

“I don’t suppose she knew you were going to be there in person.”

“If you’re unwilling to drive me, I’ll go in the van.” He tried — how he tried! — to be civil to Ingeborg because she was always civil to him, but he was starting to feel as if no one believed him.

They assembled at the side of Summer Lane, close enough to Kingham Field to get a sight of the one-time entrance to Jackdaw, much of it infilled and overgrown, but with about a metre and a half of the stone arch exposed.

The location would have given breathtaking views down the escarpment to Wellow Brook if there hadn’t been so many tall trees coming into leaf. This side of the village was more wooded than he’d appreciated. In one way, this was encouraging: there was a chance of finding overgrown shafts. But a proper search was likely to take days rather than hours.

“How did this lot find us?” Ingeborg asked.

About a dozen of the local youth of both sexes had appeared on foot along the lane and were clearly heading towards the police vans. Half of them were using their phones. The others were giggling or guffawing, except one who saw Diamond and gave a nod.

“That’s Stanley and his friends. I invited him along and he said he’d bring some support. It’s only thanks to him that I’m here at all. I won’t introduce him. He’s antisocial.”

“Really? He doesn’t seem to be short of friends,” Ingeborg said.

“Could be me who’s antisocial, then.”

She looked the other way.

Sticks, spades and cutting equipment were unloaded.

Everyone was asked to gather round the back of the search and rescue van, for it now contained Diamond, sitting in state between the open doors. “Not too close,” he said. “Keep away from my foot.” He thanked everyone for coming and set the parameters for the search, a northeasterly trek towards the top with everyone spaced at intervals of about five metres on the open land and two metres in the wooded sections. “It’s not a fingertip search, so we can move at a moderate walking pace. You’re looking for a hidden shaft, about the size of a door. It will be covered with a grille or a lid of metal or wood probably coated with leaf mould and hidden by brambles and bracken, so you’ll have to force a way through. I suggest you thump the ground ahead of you with your stick and listen for the sound it makes. Anything suspicious, tell the head honcho, DCI Halliwell. I’ll be here waiting for a call.”

They spread across the field, about thirty searchers altogether, including Stanley’s volunteers and most of the team from CID, apart from John Leaman, who had stayed behind to man the office. The mood was cheerful. For the police it was a change from routine duties, and for the youths “a bit of a giggle” being on the side of law and order.

Satisfied that everything possible was being done, Diamond heaved himself fully into the van and got his legs into a level position. He wasn’t in severe pain, but the foot was reminding him that he should, perhaps, have spent a few more hours in professional care.

The first call from the search team came after forty-two minutes. “It’s impossible to hold the line, guv,” Halliwell told him. “We can do it crossing fields, but the woods make all kinds of difficulties.”

“Fair enough. You can’t walk through trees.”

“It’s the other stuff. Bits are impassable, really overgrown, so we have to scythe it down or go at it from another angle.”

“If it’s all that overgrown, you can leave it. The shaft we’re looking for must have been disturbed not long ago for the body to have got down there.”

“He’ll have covered his traces if he’s got any sense.”

“Do the best you can,” he said. “Are the teenagers still interested?”

“Can’t fault them so far. Stanley doesn’t say much, but he’s well in charge. They listen to him.”

“Like I should have done. All kinds of difficulties, you said. What else is there?”

“You talked about forcing our way through bracken and brambles but we’re dealing with big patches of stinging nettles.”

“They grow fast this time of year.”

“Some of us have sore hands to show for it.”

“In a good cause, Keith. How far have you got?”

“Five hundred metres, no more.” Halliwell’s voice changed. “Hold on. Someone’s found something. I’ll get back to you shortly.”

Diamond could hear faint shouting over the phone. The frustration of not being close to the action was hard to endure. He pressed the phone closer to his ear. Then it clicked off.

Almost five minutes passed before the line was active again.

Halliwell said in a disappointed voice, “Badger sett. One of our guys found quite a large hole and Stanley took one look and said badgers. We found more burrows, so he’s right. We’re moving on.”

Diamond sighed and opened an Ordnance Survey map to get a sense of where the search had reached. It was large-scale, showing footpaths, bridleways and trails, and it gave a good idea of the area including the Combe Down railway tunnel way underneath where he was now, but it didn’t show any of the quarry locations. He’d need the sort of hand-drawn map old Seymour Ramsay had hanging on the wall of his cottage. He could remember the two named quarries south of Summer Lane, where he was now. To the west of Jackdaw was Vinegar Down, one of the oldest. They’d reach that if they went much farther.

His phone chirped again. “We may have found something,” Halliwell told him. “It’s definitely man-made. Stone, rectangular, about the size you said, on the edge of the same wood where the badgers were. We’re removing earth and dead leaves right now. Ingeborg is sending you a picture.”

“Have you given it a thump to see if it sounds hollow?”

“Too much muck for that. Check the photo. She’s sending it now.”

Technology had its advantages, he had to admit.

This was promising. Enough earth had been cleared to show the stone sides of what appeared to be a shaft a good two metres in length. The width was less than the opening he’d used with Stanley, under a metre, but it might well have been the difference between shafts meant for light and ventilation.

“I like the look of this and it’s in the right area,” he told Halliwell over the phone. “Get the opening clear and we’ll send someone down.”

“There seems to be an obstruction, guv.”

“Don’t force anything, then. There could be traces left by the killer. Is it boarded over?”

“It’s stone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Down about the length of my forearm. I’m not sure now if it is a shaft we found. Stanley is coming over. He’ll know.”

There was a pause for the verdict. Stanley was unlikely to say much, but his opinion was worth having.

“He says it’s not a shaft, guv.”

“What the fuck is it, then?”

“A coffin.”

“A what? You just told me it’s stone.”

“A Roman coffin, but without the lid. Apparently, it’s not unusual here. Ten or more have been found over the years. There was a Roman settlement up here. A villa was excavated in the eighteen-hundreds. The locals often turn up coins and bits of pottery. The south-facing slope we’re on would be ideal for a vineyard.”

“Did Stanley tell you all this?”

“No, his friends. He took one look at it and said ‘coffin.’”

To the point, as usual.

“Pity. Keep going, then. Things can only get better.”

He didn’t hear what Halliwell said to that. The phone went dead.

When the next call came, his hopes weren’t high. He guessed the search team would be needing a break. The sun was up and getting warm for April.

“What is it this time, Keith? An alien spaceship?”

“What?” The voice wasn’t Keith’s. He hadn’t checked to see who the caller was. “This is John Leaman, from Concorde House.” Solemn John Leaman, the most literal man in the team.

“Got my wires crossed. Sorry, John. What’s the latest from the hub?”

“You’re not going to like this, guv.”

“Georgina on the warpath?”

“No.”

A rising note in the response told him that whatever bad bit of news he was about to hear wasn’t necessarily bad news for Leaman. The man couldn’t wait to pass it on. He was positively smug. “Let’s hear it, then.”

“A call came in just now from a Mrs. Hector.”

He knew the name. He had to dredge deep in his memory. Still couldn’t grasp it. His life experiences were mapped in his brain as pre- and post-anaesthetic and Mrs. Hector was pre-. Registered there, but hazy.

“Belinda Pye’s landlady,” Leaman reminded him.

“Got you. She remembers something?”

“No.” Leaman was enjoying this. “Are you sitting down?”

“I’ve got no choice. Spit it out, man.”

“Mrs. Hector says Belinda is alive and well. She returned to her room this morning.”