The Moon Tunnel

by The Moon Tunnel

  ‘Busy lunchtime?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘Belter,’ said the barman, revealing a rich Ulster accent.

  ‘Diggers?’

  The barman consulted a railway station clock about five feet in diameter which hung on the far wall.

  ‘Does that say 6.30?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes and producing a slightly gritty sound. Dryden nodded. ‘Any time now, then. Clockwork.’

  Dryden let this remark hang in the air. He drank his beer while the barman emptied ashtrays and, with bucket and corks, began to clean the pipes. Less than a minute later they heard the front door open and a gaggle of excited voices filled the outer corridor. The digging team arrived, led by Jayne, the girl with the sensational hips. Dryden judged the moment and bought a round, securing a place in the circle at one of the heavy iron-legged tables. Josh, the digger who had found the body in the tunnel, sat next to the leggy blonde and wrapped an arm round her waist. The group broke open a collective packet of Golden Virginia, but Dryden could smell that on site they might have had different tastes – the aroma of cannabis clung to them.

  Josh sported a Save the Whales badge on a T-shirt emblazoned Glastonbury 2003 across his wide chest. The girl slumped in his arms, her breasts wandering under a loose-fitting hand-dyed top. Dryden liked misfits but this lot were annoyingly co-ordinated in their eccentricity: a troop of lost souls from a less materialistic decade who spent their days unearthing an even more distant past – a time before money existed.

  Josh was, Dryden had long ago decided, the nominal leader. His height, the obvious good looks, the carefully tousled hayrick of hair, all helped buttress a sense of power.

  ‘It’s about the body in the tunnel,’ said Dryden. ‘I just wanted to do a follow-up feature, now it looks as though we know who chummy was.’

  ‘There’s a name?’ said Jayne.

  ‘Yes. We think it’s the body of an Italian PoW – Serafino Amatista. But he didn’t try to escape when he was in the camp. He was going in – as we saw.’ Dryden swallowed a couple of inches of beer but noticed the rest had nearly drained their glasses. He bought refills and threw the barman in the round for luck.

  He returned and sat next to Josh, the rest of the diggers now lost in a conversation about Anglo-Saxon ritual. ‘Anyway, it’s clear this Amatista was going into the camp. By the end of the war the Italians were given a lot more freedom, as internees, replaced behind the wire by the Germans. The Italians were moved out on the land – to some of the larger farms which could organize the labour. There was one at Buskeybay – on the Lark – my family still talk about them. They were popular, friendly, good workers. Some of them stayed.’

  Josh nodded, playing with Jayne’s ear. ‘Look,’ said Dryden. ‘Can you tell me exactly what happened that morning – the day you found him.’

  The digger took his time making a roll-up. ‘Well, I’d been working on that stretch of the trench – the east lane we call it, running off the central crossroads out towards the old camp perimeter and the pine trees. I was walking the bounds – that’s like checking the edge of my area of excavation. You have to make sure nothing has contaminated the site – animals overnight, water damage, whatever. The dogs had gone, Valgimigli was worried, so we all had to check the site. The fog was really bad so I had to get right up close to the edge of the trench, and that’s when I found the tunnel.’

  ‘Right where we found the body?’

  ‘No. Not at first. I found the other side first. We’d cut through the tunnel, so it was in the walls of the trench on both sides. We hadn’t seen it at first because the soil was compacted and the trench was machine dug at that depth and that compresses the clay – like a layer of plaster spread on a rough wall. But overnight I suppose the looser soil had shifted and fallen slightly – so you could see the outline of the tunnel. I pulled at the edges with my fingers and found traces of the clapboard they’d used to shore the thing up when it was built. It was pretty clear to me what it was – especially at that depth. It was like the classic escape story, you know? I worked on that side for a while – five minutes maybe. Then I thought – what about the other side?’

  He paused for effect, draining some more beer. The others were listening now, and Dryden saw some looks exchanged. Something was going on, and he wasn’t included.

  ‘That was very different. The first foot or so was open, the soil had spilled out into the trench. The clay inside was very unstable, clods and pebbles were falling from the roof, which had buckled.’

  ‘But you went in?’

  ‘Not far – a few feet. I used the long entrenching spade to work away at the earth. It was creeping all the time, it wasn’t difficult. Then the hand appeared, and the top of the skull. So I got out and went and got Professor Valgimigli – and you arrived.’

  Dryden nodded: ‘Do you think someone had been working in the tunnel that morning, or the night before? Had someone been there before you? The dogs had gone that night, hadn’t they – so perhaps the site had been visited? By nighthawks?’

  Josh shrugged. Jayne ran her hand up inside his T-shirt. ‘I guess it’s possible. I told the police – they didn’t seem bothered.’

  ‘It’s possible that the oilskin wallet you found – with the pearls – had once contained a canvas – an oil painting. A very valuable oil painting,’ said Dryden.

  ‘And you think we’ve got it?’ he said, gripping his pint glass.

  ‘Actually, I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Dryden, drinking.

  Josh tried to retrieve the situation. ‘I didn’t poke around. I found out what we were dealing with and then called for help.’

  The Frog Hall’s windows were frosted, and the mist crowded out what little light was left in the day. A gull appeared in outline on the sill above their table, the sound of its feet shuffling on the wooden grating.

  ‘What’s Professor Valgimigli like to work with?’ asked Dryden, switching tack.

  Another cat’s cradle of exchanged glances. It was the girl who broke the silence. ‘Too many airs and graces – all that Tuscan disdain. It pisses us off – but he knows his stuff. The rein rings are a big find – if we find a chariot burial we can all use it in our work – I’m doing an MA, it’ll help. He can just be a bit difficult. Haughty.’

  They all nodded. ‘Which is laughable,’ added Josh, deciding to put the boot in. ‘When you think where he came from.’

  They all smiled in a way which made Dryden’s skin creep, but he took the bait. ‘Tuscany?’ he asked, remembering too late that he’d had a chance to ask Valgimigli himself on the steps of Alder’s funeral parlour.

  ‘Yeah. But originally. All that Italian sophistication, eh? Try the Fens.’

  Dryden looked incredulous. ‘You can’t be serious. The accent. The tan. The career?’

  ‘His passport’s British – we’ve seen it. We went to Oslo to see a ship burial when the dig started.’

  ‘Fine. So he’s a Brit.’

  ‘The Fens,’ said Josh. ‘He told us – later, when he talked us through the history of the site. He said he came here as a kid, from school – to see the huts. He left after university – Cambridge – for Italy.’

  ‘And he’s still got local connections here in the Fens,’ added Josh.

  Dryden’s patience was thinning out rapidly, but he felt that he was getting closer to the heart of the mystery of Serafino Amatista, so he played the game one more time. ‘Really?’

  The diggers crowded in and told the story between them, savouring its whiff of scandal, the assumption that somewhere lay a family secret which the unflappable professore wished to remain buried. The scene was vivid and, Dryden suspected, dramatized by the retelling. It had been mid-summer, the main cross-trenches were being dug, and Valgimigli had been working outside on the trestle tables, sifting through the pottery they had unearthed so far. During the day the security firm was off the site, the dogs delivered only at nightfall, and the white van which had quietly slipped through the gap in the perimeter fence had faile
d to catch their attention.

  Voices had been raised immediately, and in the days before the fog had got a grip, they’d had a grandstand view. A man, late thirties, with thinning black hair had got out of the van and confronted the professor, jabbing a finger into his chest repeatedly.

  ‘Keep away,’ they’d heard from him, but Valgimigli’s replies were muted. He tried to lead the man into the office but had been pushed aside, tripping and falling into the dust. Back on his feet he abandoned his reticence, and stooped to pick up one of the boundary posts used to map out the dig site. He brandished it like a club, and advanced on the van driver screaming: ‘I have every right. I have a right.’

  Then came the humiliation. The driver stepped forward, wrenched the wooden post from Azeglio’s weak grip, and tossed it effortlessly fifty yards into the surrounding brush. He slapped Azeglio’s face, a calculated insult, and spat in his eyes. Then he drove away, leaving the archaeologist standing in the drifting cloud of red dust the van had kicked up.

  The van had a painted logo, said Josh, wine bottles and a bunch of grapes, and the name in coniferous green on a lemon-yellow backdrop: Il Giardino.

  18

  Dryden stood in the cold night air and let the first frost of the year sober him up. .The fog had gone, the moon was up, and everything was clear to the eye. But the mystery of Serafino Amatista seemed deeper still. Why had Azeglio Valgimigli returned to the Fens? What precisely was his link to Il Giardino? Had he been honest with the police about his connections with the Italian community? Dryden looked up at the moon, a sliver of darkness short of full, knowing that tonight there was little chance of finding answers.

  He climbed Fore Hill to the Market Square as the cathedral clock chimed 9.00pm. The pointlessness of his life swept over him in the stillness, and he resented the duty of visiting Laura, and he felt further guilt: Vee Hilgay’s eviction might go ahead the next day and he had done nothing to help her find her inheritance. The Dadd was the only thing which would save her from the indignity of a lonely death.

  ‘Alone,’ he said, tired of inaction, and tired of his life.

  In the Market Square a drunk urinated in an ornamental flower bed with no apparent sense of shame. Under a lamppost whose light flickered on and off with an audible electrical buzz a couple were entwined, daring each other to break off before asphyxiation set in.

  Might Valgimigli be on the site tonight? He’d told the police he would sleep in the Portakabin at California in case the nighthawks struck, but would the arrival of his beautiful wife from Italy alter his plans? Or would they mount the vigil together? Dryden, suddenly buoyed up by a sense of purpose, dashed under Steeple Gate and out into the cathedral close, crossing unseen through the building’s vast shadow, to reappear 100 yards beyond, taking his own pitiful shadow with him across the moonlit grass.

  He had determined on action but was unclear what to do. So he hurried instead, and was at the site of the dig within ten minutes. The two wire-mesh fencing sections which had been arranged to block vehicular access stood apart by a foot: the chain and lock which should have held them missing. Beyond, four halogen floodlights lit up the scene like a football pitch. The jet-black cross of the two digger’s trenches was clear, and the white concrete bases of the twenty-four huts. A light burned within the mobile unit, a slightly warmer red than the abrasive blue-white of the floodlights.

  Dryden stood in the gap in the fence. ‘He won’t be there,’ he said to himself, realizing he should have called Humph for support – moral if not physical. If the archaeologist was there what would Dryden say? But he wouldn’t be there; the light must be on a timer. He was unlikely to be spending a precious night with his wife in a damp mobile home on the edge of the fen, their first night together for months. She didn’t look like a woman who enjoyed asceticism. But in that case why was the site open, and so soon after the police had warned the archaeologist of the dangers of the nighthawks?

  Dryden walked briskly towards the caravan and tapped on the thin metallic door, briefly failing to suppress an image of the couple curled up on a bunkbed inside. He knocked again, the superstructure tilting slightly from the blow, then settling on its springs. He heard a dog bark on the fen and remembered the three which had died on the site, recalled the black lips peeled back from the stone-white teeth.

  He shivered, looked up at the stars and wished he was somewhere else.

  He contemplated the black cross of the trenches, seeing them for the first time as a crucifix, and then several things happened in rapid sequence. First a stretch of the inky black trench in the far eastern side of the site flashed blue, followed by the muffled retort of a pistol shot which sounded once, and then echoed once, twice and a distant third time from out on the fen. Finally, across the floodlights, a single wisp of white smoke, as insubstantial as a breath, drifted up from the trench and across the moon.

  Cowardice rooted him to the spot, his stomach pirouetting, coupled with the familiar freezing of the heart. Dryden’s ears had captured the shot, a tiny cornered percussion, which rang still like tinnitus. Why didn’t he run? Already he’d begun to tell himself a different story. It wasn’t a gunshot but a flashgun, not a murderous bullet but an archaeologist’s photo shoot: a night-time study of uncovered remains, artistically caught by moonlight. Perhaps Professor Valgimigli had finally found the Anglo-Saxon chariot and its treasures. That was it: a further find, perhaps a sensational one that demanded instant recording. Self-deluded, Dryden shouted, ‘Professor?’ then let himself down the ladder and into the trench. He made his way towards the crossroads, passing the spot where the chariot rein rings had been uncovered just five days earlier. But there was no one in sight.

  At the centre he stopped and looked east, towards the spot where they had uncovered the tunnel, and the pine forest beyond. The long slit trench ran before him like a vision of the Somme, or Passchendaele. But the men were gone and so, it seemed, were the dead. The moon, low in the northern sky, half lit the scene. Dryden let his eyes sweep forward along the arrow-straight gully, and in the far distance knew instantly that something stood in the moonlight.

  He walked towards it, telling himself it was Valgimigli and waiting for him to shout out. He was twenty yards away when he stopped and forced himself to look again. The moon was rising and with each speeding kilometre across the night sky it revealed another centimetre of the dark tunnel. The archaeologist was kneeling, his head caught the moonbeams first, and Dryden saw that he looked up, his mouth gaping slightly in what looked like wonder. The face of a child, perhaps, following its first comet across the night sky.

  But Dryden felt no wonder, only fear. The head was strangely insubstantial, incomplete. He walked forward again to within six feet. The head was, like the moon itself, only half lit. But the moonlit side, tilted up and slightly towards the front, showed the damage that the gunshot had wrought. Below the eye a hole gaped, sheared away from the teeth and jaw. The black blood obscured the exposed neck below, and the teeth glittered like quartz in rock. In the frosty air the head steamed, and Dryden smelt the iron of blood on the air.

  One of Dryden’s knees gave way and he slumped to the side, supporting himself with a hand thrust out into the damp soil of the trench. He heard his heartbeat racing in his ears and a necklace of bright lights obscured his vision, a warning he might pass out. He willed himself to stay conscious and looked again at the corpse.

  He waited as the moon’s flight shed more light on the kneeling victim. A rough rope was revealed around the neck, and just behind it Dryden could now see the square-cut end of a wooden post. That was why the corpse looked upwards, the skull carried the weight of the body below, the chin the latch which held the rope. Dryden forced himself to stand, his knees buckling out of synch, and edged himself forward to circle the body, noting the hands bound too with the same length of rope, but oddly loose, and the nail driven through the post which held the neck ropes high.

  He completed the circle like a pilgrim at a sacrifice. His
muscles shivered, and he tasted gall in his throat which made him retch, lose his breath and then gulp in another lungful of air, this time laced with drifting cordite from the gunshot. He gagged again, feeling the contents of his stomach fold over and lurch again. In his pocket he fingered the mobile phone he wanted so much to use. But could he speak, or would he scream?

  The mutilated head dripped blood down the body’s left side, over the shoulder and forearm, until it fell from the perfectly manicured fingers to the ground. The chin held the body’s weight, but as the muscles stiffened with rigor mortis the torso twisted by millimetres, giving an illusion of creaking life. The rope twisted too, and an occasional rivulet of blood shot out obscenely from the neck. The legs were buckled in the zigzag semaphore of death, the feet turned on to their sides.

  Where was the killer? It was the first coherent thought he had been able to construct for many minutes. As Dryden asked the question he saw again the pitch black crucifix of the trenches, and the floodlights. Had someone run for cover after the gunshot? After his shout? Or were they still here, with him? He spun on his heel and looked back down the long trench. Nothing. He turned back and watched Valgimigli, motionless for a second, but then the rope and nail finally gave out and the corpse fell forward, its arms swinging round in what looked like a final attempt to embrace the living, before it fell to the ground. One hand touched Dryden’s shoe, leaving a bloody fingerprint. Dryden, immobile with fear, listened to a distant scream for several seconds before realizing it was his.

  19

  Dryden had been in the incident van for three hours. It was windowless and preternaturally white: heaven’s waiting room. Apart from two hard chairs, a single interview table provided the only furniture. It was attached with brass hinges to the wall and on it stood a row of six polystyrene coffee cups, marking Dryden’s imprisonment in half-hour instalments. The WPC who had stood watching him had opened the door once, revealing that the fog had returned with the dawn, and that in a featureless landscape the only detail was the distant dull reflection of the scene-of-crime tape, and faintly, a silent revolving blue emergency light. The cold frost had rushed in too, making him shiver more violently. But he could not fool himself: the sudden jolting of his limbs was due to fear, and his inability to mask it. His nervous system hummed, as if permanently attached to a low-voltage power source. A muscle below his eyelid fluttered and his stomach lurched, oiled by the coffee.