The Moon Tunnel

by The Moon Tunnel

  Speedwing, the radical druid, lived on the river in a narrow boat called The Prancing Pony. At water level the Ely smog was less poisonous, but thick enough to obscure the far bank where the watermeadows normally stretched to the horizon and the city’s nearest neighbouring ‘island’ of Stuntney. Today just the far bank was visible, and as Dryden watched a river rat slipped out of the grass and into the black water with an oily, audible plop.

  The Prancing Pony smelt of damp despite the acrid smoke pouring from a tin chimney. Various scenes from Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings had been expertly recreated along its wooden cabin panels. On the roof two bikes were chained, alongside a herb garden contained in various terracotta pots. A plump white cat sat amongst them: its fur shivering with the imposition of the water droplets deposited by the mist. It saw Dryden with its pale pink eyes but declined to move.

  In another age, thought Dryden, they’d have hanged these people as witches.

  Speedwing was a Water Gypsy, one of a small and almost entirely innocent group of thirty- and forty-somethings who tried to live an alternative life along the river bank in a necklace of narrow boats ranging from the chichi to the dilapidated. Local gossip attributed to them all manner of crimes, from naked moonlight dancing to peddling heroin. But the truth about the Water Gypsies was much more mundane, as Dryden had discovered in the weeks after Laura’s accident when, walking aimlessly by night, he had come upon them around a camp fire out by the clay pits. Drunk himself from a desperate raid on Humph’s glovebox bar he had found their anarchic party deeply satisfying. He’d sat, smoked and talked about a lifestyle which offered escape – a commodity which he savagely desired. And he’d flirted with Etty, the lonely but beautiful Water Gypsy who had made it clear Dryden could seek more than solace on the riverside. For that one night he joined them, and not only did they accept him, they let him back in when he needed them. But for Dryden the escape was only intermittent, for even from the watermeadows he could see the Gothic crenellations of The Tower Hospital, and the responsibilities it represented. And while their brand of alternative lifestyle embraced freedom and nonconformity, it also included alienation, loneliness and envy – a not entirely attractive cocktail.

  But Speedwing was different. Speedwing was a druid, and the dish aerial on the roof of The Prancing Pony linked him via the internet to the rest of the druid world. Speedwing’s finest hour had come a few years earlier when the retreating tide had revealed Sea Henge – an Iron Age wooden ring, exposed on the beach at Holme, directly north of Ely on the Norfolk Coast. Speedwing had led the resistance to the decision to remove the ring to a museum for preservation and display. He had recited druidical verses, danced and paraded for the TV cameras, brandishing a staff decorated with feathers; and at the key moment had broken through a ring of bemused police constables to throw himself on the exposed central wooden plinth, where the archaeologists believed the bodies of the Bronze Age victims, exposed to be eaten by birds, had rotted in the sun. He hadn’t stopped the dig, but he’d established himself as the druid to watch. Dryden wasn’t the only journalist to have Speedwing’s mobile phone number: it was in the contacts book of half the hacks on Fleet Street. But only Dryden knew that his real name was Brian.

  Dryden shivered, sensing an unseen sunset beyond the grey mist. Fatigue washed over him and he wanted desperately to lie down, close his eyes in the dim crepuscular light. Instead he knocked loudly with his knuckles on The Prancing Pony’s forward hatch, and the boat rocked in response. He looked along the river bank and strained to see anything earthbound: a line of pollarded willows floated on the mist, leading the eye into the white nothing of the open fen, and between the two a figure hung, one arm held out towards the water with the rigidity of a statue.

  ‘Brian?’ Dryden was thirty yards away when he said it but the mirrored water offered perfect acoustics.

  The arm began to pull in a long line, which slipped, dripping, out of the water.

  By the time Dryden got to him the eel trap was on the grass, a long wicker basket closed at one end, which enticed the eel in without allowing it the space to reverse out. A grey brown eel twisted inside, effortlessly flipping the trap from side to side.

  ‘Dinner?’ said Dryden.

  Speedwing had a whiskered face, like the eels. His red hair was blanching to grey. His eyes were slate-black like the river.

  ‘Nah. Can’t stand ’em. But the restaurants in town’ll pay. Visitors like ’em.’

  They walked back towards The Prancing Pony.

  ‘I got your press release,’ said Dryden. ‘But is this one really going to happen? A man’s been murdered.’

  Speedwing caught hold of one of the lapels of Dryden’s overcoat: ‘I heard. That’s our point, isn’t it? Desecration. Perhaps he paid the price. So yes, we are up for it. That site is a sacred burial place. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t just pick any old spot, Dryden – it had probably been a place of worship for thousands of years. Now it’s a murder scene. We owe it to the ancestors to reclaim it. We owe it to the victim.’ Dryden recognized some of the tired phrases with which the true aficionado is at ease.

  He let the druid ramble on while another, more interesting, question formed. At Sea Henge Speedwing had been a constant spectator, sleeping in the dunes behind the beach and haunting the archaeologists’ every move. Had he mounted a similar vigil at California? There were plenty of places amongst the pine trees from which he could have spied on Professor Valgimigli’s last days.

  Speedwing was still talking. ‘And the police are taking it seriously even if you aren’t. They’ve been in contact and they’re putting officers out on the night. We don’t want trouble. I told ’em…’

  That was good enough for Dryden, and should be good enough for the editor. He’d check with the station to make sure Speedwing was telling the truth. If he was, The Crow could hook the story on that, and then run Speedwing’s comments. That way everyone was covered.

  ‘Have you been on the site?’ asked Dryden, and knew immediately it was the right question.

  The black eyes flashed. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He thrust a hand into the trap, extricated the eel, and with a sharp twist of his wrists broke the cartilage of the backbone. The scrunch of crushed vertebrae echoed under the mist.

  ‘Was that why the police really came round?’

  Speedwing began to walk back to his boat. ‘We’ve tried to keep a vigil. I spent a night up there, in the pines. Saw nothing and we’ve got nothing to hide.’

  ‘Get on the site?’

  ‘No. Never. Why?’

  Dryden shrugged. ‘Someone did. The body in the tunnel, there was something buried with it, I think, something valuable.’

  ‘Valuable to whom?’ asked Speedwing. ‘All property is theft,’ he said, consulting what looked like a Rolex watch.

  ‘Did they ask about the nighthawks?’

  ‘Yup. We told ’em what we knew.’

  They’d got to the boat. Dryden was tired pulling answers out like teeth. ‘Look – do you want something in The Crow about the demo?’

  Dryden knew that without pre-publicity Speedwing’s event would be reduced to the usual suspects. But a good show in the paper might pull in new members, middle-class sympathizers who’d otherwise never think of demonstrating.

  Speedwing checked the watch again. ‘’Course.’

  ‘Right. I need help too. And not just for a story. What did you see?’

  Speedwing looked at his hands, over which was smeared the eel’s blood: ‘The night the dogs were killed – the night before they found that poor bastard in the tunnel? Well, we went up after the pubs closed and we saw ’im…’

  ‘Saw who?’

  ‘The professor. Working in the trench. By torchlight. That’s what we told them, OK? And that’s all I’m telling you,’ he said, walking away, the twitching eel held by its shattered spine.

  25

  Back in the Capri Dryden let his head rock back on the rest and as he closed his eyes he felt
the grit under the lids, scratching. He had evaded sleep for more than thirty-six hours – but for his snatched few minutes in the Capri – and the adrenaline-fired lightheadedness was suddenly transmuted into exhaustion. It flooded through him, each muscle settling into individual sleep ahead of his brain, which continued to whirr under the effects of caffeine. He felt sick, but managed to say ‘The Tower’ before slipping off, descending immediately into a dream overseen by Valgimigli’s cloven head, the lips a livid deathly blue.

  He awoke disorientated; clearly, hours had passed and the cab’s interior was illuminated by stark moonlight. Beside him Humph slept, an unconscious guardian angel, an oily fish-and-chip paper held in a ball in one of his tiny fists.

  Dryden checked his watch: 11.48pm. The Victorian façade of The Tower showed no other light than a dozen images of the floating moon. He slipped past reception and, listening at the foot of the echoing stone stairwell, heard only a single distant cry of pain from the rest of the hospital.

  Laura’s room was in darkness, the printer silent, the computer screen of the COMPASS dead. Dryden sat, lit one of the cigarettes from the bedside table and poured some wine, uncorking the opened bottle. Laura slept, her breathing so faint he leant forward to catch its reassuring rhythm. As he did so he touched the computer keyboard and the screen lit up, awakened from hibernation mode. A document stood open and Dryden recognized the typography as that from the online edition of Who’s Who.

  MANN, Siegfreid Viktor, CBE, FRHS. Historian and writer. Reader in History at the University of Cambridge 1985–90, b 10 April 1920; s of late Prof Werner Mann and Elka Mann (nee Hauptmann) m Ruth Jane Holland 1948 d 1965; two s one d. Educ. Heidelberg Uni (BA) 1938–41. Oberstleutnant, German Wehrmacht 1941–5. St Edmund’s Coll, Cambridge. (MA 1949–52, Hon Fellow 1985–) Fellow and Tutor, New Hall (1953–65). Visiting Reader in Military Studies: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (1965–83). Reader in German international relations, University of Parma (1983–5). Publications: Reconciliation and Contemporary Politics: the occupation of Greece and the development of post-war democracy 1943–1954, 1955; The German Army: a definitive history, 1966; Blitzkrieg: the utilisation of terror in war, 1971; Unholy Alliance: the politics of the Axis Powers: 1940–1945, 1980; The Soldier’s Story: a memoir, 1981; The Storm Passed: recovery and reconstruction in occupied Europe: 1945–1958, 1988; Never Again: contemporary European attitudes to war, a review of the literature, 1994. Recreations: Greek wine, gardening: volunteer assistant curator Cambridgeshire Museum Service. Clubs: The Cambridge Society, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA), British Association of German ex-PoWs. Address: Vintry House, West Fen Road, Ely, Cambridgeshire. e-mail siegfriedv.mann@cam.ac.uk

  Dryden closed his eyes and wished for sleep, but felt only the claustrophobia of the moon tunnel. He thought of Serafino Amatista, dying in his grave, and the German officer who had identified him as a deserter. Could that officer really have been Siegfried Mann? The short Who’s Who entry left little doubt he had been a prisoner. Had he spent the last years of the war inside the wire at California? Was the aged historian the agent of Serafino’s nemesis?

  Dryden swung the COMPASS screen round, pulled up the bedside chair, and using Google typed in ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘Agios Gallini’, the village Roman Casartelli had named as the scene of Serafino’s desertion.

  No matches. He deleted the village name and trawled an official site on the Nuremberg Trials, which had been held in occupied Germany between 1945 and 1949, and at which the leading Nazi war criminals had been arraigned. There was no mention of Agios Gallini but there was a brief reference to a 1942 agreement between the Allied Powers to allow, at the end of hostilities, local courts to pursue allegations of war crimes committed in occupied countries. Two such courts were listed in Greece in 1946, in Athens and Salonika. Dryden found a weblink to an online account of the proceedings for both courts on a site run by the Greek government: there were four language versions – Greek, English, German and Italian. Following the English route he found the first reference to Agios Gallini – Case 42 of the sixty-eight heard at Salonika.

  He called up the full indictment and let the cursor blink on the name of the principal accused: Oberstleutnant Siegfried Viktor Mann.

  The complete transcript was eighteen pages long and he decided not to print it out in case the clatter woke Laura. Instead he settled himself by the bedside, pouring a fresh glass of wine.

  Mann was not the only accused. He was indicted alongside four men in his command who had, under their own admission, formed a firing squad in a quarry outside the village of Agios Gallini on the afternoon of 4 August 1943. Mann, however, as the commanding officer, was the only accused who faced the death penalty if convicted. The charge was straightforward: that they had summarily executed Constantine Karamanlis, a 73-year-old peasant farmer in the village, in reprisal for the alleged murder of Serafino Ricci, an Italian conscript and the guard provided by the civilian occupying administration. While the court noted that a proclamation issued by the Italian authorities specifically required reprisals in such cases, the presiding judge referred to an Allied declaration of 1943 which made it clear that such acts were barbarous, and would constitute a war crime whatever local legislation had been put in place. Mann and his comrades faced a further charge: that on the afternoon of the same day, while the rest of the villagers were held in the church by other members of Mann’s company, he or his soldiers were responsible for the death of Katina Papas, Constantine Karamanlis’s five-year-old granddaughter. She was last seen entering her grandfather’s house shortly before his arrest.

  Mann and his co-accused did not appear at the preliminary hearing. A statement was entered into the court records by his lawyer in which Mann stated that a search of the village had revealed a cache of three rifles and a box of ammunition hidden in the old man’s house. Karamanlis had, therefore, been shot as a partisan, not in reprisal for the death of the village guard. Mann’s lawyer, who had secured statements from two Greek eyewitnesses to the ransacking of the village, stated that the discovery of the arms and ammunition was not disputed. Further, there was no evidence, except the circumstantial, to link Mann and his men to the disappearance of the child. The submissions were reluctantly accepted by the court, and the indictment put aside. The fate of Katina Papas remained unknown, the court ruled, adding a direct appeal for any information which could help identify the whereabouts of the child’s body.

  Dryden briefly reviewed the other cases before the court. More than forty preliminary hearings led to full trials, before a bench of three judges, in Salonika in 1947. Of these twenty-nine resulted in convictions and eight German officers were hanged at Piraeus in November of that year. Six others were given prison sentences, served out in their native Germany. Dryden followed another link to a newspaper cutting on the executions. There was a grainy black and white picture: the eight strung up from a single gibbet in a prison yard.

  Outside Laura’s room the moon hung, perfectly framed in the clear cool glass of the window. Dryden considered the life and times of Siegfried Mann. A well-educated young man, set for an academic career, pressed into Hitler’s army. Posted to Greece, where the simple polarities of war are blurred by the Italian civil government, and the simmering hatred of Right and Left, which would later explode into civil war. Then came Agios Gallini, and the events of 4 August 1943.

  ‘Did Mann kill Serafino?’ Dryden asked his sleeping wife. Perhaps Azeglio Valgimigli had suspected Dr Mann of the killing. The Italian academic appeared to have known him well – and it didn’t look, from the Who’s Who account, that the German had tried to hide his background and history. Professor Valgimigli knew the story of Serafino Amatista, the missing member of the legendary ‘gardeners’ of California. When the body was found in the moon tunnel he may have suspected the identity of the victim, and that of his killer. Had he confronted his former tutor with the crime? It was a motive Dryden was sure the police ha
d considered.

  The moon had moved to the edge of the window, and now shone through the monkey puzzle tree at the centre of the hospital lawns.

  ‘But why the execution?’ he asked himself. He stood, bringing the PC screen into Laura’s sightline again. Dryden stroked a single auburn hair back from her eyes, the tiny movement prompting her eyelashes to flicker, and then open.

  They held each other’s gaze for a moment before the effort became too much and the brown irises swam slightly, losing their focus.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have woken you. Hair?’

  He took up the brush and ran it lightly over her scalp.

  ‘Well done – on the Mann biog, I found it on the screen. I did some more digging as well. Not only was he almost certainly a prisoner at California, he was the German officer involved in the incident at Agios Gallini – the village where Serafino deserted. My guess is he identified Serafino. Perhaps he killed him too.’

  He took up the mouse to close down the computer screen for the night. Various folders dotted the sky-blue surface of the desktop. He recognized correspondence with family, some friends in London, and work that Laura had been doing towards writing a play – using her gifts as an actress in one of the few ways left to her. But in the bottom right-hand corner was a single document marked Untitled (WP). It was unlike her not to tidy up her work. Dryden moved the cursor quickly to the spot and double-clicked.

  An Enter Password box appeared. Dryden stared nonplussed at the blinking cursor, aware it was demanding a key he didn’t possess.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, immediately aware that his tone was wrong, both peremptory and patronizing. He’d had no right to try to open the file without asking. But the question rankled, so he lifted the suction tube from its antiseptic dish and placed it lightly between her lips. He waited for the familiar clatter of the PC and printer but nothing came, so he poured himself some more wine, brushing his wife’s lifeless hair. Troubled that they could not share a secret he asked again, ‘What’s in this document, Laura?’