‘Ma’am, the Theatre Royal is on an outside line.’
She said, ‘I don’t want the theatre. Where’s Diamond?’
‘He’s out, ma’am, on a job.’
‘Out where?’
‘Bathford.’
‘Does this have anything to do with a vanload of uniformed officers being driven away from here this morning?’
‘Quite possibly, ma’am.’
‘So that’s why I can’t get hold of anyone. This is too much.’
Then Leaman heard another voice. The theatre man was back on the line. ‘There you are. I seem to have been talking to myself for the past two minutes. Who is this?’
‘ACC Dallymore.’
‘How charming. Assisi as in St Francis of? Well, my dear, this could be your lucky day.’
Leaman gently replaced the receiver.
15
B athford has about eight hundred houses. ‘That’s a mere fifty each,’ Diamond told his team, assembled in the Crown car park at eight thirty next morning. He wanted to be positive from the start. ‘No challenge at all. DI Halliwell will tell you the streets you are covering and issue you with a mugshot of Danny Geaves. You ask if they’ve seen him around the village over the past ten days. And — this is important — if they have, you find out if he was seen with anyone else. Report every sighting to me at the first opportunity.’
Wonderful the difference a night’s sleep can make. They listened without a murmur, picked up their streetmaps and mugshots and moved off briskly as if house-to-house was as good as a pub crawl. And results started coming in almost at once. A stranger in a village stands no chance of staying undercover. Five sightings were reported in the first hour. Diamond spoke to each witness himself. By their accounts Geaves had been in the area for about a week to ten days, mostly on the southern outskirts in the area where the postman had seen him. One woman complained that two of her chickens had been taken, and not by a fox. (‘How do you know a fox didn’t take them?’ ‘Because I’ve never come across a fox with size-nine footprints.’) No one could say where Geaves was spending the nights. And no one had seen him with Delia, or any other woman.
Diamond looked up the steep ascent of Bathford Hill. ‘What’s up there?’
‘The church.’
‘Past it, I mean.’
Halliwell had the map open. ‘Farleigh Rise, where we were yesterday.’
‘To the right.’
‘Mountain Wood. There’s a footpath.’
‘And what’s that tower thing at the top?’
‘Browne’s Folly, it says.’
Jutting above the foliage was this lone grey building with a flat Italianate roof and arched windows.
‘I didn’t notice it yesterday.’
‘We were on the other side. Am I wrong, or have you just had an idea, boss?’
After the house-to-house was completed, and lunch eaten, Diamond led his little army up the hill. One of them had grown up in Bathford and was able to make the stiff climb more bearable for everyone by relating the history. A quarry owner called Wade Browne had built the tower in 1848. The official story was that he was a public-spirited man who gave employment to local workers in a time of depression. In the more cynical version he was a self-admirer who wanted a memorial as impressive as William Beckford’s tower on Lansdown. Probably there was truth in both.
Twice Diamond called a halt to admire the scenery, as he put it. ‘You can probably see the way my mind is working,’ he said to Halliwell between gasps.
‘Yes, but could he get inside the tower, guv?’
‘A desperate man can get inside anything.’
On the ridge of the hill the going got easier. The tower was about fifty feet high and Browne’s initials and the date 1848 were on a plaque over the door. Unfortunately the door was made of iron, and locked, and there was no sign of a forced entry. The only windows were at the top, out of reach of anyone except Spiderman.
The searchers stood at a distance and looked on while Diamond slowly circled the building. Good thing he couldn’t hear what was being said about follies.
Halliwell went over and said in confidence, ‘We marched them up to the top of the hill. What now, guv?’
‘Ask that local lad to come over.’
The constable looked nervous, as if fearing something he’d said had been overheard by the detective superintendent.
‘What’s your name?’ Diamond asked.
‘PC Flint, sir.’
‘And you grew up in Bathford?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You must have come up here a few times.’
‘Years ago, I did, sir. I knew it as the pepperpot. That was the local name.’
‘Did you ever see inside?’
‘Being kids, we were curious, like. In those days the door was off its hinges.’
‘And what’s it like in there?’
‘Nothing much to see. Stone steps going round the inside walls to the top. We climbed up them. The rail was broken in places. There was a wooden viewing platform up at the top once, built across two iron girders, but it had all rotted when I looked in. There were bits of it at the bottom. Old rubbish and all sorts.’
‘Not a good place to hole up in?’
‘Definitely not. Damp, cold and nowhere to lie down. Mind, they tidied it up since and repaired the roof, and the door, of course.’
‘And made it secure. Who would have the key?’
‘The Wildlife Trust people. It’s all part of the nature reserve.’
‘Where do we find them — in the village?’
‘I think their office is in Bath.’
Diamond’s options were running out. ‘As a local man, Flint, if you were on the run and wanted a place to hole up, where would you go?’
Flint gave it some thought. ‘An empty house, sir?’
‘Where the neighbours would spot you soon enough. They haven’t. I don’t think he was in a house.’
There was a longer pause.
‘The only other hidey-hole I can think of is the caves, sir.’
This was more promising. ‘There are caves up here?’
‘Underneath us. This is quarrying country. The hill is riddled with them. At one time it was all linked up with Monkton Farleigh mine.’
‘I know about Monkton Farleigh.’ The vast subterranean stone workings there had been used in the war to store munitions and the place had since been opened as a tourist attraction, with rides on the underground tramway.
Flint added, ‘The Browne’s Folly quarries were just as well known in their day. There are entrances all along the Pepperpot Trail.’
‘Come again.’
‘The path along the ridge. We’re on it.’
‘Show me, then.’
PC Flint strode out, puffed up with his importance on the team.
