“They were stacked tidily when we came in,” Halliwell said.
Diamond rapidly checked the other rooms. In the front room was a second door. “What’s this-a cupboard?”
“Sort of,” Halliwell said. “It’s more storage space, but she doesn’t use it. Actually it’s a kind of cellar. Goes right under the street. All these old houses have them. There’s no one in there. Just some wood and a heap of coal left by a previous owner.”
Diamond opened the door. “Someone get me a torch.”
One was handed to him and he probed the interior with the beam. He’d have called this a vault. Basically it was a single arch constructed of Bath stone, and tall enough to drive a bus through, except that a wall blocked off the end. Yet it was obvious no living creature larger than a spider was lurking there.
Halliwell said, “It’s not connected to any other house, if that’s what you were thinking, guv. They used them as wine cellars two hundred years ago. There’s been a lot of concern about them because they weren’t built to support the modern traffic going over them.”
Diamond stepped around a dust-covered heap of coal that had probably been there since the Clean Air Act came in, and moved towards the back wall. He swung the torch beam over the stonework and bent down to look at some chips of broken mortar he’d noticed among the coal. “This is recent.”
Halliwell came closer.
Diamond shone the torch close to the wall itself. “You see where this comes from? Some of these blocks of stone have been drilled out and moved. They’re not attached to anything. The wall isn’t surface-bearing here. It’s just a screen to separate this side of the street from the house opposite. Someone has broken through and replaced everything later.”
Halliwell crouched down to look. “Sonofabitch!”
Now it was Diamond who felt the need to speak the obvious. “He must have got in from the house across the street, down into their basement. He got to work on some stones in the wall and cut his way through. And that’s the way he got out with his prisoners. When they were through he shoved the blocks back into position from the other side.”
“But the door to the basement was locked,” Halliwell said.
“From the inside. He locked it when he left, and took the key with him. I don’t believe it was locked when he came in the first time. It was in the lock, but he was able to open the door and get into the house.”
“Cunning bastard,” Halliwell said. “And none of us spotted this.”
“You were looking for people, not means of entry.” Diamond’s mind was on the next decision, not past mistakes.
“I can shift this lot, no trouble,” Halliwell said.
“Not yet. We’ll go in from upstairs. Get some men down here, but have them in radio contact, ready to go when I say, and not before.”
“Armed Response are waiting in the street.”
“Good. But I don’t want a shoot-out in a confined space. He’s got his hostages and he’ll have his crossbow with him. We don’t know what we’ll find when we go in.”
He ran upstairs and out to the street. It was already closed to traffic. He briefed the inspector in charge of the ARU, telling him how he proposed to handle the situation. Men were posted at strategic points. Diamond was fitted with a radio.
Exactly as he expected, there were signs of a break-in when he went down the basement steps of the house across the street from Georgina’s. The door had been forced with some kind of jemmy. Like several of the basements along the street, this one was unoccupied, though the flats on the upper floors were all in use.
With two armed officers close behind him, Diamond entered as silently as possible, stood in the passageway and listened. The place was ominously quiet. He felt the cool air on his skin. He waited a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the restricted light. Then he reached for the handle of the door to the front room, the one with access to the vault below the street.
Nobody was in this unfurnished room, so he crossed to the door to the vault and cautiously opened it. One glance confirmed that no one was inside. However, there were tools lying against the wall, including a power drill, hammer and chisels. Any lingering doubt was removed that the Mariner had been here.
Turning away, he indicated to the marksmen that he would check the other rooms. He returned to the passageway and looked into a small room once used as a kitchen. Nothing was in there except some bottled water.
There remained the back room, presumably used as a bedroom when the flat was occupied. He looked towards the back-up men and gestured to them with a downward movement of his hand. He wasn’t going to rush in. The door was slightly ajar, so he put his foot against it and gently pushed it fully open.
A crossbow was targeted at his chest. The Mariner, in baseball cap and leather jacket, stood against the wall. Beside him, on the floor, were two motionless bodies.
Diamond’s heart raced and a thousand pinpricks erupted all over his skin. For this was a triple shock. There was the sight of the dead-still women; there was the threat from the crossbow; and there was the hammer blow of who the Mariner was. With a huge effort to keep control he managed to say, “It’s all over, Ken. I wouldn’t shoot if I were you. Killing me isn’t in the script.”
But Ken Bellman kept the crossbow firmly on target.
Ken-boring old Ken, the lover Emma Tysoe had dumped without ever realising he was the killer she’d been asked to profile. Ken, the man Diamond and Hen had put through the wringer, or so they believed. Ken-the wrongly accused, the man who’d proved beyond doubt that he didn’t carry out the murder on the beach.
Ken Bellman was the Mariner.
Diamond’s best-his only-option was to talk, steadily and as calmly as he could manage, as if he’d fully expected to be facing this. “You’re not going to shoot that thing. You’ve settled the score, several times over. If you take me out-as you could-you’ll be gunned down yourself. The men behind me are armed.”
“Hold it there,” Bellman said, his eyes never shifting from Diamond. They looked dead eyes. He, too, was in deep shock. This was a petrifying humiliation for him and he was dangerous. He’d believed himself invincible.
“The game is done, just as you wrote on the wall,” Diamond said with a huge effort to keep the same impassive tone, “and if you say you won, well who am I to argue? You outwitted the best brains in the Met and you had me on a string until a few minutes ago. I watched you arrive last night with your rucksack full of tools, and still I wasn’t smart enough to twig who you were, or what you were up to. OK, you didn’t get to your last location. That advertising board on Wellsway, wasn’t it? ‘Because of British Metal.’ Give me credit for working that out for myself. I don’t take much out of this. And now I’m asking you to call it quits.” He took a step towards the crossbow.
Bellman warned in an agitated cry, “Don’t move!”
But Diamond took another step, spreading his palms to show he was unarmed. This had become a contest of will power. “I’m going to ask you to hand me the crossbow, Ken. Then we’ll have a civilised talk, and you can tell me how you managed to achieve so much.”
“I won’t say it again!”
Diamond had taken three or four short steps and was almost level with the feet of one of the bodies. He said, “You know you’re not going to shoot now.”
Then the unexpected happened. There was a moan from one of the women and Bellman reacted. He swung the crossbow downwards and released the bolt.
In the same split second, Diamond threw himself forward and grabbed at the bow with both hands. The bolt missed Anna Walpurgis’s head by a fraction and hit the floor with a metallic sound, skidded towards the nearest corner and ricocheted off a couple of walls. Bellman let go of the bow and lurched backwards. The two ARU men hurled themselves on him.