The Moon Tunnel

5

Jerry’s was Ely’s only nightclub, a refurbished former bingo hall just off Cambridge Road. At Christmas and on Friday nights it employed a solitary bouncer in ill-fitting DJ, but the rest of the time the last thing Jerry’s needed was someone to turn people away. The interior was painted blackout black, principally to disguise tatty furnishings. A neon sign outside flashed ‘J rr ’s Nites ot’. A blackboard advertised live Premiership football and a ‘happy hour’ from 5.00pm to 8.30pm nightly.

Dryden bought Garry a bottle of industrial-strength lager which he drank by the neck, and a pernod and blackcurrant for himself, insisting that the barman add the cocktail umbrella advertised on the poster behind the counter at the inclusive price of £1.80. They took seats by the pool table and watched as two teenagers wordlessly played out a game. The juke box finished playing something contemporary Dryden didn’t recognize and then fell silent, the scattered customers unwilling to invest further cash. Beside the clash of the pool balls there was silence; it was 4.29pm on a Thursday, pay day for most of Jerry’s customers. Later on things would quieten down.

Garry fingered his crotch and lit a cigarette, the exhaled smoke catching the spotlight beams focused on the pool table. His acne, in full battle formation, shone under the harsh lighting. Dryden heard the distant sound of the cathedral bell tolling the half hour and stood, putting a pound coin in the juke box, from which he selected ten records, six from the golden oldies section after first picking four at random from this year’s hits. This way he would be sitting down before his own embarrassing choices came on. With luck, another punter would be at the juke box by then.

Dryden inhaled some alcohol and thought about the body in the PoW camp tunnel. He thought about his dream: the compression of the sand around him, the grains in his mouth. How had the victim died? And who was the killer? It seemed certain that he had been crawling into the camp. Had his killer been waiting for him, or attempting to escape?

The door opened, admitting a wedge of spectral autumnal light which illuminated a smashed bottle in a corner by a one-armed bandit. And in walked Russell Flynn trying to look old enough to buy a drink. Russell was one of Dryden’s contacts, the provider of a string of lowlife tipoffs from the town’s notorious Jubilee council estate. Russell had been born on the Jubilee, Ely’s answer to Moss Side, a rabbit warren of terraced council houses enlivened by the odd wrecked car.

Dryden’s cat-green eyes followed him to the bar. The teenager had bright red hair, innocent freckles and teeth with gaps, none of which had prevented him from getting two years’ community service after pilfering the contents of an entire row of allotment sheds on the edge of town. The manhunt to track this super-criminal down had been aided by the discovery at the scene of Russell’s coat, hung on a hook in the first hut, where he had taken it off in anticipation of working up a sweat as he loaded the pilfered tools and assorted hardware. Inside the coat was Russell’s wallet. Inside that was his benefit card and provisional driving licence. It was a crime of such baffling ineptitude it even made it on to the ‘and finally’ section of the local TV news. The magistrates were less amused, and but for some entirely fictitious story about his father dying of cancer Russell would have spent the rest of the year in Bedford prison.

Russell had met this setback to his career as a criminal mastermind with typical aplomb by attempting to mar his juvenile looks with a dragon tattoo emblazoned on his neck, rising from a basket of flames which matched his hair. Bright was what Russell wasn’t, but he was skint, and Dryden’s occasional fiver for information received was much sought after.

Dryden bought Russell a double Southern Comfort and lemonade, thankful again that he didn’t need The Crow’s pitiful wages to rent a flat. His boat, PK129, stood on the edge of town at Barham’s Dock, a floating bolthole with a mooring fee of £25 a year. It left enough to live on, in a kind of desultory way, while Humph bolstered Dryden’s fares with a series of lucrative late-night bookings, mainly ferrying bar staff home from the clubs in Newmarket and Cambridge. They were a small-scale black-market economy.

Russell sat tinkering with an already empty glass. ‘Nighthawks,’ said Dryden. ‘Heard anything?’

The first of Dryden’s selection came over the speakers. ‘Jesus,’ said Russell. ‘Who put that crap on?’ All eyes turned to a teenager in immaculate trendy T-shirt and jeans making a selection at the juke box.

Dryden shook his head at the inability of some people to stay abreast of modern cultural developments.

‘They lift stuff off these digs, yeah?’ said Russell finally. ‘R. K. Logicial, innit?’

‘Heard anything local? How do they shift the stuff?’

Russell shrugged. ‘It’s a London crowd what do it. I s’pose they have people local too – but I ain’t ’eard. It’s well organized, like hare coursing. If they need to shift the stuff they have fences – like for burglary. For that kind of stuff you’d need to get it to auctions, or sell it private. I’ve heard some goes abroad.’

Dryden wondered how much Russell would know about crime when he was old enough to vote.

‘And where would I look for a fence like that, Russell?’ said Dryden, putting a fiver under the 16-year-old’s glass.

‘You can forget the Jubilee – it’s all cheap stuff. TVs, DVDs, CD players, anything ’lectric. This is totally different.’

There was a silence as they watched Garry slicing a pool shot so badly he left a deep scuff mark in the green baize.

‘Well?’ said Dryden, suddenly tired of the week.

Russell ran a finger around the sticky top of his glass. ‘You could try Alder’s.’

‘The undertakers?’

‘Sure. Old Man Alder’s been in the game for years – my dad used to use him.’ Russell’s father was currently holidaying on the Isle of Wight, postcards care of HMP Parkhurst.

‘They used to do house clearances, when they had a stiff. Body out the front door, heirlooms out the back. They’re always selling stuff – most of it legit. Alder used to run auctions as well. Now it’s more – discreet.’ Russell liked that word, so he grinned, revealing some green vegetable matter clinging to one incisor.

Dryden heard the cathedral bell toll the hour and he thought of Laura in her hospital bed at The Tower. Later, he would visit, as he always did. The tiredness increased, fuelled by the cocktail.

‘I guess I should have a look round Alder’s yard then,’ he said.

Russell stood, conversation over. Clearly he charged by the minute.

Dryden considered his miniature umbrella. It was too early, he argued, to visit Laura. He feared long visits, the possibility that he might say what he sometimes thought: that he’d rather they’d both died that night in Harrimere Drain, rather than having to endure this carapace of a life, a shell in which he lived on one side of consciousness while she existed on the other. He was half-alive, tied to a woman who was half-dead.

He bought himself another drink and sat in the shadows watching Garry lose at pool. He thought about himself, about his nightmare self, dying in the tunnel on the beach, and about the PoW, lying in his tunnel for maybe sixty years.

‘Someone should care,’ he said out loud, so that Garry nodded in agreement to cover up his own embarrassment.

The archaeologists clearly saw the discovery as an inconvenience, a temporary setback in their attempts to uncover the Anglo-Saxon chariot burial. The police were little better, convinced a man who had lain unmourned for more than half a century could go quietly to a fresh grave. Dryden sank his cocktail and rang Humph on the mobile. Five minutes later he was outside in the smog, a wraithlike figure on the pavement edge, waiting for the Capri’s sickly orange headlights to emerge from the gloom.