Authors: Kim Fleet
Aidan pulled away, picked up the cup and saucer from the carpet and carried them into his kitchen. The toaster wasn’t quite parallel to the wall and he moved it back into place. A line of herbs, a present from Eden, sat on the windowsill. He plucked off a couple of leaves and crushed them in his fingers, releasing the scent of thyme.
‘I’ll walk you to your hotel,’ he said, coming back into the sitting room.
The county archives in Gloucester had a box of materials on the Cheltenham Park School. Aidan bagged a table in the corner of the study room and took everything out piece by piece, placing it in front of him like a giant jigsaw. Photographs of rows of pupils with serious expressions and nineteen-thirties haircuts. The school during the Second World War, the hockey pitches dug up for vegetables and Anderson shelters. A plan of the house when it was built; designs for the pleasure gardens and the Temple of Venus in the grounds. Account books: page after page of scrawly faded writing. At some point the books had been exposed to water – ink slipped across the pages in a slick, the words obliterated for ever.
Aidan peered into the background of the school photos. The formal gardens – clipped hedges and geometric paths – were there, in the swathe of land between the building and the Temple of Venus. The skeletons were found there, in the formal gardens, close to the original building, an area that had hardly been touched in the past two hundred years, not even by war, until now, the diggers had grubbed it all up for foundations for a gymnasium and science block. Progress.
Aidan ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. It had been a mistake to walk Lisa back to her hotel last night. He should have phoned her a taxi, waved her off and escaped, instead. He groaned. Instead of walking her along frost-sparkled pavements to her hotel, agreeing to have a drink at the bar, talking over old times. Staying too late; drinking too much; chewing over the past and raking it all up again. And then she’d leaned forwards, her eyes dark and huge, and looking more than ever like a sprite from another world, and asked him something so startling at first he assumed he’d misheard her. When clarification proved he hadn’t misheard, he recoiled, left in a hurry. And to make it worse, he realised he’d left his scarf in her room, handing her an excuse to be back in touch with him.
He groaned again, reaping a disapproving look from a dedicated genealogist occupying a study carrel opposite. It was a right fucking mess.
Aidan shuffled the papers around the desk until they formed a new pattern. In front of him were the plans for the building that was now the school: a massive Georgian residence of mellow stone, the Temple of Venus in the line of sight of the formal rooms on the first floor. A dotted line joined the house to the temple. He squinted at the diagram, struggling to make out the writing. What was that? It cut right across the formal gardens. Suddenly the pattern cleared. Pushing back his chair, he went outside, lurking by the fire escape to make a phone call.
‘Trev? Aidan. Can you and Mandy get a geophys survey of the school site? I think I’ve found something interesting. I’ll tell you where to focus.’
He sweet-talked the archivist into making copies of the diagrams for him. When she returned with the sheets, she also offered a leather-bound book which she carried in gloved hands.
‘This is a diary, written in Cheltenham in the 1790s, when the house was built,’ she said, handing him a pair of white cotton gloves. ‘It was originally called Greville House. Could be some mention of it in here, if you’re interested.’
‘Sure, I’ll have a look.’ Any excuse to delve into the past, he thought, relishing the familiar tremor of expectation as he handled the book and wondered what treasures it contained. Details of what people had for dinner, gossip about their neighbours, complaints about tradesmen: it all fascinated him. He could spare another hour in the archives to browse through this. And by the time he got back to the office, Lisa should be safely on her way to Oxford and it’d be another ten years before he saw her again. Hopefully.
Ezekiel Proudfoot, the diary’s author, was concerned with three topics: marrying off his daughters, the quality of the sermons he heard in church each Sunday, and his bowel movements. The last, it appeared, were not eased by the reputed health properties of Cheltenham waters, no matter how many gallons of the sulphuric brew he downed at the town spas.
Aidan settled in his chair for an hour’s entertainment in Ezekiel’s company. His descriptions of Georgian Cheltenham were diverting, and the acerbic comments about worthy Cheltenham personalities could have come straight from a contemporary gossip magazine. But what made Aidan sit up and reach for his notebook were the remarks Ezekiel made about one Mr Ellison:
Mr Ellison occupies the finest house in Cheltenham, Greville House, the largest villa in the whole district. It is a mixed honour to be invited there, though Mrs Proudfoot insists we should go. She, good innocent woman, thinks only of viewing the rooms and furnishings, perusing the pleasure gardens that have recently been planted, and of deciding which ideas she shall copy in our own much more humble home, at great calamity to my pocket, no doubt. But it is not the expense of new tables and curtains and paths that stays my hand. It is the reputation Mr Ellison is unhappy to own in Cheltenham, the rumours of the company he keeps and of a secret society that meets in his own home, in Greville House!
I am not one for idle gossip, as any who knows me will testify, but when I hear from our own parson that Greville House is linked in infamy with the Hellfire Club, then it becomes a place where I cannot let my dear wife and daughters pass a minute. No matter how grand the wallpapers nor how piteously they cry to be allowed to go.
It is rumoured that there is a society, the so-called Paternoster Club, that meets in Greville House, attended by many a fine gentleman and many a woman of low morals. Alas, even here in Cheltenham we have such women. Actresses, and worse. I cannot divine the purpose of the club, only that it is closed to any who are not of sufficient means, and any who are not of appropriate temperament. By which is meant, I infer, debauched, depraved, corrupt and dissolute.
No, I told Mrs Proudfoot firmly. We shall not accept the invitation to go to Greville House to see the rooms and gardens and the Temple of Venus now it is all finished. We shall stay at home, and count our blessings.
She was not cheered by this.
Lisa was outside his office, sucking deeply on a cigarette, when Aidan got back to Cheltenham.
‘Thought you’d be back in Oxford by now,’ he said, kicking himself for sounding churlish.
If she noticed, she didn’t react. She ground the cigarette out with her heel and kicked the stub into the gutter. ‘I’ve finished my report but thought we could add in whatever you got from the archives, and anything else the team have turned up.’
‘Not your job to do this, surely?’ They both knew it wasn’t. Go in, look at the bones, make a pronouncement, go home, write a report. That was how it worked.
‘I know, but it’s nice to be working together again. It’s been far too long. We don’t see enough of each other.’
She held the door open for him, and they went into the office together.
‘Ah, you’re back,’ Trev greeted him, a tea-stained mug clamped in his nicotine-stained mitt. Aidan experienced a rare sensation: being pleased to see Trev.
‘Everyone in the meeting room?’ Aidan asked.
‘Just grabbing a cup of tea. Mandy’s found a packet of biscuits!’ Trev sloped off to the meeting room, evidently happy with life.
Aidan followed him, aware of Lisa close on his shoulder. Mandy and Andy were already in the meeting room, in deep discussion over a printout spread in front of them. Today Mandy’s hair was an even more virulent shade of red than normal, making her skin jaundiced. She wore a silver ring on each finger, each set with a different semi-precious stone. Andy was young, strong and tattooed, his blond hair gelled into a quiff. Andy, Mandy and Trev. They sounded like children’s TV presenters. Looked like it too, in their bright, stripy sweaters. Aidan sighed, seeing his team through Lisa’s eyes.
Mandy and Trev were seasoned archaeologists who’d worked at the Cultural Heritage Unit for years. He’d inherited them when he took up the post of director. Andy was fresh out of university, hardworking and enthusiastic, and surprisingly tolerant of Trev’s habit of referring to him as the YTS boy.
Lisa took a seat next to Mandy. She glanced at Aidan and announced in a stage whisper, ‘Cute, isn’t he?’
‘Who?
Aidan
?’ Mandy asked, her eyes round with disbelief.
‘All right, my lover?’ Trev said, huffing into the chair on Lisa’s other side. He was a galumphing bear of a man in his forties, his hair a grizzled halo. A frowsty, stale wool odour hung over him like a miasma.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she said, quirking an eyebrow at Aidan as if to say ‘quaint staff you’ve got here’. Aidan ignored her, drawing a black notebook from his coat pocket. It was fastened with an elastic band, and had a fountain pen clipped to the top. The notebook was expensive, an indulgence: Eden had bought him a stash of them for Christmas. Seeing it now brought a faint twinge of guilt.
Aidan cleared his throat to mark the start of the meeting. ‘So,’ he said, declining the biscuit packet as it circulated. How long had those biscuits been around? They looked prehistoric. ‘Did you excavate those with the skeletons?’
‘They’re all right if you dunk them,’ Andy said, bobbing his biscuit enthusiastically, until – predictably – it broke off in his mug.
‘Amateur,’ Trev said, shaking his head in mock dismay at the youth of today.
‘All right, everyone,’ Aidan said, trying to pull the meeting to order. ‘On Monday we excavated two skeletons from the grounds of the Park School. Lisa,’ he turned to her, ‘you examined them. Can you tell everyone what you found?’
She ran through her findings with economy: a male and a female skeleton, over a century old and possibly much older. No evidence to indicate how the female, aged late teens, died, but the male had a cut mark on his ribs suggesting he was stabbed.
‘We found an object in the ribcage when we excavated,’ Aidan said. ‘Andy, you cleaned it up and x-rayed it. What did you find?’
‘Metal tip, probably from a knife,’ Andy said. ‘Probably snapped off in the body.’
‘Can you date the knife?’
‘I’d estimate a couple of hundred years.’ His mouth drooped as he announced this, evidently hoping for something much more interesting and preferably Anglo-Saxon.
‘It could have been an old knife used in the attack,’ Lisa said. ‘The knife isn’t necessarily contemporary with the skeleton.’
‘An antique knife used to stab a Victorian man,’ Aidan said, drily. Lisa loved playing devil’s advocate but he wasn’t in the mood for outlandish speculation, especially not from her. He caught the hot flash of anger that crossed her face.
‘And no sign of how the female died?’ Trev asked.
‘No.’ Lisa tapped her pen on her notebook.
‘I’ve done some research into the area, to see whether we should expect more human remains,’ Aidan said, ‘and I found something interesting in the archives. The school was originally called Greville House, and a local diarist heard rumours that it held meetings of the Hellfire Club there.’
‘Wow,’ Mandy said, spraying jammy dodger crumbs.
Andy smirked and made a lubricious face at Trev.
‘Orgies, in Cheltenham?’ Trev laughed, rubbing his hands together. ‘Must be something in the water.’
‘The diarist didn’t specify exactly what went on there, just that he wasn’t going anywhere near the place, and neither were his wife and daughter.’
Everyone laughed. The biscuits made another circuit of the room.
‘But I did find something relevant,’ Aidan said, as they settled down. ‘There was a plan of the original house and drawings of the grounds. It looked like there was a tunnel that led from the house to the Temple of Venus.’ He turned to Mandy. ‘What did the geophys turn up?’
Mandy unfurled a huge sheet of paper, marked with dark patches. She used the end of her pen to show patterns under the soil.
‘We surveyed the whole site that they’re going to build on,’ she explained, ‘apart from the bit where they’ve already put new foundations. If there were skeletons under there, they’ve been minced to dust by now.’
‘Any evidence of other burials in the geophys?’ Lisa asked.
Mandy shook her head. ‘Nothing conclusive. A few little patches of anomalies, but they could be anything. The ground has been disturbed for some school buildings already – they could be related to that.’
‘We didn’t do the whole site,’ Trev added. ‘It would take days to cover the whole thing.’
‘However,’ Mandy said, her eyes alight. ‘You can see here there’s a fainter patch in a straight line from the school to the Temple of Venus.’ Her pen traced the route. ‘Something hollow and man-made, and it’s quite a size.’
‘Could be talking about me,’ Trev quipped. Aidan ignored him.
‘The tunnel is still there?’ Aidan said.
‘Looks like it.’
It was a long, rattling journey to Cheltenham. Rachel stared out of the coach window at the countryside and yearned for the harsh bounce of light on the Thames, haggling with pedlars, and the scramble of London life. She was going backwards. Back to where she came from – to soft mud and country towns, to people who spoke slowly as if there was no hurry in the world.
Now her dreams of snagging a rich lover and being set up in a house in Westminster were risible. No one in Cheltenham would set her up in a house. They wouldn’t cart her back to London, not when they probably already had a mistress there. And anyway, who takes the spa waters and hopes to fall in love? Only honest women; not her sort of people. She was nothing but a holiday whore.
Her spirits sparked as they clattered into Cheltenham itself. At least there were houses here, and a long road of shops. They dined and rested the first night at the Plough on the High Street, the next day taking occupancy of their new home. They were to reside in Coffee House Lane, squashed between a malt house and the theatre. It was an old house, with sloping floors and beams low enough to crack the heads of the unwary, and with doors that either stuck and needed a kick to open, or else swung wide as though a ghost were announcing himself. It was well furnished, though: the Cheltenham tradesmen eager for the rub of Mrs Bedwin’s money and none too pernickety about the source of the revenue. She’d brought ten girls with her, including Rachel and Roseanne, whose black skin was certain to be a novelty in provincial Cheltenham. The girls ran from room to room, clucking with approval, as Mrs Bedwin stood in the hallway and calculated her profits.