The Moon Tunnel Read online

  Archaeologists who found the grisly remains – while excavating Ely’s Anglo-Saxon site – said there appeared to be a bullet hole in the skull.

  Police at Ely are investigating the find and confirmed that an initial investigation suggested the victim was trying to enter the camp when he died, not escape from it.

  Professor Azeglio Valgimigli, head of the international team working on the site at California, said, ‘This was a shock for the young diggers who unearthed the remains – it is quite clear that this is not an Anglo-Saxon find.

  ‘We intend to try and excavate the tunnel to see if it can be traced back to the camp huts – and out beyond the perimeter. Presumably it was used as an escape tunnel during the war.’

  The PoW camp was opened in October 1941 to accommodate Italian prisoners taken in the Western Desert during the Allied invasion of North Africa. In 1944 the Italians were moved to an internment camp on the fen and the PoW camp was used for German prisoners taken after the D-Day landings.

  Dryden added a further 200 words of drivel, confident it would be read only by the few who bothered to turn from the front page to page 15, and then let Jean read the story back – he could have stood thirty yards away. Humph had settled down for a nap and a sickly smile had creased his surprisingly neat, childlike face.

  The story filed, Dryden turned his attention to the town dump. From behind the recycling bins a path led up the slope of the artificial mountain, and as Dryden climbed he heard voices drifting in the mist. At the top Dryden found Garry Pymoor, The Crow’s junior reporter, half a dozen of the site workers in reflective jerkins, a man in a suit carrying a clipboard, and a young PC. Garry had been sent out by the newsdesk to keep a watching brief on the dump story and make sure the paper’s photographer was called in if the council turned up. The man in the suit looked like he had a bad smell under his nose, which of course he did, though Dryden suspected the expression was perpetual, and not the result of standing on a giant compost heap.

  And there was Ma Trunch. Dryden had known her since he’d started on The Crow five years earlier, after Laura’s accident. Ma was considered a bizarre character by Fen standards – which meant that she’d have been locked up anywhere else. She was a mountain of a woman, a human echo of the landmark which had helped, reputedly, to make her fortune. She wore several layers of loose-fitting T-shirts and jumpers and what looked like two pairs of ski-pants which had never seen the Alps. Around her waist she always wore a rope, from which hung an impressive array of keys, a dog’s lead attached at the other end to a dog – a greyhound with dreamlike grey eyes. What appeared to be a tractor-engine rag held her bright red hair in a high top-knot. Her face was an arrangement of several slabs of flesh, many of them nipped by the outdoor air a cherry red. She was a common enough sight around the town, ambling the fields with her metal detector while the dog ran rings round her.

  ‘Ma,’ said Dryden, eyeing the dog. The reporter was a physical coward of commanding range and a fear of dogs was up there with his fear of heights. He tried not to watch as the dog dribbled over its exposed teeth.

  Ma ignored Dryden and turned to the suit. ‘You are kidding me?’ The accent belied her looks. There was a distinct edge of upper-class elocution, and the confidence of money.

  The man looked at the clipboard, which Dryden noted was bereft of paper. ‘No. I’m afraid not, Mrs Trunch. Public access to the site will have to be suspended while we take a closer look. This…’ and he indicated a rising cloud of poisonous-looking steam literally billowing out of the side of the landfill, ‘This,’ he repeated, ‘is a cause of legitimate concern, you’d have to agree.’

  Garry was listening intently and taking notes, a sure sign he had no idea what was going on. His mouth hung open like the back of a ro-ro ferry and his spots glowed.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Ma, turning to Dryden. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Just checking,’ he said by way of defence.

  ‘And there are other irregularities,’ said the suit.

  ‘Irregularities,’ said Garry slowly, taking time on the shorthand outline. He turned to Dryden. ‘The inspector found them while checking the site for the sources of pollution…’

  ‘Found what?’ said Dryden, forever surprised at Garry’s ability to miss key facts.

  Garry pointed to the edge of the flat platform where a green tarpaulin lay over what looked like a pallet of sandbags. Dryden flipped the edge back, then the whole sheet. There were three dogs, all Alsatians, with identical collars. Death is always ugly, but in this case it had excelled itself. Dried blood had trickled from the mouths of two of the dogs, and all three were tangled in tortured knots, teeth exposed in agony.

  ‘Dump-truck driver says he didn’t see the dogs in the rest of the refuse and didn’t look down after he’d dropped the load,’ said Garry. ‘They reckon they were dumped in one of the household waste skips. What ya reckon?’

  Dryden shrugged. ‘Guard dogs?’ he asked the PC. ‘Alsatians. Identical collars. What time did the site close last night?’

  The PC tried to pretend he’d thought of this and walked off to radio the station in Ely.

  ‘Eight,’ said Ma, reining in the greyhound which had picked up the scent of the dogs.

  ‘Poison is my guess,’ said Dryden. ‘Ma?’

  She nodded sadly, patting the greyhound’s long, equine head.

  ‘Bit odd,’ added Dryden. ‘If you wanted to knock out the dogs to get in somewhere – why not leave the dogs on site?’

  Ma, watching a short line of cars making its way across the fen towards the household skips to dump their rubbish, heaved her massive shoulders. ‘Some people are bastards. Perhaps someone won the pools and decided they didn’t want the dogs any more. People are like that sometimes – callous. Working dogs don’t get redundancy.’

  Redundancy. That was another ugly word. The dump-site workers in their reflective jackets shifted uneasily on their feet.

  ‘OK,’ said Ma, ‘let’s close her down.’

  4

  Humph’s cab stood in the thickening mist, a grey cutout of a Ford Capri, emitting the perfectly enunciated vowels of a Polish peasant. Dryden opened the door, put one knee on the passenger seat and rested an elbow on the roof, cradling his mobile in the other hand.

  He got through to Jean first time. ‘Fudge Box,’ he said.

  ‘Righto,’ yelled Jean, and he heard her typing swiftly as he dictated.

  ‘The corpses of three Alsatian dogs were discovered at Ely’s Dunkirk refuse site late yesterday (Thursday). Police are investigating the possibility that the animals were poisoned and dumped by burglars. All three animals wore ID collars which have been removed by police for investigation. They carried code numbers, not names, and the single word RINGFENCE. Any member of the public with information should ring Ely 66616.’

  Jean read it back. ‘OK, thanks. Put me through to the desk.’ The Fudge Box was a survivor from the days when newspapers were newspapers – a blank space on the front page into which late news could be stencilled. Most evening newspapers used it for the truly sensational. The Crow was quite capable of using it for flower-show results.

  Charlie picked up the phone and burped. Dryden could smell the stale ale, even down the line.

  ‘Hi. Look – they’ve closed the dump site. You’ll have to go into the inside story and tinker a bit – and rewrite the intro on the splash – OK?’

  ‘Sure. No problem,’ he said. ‘Can you do it?’ Dryden could hear the electricity of panic buzzing on the line.

  Dryden looked at his watch. ‘Jesus. All right. Give us ten.’ The radio crackled to life as the BBC pips marked two o’clock. The Crow’s deadline was past by fifteen minutes, but the printers were friendly and flexible.

  ‘The Crow,’ said Dryden, buttoning the black great coat high to his neck and fiddling ineffectually with the Capri’s heating system.

  Market Street was empty but for the damp queue at the bus-stop and a single boy racer, parked up on the taxi r
ank, his stereo blasting out a bass beat which made the nearest shop window flex. The market on the square was packing up already, the smog having sent people home early. Steam from the mobile burger bar added to the fug, burnt onions complementing the tang of soap.

  Jean smiled, displaying budget dentures, as Dryden bounded in and thudded up the wooden stairs to the newsroom. A dedicated spinster, she had taken on the role of Dryden’s moral guardian since the crash which had put Laura in a coma. In her mind their tragedy had only one happy ending: a miracle recovery and a return to the life they had lost. In the meantime she was determined to keep Dryden’s life chaste and otherwise spotless.

  Dryden did not resent his unbidden chaperone, sharing with her as he did the dream that one day his life would be as it had been before that damp, misty, evening five years earlier. Jean’s best smile, reserved for Dryden, compressed a lifetime of sympathy into a single facial expression.

  After ten years in the echoing chaos of the News’s offices on Fleet Street The Crow’s version always gave Dryden a pang of childish comfort – it was like going to work in a doll’s house. Six workstations had been crammed into the room, part of which had been partitioned off with opaque glass to protect the privacy of the editor: Septimus Henry Kew. Spikes bristled on each desktop, weighed down with press releases and discarded council agenda papers, and Splash – the office cat – was curled up on the bare boards of the floor where the hot-water pipe ran to the boiler. An air of barely suppressed panic gripped the room, which was full, and strewn with the detritus of press day – polystyrene coffee cups, two overflowing ashtrays on the subs’ bench and a discarded portion of fish ’n’ chips.

  Dryden had left Garry at Dunkirk to complete a short feature on what the closure meant for the company and its workforce. Dryden’s desk sported a ‘laptop’ PC which the editor had snapped up in a sale. It was portable only in the sense that you could move it around with a block and tackle. The newspaper’s editorial operations were entirely accommodated within the one room – in one corner of which was an acoustic hood, salvaged from the demolition site when they’d knocked down the old post office, from which Dryden was officially sanctioned to phone over any breaking big news story to the Press Association in London, a source of extra income which boosted all their wages by £5 a week. Dryden picked a press release off his spike and drop-kicked it over the screen and into a distant wastepaper bin, a childish routine which gave him huge satisfaction.

  The Crow, datelined Friday, was published Thursday afternoon by a small printer on the outskirts of town; the circulation was 17,000 and falling, but it had once sold 21,000 across the Black Fens. The chief sub, a wizened elf of a man known universally as Mack, walked over and slipped a proof of the front page onto Dryden’s desk. His story on the skeleton found at the archaeological dig took up the ‘basement’ – the bottom of the front page under the smog splash, with a file pic of Professor Valgimigli and an archive shot of the PoW camp in 1944 credited to the town’s museum. A group of Italian prisoners were at the perimeter wire, apparently laughing at a guard shouldering a rifle for the cameraman. Dryden was always pleasantly surprised by the way in which even the most cynical of hacks would respond to a good story. The page looked great, the headline ‘Mystery Corpse Found at Town Dig’. The Fudge Box on the dogs found at the town dump had made it to the bottom left-hand corner.

  Dryden had five minutes to rewrite the splash. ‘I’ll put the stories back in your PC basket,’ said Mack, retreating to the half-open bay window to inhale a roll-up.

  By Philip Dryden

  Government boffins have solved the mystery of Ely’s ‘pea souper’ – the thick polluted fog which has shrouded the city since the weekend.

  They have traced the cause to the city’s Dunkirk refuse dump where an underground fire is believed to be spewing sulphur dioxide into the air.

  Visibility in the town centre for Saturday’s weekly market was reduced to 50 metres and at times traffic came to a complete standstill as drivers tried to negotiate the crowded streets.

  ‘It’s worse out where we live,’ said Mrs Marjorie Halls of West Fen Road, Ely. ‘I tried to take our daughter to school yesterday and we couldn’t see our feet it was that thick.’

  While the city is notorious for autumnal mists, experts agree the thick, off-yellow cloud which forms at dawn and usually lasts until dusk is almost certainly the result of industrial pollution.

  Officials from the Department for the Environment in Whitehall have been concentrating their enquiries at Dunkirk, the tiny hamlet that surrounds the large dump, which is run privately under contract from the local council.

  ‘The compacted waste at this site, which began operation in 1964, has ignited below ground,’ said Dr John Towner, a government scientist speaking for the DfE.

  Smoke can be seen billowing from the western edge of the landfill site. Sensors have been set around the perimeter of the man-made hill, especially where it follows the course of the River Ouse.

  Dr Towner said early results showed extremely high emissions of sulphur dioxide. ‘The smoke particles provide nuclei on which the sulphur dioxide gas can combine with water to form sulphurous acid,’ he said.

  The eastern side of the site, where members of the public can dump rubbish in recycling bins, has remained open throughout the pollution scare, despite health warnings.

  ‘I am not convinced that the fog is caused by the site,’ said Mrs Evelyn May Trunch, the site owner. ‘Every year we get some burning inside the fill but this is normal and in no way dangerous.’

  But the visiting government health experts are meeting officials from East Cambridgeshire District Council today (Friday) and may order the site closed temporarily while the problem is tackled.

  A spokesman for Ely & District NHS Trust said that the Princess of Wales Hospital had recorded a sharp rise in patients reporting asthmatic conditions, and minor skin complaints, as well as dozens of minor injuries due to falls and road traffic accidents.

  ‘My advice to anyone with a pulmonary condition is to stay indoors during the day,’ said Dr Peter McCaffrey of the town’s group health practice.

  Experts have noted that, while the burning at the site continues at night, the lower temperatures and lack of sunlight above the mist layer prevent the formation of acids in the air.

  FACTBOX

  An estimated 4,000 Londoners were killed during the Great Smog of 1952, which lasted from Friday 5 December to Tuesday 9 December. The death rate peaked at 900 per day on the 8th and 9th. The visibility in the Isle of Dogs dropped to nil and remained below 50 metres for more than 48 hours. The fog – a modern version of the ‘London particular’ made famous by Charles Dickens in his novel Bleak House – was caused by huge amounts of industrial pollution and household burning of coal. Conditions were made worse by anti-cyclonic weather – a deep depression – which effectively trapped the pollution at ground level. During the Great Smog 370 tonnes of sulphur dioxide was detected in the atmosphere, which converted into 800 tonnes of sulphurous acid. This gave the smog an acrid taste and caused widespread eye irritation.

  ‘Right,’ said Dryden. ‘Can I get into this?’

  Mack looked at the clock. ‘I guess. You’ve got two minutes – I mean it.’

  Dryden watched his online box and saw the story pop up, released from the printer’s file. He went straight in, changing the intro to include the closure of the site, and tinkering with the quotes and paragraphs below.

  ‘It’s done’, he said sixty seconds later. ‘You’d better change the headline too – we need the closure in there.’

  Charlie Bracken grabbed his coat. ‘Great work. Pint?’

  ‘See you there,’ said Dryden, but instead clipped on a set of earphones and began the ritual round of late calls. At this stage in the process a nuclear explosion would struggle to make the front page, but professional pride made him plough through. As chief reporter the calls were part of his job, three times a day, every day, for which diligenc
e the editor rewarded him with an assurance that his expenses each week would never fall under £60, almost all of which found its way into Humph’s voluminous pockets.

  Dryden drew a blank on the local fire and ambulance services as well as the coast guard, AA, and Met Office. The police had a short statement on the body at California – with a provisional finding by the pathologist at the scene that the victim was male, early teens to mid thirties. Time since death unknown but probably in excess of fifty years, although the situation of the body, partly encased in the pine panels of the collapsed tunnel, made it difficult to be certain. But the circumstantial evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the victim being a PoW. The gunshot wound was a mystery, and, off the record, was likely to remain one.

  From the county police at Cambridge Dryden picked up a new story: a warning, passed on from the regional crime squad, that an organized gang of thieves had begun working in eastern England targeting archaeological digs. These so-called ‘nighthawks’ had expertly looted sites in Bedfordshire (a Roman villa), Suffolk (an Iron-Age mine) and Lincoln (a Roman wharf). Items from all the sites had found their way onto the open market, mostly in London. There was no evidence at all that they were at work in Cambridgeshire but Dryden didn’t care, with a bit of local comment and a list of the current sites in the area the warning would make a decent page lead for the Express. Even better, it gave a newsy twist to the story of the Anglo-Saxon chariot. He’d have to ask Professor Valgimigli about the security at California.

  ‘Security,’ he said out loud, and saw again the agonized limbs of the three dead Alsatians.

  The Littleport bus had just pulled up at the stop in front of The Crow’s offices and the smog swirled around it, rivulets of water running down the windows. From somewhere outside came the rhythmic percussion of shoes fitted with metal blakeys hitting the pavement hard. Dryden waited as the solitary beat drew nearer, The Crow’s front entrance bell rang, and then the metallic tattoo climbed the stairs. Garry Pymoor burst into the newsroom. ‘Hold the front page!’ he shouted, as he always did.