“Not anymore,” Diamond said. “There’s another way into it — the tunnel I crawled along — linking Patch Quarry to Jackdaw. I told you I had a sight of the body ahead of me before I had my accident. I told everyone.”
“I can see something,” Ingeborg said. “Someone’s coming up.”
All eyes were on the shaft. A hand appeared and grasped the top rung of the ladder. Then a curved yellow object. Inside the hard helmet was the chubby, florid face of Bertram Sealy.
“It’s either a hobbit or a groundhog,” Diamond called out, getting in first with the abuse.
“Coming from a Long John Silver impersonator, that’s rich,” Sealy shouted back. “Where’s your parrot?”
Diamond spoke to his team. “Someone better give the poor sod a hand out of there.”
“No need,” Sealy said. “I haven’t finished. I only came up for a body bag. There’s one on the back seat of my car if anyone here has a shred of decency and will fetch it.”
Paul Gilbert had heard. He left the Range Rover and walked over to another vehicle.
“What can you tell us?” Diamond asked Sealy without much expectation of a helpful answer.
“Very little until I get the deceased to my dissecting table. The light is terrible down there. The cause of death is anyone’s guess right now. As for the time, we’re looking at several days, going by the aroma.”
“We think about a week, the day of the half marathon,” Diamond said.
“Makes sense. The deceased is dressed in running clothes.”
“Good.”
“What’s good about that?”
“It confirms my own observation. I was down there in a side tunnel, got a partial view of her legs and saw the trainers she was wearing.”
“She?” Sealy said. “Your powers of observation can’t be up to much. I know it’s dark down there but the runner I was looking at isn’t my idea of a she.”
“Male?”
“Nothing is certain in the strange world we live in now, but that’s my assumption.” He reached for the white plastic body bag Gilbert had fetched. “I’m never without one of these. I’ll also need at least ten metres of rope and some muscle to help with the lifting. Lower one end of the rope through the hole. Can you arrange that?”
“Don’t you think we should get some pictures of the body before it’s moved?”
“Has the photographer shown up at last, then? Send him down. Send the entire police force down if you like. There’s plenty of room at the bottom. It’s just the shaft that’s narrow.” He dropped the body bag into the void and climbed down after it.
The photographer must have been listening because he left the forensics van, stepped over the tape and crossed to the shaft entrance. No attempt seemed to have been made to mark an access path. What with the rainfall, the clearance of undergrowth and the footsteps around, the crime scene was well and truly corrupted.
“Get yourself into a zipper suit and a hard hat, Keith, and see what’s down there,” Diamond said. “I won’t be joining you.”
“Sanity breaks out at last,” Ingeborg said.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“It wasn’t meant for your ears, guv.”
He told Paul Gilbert to find the length of rope Sealy had requested and he was about to go closer himself for a look down the hole when Ingeborg said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking...”
“What about?”
“How it went for you at headquarters.”
She’d heard he’d been summoned to headquarters, of course. You can’t expect an official roasting to pass without everyone getting to know and revelling in it.
“I’m still here, aren’t I? Enough said?”
Not enough for Ingeborg. “Just a warning shot, then?”
“Postponed because of a technical issue.”
“Cool.”
“You think so?”
“Maybe what’s happening here will make a difference.”
He’d put his trouble with the high-ups to the back of his mind. “How exactly?”
“The body being found. You were right to authorise the searches. It wasn’t a wild goose chase.”
“That’s true.”
She cleared her throat. “Would it be an idea to text Georgina, keep her in the loop?”
He saw the sense in that. “Smart thinking, Inge.”
“You could sit in the forensics van and do it in the dry.”
“Right now?”
“The sooner the better.”
Without more prompting from his tuned-in sergeant, he made his way to the van and opened the door at the back, pushed aside a stack of overshoes and made enough room for his rear.
Back at Combe Down dealing with the corpse I saw down the quarry. May be late returning.
He resisted garnishing the message with a note of “I told you so.”
His speed of texting wasn’t the quickest. By the time he’d sent the message, the logistics of bringing the body to the surface were being discussed. Dr. Sealy had put his head out of the hole again. He’d decided the best solution was to strap the dead man to a rigid rescue stretcher and lift it vertically. He didn’t want it swinging against the sides of the shaft, so a pulley was about to be fixed in place.
One of the younger policemen asked if the body would be wrapped.
“Squeamish, are you, son?” Sealy said. “Yes, I’m zipping it into the body bag. You won’t miss your beauty sleep tonight.” He disappeared from view again.
“What a jerk,” Diamond said, back beside Ingeborg. “Where’s Keith?”
“Still down there, helping to strap the body to the stretcher, I expect.”
“He won’t mind doing that. When the nerves were given out, Keith had already left.”
A small crowd assembled around the shaft when the pulley started to turn. The mechanism jerked alarmingly at one stage as some earth was loosened under the supports and a few gasps were heard, but the job was done without more alerts. The stretcher and its load were detached from the winding mechanism and returned to the horizontal.
“Wait,” Diamond said to the officers about to remove it to a mortuary vehicle. He limped across to the stretcher. “Hold it steady for a moment.”
The tab on the zip was at the top end. He pulled it down far enough to see the face inside.
And gasped.
He zipped it up again as if the tab was red hot.
26
Diamond hated being humbled. He thrived on self-confidence and it was in short supply right now. After the accident and the disciplinary hearing he hadn’t expected fate to kick him in the guts yet again.
Sodden, in his drenched, mud-spattered suit, he leaned on his crutches and waited for Bertram Sealy to re-emerge from the shaft. Sealy was the last person on earth he wanted to enlighten, but it needed to be done.
The first to show his helmeted head was Keith Halliwell. No one was nearby to help him transfer from the rope ladder to the surface. All interest was elsewhere now that the body had been recovered. He scrambled out on hands and knees, looked up and said, “You’ll get pneumonia, guv.”
Diamond wasn’t thinking about his health. “You saw who it is?”
“The stiff? Some runner.”
Halliwell didn’t know. He’d never met the man. He may have seen his picture, but that wasn’t the same.
“Forget it,” Diamond said. “Help Sealy out of the hole.”
A second hard hat had appeared. Halliwell went over.
“You’re a useful fellow,” Sealy said. “Why don’t you give up this policing nonsense and do a proper job as my assistant?”
When this attempt at humour didn’t get an answer, Sealy switched to Diamond. “What are you waiting for, peg leg? I can’t tell you anything I haven’t already. From the look of you, I’ll have you on my slab before long.”
“I know who he is,” Diamond said.