Chapter 8: What's Down The Well

A few days later Danny had a message from Aiden. ‘Nothing known on Linda. Gerry is known to us. Several violence charges, two of the more serious ones were dropped when witnesses didn’t turn up at court. He did six months in prison years ago. That was also for violence on a woman. There have been no charges in the last four years.’

‘He currently works as a maintenance man in Bryans Gym on the main street in town. He’s a dangerous character, so take care.’

Danny thanked him and said, ‘Will do, be in touch soon.’

He contacted Tom and asked if he could give him a hand with the cone camera. Tom picked him up later that evening and they set it up near to the turn off towards Gerry’s house. Being out in the country there was only one road leading to it, and a couple of other houses.

They set it up on the road that his lane branched off. Putting it a hundred yards down from the turn off meant Danny could discover from the comfort of home what hours Gerry was absent.

The next few days Gerry went out at half past eight and didn’t return until after six. On the third day, Tom was off duty. He collected Danny from school, and they drove past Gerry’s house and parked in a field entrance.

Danny stripped his school gear off and put a boiler suit on. He gave Tom his spare phone which was signed into the cone camera. They knew Gerry’s car colour and registration number thanks to Aiden. Danny rang Toms phone and they both put their phones on speaker so they could hear each other.

Danny had made a phone pocket on a tape so it would hang round his neck, under his T shirt. He could speak to Tom without using his hands and it was not obvious it was there so Tom would hear anyone speaking to him.

He set off with a pair of secateurs in case he had to cut any branches off. Also in his bag was a small but powerful torch and a large flat screwdriver, just in case he needed to lever anything up.

He climbed over the gate into the field and walked round the edge until he came to the hedge between the field and Gerry’s back garden. He went along so he was as near to the bottom of the garden as he could judge. Then he came slowly back looking for a gap in the hedge.

He eventually found one that a dog might squeeze through, so he cut a few more branches off and made it big enough so he could just lie down and crawl through. He put the cut branches at the side so he could put them back in place afterwards.

‘Just going through the hedge,’ he said as he lay down and crawled through the gap. Standing in the garden he found himself in a neglected area that was blocked from view of the house by overgrown shrubs. He searched around and couldn’t see anything resembling a well.

He went up to the bushes nearer the house and pushed through. Now he was still quite a way from the house. The garden showed signs of half-hearted efforts to keep it from becoming completely overgrown.

He soon spotted the well. It was almost in line with him, over in the corner close to the hedge by the field. But to get to it and do anything with it he would be out in the open. Hoping there was no one else at home, he went over to it.

It had a circular brick wall around it waist high. It looked about six feet diameter. The brickwork didn’t look in good condition, so he would have to be careful not to lean against it. Falling down a well was not part of the plan. The thought of falling down it and perhaps landing on some dead bodies made Danny shiver.

The well had a circular timber lid on it the exact size of the brickwork. It looked in reasonable condition. It didn’t look new, but it was certainly in a better state than the brickwork. Danny took hold of it and lifted it up. It was made of tongue and grooved floorboards which came over to the outer edge of the brickwork. It had another layer underneath, also in a circle but this time it only came to the inside of the brickwork. That meant it couldn’t slide off.

Danny managed to lift it enough to push it aside halfway off. Taking care not to lean on the brickwork, he stood one step back. He bent over so his shoulders rested on the brickwork and his head was directly over the well. He took this position so that all his body weight was directed straight down on the bricks. That way it wouldn’t push the bricks sideways out of place.

He pointed his torch down and switched it on. It wasn’t strong enough to see anything other than more darkness deep down. There wasn’t even a reflection of water. He moved back and found a stone.

Putting himself back in the same position, he held the stone level with the top of the brickwork, closed his eyes and as he let go of the stone he started counting. He counted three then he heard a thud.

‘He put the lid back in place and measured it across. Then he checked he hadn’t left any obvious signs. Satisfied, he was about to return to the hole in the hedge when he spotted a garden cane lying on the ground. He picked it up and poked it through the hedge right by the well, into the field.

Once he was back in the field, he plugged the hole with the branches he had cut off. Then walked along the hedge until he saw the cane sticking out. He checked the hedge and about three feet past the well on the side away from the house there was another gap. It was even smaller that the first one. He set to and cut more branches so that when he returned, he would be able to go through the hedge right by the well.

Once he was satisfied, he packed all his cut branches back into the hole. Returning to the car, he sat back in the passenger seat and let out a long breath of relief. ‘I found the well,’ he told Tom. ‘I managed to lift the lid. My torch wouldn’t light up far enough down so I will have to lower something down. The well has a good lid on it and unlike the rest of the garden, it wasn’t overgrown. That suggests someone has had need to lift it off in the last six months.’

‘I assume the house is now on a water main.’ Danny said. ‘What makes you say that?’ Tom asked. ‘When I was trying to look down the well, I was leaning with my face right over the opening,’ Danny said. ‘There was an awful smell coming up. That doesn’t suggest that any water drawn from it would be any use for drinking.’

‘What’s up?’ he asked seeing the look on Toms face. ‘When I was with Lewis recently and we unearthed a buried body,’ he said, ‘The smell coming from that was awful. It reminded me of the post-mortem I went to.’ ‘It could just be rotting vegetation with not being used,’ Danny said. ‘We had still better wait until I’ve put a camera down it before we report anything.’

They headed back, Tom dropped Danny off and just before he drove off, he said, ‘It’s great to be working together again.’ Danny smiled at him. He had had an idea earlier, so he had asked Tom to give him a list of his shifts for the next few weeks.

Danny went in and had a shower. Then after dinner, saying he had some homework to do, he went up to his room. He had picked a pebble up from the front garden as he came in. It looked similar in size to the one he had dropped down the well earlier.

He went up into their loft which had a window in the gable end. He opened it, made sure his mum wasn’t out in the garden, then dropped his stone. It hit the ground after he had counted two but before he got to three.

Then he tied his shoe to a ball of string and lowered that out of the window until it touched the ground. Tying a knot in the string level with the window, he pulled his shoe back up and put it back on. After closing the window, he measured the string from its end back to the knot he had tied. It was twenty-five feet long.

Rolling the string up he returned to his room. At his desk he wrote down...

Well depth is a count of three.

Test at home drop of twenty-five feet took two and a half seconds.

Twenty-five divided by two point five is ten.

So, every second of drop is ten feet.

The well is three seconds, times ten feet, equals thirty feet deep.

He decided that he needed a rope forty feet long just to be sure. So as not to make it too heavy he decided he’d have two torches with the square batteries in, the ones with the two springs on them. That would give a good light.

The next problem was if there was water in the bottom. Although it hadn’t sounded like it, he didn’t want the camera and the phone going under water. Or the torches for that matter. The phone would probably not transmit a picture from down underground so he might not be able to see water from up above.

After a lot of thought, he came up with the idea of getting a plastic tub about eighteen inches diameter and cutting it off to twelve inches deep. If he mounted the camera and torches in a hole cut in the middle of the base, he could then fix empty small plastic coke or water bottles around the outside of the drum with their lids on. That he reasoned would make the whole thing float if it did hit water.