The Lifers' Club Read online

  He knew he’d have to tread carefully with Paul. They weren’t co-directors anymore, and Paul would expect to be treated with all the respect that the head of a consultancy company required. He’d also have to find the right time to talk to him about Ali. Paul wouldn’t be at all enthusiastic to know that a convicted murderer – however wrongfully accused he might be – was associated with one of his previous sites. It might reflect badly on the PFC ‘brand’. But if Alan played it right, after a few nights down the pub with Paul, reminiscing about the good old days, who knows? The fact was, they’d worked split shifts at Flax Hole, Paul had suggested it halfway through the dig. So, Paul was essential to the investigation. He might just hold the missing piece of the puzzle. But he didn’t know it.

  * * *

  Alan had spent every spare minute of the second and third weeks of January preparing material for his Blackfen A-level course. He knew the Guthlic’s dig wouldn’t allow him much time for anything else towards the end of the month, or in February, and he couldn’t afford to have things go wrong. He had also become aware that, despite the Governor’s personal support, some of the professional teachers in the Education Service resented an outsider breaking into their world and were keen to see him mess everything up. Then he’d be out like a shot. Despite his ulterior motive, Alan cared about his work. Now that he’d committed to teaching the course it mattered to him that he got it right. That the men who had signed up actually learnt something worthwhile.

  And as far as the ulterior motive went… Alan tried not to read too much into Ali’s parting words ‘All that digging around in the past. Hard to see the point of it now.’ It could have been Ali’s way of taking control of the situation. It could even have been a joke. One thing Alan was sure of, he wasn’t going to give up on Ali. He’d drag him out of his cell and frogmarch him into the classroom himself, if he had to.

  While he’d worked on his course notes at home in Tubney, he had time to reflect. Outside the winter was running its usual post-Christmas course. The cold, foggy windless ‘dog days’ that so often followed Christmas had given way to more active Atlantic weather, with strong winds, rain and increasingly snow, which blew off the huge open fields and accumulated in the roadside dykes.

  Every morning local farmers towed cars out of the now hidden dykes, driven there by young lads from Peterborough, Spalding and Boston, more used to pavements and street lights than bleak open country. The going rate for removal of a boy racer’s car from a dyke was £150 – and nothing said to the local Law. Most were happy to pay. Earlier that morning he’d taken the Land Rover to the village shop to buy milk and on his way back had come across two of the Campling boys and their 200-horsepower John Deere tractor. They were struggling to fix chains to a low-slung VW Golf, with drug dealer style darkened windows, which had been driven into the Old Fendyke Drain some time the night before. Alan stopped and gave them a hand. Once attached, the tractor’s huge engine barely revved above tick-over, as it pulled the car back onto the road. As it came out, Alan chatted to its anxious owner, who was standing by, shivering in the north-easterly wind. He was pathetically grateful. He looked about thirteen. Alan wanted to put an arm around his shoulder: he was the typical posey ‘young yob’: ‘all mouth and trousers’, as his mother would have said. It was so easy to jump to judgement. Yet this crumpled youngster, far from his friends and starting to feel the chill winds of winter, was showing himself human. Funny, Alan thought, as he passed him an old wax jacket, you look like a dickhead, but you’re not so bad. It was so easy to judge by appearances, but the truth always took time and effort to reveal. And you always knew it when you’d found it.

  Back home Alan sat down in his one comfy chair. To hell with the computer. He’d worked too late the night before and was fed up with the bloody screen. He sipped his tea and leant back, looking up at the ceiling. Even the indoor spiders seemed to have gone to ground. Outside it was absolutely silent. Snow was starting to fall and the wind had dropped. Again, his thoughts returned to Flax Hole.

  Slowly the realisation was dawning on him that he was involved with more than a mere puzzle. It was beyond that: something to do with so-called basic values, Right and Wrong. Long ago Alan had abandoned faith, just as his father had done in the 1960s, when he too was a younger man. Alan was profoundly suspicious of people who proclaimed Morality. He was a secularist and he didn’t support ideas like Good and Evil. They were too simple. Real life was far more complex. Although it had recently become unfashionable to be a relativist, he fervently believed that absolute good and absolute evil didn’t exist; instead there were shades of good, of evil, of right and of wrong. And some instinct told him that the wrong, that the evil in this case was far darker and more absolute, than anything he had yet experienced in his own life.

  He recognised too that the case would take a long time to sort out. He was aware he was an impatient man, and he’d have to be very disciplined with himself, if he were ever to get to the bottom of it all. He also had to acknowledge that he too had feelings of guilt. Partly about not supporting Ali and encouraging him to take a different path than the one that his family had dictated to him. But also, as his nightmare demonstrated, he also had a deep sense of responsibility for whatever had happened to Sofia. There were aspects of this case that worried him profoundly: they had to do with some fundamental attitudes to people from other cultures. He’d studied anthropology and he knew it wasn’t a matter of simple racism; it was far more subtle and pervasive than that. And it also ran very deep. In fact he wasn’t certain whether he was entirely unaffected himself. And that made it even more troubling.

  The persistent ringing of the phone intruded into his thoughts. Alan pushed himself out of his chair and stumbled back into the hallway.

  ‘Alan?’

  It was the unmistakable brisk voice of Richard Lane.

  ‘Richard, I meant to call…’

  ‘I’ve just been speaking to Norman Grant. He told me about your visit to Blackfen. I don’t know what you’re hoping to achieve.’

  ‘Well, a bit of academic stimulus never hurt anyone.’

  ‘Please, Alan, don’t insult my intelligence.’

  There was a tense silence. Alan forced himself to break it.

  ‘If I can talk to Ali, gain his trust over a period of time…’

  ‘Then you think he’ll retract his statement?’

  Lane was not a man prone to sarcasm. Alan could hear an undercurrent of tiredness, world-weariness, in his voice.

  ‘Richard, I’m not trying to undermine you or your colleagues. But I need to know the truth. You can understand that, can’t you?’

  Alan detected a long sigh down the phone.

  ‘I accept that there’s a possibility – a slim one – that Ali Kabul is innocent. However, to attempt to extract the truth from a convicted felon who has already made a full confession strikes me as astoundingly naïve.’

  ‘It probably is. But I have to try.’

  Another pause. Alan knew Lane would be weighing up the pros and cons. The risk and reward.

  ‘Are you going to tell Grant?’ Alan asked cautiously.

  ‘No. At least, not yet.’

  Alan breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  ‘On one condition. Anything that Ali says, anything at all that’s remotely suspicious, you report back directly to me.’

  ‘Fine. Whatever you say.’

  ‘I mean it, Alan. If I find out that you’re withholding even the smallest detail I won’t hesitate to blow the whistle.’

  ‘I understand. Thanks, Richard. I do appreciate it.’

  Then Alan realised he was talking into static noise. Richard Lane had hung up on him. Again.

  Eight

  It was Friday morning, an hour before dawn, and the Fens were at their most forbidding. Earlier in the night there had been a sharp frost, but sometime in the small hours a sea mist had rolled in from o
ff the Wash and every twig, leaf and blade of grass was now covered in thick grey hoar frost. Alan was scraping it off the Land Rover’s windscreen. The previous evening he had lifted the battery indoors and put it on trickle charge overnight, to make sure there were no starter problems now. To his relief, it fired first time. He listened to the engine running smoothly. Good old Brutus, he thought. He never lets me down when I need him.

  Alan was steering Brutus rather gingerly across the frozen Fens in the area known as South Holland. He could feel through the wheel that his knobbly tyres, while providing excellent traction in snow and on wet grass, were almost useless on black ice. He was now driving through huge, flat, treeless fields which were as remote as any in Fenland. From fourteen or fifteen miles away he could just see the soaring tower of St Botolph’s Church in Boston, known far and wide as the Stump. It had always amazed him that the tallest parish church tower in England had actually been built when the Black Death was laying waste the town’s population. Religious people still regard it as a symbol of man’s determination to conquer mortality. To Alan it was a Fenman’s finger: a defiant, symbolic gesture to the Almighty for inflicting such a loathsome scourge on humanity.

  The Stump was clearly visible to the south-east, when Alan turned off the single track road into the short drive leading up to Paul Flynn’s base at Priory Farm. Like many older Fen farms, the house and outlying sheds and barns were surrounded by trees, partly to shield them from the bitter north-easterly winds, but also to give the family a little privacy. Then in 1942, when Lincolnshire – ‘Bomber County’ – became in effect a vast aircraft carrier for thousands of US and RAF heavy bombers, they’d built an airfield on the edge of the farm. One huge black hangar still survived, standing behind its concrete apron. As it did during the war, it dominated Priory Farm, but silently now, a dark and slightly sinister presence.

  It had been a cold winter, but nothing could stop the aconites and snowdrops starting to poke through the thin grass around the tree trunks. In a couple of weeks’ time, Alan thought as he coaxed Brutus over the frozen surface, this will be a superb display. Paul Flynn’s farmhouse stood there in solitary splendour, defying the cold, unlit and alone. The upstairs curtains were still drawn close.

  Alan knew that Paul had the reputation of a loner, a bit of an oddball. Alan had some sympathy for him and, even in the Flax Hole days, never joined in the gossip about Paul’s lack of girlfriends – boyfriends even – and no discernible social life. Alan also enjoyed his own company. It didn’t make him a freak.

  Priory Farm made an ideal base for an archaeological business. Its remoteness gave security. The name was good too – and well merited, as the farm had been built close by the site of a long-abandoned medieval monastery, many of whose standing buildings had been bulldozed, when RAF engineers built the airfield’s perimeter runway. There were other practical advantages to the place. Council Tax was very low; there were no parking problems and there was also plenty of space, where some of the dirtier jobs, such as processing bulk soil samples, could be done without blocking the drains. The old farm buildings, too, were sturdy. They’d been built in the 1860s, when farming was very prosperous. They had a cosy feel about them, a permanence that was so lacking in their modern steel-and-concrete equivalents. In the pre-dawn gloom, Alan could just about make out their shape, emerging from the darkness. They felt huge and strangely menacing.

  He pulled over. He didn’t want to start this new and crucially important phase of the project without thinking things through. It hadn’t occurred to him that maybe Paul’s friendliness had all been a front: that maybe he wanted Alan to work at Priory Farm – where he could keep him under observation. Or was that being paranoid? Why on earth should Paul be suspicious of him? After all they knew each other from years ago. But then… Paul had changed: he was far more controlling than at Flax Hole. He was also more corporate and Alan could see that PFC was now the centre of his life. He would never allow anything, or anyone, to threaten it. And the much-vaunted Harriet: what about her? Was she on Paul’s side too? He turned the noisy engine off and leaned as far back in the stiff bench seat as he could. He shut his eyes and drank in the faint sounds of dawn: a wren’s warning cluck, a rabbit somewhere in the leaf litter. Slowly his feelings of paranoia began to ebb away, but not completely: he had heeded their warnings. I will have to watch my step – and my back – he thought, as he restarted the engine.

  * * *

  Slowly Brutus came to a halt in the PFC car park, which held just one car. Alan parked next to it. He glanced down at his phone: it was seven thirty. He got out, slammed and locked the two front doors and tied the rear canvas flap down securely. It had worked loose somewhere out in Holland Fen.

  The Archaeology Centre at Priory Farm had once been the feed store of the Victorian farm, and had been converted to offices, in 2003. Unlike any of the others, this office boasted a large bow window, which looked across to the few ruined walls of the Priory that had escaped the wartime bulldozers. Beyond the stumps of the medieval walls was a large concrete apron, where Lancaster bombers had once assembled before setting out for Germany. And out there, behind the apron, the massive black hangar was just starting to emerge from the night.

  Alan walked across the apron to an old wartime single-storey building that had been converted into a canteen for staff working in the hangar. These days, the hangar was the home of Paul Flynn’s two successful commercial enterprises, Reference Collections Ltd, and The Museum Shop. Both operations often had to work around the clock, especially if there were large orders to complete, and Alan knew there was always a good chance of a coffee in the canteen.

  And he was right. On the far side of the room were two young Asian men reading copies of the Sun. He assumed it was their white van that was parked by the main hangar entrance, being loaded-up. He muttered ‘Morning’ to the men who stood up, ready to take their empty mugs back to the counter.

  ‘No need to stand, when I enter,’ he couldn’t help saying.

  ‘That’s alright, Your Reverence,’ the older man quipped back, without even a hint of an accent.

  Alan took his mug across to a table by a window where he could keep an eye on the Archaeology Centre. As soon as anyone arrived, he’d head over there.

  He had just sat down and was looking through his rucksack for the book about St Guthlic, when a quiet female voice behind him spoke.

  ‘Do forgive me, but are you Alan Cadbury?’

  Alan looked up.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘I spotted your Land Rover. Don’t they call it Tacitus, or…?’

  ‘It’s Brutus, actually.’ He paused. Somehow that name now sounded a bit childish.

  She smiled broadly.

  ‘And I’m Harriet. Harriet Webb.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Paul tells me we’re going to be working together.’

  Alan got up to get her a cup of tea. As he waited while the machine spluttered and gurgled, he looked back at his visitor who was now busy with an iPad. He was surprised she could get a signal out here. His phone was only working intermittently.

  Alan liked to look at people from behind. When you were face-to-face, eyes – yours and theirs – dominated everything. From the side, or from behind, you had time to observe body language, which could be just as, or no more, informative. Even when she was sitting down Alan could see she held herself very erect. Her posture was superb: shoulders back and relaxed, head held high, even when she was looking at her blessed iPad. She was much taller than average, slim and very elegant.

  Most of Alan’s archaeological friends had been brought up within the commercial sector. Like him, they had managed to get a university degree or diploma, but had then devoted their lives to digging; to travelling around following the work. But Harriet wasn’t like any of these ‘circuit’ diggers. She’d never worked on the circuit, but had done very well at university. She knew what
she was doing, and where she was heading. And she didn’t even dress like a circuit digger. Unlike most of his female colleagues, she preferred a skirt to jeans, but even though she had excellent legs – and they were showing to particular advantage from where he was standing – she chose to wear her skirt just below the knees. Her heels were raised, rather than high.

  He hadn’t had much time to look at her when she arrived, but her face had struck him as attractive, if not actually beautiful. She had high cheek bones and full lips, painted a striking maroon colour. But that seemed to be all the make-up she wore. Her hair was long and dark, slightly reddish brown. He guessed her age at around thirty-five, or maybe a shade older. He was also fairly certain she was wearing contact lenses.

  He brought her tea, and a small packet of digestive biscuits, over on a tin tray and sat down opposite her. Oddly, considering her fearsome reputation and his earlier suspicions, there was something about Harriet that made him feel relaxed, even safe. But he knew he must keep his guard up.

  He looked at her eyes more closely.

  ‘Yes,’ she laughed, ‘I am wearing contact lenses. Glasses get in the way on site, especially when I’m doing close work.’

  Bloody hell, Alan thought, was I being that obvious? Better watch myself in future. Best to change the subject.

  ‘So how long have you been working for Paul, Harriet?’