The Moon Tunnel

by The Moon Tunnel

  Until she asked the question: ‘Why did you kill him?’

  He sank to his knees, finally unable to keep the muscles taut. She watched his pupils dilate, and his speech began to weave between the octaves, searching for a note. The scopolamine, unstitching his inhibitions, inflated his sense of security, and he let the ghost of a smile cross his lips. So she hit him hard with the pistol again, and he went down and lay there crying. She led him to the end of the trench, to the moon tunnel, to a place of execution, his knees collapsing at every other step, until she could go no further. There was little light, but the halogen blue just touched his hair, like a halo.

  ‘So why kill him?’ she asked again.

  He looked up and into the gun. ‘Because he loved you. Because even if he went to Italy he’d come back. Because you loved him, and I’d seen you together, and I couldn’t live after that.’ He cried, humiliated by confession.

  There was a jigsaw now, and she knew the picture. The telephone calls to Gina were such a simple lie, for Azeglio’s voice had so many times made her feel she was holding Jerome. She could admit that now: that she’d married him to remind her of the past she’d lost, the future she’d lost. And the ring: returned by post with the flowers – no note, not a word.

  ‘You planted the ID disc,’ she said, and he smiled, pleased with the deception.

  That made her angry enough, so she lifted the gun. And he stood, briefly, waiting for what would happen to him next.

  ‘I’m going to kill you for this, for robbing us of the life we had, and for sentencing me to the one I had with you.’

  His eyes sharpened feebly with fear, then swam again. He begged for his life, knowing that it would provoke her to end it. He never heard the shot, the force of it breaking his neck as it ripped through his cheekbone and skull. But as his head lolled forward, and the last second of his life congealed, he thought of the twenty-five years he had stolen from them, and it thrilled him.

  40

  When Dryden came to he thought the nightmare was over, but it had only begun. He could smell the sweat, and the iron in the soil, like blood. How long had he been unconscious? His ribs creaked, supporting the earth above. He shook his legs, the panic making his muscles spasm, and heard the splintering of wood, making him freeze. He had to free them, but how? Forward, he must go forward. He clawed at the earth, dragged himself inch by inch, clear of the fall. He felt water from the clay trickling over his face and then the cool play of air on his skin. Opening his eyes wide he searched for light, but found none. Somewhere, deep in the earth above, he heard a groan as the pressure shifted, but the panels above his head held, creaking as they twisted.

  He shuffled forward another foot and let his eyes widen again. But all was black: he was buried. His eardrums fluttered violently as they dealt with the sudden rise in his blood pressure. And then there it was, the barely perceptible long slow curve of the tunnel, unfurling ahead of him. A light, somewhere ahead. He didn’t think, didn’t remember where he was, only where he was going; didn’t remember what was above, the dense earth, waiting to fall. He thought about daylight, and a wide Fen sky, and it calmed his heartbeat. Behind him he thought he heard a sound, but ahead of him he definitely knew there was a light, and it saved his life, just when he would have twisted in his panic, bringing down the earth he feared.

  Only the dim beam of the light showed itself, striking the outside wall of the curve, its source still hidden beyond. He scrambled on, his knees locking under the strain, until the light became a sharp rectangle, the glare obscuring any detail beyond. As he moved agonizingly slowly towards it, he knew he would be free of the tunnel soon, free of the nightmare that he would be buried alive, forced to drink in the soil when his lungs screamed for air. He lunged for the light, unable to stop himself, until his muscles went into cramp and he had to stop, crying out as the pain built, and then passed. Behind him he thought he heard the sound again, the clash, perhaps, of splintered pine panels and the rasp of metal on wood. But ahead there was silence: silence and light.

  He fell into the room head first, tumbling forward, the sudden freedom bringing exquisite relief to his tortured joints. He sat up, blinded by the light from a single unshaded bulb which swung from a cellar roof. He held up a hand to protect his eyes, looking round at the roughly plastered walls. The room had a single door at the top of a short flight of stone steps. He forced his eyes shut, trying to restore normal vision, but the bright rectangle of the light he had crawled towards impinged on everything, alternately electric red and Day-Glo blue.

  He held his head in his hands and waited, listening, crouched down on his knees. There was a sound, a scuffling, sticky noise close at hand. When he opened his eyes at last he saw books: hundreds of books in an assortment of old bookshelves covering three walls of the spacious cellar. Along the fourth stood filing cabinets, industrial size, each with a neat printed card in the slot provided on the face of each drawer. A threadbare carpet, mock Persian, almost covered the concrete floor.

  Set at an angle in the centre of the room was a desk, in an exotic hardwood inlaid with dust, and behind it, in a captain’s chair, sat Dr Louise Beaumont. She brushed loose earth from her hair and returned to cleaning the pistol she held, working her fingers along the metal, easing out the grey-green clay of the moon tunnel.

  Dryden, calculating, walked briskly to the steps, climbed them, and tried the door. It didn’t move a centimetre, so he banged loudly with his fist. Somewhere above he heard a clock chime.

  When he turned back she was twisting a silencer onto the pistol barrel.

  He thought of the noises he’d heard in the tunnel. ‘They’re just behind me. The police know too,’ he said.

  ‘Know what?’ she said, and Dryden could see she was sweating, her lower lip trembling despite the extraordinary force and confidence of the voice. She looked towards the tunnel opening, the rough rectangle surrounded by the ragged edge of the chipped-away bricks.

  ‘The tunnel’s collapsed,’ he said, knowing it had cut off her retreat, and his escape.

  Dryden felt his knees give momentarily so he sat, abruptly, on the lower step.

  ‘You came back for the gun,’ he said.

  There was silence then, but distantly they could hear the murmur of the crowd.

  She put the gun down quickly on the desk. ‘That night,’ she said. ‘I heard you in the trench, coming. I thought – if they find the gun it’s over. We were right by the tunnel. It seemed the perfect place to hide it, above the head panels, where Jerome had said they’d stashed the stuff. I pushed it into the clay, embedded it like one of his precious Anglo-Saxon coins.’

  She tried to stand but failed, her legs buckling, so she sank back into the seat. Dryden knew why the gun was on the table now, to disguise the shaking hands she held below the desktop.

  ‘You always knew about the tunnel, didn’t you?’ Dryden strained to hear movement above, his only route out.

  ‘Azeglio, the fool,’ she said. ‘He made Jerome promise not to tell me he was going down. But he told me, that last afternoon, when we were together for the last time. So I kept the secret. When Azeglio uncovered the body, as he knew he would, he thought I too would be fooled. That is why he is dead.’

  Dryden forced himself to stand, dragging his feet on the cellar floor as he paced in front of her.

  ‘But you were in Italy. Why come to England?’

  She shook her head, listening, calculating. ‘Liz – at the hospital – sent me a cutting from the local paper. You wrote it. About the body in the tunnel. She thought I would be interested, and I was.’

  She moved her hand swiftly to the gun and put it quickly on her lap, the barrel and stock sticky with clay.

  Dryden forced himself to talk. ‘And I thought it was all for the painting. For the money.’

  She laughed, the sound catching in her throat and almost making her cry. ‘It’s about hatred. About a brother hating his brother; about a wife hating her husband. And all for love.’
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  He could see her eyes filling and he knew she was going to kill either herself or him. It would be herself, he guessed.

  ‘If you kill me, they’ll know,’ he said, instantly regretting the suggestion.

  She fought to keep her composure, even her sanity. ‘If you live, they’ll know for sure.’ She laughed again, and this time there was no hint of a sob.

  Dryden realized she was getting stronger, not weaker. This is why she’d been able to kill Azeglio.

  She stood, trying to level the pistol. He saw her muscles tightening along her arm, the tanned skin twisting around the bone, and he knew he had guessed wrong. She was going to kill him.

  A dog barked in the tunnel, a bolt slid back on the cellar door, and she pulled the trigger. Dryden heard the tiny sound, slightly gritty, and then the flash burnt into his eyes as he was thrown back against the wall, the ridges of the bookshelves cutting into his flesh.

  He opened his eyes and saw blood on his chest, and a clout of bone and brain on his thigh. A blue mist hung in the cellar, the echo of the explosion bouncing within the space, trying to escape.

  She knelt on the floor as her husband had done, slumped back on her haunches. Her right arm, the arm with which she had held the gun, was gone. A stump showed the white bone of the shoulder, but there was very little blood. Her face was black on the right side, the skin scorched over the cheek, the lips revealing the spattered remains of teeth. Between them on the floor was all that was left of the jammed gun, the sticky green clay on its stock now veined with arterial red. Boudicca barked from the tunnel again, but was no nearer.

  The last thing Dryden remembered was Siegfried Mann standing at the top of the stairs, a key in his hand.

  A dog barked in the guardhouse beyond the wire and Siegfried Mann stood in the moonlit ruins of Vintry House and thought of the girl in the blue dress. Whatever he thought about, he thought of her; she ran across his past, a fleeting presence, her arms held out for her grandfather. He pressed his fingers to his eyes as he heard again the multiple shots of the firing squad. Beyond the wire the guard in the nearest tower swung his searchlight across the serried rows of the PoW huts. It was 10.30pm, two hours after lights out, and the only sound was the dog, whimpering now, by the trip wire. The moon left a cloud and he stepped back into the shadows of the old house. He’d seen it many times from the stoop of the hut where he sat and read the books the Red Cross sent: the roof was just rafters, the walls obscured by ivy, the garden wildly overgrown.

  He felt no fear. They never turned the lights outwards, into the fen, something they’d all noticed right from the start, but something they’d only appreciated after they discovered the tunnel.

  Hut 8. His own. They’d been bound to find it eventually, but it was only the second day when they were examining the base of the old stove that they saw the gap, felt the current of air rising in the summer heat. But in the end they’d decided it was too late for them to escape. Summer 1944. They knew the war was over, even if the fanatics didn’t. In the other huts the members of the Party planned their escapes, dreamed of returning to a victorious army. And if the end did come they planned murder, their captors first, their enemies within second, themselves last. Which is why they kept the tunnel secret. They might need it when the end came.

  So when he found Serafino’s picture he’d thought about this meeting from the start. What had happened at Agios Gallini? Clearly the villagers had not murdered their guard. Did they attack him, perhaps? Force him into the hills? But he suspected the truth, and he wanted Serafino to tell him. So, using the Italian dictionary they’d found amongst their predecessors’ belongings, he had written the note.

  ‘Meet me at Vintry House – the ruin beyond the wire. We have found the tunnel but need your help. We can pay. 10.30: August 10th’. Then he’d given it to one of the Italians who helped distribute the food, sealing the envelope with wax and paying the man well with the promise that other letters would follow.

  August 10th. He had some Italian, learned at school and on holidays in the Alps, but this gave him a month to learn enough from the dictionary to ask his questions. He wanted to hear this man’s confession in his own tongue: from the heart, if he had one.

  He heard across the fen the cathedral bell toll the half hour. Instantly he saw him, stepping round the crumbling wall of one of the old outhouses. By moonlight the familiar face seemed younger. How long had he known Serafino? Six months, perhaps. Long enough to think he trusted him. And Serafino knew him, which is why he stayed back, one hand gripping the masonry of the old wall.

  ‘Oberstleutnant Mann?’ he said, the Italian accent redolent, even for the German, of the Veneto.

  ‘How are you, Serafino?’ he said, his Italian poor but passable. ‘I am happy you are alive. I am surprised also.’

  Serafino moved his hands down his tunic, as if cleaning blood from his hands. Mann knew two things: that he was tempted to run, and that he didn’t have a gun.

  Silence.

  ‘Why did you desert your post, Serafino?’

  Mann thought he might run then, now that he knew why he had been called. ‘Why, Serafino? Tell me, please.’

  ‘Don’t tell them. Please, don’t tell them. Here, my own people will kill me.’

  Mann thought he understood. ‘So tell me.’

  The Italian laughed then, and for the first time Mann slipped his hand into his tunic and felt the knife he’d made from the stanchion prised from his bunk bed.

  ‘Those stupid villagers. They said the English were coming soon. That they’d landed – at Kithira, in the south. That they would take me to England, to camps – camps just like the Germans had. At night the partisans came, creeping through the village. They said they’d cut my throat. So at night I did not sleep. And in the day – I decide to go.’

  ‘You knew the consequences?’ This was the single sentence Mann had practised most. ‘You knew the consequences. What I would have to do?’

  Serafino heard the anger then, and stepped back, cornering himself in the ruins.

  ‘You wanted my help with the tunnel?’

  He understood the one word – tunnel. ‘No. No – not the tunnel, Serafino. I shall inform the authorities here tomorrow that you are Serafino Ricci. A deserter. And shall I tell the messenger too?’

  Serafino held up his hand to say no, but – fatally – decided to say more. ‘I saw you shoot the girl,’ he said. ‘The girl in the blue dress. Deliberately. Do they know that too? When the war is over, will they know that?’

  Mann was only six feet away now. ‘It was an accident, Serafino. You saw the accident.’ A statement, seeking confirmation. It was Serafino’s last chance. The Italian searched in his pockets, quickly, producing a knife – a thin blade, very dark in the moonlight.

  ‘You tied her up with the man and shot them both. I saw.’

  Mann remembered the rockfall above them that day, the skittering pebbles falling down the hillside.

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ he said, the threat clear.

  Mann was very close now and he saw in Serafino’s eyes that he was a coward. That was why he had run. The Italian dropped the knife. ‘Please don’t tell them.’

  Mann stepped in so close he could smell the Italian’s breath, and the sweat from his body. He placed one hand on his shoulder and smiled, but in the shadow between them he took out the knife and pressed it skilfully through the rough tunic, where it nicked a bottom rib before he felt it sliding through the stomach wall. Swiftly he drew it across the abdomen, and Serafino’s last breath whistled. There was shock in his eyes, but it swiftly turned to the blank stare of the dying.

  Then he knelt down, both hands cradling his stomach, holding his guts in.

  He died like that, sitting, holding himself. Mann found a shovel in the outhouse and buried him beside a sapling which grew in the old garden. He took a handful of the blossom and imprinted the gorse-like scent on his memory. Then he went down into the old cellar, to the moon tunnel.

  Fr
iday, 29 October

  41

  They took her body out through the double line of trees that Siegfried Mann and his wife had planted with such care and love. Dryden, sitting at Mann’s writing desk before the open fire, wrote his statement for Cavendish-Smith. Dryden had been told all he needed to know: that Gaetano was recovering fast from his ordeal, pulled out by the police from the wood and earth which had collapsed on him as he tried to follow Boudicca down the tunnel. But there was no sign, as yet, of the dog.

  As the sun rose the detective left, the scene-of-crime experts working on in the cellar and the tunnel. Dr Mann made coffee and took it out onto the verandah of the house. They sat, watching the blazing disc inch clear of the tree-line, the mists of dawn burned away.

  Dryden had been briefly in shock. The police medic had given him some drugs, but he shivered now, not because of the cold but because he’d lived through the reality of his nightmare.

  He clasped the coffee mug in both hands and let the steam leave a film of moisture on his lips.

  ‘That’s why the police arrested you. Because they’d traced the tunnel to the house?’

  Mann nodded, smelling the coffee.

  ‘And you knew the tunnel was there?’

  Mann sipped, watching the sun. Dryden was tired now, and his patience with lying had gone. He fished in his pocket and took out the small mother-of-pearl badge he had retrieved from Jerome Roma’s coffin.

  Mann eyed it, but his hands remained around his coffee mug. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, still sipping.

  ‘A forgivable error on your part. Serafino Amatista was one of the gardeners – there were six. They were very proud of their ingenuity, almost arrogant about their cleverness and courage. In one of the raids they took these buttons – stripped from something bulky, a smoking jacket, perhaps. They wore the buttons as badges: just the six. At Il Giardino they have them in a cabinet. But only five.’