“All in good time.”
“Do you have her phone number? She’s the nearest I’ve got to next of kin. Well, I have a sister, but she lives in Liverpool.”
“You’re recovering. You’re not dying.”
“Would you ask Paloma to visit?”
“If she calls to enquire about you, we’ll ask her to come in as soon as visiting is permitted. Does that put your mind at rest?”
“Not really, if I’m honest. When vomiting ends, visiting starts. Is that it?”
“In a nutshell, yes.”
“Except this is a sick bowl.”
She shook her head and marched out.
He’d tried everything he could think of. Charm, wit, invention.
Soon the pain in his foot took over from everything else. When another nurse came to take his blood pressure, he asked for something to ease the soreness. And two hours passed like two minutes. They woke him up to get him to exercise the ankle joint. It reduced the risk of clotting, they said.
After that, he slept again.
The anaesthetist came by and so did the consultant.
“You may be slow to heal, Mr. Diamond.”
“Why is that?”
“The nature of the injury. Several bones were severely damaged. I did the best I could. Be patient, wear the post-operative shoe, do the physiotherapy, and we’ll see how you are in a few weeks. Oh, and stay out of dangerous caves.”
“Quarries.”
“It was a quarry? I stand corrected.” The consultant turned to the sister beside him. “I don’t think he heard that. Look, he’s drifted off again.”
21
“Did the drone find anything at all?”
Diamond wasn’t interested in the drone. He asked the question to demonstrate to his deputy, Keith Halliwell, that he had a grasp of life outside the orthopaedic ward. Over the past twenty-four hours he’d got accustomed to being treated as a basket case. He was sometimes accused of being a grouch. Couldn’t usually understand why. In here, he knew what they meant.
Halliwell shook his head. “Too many trees. Drones can’t see through trees. When are you coming out, guv?”
“Today, if I have any say in it. They got me out of bed first thing this morning and walked me in the corridor outside. I’ve done that twice, with some help. Paloma was here at nine. That’s halfway through the day in hospital. I was already thinking about lunch. Anyhow, she’s offered to do the caring when I’m released. I get the feeling the hospital won’t object if I discharge myself. They’ll be glad to be shot of me.”
“Paloma called me at the office. Said you wanted to see me.”
“Correct. Did she give you the message about Stanley, the lad who was with me when I did this?”
“Sending him fifty? I did. He should have got it by now. That was yesterday.”
Irritated, Diamond said, “I know it was bloody yesterday. My head is straight now. I’m off everything except ibuprofen if I need it. Do I sound as if my head’s clear?”
“Clear as a bell.”
“Because we have a problem. When I was below ground with Stanley, I saw something that needs to be acted on. Shortly before the accident we wriggled through a tunnel, really narrow. We had no choice, because the main tunnel had come to an end. I suppose this cut-through was only about forty to fifty metres, but it took a lot of effort.”
“To dig?”
“To crawl through, dumbo. But you do have a point. I was thinking if they took the trouble to dig the thing, it ought to lead somewhere. And I was right.”
A nurse appeared at the end of the bed.
“Not now. I’ve got a visitor,” Diamond said.
“Have you exercised the foot today, Peter?”
“Don’t you people talk to each other? I walked up the corridor twice. I’m not interrupting my conversation to do it again.”
“I’m not suggesting you get out of bed. It’s important that you move the ankle joint. You can do that while you’re talking to your visitor. Both feet, please.”
After she’d gone, he said to Halliwell, “See what I’m up against?”
“Don’t mind me, guv. Wriggle your ankles as much as you like.”
“They call me Peter. Did you notice? Not Mr. Diamond. It’s all part of the brainwashing. You feel five years old. Where was I before she interrupted?”
“Down the tunnel. You were saying it led somewhere.”
“Right. To a room.”
“In the mine?”
Diamond looked as if someone had given his injured foot a twist. “Quarry.”
“A room in a quarry?”
“A big space, big enough for a crane and a trolley on rails and horses to work it. I could see all this ahead of me. That’s where I was heading when I hit my helmet on the roof and brought down the lumps of rock. Idiot me — I was too excited.”
“Anyone would be,” Halliwell said.
“Yes, but there was something else. When the quarrymen cut these rooms, they leave massive pillars, ten feet wide at least, to support the roof. One of them was there in front of me. And in that microsecond before I hit my head, I had a view of the floor beyond the column and there was something down there, Keith. A body, in running shoes.”
22
“He’s coming in,” Halliwell told the team at Concorde House. “He persuaded them he’s fit to leave hospital and he’ll be in first thing tomorrow. He wants us all here.”
After a stunned silence, DI John Leaman said, “I bet they were glad to be shot of him.”
“He can’t drive with an injured foot,” Ingeborg said. “How’s he getting here?”
“Paloma.”
“He might listen to her. She’ll tell him it’s too soon.”
“He’s dead set on it.”
“Why? What’s on his mind?”
Halliwell shared Diamond’s story of the body in the quarry and Leaman said it was unlikely and probably wishful thinking. “He’s obsessed with this idea that the woman is down in the stone mine. They’ll have given him some kind of anaesthetic for the operation and he’ll have imagined it.”
Some of the others agreed. One of the civilian staff spoke about the anaesthetic-induced fantasy she’d once experienced of finding Satan in her bed. “It was horribly real at the time. I can still picture it and now I never get into bed without putting on the light first.”
To the credit of Bath CID, no one followed up with a lewd comment.
“Getting back to the boss, whatever it was, he’s convinced it happened and he wants action,” Halliwell said, doing his duty as deputy.
“Sending some of us down the mine so we all end up in hospital? Count me out,” Leaman said.
“It’s blocked. The roof fell in,” Paul Gilbert said.
“He’ll think of something. He always does.”
“And he’s usually right,” Ingeborg said. “I say we should take him seriously.”
Diamond’s entrance on crutches at 8:30 next morning was watched with misgivings by the team. His office chair had been wheeled into the CID room. Helped by Paloma, and clearly awkward with the crutches on the shiny floor, he came to rest on the padded seat with a thump and a swear word while Halliwell held the back to stop him from rolling. If anyone had expected the big man to look pale after his ordeal, they were mistaken. He was rosebud pink from the effort.
A second chair was supplied as a foot rest.
In the circumstances, a round of applause might have been nice. It didn’t happen. They were all too suspicious about what he was planning.
Paloma said something to him and left.
He cleared his throat. “I told you we were looking for Belinda’s body when we last met. And now I know where it is — down the quarry where I copped my broken foot.” He paused as if to check whether anyone was smiling at his misfortune. They weren’t, so he grinned instead. “And now someone has to go down and deal with it.”