The Bodies at Westgrave Hall Read online

  The Bodies at Westgrave Hall

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One 2018, Kazakhstan, Central Asia

  Oxfordshire, UK

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten Boxing Day morning

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve A few hours earlier

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen Five minutes earlier

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Canelo Crime

  About the Author

  Also by Nick Louth

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  For Louise, as always

  Chapter One

  2018, Kazakhstan, Central Asia

  Russian Air Force Colonel Lev Rossivsky checked the radar screen, picked up his largest binoculars and made his way up to the roof of the control tower of Kuznetsov Air Base. It was only a single flight of stairs and led out onto a rough concrete roof. The wind was blowing from the east again, whipping up a fine sand from the endless miles of parched scrubland and leaving a rose-tinted haze that masked the distant sparkle of Lake Balkhash, eighty miles to the south. As he put the Carl Zeiss Jena lenses to his eyes, he didn’t even glance at the rusting hulks of obsolete helicopters or the remains of the 1950s MiG 15 jet fighter that littered the base. He was looking for something that even in all his thirty-year air force experience he had never seen. The base was not much used since the fall of communism, but still had one great asset that came into play from time to time. It had the longest runway in Kazakhstan. Today, it might well need every inch of it.

  Rossivsky peered south-west, looking high in the sky for the glint of sun on aluminium. Then he saw it, a bright silver dot. He watched the approach as the aircraft grew and grew, gradually getting lower, until he could make out the distinctive twin tail-fins and hear the approaching roar of the six giant jet engines. Sixteen pairs of landing wheels appeared underneath the giant jet’s fuselage and nose. The Antonov An-225 Mriya, the world’s largest cargo aircraft, 640 tonnes fully loaded, was coming in to land. With a puff of dust, and the scream of reverse thrust, the Antonov touched down, and rumbled past him right the way to the end of the runway. Bigger than a jumbo jet, the An-225 was originally designed to deliver the Buran spaceplane to the Baikonur launch site nearly 1,000 miles west, when that now-obsolete project was on the frontiers of space science.

  Its cargo today was nothing to do with cutting-edge technology, Indeed, it was not a product of human ingenuity at all.

  It far predated that.

  Rossivsky turned his attention to the concrete apron. An olive-green articulated low-loader with military markings growled into life. Plumes of filthy diesel smoke rose from the MAZ-239 as it began to inch forward. The transporter, designed to carry six forty-tonne T72 main battle tanks, was being tested by an even heavier load. On its back, and in places wider than the vehicle itself, was a 185-foot-long object, roughly the shape of a giant dagger, wrapped in a silver tarpaulin. He had not seen beneath that covering, for all of the weeks of organisation that had been required to bring it here from the mine of Karabulak, 400 miles to the north-east.

  The low-loader approached the Antonov, whose rear tail ramp had now been lowered. Four large mobile cranes were on hand to manoeuvre the object gently from the low-loader onto two specially-made motorised cradles, self-propelled undercarriages each capable of dealing with a 200-tonne weight. Once the object was safely stowed on the cradles, engineers in hard hats used handheld remote controls to drive the irregularly-shaped silver-sheeted object inch by inch into the belly of the aircraft. It took an hour to stow it.

  The project was the brainchild of a reclusive British-based billionaire, a man who had the money to do anything he wanted.

  Oxfordshire, UK

  RAF Brize Norton was used to some unusual flights, but the arrival an hour before dawn of the An-225, the first ever British landing by this unique aircraft, created quite a stir. A sizeable media presence was there to see the unloading onto the specially-made twenty-two axle Nooteboom low-loader and the huge convoy of cranes and marshalling vehicles which were to accompany it on its hundred-mile journey via the M40, M25 and A3. Although about the same length as a wind turbine tower, the cargo was much heavier. The convoy travelled at ten miles an hour, accompanied by a five-mile tailback of frustrated drivers, until it finally left the A3 and headed into the Surrey countryside. The smaller roads to its final destination had been closed off in advance by arrangement with the police. The UK traffic management plan alone had cost half a million pounds, one of the smaller overheads of the exercise.

  Onlookers lined the lanes as the lorry crawled the last three miles to Westgrave Hall. There, waiting for it, were three giant eight-wheeled cranes, their jibs already arching into the sky over a half-completed building. Teams of high-vis-jacketed construction workers, helmeted in orange, oversaw the cargo’s final movement. It was a 300-yard lift from the road and into the building. That was not too far in general construction terms, but for the 240-tonne relic within, it was a monumental piece of travel. Arrangements took much of the day, and it was almost five in the afternoon when the enormous silver-jacketed cargo was finally lifted from the low-loader, and manoeuvred across into the building that had been designed to receive it.

  A lad on a bicycle stopped to watch, amazed at the hundreds of people who had gathered in this normally quiet rural lane. He pointed at the now-suspended object, its huge shadow falling across the crowd in the late afternoon sunshine. ‘What’s in that thing?’ he asked no one in particular.

  ‘Haven’t you read the papers, Steven?’ replied Mary Hill, the verger of St Michael All Saints’ parish church. ‘It’s a giant fossil, 170 million years old.’

  ‘Is it a T-Rex?’

  ‘No. It’s a fish-eating plesiosaur, even bigger than a Tyrannosaurus.’

  ‘Cool!’

  Mrs Hill’s husband Colin leaned towards the boy. ‘It is, apparently, the largest one ever found. It used to swim in shallow tropical seas in what is now Central Asia.’

  ‘Why is it coming here?’ Steven replied, scratching his ear.

  ‘You’d better ask the Russian chap who owns Westgrave Hall,’ Colin replied.

  * * *

  For the previous six months, a continuous stream of construction traffic had poured into the grounds of Westgrave Hall. Quarry trucks rattled and roared down the narrow lane, churning up the manicured grass verges, carving ruts through the carefully cultivated roadside wildflowers, spreading mud and drowning out the birdsong. Late into the night the growl of diesel engines and reversing beeps could be heard, only stopping for a few hours before beginning again at seven in the morning. Pile-driving seemed to begin at the crack of dawn, each impact a mini earthquake which rattled crockery throughout the village. Arc lights on crane jibs lit up the night sky, in mockery of the moon, confusing the birds who began singing into the small hours. On occasion the rhythmic thudding of a helicopter heralded the arrival of the estate’s new owner. The villagers, curious or furious and sometimes both, regularly congregated on the rocky outcrop at the back of the churchyard, with sandwiches, scones and thermos flasks of coffee supplied by the Women’s Institute, to peer across the ro
ad and over the Westgrave estate’s high stone walls. It was the best vantage point in the village to give a view into what was happening. There on Buckridge Mount, where an Iron Age fort once stood, a concrete and glass building had taken shape, ready for the precious cargo from Kazakhstan. The Volkov Library was a two-storey white concrete edifice with a glass frontage more than a hundred yards long, fronted with tinted glass panels, each as big as a badminton court.

  Then, in the days after the fossil’s arrival, and the installation of the library roof, the noise began to diminish. The inhabitants of Steeple Risby began to look at the finer details of the transformation of the Westgrave Hall estate.

  ‘Did you look at the final planning document, Colin?’ asked Nigel Welland, chairman of the local parish council. He stood in the churchyard with Colin Hill watching workmen fixing the library’s slightly pitched steel roof. Nigel was resting a hand on the lichened headstone of Edwina Fortescue (1806–59), a distant relative on his mother’s side, who had gone off to become a lady in waiting in the court of Queen Victoria.

  ‘Yes. Ignored all the tree protection orders, the archaeological excavation plan, objections from the water company, the caveats from highways who said this road was not big enough. Talked about benefits to the community, education and investment. Mary is absolutely incandescent.’

  To Colin Hill, retired insurance underwriter and chairman of the local antiquarian society, living in Steeple Risby had shifted from being a retirement dream to a living nightmare. The parish council, of which he was secretary, had been molten at its impotence, having objected at every stage to the planning application, as had the district council. The Westgrave Hall redevelopment plan, prepared by a top City legal firm and award-winning architects a year ago, was rejected locally, but an immediate appeal went up to the national planning inspectorate. Before they had a chance to consider it, the minister called it in and personally approved it.

  ‘Bloody oligarch must have greased some palms,’ Welland said. ‘Payment to party funds no doubt.’

  Colin nodded. ‘Money talks.’ He knew that because he had money himself, quite a sizeable sum from working a lifetime in the City, and he reckoned he had some influence too from the friends he still had there. But it didn’t take long before he realised that his resources were as nothing compared with the stranger who had arrived from Russia, a man who was destined to change his life for ever.

  Chapter Two

  It was more than a year after the arrival of the fossil in June that the machinery finally fell silent. The work was completed, and Colin and Mary Hill received an invitation to go up to Westgrave Hall for the opening of the Volkov Library, where they would be able to see the fossil. Mary had shown her husband the expensive envelope and thick golden card.

  ‘I’m not going to go,’ she said. ‘They mess up the village, make our lives a misery and then they think they can just snap their fingers and bring us up to the hall when it suits them.’ She folded her arms.

  But Colin was tempted. The card described a guided tour of the new library and an explanation of the fossil from the renowned TV palaeontologist Dr Sophie Cawkwell. The press would be there too.

  ‘Come on, Mary, don’t be obstinate. If we get to speak to him, maybe we can get the footpath reopened.’ He left unsaid his desire to see Dr Cawkwell, whose spectacular figure and penchant for cut-off shorts and tight T-shirts always guaranteed Channel 4 a good audience from middle-aged men, whether they liked fossils or not. They enjoyed seeing her, in cowboy hat and hiking boots, crouching in some desert in Mongolia or South Dakota, tapping away at a piece of limestone or sandstone. At least he could say hand-on-heart he was genuinely interested in what she was talking about.

  Colin recalled the very first day that Alexander Volkov arrived in the village, back in August 2016. Colin was mowing the lawn at the front of the churchyard, when a shiny black Mercedes stopped and from the rear door emerged an enormous black-bearded man, wearing a sports jacket and jeans. He must have been six foot four, and he was grinning as he bounded across to the low stone wall which encircled the parish church. Colin stopped the mower and walked through the lychgate, not wanting the stranger to vault the wall and crush his carefully nurtured delphiniums. Hill prepared to offer directions, something he often did to motorists confused by the profusion of back lanes around the village.

  ‘My name is Alexander Volkov, and I am the new owner of Westgrave Hall,’ the man said in a thick accent, taking one of Colin’s gardening-gloved hands in both of his. Colin took a step back, thinking the visitor was going to give him a bear hug, but discovered he was merely happy to occupy his personal space.

  Colin introduced himself. ‘Nice to meet you. I thought the estate was being left to the National Trust.’ Both he and Mary had been lobbying for the Westgrave family to pass the estate to Britain’s most loved custodian of things grand and ancient. Lady Margaret had apparently indicated on her deathbed that it was her desire, or so local gossip went. However, the four Westgrave children, not one of them under seventy, had seemingly chosen the glitter of money over a burnished posterity.

  ‘No, I have bought it from the family. But I will be a good neighbour to all of you in Steeple Risby.’ It was clear he had practised pronouncing the name of the obscure village. ‘You must come to my home, soon. I have Georgian champagne and the best Altai mountain vodka, filtered through birch charcoal. It is wonderful!’ With that, he bounded back to his car.

  Over the next two years, the Hills had watched in consternation as Westgrave Hall was first encased in scaffolding and then shrouded in tarpaulins. No one in Steeple Risby had in fact been invited up to the house, and dog walkers using the three public footpaths which crossed the parkland found that the stiles had been blocked off with ugly metal fences and wrapped in razor wire. The parish council complained, to little effect.

  Enquiries to the local county council eventually led to enforcement action, but the rights-of-way officer and besuited lawyer armed with a court order were no match for the shaven-headed heavy with a snarling guard dog leashed in each hand. The police declined to intervene, calling it a civil matter.

  Mary Hill, now in her seventies, had been responsible for the maintenance of the Westgrave family chapel and necropolis at the hall, but since the arrival of the Russians had found her services no longer required. Worse still, she was unable to visit the grave of her first husband, William, who was buried on chapel grounds. The locks on the site gates had been changed, and barbed wire had been looped along the top of the parkland railings. This she considered to be ridiculous and unsightly. The cattle which grazed the parkland were still there, and the tenant farmer continued to look after the land, but the house itself was now what she termed occupied land.

  Originally the seat of Lord Henry Algernon Westgrave, whose beloved only son died in the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade in Crimea in 1854, Westgrave had a rich history, of which Mary was proud to be a custodian. The family chapel recorded the Westgraves’ role as defenders of the faith right back to the Siege of Acre in 1190. The honourable aristocrat, a cousin of Lord Palmerston, would have been appalled had he known that his ancestral home was now owned by the descendant of his Crimean enemies. That a Russian, an upstart social climber from what Mary termed a family of Siberian convicts, and who had come into his billions only twenty years ago, was now occupying the fifty-two-bedroom Palladian stately home would send a shiver down his spine.

  * * *

  The open day for the Volkov Library turned out to be a great success. Colin Hill had finally persuaded his wife to come with him, though it was clear from her choice of a scruffy black cardigan and fusty beige skirt from the Oxfam shop that she was determined a) not to enjoy herself, and b) to make a point. They were there together with a few members of the parish and district councils. There were also a great many journalists, not only from local papers but the nationals too.

  And there was plenty to see.

  Entering via double glass doors, the v
isitors looked up to see a cavernous library building constructed around the 240-tonne limestone slab. The rock was 185 feet long, 22 feet wide at its widest and 8 feet deep, suspended within an atrium on gigantic iron chains, each link the size of a tea-tray. These carefully restored anchor chains were from the German battleship Tirpitz, sunk in 1944 in a Norwegian fjord, and were suspended from a series of fifteen giant cedar beams which traversed the ceiling. Exposed granite walls on both the ground floor and the balconied mezzanine above were interspersed with glass-fronted bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes titled in Russian.

  It was possible to walk right under the colossal stone and see many of the smaller ammonites and brachiopods caught within it, illuminated by carefully positioned spotlights on the ground floor. At this lowest point, a steel keel had been screwed in from end to end, which prevented the rock from falling apart when it was being moved. But it was only by ascending to the gallery and looking down across the atrium that it was possible to see the plesiosaur in all its serpentine glory, partially exposed on the upper surface of the rock. The creature’s beautifully delicate neck was stretched out, as were the two desk-sized front flippers. The ribs and vertebrae were in beautiful condition, apparently undisturbed in the 170 million years since its death. Moving along the length of the fossil, after the ribs diminished and the tail bones tapered off, there were ten yards of featureless rock before the most moving sight of all. A baby plesiosaur, just six feet long, a perfect miniature version of its parent, behind which it had been swimming when they both met their untimely end.

  Colin Hill was almost moved to tears by it, as he made his way along the balcony to join the crowd now gathered there for the presentation. Dr Sophie Cawkwell, elegant in a navy trouser suit, held centre stage as she described the life and times of these extraordinary creatures.