Or was it? He started to walk on.
A second shout came, less friendly. Spiro glanced over his shoulder and recognised the teenager who had bought the Claud Butler bike. Strange. The kid had got a bargain. What had he got to complain about? But the shout hadn’t come from the kid. An older guy, around forty, in leather and jeans, was creating this scene and he looked as if he wanted a fight and was big enough to win one. He had a phone in his hand and was speaking into it. He broke away from the kid and his mate and started running towards Spiro. Maybe he was the kid’s father, angry that his son had been involved in receiving stolen goods. Or he could be a mugger who thought the fifty pounds hadn’t been spent yet.
Spiro didn’t wait to find out. He started running, too, sprinting flat out up the street, then around a side turning towards Broad Street, where he would feel safer if only because it was a main thoroughfare, sure to be equipped with CCTV. His legs ached and his backpack was bouncing against his spine, but he kept going at the best speed he could manage, hoping his pursuer would give up. He glanced over his shoulder and he was definitely putting distance between himself and the guy.
Most of Broad Street is pedestrianised. Reach the redbrick section, Spiro told himself, and you should be safe. He was going to make it and he reckoned he had fifty metres in hand over the mugger. He took another look over his shoulder and saw no sign of him.
Nasty. He’d made the mistake of thinking everything here would go his way. Never let your guard down when you’re living rough or some evil-minded schmuck will try it on. He slowed to a walk, like other people around him, and gave his legs and lungs a chance to recover.
He was spent, so exhausted he didn’t react to the police patrol car moving straight up the walkway with siren blaring and lights flashing. Didn’t show much interest when it screeched to a stop and two officers jumped out. Had no thought that they’d come to arrest him. Only when he was wrestled to the ground, had his face pressed to the bricks and felt himself being handcuffed did he understand he’d been nicked.
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.”