All that could be heard was the faint hum of car tyres on the motorway to the north.
“I’ve given plenty of thought to this. God knows, I’ve had time to think.”
John Leaman was rash enough to interrupt. He, too, had had time to think, and it wasn’t in his nature to hold back when something unwelcome was in prospect. “Isn’t this a job for the professionals, guv?”
“Who do you mean?”
“Cavers. If any of us tried, we’d do no better than you.” Leaman sometimes spoke good sense and today he was speaking for the team, but he was incapable of being tactful.
Diamond grasped the chair arms as if he was about to stand up. On finding he couldn’t, he said with menace, “Where did I go wrong, then? Tell me, John. We’re all listening.”
Leaman eyed the surgical boot. “Causing a roof fall and getting injured.”
“If I’d left it to the professionals, we wouldn’t know Belinda was down there.”
“Can we be certain she is?”
Everyone except Leaman winced. Some looked down to avoid eye contact.
Diamond said, “You’ve got my word she’s there.”
“I’m not calling you a liar.”
Mercifully, this went unheard by Diamond. He talked through Leaman’s words. He was down in the quarry again. “We crawled through this small connecting tunnel and it opened up to reveal a room, a quarryman’s term for a really large space where they loaded the stone onto trucks. I didn’t get in there because of what happened, but before my foot was crushed I caught sight of her legs. Flat to the floor. She was mostly concealed by a pillar, but her shins and feet were visible and she was definitely wearing trainers, modern running shoes with the Adidas logo. Is that good enough for you?”
Not for Leaman. It turned him into counsel for the prosecution. “What if you imagined it?”
“I didn’t imagine anything. I saw for myself.”
“Before you came in, some of us were saying anaesthetics can do strange things to the brain. Really vivid images.”
“This was the day before I had the bloody anaesthetic. I was down the tunnel.”
“When the rock landed on your foot, did you pass out?”
“Momentarily. It doesn’t alter anything.”
“It does if it affected your memory.”
“I was conscious again almost at once.”
“And what did you say to the guy who was with you?”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“He’s the only independent witness. Did you tell him you’d just spotted a body?”
“Listen, I was in extreme pain. I was thinking I could die down there.”
“So you didn’t?”
Diamond was being skewered by one of his own team.
Ingeborg said, “Get real, John. The boss was in agony.”
Leaman wouldn’t be deflected. “What was his name? You remember that?”
“Of course I bloody do. He was Stanley.”
“Did Stanley see anything for himself?”
“My arse,” Diamond said and stopped Leaman in his tracks. The words were literally meant, but they came out as a rebuke.
The team waited for a second eruption, but it didn’t come.
“He was behind me. And, no, we didn’t discuss it while we were struggling back to the shaft. Even if I’d been out of pain, Stanley isn’t the sort you share your discoveries with. I’m not sure I’d want to share anything with him, but he saved my life. And now, if you’ve had your say, John, we’ll move on.”
Shot to bits, Leaman nodded and went silent.
“The problem is this,” Diamond said to everyone, back in charge. “The only way we know is where I went, down a ventilation shaft in a spinney southeast of the village, along a main tunnel with a rail track for a few hundred yards, no more, and then on hands and knees through a smaller one that is now blocked.”
“And dangerous,” Ingeborg said.
“True. But it led to a room in another main tunnel. The distances wouldn’t be huge above ground. If I can work out the direction we travelled we might be able to pinpoint the position.”
“Didn’t you have a compass?” Halliwell asked.
He shook his head. “Stanley had his phone, of course, being a teenager. No use at all underground. With hindsight, a compass would have been sensible, but I didn’t think of it.”
“How would this have helped?” Ingeborg asked.
“Pinpointing the position above ground? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it, how the body got down there?”
“Through a shaft?”
“All these tunnels needed light or ventilation or a means of extracting the stone. Find the right shaft and we’ve got our crime scene.”
She picked up her mobile and started scrolling.
“You won’t find it there,” Halliwell said. “Patch Quarry is unmapped, isn’t that right, guv?”
“Yes,” Diamond said. “But I’m thinking we may have linked up with another quarry.”
“Is there one nearby?”
“Seymour, the local expert, talked about one called Jackdaw.”
His memory was functioning well enough.
Ingeborg said without looking up from her screen, “The approximate area is southeast of Combe Down, above Midford and Tucking Mill, right?”
“Correct.”
“There’s a steep-sided valley to the south called Horsecombe Vale, so there can’t be any underground workings there. Where’s the entrance to Patch Quarry, guv?”
“In a wooded area below Summer Lane. It’s just a hole in the ground with a grille over it.”
“Jackdaw isn’t far off.”
“I’m trying to recall what Seymour told me about Jackdaw. He knew of a blocked-up entrance in a field — Kingham Field — a proper arched entrance, suggesting it was a major quarry that you walked into rather than using a ladder, but no one seems to have kept a record. Some workmen drilling foundations in the late 1980s some distance away broke through to a section they thought must be a part of Jackdaw.”
“The Brow,” Ingeborg said, still using her phone. “The work was going on near a Grade Two listed Victorian building called the Brow. It will have been filled in, surely.”
“But not the entire workings, if they extended some way,” Diamond said.
“Should we go back to Seymour?”
“He told me as much as he knew, and no one is better informed.” He sat back in the chair and folded his arms. “There’s no ducking it. This calls for another search.”
You could have filled a removal van with the unease in the room.
“Above ground?” Halliwell said.
“Of course.” This eased the tension appreciably. “Didn’t I make that clear? We want to find a shaft down to Jackdaw Quarry. We’ll get help from uniform again.”
“Will the ACC play ball?” Halliwell asked. “She wasn’t too pleased the last time we borrowed some bobbies.”
“Because I didn’t consult her,” Diamond said. “It’s all about protocol and her self-esteem. I’ll do it by the book this time.”
He insisted on being driven to Combe Down to supervise the search. “I’m not missing the action,” he told Ingeborg when she said that crutches wouldn’t work well in a field. “Besides, I promised Georgina I’d make sure the extra men were used properly.” By toeing the line he’d lulled his reluctant boss into parting with fifteen bobbies and a vanload of search and rescue equipment.
“I don’t suppose she knew you were going to be there in person.”
“If you’re unwilling to drive me, I’ll go in the van.” He tried — how he tried! — to be civil to Ingeborg because she was always civil to him, but he was starting to feel as if no one believed him.
They assembled at the side of Summer Lane, close enough to Kingham Field to get a sight of the one-time entrance to Jackdaw, much of it infilled and overgrown, but with about a metre and a half of the stone arch exposed.