A vast network of ditches and dykes had meanwhile been dug, to give the rain somewhere to run off to after storms as fierce as last night’s, to be pumped out into the rivers or the sea, or to be released through sluice gates at low tide. One such ditch ran between Warne Farm and the King John Hotel, its northern neighbour, all the way from the sea up to the lane behind. The hotel was still easy enough to reach along the seawall. You could even hike directly across the fields – though that meant fighting through a hawthorn hedge as well as jumping the ditch. Yet, thanks to the perverse layout of the local roads, it still took several minutes in the BMW, especially once Oliver and Anna got stuck behind a tractor hauling a huge haystack on its flatbed trailer, scattering straw like rustic confetti. With no hope of overtaking on this narrow lane, Oliver sighed and dropped back, using their reduced pace to dart puzzled glances at Anna, until finally he just shook his head. ‘I have to ask,’ he said. ‘Have we met?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’ smiled Anna. ‘How very insulting.’

  He shook his head, annoyed with himself. ‘I’m usually good with faces. I need to be, for my job. It’s just, I meet so many people.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up. It was years ago, and only for an afternoon.’

  ‘How about a clue?’

  ‘Bolingbroke Castle. There was an excavation there.’

  ‘Bolingbroke?’ frowned Oliver. ‘That was the mosaic, yes? But I don’t remember you, and I think I would. There was this spiky old bird who seemed furious that I was there at all, and a guy with such a terrible twitch that we had to cut him out.’

  ‘Yes. But you only interviewed them after asking me. I pointed out that you should probably talk to someone who knew what they were doing, rather than a first year undergraduate. You assured me that knowledge was massively overrated, then suggested we have lunch together to discuss what I should say.’

  ‘Oh hell!’ he said. ‘That was you?’ But he seemed amused rather than embarrassed. ‘In my defence, though, you should have seen yourself that day, with your face all flushed from digging. Every man there was gagging to ask you out, believe me. I just had the balls.’

  ‘That?’ mocked Anna. ‘That’s your defence?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’ He reached across her for his glove compartment, where he kept a multipack of extra strong mints. He took out a new tube then flipped one up for himself, popped it in his mouth. ‘Got to keep the species going, right?’

  ‘And to think I almost believed you about it being a working lunch.’

  ‘Yeah, well. A useful lesson then. Never believe a word I say. Anyway, you spanked me pretty hard, as I recall. Couldn’t sit for a week.’

  Anna laughed. He’d had the kind of cocksure charm that her vanished father had apparently had, and which she’d therefore disapproved of on principle, yet couldn’t help enjoying in practice. Perhaps that was why she’d rejected his offer of lunch so sharply, retorting that she was already working on one antiquity, thanks, and didn’t need another. Everyone had fallen about laughing, if only from the look on his face, as though he’d walked into a wall. Then she’d done it again, when they’d all gone out for a drink afterwards, and he’d grumbled about how he kept butt-dialling people even though his phone was locked and in his back pocket; and she’d suggested sweetly that maybe facial recognition was to blame. ‘Did I really?’ she said diplomatically, deciding to pretend forgetfulness. ‘How awful. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Apology accepted. Slate wiped.’ He flipped up another mint with his thumb, held it out to her. ‘Peace offering,’ he said. ‘I mean you never know when you’re going to be glad of having minty fresh breath.’

  ‘Wow. You don’t give up easily, do you?’

  ‘No. Why? Do you?’

  Anna took the mint and crunched it between her teeth, washing its delicious sharp sweet flavours around her mouth before swallowing it away. ‘So you and Elias,’ she said. ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘What was all what about?’

  ‘Come on. You looked fit to kill each other.’

  ‘He looked fit to kill me, you mean.’

  ‘If you like. I still want to know.’

  Oliver sighed. ‘It’s not a pretty story. I don’t come out of it very well.’

  ‘Thank god I was already sitting down,’ said Anna. ‘But you owe me more than that.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Then he blames me for wrecking his career and his marriage.’

  ‘Jesus. And did you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver gloomily. ‘I rather think I did.’

  TEN

  Elias stood in the gap between the fields and gazed down at the ground beneath his feet. His duty was clear enough. He needed to alert Frank Mason to the possibility of human remains being buried here so that he and his team could get to work at once. But the remains were at least several weeks old, which reduced the urgency; and while Mason was a fine Crime Scene Manager, he was also a protégé of Trevor Wharton, assigned this case in part to keep an eye on Elias and report back. Report this back and Wharton would likely use it as an excuse to abandon his thankless Grimsby knife hunt and take over here instead.

  That would have been okay with Elias if Wharton had been a good detective. Unfortunately, he was barely a detective at all. His investigation technique was to hold numerous press conferences at which he’d list all the resources he was committing while hinting gnomically at promising leads. Then he’d sit back and hope that something turned up for which he could take the credit.

  Elias wasn’t having that. He was invested in this case now. He meant to solve it.

  He returned to the farmhouse for a glass of water to wash away the lingering taste of butyric acid. WPC Quinn was still at the kitchen table, gabbing away with PC Rodgers and the Scene of Crime team. Mason toasted Elias rather sheepishly with his mug. ‘They never came anywhere near here,’ he said, to excuse himself. ‘And Ms Warne said we were to help ourselves to anything we wanted. So we thought a coffee for the road…’

  ‘For the road?’

  ‘Another stabbing, would you believe? In Grantham, this time. Wharton said to call him if you had a problem.’

  Elias gave a grunt. Wharton knew he’d never call. And it suited him just fine. ‘Anything I should know?’

  ‘It’ll be in my report,’ said Mason. ‘But basically no. No fingerprints, no hairs, no DNA. Only those bootprints.’

  ‘Any idea what they were looking for?’

  ‘We searched the barn pretty thoroughly,’ volunteered one of Mason’s team. ‘Maybe they’d already found it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Elias. ‘Maybe they had.’ He waited for them to rinse out their mugs and leave, then turned to Quinn. ‘You finished Anna Warne’s statement yet?’

  ‘Check your email,’ she said.

  ‘Great. Then thanks for everything. I’ll call if I need anything else.’

  ‘We can go?’ she frowned. ‘All of us?’

  ‘All of you,’ he said. ‘Though not a word about last night, please. Can’t be having a media circus. And if you could arrange for a car at the top of the drive…?’

  Her puzzled look cleared. She suspected what he was up to. A sharp one, that. Worth keeping an eye on. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to it myself.’

  He waited for her to leave, ran himself a glass of water. The cheesy taste still lingered, however, if only in his mind, so he put on the kettle and checked the biscuit tin. A pair of custard creams had somehow survived the general carnage. He took them out with his coffee. The barn was a cavernous tall affair with creosoted slat walls, a pitched roof of terracotta tiles and double doors at either end, large enough for the tractor, which was parked alongside the ditch digger.

  Two ploughs, a harrow, a seeder, a front-loader and various other attachments were lined up against the walls, as were a pair of rakes, a wide-headed stiff-bristled broom and several sacks of fertiliser up on wooden pallets. The brick floor was rutted from decades of wear and tear, and covered by the pebbles of dried mud that got everywhere at this time of year, and which would have made it a nightmare to search for anything small.

  No way had those two intruders found what they’d been looking for. If they had, they’d have left before Anna Warne could have spotted them. So then. What was it? And what had made it worth taking such a crazy risk for? Perhaps it had some great personal or intrinsic value. More likely, though, it was incriminating in some way.

  Elias had enough respect for Mason and his team to know that they’d have found it had it been lying openly on the floor. But equally those men must have had good reason for looking in the places they had. He had a good idea now why they’d been out in the fields, which offered a clue as to why they’d searched in here too. Because every crime had been committed before. A few years on the force taught you that. And this particular crime, he strongly suspected, had been committed half an hour’s drive south of here, on the Norfolk side of the Great Ouse – though surely elsewhere too.

  He finished his second custard cream, set down his empty mug and walked over to the side door at which Anna Warne had been standing when she’d been spotted by the two intruders. Then he paced out the distance to the other side of the tractor. A little over ten yards. In bad light and with uncertain footing, it would have taken a man in reasonable condition at most two or three seconds to cross. If they’d set off at once, and Anna had been as badly hampered by her gumboots and waterproofs as she’d said, falling in the courtyard and dropping her torch and keys, then they should have caught her easily before she got inside the house. The implication, therefore, was that they hadn’t set off at once. They’d attended to something else first.

  Elias meant to find out what.

  ELEVEN

  The tractor lumbered on ahead, spewing out exhaust smoke of a thickness and colour that normally announced a new pope. Anna gazed at Oliver in consternation. ‘You wrecked Elias’s career and his marriage?’

  ‘Can we not talk about something else, please?’ begged Oliver.

  ‘He’s investigating my uncle’s murder. So no.’

  ‘Oh god. Okay.’ He took a breath then bit his teeth together. ‘So I guess it started about two or three years ago now. Your mate’s boss at the time was a guy called Colin Vaughn. Very highly rated, liked by everyone, and pretty much a shoo-in to run Lincolnshire’s Special Operations Unit when the old Chief Constable retired and everyone moved up a notch. So anyway I was working at the time on a story about this biker gang suspected of running much of Lincolnshire’s drug trade. I got tipped off to a country pub where a lot of deals apparently went down, so we set up there for some undercover filming. With me so far?’

  ‘It’s hardly War and Peace.’

  ‘This is still only chapter one, to be fair.’

  The tractor turned finally into a field, only to reveal why it had been going quite so slowly, for a pair of novice cyclists were wobbling all over the road ahead, forcing Oliver to slow straight back down again, scowling impatiently.

  ‘You were telling me about Elias’s boss,’ prompted Anna.

  ‘Yes. Okay. So there we were, in this pub, and guess who shows up on our second night?’

  ‘This guy Vaughn, I assume?’

  ‘Yeah. He was out for dinner with his wife and another couple, so it all looked kosher enough. Only he went to the loos at the same time as one of the bikers. Then it happened again. You can hardly lock him up for that, right? But it made him worth checking out. Especially as there’d been rumours for years of some kind of mole inside Lincolnshire Police. Anyway, the harder we looked, the worse it got. He was forever popping in and out of bookies, for one thing. Not huge bets, but enough to make it clear he had a problem. Plus he’d been at school with a member of this gang. I filmed the two of them conferring together in the park one afternoon. Nothing definitive, but enough to mention it to my boss when he asked me for an update, and for him to pass on to our Chairman, who happened to be golfing buddies with the Chief Constable. Anyway, it’s a week or so later. News suddenly breaks that Vaughn’s house has been searched and ten grand in used notes has been found beneath his floorboards, along with a baggie of cocaine. So it’s handcuffs time for Mr Vaughn.’

  ‘Quite right too,’ said Anna.

  ‘He claimed in his trial that he’d been investigating this gang on the quiet precisely because there was a mole. He claimed that they must have realised this and so had set him up. The jury didn’t buy it, not least because of the evidence we were able to give the prosecution. The night of his conviction, we went large on the story. Our part in bringing down the bent cop. Then we all went out to the pub to celebrate. We’d already sunk a few when your mate comes steaming in. Marches up to our table and accuses me flat out of having framed an innocent man. And you know that thing that sometimes happens, when you’re chuffed with yourself over whatever, only to realise you’ve screwed up instead?’

  ‘God, yes,’ said Anna.

  ‘It was his anger that got to me. It was too righteous to be fake. So of course I got defensive. I said maybe he was only mad because he’d been on the take too. He invited me outside to discuss it further. I bottled it. Honest to god, the one time in my life. And not because I was scared, exactly. My heart just wasn’t in it. It isn’t, somehow, when you fear you’re in the wrong.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Though I was a bit scared, to be fair. The bastard did box for England.’

  Anna glanced at him in surprise. ‘He did?’

  ‘Come on. You don’t end up looking like a blue-period Picasso from too many frames of snooker. Anyway, word got out about our confrontation. Policemen can’t treat members of the public like that, at least not in front of a table full of journalists. I didn’t press charges, of course, but it still shredded his prospects. He was enough of an embarrassment to Lincolnshire police that they tried to get him to transfer out, but he dug his heels in. Fair enough. This is where his kids are.’

  ‘And his marriage? You wrecked that too?’

  ‘Oh god. This makes me look even worse, if possible. So it’s maybe a fortnight later. I’m in the supermarket, doing the weekly.’ They reached at last the turning for the hotel, headed down its gravelled drive to the fork into its car park, pulled up in an empty bay. ‘This woman comes up to me. Happens all the time when you’re on TV. You nod along to the nice things they say, thank them for watching, maybe pose for a selfie. Sometimes they’ll hit on you too. I’m usually pretty careful about that. Lincoln’s a small town, and I’ve already got a bit of a reputation, for some unaccountable reason. But this woman is sexy as hell, and she’s giving me the works. Fluttery big eyelashes, top buttons undone, pressing her chest against my arm. What can I tell you? I’m a bloke. A nice bit of cleavage and my brain turns to mush.’

  ‘Ah. Don’t tell me. Mrs Elias.’

  ‘As it turns out, yes. Not that I knew it at the time. She’d taken off her ring and she introduced herself by her maiden name. But obviously she knew who I was, and about my bust-up with her husband. Everyone did. It had been all over the local papers. She was just getting her own back on him.’

  ‘What for?’

  Oliver grimaced. ‘I want to be clear about this. I didn’t even know she was married to him at the time, let alone that they had kids.’

  Anna nodded. ‘A girl and a boy.’

  ‘That’s the thing. There used to be two boys. Their eldest fell into the swimming pool while Elias was supposed to be watching him.’

  ‘Oh hell,’ said Anna.

  ‘Yeah. And this was soon enough afterwards that everything was still raw. Anyway, I didn’t learn that until much later. That afternoon, we went back to my place. We had fun. Enough that she took to visiting once or twice a week. She’d get her hair done and wear some sexy new outfit. It was pretty obvious in retrospect that she wanted him to find out. He is a detective, after all. Anyway, she got her wish. I walked her down to her car one afternoon only to find him waiting. There was quite the blow-up, as you can imagine. And he blamed me rather than her, accusing me of picking her up in revenge for him coming into my local that night and showing me up in front of my crew.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him the truth?’

  ‘Never had the chance, to be honest,’ said Oliver. ‘Anyway, my hands were hardly clean, were they? I knew something was up. There was such sadness in her. I was just enjoying myself too much to find out why. Plus frankly I was worried for her. You should have seen how angry he was. Better all round if he blamed me. Broken marriages are brutal enough already, especially on the kids.’

  ‘How noble of you.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. I’m a saint.’

  A tall, thin, fifty-something blonde woman in a swirling blue skirt and a battered green Barbour jacket came striding by at that moment, before vanishing into the hotel. ‘Penny Scott,’ murmured Anna. ‘She and her husband own this place.’

  ‘Is she the town gossip, by any chance?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Anna Warne books herself a room and she comes straight over. Ten gets you twenty she asks about the latest from the farm.’

  ‘Ten gets me twenty?’ scoffed Anna, popping her seatbelt. ‘Ten gets me a hundred, and maybe we can deal.’

  TWELVE

  When León de Bruin had bought Fenton Airfield out of bankruptcy, it had been for its large plot of prime Lincolnshire land, perfect for a new housing development. True, it hadn’t yet been rezoned, but he was a patient, connected and wealthy man, confident of getting that changed. As it had happened, however, the business had owned several other assets, including a pair of light aircraft: a Piper Cherokee for training new pilots, and a Twin Otter for skydiving and parachute jumping. Being the kind of man who liked to squeeze a lemon to its last drop of juice, and ever keen on new experiences, de Bruin had hired the airfield’s former owner – an ex-RAF flight lieutenant named Victor Unwin – both to be his pilot and to teach him how to fly. He’d loved it from the start, circling proudly around his Tudor mansion and estate, buzzing low over Welbourn and Leadenham to repay the residents there for their endless complaints about his redevelopment plans, or circling the county to admire his housing empire and whet his appetite for more.