Sydney Gardens

Sydney Gardens is at once a cherished historic landscape and a working part of the canal route through Bath. Its bridges, tunnels, and towpaths shape the journeys of Shirley-Ann Miller and John Wigfull, while the garden’s name helps steer the police towards a mistaken interpretation of a criminal riddle. The landscape’s beauty and history persist alongside that misdirection—and, ultimately, a hanging discovered on one of its bridges.

A fashionable Georgian and Victorian park

Sydney Gardens was once a fashionable destination where visitors paid an entrance fee to see and be seen. Its attractions included a bandstand, grottoes, a labyrinth, and regular firework displays. The park’s popularity left its mark on the engineering that later crossed it: when canal builders and railway engineers sought routes through the area, elaborate measures were required to disguise the construction. Tunnels, balustrades, and wrought-iron bridges consequently became part of the landscape, though modern visitors often overlook them.

The garden’s earlier life is recalled in accounts of brass bands, a bowling green, a maze, grottoes, and fireworks. Its paths had been walked by Jane Austen, Emma Hamilton, and Lord Macaulay, as well as by Napoleon III and Haile Selassie. The historical distinction between the park as a fashionable place to be seen and its quieter later use is especially marked in winter, when a person can walk for stretches without meeting anyone.

Paths, canal, and changing views

The canal gives Sydney Gardens more than one kind of passage. Along its route, tunnels and iron bridges frame views of the water; near the garden, the towpath passes beneath Cleveland House and Sydney Road before entering the park. A white-painted wrought-iron bridge, seen through the arch of a tunnel, is a memorable landmark on this stretch. The canal’s curves and the glimpses beneath its bridges make the route visually distinctive, even when the structures that preserve the park’s older character go unnoticed by visitors.

For Shirley-Ann Miller, the gardens and towpath offer a break from a disappointing morning distributing leaflets for a bus tour. After receiving little response and a couple of vulgar suggestions, she takes a slow walk in rare autumn sunshine, heading towards Top Lock along the canal’s final spectacular stretch before it joins the Avon. A wooded section opens onto an escarpment above much of the city, with the church spires rising beyond it; the view usually lifts her spirits. She intends to reach the lockkeeper’s cottage, a small Gothic building restored by the Canal Trust that she values as a personal discovery, though it is less grand than the sights she describes on the tour.

Her route also crosses Sydney Wharf Bridge, where George Street passes over the canal and the towpath changes sides. She climbs the cobbled slope, crosses the bridge, and descends by the Mercedes-Benz showroom, unable to see the path until she reaches it. There she encounters Jessica Shaw walking towards her with a man. The sudden meeting turns an ordinary walk into a moment of recognition: Shirley-Ann blushes when she sees Jessica, whom she knows to be the murderer.

The riddle and the museum stakeout

Sydney Gardens becomes a point of interpretation as well as a physical place when the police consider the third riddle’s direction to discover the way to Sydney from Sid. Peter Diamond lists Sydney Place, Sydney Road, Sydney Gardens, Sydney Buildings, and Sydney Wharf as possible Bath references; John Wigfull adds Sydney Mews. The police establish that no Bloodhounds member lives in any of those streets, but Sydney Gardens presents another tempting connection: the Holburne Museum is there.

The museum’s presence turns the place-name into a false lead. Wigfull worries that the riddle signals another theft, and the police arrange a watch at the Holburne. Later, the line about discovering the way to Sydney is treated as the reason to post six officers in the gardens. The response is careful and extensive, but it follows the wrong interpretation: the police look for a threat to the museum rather than recognizing that the riddle points towards a bridge and a hanging.

A night watch and a morning discovery

Around midnight, Wigfull parks opposite the Bath Spa Hotel and walks through Sydney Gardens to the Holburne Museum, choosing not to park closer on Sydney Road lest he reveal his presence. He enters silently through a side door. The building, an altered former hotel with a classical façade, is difficult to secure: its front opens towards Great Pulteney Street, while drainpipes and footholds at the rear could assist an intruder. Its modern alarm and surrounding security lights offer protection, but Wigfull also relies on the six policemen posted inside and on the roof. He contacts them by radio and visits each of them every half-hour to make sure they remain alert.

Nothing suspicious happens by half past six. Relieved that the museum is intact but disappointed that the suspected thief has not appeared, Wigfull leaves instructions for the vigil to continue until the relief team arrives at eight. He crosses the frosted lawns on his way back through the gardens, enjoying the quiet of a place he has to himself. The calm proves misleading: although he encounters a dog, he is so preoccupied as he walks on that he fails to notice something more sinister nearby.

At about twenty to seven, a jogger following his regular towpath route sees an object beneath the first wrought-iron bridge through the tunnel. He cannot identify it while running, so he climbs to Sydney Road, enters the gardens, crosses the bridge, and returns to the towpath by a small gate. From closer up he sees a body hanging from the bridge. By eight, police, park officials, a doctor, and ambulance staff have cordoned off the area. They photograph the scene before cutting the body down and lowering it into an inflatable dinghy. The dead man’s broken neck indicates a considerable drop and, in the surgeon’s view, an efficient hanging rather than the more typical, slower death of a suicide victim.

The place-name’s double meaning

The body’s pockets contain a five-pound note, loose change, keys on a ring, and a padlock. A constable recognizes the padlock as the same make as the German one associated with the locked-room case being investigated by the murder squad, connecting the discovery at the gardens to the wider investigation. Peter Diamond identifies the dead man at the Royal United Hospital as Rupert Darby; the rope remains around his neck, though it has been cut higher up.

Diamond later explains that the riddle had predicted the hanging. Its reference to ending suspense describes both the suspense of the investigation and the act of cutting down a body that had been suspended from the bridge. The instruction to find the way to Sydney had led the police to the gardens, but they had chosen the museum instead of the bridge as the significant destination. Sydney Gardens thus binds together an attractive public landscape, a misread clue, and the discovery the police might have anticipated. The route that first promises a quiet walk or a guarded museum becomes the site where the riddle’s darker meaning is made visible.