Alan stood alone in the middle of the hangar. He bit into a Mars Bar he’d bought from a machine at the police station. Then he started to shiver as the glucose hit his empty stomach. He was about to turn the main arc light on, but then thought better of it. He had no wish to alert the Lincolnshire Police patrol, when next they decided to call in. Briefly he contemplated phoning Lane and his men in Leicester, but immediately thought better of that, too. Their presence would also cramp his style. No, he thought, it’s much better I sort everything out myself, here and now.
He returned to the General Office and opened the main key cupboard. He knew the combination of this secure metal box which held keys to all the Portakabin units in the hangar. He removed the keys in threes, then visited each of the places they secured. After forty-five minutes he had found nothing.
As he walked out of the last Portakabin his heart sank: Paul was nowhere to be seen. That meant he could be in only one place – a place Alan would have done anything not to revisit.
Back in the General Office he opened the key cupboard and saw immediately that the hook labelled ‘BCA’ was empty. Everyone working at Priory Farm knew that this was potentially the most hazardous facility in the entire complex and it was a sacking offence to leave the door unlocked. That empty hook was an ominous sign.
Anxiously, Alan hurried across to the other side of the hangar. From a distance he could see the door to the BCA was unlocked, and the padlock was lying on the floor, just outside it. Realising that this was a potential crime scene, Alan ran back to the General Office and put on a clean pair of lab overalls, plus new white wellies and long rubber gloves. He was taking no chances.
Gingerly he pushed open the door and turned on the light.
Something moved on the floor a few feet to his right. It was a rat – which he had interrupted while feeding. He walked across and looked down. Suddenly he felt violently sick and just made it to one of the many bench sinks around the edge of the room. The bloated-looking rat had been chewing on a human ear.
Wiping his mouth on folds of blue absorbent lab paper, which he took from a large roll on the wall, he walked over to the medium-sized maggot tank. It was the only one with an active population of maggots, as all the others had been cleaned out. Had he not been sick already, what now met his eyes would have made the strongest man vomit.
Lolling half-in, and half-out, of the tank was Paul. His shoes had been removed and lay nearby on the floor, but a slight movement beneath his shirt and trousers gave a ghastly impression of life. Alan could see that this was actually caused by a heaving mass of maggots beneath his clothes.
There were maggots everywhere: around and within his gaping throat and windpipe. Most of the flesh on his face and gums had gone and the teeth in his lipless mouth gleamed bright white in the fluorescent laboratory light. Trying to ignore the horror of the scene before him, Alan attempted to work out what must have happened.
Although he couldn’t tell for certain, because so much flesh had been removed, he supposed that Paul had been either drugged or given a knockout blow to the head. His body had then been dumped in the maggot tank – presumably in the belief that all evidence for precisely how he was killed would soon be removed. A case could even be made that he had committed suicide.
But then something truly disgusting must have happened. The blow or the drugs wore off, and he temporarily regained some measure of consciousness – enough to realise where he was and what was happening to him. He was being eaten alive. Somehow he managed to sit upright and in the process short-circuited the wires running around the rim of the tank. This allowed thousands of maggots to escape and the rat to get in and sever his left ear. On the plus side, Alan thought, it also slowed down the process of defleshing, probably by hours.
Many years ago, Alan had been on holiday with his parents on a hill farm in Wales. It had been a hot summer and one day he’d found a lamb with severe fly strike lying in a hedge. The shepherd was nearby and Alan called him over, much upset. The old man took one look and killed the animal with a blow to the head, to put it out of its misery. Alan asked why he didn’t take it back to the farm and kill off the maggots? The shepherd then explained that as they ate through the living flesh, maggots secreted toxins that built up and would eventually kill the lamb, whatever else happened. But it would take a long time. So a rapid death was infinitely kinder.
So presumably, Alan thought as he looked down on the corpse, it was the accumulation of toxins that had prevented Paul from getting the strength to climb out of the tank. And eventually of course, they, the toxins, had killed him.
Alan realised it was essential to stop the maggots before they consumed all the forensic evidence. So, steeling himself, he dragged the body over to a large chest freezer and bundled it in, before carefully closing the lid. He turned round and looked behind him. On the floor was a writhing, living rope of maggots that had dropped from the corpse, as Alan had dragged it across to the freezer. Unable to stop himself he trampled his way slowly through the wriggling mass, killing thousands of them, while coating his shoes with their – with Paul’s – blood. Somehow that made him feel better. At least he’d done something.
He then returned to the tank. He had no wish to, but he needed to take another look, now that Paul’s body had gone. Lying at the bottom, in a few inches of the stinking slimy ‘soup’, formed by the acids of putrefaction, were the miniature bones and dark brown wool of what appeared to be a Soay lamb. Gently his gloved fingers lifted it out of the way.
Beneath, and lying directly on the bottom of the tank, he could see a group of tarsals and metatarsals, the small and very characteristic bones of the human foot. As if to remove any doubt in his mind, the toenails, still painted a glossy dark pink, lay beside them, in a little pool of yellow jelly, like so many bright fallen petals off a grisly flower.