Stanley unzipped the front of his oversuit and took out a phone.
“You’re an optimist,” Diamond said. “You won’t get a signal down here.”
The young man stared at the blank screen as if it was a comforter. Or a way of blocking out Diamond.
“Better move on, hadn’t we, before our headlamp batteries run out?” Diamond said. “The ghosts of the old quarrymen would enjoy that.”
On hands and knees again, and some of the way on elbows, they progressed by stages. He could definitely feel a draught against his face, giving hope of connecting with a full-sized tunnel ahead. He still felt responsible for Belinda, promising himself the least he could do was to find her body. Rational thinking should have told him he was blameless, but the psyche doesn’t operate rationally.
And gradually the sides got wider and forward movement was easier. “We’re getting somewhere, Stanley.”
Aching in every sinew, but encouraged, he continued to crawl and squirm until — thank Christ! — he saw an opening ahead. “We’ve made it, Stanley. There’s a big space. I can see a room with rail track running through it.”
The beam from his lamp revealed more as he got closer: two huge pillars supporting the roof; a hand crane with the chain and hook dangling; some blocks of stone with lewis pins attached, ready to be hoisted; and, on the rails, a flatbed trolley that had waited to be loaded for at least a century and a half.
Howard Carter could not have felt better than this the day he unsealed Tutankhamun’s burial chamber.
Diamond rested on chest and belly for a moment and gathered strength for the last few seconds of moving like a lizard. A short way ahead was space to crouch and beyond that the bliss of being fully upright.
“Still with me, sunshine?”
No reply, which was what he expected from Stanley.
He looked over his shoulder for the glow of his companion’s lamp. Stanley wasn’t far behind.
He wriggled some more, got to his haunches, paused, braced and straightened.
Too much. His hard hat clunked against the roof and gave him a moment of dizziness, no more. Without head protection he could have injured himself and it would have been his own fault for misjudging the height.
He was telling himself it was a lucky escape when there was a grating sound from above and a section of the roof detached itself and dropped in front of him, raising dust. He stepped back, but not enough to avoid a second fall, a boulder the size of a football that bounced off the other debris and onto his right boot.
First, his foot registered only numbness and then the pain stabbed in, pain more severe than anything he could remember.
He passed out.
20
“So how did you get out of the mine?” Paloma asked.
“Quarry,” he said.
He was in bed in a side ward of the trauma and orthopaedic unit at the Royal United Hospital and somewhat sedated, but not enough to let mistaken terms get by. His right foot was cocooned by a metal blanket support that made a large hump in the bedding.
“Have it your way,” Paloma said. “Ingeborg called it a stone mine when she phoned me.”
“She doesn’t live on Combe Down.”
“Stop being so grouchy and tell me what happened.”
“Grouchy I am not. The last person who called me that got kicked off my team.”
“You won’t be kicking anybody in your present state.”
He managed a grin. “What did you ask me?”
“How you got out.”
“The lad who was with me. I don’t know how he coped. We had no chance of getting help from above ground. Phones wouldn’t work. We had to get back to where we started. Young Stanley dragged me most of the way. I used my good foot and my hands as much I could, but it was basically down to him that I got back to the shaft where we started. I’m no lightweight, as you know.”
“Then — when you reached the shaft — you still had to get to the surface.”
“Right. There was no way I could get up a rope ladder. Stanley knew what to do. He went to the top and used his phone to call 999. Don’t ever let me complain about modern youth. That kid is a hero, a bloody hero.”
“Have you paid him yet?”
“Jesus — I haven’t.” He clapped a hand to his head and raised a flurry of limestone dust.
“How much is he owed?” Paloma asked when she’d wiped the worst of it off his forehead.
“Twenty. Make it fifty. Would you tell Keith Halliwell? He’ll make sure it’s done.”
“How did they get you out?”
“The air ambulance came. It was after dark and the entrance to the shaft was in the middle of a wood, so they landed the helicopter in the nearest field. I don’t know how they knew where to come.”
“Stanley, I expect.”
“It would be, yes. You wouldn’t know it, talking to him, but he’s a bright lad. He will have used GPS to tell them where to come.”
“Good thing you weren’t on your own. You’d never have known what to do. So they lifted you?”
“Bosun’s chair. Two paramedics brought it down the shaft. They gave me a painkiller, made me as comfortable as they could and hoisted me up like Patch the dog.”
Paloma frowned. “Did you say a dog was down there or are you feeling woozy?”
“Another time, another story.”
“And what’s the prognosis?”
“Several broken bones. Do you know how many bones there are in a human foot?”
“Tell me then.”
“I was told, but I can’t remember. They had to cut the boot off to get at the foot, it was so swollen.”
“I expect the boot was some protection.”
“That’s for sure. The foot would have been mincemeat without it. They X-rayed me, of course, and I’m going for surgery later. Then I could be wearing a cast for up to three months, like a character out of a Charlie Chaplin film. What’s funny about men with their legs in plaster?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” she said, “but I’m creased up picturing it.”
“Traitor.”
“Careful what you say. You’re going to need help from me.”
“What with?”
“Driving.”
“I thought you were here to cheer the patient up. Hadn’t thought of that. What a drag.”
“Don’t fret. I’ll make sure you get to work. You won’t want to stay at home.”
“Speaking of home, could you look in and see Raffles? I’ll be here overnight and maybe longer.”
“I already fed him.”
“You’re an angel.”
Paloma smiled. “I don’t know what they gave you, but it’s having some unusual effects.”
“I’ll be more like my old self when it wears off.”
“I’ll stay well clear, then. And to think all this happened because you wanted to get one over Georgina.”
“Untrue.”
“It isn’t. You had high hopes of succeeding while the drone didn’t.”
“They didn’t find anything, did they?”
“I’ve no idea. Your CID people will know.”
He turned his head to look at the door. “Why haven’t they been to see me? Are they waiting outside?”
“Peter, it’s nearly midnight. Get some rest now and catch up with everything after the operation.”
After a night in a cell at Reading Police station, Spiro had worked out what must have happened. No one here spoke Albanian, of course, and much time had been used the evening before trying to question him in English. He’d answered in Albanian and there wasn’t much overlap except that they kept using a word that sounded worryingly like the Albanian imigrim. They searched him and took away the little money he had left and his backpack. They went through some formal procedure, reading from a printed card. He was photographed, fingerprinted and had a DNA sample taken from his mouth. But at least they didn’t beat him up. In fact, they removed the handcuffs and gave him coffee.