Chapter Ten
It was cramped and uncomfortable in the back of the brewery van. Shrink-wrapped pallets of assorted cartons and bottles creaked and rocked against each other in the darkness as the truck bounced along its delivery run. A small hydraulic lift-truck stood in position under the pallet nearest the back door ready for off-loading. The only bit of free floor space in the packed van was a narrow strip behind it. I had squeezed myself into it seconds before the roller shutter door clattered shut. It was a good enough hiding place until the driver offloaded the first pallet, and then what? He would immediately see me. This gave me only one option; I would have to jump out and escape as soon as he opened the rear door.
After being bounced around for about ten minutes I felt the truck brake and slow. It swung sharply to the left, pressing me between stacked boxes, and threatening to crush me. The van creaked and shuddered. We seemed to be moving slower than walking pace. I guessed we could be manoeuvring ready to make the first delivery. A few seconds later we jolted to a stop. The engine died and all fell silent for a few moments. Hardly daring to breath, I strained to listen for clues as to what might be happening. A creak of hinges signalled that the driver was opening his door to climb out of his cab. I prepared myself.
I hoped we were not already at my intended final destination, Bradford on Avon. For despite all my precautions, I still worried that we might have been followed. Wherever we were, the driver would see me as soon as he rolled up the shutter door. Hopefully, he'll be so surprised and flustered that I should be able to dodge past him before he can gather his wits.
When the door opened, I recognised the town of Chippenham, near the M4 motorway. We were alongside a pub in a quaint old street where mum sometimes brought me shopping. Still unawares the driver operated the pallet truck's hydraulics. It whined shrilly as it took the weight. I held my breath as he steered it onto the tail lift.
He cursed and flinched with alarm as I rose up suddenly and rushed past him to leap down to the street. Startled and occupied in his struggle to manoeuvre the pallet he couldn’t let go of it. He had to let me run by him.
He didn’t give chase either. From a little way off, I glanced back and saw him frantically checking his load. I suppose he thought I had stolen something. I realised it was not worth the hassle of chasing me. For one thing, he dare not leave his load of expensive booze unguarded. He would have to lock up it securely, by which time I would be clean away.
Chippenham is on the First Great Western’s rail line from London Paddington to Cardiff Central. Trains run frequently and most stop at the city of Bath, the next station up the line. From Bath I could easily walk to granddad’s house at Bradford-on-Avon, so I decided that would be my escape route. But first I must be sure I was not followed. I stopped running and tried to walk nonchalantly towards the station.
When I arrived a few minutes later, I found the station concourse full of noise and hectic activity. Two trains, one going west the other east had stopped within seconds of each other. Station staff were stretched to cope with the sudden rush of passengers. A porter was hauling a trolley piled high with parcels, boxes, and bundles in transit. Its metal wheels chattered and scraped noisily on the concrete floor. As the harassed porter steered it through the platform entrance gate I was able to slip onto the platform beside it without the ticket the collector seeing me.
I was too late for the westbound train; it was already pulling out. A video information display informed me that I had forty minutes to wait for the next one, so I hid in the Ladies’ lavatory. When the train arrived, I waited until platform staff were busy with the rush of passengers, then climbed aboard the nearest carriage, and again hid in a loo. I was still scared MCF had tracked me and was determined to stay hidden in case they had someone on the train. I daren't buy a ticket, because I did not want anyone to remember me, especially the conductor.
It is only a short ride from Chippenham to Bath Spa Station, much of it through Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Box tunnel. When at last I emerged from the Georgian city's fine old station and walked freely on its streets, I felt almost light headed with relief and had a definite spring in my step.
I love Bath, and always feel good whenever I’m there. It’s usually crowded with tourists, students and shoppers. It makes me happy just to be on its pavements. I was heading past regency terraces towards the old Kennet and Avon canal basin. Bradford on Avon is six miles up the canal from Bath. My plan was to walk along the towpath. It would be safe and quiet, and almost impossible for anyone to follow me without me seeing them. Best of all, the walk is through some of the most beautiful countryside in southern England. It would be relaxing and enjoyable and I certainly needed to de-stress. This would be the perfect break, and even at a leisurely pace the walk would only take a couple of hours.
The sun was hot, the breeze soft and scented with hay and woodlands. Clowning mallards and pristine swans, performed for passing narrow boats, hoping for titbits from the carefree crews of holiday-makers. These long, comfortable, holiday barges chug along sedately, stirring up the waters for the ducks and annoying dozing anglers.
I was relaxed and pleasantly tired by the time I reached Avoncliff. Here the canal flies over the river Avon on a one hundred and ten feet long aqueduct. For two centuries, it has stood in this idyllic spot between steep woodland and lush pasture. It brought to mind Sindra Gains and her unexpected enthusiasm for the canal engineering Scotsman, John Rennie, its builder.
Thinking of her also reminded me of my mobile phone hidden in the brewery van. Annoyingly, I realised I had not set it to silent ring. Somebody was sure to call me. The driver would hear it and easily find it hidden in his truck. I had intended it to stay well hidden to keep Sindra Gains and whoever she had tracking my phone, running all over the place for days before they found it.
Twenty minutes later I left the canal towpath at Bradford on Avon, and took to the old town’s precipitous, winding streets. My granddad lived in one of a stone terrace of old weavers’ cottages, overlooking the town’s famous Anglo Saxon church and dark green river.
‘Where’s your pooter?’ he asked, as he greeted me at his low front door.
‘Don’t worry, I brought it. It’s in my back-pack.’ I squeezed passed him at the door, passing from warm sunlight into the dim coolness of his oak beamed living room.
‘I got one o’ they web sites to look up – You tube or sommat. They were going on about it in the library. Say’s it’s got everything on it. And him behind the bar at the Miners Club, he says there’s another site on heez pooter that says all about your pension and what you’re entitled to. I don’t get enough pension see? I think the Government is swizzing oy.’
‘It won’t work if there’s no wireless,’ I told him. ‘Does anybody nearby have a wireless network?’
‘No need. I got a wireless in the cellar. A Bush, I’ve had her since the war.’
‘No not a radio granddad. I mean a wireless network for the Broadband.’
‘Eez got a pooter, him next door. Will he have it? He’s always pooterin.’
‘Good. Let’s hope he’s got a wireless network that we can tack onto. If not we’ll have to find a hot spot in town, the library maybe.’
‘Annot spot?’
‘Yes, don’t ask. I’ll sort it out.’ I switched on and watched the screen as a little radio mast and egg timer icon signalled that the computer was searching for a signal. When it found one Google popped up onto the screen. ‘Excellent. We’re in.’
Granddad peered over my shoulder. ‘Is that what they means when they says they’re a googlin sommat?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Huh, t’ain’t much is it?’ he grumbled.
I spent five minutes showing him how to browse the internet then left him to it. He was soon surfing like an expert, his nose inches from the screen. For the rest of the day we barely exchanged a word. I had to get my own supper. He wouldn’t stop “a-googlin”.
The following morning, he
was at it again when I came down for breakfast. ‘You’ll never believe it,’ he said, all bright eyed. ‘I looked up my old firm, and they is on eer. And they ’as got all the other old stone mines on here too.’ I looked over his shoulder at the screen.
‘You were never a stone miner, Granddad,’ I reminded him gently. ‘You were a mechanic.’
He shot me a reproachful glance. ‘Well I knows that. I’m not stupid. It were during the war. I was ‘prentice at the Royal Enfield when it were underground.’
‘What war? The charge of the Light Brigade?’ I joked.
‘Don’t be bloody lippy. World War Two of course.’ He punched me playfully. ‘They moved the Royal Enfield factory into what was a stone mine under Westwood village, about a mile from here. It was so the Germans couldn’t bomb it.’
I half remembered hearing the story before, but I let him ramble on. At school I’d been told that the crown jewels were supposed to have been hidden there for safety too.
‘Is it true about the Crown Jewels?’ I asked him.
‘Of course it is, and not only them. We had priceless art treasures from galleries and museums in London. There was millions of pounds worth of priceless stuff hidden in Westwood during the war.’
He turned to me from the screen and leaned back in his chair. ‘You know what? These hills all around here are mostly hollow. All that stone for building Bath and the great cities, it all came out of stone mines round here.’ He laughed softly, shaking his head. ‘There are tunnels and massive great caverns round here that would knock your eyes out. Do you know what? We even had an actual city underground at one time, and more bullets and bombs hidden away down there than the rest of the country put together.’
‘A city? That can’t be true.’
‘It certainly is true. It was called Burlington. They built it for the Government and all them big wigs to hide in, if Russia dropped an atomic bomb on us. We was always expecting an atomic bomb from Russia in them days. It was the fashion back then. Everybody expected to be fried like chips at any second. So what they did is - they built this place underground. Of course us peasants, we weren’t supposed to know about it. It was for all the posh people, all the nobs and royalty like that. It was all top secret. Of course, nowadays everybody knows about it. They even do tours.’ He gazed for a moment at some remembered scene in his mind’s eye. ‘Yeah that were it - Burlington they called it.’
‘Do a search on it,’ I suggested. ‘There might be a website.’ I left him and went into the kitchen to make tea. He was typing, one finger at a time. It sounded like the tick of an old grandfather clock. When I returned with our tea he was staring at a video tour of an underground system of rooms and caves.
‘This is it,’ he told me gleefully. ‘Look at it, 35 acre underground city. It’s a BBC website called wiltshire/undergroundcity .
I gaped at the screen, watching the video tour, and suddenly thought of the large trucks I had seen going into that impossibly small building at the Mackenzie Carmichael Foundation’s headquarters. A flush of excitement struck me and I flopped into a chair at granddad’s table, feeling queasy.
He peered at me over the laptop’s raised lid. ‘What’s up? You look like you lost a bob and found a tanner.’
‘How many of these places - stone mines and quarries are there round here, granddad? Do you know where they are?’
‘Of course I do. There’s dozens of ‘em. If you get my map down off’n the big boy, I’ll show you where they’re all to.’
The big boy was what he called his huge bookcase. I stood on a footstool and reached into the narrow space above it under the beamed ceiling and found his map. Granddad blew dust off it and spread it out on the table. He began to point out the various stone mines, marking each one with a Smartie. I soon saw what he meant about the hills around this part of Wiltshire and Bath being hollow.
As I watched I thought about MCF's secret headquarters. Granddad's map was quite old and tatty and I wondered if their big old house might be on it as it was before it became MCF's HQ. I studied the map minutely, looking for a stone mine near a big country house and a military airfield. Eventually, one particular remote spot caught my eye. It was called Monkton Rudloe. I recalled my trip with Sindra, and the avenue of trees leading from MCF's front door step to an abandoned airfield. This place on the old map fitted the bill exactly. It showed a large manor house with a stone mine symbol beside it, and a small military airfield adjoining its grounds. Could this be the secret place Sindra had taken me to?
‘It’s famous all over the world is Bath stone,’ Granddad said. ‘It’s what they call a free-stone, because it’s free of imperfections. You can carve it and shape it for all sorts of fancy work.’
Later as we watched the video tour of the underground city together, my mind was racing. I decided to take a closer look at Monkton Rudloe. MCF had some very dodgy employees. The young vicar-man had murdered the professor. I had seen him do it. Maybe there I might find some incriminating evidence that I could give to the police. With any luck that might start a proper investigation into Jack's disappearance as well as the poor professor's murder. Monkton Rudloe could be the very place Sindra had taken me to. It was the obvious place to start.
………..