Drowned Lives

8

‘On the roads this morning, traffic is particularly heavy on the A38 and A5. Watch out for hold-ups at Muckley Corner and the Weeford Roundabout. And the weather for South Staffordshire today is: cold and wet.’

I turned off the radio and pulled on my old waxed jacket, ready to go out. The word was that the Under Sheriff and his bailiffs would begin clearing the tree houses at the third camp near Hilton this morning, no matter how wet the weather. In fact, the rain would be on their side — the protesters would be staying inside, and there would be fewer supporters on hand to hinder the operation.

I had to be there, on the off-chance of getting that crucial human interest story — a pregnant woman manhandled by the bailiffs perhaps, or the notorious Squirrel arrested again. There was also a chance of being on the spot for just the right photograph, one that the nationals would snap up. Some hopes. With my luck, there’d be so much else happening around the world that the protesters would be relegated to a paragraph on page 30. But still, I had to be there.

As I drove away towards Gaia Lane, a figure in a red waterproof and hood stopped on the pavement and waved to me. It was Rachel, out walking old Mrs Norton’s cocker spaniel, Jed. Automatically, I acknowledged her greeting, though she probably wouldn’t even see me through the streaming windows.

Most of the rest of the day I spent tramping about in the rain on the edge of a muddy field, watching very little happen. The bailiffs seemed reluctant to move in, and when they did eventually decide to get on with it, the tree people put up no resistance. The constant drizzle blurred the scene, creating a dismal atmosphere in which there were only shades of grey, no black and white confrontations to provide the striking image I wanted.

Later in the afternoon, a mist began to develop. By then I was chilled through and rain had trickled down the neck of my coat, soaking my collar. The wellingtons I’d brought with me in the boot of the car were caked with clay. I decided to go home and change.

There was a meeting I had to attend that night in the community hall at Boley Park. Although the tree houses and tunnels of the eco-warriors had attracted most publicity, the road scheme had also brought together a consortium of local councils and community groups calling itself the Alliance Against the South Staffordshire Link Road. The Alliance was pursuing a legal challenge against the road, which it hoped to take to the Court of Appeal.

The hall was already crowded by the time I arrived, and I spotted Andrew Hadfield across the room with other members of the trust. The WRG work party had gone home by now, and these were the real activists, dedicated to promoting their cause on every occasion, by whatever means they could.

Tonight was notable because one of the local MPs from an area crossed by the new road had turned out to support the campaign. His presence on the platform had attracted a good crowd, included a sprinkling of press.

There was nothing like a high-profile personality to attract publicity to a cause. And the MP, Lindley Simpson, was as high-profile as you could get in this part of Staffordshire. He was a rising star in the New Labour government, one of Tony Blair’s generation, who’d already become a junior minister in the Department of Agriculture. How much he knew about road schemes and transport policy remained to be seen, but at least he was there. An MP for a constituency in the vast, sprawling West Midlands conurbation around Birmingham, he might have been expected to be in favour of the new road, so his support was regarded as a coup for the Alliance. But maybe it was just a public relations stunt.

The MP sat at a table on the platform, alongside councillors. He was in his early forties, well-groomed, with short fair hair, and he was wearing a smart dark suit and a bright red tie. His manner was a little too slick for me, his smile exaggeratedly sincere. He behaved as if he was entirely at home in the spotlight, undoubtedly a man who’d been trained how to behave in the public eye. Lindley Simpson wouldn’t open his mouth and say the wrong thing, or be caught off-guard. He was a media-friendly politician. In a few years’ time, if he managed to keep his nose clean, he’d be a man of power and influence.

I took a seat at the side of the hall and spent some time studying the audience. To me, they were more interesting than the platform party, because they were a whole mixture of types. You could see the journalists, keeping their distance from the crowd, and the council officers clustering together as if afraid that they might find themselves taking the blame for something if they ever became isolated.

At the end of the front row was a group I couldn’t quite place. There were a couple of men and a woman with black hair. They were behaving in a quiet, self-effacing manner, speaking to no one around them. They certainly weren’t drawing attention to themselves. Yet it was that air about the little group that made me notice them.

After a while, I realised that they were exchanging glances with Lindley Simpson. Whenever the discussion moved on to another topic, the MP would glance to this little corner, like an actor looking for his prompt. Maybe he was getting secret signals about what his views ought to be. Were these people what the tabloid newspapers referred to as ‘spin doctors’? Special advisors, press officers and the like? It seemed that every government minister had them these days.

When the meeting was over, Andrew Hadfield wandered over towards me. He was with another Trust committee member, Phil Glover, one of the organisation’s real experts, an experienced civil engineer who’d masterminded the plans for the restoration. He’d drawn up a new line for the canal in places where the original route had been built over. In one section, a bridge had been lost in the middle of a concrete works, and he’d proposed a replacement route thrust-bored under a railway embankment some way to the south. Like me, most of the Trust members would never even have heard of thrust-boring. So Phil was a man whose brain I picked shamelessly for his technical knowledge.

They both greeted me like an old friend. They were useful to me, and in my business, that constitutes a friendship.

‘What do you think, Chris? Is the Right Honourable minister on our side, is it just a load of politician’s bullshit?’ Andrew jerked his thumb at the front of the hall, where the platform party were conferring together in a self-congratulatory way.

‘Lindley Simpson? It’s a bit difficult to say, isn’t it?’ I glanced at my notebook. ‘I’d guess there was nothing he said that couldn’t be interpreted to mean whatever you want it to mean.’

‘That’s about the size of it, isn’t it? All words and no action. The action’s left to people like us.’

Phil smiled sardonically. I wondered what was going through his mind when he looked at Andrew. But all he said was: ‘I suppose we need every kind of support we can get.’

The councillors on the stage were splitting up now as the hall emptied. Simpson trotted down the steps to join his support team. One of the men half-rose from his chair to shake hands with him. I could see that he was quite a small man, maybe five foot six, with heavy shoulders and a barrel chest like a wrestler’s, straining the seams of his jacket.

‘Which reminds me,’ said Andrew, ‘how did you get on with the old man?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Phil. ‘Old Mr Longden.’

I frowned. Did everyone know my business?

‘There’s something he wants me to help him with,’ I said. ‘Some kind of research project.’

‘And are you going to?’

‘I don’t think so, Andrew.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Oh, he’s very vague and mysterious about it. I found him a bit irritating, to be honest. Slightly unstable. I still don’t know what his project is exactly, but my gut feeling is that it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth. He’s not somebody I want to get involved with.’

‘Are you sure? Are you really going to turn down old Samuel?’

I shrugged, watching the politician’s group walking down the hall. ‘Yes, I think I am. I’ve got better things to do with my time. More interesting things to think about.’

Andrew followed my gaze. ‘Such as our tame MP?’

I didn’t answer. My eyes had been moving from the tall, elegant Simpson, to the short, dark, muscular man at his side, and then to the other two people with them. It was the woman who attracted my attention now. From behind, all I’d seen was a curtain of black hair. But now, as they walked towards me, I was struck by her looks. Her eyes were almost as dark as her hair and set in a pale face with high cheek bones. She was taller than the thickset man beside her, and she moved with the grace he lacked. She had an expression on her face like someone who’d accidentally walked into the wrong bar and found herself among a bunch of drunken labourers. Her eyes were fixed on the exit, and she completely failed to see me.

As the group passed, the thickset man was saying something to Simpson that I couldn’t make out. But the MP was turned half towards me when he replied, and I heard his words clearly.

‘Yes. But it cuts both ways, Leo,’ he said.

Rachel was lurking in the window of her half of Maybank when I arrived home. It was hardly unusual. But I hadn’t been inside my house more than a few minutes when she was knocking on the door. She appeared to be in a state of excitement.

‘Somebody’s been to see you, Chris.’

‘Oh?’

‘An old gentleman. He came in a taxi.’

Immediately, my heart sank. There was only one old gentleman it could be, and I’d already made my mind up that I didn’t want him coming to Stowe Pool Lane.

Rachel saw the look on my face and hurried on. ‘He said he knows you very well. He just wanted to drop off a few things you’d need.’

‘What things?’

‘I don’t know what they are. He didn’t say. Since you weren’t here, he left them with me. I hope that’s all right,’ she added, watching me with a bright eye and a cautious smile.

‘Did this old gentleman give his name?’

‘Mr Longden. He was very nice, I thought. Very polite. He had old-fashioned manners that you don’t see very often these days. He said he was a—’

‘—a friend of the family?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So where is it, then? All this stuff he left for me?’

‘Oh, it’s still in my hallway. I think you’ll have to help me bring it all round. There’s rather a lot of it to carry, you see. The taxi driver had to bring it in for him.’

I let my eyes close against a rush of anger. What on earth had Samuel Longden dumped on me? What gave him the right to impose on me like this? He’d even involved my next-door neighbour, encouraged her to poke her nose into business that I’d rather she didn’t know about.

‘There are some files,’ said Rachel. ‘And a box. Mr Longden said it was all to do with a project you were helping him with.’

I sighed. ‘I’m sorry if you’ve been put to any trouble.’

‘Oh, it’s all right. I liked the old chap. Not that I had much chance to talk to him. The taxi was waiting, and he had to rush off.’

I put the front door on the catch and walked round to Rachel’s house with her. I could simply have stepped over the low wooden fence that separated our front gardens, but it was too valuable as a symbolic barrier to be treated in such a dismissive way.

Sure enough, a black file and a bulging A4 folder sat on a long wooden box in her hallway. I felt her watching me carefully to see my reaction. I knew she’d want to know all about Samuel and the nature of the ‘project’. So I kept my face straight, trying not to show my despair at the weighty evidence of Samuel Longden’s invasion into my life.

I hefted the box file, which felt as though it was loaded with house bricks, and added the blue folder on top.

‘I’ll come back for the box,’ I said.

‘It’s all right,’ said Rachel. ‘I think I can manage that.’

‘No, no. Don’t try if it’s full like these.’

But she picked the box up anyway, without any apparent effort. ‘It seems to be empty.’

We trailed back to my house and I couldn’t stop Rachel following me into the front room, since I had no hands free to shut the door. I dumped the files on the dining table and she slid the box next to them.

‘It all looks very interesting,’ she said. ‘Is it a big story you’re working on? An investigation?’

‘To be honest, I’ve no idea what it is.’

‘Oh, but surely... Mr Longden seemed to think you’d know all about it.’

‘I wish I did. No — scrub that, I wish I didn’t know anything about it at all.’

She was starting to fumble at the lid of the file. She pressed the button and it sprang open, revealing a thickly compressed mass of paper under the metal spring that was supposed to hold it down.

‘I’ll look at it later, I think,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s probably confidential material.’

She withdrew her hand reluctantly, her curiosity simmering. ‘I suppose I’d better leave you to it, then.’

When Rachel had left, I lifted the lid of the file again and flicked through a few pages without actually reading anything. The file was crammed with papers, scrawled notes, cuttings from local newspapers and photocopies of pages from old documents and books. I pulled the elastic band off the folder and saw a stack of typewritten A4 sheets. It was a manuscript. So that was what it was all about — he was writing a book.

But my attention was drawn from the files to the box alongside them. It was an old box, made of something like oak, and about eighteen inches long by a foot deep, with a close-fitting lid bound in tarnished brass. In fact, it was a very old box, with the patina of age on it, the grain smoothed by many hands.

But the most curious feature was the three brass-plated keyholes on the front, only one of which contained an ancient iron key with an ornate handle. Three keyholes, but only one key.

Intrigued now, I turned the key. It moved slowly, but without sticking. I heard the lock click, but the lid wouldn’t move. I removed the key and tried to insert it in the middle of the three holes, but it wouldn’t fit. I tried the third, with the same result.

So it must need three keys to open the box. Why would anyone make an item like that? And what would they keep in it? I ran my hand over the surface. The whole object was solid and heavy, and the wood felt as though it was very thick. There were no screws at its corners, only perfectly fitting dovetail joints varnished and smoothed over. When I tapped the lid of the box, it gave a deep, hollow sound.

Was it really empty? Why would Samuel Longden have sent it to me if it was? Without the other two keys, there was no way I could find out without forcing the lid and destroying what might be a valuable antique. And did it matter anyway?

I put the box back down and I stared at the other items covering my table. I thought I could detect the same musty odour that had emanated from the old man himself when he sat in my car at Fosseway. Mouldy books in the cellar of a second-hand bookshop. It was the smell of age, of thousands of forgotten words buried in paper-bound graves, waiting for somebody to open their covers and reveal their secrets to the light.

I shook my head. Some people might be excited by that smell. I wasn’t one of them.