Alan had a restless few hours’ sleep, which ended in a nightmare in which the graveside collapsed and he crashed onto the skull, smashing it to pieces, while Harriet looked on in stern disapproval. Then, quite out of the blue, a fire engine, all bells and sirens at full blast, was hurtling towards them. At that his brain woke up. It was the phone. The bloody phone. Last night he’d been too tired to turn it off. He reached out and picked it up. His sleepy eyes wouldn’t focus on the screen.
‘Hello?’
‘Alan,’ the voice was half-familiar. ‘It’s Alan, here.’
Alan? For an instant his woolly brain thought he was going mad. Then sanity returned: it must be Dr Alan Scott, the soil micromorphologist in Cambridge.
‘I finished with the soil samples last night, but thought you wouldn’t welcome a call so late, as I know you’ve been quite busy these evenings.’
‘Yes, it’s been a bit frantic.’
‘And last night’s was good. We had it on in the lab. The students cheered when the skull appeared. And that Tricia has won over the blokes, big time. You’d better watch it, Alan, or she’ll up-stage you, unless you’re careful.’
‘I hope she does. I think she wants a career in TV, which is more than I do. But the samples?’
Small talk. He hated it.
‘Oh, yes, the samples. Well, for once I think we took them from the right place and the sequence doesn’t seem to have been disturbed too much by post-depositional effects.’
‘Ah, that’s good. So not a lot of drying out?’
‘No. So I think we’re deep enough down to be able to say some useful things.’
‘Like?’
Alan’s sleepy mind had now fully woken up. He wanted Dr Scott to get to the point.
‘There’s a clear cut-line in the lower part of the alluvium.’
For Alan, that was the big story. It confirmed what he had seen, but couldn’t prove in the trench.
‘Yes, we could see something very faintly, which lined up well with the edge of Grave 2. Is that what you spotted in thin-section?’
‘It is, I’m certain of that. And the other thing that’s very clear are the separate episodes of flooding, which form a series of quite distinct varves, about half a millimetre thick.’
This was more music to Alan’s ears. He’d learnt about varves when studying the history of archaeology at Leicester. They were first identified in Scandinavian glacial lake-beds in the 19th century.
‘I couldn’t spot any obvious standstill or weathering horizons,’ Dr Scott continued. ‘So I must assume the flooding was a regular annual event. And you say the pottery dates the start of alluviation to the later third century?’
‘That’s right. Sometime shortly before AD300.’
‘Well, in that case the grave-cut was made some fifteen centimetres, say three centuries of flooding episodes, later. I’d guess sometime between AD600 and 650 – certainly no later.’
‘And presumably flooding continued?’
‘Well, no. There’s a standstill horizon almost immediately after the cutting of the graves.’
‘Any idea how long that was?’
Dr Scott took a deep breath. ‘That’s difficult to say. Maybe two or three centuries? Then flooding recommenced, but worse than before. This time the varves are at least twice as thick.’
‘Does that sound to you like they’d introduced flood-control measures? Maybe a cemetery wall, or else they did something to improve local drainage?’
‘I’d go for the drainage,’ Dr Scott replied. ‘Walls tend to collapse, whereas drains were maintained.’
‘Yes,’ Alan was thinking aloud. ‘That certainly fits with the archaeological evidence. And we know the early monastic communities were keen to drain. It gave the brothers something useful to do.’
That wasn’t quite fair, but what the hell. Alan felt elated. That call was just what he had wanted to hear. It had given him the reliable, accurate dates that are so often lacking on early post-Roman sites. It had also allowed them to characterise and date the onset of flooding, which was somewhat later and initially slower than he had originally suspected. Then he thought back to Stan’s notebook and those buried horizons just off the edges of Fursey island. Yes, he thought. All of that was now starting to look a lot more credible. Stan had been on to something, there was no doubt about that – and it gave Alan grim satisfaction. But why conceal it? Common sense would suggest it would boost Fursey as a visitor attraction. Or were they worried that it might affect the way they farmed? And what about the impact on land prices?
* * *
Alan decided to walk to Fursey for the final day of the ‘live’, because of Candice’s ‘small wrap party’ in the catering tent afterwards, which he feared it wouldn’t be that small. He was picking his way through the trees around the edges of the park to avoid the visitors who were already queuing along the drive, and was thinking, as he did every day, about Stan. He thought back to his wake. Things had seemed so straightforward back then: black and white; goodies and baddies. He had been quietly confident that he’d soon get to the bottom of it all: the strange curse; the river deaths and the loss of his friend. But that was almost four months ago and, since then, even Lane hadn’t managed to unearth anything strange or unusual. And now the latest discoveries on the dig, together with the soil micromorph results, were strongly suggesting that prehistoric and ancient Fursey had been a very much more prosperous and populated place than anyone had hitherto supposed. He shook his head. He was in no doubt that his friend had started to glimpse this for himself. Stan would have been very excited, and he was like Alan: there was absolutely no chance that he would have killed himself once he’d found something important to chase. He wondered again about the notebook, and why Stan had hidden it so carefully. There was so much to think about.
Alan headed towards the fringes of the park and leant against a fallen tree trunk that had been dragged there many years ago. Its surface had been pecked away by generations of woodpeckers and boring insects. It felt soft – more like a chair than a log against his backside. It was also damp from the morning dew. Now what, he wondered, were the implications of these discoveries for the current generation of the Cripps family? First and foremost, they gave John and Candice solid reasons to be optimistic about the future: any heritage-sector asset based on such a rich and developing story must have a promising future, especially if the asset happened to lie so close to the tourist Mecca of Cambridge. But Alan also knew that Stan was discreet – cautious even. And he certainly wasn’t the sort of person who shot his mouth off or bragged about his discoveries. However, it would be quite another thing to mention them to a fellow professional. Maybe he even sought advice. Alan could readily imagine he might have mentioned something about his research off the island edge to his new confidant, Peter Flower, who might have told Candice (and for what it was worth, Alan was becoming increasingly suspicious that Flower had his greedy little eyes on her ‘assets’, too). Then maybe together they hatched up the plan to reintroduce Stan to drink, as a means of getting him to tell them more? It was a nice idea, but somehow it lacked conviction – and it may not have worked.
On the other hand, Alan’s earlier idea that it was all about Flower controlling Stan through the bottle, seemed to make even greater sense now. In fact, the more he thought about it, that bottle of 20-year-old Glen Hubris McTavish from Fisher College hidden in Stan’s ‘cupboard’ was the only firm, tangible new clue that Alan had so far been able to discover.
But there was another element to the case – and Alan was now 100 per cent convinced that it was indeed a ‘case’ in the police sense of the word – that had to be examined. For a moment he considered the curse myth. He smiled wryly, then pulled himself up short. These things shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Yes, he thought, they do get exaggerated and overblown, but they can also highlight fundamentally important themes and tensions. And why had water for so long been important to the Cripps family? In the past drainage had unlocked untold wealth and had given them a competitive edge that was hugely resented by their less successful neighbours. But today, especially in the southern Fens, the picture had changed. The big money now lay in development, not in farming. And personally, he was sad about that and what it might mean for the social health of rural communities, where pushy and oblivious incomers were increasingly being resented.
He altered his position against the log and felt the warmth of sunlight on his face. Then he opened his eyes. An idea had struck him: Sebastian and John may not have been the closest of friends, but they were brothers and it mattered to both of them that the estate regained some of its former glories. So had John, or indeed Candice, hinted to Sebastian that Stan had revealed rich and extensive Roman and Iron Age remains, buried beneath his fields in the fen around Fursey? Because if they had, Sebastian, who was a local councillor after all, would instantly have realised that these deposits would have constituted a permanent and profound planning blight to any ideas he might have had to sell or, more importantly, develop the land. Even assuming that the remains weren’t immediately given legal protection through scheduling, their excavation ahead of sale or any building work would have been cripplingly expensive.
Meanwhile, John would have been delighted at the new discoveries, as they would enhance Fursey – especially if they could be excavated in public. So there could have been very real tension between the two brothers – and indeed their wives, too. But tensions strong enough to cause a death? Well, why not? Livelihoods and reputations were at stake. Maybe even marriages too?
Then he had another idea. The wake hadn’t quite worked out the way he’d expected. The scene-in-the-library that he’d anticipated, had turned out to be less straightforward and very opaque. And why? Because he hadn’t pulled any strings; he had made no attempt to intervene and probe for information. He had just observed and he had discovered that the Cripps family were very good at thwarting observers. But now Candice had offered him another scene-in-the-library, only this time it would be a dinner, not a wake. And it would be his last chance. He had to do something active. Mere observation wasn’t enough. Intervention was required.