No Stone Unturned (2 page)

‘What's that?'

‘A foot rub.'

‘What?' Kelly looked at her friend as if she had gone mad, then laughed as she realised what Leanne meant. Standing to the left of the arched doorway leading into the House of Commons was an impressive bronze statue of Sir Winston Churchill, hands on his hips, purposefully stepping forwards as if to show off a fine pair of shiny new boots.

‘You're supposed to rub his boot for luck,' said the tour guide, as he caught Kelly's eye. ‘New MPs like to touch Churchill's foot before making a speech in the Commons for the first time.'

‘Go on,' urged Leanne, nudging Kelly.

Kelly laid her hand on the tip of the statue's foot, polished to a shining gold by the hands of decades of hopeful politicians. ‘What is it about me and old boots?' she whispered.

Chapter 2 – July 2012

T
welve months earlier, Kelly Hearn was reaching the end of her first year at The Shakespeare Academy. As she emptied her locker outside her tutor group room on the first floor, a wave of relief overcame her. She had made it through three whole terms—two terms longer than her brother Perry had bet she would—and a smile spread across her face as she thought about the summer holidays ahead. Six weeks of not having to get up early and run for the bus. Six weeks of not having to wear a tie and go everywhere dressed like a stick insect in a stupid bottle green blazer. Even better, six weeks in which the only skirt she possessed could stay on its hanger in her wardrobe.

Kelly stuffed the last of her books into her bag, swept the stale crisps and biscuit crumbs out onto the floor with her hand, threw the empty water bottles into the bin and headed outside to join the queue for the bus. With any luck, she would avoid seeing Charlotte, her tutor group's resident bully, and her sidekick Leanne, who followed Charlotte everywhere like an adoring puppy. That was something else Kelly wouldn't miss over the holidays: all those so-called accidents, where Charlotte would knock Kelly's pencil case off her desk, sending her pens skidding across the classroom floor, or bump her arm just as she was pouring her juice in the dinner hall. Nor would she miss Charlotte's pathetic name-calling.
Dirty pikey. Smelly tinker. Thieving gypsy.
They weren't the worst of the insults that had been hurled at Kelly—or muttered under the breath—at one point or another during her first year.

Although she never gave Charlotte the satisfaction of seeing it, the bullying upset Kelly badly. She knew she ought to report it, but she didn't want to draw attention to herself. Instead, when things got bad, she would hide in the toilet and stuff her tie into her mouth to stop the sobs from escaping, or retreat to a far corner of the Learning Resources Centre and duck down behind a PC screen until she could control her urge to cry. The LRC was one room where Kelly knew she was safe. Charlotte never went there. To Charlotte, studying outside of lessons was definitely not cool.

Kelly took her usual seat three rows from the back of the bus: far away from the geeks in the front seats, close enough to the in-crowd at the back to enable her to hear what they were up to, without being in their direct line of fire. Thankfully, the ‘cool' kids had stopped staring at her, nudging one another and giggling, a long time ago. Mum had been right about that. ‘Don't react, love,' she had said, when she met her off the bus at the end of her first week. ‘If you ignore them for long enough, they'll just get bored of it.'

And they had. Kelly spoke to no one and kept herself to herself and her bus journeys became quite tolerable. Kelly wondered how she would have fared if she'd followed her dad's advice. The Hearns had a reputation for being useful with their fists, and Kelly knew that her dad's approach to dealing with someone like Charlotte Kennedy would be physical.

Kelly cooled her forehead on the glass of the bus window and smiled as she pictured the look of surprise on Charlotte's usually smug face if Kelly laid a punch on the end of her podgy, spotty nose.
No
, she thought.
Somehow I don't think that would help. Not unless I wanted a fast ticket to the head's office.

Kelly had had to stand her ground with her dad about taking the school bus. At first, he had wanted to drive her there and back every day, but Kelly knew that would only give Charlotte an even bigger excuse to tease her. ‘No,' she had argued. ‘You need to let me do this my way. I have to try and fit in, do what everyone else does.'

In the end they had reached a compromise. Kelly agreed to let her mum meet her off the bus for the first few days, until she settled in. But even that gave some of the other kids something to laugh about. Thankfully, Mum saw how uncomfortable Kelly felt, and soft-talked Dad until he relented and let Kelly walk home from the bus stop unchaperoned.

It wasn't nice being an outsider. It was a lonely place to be, and as she watched the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon make way for the fields and hedgerows lining the lanes leading towards Wilmcote, Kelly felt more than a little sorry for herself. She had found a way to survive school, but after a whole year she hadn't made any friends. The Shakespeare Academy wasn't like any of the primary schools she had been to, where everyone was kind and the other children didn't seem to care where or how she lived.

She did like her form tutor though. Could she count him as a friend? Yeah, why not? Good old Mr Walker. He was also Kelly's history teacher, and quite early on he had told her that he considered himself a bit of a traveller too. His father had been in the military and had been stationed all over the world so, as a child, Mr Walker had never stayed in one place or at one school for very long. Secretly Kelly thought Mr Walker looked pretty hip, considering he must have been nearly fifty. He rode a motorbike to school and arrived each day clad in black leather, and although he would change before lessons, he always had a slightly greasy, scruffy look about him. Kelly liked that. He wasn't perfect.

The thought of the disapproving looks that some of the other teachers gave Mr Walker when he roared into the school car park on his old motorbike made Kelly snigger, and she shook her head, throwing off her earlier gloominess. After all, what had she expected? She'd known when she started at The Shakespeare Academy that she was going to be the only Traveller in Year 7. She'd known it was going to be tough.

She had fought so hard to get there, too. It hadn't been easy, convincing her parents to let her go on to secondary school. Her elder brother Perry, who was fifteen, hadn't been to school since he was eleven and now worked with their dad in his tree-cutting business. That was the norm in her family. Boys went to work with their dads and girls learned to clean and cook with their mums. That was just the way it was. But Kelly had been determined to carry on with her education—and so had begun a long campaign to convince her parents to let her.

Kelly's mum and dad loved her dearly and it wasn't a case of them wanting to hold her back. It was more that they worried for her, knowing how tough life could be for Travellers who tried to carve a place for themselves in regular society. They had experienced plenty of prejudice in their lifetime and wanted to protect their children as much as they could.

But what finally swung it for Kelly was her final primary school report. ‘Dazzling,' her headteacher had called it, arguing that it would be a crime if Kelly did not go on to secondary school. So Kelly's parents gave in, and their daughter's place at The Shakespeare Academy was confirmed.

As the school bus came over the humpbacked railway bridge into Wilmcote and pulled up at her stop, Kelly thought of all the lovely long walks she would have time for over the summer holidays with her dog, Tyson. She hurried to the front of the bus and got off without a backward glance at her schoolmates. She sucked in the fresh air and heard the whoosh of the bus's doors as they closed behind her. Six weeks of freedom had just begun.

Chapter 3 – Summer 1839

T
he elegant hands on the mantelpiece clock were pointing to half past five when architect Charles Barry swung his legs over the side of the four-poster bed in his room at the Arden Inn. He groped for his boots, feeling on the rug with his toes. Although dawn had not yet fully broken, Barry was wide awake and anxious to get on with the day.

He had arrived in Wilmcote the night before in the company of two of the country's leading geologists and a highly acclaimed stone carver. The men were nearing the end of a four-week tour of England, visiting the six quarries bidding for the contract to supply the building stone for Barry's latest project. One hundred and two quarries had originally been identified, and many months of paperwork and studying rock samples had been devoted to the task of narrowing the shortlist down to six. It was essential that they made the right choice.

It was now three years since Barry had won the commission for what was likely to be the greatest project of his career. It was a venture of such immense scale that it gave him recurring nightmares and stretched his abilities—and his patience—to their limits. But the rewards should be huge and would mean that Barry, his beloved wife Sarah and their six children could live for the rest of their days in luxurious comfort. Barry had no intention of working into his fifties. His eldest son, Edward, was now sixteen and was proving himself to be a brilliant student, with an ability to learn fast and a keen eye for design. He had made clear his wish to become an architect in his father's practice. Confident that the future of his business would be in safe hands, Barry already had retirement in his sights.

The extensive land reclamation and ground works that formed the first part of the project on the Thames in the heart of London were now nearing completion, and the foundations for the building were already being dug. A decision on the limestone, the main construction material, had to be made—and swiftly.

Today's visit to Wilmcote Quarry and Cement Works was the last of their tour, and Barry was looking forward to making his decision, placing his order and moving on to the construction stage. The owner of the quarry, Richard Greenslade, was not expecting Barry and his colleagues until nine o'clock, when he had promised to give them a full tour of the quarry so they could assess the quality of the stone and his company's production capacity, as well as their ability to deliver the material on time.

Barry was always an early riser, needing only four or five hours of sleep a night, and quite used to heading out for an early morning promenade before any of his colleagues had surfaced. He didn't mind at all. For him this was valuable thinking time, when his ideas could flow uninterrupted. Some of his best decisions had been made before breakfast.

He was the only guest up and about when he descended the stairs at the Arden Inn that morning. Putting on his top hat, he slipped quietly out of the front door then paused on the steps of the inn to get his bearings and decide which way to walk.

In the soft, early dawn light, Wilmcote was a peaceful and pretty place. The Arden Inn had pride of place right at the heart of the village, facing a small triangular village green bordered by orchards, a thatched blacksmith's forge and an old Tudor farmhouse. But its rural beauty and tranquillity were lost on Charles Barry. He disliked being away from London and detested the thought of a quiet country life. He preferred the hustle and bustle of the city, and fared far better in a man-made urban architectural landscape than in a rural, natural one.

Barry decided to turn left and, leaving the village green behind him, walked up the main street, following the road between two identical, parallel rows of quarrymen's cottages built from the local stone. He came to a stop when he realised he had, by chance, found the lane which led to the quarry. He glanced at his pocket watch. Six o'clock. There was still time to carry out a bit of reconnaissance before breakfast.

He quickened his pace and headed across the road and up the lane. A couple of minutes later he reached a fork, where a small sign on a rickety wooden gate indicated that the right-hand track went to Stone Pit Cottage. To the left was a wider lane with a larger sign pointing to the quarry and to Stone Pit Farm, which Barry recognised as the home of Richard Greenslade. He followed the latter route and walked on for a few more minutes, enjoying the early morning bird song, until he came to a large, imposing set of metal gates. Unsure whether this was the entrance to the quarry works, Barry hesitated for a second before lifting the latch and passing through. The gate was heavy, and as he let it go, it swung to a close with a loud clang. Undeterred, Barry continued, following the track around the side of a stable building. Then he suddenly realised his mistake. He was standing in the rear garden of Stone Pit Farm house.