The Moon Tunnel

Monday, 25 October

13

When Humph cut the Capri’s engine the street was utterly silent. Out of the fog the silhouette of a mother appeared, dragging a child towards the primary school on the edge of the fen. Just past 8.30am on the Jubilee Estate, Monday morning, and nothing else moved except stolen goods.

Dryden peered out of the Capri’s passenger side window. He had twenty-four hours before the Express’s deadline and only one way of proving a link between Osmington Hall and the body found in the tunnel, which looked likely to be that of Serafino Amatista, a PoW last seen working in the fields around Ely in the autumn of 1944.

‘Next street on the left,’ he said, glimpsing a road sign in the swirling mist. ‘Number 29.’

Humph didn’t ask why, but nudged the Capri through the fog. He came to a stop at the junction and peered ahead. ‘Can you see that?’

Dryden cleared some condensation. ‘Yup. Give it a wide berth, they kick.’

The Jubilee had been built on once-flooded land on the edge of the town. The open, puddled fields beyond were home to travellers’ horses. One of them had wandered in, and stood now as bemused and sightless as the cabbie. They left it snuffling the wet grass at the edge of the road and turned into the next street.

They passed two cars up on bricks and an abandoned supermarket trolley containing a soaking blanket and a can of Carlsberg Special Brew. Overhead the streetlamps failed to penetrate the gloom, a necklace of cold amber.

They inched past a parked car, a burnt-out Vauxhall Corsa with a ‘Police Notified’ placard inside its windscreen. The end of the cul-de-sac was a bit more upmarket: from what Dryden could see the fences were up, gardens were neat and the household rubbish was in the bins, not in the road. Number 29 was a ground-floor flat in a two-storey house. The door was solid, without glass, and after knocking Dryden waited a full minute before flipping up the letterbox to peer in. Nothing, but he sensed movement and felt the warmth of central heating within, so he knocked again and waited.

He heard a door open and the sudden sound of Radio Four’s Today programme. He heard a chain rattle and fingers rounded the edge of the door.

‘Yes?’ The voice was feminine but muscular, with plenty of confident strength.

‘Miss Hilgay?’

She let him in after he showed his press card. The front room was a surprise. Modern furniture, mostly Ikea, with none of the usual forest of framed family snapshots which seem to trail the elderly like small dogs with coats on.

On the table there was a pile of Labour Party fliers for the forthcoming local election. She’d been sticking them in envelopes and addressing them to post.

This didn’t seem right. Dryden checked his notebook. ‘Miss Viola Hilgay?’

She must have been seventy, more, but she stood her ground, one hand on the bare mantelpiece above the electric fire.

‘They call me Vee. Always have done, I’m afraid – but it’s better than Viola, don’t you think? Terrible affectation. Tea – I was just…’

Dryden shook his head. ‘It was just a brief enquiry about Osmington Hall.’ He told her about the discovery of the body at the PoW camp, the Italians questioned about the spate of robberies in late 1944, and the last unsolved case – the robbery at the Hall.

‘Yes. The police came,’ she said.

Dryden, surprised the local police had matched the stolen goods so quickly with Osmington, cursed silently beneath a smile.

Miss Hilgay bowed her head. ‘Look. I’m going to make that tea – you’ll join me?’

Dryden gave in, dutifully involved in the tiny but time-consuming rituals of ferrying mugs and sugar from the kitchenette to the living-room table.

She drank from a large mug with a picture of Tony Benn on the front. Dryden noticed that despite her confidence her hands shook slightly. Her eyes were green, like his, but one – the left – was sightless. The pupil had glazed over with a milk-white swirl which made it look like a tiny moon, rising between the eyelids.

‘They’re going to evict me,’ she said, slurping the tea.

‘Sorry?’

‘I thought that was why you’d come. I can’t pay the rent any more. They say it’s too big and there’s some one-room places – warden controlled. I’d rather die. I’ve told them they’ll have to carry me out. They don’t care. I’m just waiting for them to turn up. Today, perhaps tomorrow. I told that policeman, he didn’t care…’

The word ‘either’ hung in the air unspoken. Dryden looked out of the window in embarrassment, conscious that the lonely landscape that was his personal space had just been violated.

‘Do you remember the Hall?’ he asked again, ignoring the diversion.

‘Yes. Oh, yes. Very much so, Mr…?’

‘Dryden. Philip Dryden.’

‘I was fifteen when we left. I loved the place, naturally, any child would. I was just lucky it was me. I spent my life exploring it, really. There were a hundred rooms – did you know that?’

Dryden shook his head.

‘That’s what the National Trust says, anyway – they must be counting some cupboards,’ she said, laughing.

‘Anyway, I left in 1949. My father died and left debts – and then there were death duties. My mother and I moved out to an estate cottage; she had some money which was not entailed with the house.’

She dried up, wistfully eyeing the pile of unaddressed envelopes.

‘And what did you do?’

‘I lived off her money when she died. I went to university – very daring, the first woman in the family to break that taboo. Birmingham – another taboo!’

They both laughed. ‘Then I worked for various charities – Shelter, mainly. Then I got old and everyone thinks you’re useless when you’re old. So I’m here, waiting for a bailiff to call.’

She laughed, a real slap-in-the-face-of-life laugh.

‘At the Hall – you were an only child?’

‘Yes. Very much the only child. Horribly precocious, I suspect.’

Dryden shook his head, sipping the tea.

‘Well. I was seen and never heard, never spoken to, in fact. But I had friends. There was Georgie for one. That’s why I remember the robbery. They let me see the body, which was extraordinary, wasn’t it? I suppose they thought differently then – about servants. It was just… laid there. I think they thought I’d lost a pet or something; dreadful, really. They kept saying there’d be another underbutler. They were like buses to them, you see – one along every few minutes.’

Dryden laughed but Miss Hilgay didn’t. ‘They laid him out in the kitchens, on one of the scullery tables. Georgie was fun, so I couldn’t understand why they’d done that to him – the burglars. His face was lopsided, stove in I suppose. There was a lot of whispering, about the blood.’

Dryden heard the key turn in the front door. Someone pushed it open with practised confidence and went straight to the kitchen. ‘Tea, Vee?’ There was a laugh in the voice, not quite a cruel one, but almost.

‘We’re in here. Bring a cup.’

Russell Flynn stood at the doorway, his tattooed dragon livid on the white flesh of his neck. Russell affected a nonchalant smile as he nodded at Dryden, but as he set the tea cup down it rattled in its saucer.

‘Russ,’ said Dryden, bringing out his notebook.

‘Russell is doing community service,’ said Miss Hilgay, pouring the tea. ‘He helps out – household tasks. We’re friends.’

‘So are we,’ said Dryden, beaming at Russell with 100-megawatt insincerity.

‘Miss Hilgay,’ said Dryden. ‘The police, did they tell you what they found with the body in the tunnel? A candlestick, some pearls…’

She shook her head. ‘Yes. But I already knew. Russell told me. He’s very good on local crime.’

‘Really?’ said Dryden, taking a biscuit.

‘He showed me the story in The Crow – so I rang the police.’ Dryden nodded, comforted that his own detective work had not been bettered after all.

‘The pearls and the candlestick were taken in the robbery. The police said they took the candlestick because it was the murder weapon. It had a black ebony ring. Worthless almost. As were the pearls, I’m afraid.’

Dryden looked at Russell, whose gaze fell to the sugar bowl.

‘Russell said that sometimes the police don’t give out all the details. That they may have found something else in the tunnel.’ It was a question, but she tried not to sound as if she wanted an answer.

Dryden shook his head. ‘I was there – there was nothing else.’

Her head lolled over the cup.

‘I’m sorry. It’s the Dadd, isn’t it? The Richard Dadd – the moonlight picture. You hoped…’

‘Yes. It was always my favourite. Well, ours. Georgie and I would imagine what the story was… fantasize about that scene, so mysterious, under the clouds. It’s the only thing left, you see – of the estate. Everything else went in death duties. But the Dadd was lost.’

‘So if they found the Dadd, you’d be rich?’

‘Again,’ she said, smiling. ‘Me. I’ve spent most of my life vilifying the rich – which got progressively easier as we lost our own money. Bit tricky if I got it back, eh? I’d have to give it all to Russ.’

Russell beamed, his freckles disappearing in a genuine blush.

‘But the pearls?’

‘As I say, worthless. I’d like to have them, though. My mother left them out that night – they were a copy of a real set my grandfather had given my grandmother. They’re fake. I used to wear them in the nursery. An odd thing to die for.’

‘Wouldn’t the Dadd, if it was found, simply be included in the estate to meet the debts?’ he asked, and Russell shot a glance at his elderly friend.

‘No. No, all the debts were paid. There was a tiny surplus, so we paid off the staff at the hall and provided a small pension for them. That was my mother’s decision, although she wasn’t happy. I told her we had no choice – the poor people. It was their home too.’

‘Home,’ said Dryden, regretting it instantly.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking round. ‘I’ve lived here for twenty-one years.’

Dryden looked out the front window, the smog was pressing up against the glass, cutting off the rest of the world. ‘Are they really going to evict you?’

‘Not today, it seems,’ she said. ‘They always come early – to catch you unawares, Russ says. But soon. They’ve made so many promises – but I bet that’s the one they’ll keep.’

Dryden stood. ‘I wonder where it is – the painting?’ he said, returning his tea cup to the tray.

There was an awkward silence as Vee shuffled the election leaflets. Dryden sensed that she was trying not to cry. Russell stood and put an arm round her shoulders.

‘I don’t think about that,’ she said eventually. ‘To think that someone else’s eyes may be falling on it right now. Do you think they’re innocent eyes, Mr Dryden?’ she asked, smiling.

‘I doubt that very much,’ said Dryden.