Friday had been a good day at Impingham and the team arrived back at Priory Farm in high spirits. Everyone was ready for the weekend. Steve’s replacement, Jake Williamson, asked Alan if he’d join them for a quick pint before heading home. Sadly Alan had to decline. He told Jake that he was planning to get away early for the weekend. Jake and the diggers then headed noisily down the road towards the village pub. Alan walked over to the hangar. He tried to appear relaxed and slightly bored, as if doing the final chores of the week. But beneath the surface he was wired and ready to go. Much to do, so little time.
The Reference Collections office was the lower of the first two stacked Portakabins along the left-hand side of the hangar. Inside it, the admin staff were getting ready to leave for home. A middle-aged lady, Alan thought her name was Elsie, who was still sitting at her desk, handed him the keys to the Tool Store.
Alan asked about Paul’s whereabouts, as he didn’t want to bump into him in the next few minutes.
‘He’s in a meeting with important clients,’ Elsie replied, ‘it’s about the big York job.’
‘Odd time for a meeting?’
‘Yes, they phoned from Leicester this morning. Poor Paul didn’t seem too happy. Still, as I said, if you want to be a high-flyer you sometimes have to burn the candle at both ends.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Still in the board room, I think.’
Alan leant across to the window and glanced at the upstairs windows. The board room was in the top layer of the two Portakabins. He could just see the outline of people sitting around a table. Even with one of the hangar’s main sliding doors open, it was gloomy inside the vast interior. They already had the lights on.
‘When’s it ending?’ He asked.
‘Late, apparently. Then they’re going back to Leicester for an architect’s meeting first thing tomorrow. It’ll probably last all morning.’
‘What, on Saturday? Everyone? Even Paul?’
Alan pretended this was news to him.
‘Why the surprise?’ Elsie replied. ‘That’s what happened last weekend too. It’s the way they do things these days. “Intensive brainstorming” they call it.’
‘Blimey,’ Alan replied, ‘glad I’m not doing it. By Friday night my brain’s too whacked to be stormed.’
She smiled.
‘Me too. But I wouldn’t worry, they’re all well paid. Anyhow, one of the chaps from Leicester told me not to hang around after I’d brought them tea. He said they’d all be having something a bit stronger later on, when their spirits started flagging.’
‘One of those meetings, then?’
‘A booze-up, d’you mean? No, they were serious, alright. They all had laptops with them. They meant business. Like you said, glad I’m not up there with them.’
Quietly Alan slipped out of the Portakabin, leaving Elsie busily preparing the tea tray for the meeting in the board room. He headed for the main hangar doors, one of which was rolled back, open. He walked around the edge of the hangar then stood briefly on the dark side of the closed door and looked back at the board room window. The angle was better here and yes, he could clearly see Paul and Abdul’s distinctive silhouettes, sitting next to each other,
Relieved to be out of the gloom of the hangar, and back in the warmth of the sunshine, Alan went round to the Tool Store and checked out a selection of spades, mattocks, shovels and forks, which he loaded into the back of his Fourtrak.
But he still had one more essential thing to do.
He returned to the Tool Store and locked the door behind him. But instead of selecting more tools, he walked across to a small door at the back of the store. This opened onto the narrow space between the stacked Reference Collections Portakabins and the north wall of the hangar. Very slowly he pushed on the door and looked out, taking care not to be seen. All was clear. High above his head, the lights in the board room provided some welcome illumination. He walked along the inside of the hangar, staying close to the base of the Portakabins, so as not to be seen, should anyone up there look down.
Halfway along the hangar wall was a side door into a place that Paul had named – rather pretentiously Alan thought – the Innovations Space. This was a fairly standard wartime extension to the hangar, used by RAF maintenance crews to strip down and run Merlin engines. It was a large space with insulated, double-thickness walls, plus fitted floor-to-ceiling racks and cupboards along two walls. Originally these had held engine parts and spares; they were heavily built, but were now used to store reference materials and packaging. The purpose of the small team working in the Innovations Space was to devise eye-catching products that would appeal to specialists and collectors alike. They were responsible directly to Paul. Theirs was development, rather than production work, which was done elsewhere.
Once in the Innovations Space, Alan turned on the light, knowing that the thick walls would reveal nothing on the outside. He jammed a short baulk of timber into the grab handles that the RAF had welded to the side door he had just come through. This shut it permanently. Then he took out a piece of paper from his pocket. It was the diagram that Grahame had drawn for him on that Saturday morning as they’d sat together at the kitchen table. He stared at the image on the page for a long time. Then he looked around. There was a large table in the centre of the room and a bench at the far end. To the left was a standard self-contained laboratory emergency shower, and directly opposite it, a fume cupboard. Beside the cupboard were two pressurised cylinders of carbon dioxide.
He took a package out of his pocket: a set of small, decorative birthday cake candles.
He walked past the table, over to the bench and gathered-up as many storage boxes as he could find. Next, he collapsed them, making a three-foot high stack of cardboard at the foot of the workbench, along the back wall. Then he lit two candles and made small puddles of soft wax: one on the table, the other just above the door of the corridor from the Main Office. Into each of these puddles he pressed an unlit candle. Finally, he moved the access stepladder across to the shelves above the workbench, and lashed it securely in place. He climbed the ladder to the top shelf and again lashed it in place. He was taking no chances. From the ladder, he pulled at the shelf firmly. It didn’t budge. It was good and strong. He also checked with his hand to make sure there was nothing sharp up there. But it was clean. Just cobwebs and dead flies.
There was one last thing he had to do. He left the Innovations Space and walked down the corridor into the General Office, where he let himself out into the main hangar, having first locked the door and put the key in his pocket. Next he made his way to the hangar’s north-east corner, where he knew there was a small door to the outside. On his first visit to Priory Farm, back in 2002, there’d been a toilet there – probably left over from the war, to judge from the crazed glaze of the War Department utility bowl. It was almost completely dark at the back of the hangar, but he could just make out it was still there.
The toilet was enclosed within a plywood cubicle, which he now clambered up. Once on top, he loosened a sheet of plywood with the blade of his pocketknife, and lowered it carefully to the ground. Then he climbed into the space where the cistern was housed. He knew this would have to be accessed by a trapdoor, which he removed and placed to one side. Then he lowered himself into the little compartment below, standing on the bowl. He looked down: it was dry and held two mouse skeletons. He remembered the water supply had been cut-off after a sharp frost in 2003. Strangely, the seat was still up.
A couple of dead, but very thorny bramble stems had penetrated through the external door. He snapped them off and pushed down hard on the handle. The latch was rusty and gave way easily. It didn’t take much effort to open it. Once outside, he pushed the door ajar and then made his way through the hawthorn scrub along the hangar’s east back wall, round to the concrete apron at the front.
As he climbed into the driver’s seat he saw his face in the Fourtrak’s mirror. He was thickly covered with dark grey dust and grime. He didn’t look like himself at all.