The Moon Tunnel

12

Humph’s cab flew back towards Ely and at precisely 6.00pm they saw the Octagon Tower on the distant cathedral light up, the silver-white halogen floodlights picking it out clearly on the horizon. The smog had seeped away from the town streets along with the warmth of the day and now the darkness of the Fens crowded in, pushing the light back into shop doorways or into amber pools at the base of lampposts. It was one of the things that Dryden loved about the place: the way that, unlike the big cities, the night brought a relief from the intrusion of light as shadows filled the alleyways of the old town.

Humph dropped Dryden outside The Crow and set off for one of his regular weekly runs – ferrying a nightclub bouncer from Prickwillow out to his job in Newmarket. The Crow was closed but Dryden used his key to enter by the back door. The newsroom brought its familiar feeling of claustrophobia: you could have played five-aside football in his old office at the News – home to more than 100 journalists. The Crow’s version could just about accommodate a game of table tennis. He felt a pang of loss for a once-glamorous career, closely followed by a rush of guilt when he considered what the crash had done to Laura’s life; at least he could still hold a Biro.

He logged on to his PC, secured an internet connection and browsed the local council site. He called up the electors’ roll and punched Hilgay into the search box. Four names appeared: three in one household out on the Fen in a nearby village and one in an address on the Jubilee Estate. If this was the last living member of the family which had once owned Osmington Hall then they’d certainly fallen on the hardest times of all. The Jubilee gobbled up about 80 per cent of the county’s social services budget in the city and about 75 per cent of police time – benefits for which the residents were less than appreciative.

He switched to Google and typed in ‘Richard Dadd’. From artcyclopedia he found a link to artprice.com and found a Dadd auctioned in New York in 2003 – a canvas ten inches by six, it had fetched $2.6m. Dryden looked at his ruler, whistled, and searched for the website of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. There he found that many of its works were reproduced online. Dryden tapped in ‘Dadd’ and ‘moonlight’.

A picture appeared and Dryden felt a sudden cold-ness: the sketch showed a moon rising through the leaves of a forest, an adolescent boy in rustic smock was watching it rise, as if witnessing a vision. The scene was dreamlike, and the nearby woods hid half-seen faces of elves and fairies. The picture held a spell, and Dryden understood why someone might have killed to get it. He hit the printout button, pocketed the A4 reproduction and closed down the PC.

He walked to The Tower thinking about the moon, and lunatics. It was a gibbous moon, just four days from full, a bulging lantern of cold white light directly overhead. The town was silent, in that unnatural lull between the shops closing and the pubs getting into full swing. Somewhere, in the trees of the cathedral park, he heard an owl’s call followed by the tiny shriek of something being killed.

As soon as he opened Laura’s door he knew she was awake. The COMPASS machine clattered into life.

‘SHOULDERS.’

Dryden knew it was unreasonable but the peremptory tone of the COMPASS tickertape always irritated him. He knew the missing question mark was in his wife’s mind, but its absence made her request into an order, and he felt the familiar guilty urge to be free of his role as dutiful visitor.

He put his head beside the PC screen hoping her eyes would be able to see him with peripheral vision but, oddly dry, they stared past him.

‘Sure,’ he said, sitting on the bedside and insinuating an arm behind her so that he could lift her forward, laying her head on his shoulder. He began to massage the muscles at the base of her neck, feeling the knots which caused her so much pain. He felt the familiar onrush of tenderness, and began to widen the movements of his hand in a sensuous and sinuous series of circles.

As he worked he talked, feeling the warmth of her body raise his spirits, so that he found it easier than he’d expected to tell her about his visit to Buskeybay and his decision to sell off his mother’s belongings.

He laid Laura’s head gently back on the pillow, then used a brush to arrange her hair. Then he uncorked the wine bottle beside the bed and poured himself a glass, lighting up the single Greek cigarette.

There was silence and Dryden was irritated again, irritated that she didn’t respond in some way. She’d known his mother too, and could have shared the memory.

He forced himself to talk. ‘I’m sorry you wasted time on the PoW – nobody ever escaped, I know. The curator at the museum, I’ve mentioned him before…’

The COMPASS burst into life with a rapid: XXXXXXXX, part of their code, a signal that she wanted to butt in.

‘SEE 15.’

On the PC’s desktop various folders held documents Laura would work on when she was conscious and alone. Dryden moved the cursor over to document 15 and double clicked, sitting up beside her on the raised pillow so that he could read the screen.

There was a single line of text, the spelling mauled by Laura’s botched attempts to control the COMPASS. He reminded himself of the effort required for her to type out a single letter.

MOD EMAIL SEE INBOX. NO POWS OUT. BUT SEE REOLY ITALIAN ASOC ALSO EMAIL AND MOD 2.

Dryden swung the cursor into Laura’s e-mail inbox and retrieved the reply from the MoD’s information desk.

Dear Ms Dryden,

Thank you for your enquiry. As I understand your e-mail you wish to know if we have records of PoWs who escaped during the last war. Particularly from the camp at Ely, Cambridgeshire. I can confirm that no records exist of any escapes, or indeed attempted escapes from that camp, between 1940 and 1945. There were, by contrast, two from Walpole Camp, thirty miles to the north. Yours sincerely,

Matthew Lumby

Senior Information Officer

Ministry of Defence

PS. Our research officers tell me that the National Association of Italian Ex-Servicemen, based in Manchester, has remarkably complete records on PoWs. You could e-mail them via the link below if you wish to trace any individual. www.naie.org.uk

Dryden fished out the return e-mail from Manchester.

Dear Ms Dryden,

Thank you for contacting our association and for the attached copies of your e-mail to the MoD and their reply. They are correct in saying that none of the Italian servicemen imprisoned at Ely in the camp known as California ever escaped. However, we can tell you that post 1943 all Italian PoWs were reclassified following the surrender of the Italian government. As non-combatants, and foreign nationals, they were released and assigned to internment camps, as I am sure you will know. The Ely area was administered from Cambridge and their records show that one former PoW did go missing in this period – in October 1944. His name was Serafino Amatista. He was billeted on a series of farms in the Ely area, although he had to report to the internment camp set up at the nearby RAF base at Witchford. We took the liberty of attempting to trace Amatista’s history from our files in order to provide you with all the information at our disposal. We have to tell you that no one of that name was ever conscripted into any of the Italian armed forces, or indeed listed as a volunteer. There are two possible explanations for this inconsistency. Either Serafino was missed out from the lists of those under arms due to an administrative error (a common problem in Italy once war had broken out) or he gave a false name on being captured. In our experience captured Italian servicemen found without papers or ID who gave false names, of which there were several thousand, were often deserters who feared retribution from their compatriots who had fought bravely for their country.

Please do e-mail again if we can help further. Our website contains further information about the thriving Italian communities in the UK.

Yours sincerely,

G. P. Ronchetti

Vice President

National Association of Italian Ex-Servicemen

Dryden dipped back into the inbox for the second reply from the MoD.

Dear Ms Dryden,

I am glad the National Association was helpful. We have traced our records of Serafino Amatista and he is recorded as being captured in September 1942 by a British Army patrol which broke up a food riot in the outskirts of occupied Bari, southern Italy. He was one of a group of about 200 Italian servicemen who had sailed home from Parga, western Greece, shortly before the port fell to the Allies. A converted troop ship took all the prisoners to Southampton and Amatista arrived in Ely at the PoW camp in early October 1942.

I hope this helps.

Matthew Lumby

‘Right,’ said Dryden. ‘So Serafino Amatista escaped in 1944, but according to the official records he didn’t exist.’ Laura remained impassive, the COMPASS silent. Was the corpse in the tunnel Serafino Amatista? And why, if it was, had he tried to get back into the camp?

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Dryden, knowing he was being ungrateful for the work she’d done.

He poured more wine. ‘There’s something else. The stuff they found in the tunnel with the body looks like loot to me – pearls, and the candlestick. There was a robbery, and a murder, in ’44 at Osmington Hall – remember the place? We went there with Mum, years ago. It may have got into the papers at the time – although I doubt it. Some of the nationals may have it online, and there’s an archive in Cambridge of the local papers. If you e-mail this guy he’ll let you on.’

Dryden tapped a name on the end of document 15. The county archives were now stored in a fireproof facility at the central library following a blaze which had threatened to destroy two centuries’ worth of data. At the same time stored back-copies of newspapers were photographed and put online.

‘The Crow may have done something on it – and there may be some background. See what you can find.’

The COMPASS jumped into life: ‘I TRIED.’

‘Jesus,’ said Dryden, suddenly aware how ungrateful he had been. He tore off the tickertape paper and lay on the bed beside his wife, cradling her head against his chest. Turned away from the COMPASS she couldn’t talk, but he knew she enjoyed these enforced silences. He held her tight, and imagined that none of it had ever happened, not the crash, not the coma: life without the COMPASS.

When he finally got back to the cab Humph could tell by his eyes he’d been crying. He offered Dryden another bottle of single malt and fired the Capri into life.

‘Home?’ said Humph, regretting the word.

By the time they’d parked up at Barham’s Dock the boat, in battleship grey, was bathed in moonlight. Dryden listened as the Capri drove off towards the distant main road, its progress marked by the clatter of its loose exhaust. Then there was silence, pointed up by the trickling of the water along the river bank and the plash of the boat’s bilge pumps.

PK 129 was a former naval inshore patrol boat. Steel in construction, it had lumpy, industrial lines and the paraphernalia of a real working boat. Dryden had always despised the glossy white sleekness of the gin palaces which crowded the river in high summer. In the wheelhouse was a simple plaque which read ‘Dunkirk: 1940’, a romantic touch which had instantly sealed her purchase, financed by the sale of their London flat. He felt tethered here to reality, but with an avenue of escape always open along the river.

He opened up the cockpit tarpaulin and stepped in, pressing a button to fire the generator into life. The floodlight mounted on the deck blazed into the night, revealing 200 yards of riverside footpath. Dryden imagined the beam picking out the flailing arms of survivors in the water on that night in 1940 at Dunkirk, the sea calmed by the glistening oil spilt from the smoking wrecks of the rescue boats. Something caught his eye mid-river, but it was only a gliding black swan, its red beak catching the moonlight.

He fetched a glass, sloshed in an inch of Talisker and returned to the deck. Looking up at the moon he thought of its light falling through the green skylight onto the floor of the Italians’ makeshift theatre. In the shadows he placed Serafino Amatista, the face still unseen, the deserter’s eyes watching always, scared of discovery. Who had been his friends, and who his enemies? Who had lain in wait for him in the tunnel under the old camp? And what had made a coward of him in the summer heat of wartime Greece?