After Sydney Gardens, excited onlookers lined the road all the way to the humpback bridge at Bathampton. There the support thinned and Maeve was thankful for a quiet stretch southwards along the canal towpath — quiet, except that she was doing it with five thousand others, most, it seemed, ready to chat along the lines of, “Your first time? Mine, too. And the last. My feet are killing me already.”
They progressed through the spectacular Limpley Stoke valley, but she wasn’t in this to admire scenery. She’d needed more elbow room and was getting it now. The conversation dwindled and was replaced by the muffled drumming of footfalls.
A cyclist came by, steadily overtaking runners. “Have a heart, mate, and give me a lift,” someone shouted, but there was no comeback from the rider, intent on getting through on the outside without hitting anyone. Presumably he was someone’s trainer. All the elite runners had trainers and called them coaches. He’d have some catching up to do if he wanted to get through to the leaders. Maeve had a mental map of the route and was looking forward to slaking her thirst at the Dundas Aqueduct.
“Take water at every opportunity,” Trevor had advised. “Dehydration is your biggest enemy.”
She wasn’t worried that Trevor hadn’t been much in evidence today. He must have felt no more needed to be said. She’d seen him from a distance with his bike in the runners’ village before the start and for once he’d been looking the other way. Even in the Longford Road staffroom he had this habit of gazing at her in the way a racehorse trainer studies a filly entered for the Derby, assessing her haunches for excess fat — of which there was still too much — and planning how to get her race-ready. He would never say she was flabby or overeating. Instead he’d tell her, as he had a week ago, that she might care to go to the swimming pool and practise walking in water.
Isn’t that what they do with horses? She hadn’t taken up the suggestion. She had the feeling Trevor would insist on watching, getting an eyeful of her less-than-svelte figure.
She was gasping for a drink of water. Overindulgence in cheap Merlot and sex the day before? No way, she told herself. I can cope with alcohol. The running is making me thirsty. All I need is to recharge. Happily, plenty of hydration was on offer when she jogged into the aqueduct car park. Red-jacketed marshals at tables were making sure everyone could grab a bottle.
“Can I?” she asked the guy when she reached for a spare one. He was trying to manage two tables with armfuls of packs.
“Help yourself. I don’t think I’m winning here. There was someone next to me until a few minutes ago. He vanished just when it was getting really busy.”
She moved on herself, making way for other thirsty people. She noticed some queueing to use a portaloo, jogging on the spot, either to keep the muscles supple or from pressure on the bladder. She wondered if the missing marshal was inside. It wasn’t only the runners who sometimes needed a leak. Personally, she was blessed with excellent plumbing aided by the drying effect of that wine.
She guzzled most of one bottle, rejoined the race and splashed the last part over her head. Personal grooming be damned.
The race left the towpath and followed the track bed of a former railway, now a leafy lane leading eventually to the village of Monkton Combe. Maeve knew from her training runs what to expect — the nearest thing to a theme park, starting with mouldering evidence of an industrial past, the source of Bath’s wealth, remnants of railways, dried-up coal canals, blocks of Bath stone and a mill that over the years had processed fuller’s earth and flour and also served as a yard for sawing stone. All this was climaxed by the tunnel of death, the mile-long excavation underneath Combe Down. On a November day in 1929, locomotive 89, a heavily overloaded steam engine hauling thirty ten-ton wagons of coal, had been straining to make the 1:100 rise through the dark, unventilated tunnel. So slow was progress that the driver and his fireman were overcome by carbon monoxide fumes emitted from their own funnel. They collapsed in the cab. Driverless, still at a crawl but fatally out of control, the train chugged into daylight and on through another tunnel, the Devonshire, before picking up terrifying speed down the hillside, at least sixty miles an hour before it reached a set of points in the goods yard at Bath station and was derailed and overturned, crushing a goods inspector who was waiting to see the train in. The trucks concertinaed. Hot coals were flung into nearby homes. It was remarkable that only three men were killed.
This would be Maeve’s first time through the tunnel of death. In training, she had approached the entrance a number of times and avoided going in. The interior had been spruced up and given some lighting in recent years to become a cycleway, but it still felt spooky to anyone who knew the story. She would make sure she stayed close to the runner ahead.
12
While the five thousand were driving their protesting bodies along the roads and footpaths south of Bath, Diamond and young Gilbert enjoyed coffee and cake at the Holburne Museum and then took a gentle stroll to Great Pulteney Street. It was sensible to be posted somewhere near the finish, so they found a position fifty yards short of the big red gantry that stretched across the street. News of the leading runners was being relayed over the public address, but the two CID men didn’t pay much attention. For them this was a lazy Sunday, an agreeable way of earning overtime.
The finishing straight filled up and the marshals in their high-visibility jackets took control. Some of the crowd were getting updates by phone from the runners themselves. The sense of anticipation was rising.
A bigger buzz of excitement suddenly spread along the lines. An hour and twelve minutes was showing on the digital display on the gantry and shouts had been heard from the top of the street. Shortly after, a runner appeared. He had a clear lead.
“Told you, didn’t I?” Diamond said.
Harry Hobbs, the black guy Gilbert had been at school with, was about to finish first.
If Diamond expected to be congratulated, he was mistaken. Gilbert cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Up St. Mark’s!”
To whoops and screams of encouragement and near-delirium from the public address, Hobbs sprinted the final yards and breasted the tape in record time. “And what’s more,” the announcer added, voice breaking with emotion, “Harry is one of ours, a local lad, from Midsomer Norton.”
Some forty yards behind, the next two were in a sprint for second place. Both were black. Diamond wasn’t getting caught out again. He didn’t venture an opinion on their countries of origin. “Daniel Wanjiru and Martin Maiyoro, both of Kenya,” came the announcement.
More elite runners appeared soon after, with quite long gaps between small groups going at a pace Diamond couldn’t have kept up with for more than a few yards, even in his rugby-playing days. After crossing the line, they were wrapped in tinfoil blankets and escorted away by volunteers.
Paul Gilbert’s attention was on his old school chum, being photographed with the Kenyans. “Remember why we’re here,” Diamond said, feeling the need to reassert himself. “Keep an eye on the crowd. It only takes one idiot to spoil the day for everyone.”
Three more minutes and at least five hundred runners passed before it happened. A ripple of amusement animated the crowd. The two officers leaned in for a better view.