The Moon Tunnel

16

Dryden and Humph sat on one of the cemetery’s benches, together, alone, in the dense pale fog which had settled in their hair. Beside them a child’s grave lay fresh, a bunch of flowers enclosed in cellophane, the condensation within like a stifled breath.

The cabbie took up half the bench, his tiny ballerina’s feet hanging clear of the ground. He wore wraparound reflective sunglasses, apparently worried someone would spot him outside his beloved taxi cab. Dryden hauled in a breath and choked on the hint of sulphur; the fires were still burning out at the town dump, churning out the gases which created the pea-souper. He’d been out twice over the weekend to check the site. The fire brigade were pumping thousands of gallons of foam into the artificial hillside, but with little apparent effect.

Dryden reached inside his overcoat pocket and retrieved an apple and two cocktail sausages. Humph’s eyes settled longingly on the cab parked beyond the cemetery railings: a grey outline in the fog. An unseen bus ground its gears on the distant High Road. At the centre of the cemetery stood a brutal Victorian steeple, open at the base, and Dryden tilted his head to try to see its apex. But the grey image faded quickly to white, and the gently falling mist hung tiny globes of water on his eyelashes.

He checked his watch: still half an hour until Serafino Amatista’s funeral.

‘Thanks for waiting with me,’ he said.

Humph shrugged, retrieving a book from his pocket which Dryden recognized as the text which accompanied his language tape. The cabbie began to memorize the names of nine different Polish pickles.

Dryden decided to get the story of the Italian association’s appeal for funds over to copy, giving it a lot more chance – twenty-four hours ahead of the Express’s final deadline – of being used in full on an inside page. He scribbled it out in his notebook and called The Crow, getting Jean to take it down:

By Philip Dryden

Ely’s expatriate Italians are out to raise £5,000 to erect a memorial to Marco Roma, the man they say held together their community through the poverty and bitterness of the post-war years.

More than 300 Italians live locally, and most of them are in the area because of the large number of PoWs who spent the last years of the war working on local farms.

‘Marco Roma fought to keep alive the traditions of his native Italy,’ said Roman Casartelli, the president of the Italian Ex-Servicemen’s Association of East Cambridgeshire.

‘But he always insisted that, while links should be maintained with our native country, England was now our home. He worked to integrate the community and won the respect of all,’ added Mr Casartelli, a retired railway signalman.

The association decided at a meeting yesterday (Monday) held at the restaurant founded by Mr Roma – Il Giardino at Ten Mile Bank – that a public subscription should be opened to fund a memorial at Ely Cemetery, where many of the former PoWs are buried.

‘We would wish this memorial to express our thanks to Marco – but also to the local English community for the welcome that we received here after the end of the war and the affection we feel for our adopted home,’ said Mr Casartelli.

Donations can be made by cheque payable to Marco Roma Memorial Fund and deposited at Lloyds TSB Bank, High Street, Ely. Donations can also be posted to Mr Casartelli at The Old Signal Box, Queen Adelaide, Ely.

Jean read the story back, Dryden made a couple of changes, and then rang off. The hum of voices, discreetly low, approached through the mist.

‘At last,’ said Dryden, rising and taking up what he hoped was a pious stance.

Thomas Alder, funeral director, appeared from the gloom, pacing out the procession with his ceremonial staff. Dryden considered the man that Russell Flynn claimed was a clandestine criminal fence, able to slip items of interest into the London market. An impassive face went with the job, but Alder had perfected the routine. With white hair and pale skin, he looked like one of the alabaster figures on the richer tombs: pious, watchful, innocent.

Professor Azeglio Valgimigli followed the priest – a woman on his arm. She was striking even from twenty yards – smaller than her husband, with a slim figure expertly clothed in white, which highlighted her glowing tan. She radiated sex like a colour: her breasts were high and full and the blouse she wore was cut to reveal the promise of a deep cleavage. Her hair was blonde, covered in thousands of droplets of mist and gathered up to reveal a sculpted neck. Her eyes were blue, but almost colourless, and her sensuous lips were held in a neat professional bow.

There were about a dozen other mourners, and Dryden briefly reflected on the irony that this unknown PoW should warrant such a congregation. Amongst them Dryden spotted the rest of the archaeological team, and DS Bob Cavendish-Smith, one of the detectives based in Ely, a smart graduate-entry copper. Despite the affected ‘Bob’ he was known at the station, inevitably, as ‘Posh’. Cavendish-Smith had a degree in forensic studies from Lincoln University, a fact he’d made pretty sure everyone knew when he’d first been posted south. The implication was clear: he was just passing through this rural backwater, en route to the Met and eventual promotion to commissioner.

Dryden noted with satisfaction that the mourners carried the coffin with some effort, weighted as it was with the items from the museum and, he presumed, some stone added by Alder’s apprentices. The ceremony itself was swift and necessarily anonymous, the consul from the Italian Embassy reading out a short prayer in his native tongue. Valgimigli carried the wreath from the diggers, his wife, incongruously, one from the German Embassy. The stone Valgimigli had ordered would have to wait six months for erection, so that the grave could settle, the coffin and its contents decaying into the earth. For now a single wooden cross had been provided with the catch-all euphemism: Rest in Peace.

The Valgimiglis looked oddly discomfited. The professor seemed agitated, constantly adjusting the line of his black overcoat and swapping fur-lined gloves from hand to hand. His wife was somewhere else, chin high, staring out over the fen, perhaps searching for the outline of the sun in the all-enveloping mist. A chorus of ‘Amen’ marked the end of proceedings and Dryden deserted Humph and headed for the archaeologist, who seemed eager to quit the graveside, although his wife lingered, adding a prayer. As Dryden approached, Valgimigli stiffened, stepped off the path and waited for the woman to join him: ‘My wife – Philip Dryden, the reporter I mentioned.’

Dryden revelled in the implied insult. It was nice to know he was worth a mention.

The woman bristled, clearly annoyed at the anonymous introduction as the professor’s chattel.

She took Dryden’s hand warmly. ‘Louise Beaumont. Dr Louise Beaumont.’

The touch was cool and sensuous, and Dryden saw briefly a vision, a swimsuit, the water running in rivulets off the suntanned skin. ‘A visit?’ said Dryden to her, unable to guess her age. She might, like her husband, be into her forties but she could have passed for early thirties.

‘Yes, yes. A week – London, and home. I felt I should come today. An unknown soldier, then?’ she said, looking beyond her husband towards the open grave.

‘Not quite,’ said Dryden. He sensed an air of repressed agitation in her, too, some pressing unfinished business perhaps, despite the sound of clay being shovelled onto the nearby coffin.

Professor Valgimigli buttoned his coat, ignoring Dryden’s remark. ‘As I said – a story lost to the past.’

‘My husband is a romantic, Mr Dryden,’ she said. ‘I think he’d rather all stories were lost in the past. That’s where he’s at home – in the past.’

Valgimigli smiled but Dryden sensed this was a bitter division between their views of life, between the love of the past and the joy of the present.

‘Doctor?’ asked Dryden.

‘Medical,’ she said. ‘Absolutely nothing academic,’ and they all laughed.

‘My wife believes science can solve everything,’ said Valgimigli, gripping her arm just above the wrist. ‘I suspect we will never know. I like it that way. This makes me a romantic – this I don’t understand.’ He smiled with his mouth, and Dryden was again impressed by his falsity, the air of show.

‘We do actually know some more about him,’ said Dryden, instantly securing the professor’s attention.

‘Well, we think we know more. An Italian prisoner named Serafino Amatista – one who went under that name, anyway – absconded from internment shortly after being released from the camp in 1944. He has never been found. He was one of a small group of prisoners who dug the tunnel, and later – after they were billeted out on farms – carried out a robbery at a country house. That’s where the pearls in the tunnel came from: Osmington Hall.’

Professor Valgimigli leaned in close and Dryden caught the look in his wife’s eyes: suspicion was there, certainly, and perhaps pity.

‘Fascinating. How delightful that you have found this man, Mr Dryden – but who shot him, eh? Can you tell us that?’ Dryden noted that Valgimigli’s agitation had disappeared, the hands, relaxed now, snaked around his wife’s waist. ‘And why crawling back into the camp? That is bizarre too – no?’

‘Thieves fall out,’ said Dryden. ‘And perhaps another reason… Serafino was a deserter. He left his post, guarding a village in occupied Greece. The German authorities were led to believe he had been killed by the villagers. There was a reprisal. He had good reasons to try and protect his identity. But someone at the camp – one of the Germans who replaced the Italians at California – recognized him. Perhaps they met?’

He could have told them more; that the burglars had killed someone that night in 1944. And that the most valuable item taken from Osmington Hall was still missing: the priceless Dadd. All this he kept to himself, distrusting Valgimigli and guarding his story.

The archaeologist laughed and slipped his gloves on, finally ending the hand-to-hand shuffle. Dryden watched them talking as they walked away, arm-in-arm, towards the cemetery gates. Despite the way they held on to each other, the rest of their bodies never touched.

Thomas Alder, funeral director, raised a black top hat to the mourners as they left. He made an exception for Dryden.

‘Can you arrange a house clearance?’ asked Dryden. ‘The stuff has been moved once – to an old barn. There’s several generations of it, I’m afraid – but little of any worth.’

Alder nodded, sensing that the animosity which had existed between them had lessened. ‘We usually recommend the auction rooms – at least for the best furniture. You have removed anything of sentimental value?’

‘There’s very little,’ said Dryden. ‘Some photographs, perhaps, one or two pieces of furniture which have been in the family since before the Great War, and some pictures. I’m afraid I’m no expert. And neither…’

‘Indeed,’ said Alder emphatically. He handed Dryden a card. ‘Let me know when the items are ready for collection.’

A polished hearse drew up smartly to ferry the funeral director away. Dryden examined his own reflection in the black mirror of the paintwork: a lonely figure, standing amongst gravestones.

Cavendish-Smith appeared at his side. The detective was a rarity in the police force – a public-school boy with an all-year tan and an expensive haircut, his chin held arrogantly high. Dryden had interviewed him when he’d got the job in Ely and been appointed to head a task force charged with stopping an outbreak of town-centre graffiti: a poisoned chalice no doubt designed to derail his glittering career. Publication of the interview had resulted in an aerosol insult on a white wall in Market Square which Dryden had long treasured: POSH COP WON’T CATCH US.

But the posh cop did. He picked up likely kids in a late-night swoop and had traces of spray paint on their hands analysed and matched to fresh graffiti on the walls. It wouldn’t have stood up in court, but then it didn’t have to. The threat of a heavy fine made sure the parents delivered the punishment. Infuriatingly the story was leaked to one of the nationals – inevitably the Daily Mail. Dryden suspected Cavendish-Smith.

The detective had one other obvious public-school trait: an obsession with regular and appropriate food, a vivid contrast with Dryden’s own Bohemian diet.

‘Dryden,’ the accent was neutral, no trace of his native Newcastle. ‘I hope I will not be reading any surprises in tomorrow’s paper?’

Dryden extracted a piece of pork pie crust from his overcoat pocket and brushed some sand off it carefully. Cavendish-Smith looked horrified but checked his watch, clearly pining for lunch.

‘Bob,’ said Dryden, revelling in the discomfort this familiarity produced in the DS.

‘I’ve found out a few things. I don’t mind sharing that information – but I’d appreciate it staying between us until the Express is out.’

The detective nodded: not quite a deal, but it was the best Dryden would get. Cavendish-Smith did not court the press, and even Dryden’s mildly puffy interview had failed to win a single favour. He told the detective about the missing PoW Serafino Amatista, and the link with Osmington Hall, pretty sure he’d got that far himself using police records.

Cavendish-Smith didn’t say thanks. ‘Right. Well, he’s dead and buried now.’

‘But you’ll still date the bone sample?’

‘I don’t expect any surprises. Do you?’ he said, walking off. ‘We may never be able to prove it’s him anyway – if he was a deserter it’d take years to get a match.’

Dryden fell in beside him. ‘I’d appreciate a call – when the data is through. It would be a big help…’

Cavendish-Smith looked at him. ‘I bet it would.’

Dryden doubted he’d even remember his name.