Their Lost Daughters (DI Jackman & DS Evans #2)(47)

Max stood up immediately. ‘I’ll go with you.’

Marie watched them walk away and then turned to look back over the lonely stretch of marsh. She wanted terribly to be gone from here.

Gary pointed back to the house. ‘Looks like our man is here, Sarge. Rosie is waving to us. Shall we go?’

*

A white van, dirty, dented and half dead, groaned to a halt behind their police car. Ted Watchman, the young man who got out could be nothing other than an archaeology student. His wavy hair was unfashionably long. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses and mismatched clothes.

‘The fire chief sent you this little beauty, sir. Lovely bit of kit!’ the uniformed sergeant said, looking at the thermal-imaging camera with undisguised longing before passing it to Jackman. ‘I hope you know how it works.’

‘If you’re stuck, Inspector, I do. Hey, that’s not your average handheld job either! That’s a state-of-the-art industrial model.’ Ted smiled.

‘As long as it works, I don’t care what it is,’ Jackman mumbled. ‘So where did the Fire Service get it from, if it’s not standard issue?’

The sergeant smiled grimly. ‘I’ve been told to tell you to guard it with your life. It’s on loan from a Search and Rescue Team, and apparently it’s worth a couple of grand more than my car.’

Hastily, Jackman passed it to Ted. ‘I’ll leave it to the expert, thank you. But, as a civilian I need to explain the risks involved should you need to accompany us anywhere of possible danger.’

‘As I think I’m the only person here who can operate this camera, and because I’ve been in some very dangerous places before, sir...’ Ted grinned, ‘I’m game if you are?’

‘That’s not the kind of risk assessment that I was thinking of, Mr Watchman, but we seriously need your help.’

Gary handed Ted the geophysical surveys. ‘This is the area that interests us, sir.’

He circled his finger around the storerooms and the barn, and his voice was grave. ‘We are looking for anywhere that may conceal a missing girl. Time is of the essence.’

‘Call me Ted, and Rory told me what you’re looking for.’ He took the plans and stared at them ‘Hey! This was the Roman villa dig, wasn’t it?’ He flopped down on the ground and spread the sheets around him.

‘Apparently,’ Jackman said.

‘I’ve seen some of these before. It was an absolute travesty that this dig was aborted. The university was certain they could have made a monumental find here.’ He bent closer to the printouts and let out a low whistle. ‘Whoa! There’s a lot going on here.’ He looked up at Jackman. ‘Can I see the actual area, please?’

‘Sure. Come on.’

Ted strode alongside Jackman. ‘I’ve got some equipment in my van. I brought everything I could think of that might be useful.’

‘Good, but I cannot stress enough how quickly we need to move.’

‘Okay, we’ll check out what we’ve got first, and then take it from there. That camera you’ve borrowed could save us hours.’

Jackman’s heart sank. ‘We don’t have hours, Ted. This is not archaeology. If there’s a girl down there, she might be dying. It’s crucial that we find her.’

For the next fifteen minutes, Ted paced, measured, consulted his surveys and muttered to himself. Then he began drawing in a large plain A4 notebook.

Jackman felt like shaking him.

Ted let out a long noisy breath. ‘Right, well, normally at this point I’d do checks of my own, use an EM conductivity instrument, maybe even run a ground-penetrating radar check to confirm my initial interpretation, but if time really is so important . . .’

‘Believe me, Ted, it is,’ growled Marie.

‘Then this is what I consider to be beneath this area, given all I have are old geophys surveys.’ He thrust the drawing at them. ‘There was another building here. Looks like a large, long structure. Its foundations can clearly be seen and they extend beyond the present storerooms and the barn.’ He blinked at Jackman and pushed a lock of hair from his eyes. ‘My guess is that it was a much earlier storehouse of some kind, with an extensive cellar system of its own. The upper part was demolished and the present barn, stores and yard erected over the top of it.’

Jackman looked carefully at his sketch. ‘And these?’ He pointed to a network of double lines.

Ted’s eyes glinted. ‘Tunnels, Detective Inspector. Probably six or more. Some going under the main house, some extending towards the highway and some leading right out onto Hobs End Marsh.’





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jackman had no proof that Emily was being held in the tunnels beneath Windrush.

He had no proof that the tunnels were even accessible.

He had coerced a small army of uniformed officers into searching a dangerous wreck of a building with little or no justification, and he had got one of his detectives to sweet-talk the Fire Department into loaning him equipment that was worth a small fortune. Even the university had sent one of their finest, complete with enough technology to unearth a lost city.

And now he had requested and received reinforcements, in order to find the entrances to six underground tunnels that might not even exist.

He was beginning to doubt his sanity, until the team gathered in a circle on the foyer floor and held a discussion, and Jackman found that they all agreed with him.