“He’s called Patch, for the obvious reason,” Seymour said. “He only moves when absolutely necessary because one of his forelegs is missing.”
Diamond winced.
“He moves better than I do,” Seymour added. “There’s a saying among vets: ‘Dogs have three legs and a spare.’ I understand you want some information about the quarries, Mr. Diehard.”
“Peter will do. In actual fact, the mines interest me more than the quarries.”
“Mines?” He sounded as if he’d never heard of them.
“The mines underneath us.”
“They’re all known as quarries here, above ground or below. Coffee or tea?”
It was hard to imagine how Seymour would manage a tray with hot drinks.
“Had one before I came, thanks. It’s about a missing person, a young woman from Bath who was in the half marathon on Saturday. She seems to have run off course and hasn’t been seen since.” All of which was true without going into suspicion of murder.
Seymour was still wanting to be hospitable. “Do sit down, Peter. Move Patch off the chair in the corner and bring it closer to where I sit by the fire.”
“He looks too comfortable.”
“He won’t mind. Put his cushion on the floor and he’ll know what to do.”
Tough, but it was this chair or squat on the floor. Fortunately, Patch seemed to have been through this indignity before. He hopped off, surprisingly sure-footed, waited for the cushion to be repositioned and settled on it without objection.
“Was the lady runner seen in Combe Down?” Seymour asked when Diamond was sitting facing him.
“Not to my knowledge. But it’s the obvious place to make for if she couldn’t face running through the old railway tunnel.”
“A panic attack?”
“Possibly.”
“But if she’d entered the race she must have known it included the tunnel.”
“She may have been put off by someone seen running with her, getting too familiar for comfort.”
“That sounds more likely. And you’re wondering if she is lost in one of the quarries. Is that it?”
“That’s exactly it. I know most of them were filled in some years ago.”
“There’s only one left in business.”
“Some abandoned workings outside the village weren’t given the treatment, isn’t that so?”
“They weren’t judged to be a danger to anybody’s property. I’ll show you on a map if you wish.” He pointed to one hanging on the wall. “Take it down and bring it over here.”
Diamond unhooked the framed map of Combe Down and handed it to Seymour. “I’m interested in any that lie to the southeast, above where the railway tunnel entrance is.”
“The obvious one would be Jackdaw.” His arthritic forefinger touched a point on the map. “The entrance was here, through an inclined shaft in Kingham Field. It was certainly one of the larger quarries because you can still see the grand arched portal opposite Lake Cottage, just off Summer Lane. The way in was blocked off years ago, before my time, with backfilled spoil, but it must have been a major source of stone. Some of it was used in the building of the railway tunnel.”
“Really?” Diamond leaned forward for a closer look.
“But the full extent of the Jackdaw workings is unknown. They must have been extensive. Back in the 1980s when some foundations were being laid near Monkton Combe Junior School, the workmen broke through to a tunnel believed to be part of the Jackdaw complex.”
“How far from the entrance is that?”
“More than a furlong.”
Diamond didn’t think in furlongs.
“About two hundred metres.”
He didn’t think in metres either, but he let that pass. “It also looks close to the disused railway. That’s the route the runners took.”
“Down in the valley. If your missing lady found her way into the Jackdaw workings she had some uphill running to do first.” There were no blind spots in Seymour’s thinking. He was visualising this.
“Agreed, but we found her running vest this morning in a field near Summer Lane. An underground quarry on that scale must have had some ventilation shafts.”
“Very likely.”
“Do you know of any uncovered ones?”
“For Jackdaw? No.” It was a negative, but there was some reserve in the old man’s tone.
Diamond waited.
“Most of them have been identified and covered or filled in, but there could be others. A shaft was discovered by accident only three years ago. It’s a bit of a mystery which quarry it belongs to. Possibly a previously undiscovered one.”
“Where’s this?”
“In the woods near Kingham Field. There was a quarry opened there in 1810 by William Smith, the father of English geology, but that one was short-lived and to the best of my knowledge was not below ground.”
“You said ‘discovered by accident’?”
“Literally so — and the accident was to an individual not a million miles from here. If Patch could talk, he’d give you his first-hand account.”
Hearing his name, the fox terrier lifted his head from the cushion and stared in their direction.
“He’s only here by adoption, you see,” Seymour said. “He belonged to a local lady, Miss Wayland, and in those days he had four legs and was taken for regular walks off the lead. He’d wait if he needed to cross a road. He’s very obedient. One afternoon in the woods above Tucking Mill, he caught sight of a fox and did what fox terriers are bred to do, chased it until it went to earth somewhere. In his excitement he’d left Joyce Wayland far behind. She was in her sixties and not all that agile, but she did all she could to find him, calling his name until her voice ran out, unfortunately with no result. He’d vanished.”
Patch still had his ears pricked as if he knew his story was being told.
“She returned home, expecting him to find his own way back. He didn’t. She spent a sleepless night worrying about him. Next morning she was dreading what she might discover, but she retraced her steps and still couldn’t find him. In the afternoon, others volunteered to help and eventually someone heard a faint whimpering from below ground. Patch had fallen through a small hole obscured by thick fronds of bracken and was unable to get out.”
“He’d found the quarry?”
“Yes. He was nine metres down and was helpless on the stone floor. He’d broken a foreleg, hadn’t you, poor old fellow?” Seymour turned to look at Patch and got some vigorous wags of the tail in response.
“How did they get him up?”
“A young lad from the village offered to go down on a rope ladder. He’s well-known to be sympathetic to animals. He has more time for dogs than he has for people. He managed to get Patch into a sling and they hoisted up the cause of all the fuss, distressed and dehydrated, yet overjoyed, of course. Sadly, the leg was so badly fractured that it needed to be amputated. Dogs are very adaptable, as I was saying, and he was able to cope.”
“Was it a ventilation shaft he’d fallen through?”
“It was. And none of the mining engineers who have inspected it since can say for certain whether the tunnel was joined to an existing quarry, like Jackdaw, or was another one altogether. The locals have no such problem. They call it Patch Quarry and I think the name will stick. It was quoted in an article about Combe Down in the Bath Geological Society journal, so he’s earned himself a place in the history books.”
“A celebrity.”
“Don’t praise him too much, or he’ll demand a better home.”
“And how did you come to adopt him?”
“That’s the saddest part of the story. The stress of the whole incident seemed to have been too much for Joyce Wayland. Three weeks after, she suffered a sudden heart attack and died. She was a great loss to the village, active in all sorts of ways.”