‘We’re supposed to be on patrol,’ motormouth said.
‘My heart bleeds.’
The two glanced at each other, no doubt wondering how this would play with their supervisor.
Diamond at a crime scene was a formidable presence. He gave them a look that ended the exchange. They went to their car to collect those tapes.
To Leaman, he said, ‘Try the boot. If it’s locked, force it.’
Leaman was bold enough to say, ‘Guv, don’t you think we should let forensics have first crack?’
‘Get with it, John.’
‘Just playing it by the book.’
‘And what does the book say if Martin Steel is in there coughing his last?’
Leaman tried the boot, found it locked and set to work with a crowbar while Diamond called for back-up, the full works, not forgetting hard hats, flashlights and the local cave-rescue team.
The doorstepping got under way while Leaman mangled the boot-lid of the car. Subaru make sturdy locks but brute force eventually triumphed. The lid sprang up. There was nobody inside.
Just a holdall with some gym kit.
Across the street one of the uniformed officers shouted, ‘Over here, sir.’
Diamond went over.
A man in a singlet and shorts was at his front door and — praise be — keen to pass on information. ‘Like I just said, I saw him drive up getting on for an hour ago. Short hair, jeans, black top. He seemed in a hurry. Went that way.’ He pointed his thumb up the street.
‘Have you seen him before?’
‘No, mate. He’s not from round here.’
‘The car?’
‘Bit flash for here.’
‘In a hurry, you say. Was he running?’
‘If he wasn’t, he was walking at a good rate.’
‘Was he carrying anything?’
‘Nothing I noticed.’
‘What’s the road to the left?’
‘Williamstowe. Doesn’t lead nowhere.’
‘Are there mines under this part?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic? The man two doors up lost half his garden the year before last. Straight down the hole. It’s a disgrace. His kiddie could have been playing there.’
‘Where’s the nearest entrance?’
‘Try stamping your foot, mate.’
‘Proper entrance.’
‘Behind the pub, top of Firs Field. Same way the bloke went.’
They went to check. The landlord of the Hadley Arms confirmed that there was an entrance in his yard. ‘I can open it if you want and show you where the steps are, but you won’t go anywhere. It’s blocked now.’
He sent them to the ‘works’ in the middle of Firs Field — a well-secured site surrounded by ten-foot-high metal fencing where nobody was working today. A notice warned of the dangers. Diamond walked round the perimeter.
‘Unless he’s a bloody pole vaulter he didn’t get in this way.’
The man they’d first questioned had followed them. ‘He wouldn’t need to. There are shafts I could show you that even the council don’t know about. The place is riddled with them. Some have been filled in, but plenty aren’t.’
‘Where?’
‘I know of two in people’s gardens. They were for air, or light.
There’s just a grille over them.’
‘Show me.’
Diamond sounded resolute, but his optimism was being tested. If Lang had gone underground it could take a small army of searchers to ferret him out.
He followed his guide back to the main street. A second police car had arrived and Leaman was updating the newcomers, but they weren’t cavers by the look of them.
The shaft was in the garden of an old lady who sounded as if she didn’t know which century it was. A runaway killer could have walked through the house and wished her the time of day without her noticing. The garden had gone wild.
‘He hasn’t been here,’ Diamond said, seeing the brambles arching over the grille. They hadn’t been disturbed in years.
They moved on to the next, in a better-kept garden. The owners were out. There was a gate at the side you could step over. The people had made quite a feature of their shaft by giving it a stone surround and siting the grille at knee height. Trays of seeds were arranged across the top.
‘I don’t think so. Is that all?’
He was taken to another entrance more like a cave, smaller than the first he’d seen. A sheet of corrugated iron was supposed to keep intruders out, but it was no longer anchored. A slim person could have squeezed past it, and when Diamond tugged at it he made room even for his far-from-slim body. ‘We’ll look in here,’ he said.
Three more vehicles had arrived in the Avenue, one belonging to the Mendip cave-rescue team. They’d brought enough hard hats and overalls for the police as well as themselves. Diamond briefed them on the operation and they briefed him and his officers on safety procedures. Roof collapse was a real possibility. Natural fractures in the limestone meant that the slightest disturbance could cause a rock fall.
He had to give an assurance that none of his men were armed and that he doubted if the suspect had a gun.
They levered back the iron barrier and went in, three cavers and nine policemen.
‘How big is this mine?’ he asked while they were going down some steps.
‘Twenty-five acres or more. Firs is the biggest and it links up with Coxe’s,’ the senior caver said, ‘but it’s not so much the size, it’s the complexity. It’s a warren. They worked any number of faces.’
Flashlights were in use from the start, picking out the way ahead. The roof at the bottom of the steps was some ten feet high and supported by massive pillars left by the miners as they cut their way deep into the bedrock. To left and right the lights exposed tunnels of variable depth.
‘Shouldn’t we send someone into these?’ Diamond said.
‘If you do, I won’t answer for their safety.’
He doubted if anyone’s safety was guaranteed, but he didn’t say so. In this situation he had to defer to the experts. The caver who’d just spoken seemed to know what was on Diamond’s mind. He stopped by an odd-shaped pillar much narrower at the base than the top. ‘You find this near the entrances. It’s called pillar robbing. After the mines were abandoned, the locals would come in and hack off slabs of stone for their own use. Some pillars got shaved down to spindles.’
They moved on and crossed an intersection where you could see the tramlines of the old transport system for moving the blocks to the surface.
‘Before we go on,’ Diamond said, ‘I wouldn’t mind looking at what we’re walking over, in case of footprints.’ The floor was thick with dust.
‘Good thinking,’ the caver said. ‘Let’s have some more light here.’
Nothing obvious was revealed. Diamond didn’t admit to his inner misgiving that nobody had been down here in years. ‘Maybe he was ultra careful.’
‘Could be,’ the caver said. ‘Want to go on?’
‘Of course.’
They entered a narrow passage where they were forced to stoop. It soon opened into a bigger area where a rusty hand-cranked crane had been abandoned, still attached to the face with steel cables. Saw lines were visible in a bed of stone that for some reason had not been cut right out. A huge heap of rubble lay to their left, partly blocking their route. They crunched over it.
There was a choice of tunnels ahead. Each decision was like the toss of a coin with the chance of making the wrong call. Diamond flicked his flashlight from one to the next and tried to sound confident.
‘That way.’
The earlier sense of awe at the surroundings was waning and some of the party were starting to talk. He stopped and asked for silence.
What he got was better than silence. Somewhere ahead came the definite sound of a movement that could have been somebody kicking a small piece of stone. They all heard it. The party moved on at a faster rate.
The senior caver said to Diamond, ‘I wouldn’t get too excited. Bits of stone are falling all the time.’
He didn’t answer. He pressed on for another fifty yards or more and then stopped because he’d heard another sound, more drawn out and heavier.