Diamond gave Stanley a glare. “What did you say?”
“The saw. Stone-cutters called them frigbobs.” This was the first unsolicited information the young man had provided.
“Got you. It looks frigging hard to use, for sure.”
“The weight of it helped to make the cut. That and water from a drip can.”
“I noticed some timber props holding up the roof back there. Tree trunks basically.”
“Wasn’t so scientific in them days,” Stanley said.
“There must have been accidents.”
“Plenty.”
Diamond approached one of the columns and peered at some names and dates scraped into the stone. “Graffiti.”
“That’s nothing.”
“I’d call this one something. ‘1858. Elvis.’”
Stanley’s lip curled. “Says who?” He came closer and shone his lamp on the carved lettering. “Ellis.”
“If that’s Ellis, he did a poor job on the second L.”
They moved on down the main tunnel, with Diamond increasingly aware that even if Belinda’s body was down here the odds against finding it were heavily loaded. “I’m looking for more shafts. They’ll only be found above the really big spaces like the one we just came through, I suppose?”
“Rooms,” Stanley said.
Seymour had talked about rooms and Diamond hadn’t fully understood. “So I’m thinking we’re doing the right thing following the rail tracks. Let’s go as far as this main tunnel takes us. The smaller ones don’t interest me. What was that?” His head lamp had flickered as if it was on the blink, literally. Troubling. He didn’t want to lose his light source. “There it goes again.”
“Bats.”
“Are they common underground?”
“Thousands.”
He thought about bats and their feeding habits. “They live on flying insects, don’t they? They must know ways out of this place.” He didn’t get an answer, so he continued thinking aloud. “They wouldn’t be here if there weren’t ways up to the surface. They’ll know shafts nobody has mapped.”
“No use to thee or me,” Stanley said. Giving encouragement wasn’t included in his fee.
“There must be shafts up ahead. I haven’t noticed any except the one we came down.” Diamond quickened his step, hoping they’d come to another room. The tunnel had been straight up to now, but it curved to the left a short way ahead.
Disappointment awaited. They rounded the bend and were confronted with a huge heap of rubble that had covered the rails and blocked the tunnel.
“Hold it,” Stanley said. “Could be a roof collapse.”
Diamond halted. They both turned their beams upwards and examined the surface above them for tell-tale cracks. There was nothing obvious.
“Don’t move from here,” Stanley said, taking charge. He edged along the right-hand wall towards the obstruction. Most pieces of the displaced stone weren’t large. He picked some up and held it in his palm. “Spoil.”
“Too small to be of use?”
A nod.
The rubble wasn’t from a rock fall. It was unwanted pieces of stone dumped in the most inconvenient place.
Diamond swore and said, “Why here, in the main tunnel?”
Stanley stepped up to the pile and started skirting it, using his hands as well as his feet, and squeezed between the loose stone and the wall until he was out of sight. Presently he called out, “Gully.”
“What?” Diamond called back.
“Dead end. They hit a gully. Quarryman’s bleeding nightmare.”
The seam of oolitic limestone had come to an end because a ravine lay across the intended route of the tunnellers. The action of water over millions of years had penetrated the beds of clay and ruptured the Jurassic layer.
Stanley wriggled back into view. “They couldn’t get no further, so they used this end as a spoil heap.”
“We came all this way for nothing?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Got no choice.” Frustrated, Diamond fell into Stanley’s laconic style of speech. He turned and trudged back the way they had come.
This expedition seemed to be ill-fated. The scale of the task was massively bigger than he had imagined. He was unused to the clothes, uneasy with the environment and he had small confidence in his companion.
“I’ve lost my bearings,” he said to Stanley. “Do you have a sense of where we got to?”
“Dunno what you’re on about.”
“What’s above us now?”
“Woods and fields.”
“Still south of the village?”
“Maybe.”
“We’re going which way — eastwards?”
“I’m not a bleeding compass.”
“Anyhow,” Diamond said. “We’ll soon be back where we started.” And after a few more minutes of walking they returned to the open area Stanley had called a room.
They stood in silence while Diamond considered the limited options.
One of the lower tunnels led off at an angle to the one they’d explored. “I wonder where this goes.”
“How would I know?” Stanley said.
“I’m thinking it might link up with another truckway.”
“You tell me.”
Diamond had heard enough of this negative stuff. “What’s your problem, Stanley? Everything I’ve had from you since we started is a downer.”
“Waste of time, innit?”
“You’ll be paid. Lighten up, man.”
There was no reply.
“I’m going to see where this one leads,” Diamond said. “Are you coming?”
A shrug.
“I’m going to have a go.”
“Your choice.”
Stanley had made it obvious he wasn’t keen. He didn’t say whether there were dangers, or he simply considered it a waste of energy.
Diamond wasn’t being put off by a stroppy teenager. “Come on, then. I’ll go first.”
Stanley’s face was a mask of indifference.
Diamond dipped his head and stepped inside.
They soon had to bend their backs and watch for projecting stone. The cut-through wasn’t as smooth as in the main tunnel.
“Is it my imagination or is there some movement of air?”
He got no answer from behind. Only the crunch of Stanley’s boots told him anyone else was with him.
The posture was a strain, not only on his back but on knees and thighs. It came as a relief when the gap ahead narrowed so much that they were forced to go on hands and knees. He’d needed some convincing earlier to wear the knee and elbow pads. “I don’t know how far I can go like this.”
The narrow sides had one good effect: his headlamp lit up the cream-coloured stone with dazzling intensity. He didn’t like to think about the view Stanley was getting behind him. It was unlikely to make misery-guts any more companionable.
“I’m going to pause a moment,” Diamond said. “This is hard work.” He squirmed into a position where he could sit with his knees up and give Stanley a change of view. “I would say there’s definitely some cooler air coming towards us. There must be a reason why they cut this tunnel. Surely it wasn’t just for the stone.”
“Crawl space,” Stanley said, still insisting on the quarrymen’s jargon.
“Crawl space to where?”
He hadn’t expected an answer and he didn’t get one. His hand touched a small object with a smooth curved surface. He picked it up. “Hey, a candle stub. Seymour told me about these. Imagine working down here by candlelight. How long ago since this was last alight? A hundred years? Two hundred, more like.”
Stanley was unmoved.
They sat for some seconds in silence.
“Seymour has an iron candlestick he showed me,” Diamond said. “It had a spike where they hammered it into the stone where they were working.”
More seconds passed.
“Must have been a bind having to change them each time they burned through.”