He looked at the statement he had dictated to DS Bob Cavendish-Smith. He had stated the bald facts in a monotonous style he felt suited the occasion. No time for rhetorical flourishes, just the mechanical details of his arrival on the site, his failure to find Professor Valgimigli in the office and his discovery of the corpse, kneeling but roped to the wooden post. He was unsure how long these events had taken, and especially how long he had stood, rooted, before the butchered body. He’d fled the site eventually, energized by the fear that he was not alone in the trench. Then he’d phoned Humph from a call box, pathetically, telling him everything at once, spilling it out to try and distance himself from the reality of death. Humph had phoned the police before driving to the dig, where they’d waited, the Capri’s dim interior light providing some solace until the patrol car pulled up alongside, the two PCs clearly certain they were dealing with a hallucinating drunk. Once they’d seen the corpse at close range the picture rapidly changed. By the time they’d got Dryden into the mobile interview unit there was a helicopter overhead and a mobile canteen just outside the gate. Humph’s cab was unseen, but Dryden knew he’d be there, just out of sight.
The door opened and Dryden smelt the distant aroma of bacon, thought immediately of Valgimigli’s steaming, riven, head and gulped some more cold coffee. Cavendish-Smith gave him a replacement cup and pulled up a seat on the opposite side of the table. Dryden noted he had his own takeaway version: the aroma of café latte was in the air, with nutmeg. The cold neon beat down on them like a fridge light, an industrial freezer perhaps, waiting for a consignment of split carcasses to hang on hooks.
He shivered again, setting off a series of involuntary jerks which made him put the coffee down hurriedly. Cavendish-Smith read the statement again. ‘Fine. Thanks. Bit of a detective, aren’t we?’
‘More than some,’ said Dryden. ‘It’s my job. Finding stories. We’re the same in that respect.’
Cavendish-Smith looked horrified at the comparison. He stood, holding a second statement lightly in his hand. ‘You were unlucky. According to his wife, she dropped him off at the site at 8.30 – half an hour earlier you’d have found him alive.’
‘Where did you find her?’ asked Dryden, already mapping out how he could wrap up the story for that day’s paper. An interview with the widow was the top priority.
‘Never mind that. I want you to walk me through every inch of what you did last night. Every last inch. Come on.’
‘Right,’ said Dryden, tired of the neon-lit room. The WPC had left the unit first when the DS had arrived, and now Cavendish-Smith led the way, giving Dryden just enough time to get sight of Louise Beaumont’s statement on the interview table. Dryden, now familiar with the layout of the standard witness form, noted the address.
Outside the fog was thinning, moved on by a light wind. Across the site a line of police officers were down on their hands and knees, edging forward, putting anything which caught the eye into evidence bags.
‘So,’ said Cavendish-Smith. ‘Where do we start?’ Dryden retraced his steps: his entry into the camp, the knock on the caravan door, and up to the point when he heard the shot, then to the edge of the trench, dropping down using the foot ladder and jumping the last three feet. They went north to the crossroads, passing the spot where Valgimigli had found the chariot rein rings. A larger trench had been dug since Dryden’s last visit, with various protruding pieces of metal and wood marked with fluorescent number tags. Two PCs stood guard.
Cavendish-Smith beckoned one of the PCs closer: ‘Once the scene-of-crime team has been through, and the pathologist has removed the body, I want one of the diggers brought here. Right here. I want to know if anyone has dug down here – if anything is missing.’
They walked on. ‘Nighthawks?’ asked Dryden. ‘Do you really think this is about pilfered pottery?’
‘Any better ideas?’ said Cavendish-Smith, not expecting an answer.
They reached the crossroads. ‘There has to be a link with the body in the tunnel,’ said Dryden. ‘We’re almost certain it was Serafino Amatista, we know about the robbery at Osmington Hall. Valgimigli has local links – to the Italian community. There must be a connection.’
They walked on to the taped-off area where Dryden had found Valgimigli’s corpse. A team in full-length polythene suits was working at intervals along the gully. They stopped short of the corpse, which now lay sprawled, bizarrely, under a square plastic tent.
But Cavendish-Smith was watching something else. Dryden could see in the distance, further along the trench, the spot where they’d uncovered the tunnel. A group of policemen were listening to a briefing, and kitting up in what looked like potholing gear – complete with miner’s hats.
‘What are they are up to?’
The detective stopped. ‘As you so astutely point out, Mr Dryden, we need to know everything we can about the body in the tunnel. We’re digging it out – might as well see what’s in the rest of it.’
Cavendish-Smith nodded at the body. ‘Did you touch him?’
Dryden shook his head. ‘I walked around, once. Then the ropes went, and he fell forward like this.’ He took a few steps backwards, as if judging the scene. ‘It’s an execution – isn’t it?’ he said, thinking of the day Serafino Amatista had fled the village of Agios Gallini.
The pathologist stood and Dryden saw a thin smudge of blood along his white forensic suit. ‘Gunshot wound delivered at close range – under six feet,’ he said. ‘The skin is seared and there’s some cordite in the wound.’ Dryden recognized the suited figure: Daniel Shawcross, a Home Office pathologist based in Cambridge. His presence indicated that bells had rung all the way down the line to Whitehall. Dryden guessed that the death of a well-respected foreign academic, together with the involvement of the international archaeological team and the University at Cambridge, had resulted in Shawcross’s early morning appearance at the crime scene.
‘And there was this,’ he said, removing an evidence bag from his suit pocket and lifting out a piece of blue material using tweezers. The cloth was blood-soaked and burnt at one end. ‘My guess is it’s a blindfold. The impact of the bullet blew half of it away. I expect to find threads impacted into the brain just here.’ He bent down and lifted aside the plastic sheet.
Dryden counted pine trees on the edge of the site. Cavendish-Smith was unmoved. ‘How about footprints, evidence of the killer’s exit?’ he asked, wrapping a waxed Barbour more closely to his suit.
Shawcross laughed. ‘It’s like the entrance to a football turnstile down this gully. We’ve found at least a dozen separate trails. But the most recent belong to Mr Dryden here – that’s them,’ he said as one of his assistants pointed to a plaster cast being taken behind the corpse.
‘Then there’s these…’ Shawcross pointed to some boot marks in front of the body.
‘The archaeologist’s?’ asked Dryden.
‘Sure. Right from the caravan and along the gully. And these…’
They gathered round a set of Wellington boot prints. ‘These are fresh, and unaccounted for. They enter the site by the Portakabin, mimic Valgimigli’s to this spot, and then exit that way…’ He pointed along the trench towards the distant pine trees.
‘No sign of a struggle?’ asked Cavendish-Smith. ‘No sign his body was dragged?’
‘Nothing,’ said Shawcross, ducking under the tape and resuming work with the tweezers in the archaeologist’s wrecked skull.
‘Why would a man walk to his own execution? And why would the executioner tie his hands after he was dead?’ said Dryden, but the detective was gone, asking himself the same questions.
Dryden was dismissed, with instructions to keep in contact. Cavendish-Smith retreated to the mobile canteen and a full English breakfast. Dryden found Humph and the Capri, parked up amongst the trees by the call box he’d used the night before. In the glove compartment they found two identical bottles of Tequila. They drank in silence, the fierce warmth of the alcohol burning its way down Dryden
’s throat. He checked his watch, noting that his hand still shook perceptibly. He still had three hours before The Crow’s office opened. He had a story for the Express’s front page – for anyone’s front page. But for now he would close his eyes and try not to see Valgimigli’s butchered head.
Marco Roma had fought death all that summer of 1983, but now the winter had come and his body embraced the failing light of a new year, even as he fought to stay alive. He’d had the bed raised on bricks and could turn and see out from the window of Il Giardino, across the high bank, towards the distant cathedral. In the foreground his garden wilted, nipped black by the frost. Ice held the reeds on the river, and snow lay untouched across the lifeless landscape of the Black Fen. Increasingly now, perhaps every minute, perhaps every hour – he had lost the ability to judge time – he thought of home, of Italy, and the sun on the whitewashed wall of the schoolroom in Mestre. A childhood memory, preparing him for death.
Alone, he watched his breath fog the window, obscuring the winter scene, only for the cold outside to wipe it clean before he could breathe again.
His life ticked away, measured by the snowflakes which fell occasionally from a sky the colour of steel.
Then he heard voices below, the griddle hissing and finally the slow, reluctant footsteps on the stairs. He turned away from the light and considered his three sons.
It had been the same question now for eight months, since a string of hospital visits had ended in the surgeon’s consulting room. He remembered the X-rays, and the long medical lecture. His patience had finally snapped and he had extracted his death sentence in language unencumbered by euphemism. Then he had come home to tell his wife and his sons: Pepe had cried, and he’d loved him more for it than the stoic courage of his brothers. And he’d cried too, later, when he knew that Mamma was glad it would not take long.
The same question: ‘Is there nothing left?’
It was Jerome. It was always Jerome. Footloose Jerome, keen to leave his family and strut in the world beyond the fen.
‘Little,’ Marco said, coughing in his throat and bringing up bitter blood.
‘Some silver, jewellery. Pearls. I’m not sure, but we thought they were fake. We wrapped them in a canvas – one we tore from the frames.’
‘They’re from the hall – where the man died?’ It was Azeglio this time, always turning the knife. ‘We shouldn’t touch it. If they can trace them back, it’s murder.’
Marco was not ashamed of what he’d done. None of them had been burdened by guilt – except, perhaps, for that one night when the fool Serafino had panicked. Sometimes Marco slept badly, the pool of blood from the servant’s head spreading across the polished floor of his dream. But that had been Serafino. For the rest they had simply robbed the indolent rich, the rich too powerful to fight for their own country.
They had enjoyed their joke, slipping back in along the tunnel at night while the police, depleted by conscription and stretched by the bombing raids on the ports and rail yards, had been powerless to gather the necessary evidence. Besides, they had the perfect alibi. Prisoners, every one, behind the barbed wire of the camp.
For most of the gardeners the good times had been brief. They’d salted their shares onto the black market and spent the proceeds. But Marco had been cleverer. He knew the prices would rise and the risks would fall if he waited. So he found the perfect hiding place, and bided his time until he could spend the money on the family he longed for. His sons. He sometimes wondered where they imagined he’d hidden the stuff all these years. They knew he went out at night, with the van, and they knew he set off for the city on the horizon. Had they ever followed? He doubted it now, now that he could see the greed, and the disappointment.
The snow fell in a sudden flurry and the cathedral disappeared.
‘We shouldn’t touch it,’ said Pepe, standing at the window. ‘We can get through.’ He stood, wringing a cloth between his hands. He looked at his brothers, making a decision. He knew too much already, the rest he would leave to them.
‘There’s work to do,’ he said, and they listened to the weary steps descending and then the violent hiss of the scalding urn below.
‘We can get through,’ said Marco, echoing his youngest son.
Jerome tossed the solicitor’s letters on the bed. ‘That’s not what they say. We owe £56,000 – we can only just afford the interest payments. We should sell.’ His father lifted a leg, dislodging the papers, letting them slip to the floor.
It was brutal – even for Jerome – but he knew it would work, for Il Giardino was his father’s monument, his memorial.
Marco considered the two eldest boys and thought how much they were alike: the voice, the profile, the natural arrogance their educations had given them. He felt he liked them less as death approached, felt them to be strangers in his house. ‘One of you will have to go down,’ he said, elbowing himself up on the pillows.
It was the first clue he’d ever given them and he could see Azeglio and Jerome computing: ‘Down?’
The boys edged their seats to the bedside. ‘I need paper. You’ll need a torch, clothes, it’ll be dirty. Mamma knows where my stuff is. I hope you’re brave.’
They fetched some paper, and a tray to lean on.
‘It’s a tunnel,’ he said. ‘We called it the moon tunnel.’
Tuesday, 26 October
20
The Capri still stood under the pine trees, the mist tangled round its wheels like candyfloss. The interior light was on and the windows fogged by Humph’s capacious breathing. Dryden’s was shallow, the sleep into which he had fallen troubled and broken.
He woke, covering his eyes, trying to dislodge the images of the night. ‘Malt,’ he said.
Humph flipped open the glove compartment, found a bottle of Bowmore and, after cracking the top off, emptied the miniature into the Bakelite cup from his coffee flask.
‘There’s posh,’ said Dryden, taking the short in one, the golden liquid searing his throat and reaching down into a stomach chilled by a vivid vision of death. He reached out a finger to hit the on button for the radio, his arm jerking still, the nerve ends raw.
Radio Four: the Today programme. 6.45 am. He pressed the button again, restoring silence. Somewhere a seagull yelled, circling the pine trees above.
Press day, but too early for the office, too late to sleep. Humph, burdened with the knowledge of what Dryden had found, fussed with the cab’s heater.
Dryden kicked out his feet, claustrophobia making him sweat despite the frost. He wanted air, needed a conversation about the real world, a world where you didn’t stumble on a mutilated corpse by moonlight.
He took Thomas Alder’s business card from his top pocket: ‘Buskeybay,’ he said. ‘You can take your time.’ He found another Bowmore, feeling better for the first.
Out of town the mist was confined to the ground, a thick frosty sheet stretched over the black earth. The sky was stretched green and blue, with a pink stain where the sun would appear. Out in a field two figures stood, a long-legged dog circling. Dryden got Humph to pull up in a lay-by where a mobile tea bar was still shuttered. Under the trees a BMW stood parked, its opulent black paintwork drinking in the light.
‘That’s Ma,’ said Dryden, winding down the passenger side window. Boudicca, the greyhound, searched the field, sketching out a complex geometry, but Ma was immobile, her arm rising occasionally to point out landmarks across the fen to her male companion. Half a mile away the houses of Dunkirk were black on the horizon, the dump itself rising up to the north, the plume of smoke from the deep-rooted fire drifting towards the river and the city beyond.
Then they shook hands, more than a farewell, more like a deal, the man making his way briskly back towards the BMW where he flipped up the boot to stow a Barbour, revealing a suit below. Inside, by a vanity light, he opened up a document bag, a mobile phone mouthpiece hanging from a headset. Meanwhile Ma melted into her landscape, the dog reappearing just once from the ground mist, befo
re joining her on the trek back to Little Castles.
Dryden tried to think, computing Ma’s shrouded motives. ‘I give up,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
Roger Stutton opened the door of the old farmhouse at Buskeybay before Dryden could knock, his grey hair ruffled, his tall ascetic frame bent slightly under the beamed ceiling. Inside Dryden could smell coffee, and burnt toast.
‘Good God, Philip – what’s wrong?’ he said, searching Dryden’s face. He took him by the arm, leading him into the old kitchen, where the heat transported him into a childhood memory: the worn oak table laden with a Christmas dinner, a goose at the centre, the wrought-iron doors of the stove open to reveal red-hot coals. For the first time that day a new image had been overlaid across that of Azeglio Valgimigli’s shattered face.
‘Sit,’ said Roger, fetching the coffee. Dryden walked to the window instead, looking out across the fen which stretched down to the Lark, where a flock of swans rose, creaking, into the sunlight.
‘I found a man, murdered,’ he said: ‘Last night. His head blown away.’ He traced a finger along his own face, where the bullet had sheared away the professor’s skull. He sat then, telling him everything, as he’d told Humph, downloading the images to try to free up some space for his life to begin again. He left out nothing, bringing each detail to life, realizing that as he spoke he could feel his heartbeat slowing.
‘Sleep, Philip,’ said Stutton when the story was over. ‘There’s a bed upstairs.’
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