The Finisher

25

Vindicated.

He hadn’t hallucinated while dosed on morphine. A body was down there. Not Belinda’s, obviously, so whose?

From Summer Lane, where Paloma stopped the car, he could see several four-by-fours and a crime scene van parked on the far side of Shepherd’s Field near a wooded area. This had to be the copse containing the shaft entrance Halliwell and the search team had discovered at the end of the previous week. No one seemed to be about and it was still raining steadily.

“Let’s go.”

“We’re going nowhere,” Paloma said. “My car won’t go through mud like that and you’ll be no help when I get stuck.”

He looked at the state of the ground and the tracks left by the vehicles that had made it to the top of the field, all four-wheel drives.

“Help me out, then.”

“You’re not aiming to cross the field on crutches, I hope?”

“Try and stop me.”

“You haven’t even got a mac.”

“Don’t wait,” he said. “Someone else will see that I get home.”

He set off at a speed that would have confirmed Georgina’s worst suspicions about his ability to climb stairs. Keeping out of the ruts left by the vehicles and going like a crane fly at a window, he managed without falling once. The action wasn’t elegant. Single-minded intent got him there.

Through the trees ahead was a wide area marked off with police tape. On getting close, he saw that a mass of tangled ivy had been dragged away to reveal the hole that was the outlet to the shaft. The protective grille had been lifted and a rope ladder was in place.

He spotted some of his team in a Range Rover and banged the side with his crutch. A steamed-up window was wound down and Halliwell looked out at his bedraggled boss. “Didn’t expect to see you, guv. Don’t you have an umbrella?”

“How could I with these?”

“You’d better get in. We’ll make room.”

Ingeborg and Paul Gilbert slid closer to make a space on the back seat.

“Don’t bother,” Diamond said. “I won’t be able to climb in. What’s happening? Is someone down the shaft? Someone living, I mean.”

“Stanley, with the guts man,” Halliwell said.

“Who did you get?”

“Dr. Sealy.”

“Him.” Bertram Sealy was a complainer with an acid tongue, not Diamond’s favourite forensic pathologist. His one redeeming quality was that his thoroughness couldn’t be doubted.

Ingeborg said, “You’re getting soaked, guv. You’ll ruin that suit. We must have an umbrella in the back. Paul, why don’t you see if you can find it?”

“Don’t fuss. I’ll survive. Stanley, you said. You do mean the lad I was underground with?”

“He discovered the body,” Halliwell said.

“How was that? I called off the search.”

“It seems he came back yesterday and went down for a look. He’s not much of a talker, as you know, but he’s the go-to person if you want to see down a quarry and it gives him status in the village.”

“He found the body and called us?”

“Nothing so simple as that. Sod-all was done about it until this morning. The call came from that old guy you visited last week.”

“Seymour Ramsay.”

“Stanley must have spoken the word ‘body’ to someone in the pub last night and the news got back to Mr. Ramsay and he decided it was a matter for the police.”

Knowing the personalities involved, Diamond had to agree that this was the likely scenario. “So what are we dealing with, Keith? Is this a fresh corpse or a skeleton? Clothed? Male or female?”

“Mr. Ramsay didn’t seem to know. You’d think Stanley would have told him.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“We’ll know shortly, anyhow.”

“Hasn’t anyone taken a picture yet?”

“The photographer is sitting in the forensics van waiting for his chance to go down. Nothing can be rushed. It’s dangerous down there.”

“I’ll vouch for that.”

“Old Mr. Ramsay said the quarry has a sad history. There are stories of roof falls going back to the eighteen-hundreds. It was reopened about 1912 and then closed again a year later after a fatal accident.”

“Did they get the guy out?”

“Don’t worry, it’s not his body. But the mine was too dangerous to work. The entrance was sealed and the ground levelled. The only access point is here.”

“Not anymore,” Diamond said. “There’s another way into it — the tunnel I crawled along — linking Patch Quarry to Jackdaw. I told you I had a sight of the body ahead of me before I had my accident. I told everyone.”

“I can see something,” Ingeborg said. “Someone’s coming up.”

All eyes were on the shaft. A hand appeared and grasped the top rung of the ladder. Then a curved yellow object. Inside the hard helmet was the chubby, florid face of Bertram Sealy.

“It’s either a hobbit or a groundhog,” Diamond called out, getting in first with the abuse.

“Coming from a Long John Silver impersonator, that’s rich,” Sealy shouted back. “Where’s your parrot?”

Diamond spoke to his team. “Someone better give the poor sod a hand out of there.”

“No need,” Sealy said. “I haven’t finished. I only came up for a body bag. There’s one on the back seat of my car if anyone here has a shred of decency and will fetch it.”

Paul Gilbert had heard. He left the Range Rover and walked over to another vehicle.

“What can you tell us?” Diamond asked Sealy without much expectation of a helpful answer.

“Very little until I get the deceased to my dissecting table. The light is terrible down there. The cause of death is anyone’s guess right now. As for the time, we’re looking at several days, going by the aroma.”

“We think about a week, the day of the half marathon,” Diamond said.

“Makes sense. The deceased is dressed in running clothes.”

“Good.”

“What’s good about that?”

“It confirms my own observation. I was down there in a side tunnel, got a partial view of her legs and saw the trainers she was wearing.”

“She?” Sealy said. “Your powers of observation can’t be up to much. I know it’s dark down there but the runner I was looking at isn’t my idea of a she.”

“Male?”

“Nothing is certain in the strange world we live in now, but that’s my assumption.” He reached for the white plastic body bag Gilbert had fetched. “I’m never without one of these. I’ll also need at least ten metres of rope and some muscle to help with the lifting. Lower one end of the rope through the hole. Can you arrange that?”

“Don’t you think we should get some pictures of the body before it’s moved?”

“Has the photographer shown up at last, then? Send him down. Send the entire police force down if you like. There’s plenty of room at the bottom. It’s just the shaft that’s narrow.” He dropped the body bag into the void and climbed down after it.

The photographer must have been listening because he left the forensics van, stepped over the tape and crossed to the shaft entrance. No attempt seemed to have been made to mark an access path. What with the rainfall, the clearance of undergrowth and the footsteps around, the crime scene was well and truly corrupted.

“Get yourself into a zipper suit and a hard hat, Keith, and see what’s down there,” Diamond said. “I won’t be joining you.”

“Sanity breaks out at last,” Ingeborg said.

“I didn’t catch that.”

“It wasn’t meant for your ears, guv.”

He told Paul Gilbert to find the length of rope Sealy had requested and he was about to go closer himself for a look down the hole when Ingeborg said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking...”

“What about?”

“How it went for you at headquarters.”

She’d heard he’d been summoned to headquarters, of course. You can’t expect an official roasting to pass without everyone getting to know and revelling in it.

“I’m still here, aren’t I? Enough said?”

Not enough for Ingeborg. “Just a warning shot, then?”

“Postponed because of a technical issue.”

“Cool.”

“You think so?”

“Maybe what’s happening here will make a difference.”

He’d put his trouble with the high-ups to the back of his mind. “How exactly?”

“The body being found. You were right to authorise the searches. It wasn’t a wild goose chase.”

“That’s true.”

She cleared her throat. “Would it be an idea to text Georgina, keep her in the loop?”

He saw the sense in that. “Smart thinking, Inge.”

“You could sit in the forensics van and do it in the dry.”

“Right now?”

“The sooner the better.”

Without more prompting from his tuned-in sergeant, he made his way to the van and opened the door at the back, pushed aside a stack of overshoes and made enough room for his rear.

Back at Combe Down dealing with the corpse I saw down the quarry. May be late returning.

He resisted garnishing the message with a note of “I told you so.”

His speed of texting wasn’t the quickest. By the time he’d sent the message, the logistics of bringing the body to the surface were being discussed. Dr. Sealy had put his head out of the hole again. He’d decided the best solution was to strap the dead man to a rigid rescue stretcher and lift it vertically. He didn’t want it swinging against the sides of the shaft, so a pulley was about to be fixed in place.

One of the younger policemen asked if the body would be wrapped.

“Squeamish, are you, son?” Sealy said. “Yes, I’m zipping it into the body bag. You won’t miss your beauty sleep tonight.” He disappeared from view again.

“What a jerk,” Diamond said, back beside Ingeborg. “Where’s Keith?”

“Still down there, helping to strap the body to the stretcher, I expect.”

“He won’t mind doing that. When the nerves were given out, Keith had already left.”

A small crowd assembled around the shaft when the pulley started to turn. The mechanism jerked alarmingly at one stage as some earth was loosened under the supports and a few gasps were heard, but the job was done without more alerts. The stretcher and its load were detached from the winding mechanism and returned to the horizontal.

“Wait,” Diamond said to the officers about to remove it to a mortuary vehicle. He limped across to the stretcher. “Hold it steady for a moment.”

The tab on the zip was at the top end. He pulled it down far enough to see the face inside.

And gasped.

He zipped it up again as if the tab was red hot.