Finally she looked up and said, ‘I feel such a heartless bitch. My best friend, and now she’s dead.’
‘Don’t give me that heavy stuff,’ he said. ‘I’m not impressed. You’ve been stringing us along. I’m not judging your morals. I just want some truth from you.’
‘You’ve got it now.’
‘Some of it. I don’t suppose Joss knew you were sleeping with her husband. Did she?’
She gripped the cross at her breast. ‘Please God, she didn’t.’
‘When did it start?’
‘Soon after they came to live down here. They had no sex life at all after the abortion. She was on a huge guilt trip. Marty tried to be understanding. He’s the kindest of men. He started to tell me about the problem with their marriage one time when I called and she was out riding, but she came back early so I suggested we met for a drink — Marty and me, I mean.’ She sighed. ‘You know the rest.’
‘The late evenings were spent with you?’
‘And weekends sometimes.’
‘So when did you see him last?’
‘Friday afternoon at my cottage. He left me about seven.’
‘Did he say anything about the upcoming weekend? Were he and Joss planning to meet anyone?’
‘If they were he didn’t mention it. I got the impression it was just the usual routine.’
‘Was he anxious? Under pressure?’
‘Not that I noticed.’
‘Did he ever speak of anyone else threatening him or Joss?’
‘Never.’
‘How much does he confide in you? Do you talk about your lives?’
‘A lot.’ She dabbed her face with a tissue. ‘It isn’t just the sex.
We go back a long way. He understands me better than anyone.’
‘Did either of them ever speak of belonging to a secret organisation?’
‘The Law Society?’
‘I don’t think that qualifies.’
‘The Rotary?’
‘Probably not,’ he said, straight-faced, but avoiding Paul Gilbert’s eyes. He moved on without explaining why he’d explored that avenue. ‘Did Marty ever speak about suicide?’
She shook her head. ‘He’s very positive, even though his marriage was going wrong.’
‘There have been other cases of people being found hanged in Bath. Did you ever discuss them?’
‘We had better things to do with our time.’
A faint smile played on Gilbert’s lips. This young man was getting above himself.
There was an interruption. John Leaman put his head round the door and signalled to Diamond that something new had come up.
‘Is there anything else you want to tell us?’ Diamond asked Agnes Tidmarsh. The interview had run its course. ‘In that case, the constable will help you make a written statement. Thanks for coming in.’
He went out to Leaman. ‘Have we caught Lang?’
‘No, but we’re getting warmer, guv. We’ve found his car.’
37
‘W here?’
‘The Avenue at Combe Down.’
‘Really?’ The significance escaped Leaman, so Diamond added, ‘Only a stone’s throw from Midford.’
This was an underestimate. It would have taken a relay of stone throwers to span the three-quarters of a mile across Horsecombe Vale, but the two places were close enough for comment.
‘Let’s go. You can do the driving.’
‘Me?’ Leaman said.
‘Why not? The phone calls must have tailed off by now.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘Delegate, man. The first principle of management.’
Leaman looked for the office dogsbody, Paul Gilbert, but he was busy on Agnes Tidmarsh’s statement. One of the civilian staff offered to oversee the taking of calls. ‘The boss sounds hearty,’ she said.
‘He’s expecting a result,’ Leaman said.
‘The ram raids?’
‘I should live so long.’
Combe Down was once a quarrymen’s outpost of eleven cottages to the south of the city. When Bath stone was in heavy demand for the great Georgian phase of building, the place grew into a mining village. Only after the mining industry declined in the nineteenth century were the south-facing slopes developed for suburban living, ideal, potential buyers were told, for sun-seekers and convalescents. In the second world war the Admiralty decamped from London and set up a vast establishment on the Fox Hill side. Now Combe Down is indistinguishable from Bath’s urban sprawl except that it has a hidden hazard. Its glory and its undoing is below ground, the gorgeous cream-coloured oolitic limestone that can be sawn or squared up with relative ease regardless of the alignment of the joints. Fine buildings across Britain — Buckingham Palace and Brighton’s Royal Pavilion among them — are mainly of stone mined in huge quantities from the workings there. The downside is that the 45-acre honeycomb underground created a huge problem of subsidence. Subterranean roof collapses happened too often for comfort. Something had to be done. Various schemes for infilling and reinforcement were debated for years. To complicate the problem, the mine-owners could not be held responsible; the workings were abandoned half a century before. In law, the landowners above ground owned what was — or was not — beneath them. Trying to negotiate with hundreds of house-owners was a planner’s nightmare. Finally in the twenty-first century government funds were secured for a stabilisation project and a programme of infilling with ‘foam concrete’ was started. Over a hundred miners, most of them Welshmen, had been at work for some years using timber and steel platforms. They were likely to be employed for some time yet.
The unique character of the place was on Diamond’s mind as Leaman drove them up the steep, narrow rise of Prior Park Road. What if Harry Lang had found a way into one of those disused mines and was holding Martin Steel down there? The job of finding them would be daunting and dangerous. Nobody knows the full extent of the workings. Attempts to map them are foiled by roof collapses and the waste rock dumped by the original miners. You can get a certain way if you are willing to take risks and squeeze through narrow openings, but it is a job for cavers, not policemen. For a fugitive it offers the chance of hiding up for a long time.
He hadn’t forgotten that Danny Geaves had holed up in the mine above Bathford at the Browne’s Folly quarry, a few miles east of here. Had Geaves unwittingly given his killer the idea of using these quarries?
You have to be positive in this job, Diamond told himself, or you go bananas. Maybe Lang was still above ground.
He was getting to know this area south of Bath better than he’d ever done. A sign to Lyncombe came up and he realised they were passing close to Paloma’s place. He looked forward to telling Paloma how Jerry’s help had been crucial to the inquiry, leading them directly to Lang. Better nick Lang first, though.
They linked up with Ralph Allen Drive where the gatehouse signified that this was once the carriage road to Prior Park, the quarry-owner’s Palladian villa. Not only was it graced with pillars, long since gone, but a tramway ran beside it to bring freshly mined stone from the quarries down to the river.
Half a mile on, they reached the Avenue and spotted the police car next to Harry Lang’s silver Subaru Legacy.
Diamond was muttering as he got out. If the officers who’d found the car thought they were due for a pat on the back they were mistaken.
‘Why haven’t you got tapes round this?’
‘We weren’t told, sir.’
‘Weren’t told? What have you got between your ears? You know the driver is a suspected killer. It may have been used to transport corpses. Get it done now. Have you checked for witnesses?’
‘Interesting question. In point of fact we don’t know how long the car’s been here,’ the same officer said.
Lippy. Diamond could imagine this jobsworth holding forth in the Manvers Street canteen. ‘That isn’t what I asked.’
The second constable had the sense to say, ‘No witnesses as yet, sir.’
‘So when you’ve secured the car, start knocking on doors. Soon as you find some curtain-twitcher who saw the driver, call me over.’