Episode 5 - The wall

Tuesday

Mr Sloane had heard nothing from the forensic team, so having notified Al, he expected im to turn up at around 10 a.m. Sloane wrenched himself out of Joyce’s bed and made his way to the priory at about 7 armed with a torch and an umbrella and did what Al would otherwise have had to do.

Fortunately, Mr Sloane had decided to give a different patch his attention in the hope that there would be no bones for Al to dig up. By the time the youth appeared, a large area of what Sloane decided must have been the kitchen garden had been worked loose with the pick and he had even started to remove the turf. Al would remove the topsoil, Sloane decided. Surely he would manage that.

Albert was definitely not cut out for excavation work, but Sloane did not have the heart to send him away. Quite apart from Al’s inadequacy, he was a decent young guy and Sloane, being mitten with Joyce, was not as enthusiastic about digging as he had been, especially as the forensic team from HQ had been a good sight more efficient, he could see.

By arriving early, Sloane was hoping to save himself a lot of annoyance trying to get Al to use a pick as a tool rather than a lethal weapon. Joyce was at school all morning, assisting Miss Plimsoll in the classroom, which Joyce found excruciating since Miss Plimsoll was old school and seemed more interested in neat handwriting than the content of what was she was dictating, which was usually a page out of the textbook pupils already had on their desks. The kids were taking dictations from Miss Plimsoll’s careful enunciation when they should have been analysing classical literary texts as part of the English language syllabus.

Joyce was working herself in part-time, so she had the afternoons off and plenty of time to think how to improve what Miss Plimsoll thought was educational.

Sloane planned to spend the rest of the day with her after an hour or to of archaeological activity. He had fortunately received no information from anyone to keep him from the priory or from leaving it.

As the morning progressed, however, it became obvious that this was a dig to end all digs.

***

Monkton Priory was at the top of a hill. The kitchen garden behind and to the left of the church sloped downwards towards Monkton Wood, which was quite a large old forested area that was frequented by wild boar and wild humans. The woods, or rather the wild boar, were rumoured to have claimed lives in the past, but short of felling all the trees, you could not stop people going there. There was less traffic during the winter and if you made enough noise whatever the season, you would not be bothered by the boar, but generally speaking, Monkton Wood is not a place for the faint-hearted.

***

Sloane instructed Al to work in rows starting at the top end and going gradually downhill. To be exact, it was mostly ‘Mack’ Sloane who did the digging, but Al seemed to enjoy throwing the excavated soil to the other side of the red and white tape barricade, so the team worked well side by side.

An hour later, Al asked Mack, who had stepped out into the wood since he needed what he called a “wee” and left Al to it for a few minutes, what he should do with the stones. Al could not decide by himself to do with stones he had dug out of the hole he was helping to create during Mr Sloane’s absence, which was incidentally so long that Al had felt obliged to ask if Mr Sloane had had a problem deciding which tree to pee against.

“Shall I throw them over there?” he shouted, holding  up a stone and pointing to where the bones had been found.

Startled, Sloane hurried back up the long hill to the spot. Why would there be stones in a kitchen garden?

“No!” he panted. “They could be important!”

Systematic removal of soil gradually revealed what looked like the entrance to a cave.

“But it can’t be a cave,” said Sloane. “We’re moving downhill.”

“What if it’s the entrance to something else?” said Al.

“We’ll have to keep digging, Al. I’ve no idea what it is but it must be 6 feet down.”

“Like agrave,” said Al.” Where’s the metal detector? The bodies might still be wearing wedding rings.”

“At home,” said Sloane, “And don’t talk rubbish!”

“A fat lot of good it will do there.”

“It isn’t working properly.”

“Booaaaa! What’s the use of digging if we don’t know what we’re digging for?”

“Firstly, it’s me digging,” said Sloane, “and secondly, we are still digging for ecclesiastical treasures.”

“I know the bones over there were accidental,” said Al. “You forgot the metal detector, didn’t you? Be truthful!”

“Well…”

“Better still, you didn’t go home at all. Booaaa…. Nice, if can get it.”

***

The entrance to whatever was behind the stone wall took Sloane another hour to dig free. He was reminded of the pyramids. He had not actually dug up a pyramid, but there were walls around them and they had had to be rediscovered. When the Monkton Priory wall was finally exposed, it was clearly impenetrable for the two archaeologists. The loose stones had probably not fitted, Al thought.

“We’ll have to get it open,” said Sloane.

“Could it be a well?” Al wanted to know.

Sloane’s basic lack of knowledge about archaeology was now tripping him up as he wondered what it could be.

“Wells are round, Al, and go downwards, but we are at the bottom.. We’ll have to get an expert in. I’ll call the owner for advice. You can go home now. Here’s five pounds for your work today and I’ll be in touch for tomorrow”

Al did not reveal that he had been paid up to Wednesday. His moped was propped up against one of the memorials in the old cemetery. He mounted and made off, He wasn’t going to wait for Mack to change his mind.

***

“Cleo. There’s a hitch,” said Sloane, indulging in a deliberate understatement in his phone-call.

“What kind of hitch, Mr Sloane?”

“We’ve come up against a wall.”

“All buildings have walls, Mr Sloane. You should not be excavating part of the church. Where is it then?”

“Underground.”

“You’ll have to explain that more clearly, Mr Sloane. Walls go up rather than down and you are digging, aren’t you?”

“While I was in the woods for a moment – you can imagine why since there are no public conveniences at the priory – well, my assistant came across some stones.”

“I would expect stones at a ruin, Mr Sloane.”

“These were about a foot down, and it looked like a barrier.”

“Stones were bound to be lying around after several hundred years among the ruins.”

“Not in a kitchen garden. That’s next to where the bones were found.”

“How do you know it used to be a kitchen garden, Mr Sloane?”

“Because the Monks were self-contained, so they grew vegetables behind their huts.”

“I expect they kept hens, too, and you came across stones from an ancient henhouse,” said Cleo, tongue in cheek..

Although it was unlikely that hens had been kept underground, Sloane immediately claimed the idea as his own.

“Try to find the floor plan,” said Cleo. The base stones will still be there, won’t they, even if the hut was built of wood?”

“I’ll do that,” said Sloane, thankful for the suggestion.

“I’ll look forward to hearing how you get on,” said Cleo. “And I’ll make sure someone comes to your assistance if that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

***

To Sloane’s surprise, Al came back.

“I’m sorry I left, Mack.”

“I told you to go home.”

“But I haven’t done five pounds of work yet,” said Al, whose guilty conscience had got the better of him.

“Ten pounds, actually,” said Sloane. “You didn’t think I’d forgotten that, did you, Al?”

Al shook his head. Maybe Mack wasn’t as daft as he thought.

“I’ve been thinking,” Sloane said. “It could be a henhouse, couldn’t it?”

“Booaaaa. We’d better keep digging.”

“No. We can’t remove the wall on our own.”

“I thought the wall was a kind of door, Mack,” said Al.

“The door will be on the other side,” Mack improvised. “we will wait for help to arrive.”

***

Cleo’s phone call to Gary was followed by Gary phoning Chris about the issue. Chris, who was alarmed at developments on the dig site, phoned a landscape designer he knew who had a team of labourers to do the hard grind. Robin Dewhurst of Dewhurst and Co that claimed to do everything for your landscaping would send a team there immediately.

Chris wondered why Sloane had turned up until he remembered that e had not actually sealed off the whole of the priory.

***

Dewhurst and Co did not waste time on conjecture. They arrived armed with equipment that would have toppled Tower Bridge and set to work while Mr Sloane gave instructions and Al looked on in amazement from a safe distance..

It took them only fifteen minutes for Dewhurst’s merry men to knock the wall down. Chris was only just in time to see it happening.