And then it had changed, for the first time, a month ago. Childhood, summer, on the beach at Lowestoft. His parents, distant figures by the beach hut they always rented for the two weeks after the harvest. He had been five, perhaps six, and enticed away from his modest castles by the bigger children playing down by the waterline. They’d dug a pit, the base of which was black with shadow. Beside it, an identical one, and between them the tunnel. He’d watched, hypnotized by the children crawling through. Then they caught his eye and he looked wildly for an adult nearby who might step in and save him. But his parents gazed skywards in their deckchairs. So he’d gone down, feeling sick, egged on by the girls who said he shouldn’t.
Even now, in the overheated cab, he could feel the damp sand around him, the distant sounds of the beach growing dimmer as he crawled forward to the smiling faces by the tunnel exit.
Then came the crump of the falling sand above, the sudden weight on his back, and the sand in his mouth as he tried to scream.
He’d wake screaming, his rescue postponed, screaming with his mouth full of sand. Even now the sweat broke out, trickling down by his nose towards his dry lips.
‘Claustrophobia,’ he said, kicking out his heels in irritation at the cramped space inside the Capri: the passenger seat had rusted solid in a forward position, radically reducing the leg room.
Out of the mist loomed a signpost with one sagging arm: ‘California’, the name of the farm which had once covered the site. The farmhouse and outbuildings had been demolished in the early years of the war, opening up the space for a PoW camp. The area was dry, and good for fruit trees, the clay preserving it from the damp, black layers of fenland peat just beyond the site perimeter.
A year earlier builders, ripping up the old PoW huts and their concrete bases to make way for a housing development, had found a tiny amulet amongst the rubble. It was a figure of a charioteer, beautifully executed in a soft, yellow gold. They’d tried to hush the find up, fearing it would wreck their timetable, but Dryden’s half-hearted band of local contacts had, for once, come up trumps. Taking half a whisper and a series of ‘no comments’ Dryden had written a story in The Crow headlined ‘Secret Treasure Unearthed at Ely Dig’, and the council had put a stop to building for six months, later extended to a year as more was uncovered: a gold pin and a silver pommel from a sword amidst a ton of broken Anglo-Saxon pottery.
Over a newsless summer Dryden had drummed up various experts to muse on the chances of finding a fabulous treasure in the clay of the Isle of Ely, perhaps to rival the famous Suffolk Viking burial site at Sutton Hoo. Dryden, who had an eye for detail even if the other one was largely focused on fiction, had supplied plenty of copy for Fleet Street. He’d stretched the truth but never consistently beyond breaking point. The nationals had finally moved on, leaving him with the watching brief, so he’d added a visit to the dig office to his necklace of weekly calls to places which just might give him a story in a town where a car backfiring can warrant a radio interview with the driver.
Humph’s Capri clattered through the site gates towards the dig office – a Portakabin flanked by two blue portable loos, all pale outlines in the shifting white skeins of mist. A radio mast, rigged up to provide a broadband internet link for the office, disappeared into the cloud which crowded down on the site. An off-white agricultural marquee, like some wayward beached iceberg, covered an all-weather work area. Here pottery and other artefacts were cleaned and categorized by the diggers if bad weather had forced them off the site.
The cab’s exhaust pipe hit a rut with a clang like a cow bell and Humph brought the Capri to a satisfying halt with a short skid. Dryden got out quickly, as he always did, in a vain attempt to disassociate himself from his mode of transport. The Capri was a rust bucket, sporting a Jolly Roger from the aerial and a giant red nose fixed to the radiator grille. It was like travelling with a circus.
Humph killed the engine and silence descended like a consignment of cotton wool. Clear of town, visibility in the smog was better, but still under fifty yards. The site was lit by four halogen floodlights at the corners, an echo of the original guard towers of the PoW camp. The lights were on in the gloom, but failed to penetrate with any force to ground level. The Portakabin was open, and inside a neon light shone down on a map table on which were some shards of pottery.
‘Professor Valgimigli?’ called Dryden in a loud voice damped down by the mist. Nothing.
Luckily Dryden had a plan of the site in his head: the archaeologists had dug two trenches which met like the cross-hairs of a gunsight at the centre of the old PoW camp. The trenches avoided the concrete bases of the twenty-four original prisoners’ huts – six of which lay within each quarter of the site. The Portakabin stood at the southern end of the main north-south trench. Dryden surveyed the ditch ahead, which seemed to be collecting, and condensing, the mist. He found the top of a short ladder, took three steps down and jumped the rest, effortlessly pulverizing a shard of sixth-century pottery as he landed.
Light levels in the trench were very low, the mist denser, and he felt his flesh goosebump as he walked slowly forward straining to find a recognizable shape in the chaos of the shifting air. Disorientated by the lack of visual landmarks he tried to estimate visibility, but looking down realized he could barely see his feet. The acrid mist made the back of his throat ache, and he covered his mouth with his hand as he edged forward.
Ahead of him, funnelled along the trench, he could hear the susurration of the distant pine trees, and then something else: the brittle tap-tap of a digger’s trowel on clay and pebbles. He moved north and the sound grew suddenly clearer, preternaturally close, almost – it seemed – in his own head. He coughed self-consciously, and suddenly a figure in grey outline stood before him.
‘Dryden. Welcome to the kingdom of the mist.’
‘Professore,’ said Dryden, recognizing the voice of Azeglio Valgimigli, the academic leading the dig, an international collaboration between Cambridge, Lucca, Prague and Copenhagen. He was a deeply cultured man, a facet of character that bewitched Dryden, who was not. But there was something of the charlatan about him as well, something a little too mannered in the precise academic movements of the slim hands, and the perfectly manicured fingers. Dryden imagined him working in a cool, tiled museum expertly caring for the artefacts in glass-fronted exhibition cabinets which, like him, had been arranged for effect. He was lean, but slightly too short to carry off the half-moon professorial glasses, and the deep, terracotta, Tuscan tan. Dryden knew his age thanks to a press release issued when the dig began. The Italian was thirty-nine but looked older, the academic manners slightly archaic, the constant attempts at gravitas strained.
His clothes, although caked in dust, were the finest: moleskin trousers, a leather shirt, and a faded silk bandanna, the last an affectation which made Dryden wince. To combat the Fen mist he wore a thermal vest, but even this was a fashionable matt black.
Dryden, who made a point of making friends with people he didn’t like, greeted him warmly with a handshake.
‘What today?’ he asked, peering into the hole Professor Valgimigli had dug in the trench face.
‘Today, Philip, we are – what you say? Up page?’
Dryden had given the archaeologist a brief drunken tutorial on the various gradations of newspaper story: from splash to filler, from page lead to down page. The Italian had been enticed into The Fenman bar opposite The Crow’s offices after the finding of the silver pommel – a conversation which had resulted in the headline ‘Royal Sword Found at Ely Dig’. Which was a shame, as it was almost certainly something else, but Valgimigli was unable to demand a correction owing to the confusing effects of six pints of dark mild and a fervent desire for publicity of any kind. The story had, after all, got him a page lead in the Daily Telegraph, complete with a flattering picture.
‘Up page’ was encouraging, but Dryden didn’t trust the academic’s news judgement.
‘Can I see?’
Valg
imigli crouched down on the damp clay and folded back a piece of tarpaulin. Against the dark green material the archaeologist had arranged what looked like six identical rusted carburettor rings.
‘I found them by this.’ Valgimigli picked up a curved shard of pottery decorated with blue smudges.
‘Note the design,’ said the Professor. Dryden studied the pot. Heads, perhaps? Pumpkins? Banjos? Was there anything duller than old pottery, he asked himself. Yes, old carburettor rings.
‘It’s a bull’s head,’ said Valgimigli, and the smile that spread across his face was a living definition of the word smug.
‘And these?’ said Dryden, pointing at the rings.
‘They don’t look like much, do they?’ asked the archaeologist, not waiting for Dryden to confirm this judgement before adding, ‘They’re rein rings.’
‘Like for horses?’ asked Dryden.
‘Chariots,’ said Valgimigli triumphantly.
‘So?’ Dryden had bright green eyes, like the worn glass you can pick up on a stony beach. When he knew he had a story, they caught the light.
The archaeologist covered up the rings. Dryden whistled, knowing just how annoying that can be. ‘Chariots. Like Boudicca. Charlton Heston.’
‘If you like,’ said Valgimigli, letting him build any story he wanted.
‘I like,’ thought Dryden, disliking him even more for underestimating him so much.
They looked up as a shadow fell across the trench. The crew had appeared, and stood in grey silhouette against the white sky, ghosts on parade. Dryden had got to know them over the months, Professor Valgimigli’s ‘muscle’ – a team of six postgraduate students from Cambridge. The other senior archaeologists made only occasional visits to the site. Valgimigli ran the show, Lucca having provided the biggest single contribution to the costs.
There were five of them. ‘Josh has found something, Professor,’ said a woman Dryden knew as Jayne. He noted with appreciation the curve of the hips and the tight jeans, fashionably bleached. Her voice lacked confidence and held an edge of anxiety. ‘Something he shouldn’t have.’
The crew stepped back into the mist, leaving Valgimigli and Dryden to continue north to the central ‘crossroads’ where the two site trenches met. Here they turned east and continued for a further twenty-five yards. They reached a large hole dug in the north side of the trench. The diggers stood on the trench lip, while a large floodlight had been set up in the ditch floor aimed into the exposed cavity.
Valgimigli stopped. ‘Josh?’
‘Here, Professor.’ The voice was so close Dryden jumped, exhibiting the nerves which he generally hid so well. Josh backed out of the hole, dragging with him a set of trowels and a torch. Josh was tall, blond, and well-built, an ensemble undermined by heavy features and weak, grey eyes. ‘The light’s bad, but have a look.’ Dryden saw now that the hole was about two and a half feet square, and the sides were roughly panelled in what looked like old pine slats.
Valgimigli emerged and handed the torch to Dryden without a word. Dryden, faced with an unknown fear, did what most children do – he ran towards it, thrusting his torso into the hole and crawling forward three feet, bringing his trailing arm, which held the torch, around in front of his body.
His face was less than six inches from a skull. Its dull yellow surface caught the light like rancid butter. Only the top of the cranium was visible, with part of the brow exposed towards the ridges above the eye sockets. Around the head newly exposed earth trickled and shifted, a pebble dropping from the tunnel roof struck the exposed bone with a lifeless, hollow tap.
Dryden drew back a foot and saw that the head was not the only bone uncovered. The fingers of the right hand were clear of the earth as well, giving the impression that the skeleton was emerging from its grave. A snail, its shell threatening to topple it forward, descended the cranium towards the unseen jaws.
Dryden backed out, feeling with relief the caress of the cool moist air.
‘And that?’ said the archaeologist, kneeling down and using a long metal pointer to gently tap the exposed bones of the finger. Something man-made caught the light, something folded into the exposed finger bones. Valgimigli stepped into the opening and, reaching forward, lifted it gently out of the creeping earth. The rest of the digging crew had climbed down into the trench using a portable ladder and had laid a clear plastic artefact sheet on the floor. Valgimigli placed the object centrally with the kind of meticulous care reserved for a religious ikon. It was a folded wax pouch, the kind smokers use for tobacco but much larger, A4 size. The archaeologist prised it open using one gloved hand and the metal probe.
A string of milk-white pearls spilled onto the plastic sheet. The clasp, in silver, untarnished. Valgimigli put his hand into the envelope and extracted a large candlestick, also untarnished silver, with an inlaid ebony collar. He placed it beside the pearls.
‘It’s a tunnel,’ said Josh redundantly. He was standing against the opposite wall of the trench where a corresponding square of loose earth could be seen. ‘We sliced through it. The digger smoothed the clay across the opening – it looks like it had already collapsed.’
‘Killing our friend here,’ said Valgimigli. ‘The bones, Josh? What’s your guess?’
Josh, flattered by the question, thought for ten seconds. ‘Fifty years?’
Valgimigli nodded. ‘Indeed. A man in a tunnel on the site of an old PoW camp,’ he said. ‘A mystery solved, Dryden?’
Dryden put a knee on the tunnel edge and pressed his body to the side, allowing the floodlight’s white-blue beam to light the skeleton. The loose earth moved again, exposing the forehead and a shoulder blade, and a corroded ID disc hanging from the neck by what looked like a leather thong.
‘Hardly,’ he said, stepping back and taking the probe. ‘I’d say that was a bullet hole.’ He indicated a neat puncture in the cranium just below the brow. ‘The ID disc will help, of course. But there’s still another mystery here…’
Dryden waited for someone else to spot it too. In Valgimigli’s eyes he saw a flash of anger at being treated like a student.
Dryden took the metal pointer. ‘As I understand it the PoW camp huts are behind us over there…’ A few of the students peered into the thick mist to the north.
He waited another few seconds. ‘And the perimeter wire would have been over there,’ Dryden swung the pointer 180 degrees. ‘So our prisoner of war was on a very unusual journey indeed: he was crawling in, not out.’
3
Ely’s town dump was marked by a landfill site eighty feet high – the Fens’ own Tabletop Mountain. Seagulls circled it constantly, scavenging for food, and occasionally swooping to dive-bomb the tipper truck which climbed like some Sisyphean robot with its latest batch of rotting spouts, fish bones and lawn shavings. When the mists obscured it, as they had with depressing regularity that autumn, you still knew it was there: you could smell it from the town square.
At the foot of this man-made hill lived the little community which eked out an existence beside the line of bright green recycling bins and the wooden pens stacked with discarded electrical trash, fridges brimming with CFCs, and waste metal. Two caravans up on bricks provided office accommodation. The workforce lived in a scattering of post-war bungalows built on the surrounding fen: the far-flung hamlet of Dunkirk.
Humph pulled the Capri up short of the gates, aware that if he went inside he might never get his cab back. Dryden had an hour and a half before The Crow’s final deadline in which to phone over the story of the unearthed skeleton. He’d save the rein rings for The Crow’s sister paper, The Ely Express, which published on Tuesdays – there being little point burying a decent tale on a day when there was some real breaking news.
But the big story of the week was the town smog. The mist around the dump was off-white with patches of purple-brown, like diseased phlegm, and indicated clearly that the current theory as to the cause of polluted fog was probably right: pollution, the experts suspected, was leaking out of
the fifty-year-old landfill site and combining in a chemical cocktail with the autumn mists rising from the nearby river. Dryden had written a story ready for this week’s edition of The Crow, but he needed to get the latest as close to deadline as possible so he could do an update. Given that the smog affected almost all the paper’s dwindling band of 17,000 readers the story would probably make that week’s splash – despite the mysterious find on the site at California.
But first he needed to get the story of the discovered bones over to copy. A decade on Fleet Street had taught him to write fast, and write now. He’d chatted to the newsdesk in the shape of the The Crow’s reliably unreliable news editor Charlie Bracken: he wanted 350 words an hour ago, but in the circumstances twenty minutes would do. Dryden got him to read back some facts and figures about the site from one of the previous stories they’d run to help pad out the copy.
Then he got out of the cab, wrapping himself in his heavy black overcoat, closed his eyes, leant on the roof and told himself the story: ‘“The skeleton of a man was yesterday found in an old tunnel underneath Ely’s wartime PoW camp.” How does that sound?’ he asked, bending down to Humph’s level.
The cabbie tried a yawn, feeling the exciting onrush of his daily siesta. He didn’t answer, still aggrieved that he had been interrupted while trying to memorize the ten different types of Polish sausage helpfully listed on his language tape.
‘It’ll have to do,’ said Dryden, answering his own question, and punching The Crow’s switchboard number into his mobile. He braced himself for the ordeal of filing to Jean, the paper’s deaf copy-taker. His real problem was stretching the story to 350 words; he’d have to use up all the facts in the intro.
‘Right!’ bellowed Jean, when he got through. ‘Off you go.’
The skull and bones of a man were unearthed yesterday in an old tunnel underneath Ely’s one-time PoW camp.
The Moon Tunnel Page 2