From behind the editor’s screen a series of sharp sniffs erupted.
Garry had suffered from meningitis as a child and in order to give him some semblance of the balance the disease had destroyed the doctors had hit upon the sonic shoes: the regular audible feedback helping him to stay upright. But disorientation was part of Garry’s character, and even if he stayed on his feet he’d normally find some other way of falling down.
‘Got the feature,’ he said, dropping his notebook onto his desk and putting his feet up. ‘Could be fifteen job losses in the short term – twenty-five if it closes for good. End of a family business etc., etc.’ Garry grinned, happy wallowing in someone else’s misfortune.
‘Drink?’ Dryden asked, standing and closing down the PC. ‘How about Jerry’s?’
Garry, pleased they were boycotting the usual drunken post-deadline bash in The Fenman with Charlie Bracken, grabbed the full-length leather coat he had worn throughout that stifling summer. His personal hygiene was what the Americans like to call ‘an issue’.
‘On the mobile,’ shouted Dryden, leading the way.
5
Jerry’s was Ely’s only nightclub, a refurbished former bingo hall just off Cambridge Road. At Christmas and on Friday nights it employed a solitary bouncer in ill-fitting DJ, but the rest of the time the last thing Jerry’s needed was someone to turn people away. The interior was painted blackout black, principally to disguise tatty furnishings. A neon sign outside flashed ‘J rr ’s Nites ot’. A blackboard advertised live Premiership football and a ‘happy hour’ from 5.00pm to 8.30pm nightly.
Dryden bought Garry a bottle of industrial-strength lager which he drank by the neck, and a pernod and blackcurrant for himself, insisting that the barman add the cocktail umbrella advertised on the poster behind the counter at the inclusive price of £1.80. They took seats by the pool table and watched as two teenagers wordlessly played out a game. The juke box finished playing something contemporary Dryden didn’t recognize and then fell silent, the scattered customers unwilling to invest further cash. Beside the clash of the pool balls there was silence; it was 4.29pm on a Thursday, pay day for most of Jerry’s customers. Later on things would quieten down.
Garry fingered his crotch and lit a cigarette, the exhaled smoke catching the spotlight beams focused on the pool table. His acne, in full battle formation, shone under the harsh lighting. Dryden heard the distant sound of the cathedral bell tolling the half hour and stood, putting a pound coin in the juke box, from which he selected ten records, six from the golden oldies section after first picking four at random from this year’s hits. This way he would be sitting down before his own embarrassing choices came on. With luck, another punter would be at the juke box by then.
Dryden inhaled some alcohol and thought about the body in the PoW camp tunnel. He thought about his dream: the compression of the sand around him, the grains in his mouth. How had the victim died? And who was the killer? It seemed certain that he had been crawling into the camp. Had his killer been waiting for him, or attempting to escape?
The door opened, admitting a wedge of spectral autumnal light which illuminated a smashed bottle in a corner by a one-armed bandit. And in walked Russell Flynn trying to look old enough to buy a drink. Russell was one of Dryden’s contacts, the provider of a string of lowlife tipoffs from the town’s notorious Jubilee council estate. Russell had been born on the Jubilee, Ely’s answer to Moss Side, a rabbit warren of terraced council houses enlivened by the odd wrecked car.
Dryden’s cat-green eyes followed him to the bar. The teenager had bright red hair, innocent freckles and teeth with gaps, none of which had prevented him from getting two years’ community service after pilfering the contents of an entire row of allotment sheds on the edge of town. The manhunt to track this super-criminal down had been aided by the discovery at the scene of Russell’s coat, hung on a hook in the first hut, where he had taken it off in anticipation of working up a sweat as he loaded the pilfered tools and assorted hardware. Inside the coat was Russell’s wallet. Inside that was his benefit card and provisional driving licence. It was a crime of such baffling ineptitude it even made it on to the ‘and finally’ section of the local TV news. The magistrates were less amused, and but for some entirely fictitious story about his father dying of cancer Russell would have spent the rest of the year in Bedford prison.
Russell had met this setback to his career as a criminal mastermind with typical aplomb by attempting to mar his juvenile looks with a dragon tattoo emblazoned on his neck, rising from a basket of flames which matched his hair. Bright was what Russell wasn’t, but he was skint, and Dryden’s occasional fiver for information received was much sought after.
Dryden bought Russell a double Southern Comfort and lemonade, thankful again that he didn’t need The Crow’s pitiful wages to rent a flat. His boat, PK129, stood on the edge of town at Barham’s Dock, a floating bolthole with a mooring fee of £25 a year. It left enough to live on, in a kind of desultory way, while Humph bolstered Dryden’s fares with a series of lucrative late-night bookings, mainly ferrying bar staff home from the clubs in Newmarket and Cambridge. They were a small-scale black-market economy.
Russell sat tinkering with an already empty glass. ‘Nighthawks,’ said Dryden. ‘Heard anything?’
The first of Dryden’s selection came over the speakers. ‘Jesus,’ said Russell. ‘Who put that crap on?’ All eyes turned to a teenager in immaculate trendy T-shirt and jeans making a selection at the juke box.
Dryden shook his head at the inability of some people to stay abreast of modern cultural developments.
‘They lift stuff off these digs, yeah?’ said Russell finally. ‘R. K. Logicial, innit?’
‘Heard anything local? How do they shift the stuff?’
Russell shrugged. ‘It’s a London crowd what do it. I s’pose they have people local too – but I ain’t ’eard. It’s well organized, like hare coursing. If they need to shift the stuff they have fences – like for burglary. For that kind of stuff you’d need to get it to auctions, or sell it private. I’ve heard some goes abroad.’
Dryden wondered how much Russell would know about crime when he was old enough to vote.
‘And where would I look for a fence like that, Russell?’ said Dryden, putting a fiver under the 16-year-old’s glass.
‘You can forget the Jubilee – it’s all cheap stuff. TVs, DVDs, CD players, anything ’lectric. This is totally different.’
There was a silence as they watched Garry slicing a pool shot so badly he left a deep scuff mark in the green baize.
‘Well?’ said Dryden, suddenly tired of the week.
Russell ran a finger around the sticky top of his glass. ‘You could try Alder’s.’
‘The undertakers?’
‘Sure. Old Man Alder’s been in the game for years – my dad used to use him.’ Russell’s father was currently holidaying on the Isle of Wight, postcards care of HMP Parkhurst.
‘They used to do house clearances, when they had a stiff. Body out the front door, heirlooms out the back. They’re always selling stuff – most of it legit. Alder used to run auctions as well. Now it’s more – discreet.’ Russell liked that word, so he grinned, revealing some green vegetable matter clinging to one incisor.
Dryden heard the cathedral bell toll the hour and he thought of Laura in her hospital bed at The Tower. Later, he would visit, as he always did. The tiredness increased, fuelled by the cocktail.
‘I guess I should have a look round Alder’s yard then,’ he said.
Russell stood, conversation over. Clearly he charged by the minute.
Dryden considered his miniature umbrella. It was too early, he argued, to visit Laura. He feared long visits, the possibility that he might say what he sometimes thought: that he’d rather they’d both died that night in Harrimere Drain, rather than having to endure this carapace of a life, a shell in which he lived on one side of consciousness while she existed on the other. He was half-alive, tied to
a woman who was half-dead.
He bought himself another drink and sat in the shadows watching Garry lose at pool. He thought about himself, about his nightmare self, dying in the tunnel on the beach, and about the PoW, lying in his tunnel for maybe sixty years.
‘Someone should care,’ he said out loud, so that Garry nodded in agreement to cover up his own embarrassment.
The archaeologists clearly saw the discovery as an inconvenience, a temporary setback in their attempts to uncover the Anglo-Saxon chariot burial. The police were little better, convinced a man who had lain unmourned for more than half a century could go quietly to a fresh grave. Dryden sank his cocktail and rang Humph on the mobile. Five minutes later he was outside in the smog, a wraithlike figure on the pavement edge, waiting for the Capri’s sickly orange headlights to emerge from the gloom.
6
Humph brought the Capri to a halt by a lone poplar, its black trunk reflecting the cold white light of the moon. Out on the fen, beyond the city, the evening was clear and brittle, the sky a planetarium turning slowly overhead, the vanished sun an amber smudge to the west. Dryden considered their destination gloomily, a line of buildings broke the horizon like an Atlantic convoy. The road sign, pointing drunkenly down into the black earth, read simply ‘Ten Mile Bank’. It looked like the kind of place that couldn’t afford a village idiot.
They were just twenty-five minutes from the centre of Ely, but they’d travelled back decades in time. A vestigial mist lay in the Forty Foot Drain, obscuring any small boats tied up by the village wharf. On top of the flood bank ran half a mile of intermittent civilization: tied cottages, a Methodist chapel, a supplier of tractors and heavy agricultural gear, and a featureless brick working-men’s club with a neon sign that didn’t flicker because it didn’t work. The club was subsidized by a large farming conglomerate which owned everything you could see, including the horizon.
At the end of the bank there was a T-junction where the village’s only street met a B road. Set back from the junction was the biggest local employer, a sugar beet factory dominated by three 120-foot metal cylinders you could see from the coast thirty miles to the north, trailing white smoke across the sky like the Queen Mary entering New York harbour. The moon caught the smoke now, three great plumes of spectral light obscuring the stars lying low along the edge of the distant sea.
Humph swung the cab into a lay-by opposite the factory gates and pulled up outside a roadside café. The temperature was falling fast, the sun long gone in the west. The café’s exterior was a brutal example of post-war utilitarianism: a single-storey concrete façade with a lone flourish – a carved stone block showing an Italianate scene of a Roman ruin overgrown by exotic flowers, below the just-discernible stencilled words Il Giardino – The Garden. Steam fogged its metal-framed windows, obscuring the interior.
‘Usual?’ said Dryden, climbing out and not waiting for an answer.
He’d known Humph for five years now, but it seemed more like a lifetime: a wasted lifetime. Since the crash Dryden had not driven a car, haunted by the claustrophobia and the panic which had swept over him as they’d slipped beneath the waters of Harrimere Drain. Humph had ferried him about in those weeks after the accident, waiting patiently outside The Tower Hospital on the outskirts of town while he sat by Laura’s bedside.
Eventually Dryden had taken the job on The Crow and dumped his Fleet Street career. Laura’s coma, the latest example of the newly diagnosed Locked In Syndrome, had dragged on for weeks, to months, and into years. Humph, meanwhile, had effortlessly evolved into Dryden’s informal chauffeur. Daytimes were spent dozing in the cab, but for Dryden’s occasional travel demands. They spent a lot of time going nowhere, but they were company for each other, like book ends.
So no need to wait for Humph’s reply. Three fried eggs, six rashers of bacon, one ciabatta sandwich. Sensible eating rules, which Humph made occasional efforts to enforce, did not apply after dark.
The interior of the café was a surprise for visitors. The tables had checked cloths and Chianti bottles held guttered candles. The walls were testimony to the impossible dream that Ten Mile Bank, and its disparate community of far-flung farms and smallholdings, could support an Italian restaurant. Pictures of Venice hung in gilt frames, plastic bunches of grapes decorated the beams along with cascades of garlic and chillies. A high shelf held a line of wine bottles. Dryden loved the place, chiefly because it reminded him of where he had met Laura, in her father’s north London Italian café.
Like a thousand other institutions attempting to introduce the British to fine food, Il Giardino had long ago resorted to the lucrative trade of supplying the Great British Breakfast. The counter was standard greasy spoon: Formica stained by a generation of spilt tea. And while a chalkboard offered spaghettial aglio, lasagne verde and Bolognese, an array of frying pans indicated that the all-day breakfast was indeed the best seller at £4.95, with tea and two slices of fried bread. Humph’s ‘usual’ was, Dryden noted with satisfaction, already bubbling on the grill.
The man behind the counter was always behind the counter. Dryden called him Pepe, as everyone did. Pepe Roma was, Dryden judged, in his mid to late thirties. Italian film-idol looks had been severely marred by a decade frying food under artificial lights and a lifetime of turnip-nipping Fen winters. He swept a scrubbed hand back through already thinning jet-black hair. The curve of his skull caught the neon light above the grill.
‘Dryden,’ he said. ‘What can I get you?’ Dryden was an erratic and eccentric eater, usually preferring to snack from provisions squirrelled away in his coat pockets.
He considered the chalkboard but let his eyes rest on the ancient, but still gleaming, espresso machine.
‘Corretto?’
Pepe went below the counter and reappeared armed with a murderous looking bottle of grappa. ‘You don’t drive, eh?’
There was only one other customer, a lorry driver with forearms like rolled pork joints, who sat reading yesterday’s Sun over a plate wiped clean with dunked bread.
Pepe looked at Dryden with eternally disappointed eyes: ‘Focaccia?’
Dryden was one of the few daytime customers who could be inveigled into eating something Italian. Usually he bought freshly baked bread, olives and cheese for his regular late-night meal at The Tower.
‘Sure. Join me for a drink?’
Pepe brought the bread over. It was a rich nutty brown and still warm. Dryden broke it and offered his host some. They ate in silence while Dryden slurped the corretto and Pepe sipped from a small glass of grappa. Outside, through an oval Dryden had cleared in the steam, Humph ate at the wheel of the Capri – a picture of manic concentration.
They talked about Humph’s great loves, his two daughters, and Ipswich Town FC. Dryden waited for the conversation to lapse into easy silence.
‘And Laura?’ asked Pepe.
Dryden saw his chance. ‘Progress is slow. She wants to eat here one day. Perhaps it will be soon, who knows?’ He sipped his coffee: ‘A story – today. They found a body – just the bones – in a tunnel under the old PoW camp. Your father, he was a prisoner there?’
A wooden shield on the wall, which Dryden had noticed the first time they had stopped at Il Giardino almost three years earlier, was set against a background of the Italian flag above the legend ‘Association of Italian Prisoners of War. Ely Branch’.
‘Sure. Papà Marco was captured in the war, early on, in North Africa. They shipped him to Southampton, then by rail to Ely. That was 1941 by then. He was interned in the PoW camp, then released with the rest, at least most of the rest, to work on the fields. After the war he saved and bought this.’ He raised a hand in mock triumph, looking round at the restaurant. His head dropped as he moved a plastic tomato sauce bottle like a chess piece on the table cloth.
‘But why stay? I don’t understand. I guess I’d have been on the first boat back to – where was it? Venice?’
‘Not really. Mestre. It’s on the coast to the north. You w
ouldn’t like Mestre, Dryden – it is Venice’s workshop, that is what they say. An industrial city, without beauty.’
Dryden considered the slate-blue landscape under the moon he could see through the oval in the steam. ‘But better than this?’
‘Not then. I don’t know much but Dad talked about it a bit, before he died. There was revolution in the north, turmoil, the Right fighting the Left, no one in the middle. There was no respect for soldiers, there is still no respect for soldiers,’ he said, glancing at a picture on the wall showing a young man in a uniform at a village café table.
‘Some went back but the news wasn’t good – no jobs, and more fighting. And anyway, by then people like Dad had been accepted here, had friends, and were working on the land. Even when the soldiers came back there was work.’
‘And romance?’
‘For some. Dad had met Mum at home. But yes, others married local girls. Some of them did it pretty quick before the competition got back from the war.’
They laughed together and drank. Dryden saw that Humph had succumbed to an early evening nap.
‘They meet then, the survivors, the ones who stayed behind?’
‘Yup. There’s the association. They’ve got a website, the lot. Dad founded it. There’s a meeting here next week – Monday lunchtime – always Monday lunchtime – the last Monday in the month. You should come – there’s a story. They want to build a memorial to Dad. He loved his home country, yes, but not like the rest.’
Dryden felt the effects of the grappa trickling through his brain. ‘How did he love his country?’
‘From a distance. He said we’d left. That was it. We had a new life and there was nothing sadder than a patriotic expatriate. We are Italians and proud of that, but Italy is not our country now – this is our country.’
The Moon Tunnel Page 4