The Secret Hangman

37

‘W here?’

‘The Avenue at Combe Down.’

‘Really?’ The significance escaped Leaman, so Diamond added, ‘Only a stone’s throw from Midford.’

This was an underestimate. It would have taken a relay of stone throwers to span the three-quarters of a mile across Horsecombe Vale, but the two places were close enough for comment.

‘Let’s go. You can do the driving.’

‘Me?’ Leaman said.

‘Why not? The phone calls must have tailed off by now.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

‘Delegate, man. The first principle of management.’

Leaman looked for the office dogsbody, Paul Gilbert, but he was busy on Agnes Tidmarsh’s statement. One of the civilian staff offered to oversee the taking of calls. ‘The boss sounds hearty,’ she said.

‘He’s expecting a result,’ Leaman said.

‘The ram raids?’

‘I should live so long.’

Combe Down was once a quarrymen’s outpost of eleven cottages to the south of the city. When Bath stone was in heavy demand for the great Georgian phase of building, the place grew into a mining village. Only after the mining industry declined in the nineteenth century were the south-facing slopes developed for suburban living, ideal, potential buyers were told, for sun-seekers and convalescents. In the second world war the Admiralty decamped from London and set up a vast establishment on the Fox Hill side. Now Combe Down is indistinguishable from Bath’s urban sprawl except that it has a hidden hazard. Its glory and its undoing is below ground, the gorgeous cream-coloured oolitic limestone that can be sawn or squared up with relative ease regardless of the alignment of the joints. Fine buildings across Britain — Buckingham Palace and Brighton’s Royal Pavilion among them — are mainly of stone mined in huge quantities from the workings there. The downside is that the 45-acre honeycomb underground created a huge problem of subsidence. Subterranean roof collapses happened too often for comfort. Something had to be done. Various schemes for infilling and reinforcement were debated for years. To complicate the problem, the mine-owners could not be held responsible; the workings were abandoned half a century before. In law, the landowners above ground owned what was — or was not — beneath them. Trying to negotiate with hundreds of house-owners was a planner’s nightmare. Finally in the twenty-first century government funds were secured for a stabilisation project and a programme of infilling with ‘foam concrete’ was started. Over a hundred miners, most of them Welshmen, had been at work for some years using timber and steel platforms. They were likely to be employed for some time yet.

The unique character of the place was on Diamond’s mind as Leaman drove them up the steep, narrow rise of Prior Park Road. What if Harry Lang had found a way into one of those disused mines and was holding Martin Steel down there? The job of finding them would be daunting and dangerous. Nobody knows the full extent of the workings. Attempts to map them are foiled by roof collapses and the waste rock dumped by the original miners. You can get a certain way if you are willing to take risks and squeeze through narrow openings, but it is a job for cavers, not policemen. For a fugitive it offers the chance of hiding up for a long time.

He hadn’t forgotten that Danny Geaves had holed up in the mine above Bathford at the Browne’s Folly quarry, a few miles east of here. Had Geaves unwittingly given his killer the idea of using these quarries?

You have to be positive in this job, Diamond told himself, or you go bananas. Maybe Lang was still above ground.

He was getting to know this area south of Bath better than he’d ever done. A sign to Lyncombe came up and he realised they were passing close to Paloma’s place. He looked forward to telling Paloma how Jerry’s help had been crucial to the inquiry, leading them directly to Lang. Better nick Lang first, though.

They linked up with Ralph Allen Drive where the gatehouse signified that this was once the carriage road to Prior Park, the quarry-owner’s Palladian villa. Not only was it graced with pillars, long since gone, but a tramway ran beside it to bring freshly mined stone from the quarries down to the river.

Half a mile on, they reached the Avenue and spotted the police car next to Harry Lang’s silver Subaru Legacy.

Diamond was muttering as he got out. If the officers who’d found the car thought they were due for a pat on the back they were mistaken.

‘Why haven’t you got tapes round this?’

‘We weren’t told, sir.’

‘Weren’t told? What have you got between your ears? You know the driver is a suspected killer. It may have been used to transport corpses. Get it done now. Have you checked for witnesses?’

‘Interesting question. In point of fact we don’t know how long the car’s been here,’ the same officer said.

Lippy. Diamond could imagine this jobsworth holding forth in the Manvers Street canteen. ‘That isn’t what I asked.’

The second constable had the sense to say, ‘No witnesses as yet, sir.’

‘So when you’ve secured the car, start knocking on doors. Soon as you find some curtain-twitcher who saw the driver, call me over.’

‘We’re supposed to be on patrol,’ motormouth said.

‘My heart bleeds.’

The two glanced at each other, no doubt wondering how this would play with their supervisor.

Diamond at a crime scene was a formidable presence. He gave them a look that ended the exchange. They went to their car to collect those tapes.

To Leaman, he said, ‘Try the boot. If it’s locked, force it.’

Leaman was bold enough to say, ‘Guv, don’t you think we should let forensics have first crack?’

‘Get with it, John.’

‘Just playing it by the book.’

‘And what does the book say if Martin Steel is in there coughing his last?’

Leaman tried the boot, found it locked and set to work with a crowbar while Diamond called for back-up, the full works, not forgetting hard hats, flashlights and the local cave-rescue team.

The doorstepping got under way while Leaman mangled the boot-lid of the car. Subaru make sturdy locks but brute force eventually triumphed. The lid sprang up. There was nobody inside.

Just a holdall with some gym kit.

Across the street one of the uniformed officers shouted, ‘Over here, sir.’

Diamond went over.

A man in a singlet and shorts was at his front door and — praise be — keen to pass on information. ‘Like I just said, I saw him drive up getting on for an hour ago. Short hair, jeans, black top. He seemed in a hurry. Went that way.’ He pointed his thumb up the street.

‘Have you seen him before?’

‘No, mate. He’s not from round here.’

‘The car?’

‘Bit flash for here.’

‘In a hurry, you say. Was he running?’

‘If he wasn’t, he was walking at a good rate.’

‘Was he carrying anything?’

‘Nothing I noticed.’

‘What’s the road to the left?’

‘Williamstowe. Doesn’t lead nowhere.’

‘Are there mines under this part?’

‘Is the Pope a Catholic? The man two doors up lost half his garden the year before last. Straight down the hole. It’s a disgrace. His kiddie could have been playing there.’

‘Where’s the nearest entrance?’

‘Try stamping your foot, mate.’

‘Proper entrance.’

‘Behind the pub, top of Firs Field. Same way the bloke went.’

They went to check. The landlord of the Hadley Arms confirmed that there was an entrance in his yard. ‘I can open it if you want and show you where the steps are, but you won’t go anywhere. It’s blocked now.’

He sent them to the ‘works’ in the middle of Firs Field — a well-secured site surrounded by ten-foot-high metal fencing where nobody was working today. A notice warned of the dangers. Diamond walked round the perimeter.

‘Unless he’s a bloody pole vaulter he didn’t get in this way.’

The man they’d first questioned had followed them. ‘He wouldn’t need to. There are shafts I could show you that even the council don’t know about. The place is riddled with them. Some have been filled in, but plenty aren’t.’

‘Where?’

‘I know of two in people’s gardens. They were for air, or light.

There’s just a grille over them.’

‘Show me.’

Diamond sounded resolute, but his optimism was being tested. If Lang had gone underground it could take a small army of searchers to ferret him out.

He followed his guide back to the main street. A second police car had arrived and Leaman was updating the newcomers, but they weren’t cavers by the look of them.

The shaft was in the garden of an old lady who sounded as if she didn’t know which century it was. A runaway killer could have walked through the house and wished her the time of day without her noticing. The garden had gone wild.

‘He hasn’t been here,’ Diamond said, seeing the brambles arching over the grille. They hadn’t been disturbed in years.

They moved on to the next, in a better-kept garden. The owners were out. There was a gate at the side you could step over. The people had made quite a feature of their shaft by giving it a stone surround and siting the grille at knee height. Trays of seeds were arranged across the top.

‘I don’t think so. Is that all?’

He was taken to another entrance more like a cave, smaller than the first he’d seen. A sheet of corrugated iron was supposed to keep intruders out, but it was no longer anchored. A slim person could have squeezed past it, and when Diamond tugged at it he made room even for his far-from-slim body. ‘We’ll look in here,’ he said.

Three more vehicles had arrived in the Avenue, one belonging to the Mendip cave-rescue team. They’d brought enough hard hats and overalls for the police as well as themselves. Diamond briefed them on the operation and they briefed him and his officers on safety procedures. Roof collapse was a real possibility. Natural fractures in the limestone meant that the slightest disturbance could cause a rock fall.

He had to give an assurance that none of his men were armed and that he doubted if the suspect had a gun.

They levered back the iron barrier and went in, three cavers and nine policemen.

‘How big is this mine?’ he asked while they were going down some steps.

‘Twenty-five acres or more. Firs is the biggest and it links up with Coxe’s,’ the senior caver said, ‘but it’s not so much the size, it’s the complexity. It’s a warren. They worked any number of faces.’

Flashlights were in use from the start, picking out the way ahead. The roof at the bottom of the steps was some ten feet high and supported by massive pillars left by the miners as they cut their way deep into the bedrock. To left and right the lights exposed tunnels of variable depth.

‘Shouldn’t we send someone into these?’ Diamond said.

‘If you do, I won’t answer for their safety.’

He doubted if anyone’s safety was guaranteed, but he didn’t say so. In this situation he had to defer to the experts. The caver who’d just spoken seemed to know what was on Diamond’s mind. He stopped by an odd-shaped pillar much narrower at the base than the top. ‘You find this near the entrances. It’s called pillar robbing. After the mines were abandoned, the locals would come in and hack off slabs of stone for their own use. Some pillars got shaved down to spindles.’

They moved on and crossed an intersection where you could see the tramlines of the old transport system for moving the blocks to the surface.

‘Before we go on,’ Diamond said, ‘I wouldn’t mind looking at what we’re walking over, in case of footprints.’ The floor was thick with dust.

‘Good thinking,’ the caver said. ‘Let’s have some more light here.’

Nothing obvious was revealed. Diamond didn’t admit to his inner misgiving that nobody had been down here in years. ‘Maybe he was ultra careful.’

‘Could be,’ the caver said. ‘Want to go on?’

‘Of course.’

They entered a narrow passage where they were forced to stoop. It soon opened into a bigger area where a rusty hand-cranked crane had been abandoned, still attached to the face with steel cables. Saw lines were visible in a bed of stone that for some reason had not been cut right out. A huge heap of rubble lay to their left, partly blocking their route. They crunched over it.

There was a choice of tunnels ahead. Each decision was like the toss of a coin with the chance of making the wrong call. Diamond flicked his flashlight from one to the next and tried to sound confident.

‘That way.’

The earlier sense of awe at the surroundings was waning and some of the party were starting to talk. He stopped and asked for silence.

What he got was better than silence. Somewhere ahead came the definite sound of a movement that could have been somebody kicking a small piece of stone. They all heard it. The party moved on at a faster rate.

The senior caver said to Diamond, ‘I wouldn’t get too excited. Bits of stone are falling all the time.’

He didn’t answer. He pressed on for another fifty yards or more and then stopped because he’d heard another sound, more drawn out and heavier.

‘T Rex,’ some wag said.

‘Shut up.’

The caver said, ‘It’ll be traffic overhead. The roof is shallow here. We’re right under the Bradford road.’

‘Let’s move on, then.’ But he stopped a moment later, a Robinson Crusoe moment. His light had picked out a set of footprints in the dusty stretch ahead. They were not made by some miner a century ago. They had the zigzag pattern of modern trainers and they led into a side-tunnel.

Another vehicle drumrolled overhead as if dubbed in to emphasise the drama. Nothing needed to be said. Everyone appreciated the significance.

The tunnel looked no different from others the cavers had declared too dangerous to enter. Diamond didn’t give them the chance to object. He dipped his head and went in first, shining the beam as far ahead as possible. His hard hat struck overhanging parts of the roof more than once. The way through had been roughly hewn, suggesting it was a trial cut, or a passage linking with another part of the mine. He could just about walk without going on his knees, but he didn’t fancy stooping like this for long.

Suddenly he heard the scrape of stones only a short way ahead. He raised the torch beam and it caught the gleam of white trainers moving scarcely less than forty yards in front.

He shouted, ‘Police! Stop where you are, face down on the floor.’

If he was heard, he wasn’t heeded. The trainers moved on and disappeared.

He didn’t understand how, unless there was a side-passage. He didn’t think he could be outpaced that rapidly, although Lang was presumably a fit man. All he could do was press on and hope for another sighting. The flashlight showed nothing yet. More tunnel, but nothing else.

He shouted, ‘Harry Lang?’

There was just an echo.

But the tunnel ended not far beyond the point where he’d sighted the man ahead. It opened out into a far larger space where stone had been mined extensively and there were massive pillars supporting the roof. He stepped out and straightened up and the others emerged as well and stood with him, taking in the new situation, a roof ten to fifteen feet high and a choice of directions.

It was a relief to stand upright, but with it came the depressing realisation that Lang could have gone any one of six ways. No footprints here. Any dust was confined to the edges of the working.

‘I spotted him,’ Diamond said. ‘I definitely saw him.’

‘This is Coxe’s mine,’ the senior caver said, as if it was the other side of the moon. ‘We’ll be somewhere under Fox Hill.’

‘Is it large?’

‘Large enough. I’d say the odds are stacked in his favour now, but it’s your call.’

Whatever else you could say about Diamond, he wasn’t a quitter. ‘In that case, we split up. Three teams of four. A caver with each. Do we have enough lights? Meet back here in half an hour. The team that brings back Harry Lang gets free drinks at the pub.’