The Way, the Truth and the Dead

by Francis Pryor

  Alan nodded. He was only too well aware of that.

  Lane took a deep breath and resumed. ‘As I was saying, we reckon that the accident probably happened on the weekend of the thirteenth and fourteenth of March, the last two days of the coarse-fishing season. Normally, the riverbanks would have been crowded on the Monday, and maybe his body would have been spotted. But the place was deserted.’

  ‘But you told me before supper that he usually went fishing with his partner?’ Alan had to ask.

  ‘He did,’ Lane replied. ‘But on that particular weekend, Fellows couldn’t join him. So he was fishing alone. Then next morning, Joe Thorey had some business to attend to in Ely – something to do with the estate shotgun licences – so didn’t get back to Fursey until after dinner. He found Hansworth’s stool, rod and keepnet, which he took back to the apartment. Apparently he quite often left tackle on the bank if it needed to be repaired – which was something Thorey did for him—’

  ‘Privately, “on the side”?’ Alan broke in.

  ‘Yes, from time to time. It was simpler than taking stuff over to Keeper’s Cottage. And I gather Thorey did quite a lot of work of that sort. It seems he quite enjoyed it.’

  ‘And did any of the kit need repairing?’

  ‘Yes, all of it. Thorey described it as “end of season maintenance”. So he cleaned it all up.’

  ‘And in the process’ – Alan was thinking aloud – ‘he removed most of the evidence. Unfortunate, that?’ The question was asked with a hint of irony.

  ‘Yes,’ Lane replied, also deep in thought. ‘You’re right, it was; but I think it’s an understandable mistake for a keeper to have made. There had been very heavy rain over the previous week and the river was still rising. It might all have got washed away.’

  ‘Hardly ideal fishing conditions, then?’ Alan still wasn’t altogether convinced.

  ‘Yes, that’s what we thought too, but apparently the stretch of water downstream of the mill is much calmer than the main river. In effect, it’s a backwater and, according to Thorey, fish tend to gather there when the river’s in spate.’

  ‘OK,’ Alan conceded. ‘So did they find his fingerprints on the rod?’

  ‘Yes, they did, along with Thorey’s, of course. Anyhow, Hansworth’s absence was noted the following morning when he failed to arrive back at work. His absence caused consternation, as the end of the financial year was approaching. And he didn’t turn up at his smart flat in the Barbican, either. The next day the press got to hear about it and there were big headlines on all the financial pages – “Prominent banker disappears”, that sort of thing. All were speculating that he’d “done a runner”.’

  ‘But then he never reappeared,’ Alan added.

  ‘Quite,’ Lane replied. ‘So the “done a runner” story died. Eventually his body turned up close to Denver Sluice, but that was in May and by then all useful forensic evidence had long rotted away. In fact, he was almost unrecognisable and was eventually identified by DNA.’

  ‘Any broken bones?’ Alan asked. He was thinking of Stan.

  ‘No, none, but then there aren’t any more mills downstream of Fursey.’

  Alan had one last important question to ask. ‘You mentioned that Joe Thorey found Hansworth’s rod. As a matter of interest, what happened to him after that?’

  ‘At the time he found the rod, he’d been employed, if that’s the right term on a part-time basis; he used to help out when needed on shoots and during the fishing season, but Sarah Cripps had ambitious plans for the shoot, which soon became very much larger and better organised. I gather they charge over a thousand pounds a day for a gun. Joe Thorey got a full-time job as a keeper on the estate at the end of March. Eventually, the following summer, he was appointed head keeper on Bert Hickson’s early retirement. Hickson moved out of Keeper’s Cottage and Thorey moved in. That’s the way things work on such estates.’

  ‘And of course, it was Hickson,’ Mary added quietly, ‘who found your friend Stan.’

  Yes, Alan thought, wheels within waterlogged wheels. Two ‘accidents’, both involving water and on land owned and controlled by the Cripps family.

  In Stan’s case, Alan could see at least two clear links already: to the Smileys and to Sebastian, both of whom had known about the storm damage to the mill before it appeared on the television news. And in the Hansworth case it was difficult to ignore Thorey’s role, although Alan was also aware that his judgement might be clouded by his dislike of the man. And as for motives that linked the two deaths? That was much harder. The obvious one for Stan would be some archaeological discovery which adversely affected the Fursey Estate. But that couldn’t possibly apply to Hansworth. But what about Candice and Sarah? At first glance they didn’t appear very close, but life had taught Alan that women were far better at dissimulation than men. And they both had a strong interest in seeing that the Cripps family fortunes increased: Sarah, through the shoot and ‘field sports’; and Candice through the abbey dig. Then his mind flicked forward: and of course poor old Stan didn’t like doing television. Candice had told him that it didn’t matter, but Alan had detected more than a hint of regret in her voice when she’d said it. Maybe she realised that Fursey would always be a ­second-division attraction without national publicity. So did she see Stan’s refusal to do TV as damaging her career – her life? More to the point, she was now absolutely delighted that he, Alan, was leading the Test Pit Challenge project. So from both Candice and Sarah’s point of view, things had worked out well. Very well indeed.

  * * *

  Alan didn’t spend a very restful night; his mind was constantly working. There was nothing for it but to take charge. Look for the evidence, rather than speculate. He put on his black North Face jacket and rucksack, pulled up the hood, then clicked his phone on to silent: 4.03am. He stood still, took a few deep breaths, then turned out the house lights, opened the back door and slipped noiselessly out. He climbed out of his untended back garden and headed away from the few village streetlights, then he crossed to the unlit side of Fore Street, and a gap in the brick wall surrounding the park. Everyone in the village knew that this led to a shortcut that younger people used if they needed somewhere away from prying eyes – which was exactly what Alan was after now.

  The trees in Fursey Park were quite famous and included several massive old oaks, some of which had been pollarded in the Middle Ages. There were also the remains of an early medieval deer boundary ditch, which may well have been in active use when the monks took the site over in Norman times. Alan hurried from tree to tree as by now the wind had got up and occasionally moonlight lit the scene. He caught sight of roe deer and a tawny owl returning to its nest with a small rat clasped in its talons. The tree cover became thinner as he approached Abbey Farm and he waited for a large patch of cloud before he attempted to cross the open ground behind the 1950s pig sheds. Alan clearly remembered seeing Stan in what he called his ‘cupboard’, when he came for his second visit in early November, just over a year ago. But now things had changed and were about to change even more, Alan reckoned, as he looked at the teleporter parked on the edge of the yard, just outside the abandoned buildings. They belonged to a firm of demolition contractors. He knew it was now or never.

  He climbed through an open window and found himself in what had been the main Fursey Abbey offices, until the end of last year. Alan had helped them transfer stuff into the current, but temporary, Portakabin office, three weeks previously. He glanced at a tattered Year Planner for 2009, which was still pinned to the wall. On the wall, too, were scraps of Christmas decorations, presumably the last office party in the old building, which somebody had attempted rather half-heartedly to remove.

  The floor inside the broken window was damp and slippery, but once he’d got further into the building he even detected a hint of warmth, presumably left over from daytime sunshine on the single-storey flat roof. Everywhere there was the sad, musty smell of abandonment. Nobody cared about these buildings anymore
and soon they would vanish forever.

  Alan tried to picture that day when he visited Stan. They’d come in through the main door and someone, probably ­Candice he now realised, had spotted him through the half-open office door. He must have looked like an archaeologist, because she’d called out, ‘If you want Stan, he’s further down the corridor, third door on the right, just before the freezer room.’

  When he’d first walked along the corridor he’d been passed several times by kitchen assistants in pale-blue overalls and white aprons heading towards the double kitchen doors at the end. Just out of interest he pushed them open and had a look: the place had been stripped clean of everything, except the worn linoleum floor. All that remained were several drain holes in the floor and walls and the larger openings for extractor fans in the ceiling. There was a strong smell of stale cooking oil.

  Next he pushed at the door into Stan’s ‘cupboard’, half expecting, for some reason, to find it locked. But it opened. He shut it quietly behind him. As he did so he pulled a small torch from his pocket and looked around. The desk had been moved to the centre of the room, as if they had planned to take it away, but had had second thoughts. And who could blame them? It was very tatty, with woodworm holes across the whole of the back. Alan flashed his torch at the wall where he remembered it had originally stood and, yes, woodworm was there, too.

  He pulled open the large drawer at the centre of the desk. It was empty. The drawers on either side of the knee-space were empty too and the top one had been removed and was still lying on the floor. Then he walked across to the two-drawer filing cabinet close to the wall opposite the door. Stan’s old and slightly warped drawing board was propped up against it. Alan pulled open the top drawer and looked in: a few disposable draftsman’s pens and some elderly scale-rules, but nothing else. Alan looked carefully through the hanging-files in the lower drawer, but they were all empty. Then he stood back. He was certain there must be something else here too. But where?

  Suddenly the early morning silence was shattered by a loud creaking rasp. All the hairs on the back of Alan’s neck stood up. It was a strange, unearthly, sound. He looked around for a weapon of some sort, but the tiny room was absolutely bare. He opened the door and slipped into the corridor. Then the sound came again, quieter this time, and clearly from the old office. Alan took out his clasp knife. Hardly an offensive weapon, but much better than nothing. Then rapidly he threw open the office door and pulled it back. When he gingerly looked again, the place was empty. But he could feel a very slight breeze. Then the ungreased iron-framed window creaked. Bloody thing! Feeling a bit of a fool, Alan shut it.

  As he returned to Stan’s ‘cupboard’ Alan thought about the building’s original use as a piggery. They’d had a smaller one on the farm at home, until his father had got fed up with the long hours and unstable prices for pork. At one end of each unit there used to be a small compartment where his father would keep food supplements, veterinary supplies and a card index of the current batch of sows and their litters. This is what Stan’s little office had once been.

  Half of the wall away from the door was angled at 45 degrees, which was where the ‘clean cupboard’ had been when the building was still part of the farm. Now the floor space in front of it was occupied by the filing cabinet. If it was anything like the piggeries back home, Alan thought, this angled wall still covered the place where they’d kept things that they didn’t want to get dirty: wormer guns, spray cans etc. Alan tapped the wall with the butt of his torch. It was hollow, but had been neatly covered-over with a sheet of plasterboard, presumably during the original conversion in the late ’70s. He moved the filing cabinet. And it paid off. Just above the floor was a small and very home-made sliding hatch of white cardboard.

  Alan raised the little hatch and shone his torch inside. Propped against a quarter-full bottle of whisky in front of dozens of empties was a battered brown notebook. The cover bore the felt-tip legend, in Stan’s handwriting: ‘Fursey BH log: Nov 11–28, 2008.’ Why wasn’t it in the desk? Why would Stan have kept a secret log, Alan wondered? Presumably he was keeping it secret from someone in the Cripps family, as there were no archaeologists with him at the time. John? Candice? Surely not Sebastian? He shook his head.

  Outside it was that ‘darkest hour just before dawn’. He knew he didn’t have long, but he couldn’t resist taking a closer look at the notebook’s pages. They were full of little columnar stratigraphic sketches, complete with notes and levels above or below sea level, known in the trade as Ordnance Datum (OD). Typical of Stan, Alan thought, each sketch is dated and even timed: ‘Completed 20.15’. He glanced at another: ‘20.25’; and another ‘21.00’. Alan had several notebooks of his own like this one, and he recognised it for what it was instantly: a set of auger, or borehole logs. He also knew they’d make no sense unless he could work out the levels and draw up a collated transverse section at 1:20, or smaller if needs be. And that would take time. He slipped the notebook inside his jacket and zipped the pocket.

  Next he pulled out the lone bottle with whisky still in it. A small glass had been up-ended over the stopper. Alan sniffed it. He could just detect the faintest aroma of one of his friend’s last drinks. Scents and smells had a powerfully evocative effect on Alan. Briefly Stan stood beside him. No need for words. The bottles said it all. How very sad and what a bloody awful waste of talent. Then the moment passed. He almost shouted at the injustice of life in his rage and frustration. Finally, a tired calm took over: what was the point?

  He was about to put the bottle back in the wall recess, but then he paused. He was shining his torch on the small label on the back of the bottle. A 20-year-old Glen Hubris McTavish – probably the finest Speyside malt money could buy. He looked more closely and there, in tiny print at the very bottom of the back label, was the line: Distillers by Appointment to Fisher College, Cambridge. For a moment he hesitated, then he slipped the bottle in his rucksack.

  He remembered what Stan had said about Peter Flower: ‘Such a kind and helpful man’. Oh yeah? Somehow Alan choked back his anger, but the discovery of the bottle was important to his search for the truth. What would Flower have gained – what was his motive? Then it came to him. It was so bloody obvious. What would an academic gain from a shy, reticent but technically competent co-author who had started to drink? Control was the answer. Complete control of everything that mattered – everything that allowed him to enlarge his own reputation at the expense of Stan’s. And to add to the irony, in the eyes of the world, it would be he, Peter Flower, who was trying to help Stan fight off his addiction. From now on, Alan knew his investigation would be more focused, and personal. Horribly personal.

  Eight

  Alan arrived on-site early. It was a lovely, sunny Monday morning, the last day of February, and the main car park dig had been underway for six weeks. At this stage it had not been an excavation, so much as a scrape, with the whole area being carefully trowelled over at least twice. Davey and his digger had been gone for four weeks. The geophysics team, too, had finished a week ago. They’d revealed lots and lots of small features, but nothing very substantial – which was what ­Candice and John wanted if the new Fursey visitor centre and shop/restaurant project was not to be held up. But in his heart of hearts, Alan was a tiny bit disappointed. He’d have liked a bloody great fort ditch and gateway; something to have got his teeth into.

  At the end of the previous week, Clare Hughes the county mounty from the local county council’s development control department had visited the site, unannounced, as she didn’t particularly want a load of developers breathing over their shoulders. She and Alan trusted each other and got on well together. They had looked at digital plans of the finds, which they placed over the newly arrived geophys plot, and it didn’t take long before they’d isolated several areas of potential interest. Some time ago, Clare had phoned Alan and they had agreed that they couldn’t simply abandon the site to the new car park completely unexamined. True, in theory it would be
protected and preserved below the thick layer of tarmac, but you can’t protect something if you don’t know what it is. Maybe a heavy covering would be inappropriate; maybe water should be permitted to soak through? They just didn’t know. So somehow they had to characterise the nature and extent of the more deeply buried remains together, of course, with their preservation. This would require a number of hand-­excavated trial trenches. The Fursey management company had been co-operative and reasonable, so they didn’t want these trenches to delay completion of the car park beyond the Easter deadline – and to Alan’s huge relief, Easter was late that year (24 April). Alan had explained to Candice that if the worst came to the worst, there might be a delay, but if that did happen, the extra local TV coverage and added visitors would more than make up for the disruption.

  After about an hour poring over plans, Alan and Clare had decided on two initial trial trenches to characterise contrasting areas. Both would be aligned east-west. Trench 1 would be placed over a seemingly blank area, where there were few finds or geophysical anomalies. But as Alan knew only too well, archaeological ‘blanks’ were often full of surprises. Trench 2 was intended to examine what looked like part of a large rectangular building.

  While they had been deciding on the trial trench locations, they couldn’t help noticing the activity outside. They both knew what was happening, in theory, at least. But the reality was very impressive. While they’d both been shut away in Alan’s Portakabin discussing trial trenches, Jake and the digging team had been on-site with road spikes and hazard tape, marking out no-go areas as Frank and Weinstein had strongly advised them to mark clearly where people shouldn’t walk. And they knew what they were talking about, Alan thought, as he watched four huge articulated trucks pull up in the park. Behind them were two mini buses full of men and women, some of them wearing new black overalls bearing the discreet dark-blue logo of New Ideas Productions. As Alan was aware, the black and the dark blue was to avoid unwanted reflection when the many lights, which were just starting to be unloaded from the trucks, were eventually turned on.