‘Bloody waste of time,’ he replied, ‘couldn’t find what I was looking for.’ His frustration was unfeigned, even if the explanation behind it was fiction. ‘I could have sworn there was a Saxon level there. Cut through by the later pits. But all the unglazed pottery I could see was Iron Age. Shell-gritted scored wares. No sandy stuff in sight.’
As ill-luck would have it, Steve’s assistant, Paula, was doing an MA in Saxon pottery, at Nottingham.
‘You were looking for parallels?’ she asked. Alan nodded, already regretting his little fable. Then she continued, ‘What, Early, Middle or Late?’
Alan had to improvise.
‘Middle, mostly. Ipswich-type. We found a few possible sherds around the graves beneath the tower at Guthlic’s…’
Alan paused to think. He should have kept his damn mouth shut. Out to the west he could see lightning. Good, he thought, it’ll give me an excuse to change the subject.
But he didn’t have time to say a word.
Alan was raising his glass to his lips. Suddenly everyone’s ears went deaf as the shockwave hit them. All the windows at the back of the pub blew in. It seemed to happen so slowly, as if a giant in the rear car park had huffed and puffed and blown the house down. Behind them, the curtains in a large bay window were lacerated by shards of flying glass, which scythed into the plaster of the wall. Scraps of fabric floated silently to the floor.
A long-haired white cat, quietly snoozing on a settle below the window, rose gracefully into the air, like a leaping dolphin, its back arched and already suffused with blood. There was an echoing, almost distant scream from the nearby kitchen and one of the chefs appeared to waltz through the swing door into the bar, his face covered with blood. As Alan watched, his graceful dance folded into collapse, as the poor man fell painfully to the floor, now at normal speed. He lay there, screaming in agony, blood welling out from between the fingers that were pressed tightly over the place where his eyes had once been.
Twenty-seven
After what seemed like several minutes, but was probably less than a second, their hearing returned. But now the sound was turned up loud. The blast of the explosion had left ears singing and senses numbed.
They sat frozen in time and space.
As if coming out of a trance, Alan rose to his feet. He had to stop that terrible screaming. His companions were still transfixed to their seats, as he stumbled behind the bar to fetch water and a clean dishcloth. The man’s lacerated face resembled more a plate of raw meat than a living being. As Alan bent down to him, the injured chef passed out. Alan made no attempt to revive him. He was better out of it. From of the corner of his eye he detected Steve’s figure, running towards the kitchen, his mobile phone held to his ear.
Alan dabbed the young chef’s face and was tempted to pull several shards of window glass from his forehead and cheeks but stopped when he found this started further bleeding. Best leave that to the experts, he thought. The manager, a trained first-aider, had somehow escaped the blast. He ran up to the felled chef and took over, thanking Alan for his efforts.
By now the eye of the storm hit them, head-on. The rain didn’t so much fall as flow out of the sky, accompanied by a swirling, eddying gale from the south and south-west. Alan stood in the doorway through which he had entered the pub less than half an hour ago, and looked back towards the chestnut trees. They were still there. But the Land Rover had gone. In its place was a twisted heap of smoking metal and two rear wheels. It looked like it had driven over a landmine. Alan remembered thinking that at least it had died a military death.
Two of the cars nearby had their bodywork bent and windows blown in. Steve was standing next to the shattered remains of the Land Rover. There were tears in his eyes. Alan had a sudden, wild thought: what about that nice girl, his assistant. Don’t say, she hadn’t got out? Maybe she’d stayed behind to text her boyfriend? Then he took hold of his racing brain and clearly recalled her sitting at their table the moment the explosion happened. All Steve could do was sob, ‘My Trimble, my Trimble.’ He was in deep shock, mourning his GPS total station. If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny, Alan thought. It’s strange how differently we all cope with extreme stress.
He ran back to the bar and found Paula sitting at the table, surrounded by shattered beer glasses. She was leaning forward, her face expressionless, but her arms were reaching around her, as if tidying up after an afternoon tea party. He watched as she gathered up crisps from the floor and the window seat, which were now splattered with drops of the white cat’s blood. She got up and picked a bloody crisp off the seat and to Alan’s astonishment ate it, her mouth open and lips parted. She ate another. Then another. The cat’s still warm blood stained her mouth and teeth. It was as if she hadn’t seen it. Alan felt his gorge rise, but he managed to retain his self-control and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. He looked into her eyes.
‘Anyone at home?’
There was no response. Gently, he shook her shoulders.
‘Paula, are you hurt?’ The mention of her name seemed to have an effect. She looked him in the face.
‘What… what…’ she was staring at him now, her eyes wide open and terrified. She gripped his arm with both hands. So hard it hurt. ‘What happened? WHAT HAPPENED?’ This was shouted, then screamed.
Alan was about to slap her face, but stopped when she fell forward in a dead faint. He rolled her limp body over into the recovery position and draped her with curtains instead of blankets. After a few minutes she started to come round. This time she knew where she was.
‘So what happened?’ she whispered in a tiny, tremulous voice.
Alan could only guess.
‘The Land Rover was struck by lightning and the gas tank exploded.’
‘And Steve, how’s Steve?’
As if in answer to her question, Steve re-entered the bar. Alan looked up at him anxiously, but the mask of shocked disbelief and grief had gone. He just looked tired. Shattered. Across the room a framed wall mirror had miraculously survived, protected behind a pillar. Alan glanced at it. His own face looked like Steve’s – as if they had both aged twenty years in as many seconds.
Paula was looking at blood on the back of her hand. She had just wiped her mouth and had gone pale. It was a young woman’s worst nightmare.
‘My face… my face… is it cut? Please tell me, Steve, is it cut?’
He put two arms around her and held her in a warm bear hug. No, you’re fine, your face is fine. You haven’t been scratched.’
‘Honest,’ she whispered, ‘not even scratched?’
‘No, not even scratched.’
‘Nowhere?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘But the blood?’
‘That was on the seat.’
‘But it’s in my mouth. I can taste it…’ She was looking aghast, her memory working overtime. ‘There was a cat there. Is that its blood? Is it? IS IT?’
Steve didn’t have time to reply before she lurched sideways, towards the fire, vomiting violently. In the process her knee came down on a thick, sharp shard of bottle glass and sliced through her jeans like a razor. It must have cut an artery. Soon her blood was pumping across the fireplace. Alan pulled her back and together with Steve they fashioned a tourniquet from a length of curtain. After a few seconds the flow stopped. It had worked. Thank God for that.
* * *
Although it felt more like two hours, it was in fact about twelve minutes after Steve’s 999 call, when they first heard the sound of sirens. An ambulance, escorted by a police car, was roaring towards them down the Melton Road. Alan ran out and guided the two paramedics round to the bar, where the injured young chef was starting to come round. Alan felt inside his white coat and found a slim wallet. He emptied its contents, looking for allergy warnings. There was nothing. Immediately they gave him an intravenous pain-killing injection.
The manager then came through. He could find no other serious casualties. So the young chef and Paula, her knee now properly bandaged, were carried out to the ambulance, which accelerated out of the car park, sirens and lights blazing.
It must have been about twenty minutes after the explosion, that Alan realised he hadn’t told anyone himself. He glanced down at his mobile. She should be home about now, he thought. He called Harriet.
‘You won’t believe it, Harry,’ he began, ‘but we’ve had the most amazing storm.’
The weather was not the way he would normally have started such a conversation, but his mind wasn’t yet working too well.
‘Yes, it must have been the one we’ve got now. It’s directly over Scoby. Very spectacular.’ She paused, while the storm raged overhead. ‘Actually it’s quite scary. Wish you were here, darling…’
Alan missed her last remark when the signal started to break up. His reply was meant to sound calm and factual, but it almost sent her into orbit:
‘I’ve never seen such lightning. The Land Rover got struck. The LPG tank blew-up. Took poor Steve’s GPS kit with it. There’s nothing left: just bits of chassis and four wheels…’
‘WHAT?’ Then immediately: ‘Alan, are you hurt?’
‘No. I’m OK. A bit shaken, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine.’
‘What about Steve? Is he OK?’
‘Yes, he’s fine. A bit shocked, too. So’s poor Paula. She also cut her knee badly on some glass and has been taken to A&E in Leicester. I think she’ll need stitches.’
‘What are you doing? Are you stranded?’
‘Yes, although we’ve got the PFC van. But the police won’t let us drive. They say we’re in shock. They’ll have it towed to Boston later, where we can collect it. Any chance of a lift home? Somehow I don’t fancy a ride in a police car.’
‘I’ll be with you in an hour.’
He knew that when she had to, Harriet could drive like a rocket.
Sixty minutes to kill. For a moment he thought about ordering a pint, but dropped the idea. So he wandered across to where Brutus’s remains were being inspected by two scene-of-crime officers wearing hooded white coveralls. Alan could see their van was parked nearby. One of them was taking measurements with a long tape beneath the chestnut trees. He jotted the distances down in a notebook. The grass between the tree and the Land Rover had been singed by the heat of the fire and all the leaves above the explosion were in tatters, hanging limply in the still air. It was the calm before the next onslaught.
Alan found he didn’t care anymore. Sod everything. The analgesics the paramedic had given him had made him drowsy. Light-headed. He started to drift off. Far away on the southern horizon, he could see the distinctive hammerhead cloud of another storm developing. As he watched the cumulus grow and develop, he began to realise he was feeling anxious. He glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes to go. Now he was fervently hoping that Harriet would reach them before it did. He couldn’t face having to live through a rerun. More lightning. More rain. Nothing would drive him back into that pub again. Nothing. He focused his gaze on his hands. They were shaking like a man with Parkinson’s. As he watched them twitch, he was almost convinced they belonged to someone else.
When Harriet drove into the car park, Alan was slipping deeper into shock. His teeth were chattering uncontrollably. He was sitting alongside a police paramedic with a silver casualty blanket draped around his shoulders. Later he recalled that, despite shaking limbs, his mind had remained strangely clear and detached. He remembered pulling his gaze away from his hands. He was looking on, while the paramedic and Harriet helped him into the car. Somebody pulled his seat belt across. He heard the snick as it fastened; then the door was shut and locked. It felt cool and close inside. Claustrophobic. He pushed the button and the window wound down. That was better. Much better.
For a few moments he looked at people moving around in the car park. Then he shifted his gaze. Away from the pub and the chestnut trees, far away to the northern horizon, where the ominous dark clouds of the previous storm slowly took on human shape. Alan watched, transfixed. A face began to form. There was the nose. And the lips. The ears. And the eyes. Yes, the eyes, those eyes: they were unmistakable. It was Little Mehmet’s side-kick, Kevin. But this time his stare was direct and cold. So cold. Alan could feel its chill. He jabbed at the button and the window began its ascent.
Then the painkillers kicked in again and the first large raindrops of the next storm smacked against the windscreen. His last words before falling deeply asleep:
‘Let’s get going.’
Twenty-eight
Harriet wanted Alan to take the next day off, but he stubbornly refused. He needed to immerse himself in his work. Otherwise he’d just sit around and brood on what had happened and what might have been. Alan simply couldn’t accept that a lightning strike had taken out his Land Rover. The explosion happened several minutes before the eye of the storm had passed over them. Yes, there was much thunder and lightning close by, but he remembered very shortly before the explosion, counting the gap between a flash and the thunder that followed, and it was still about five seconds. As a Fenman, where the flat landscape makes lightning strike a very real possibility, he was well aware that five seconds – say five miles – was still too distant for a direct hit.
Of course he had no proof at all, because the very blast would have removed the evidence. But he trusted his subconscious. That surreal moment of vision meant something. Logically, Kevin had had access to his Land Rover, when he left it in the Developers’ Car Park at Impingham. He was also known to have worked on, or rather in it, on the afternoon of the explosion, when he had made Steve the padded wooden case for his Trimble.
Steve and Kevin had worked together for several days, and Alan learned that Kevin had been very friendly. From Steve he discovered that Kevin, Stu and Darren had all served in the Royal Engineers together, Kevin as a Sergeant, the other two as Sappers. As with Paul, Alan didn’t want to arouse Kevin’s suspicions. But that wouldn’t be easy. Maybe it was already too late. Either way, Alan was determined not to be scared off. If the person who had done this thought that he could be frightened away from PFC, then they were very much mistaken. If nothing else, the bungalow fire had also strengthened his resolve. Alan, he told himself with a certain grim satisfaction: you’re becoming quite pig-headed.
Despite Harriet’s protests, Alan was heading out of the door when the phone rang. It was the local police, from Boston. Would it be all right if an officer came round to take a full statement? A routine call, they said. Alan agreed.
When the WPC arrived, Alan was only able to show her his licence and a copy of the insurance papers. The MOT certificate had been destroyed in the explosion. She left fifteen minutes later, at eleven. At five past, the phone rang, again. This time it was the loss adjuster from the insurance company, with a string of questions. Obviously, two claims in such close succession had aroused the company’s suspicions somewhat. Alan could imagine him ticking an endless succession of boxes. Why must everything be done by rote these days? Why not ask a few direct questions to discover what actually happened? But no, he thought, his mood getting blacker, that would require a functioning brain.
After he had put the phone down, his ear felt sore. He was now getting desperate to get away. Back to work or back to the Kabuls. He didn’t care which. He felt restless: unable to relax, or sit still. And he knew the men at Impingham weren’t sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs. As soon as they found out he’d survived, they’d be after him again. They had made the first move. Now it was his turn. Suddenly he felt better. He was going to do something – anything, rather than sit at Harriet’s and fret. But first he’d better phone Lane. No need to exaggerate, but he’d soon find out and then he’d be angry and accuse Alan of concealing things from him. And he didn’t want to go through that again.
He was reaching out for the
handset, when it rang. Made him jump out of his skin.
Talk of the devil, it was Lane.
‘Glad to see your Land Rover’s insurance was up to date, Alan…’
Alan didn’t let him get any further.
‘Look, Richard, I was about to phone you, honest I was, but I haven’t had a chance. It’s been a succession of jobsworths asking me idiot questions. And I don’t suppose the bloody bungalow fire helped, either. My insurers must think I’m jinxed.’
‘And maybe they’d be right, Alan. Or maybe not.’ He paused to let this sink in. ‘But what do you think?’
‘To be honest, Richard, I think it was deliberate. The Land Rover exploded about five minutes before the real lightning started, but having said that, there was plenty of rain and thunder. So I could be wrong. It’s like the bungalow fire. I suspect that might have been deliberate, too. But again, where’s the hard evidence? I wish to God I could find something definite to go on. I hate all this suspicion and uncertainty. In some ways I’d rather they were trying to get me…’ He paused. ‘At least that way I’d bloody know.’
‘Look Alan, there’s nothing to be gained by fretting. Soon things will be clearer. Something’s bound to turn up when scenes-of-crime search the wreck. Meanwhile, don’t do anything unexpected. Stay at home or at work and try not to worry too much, we’re keeping a very close eye on you both.’
‘Thanks, Richard.’ Even to Alan’s ears this reply sounded lame.
‘Don’t thank me, Alan, thank Chief Inspector Hissop.’
‘Who?’ The name meant nothing to Alan.
‘That supposed WPC who just visited you. She’s a full CI, has several firearm certificates and is a black belt in Taekwon-do. And for what it’s worth, she thought you patronised her.’
* * *
Shortly before two o’clock, there was a hesitant knock on Alan’s office door. He was standing close by it, poring over old mud-spattered working plans of Flax Hole from PFC’s own archive. He opened the door and was surprised to see his old friend, Dr Isobel Chancy, who now managed Biomedia Ltd, the Cambridge firm who were running the DNA tests on the five babies. He’d completely forgotten that they had arranged to meet today. Thank goodness he had defied Harriet’s orders and come in to work.
The Lifers' Club Page 31