Skeleton Hill

36

‘We’ll drive back over Lansdown.’

Hearing this from his superior, Paul Gilbert took a sharp breath. He’d had a testing day as Diamond’s chauffeur. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Like I said. Over Lansdown.’

‘Bit out of our way, isn’t it?’

‘Take the A431 and turn off shortly after Bitton. If you don’t trust me, you can use that satellite gadget of yours.’

‘I trust you, guv.’ Said with a faint sigh.

This would add at least twenty minutes to the journey, but it was futile to protest. Much as Gilbert was looking forward to getting home (and out) for Saturday night, he’d learned that the working day wasn’t over.

‘Being driven like this, at a sensible speed, has given me a chance to think,’ Diamond said, deciding after all to say more. ‘We know Rupert found that horse rug somewhere on the hill. I’ve got a new thought where it might have been.’

So instead of the fast route home they took the old Bath Road and diverted up Brewery Hill and through the village of Upton Cheney, swinging along the western side of Hanging Hill to climb the steep western ridge where the royalist army had once fought its way to the top at such a cost in lives.

Gilbert’s little Honda chugged steadily upwards until Lansdown’s battlefield came into view, benign, tinted gold by the evening sun. You wouldn’t have guessed at its savage history.

‘Are you thinking of stopping here?’ he asked.

‘I’ll say when.’ Diamond was preoccupied with a piece of information he’d learned days earlier. Once more it was from the calendar of events Ingeborg had put together for Keith Halliwell when he was briefly in charge of the case. One of the first entries he’d seen scrolling down the screen had not made sense. He hadn’t questioned it at the time because it didn’t have any obvious relevance to the investigation. He was interested now and he could picture it. The date would have been early in 1991, the year he’d first looked at.

Lansdown Road subsidence causes traffic chaos

Subsidence on Lansdown? He didn’t know of any mining under Lansdown Road. In centuries past, there had been open quarrying for Bath stone towards the top of the hill, but nothing underground. All the local mines below the surface, some of them notorious for caving in and alarming the residents when sudden craters appeared, were on the south-east side of the city at Combe Down and Odd Down and all the way out to Corsham and Bradford on Avon.

They motored in silence past the racecourse where Hang-glider had been paraded and the golf club where Swithin and Tipping outdid each other in bending the rules. A mile or more ahead, the landlocked lighthouse that was William Beckford’s folly appeared on the horizon. The gilded cast-iron columns of the lantern were catching the low sun.

‘That’s where we stop,’ Diamond said.

‘The tower? Will it still be open?’

‘We’re not going inside.’

Considering how productive the day had been, he was subdued, locked into his own thoughts. Paul Gilbert, uncertain how to deal with the man, chose to say the minimum.

They approached the tower and parked in the space in front of the gatehouse where poor Rupert Hope had passed his nights on a concrete bench with the horse rug as his covering.

Diamond spoke again. ‘Do you carry a torch?’

‘A flashlight, in the boot.’

‘Bring it with you.’

While Gilbert rummaged through the clutter in the boot, Diamond opened the gate and went in. Relieved to find that the flashlight still worked, Gilbert followed, stepping through the cheerless little room.

The stone memorials of the Victorian cemetery appeared theatrical in the orange sunset glow, taller than before, casting long shadows. Gilbert glanced up at a windblown, crumbling angel, its arm pointing heavenward. This was not a comfortable place to be so late in the day – or any time, he thought.

Diamond was a short way ahead, stock-still, looking towards the tower. In a low voice, speaking more to himself than Gilbert, he started on a barely audible monologue. ‘People have been telling me about Beckford from the start. I was even given a book to read. Stupidly I didn’t open it. No, that’s not quite true. I looked at the pictures. It seemed to me he was extra lumber and now I’m not so sure. Do you know anything about him?’

Realising he was being spoken to, Gilbert uttered a feeble, ‘Not much.’

‘He was rich, filthy rich, and full of himself. Strutted around Bath in a pea-green tailcoat with his four dogs and a dwarf in tow. Building towers was his thing and this was the last of them. Am I boring you?’

‘No, guv.’

‘You have to know this stuff, or you could miss the very thing we’re looking for. In the eighteen-twenties Beckford buys a house in Lansdown Crescent. Smart address, hundred metres above the city. Quite a stiff climb. Any idea why he chose to live so high?’

‘The air was nicer?’

‘You’ve got it. A dirty great cloud from hundreds of coal fires hung over the city most days. Being Beckford, he also buys a house across the street in Lansdown Place and has a bridge built to link them. Do you know it?’

‘I think I’ve seen it.’

‘Then he builds this, his tower, a mile up the hill, with a view to die for. Not content with that, he buys all the land between his house and here and shuts off the footpaths and makes this private walk. Landscaping, they called it in those days. If you had pots of money that was what you did. These days he’d buy an airline or a football club. Down the bottom near the house he puts up weird buildings like a mini-mosque and a gateway dressed up as a castle. He steps through the gate with his dwarf and his dogs and heads across country to the plantation. Come on, I’ll show you.’ He set off at a brisk pace down the path through the cemetery, with Gilbert a couple of yards behind. Below them to their right, the crimson disc of the sun was directly over Bath.

At a point where the trees permitted a view, he stopped. ‘In that book I was telling you about there’s a plan of Beckford’s walk and I’m trying to work out where we are. Below us would have been a shrubbery, bushes and plants from all over the world chosen because they smelled nice. Lower down in that middle area was an open quarry that he didn’t change because it reminded him of some ruined baths in Rome.’

‘The Caracalla Baths, I expect,’ Gilbert said, the first intelligent response he’d managed.

Wrong-footed, Diamond turned to face him. ‘What do you know about it?’

‘Where the three tenors did their first big concert.’

‘Is that so? You’re taking this in, I hope.’ He stepped out again, and the Victorian cemetery gave way to rows of more modern graves. ‘Good thing we didn’t leave it any later,’ he said. ‘Another half-hour and we’d be tripping over this lot. The walk got fancy again this side of the quarry with more gateways leading you through flower gardens and an orchard. He brought in fifty-year-old apple trees, would you believe? They blossomed all right, but never formed fruit. Keep up, will you? I’m not talking to myself.’

But for an interval he stopped speaking and marched purposefully down the slope.

‘Isn’t this private land?’ Gilbert asked.

‘I expect so.’

‘I don’t think we’ll get much further.’

They were blocked by a dense patch of brambles more than head high, sprouting a few pathetic blackberries, as if all their strength had gone into creating sturdy, vicious-looking shoots.

‘This wasn’t here in Beckford’s day,’ Diamond said. ‘The walk must have gone straight through this. Check the road, will you? See how close we are to the Granville Road turn. Is that Charlcombe on the other side?’

‘I’ll find out,’ Gilbert said, glad of a break. The boss in this tour-leader mode wasn’t easy to take, particularly when the tour party consisted of only one individual.

@@@@@He didn’t need to go far to the left to see the lights of a car moving along Lansdown Road. On the other side were the offices used by the Admiralty. He also spotted a road opposite.

Returning to Diamond, he reported what he’d seen.

‘This is the place, then. Somewhere in this area, Beckford sunk a large pond filled with gold and silver fish.’

‘Is that what we’re looking for?’

‘Quiet, I’m getting my bearings. Nearby he came to a major obstruction in the shape of a lane leading to a farm. It was one right of way he couldn’t ignore. To continue the walk he was forced to go underground. So what did he do? He made a virtue out of necessity and created a seventy-foot grotto. You know what a grotto is?’

‘Like a cave?’

‘Except this one had to be a tunnel. That’s what I hope to find if it’s still here. Where’s the flashlight?’

Gilbert switched it on and passed it over.

Diamond swung the beam this way and that, patrolling the margins of the thicket. ‘Some time in 1991 there was subsidence along the road and it caused major traffic problems. My hunch is that it happened around here due to Beckford’s tunnelling. The walk went very close to the road at this point.’

The significance of the grotto wasn’t lost on Gilbert. He could see what was coming. He didn’t fancy plunging into the brambles and getting scratched all over just to satisfy a theory of Diamond’s.

‘I think there’s a gap here,’ Diamond called from the other side. ‘I can’t get through myself, but you might.’

Resigned, Gilbert joined him and saw where the beam was picking out a space between the long, prickly shoots. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘I’m not sure. Hole in the ground. Steps, maybe. Mind you don’t fall in. Take the flashlight.’

More intent on avoiding injury than finding anything, Gilbert dipped his head and edged under a vicious-looking branch. If he showed willing, he might get a reprieve. ‘Can’t see much,’ he said, rubbing spiderwebs from his face.

‘There’s a way through. There has to be,’ Diamond told him.

A thorn pierced Gilbert’s trousers and dug into his leg. ‘I think I’ve reached my limit, guv.’

‘You’re shining the light the wrong way. Look to your left. Isn’t that a way through?’

Gilbert turned and got his face scratched. Wrestling with brambles would have been unwise by day. In this light it was madness. He was about to say so when he noticed something he was bound to report. ‘Some of these are bent right over. It looks as if someone else has been here before me.’

‘We must be close, then.’

We? Gilbert thought. There’s only one of us getting scratched to pieces.

Easing to his right to duck under an arch of thorns, he felt his foot against a hard, straight edge. ‘There may be something here.’ Gingerly he pushed his leg forward into a space above a flat, solid surface. ‘Steps, I think.’

‘Give me some light. I’m coming in,’ Diamond said, then swore as the first thorns made contact. By attacking the bush like a rugby forward he powered through to Gilbert’s side regardless of dis-comfort. ‘What I’d give for a chainsaw.’

With a probing foot he located the step for himself. ‘Let’s get down there.’

Together they battled the last of the prickles and forced their way down a flight of about ten steps.

‘Flashlight.’

They had reached an impasse. The light shone on a mass of ivy with branches like cables.

‘What’s behind it?’ Diamond thumped the butt end of the flashlight against the surface.

‘That’s the only light we’ve got,’ Gilbert warned him.

‘If we could rip some of this away…’ He tried getting a grip on the ivy. It didn’t yield.

‘Can I have the flashlight a moment? I think I can see what’s in the way.’

Low down, the beam showed what looked like vertical indented bands, largely covered in moss and creepers, but recognizable as corrugated iron.

‘Find the edge,’ Diamond said.

Not only did the light show them the limit of the iron barrier. It revealed a gap wide enough to squeeze through.

‘Someone has definitely been here.’

Gilbert went through and forced the gap wider for Diamond to follow.

‘Bloody hell.’

There was no longer any doubt that they’d found Beckford’s grotto, a tunnel stretching ahead for about twenty feet to where the roof seemed to have collapsed. There was rubble, too, imme-di ately in front of them.

‘Take care,’ Gilbert said.

Diamond wasn’t listening. He stumbled inside, picking a way over the debris with the flashlight and intermittently pointing the beam ahead towards a tall structure blocking the way.

Coated in dust, at first it looked like an extension of the rock all around it, but then he saw the faint gleam of metal and recog-nised the obstruction for what it was.

A horse trailer.