The next day, Friday, got off to a bad start. Alan had a thick head – beer at the Feathers and whisky at home. Then he slept fitfully. He had dreamt he was back at Flax Hole. Fractured images came back to him as he lay in bed. Sofia was there. A man – he didn’t see his face – was dragging her by the arm, throwing her into a trench, forcing her face down into the wet spoil heap and holding her there. Alan had been running through the mud, trying to reach her, but each step he took his boots were held tighter and tighter by the sticky wet clay, which sucked him down. And down. He was drawn further and further into the cloying earth.
He turned on his mobile and looked at the time: 08.06. Through the torn curtains he could see it was light, but gloomy outside. He didn’t feel rested, but he knew he was awake and had things to do. Like finding work. He drank a lot of water and ran a bath. He lay in the warm water, and scrubbed himself clean, but that waking nightmare remained in the back of his mind. Then he lay back; tried to wallow. He wanted to, he had to think. That panicky dream meant something, he was sure of it. Of course she couldn’t be buried at Flax Hole, that was ridiculous. But there was another memory, maybe a clue, bubbling to the surface of his subconscious, but still just out of reach. Then his phone rang. It was the Wake Up alarm: 08.15. He turned on the radio: news of a cyclone somewhere in the Pacific. He tried to regain his thoughts, while a voice said exciting things about tennis.
Then suddenly it came to him. The next step was so bloody obvious. Why didn’t he think of it before? He jumped out of the tepid water, towelled himself a bit dry and hurried into the hallway.
He picked up an old notebook by the phone and dialled a number. It rang once, then a synthesised transatlantic voice offered him three options: press one for The Museum Shop; press two for Reference Collections; or press three for PF Consulting. He pressed three and a human being answered.
‘Can I speak to Paul Flynn, please?’
‘Who can I say is calling?’
‘Alan Cadbury.’
A Chopin Nocturne cut in, played on what sounded like an amplified lute. Alan waited, almost holding his breath.
Flax Hole had been the first step on Dr Paul Flynn’s fast track to fortune and notoriety. Paul’s busy schedule meant that they had lost touch over the years, and they moved in very different circles now. Paul the businessman, always securing contracts with the big players of industrial development. Alan, the digger, hands-on in the trenches. Sure, Alan had thought him a pompous prick at times, but that was just Paul’s social manner. He liked to be seen to be in charge and at the top of the pile. But Paul was also a perfectionist. He cared deeply about his research and the integrity of his work. That was something he and Alan had in common. It might just be enough.
Suddenly the music cut out.
It was Paul’s voice.
‘Alan, how very good to hear from you.’
He sounded genuinely pleased.
‘I’m sorry, Paul, I’ve been shamefully out of touch, but I didn’t want to interrupt your meteoric rise to pre-eminence.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake…’ he said modestly.
But Alan could tell he was lapping it up. He always was a sucker for flattery. Time for some more.
‘No, but seriously. I think it’s time that archaeologists made more of an impression out there in the big wide world, and your enterprises have certainly done that.’
‘Well, we’ve tried to offer value and integrity. That’s the key.’
‘Well, it’s certainly worked. And nobody could possibly say you’d sold out to commercial interests, because you haven’t. And look at all the employment you’re offering to archaeological graduates.’
To Alan’s surprise Paul was chuckling down the phone. He had a reputation for many distinctive qualities, but a sense of humour wasn’t one of them.
‘If I didn’t know you better, Alan, I would think you were trying to butter me up.’
‘I suppose I am. It’s all a bit embarrassing really…’
‘You need a job?’
To Alan’s surprise, there was no underlying smugness in Paul’s tone. In fact, if anything, he sounded sympathetic.
‘Got it in one.’
‘How about the first of February? With a recce sometime next week?’
Alan tried not to sound like he was biting Paul’s hand off. Traces of cool must be retained in such moments.
‘Yes, I can do that… I think…’
He paused and noisily turned a few pages of his address book. ‘Yes… I can do that … yes, for sure. Where is it?’
‘St Guthlic’s Church at Scoby. The Parish Council want to install toilets. It’s just outside…’
Alan broke in.
‘Boston. Yes, I know it. A good early name and a good early church. But they can’t possibly be on the mains drains out there, so presumably there’ll have to be a cesspit too?’
‘You’re right. We’ve already done geophys along the pipe’s length and it looks like you’ll be dealing with around twenty stiffs.’
And some of them, Alan thought, are bound to be Saxon, because Guthlic was a local Saxon saint who’d lost an ear fighting off Viking raiders. In the Middle Ages that ear was permanently displayed at Crowland, Thorney and Lincoln, simultaneously. Alan loved the Dark Ages. The fifth to seventh centuries AD were a time when south and east England almost returned to prehistory, after the short Roman interlude. This was also when England re-invented itself and established its modern identity. One day he wanted to write a book about it, and a dig at St Guthlic’s would give him superb material. He didn’t find it hard to be enthusiastic.
‘Paul, that sounds absolutely fantastic! Count me in. When should I come over?’
‘I’m free on Friday morning. Say ten-ish. You could meet Harriet…’
‘Do you mean Harriet Webb? As in, the brain with the bones?’
Alan knew her by reputation. Everyone did, but she was also notoriously unforgiving. She didn’t suffer fools gladly.
‘That’s right, you’ll be co-directing with her.’
And with that he rang off.
Alan leant back against the wall. He almost felt out of breath. It had all happened so fast. And so easily. He had a job working with one of the most highly-regarded bones specialists in the UK. And he would be focusing on a period of history he was passionate about. Alan was confident of his own credibility and he suspected that Webb’s detractors were the sort of folk who resented high achievers. And she was certainly one of them, with a string of substantial papers to her name – many in prestigious national journals. In her case, the term ‘up and coming’ was spot on. Yet why did she choose to work for a consultancy hidden away in the depths of the Fens, when she could have walked into any of the best universities in the land? Money, Alan supposed. Paul certainly had a lot of it at his disposal – and that seemed to be the biggest motivator for most people, in the end.
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.