As if in slow motion, and anxious not to stir up clouds of invisible gas, he made his way to the ladder, checking the pile of cardboard was still there. Then he started to climb, listening intently. One step at a time. Slowly and methodically. After what seemed like an age, he reached the top layer of shelves. Carefully he leant across and grabbed an overhead steel joist, swinging his legs up behind him. Now he was lying safely on the shelf. Still listening. Listening, while consciously taking deep silent breaths. He knew he needed to take his body to the verge of hyperventilation.
After two and a half minutes he heard a loud crash outside. The General Office door had been forced. Almost immediately he thought he felt cool air on his face. Or was it imagination? He wasn’t sure. Either way, he hadn’t heard them closing the outside door. If it was left open that would make his next task much simpler.
His thoughts were sharply broken by a harsh voice from somewhere in the General Office.
‘We’re coming to fuckin’ get you, Alan-smart-arse. This time you won’t fuckin’ get away. We know where you are, boy.’
Alan recognised the Norfolk accent only too well. It was Kevin, the Kabuls’ ex-squaddie hit man from Impingham. He probably thinks it’s third time lucky, Alan thought grimly.
Alan was still deep-breathing. He could hear further sounds from the General Office. But they didn’t matter. He had to control his mind, not just his body.
Precise timing would be essential. There were three of them, and one of him. And they were armed. He was now completely focused on the sounds from around the General Office. A slight scrape here, a creak there, told him the three men were still in the General Office. He looked at his watch. Although it seemed like hours, they had only been there a minute.
He’d given himself a 50:50 chance he’d pull it off. Everything depended on them doing what he needed them to do. They had to be at certain places at key times. Delay would be disastrous.
The hiss of escaping gas seemed to be getting louder. He breathed deeply some more and the sound quietened. Dammit, Alan thought, it was me, not the gas. More deep breaths. Down below they were ransacking office cupboards. One, two three drawers hit the floor. Then a thud as the wardrobe was pulled to the ground.
He looked down at his watch. Two minutes. Then he heard Stu open the side door into the toilet and small kitchen. This was worrying. Alan found he was holding his breath. Angrily he forced himself to breathe out. The gas was still a long way below him. He was aware that the small kitchen would take them into the neighbouring Portakabin, the Packaging Store, where they’d be surrounded by more files and rack after rack of completed orders, boxes and bubble wrap. Again he glanced at his watch. They’d be delayed there too long: five minutes, maybe more.
As he looked down, the candle on the bench-top suddenly went out. A wisp of smoke. It had been smothered by rising gas. He glanced at his watch: the gas had taken three minutes to reach the top of the bench. By now he reckoned it was above the lower half of the space, where the large work benches were recessed well back into the walls. The volume of air above them was smaller. Alan did a rapid calculation. It would take another three minutes to reach him. Maybe even less.
They must be speeded up. He called out as loud as he could:
‘Kevin, won’t you be reasonable? I’m sure we can come to a deal.’
He tried to make his voice sound like a supercilious officer-and-gentleman. He needed to provoke them. Get their adrenalin pumping. He was being patronising, and it worked. He heard them come crashing back into the General Office. At that moment the second candle above the door flickered briefly and went out. Again he checked his watch: give them another minute. The gas was rising faster than he’d expected. Only six feet to go.
He was counting. After thirty seconds he called out a second time:
‘I say, why don’t we talk, Kevin? Do be reasonable, old chap. Stop acting like an angry schoolboy!’
‘Fuck you, arsehole!’
They had heard where his voice was coming from. Their footsteps thundered down the corridor. The door handle rattle. Locked. Alan cursed: had that been a mistake? He thought he’d need the extra time. He’d know in a few seconds. He was breathing deep and fast, making no attempt to keep quiet.
There was a short pause, as they drew back and charged. Then with a loud crash, the door smashed open. There was the sound of bodies crashing to the ground, and a sharp wheezing. Alan imagined them thrashing around, grabbing at their throats, gasping for air.
Alan took a final deep breath. He pulled down the goggles and jumped onto the heap of cardboard far below.
He dashed for the door, kicking Darren and Stu’s pistols out of reach. As he passed Kevin he stooped down and grabbed his machine pistol, which lay on the ground beside him. Leaving doors open behind him, he gulped down fresh air outside the General Office, then ran back in and shut off the gas. All three men were now fully unconscious, but not, he hoped, dead. He went outside a second time and waited for a couple of minutes while the worst of the gas cleared.
Then he returned. He checked their pulses, which were weak. But still just there. He was relieved. They were alive, if not kicking. Rapidly he dragged Kevin and his two mates out into the Packaging Store and tied their wrists, before securely wrapping them in thick layers of cling film, bubble wrap and parcel tape. Nobody could escape from that.
He was about to turn off the light when he looked back at them, lying on the floor. They lay there absolutely still. These were people who had just tried to kill him. There was something pathetic about them. To his surprise he felt contempt, not anger. Some people might have forgiven him if he had kicked each one of them in the balls, just to make himself feel better. Stretched out unconscious on the floor, his would-be assassins lacked even the dignity of the dead. He flicked the switch and shut the door, turning the key in the lock.
Thirty-eight
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.
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br /> 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.
Thirty-nine
Aware that his mobile battery had gone down, Alan returned to the General Office and picked up the phone. He looked at his watch. It was nearly two, on Monday morning. He was about to phone DCI Lane, when he remembered the three men he’d trussed up in the Packing Store. They were recovering. Kevin had even managed to half sit up. They groaned. All three men had sore heads and running eyes. But they were alive, which was more than they deserved. After he had pulled off his overalls Alan gave each of them a few sips of water, then returned to the office and phoned an ambulance. That done, he redialled Richard Lane.
A very sleepy voice answered, but by the time Alan had outlined the events of the night, he was wide awake and promised to be with him within the hour. He would also alert the local police who’d be there very shortly.
There was just one other thing Alan had to do to satisfy his own curiosity before the police arrived, and he was aware he didn’t have much time. He ran across to the main hangar doors, where he noticed the padlock had been cut and lay on the ground. Then he remembered that Lane had told him the police had done it. He rolled one of the massive sliding doors back and turned on the main arc lights. That, he thought, should keep them busy for a few minutes.
As he ran across the apron he could hear sirens approaching from Boston, far out in Dawyck Fen, breaking the stillness of the approaching dawn. They were still a mile away. Maybe more. Quickly he ducked behind a wall and ran round the outside of the archaeological building, to the side entrance. Once inside, he stumbled along unlit corridors, past his own office, across the main hall and into the Coffee Room. The door to the Out Store was locked. Paul liked to keep these keys to himself, but Alan knew Clara kept an illicit set in the top drawer of her desk. They were still there.
Back in the Coffee Room, he fumbled with the cheap duplicate key which wasn’t a very good fit. Meanwhile, out on the apron the world had suddenly come alive. Expecting trouble, DCI Lane had alerted the firearms squad, three of whom stood around the perimeter facing outwards. Two others were escorting three officers and four paramedics into the open central area of the hangar. Alan had left the door to the General Office wide open, so he hoped they’d discover the Packaging Store, where Kevin and his mates were lying. But he’d left the door to the BCA, which still held the horrors in the freezer and maggot tanks, securely locked.
At last the catch in the Out Store door moved, and he opened it. He felt around and soon found the light switch. There were no windows to the outside. In the time it took the tubes to flicker on, he had crossed to the shelves marked ‘For Christian Reburial’. He saw six boxes, in two sizes. At PFC, as at most museums, larger long-bone boxes, held all the non-cranial bones of the skeleton, whereas the more fragile skull and its mandible were placed on their own, in a smaller, square skull-box.
By and large ancient bones, with all fat and most unstable protein long gone, weigh a fraction of their immediate post-mortem weight. But each of these long-bone boxes felt unusually heavy. Alan lifted their lids, one by one. They were all packed with bones. He was certain that each long-bone box held far more than just a single individual. The skull boxes, however, contained just single heads. Carefully he lifted one out with both hands. It was light. Almost certainly ancient. He replaced it carefully.
He lowered one of the long-bone boxes to the floor and gently tipped out its contents onto a sheet of newspaper. Lying at the bottom, like so many broken pieces of a large, white-chocolate Easter egg, were shattered fragments of skull. Alan knew a certain amount about bone fracture patterns, as these were good indicators of ancient butchery techniques. One glance convinced him that the spiral fracture he could plainly see on at least two mandibles had happened when the bone was still pliable and ‘green’. ‘Green’ bone fractures cannot happen once the bone has lost its fat content and gone brittle. And that takes time.
Alan went to his own office, turning on lights as he did so. It didn’t matter if the police came in now. He picked up the phone and dialled Harriet’s number.
It was approaching 2.45 a.m., when a very sleepy Harriet answered the phone.
/> ‘Harry, it’s Alan. I know I’m probably the last person you want to talk to right now.’
Harriet cut through his bluster. She suddenly sounded very awake indeed.
‘Oh, thank heavens you’ve called. I’ve been worried sick. Where are you?’
‘In my office.’
‘At Priory Farm?
‘What the hell are you doing there?’
Alan’s mind was too fixated on the present situation to register her concern.
‘Look, it’s too long to explain, but Richard Lane will be here soon, and I must have Alaric. I need him to repeat that lipids test. As soon as possible. It’s very important.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it bloody well is.’
And then she hung up.
Everyone could hear the scream of the siren, when it was a mile away. Then the car came hurtling up the drive and onto the hangar apron. Lane jumped out and ran across to Alan who was now standing by one of the stretchers just outside the open doors of the ambulance. A paramedic was removing the last of the cling film and parcel tape. Kevin lay there resolutely silent.
‘So he’s our man, is he?’
‘Yes,’ Alan replied. ‘He certainly had a go at me. Him and his two mates over there.’ He pointed across at two other stretchers, then being carried across the apron towards them.
‘So what happened?’
Alan then gave him a brief account of the attack and the carbon dioxide. Then he remembered the machine pistol, which he’d shoved under the Portakabin steps as he gasped for air. They walked across and retrieved it. Lane, picking it up in a handkerchief, called over to a Scene-of-Crime Officer who hurried across. SOCO pulled a new plastic bag from a roll and put the gun in it.
‘You say the man Kevin was carrying this?’ Alan asked.
‘That’s right. His prints should be on it, along, of course with mine.’
The Lifers' Club Page 42