EG02 - The Lost Gardens (27 page)

Chadwick, too, should be told about the chapel. He would hear about it soon enough but if—as Kingston was now almost certain—the catacombs revealed Ryder’s secret cache of paintings, then police involvement would be essential.

At the house, he found Jamie ready and waiting in the kitchen. She was wearing blue jeans, a black wool pea coat over a cream turtleneck and a red wool scarf, loosely knotted in the front. A navy woollen hat concealed her hair.

‘You look very fashionable, I must say,’ observed Kingston, smiling.

‘Well, you said to dress warmly.’

‘No, I approve. You look great.’

‘Okay, then,’ she said, taking one last glance around the kitchen, ‘let’s go see this chapel of yours.’

‘Of yours, I believe.’

‘I’m not so sure. From what you’ve told me, the place is likely to become some kind of archaeological shrine. Somehow we’re going to have to separate it from the gardens.’

‘You’re right. I’ve been thinking about that. It’s obvious we won’t be able to keep it a secret for long, so the sooner we start thinking about dealing with it the better.’

In five minutes they reached the chapel. Kingston unlocked the door and they stepped into the cool silent interior. It was the first time in his many visits that he had seen the stained glass windows in their full glory. The morning sunshine streaming through them lit up the room with kaleidoscopic colours. Whether by accident or design, the effect was spiritually uplifting.

At the pulpit, Kingston showed Jamie how he had spotted the subtle difference in the wood graining of the pews, then made a modest ceremony of releasing the catch and starting to raise the pew. As the pew began its upward arc, Jamie gasped. She watched as it locked into the vertical. ‘Amazing!’ she breathed. ‘Awesome!’

‘Well, Jamie, here it is,’ Kingston said, as they both stood at the top of the stone steps, looking down into the darkness. ‘Let me switch the lights on and we can go down.’The night before, after their phone conversation, Kingston had gone to the garden workshop, picked up some cables and low-voltage lighting apparatus, and taken it to the chapel. Within an hour, he had managed to string temporary lighting almost a hundred feet into the catacombs. From there on, they were going to have to rely on a portable Coleman lamp, good for at least eight hours of light, and a flashlight that Jamie carried. With Kingston leading, they went down the steps.

The lights made navigating the hall much easier and far less daunting than on his first visit. After recovering from her initial awe and uttering a few more exclamations of amazement, Jamie followed silently. Every now and then, aided by illumination from the Coleman lamp, they stopped to look into one of the side rooms. Now, construction and workmanship details could be seen clearly; far more advanced than he’d thought. As they walked silently along the cobbles Kingston was gaining a much greater appreciation of the extent of excavation and engineering that had gone into the construction of the catacombs—and all of it by hand. It seemed unlikely that the monks could have done it unassisted.

Soon they reached the point where the halls branched off to the left and right; also where the temporary lighting ran out. As they continued down the central hall with Kingston holding the lamp aloft, the surroundings took on a more sinister turn. With their shadows dancing off the walls and pitch darkness only several feet ahead of them, they were walking into the unknown. The brittle silence amplified even the tiniest sound: a pebble dislodged somewhere behind them, a creak of what might be a door sagging on its hinge, or a single drip from condensation or leaching on the walls.

‘You sure you want to keep going?’ Jamie said, in a loud whisper, as they passed yet another room on their right.

‘I think we should, Jamie. Are you okay?’

‘Yes. I’m fine.’

‘I don’t think it can go on much farther. We’re a hell of a long way in as it is. It has to end soon.’

No sooner had he said the words than the hall took a sharp right turn. Round the corner, the hall was considerably wider. The ceiling was higher, too—like a gallery. A half-open door appeared on their left. Kingston shoved it with his foot and walked in, holding the lamp as high as he could. He caught his breath. This room was different from all the others—markedly different. To start with, a metal conduit ran up one wall and across the ceiling. In the centre of the ceiling was a wide, cone-shaped lampshade, the electric light bulb clearly visible. But that wasn’t all. The few pieces of furniture in the room were all modern. No question that they were from the twentieth century.

Jamie had joined him. ‘What do you make of this then?’ he asked.

‘Weird. Looks like it was an office of some kind.’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘I wonder where the electricity comes from?’

‘I can only guess it comes from the house. We’re probably standing right underneath it.’

Jamie pulled the door back. ‘There’s a switch here,’ she said, flicking it up and down.

‘Probably disconnected.’

‘Right. What do you think this was, then?’

‘I’m not sure. My guess is that, at one point, Ryder discovered these underground rooms and decided that they would make the perfect place to run his art-dealing operation. Can you think of a better set-up?’

‘If you’re right, then chances are that they were accessible from the house.’

‘Almost certainly, I would say.’

‘So we should be able to get into the house from down here, then?’

‘Unless he closed it all up.’

They left the room and continued along the gallery and entered another room on the right. Save for a six-drawer metal filing cabinet pushed up against a corner, it was empty. This room, too, was wired for electricity.

Kingston had a gut feeling that, in the next few minutes, they would discover Ryder’s secret cache: where he stored his paintings while they were waiting to be sold on the illicit international market. When they finally opened that door, would they find any paintings? Would Fox and his client Girard be proved right? Would it reveal anything more about the mystery surrounding Ryder? Contemplating these thoughts, Kingston ushered Jamie out of the room and they continued along the gallery. How much farther could it go on, he wondered?

The answer came sooner than expected. Ahead, the light from the lamp was dancing off a wall some thirty feet in front of them, blocking their path. As they approached, a hollow feeling welled up in Kingston’s gut, the kind when the winner’s name is announced and it’s not yours. Glancing sideways at Jamie, he could see that she was experiencing a similar emotion.

Now that they were closer, they could see that the gallery ended in a solid wall of stone. Kingston took a deep breath, exhaled loudly and put a hand up to his forehead. This was it then: a dead-end in the true sense of the word.

Chapter Twenty-two

Kingston stood staring at the wall, the lamp hanging by his side. His reaction was confusion, bewilderment and exasperation. He had come so far to find this?

The disappointment registered on his face was clearly obvious to Jamie, who had chosen not to say anything but instead had gone up to the wall to examine it more closely. As he watched her studying the grey stone, he tried hard to overcome the bitter taste of defeat that in a few seconds had deflated his optimism like a shrivelled balloon. All that was left now was to retrace their steps back to the chapel. Holding the lamp up higher he went over to join Jamie.

She turned to face him. ‘Look at this,’ she said, placing a hand on the wall just above her head. ‘The stone is the same but the cement or plaster looks newer on this section.’

Kingston held the lamp close to the wall, moving it horizontally along the line of the cement. ‘You’re right,’he said. ‘It’s been sealed up. I bet this is where the entrance to the house was. Behind, there’s probably a flight of steps like those in the chapel that lead up to a room in the house. It makes sense. It was relatively easy to run electricity down here to this end of the catacombs. And once that was in, he could run power tools, a simple heating and ventilation system—the works.’

‘Maybe his hiding place was the other side of the wall. That way he could still get to it from the house.’

‘It’s possible. But I still think it makes more sense for it to be on this side. That way the room would be completely closed off from either end.’

‘So where is it, then?’

Kingston shook his head. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘I suppose we’d best start back, then.’ She reached a hand out. ‘Why don’t you let me carry that back,’ she said, taking the lamp.

Kingston sighed. ‘Not much else to do here by the looks of it. At least for now, anyway.’

‘One thing’s for sure. Your friend Ferguson is going to have the surprise of his life when he sees all this. Can you imagine?’

‘I’ll call him when we get back to the house. I’m sorely tempted to call Chadwick, too, but that can wait.’

They had reached the door of the second room, the one with the filing cabinet. ‘Let’s take another look,’ said Kingston. He pushed the large iron-bound door all the way back and entered. Jamie followed. A quick glance told them that they hadn’t missed anything the first time: the room was empty.

Jamie looked up at the glass lampshade hanging from the ceiling. Remembering the first room where she had found the light switch behind the door, she walked over and pulled the door back, fully expecting to see a switch. ‘Jesus—Lawrence,’ she gasped. ‘This is it! I think I’ve found it. We just didn’t look hard enough the first time.’

Behind the entrance door, hidden when it swung back against the wall, was another, smaller, much newer door.

Two steps and Kingston was at her side.

‘My God! This
has
to be it.’

Together, they studied the door, Kingston caressing the smooth surface as if it were the patina of a fine antique. There was no question that it had been installed for security purposes. With no handle or doorknob, the only feature on the flat surface was a circular brass key escutcheon the size of a 10p coin. The key to open it would have to be small, like a padlock key. Kingston traced his hand over the surface then knocked on it with his knuckles. ‘Sounds like metal,’ he said. ‘Hard to tell.’

‘How are we going to open it?’

‘Get a locksmith down here—or take a stab at trying to drill through it, I guess.’

‘Isn’t that difficult?’

‘It is. Damned tricky. If you don’t know precisely what you’re doing, you can bugger up the lock and then you’ll never get it open.’

Jamie watched while Kingston examined the escutcheon again. Staring at it, he was actually thinking back to a time over thirty years ago when he was a captain in the army. Whatever had possessed him at the time he couldn’t imagine but he’d done a stint with Special Forces which, as part of its rigorous training regime in covert operations, survival training and commando techniques, had included, of all things, a course on picking and opening locks. Could he still remember how to do it? He knew that there was an optimum position to drill—and only one. It could also require two different types of drill bit. Jamie broke his train of thought.

‘Do we have a cordless drill?’

‘I’m sure there’s one in the workshop.’

Jamie touched his arm. ‘Let’s get out of here. It’s starting to give me the creeps. We can talk about it on the way back.’

They left the room and retraced their steps back to the chapel. Within ten minutes they were back at the house, and Kingston took off to find a drill. Luckily, Eric Newsome, the gardener in charge of the vegetable garden, was in the workshop when Kingston arrived. He found a cordless drill immediately but the only drill bits they could find were for wood. Kingston called Jamie on his mobile and told her he was taking off for Taunton to buy the drill bits.

Driving into town, Kingston mulled over the other options. The simplest would be to get a locksmith to open the door. But the last thing he wanted was to have to take a stranger down into the catacombs. Nobody would be able to keep a secret like that very long. The other choice, of course, was to call Chadwick, get the police involved and have them open it. But whatever was behind that door, Jamie should see it first. It seemed the right thing to do. Once they knew just what it was—if indeed there was anything—then they could decide what best to do next. He walked hurriedly into the town centre from the car park, fingers crossed that he could open the mysterious door.

With several different size and type high-speed drill bits in a small brown bag on the passenger seat, Kingston headed back to Wickersham. When he alerted Jamie on his mobile that he was on his way back, she reminded him of his two o’clock staff meeting. These were frequent get-togethers at which he, Robin Gilchrist—the man Kingston had hired as the temporary head gardener—and Eric Newsome would give progress reports. The meeting also gave the team an opportunity to ask questions and air problems. Kingston asked her to postpone it.

Mid-afternoon, armed with a cordless Bosch drill driver, the bits, his tool bag and protective eyewear, Kingston went to the house to meet Jamie. While waiting for her to get ready, he called Ferguson to tell him about their find but couldn’t reach him. He left a message saying he had some very important news about the chapel and would call back later. He signed off saying, ‘You won’t believe it, Roger. It’s awesome.’

Shortly after four, they took off for the catacombs.

Kingston lined up the drill bit as he’d been instructed all those years ago. On his first attempt, the bit skidded off the hard surface, chattering against the steel door. Next time he applied more pressure and the bit started to eat its way through the escutcheon, sprinkling fine shavings to the floor. Jamie stood by watching, saying nothing.

Kingston took a brief rest to cool the drill and bit and started drilling again. In less than a minute he felt the drill bit clear the lock and spin freely. He took a hesitant glance at Jamie then pushed open the door. With Jamie holding the lamp, they entered. The room was much larger than Kingston had anticipated, twice the size of either of the other two rooms. Built-in furniture covered the surrounding walls. Facing them was a desk with drawers and lower cupboards on either side. Deep worktables ran the length of the walls on the left and right. Below the tables were horizontal rows of shallow map drawers. Above the work surface, the walls were covered with a grid of vertical wooden racks like those used in framing and art shops. All of them were empty. It was obvious what the shelves were designed to contain—almost certainly, paintings.