The Moon Tunnel

3

Ely’s town dump was marked by a landfill site eighty feet high – the Fens’ own Tabletop Mountain. Seagulls circled it constantly, scavenging for food, and occasionally swooping to dive-bomb the tipper truck which climbed like some Sisyphean robot with its latest batch of rotting spouts, fish bones and lawn shavings. When the mists obscured it, as they had with depressing regularity that autumn, you still knew it was there: you could smell it from the town square.

At the foot of this man-made hill lived the little community which eked out an existence beside the line of bright green recycling bins and the wooden pens stacked with discarded electrical trash, fridges brimming with CFCs, and waste metal. Two caravans up on bricks provided office accommodation. The workforce lived in a scattering of post-war bungalows built on the surrounding fen: the far-flung hamlet of Dunkirk.

Humph pulled the Capri up short of the gates, aware that if he went inside he might never get his cab back. Dryden had an hour and a half before The Crow’s final deadline in which to phone over the story of the unearthed skeleton. He’d save the rein rings for The Crow’s sister paper, The Ely Express, which published on Tuesdays – there being little point burying a decent tale on a day when there was some real breaking news.

But the big story of the week was the town smog. The mist around the dump was off-white with patches of purple-brown, like diseased phlegm, and indicated clearly that the current theory as to the cause of polluted fog was probably right: pollution, the experts suspected, was leaking out of the fifty-year-old landfill site and combining in a chemical cocktail with the autumn mists rising from the nearby river. Dryden had written a story ready for this week’s edition of The Crow, but he needed to get the latest as close to deadline as possible so he could do an update. Given that the smog affected almost all the paper’s dwindling band of 17,000 readers the story would probably make that week’s splash – despite the mysterious find on the site at California.

But first he needed to get the story of the discovered bones over to copy. A decade on Fleet Street had taught him to write fast, and write now. He’d chatted to the newsdesk in the shape of the The Crow’s reliably unreliable news editor Charlie Bracken: he wanted 350 words an hour ago, but in the circumstances twenty minutes would do. Dryden got him to read back some facts and figures about the site from one of the previous stories they’d run to help pad out the copy.

Then he got out of the cab, wrapping himself in his heavy black overcoat, closed his eyes, leant on the roof and told himself the story: ‘“The skeleton of a man was yesterday found in an old tunnel underneath Ely’s wartime PoW camp.” How does that sound?’ he asked, bending down to Humph’s level.

The cabbie tried a yawn, feeling the exciting onrush of his daily siesta. He didn’t answer, still aggrieved that he had been interrupted while trying to memorize the ten different types of Polish sausage helpfully listed on his language tape.

‘It’ll have to do,’ said Dryden, answering his own question, and punching The Crow’s switchboard number into his mobile. He braced himself for the ordeal of filing to Jean, the paper’s deaf copy-taker. His real problem was stretching the story to 350 words; he’d have to use up all the facts in the intro.

‘Right!’ bellowed Jean, when he got through. ‘Off you go.’

The skull and bones of a man were unearthed yesterday in an old tunnel underneath Ely’s one-time PoW camp.

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.’