15: Homeward bound

Now, where was I? (We’re back in the apartment now by the way, have been for about a week.) All this - below I mean - was about ten days ago now. So anyway…


Uncle retreated to the library for a couple of hours to read a forwarded copy of the report using Julia’s old PC, whilst Julia looked worried because she didn’t know what was going on, Charlie looked worried because she thought she did know what was going on and it didn’t sit well with her. I got it in the neck from both of them, again, for not being the least worried. Eventually we decided to make coffee and take it up in case Uncle had slipped into the depths of despond.

‘Are you alright?’

‘Yes, easier to take when one knows the facts. Just a few memories drifting back, stuff one overheard the adults talk about. Seemed to me as a child they were all obsessed with money, but you know they really didn’t have enough, forever selling-off bits of the estate, I remember now, someone did suggest selling the mineral rights, but the old Earl said it couldn’t be done on account of them having already been sold, back in the previous century. Never occurred to me what that implied, men toiling in the dark beneath one’s feet and all that.’

‘Darling, what are you talking about?’

‘Oh, sorry. I was looking at him. He knows what I’m talking about because it turns out it really is the kind of rock that matters, and damn it, there is a quick fix with the right mix of concrete because it will be as hard as the rock in no time. And after all it is only really a crack and not a hole.’

‘I’m still none the wiser.’

‘Oh yes of course, well it turns out matey did come back very briefly with whoever does his Geophys and he waded-out to the middle and waved his gadget over the hole, so they have it in 3D and know it’s just a crack in the roof of the shaft.’

‘Shaft! As in mine? Going down hundreds of feet?!’

‘No, no, calm yourself my dear, we don’t have mines like that around here, we have Adit mines, masses of them around the edges of the moors, you go straight into the hill horizontally’.

‘But the Park isn’t on a hill!’

‘Oh, but it is! You just don’t realise it because the new road has such a gentle gradient, when you approach via the old road, by the time you’re passing behind the woods you’ve realised that when you crossed the river bridge just before, you were well above the pond, almost to the height of the top of the house and that the source of the river can only be at most a quarter of a mile behind you, hence you’ll never get more than a large pond and you’ll always sound pretty pretentious if you go around calling it a lake! You don’t look convinced. You know you are going up, when you take all those curves before the river, right? But by that time, you’ve actually come two and a half miles from Grimpen Cross where the old road starts.’

‘Fresh coffee anyone?’

‘Thankyou Charlotte, gosh, I didn’t notice you slip-out.’

‘Anyway, that’s by the by, because we’re all shafted, we can’t start or finish the rest of the Park, and make it a real going concern without going back and forth time and again to get permissions from whoever has taken the ground from under our feet; he’ll have his price, and a dozen legit reasons to delay whenever it suits him.’

‘What do you mean ‘whoever’, doesn’t it say in the report?’

‘The last mention in the registry is of the people who bought it in 1932 being dissolved, now the assets, in so far as there are any, must have passed to someone but… that’s his masterstroke, the weasel!’

‘Tony, your Uncle seems to think you know all about this, so does Charlotte, now in two sentences of plain English, if you wouldn’t mind.’

‘I was simply approached by a London solicitor who thought I might care to know that the old mine under the Park had recently changed hands. I take it you don’t want me to name names, need to know and all that’ I said, turning to Uncle.

‘Damn right I don’t, we’ll all need some deniability by the time this is over. Now, you’ve taken some position in this, Charlotte said you held a “pretty good” hand, I don’t think that is going to be good enough, what makes it unbeatable going into this deal?’

‘Well, the thing is what they really want is no deal at all. The conclusion of business, as it were, is them gifting the original mineral rights to the Park company itself.’

‘Oh, Christ! Here we go. Get it over with, how much per share?’

‘One penny.’

‘If this is some kind of a joke!’

‘Well, only if the mine isn’t worth anything to anybody. The only unbeatable hand is one where you and I stick together, no matter what. The thing is they want forty per cent, but they don’t care where that comes from - they rather thought they’d leave that up to me.’

‘Or else?’

‘Nothing, a delay is a delay, nothing happens and goes on happening.’

‘Surely we can put a stop to this, there must be regulations.’

‘My dear, we don’t know who they are because they are not registered yet, we don’t know how long they have left before they have to register because we don’t know when the purchase, or gift or transfer of whatever to whoever occurred; we don’t know when the crack happened or how it happening, how long the pond was draining away before anyone noticed. We don’t have any way of knowing if anyone has acted other than within the law, or the spirit of the law! All we have is laughing boy here telling us if we do it his way all will be rosy in the fucking garden! So, my dear boy, what would you advise?’

‘None of the shares have to come from you, or indeed the small investors.’

‘Oh marvellous! Some city boys want to clear out the ones we already have, the devil we know for the devil we don’t, goodbye cosy country club, hello the next country house hotel with gated community attached.’

‘All this mystery sounds a bit unconventional for city types, don’t you think? Anyway, I think the question of the hour, or perhaps the rest of today, is why now?’

‘So, what is happening at the mine, right now?’ Julia asked.

‘Bugger all I shouldn’t wonder, although these places do often have a regular stream of cavers going in. Not that they care much for these mines, but they are a bit nerdy, they want be able to say they’ve bagged every underground manmade whatever in the country and all that.’

‘You described the territory from the driver’s point of view, I assume you’ve walked it all at some point.’

‘Of course. Obviously, I missed one mine entrance, still they are pretty small and often overgrown. I suppose it must be decades since Julia and I have been to some of the more isolated places… Oh my god, it is in report, it has to be, I just can’t read it.’ Uncle went back to the screen. ‘Ha! Fancy going skinny dipping my dear?’

‘No, I do not, I thought we’d decided all that was done with at our age!’

‘Well, I’m afraid we couldn’t now even if we wanted to, least not at the same spot.’

Now, seemed as good a moment as any I was likely to get, so I walked over to Uncle and turned the screen through forty-five degrees or so. ‘They’ve given current figures for the water table presumably.’

‘That’s what I mean, but that cross section...’

‘So, seen from this angle, with the land rising all the way, that must be approximately north. So now it all comes out there, wherever there is, at more or less the same rate as it ever did.’

‘How can you know that? You’re town not country - as I keep trying to explain to you.’

‘I don’t have to, the likes of us have off the shelf software that does it all for us, adjusts for a flat screen, but in the actual data, will give you accuracy down to the last millimetre sometimes, even allows for the curvature of earth in the real data, but distorts for the sake of a good enough visualisation in two dimensions.’

‘Wait a minute, they may be using you as a middleman, but they won’t have told you what all this means.’

‘Sorry, full story has to wait till they have their forty per cent.’

Then the telephone rang, again.

This time we all heard Uncle’s side of the conversation, although it didn’t help the others much. It did tell me though, that there hadn’t yet, been any unintended consequences at the Park!