The Moon Tunnel

18

Dryden stood in the cold night air and let the first frost of the year sober him up. .The fog had gone, the moon was up, and everything was clear to the eye. But the mystery of Serafino Amatista seemed deeper still. Why had Azeglio Valgimigli returned to the Fens? What precisely was his link to Il Giardino? Had he been honest with the police about his connections with the Italian community? Dryden looked up at the moon, a sliver of darkness short of full, knowing that tonight there was little chance of finding answers.

He climbed Fore Hill to the Market Square as the cathedral clock chimed 9.00pm. The pointlessness of his life swept over him in the stillness, and he resented the duty of visiting Laura, and he felt further guilt: Vee Hilgay’s eviction might go ahead the next day and he had done nothing to help her find her inheritance. The Dadd was the only thing which would save her from the indignity of a lonely death.

‘Alone,’ he said, tired of inaction, and tired of his life.

In the Market Square a drunk urinated in an ornamental flower bed with no apparent sense of shame. Under a lamppost whose light flickered on and off with an audible electrical buzz a couple were entwined, daring each other to break off before asphyxiation set in.

Might Valgimigli be on the site tonight? He’d told the police he would sleep in the Portakabin at California in case the nighthawks struck, but would the arrival of his beautiful wife from Italy alter his plans? Or would they mount the vigil together? Dryden, suddenly buoyed up by a sense of purpose, dashed under Steeple Gate and out into the cathedral close, crossing unseen through the building’s vast shadow, to reappear 100 yards beyond, taking his own pitiful shadow with him across the moonlit grass.

He had determined on action but was unclear what to do. So he hurried instead, and was at the site of the dig within ten minutes. The two wire-mesh fencing sections which had been arranged to block vehicular access stood apart by a foot: the chain and lock which should have held them missing. Beyond, four halogen floodlights lit up the scene like a football pitch. The jet-black cross of the two digger’s trenches was clear, and the white concrete bases of the twenty-four huts. A light burned within the mobile unit, a slightly warmer red than the abrasive blue-white of the floodlights.

Dryden stood in the gap in the fence. ‘He won’t be there,’ he said to himself, realizing he should have called Humph for support – moral if not physical. If the archaeologist was there what would Dryden say? But he wouldn’t be there; the light must be on a timer. He was unlikely to be spending a precious night with his wife in a damp mobile home on the edge of the fen, their first night together for months. She didn’t look like a woman who enjoyed asceticism. But in that case why was the site open, and so soon after the police had warned the archaeologist of the dangers of the nighthawks?

Dryden walked briskly towards the caravan and tapped on the thin metallic door, briefly failing to suppress an image of the couple curled up on a bunkbed inside. He knocked again, the superstructure tilting slightly from the blow, then settling on its springs. He heard a dog bark on the fen and remembered the three which had died on the site, recalled the black lips peeled back from the stone-white teeth.

He shivered, looked up at the stars and wished he was somewhere else.

He contemplated the black cross of the trenches, seeing them for the first time as a crucifix, and then several things happened in rapid sequence. First a stretch of the inky black trench in the far eastern side of the site flashed blue, followed by the muffled retort of a pistol shot which sounded once, and then echoed once, twice and a distant third time from out on the fen. Finally, across the floodlights, a single wisp of white smoke, as insubstantial as a breath, drifted up from the trench and across the moon.

Cowardice rooted him to the spot, his stomach pirouetting, coupled with the familiar freezing of the heart. Dryden’s ears had captured the shot, a tiny cornered percussion, which rang still like tinnitus. Why didn’t he run? Already he’d begun to tell himself a different story. It wasn’t a gunshot but a flashgun, not a murderous bullet but an archaeologist’s photo shoot: a night-time study of uncovered remains, artistically caught by moonlight. Perhaps Professor Valgimigli had finally found the Anglo-Saxon chariot and its treasures. That was it: a further find, perhaps a sensational one that demanded instant recording. Self-deluded, Dryden shouted, ‘Professor?’ then let himself down the ladder and into the trench. He made his way towards the crossroads, passing the spot where the chariot rein rings had been uncovered just five days earlier. But there was no one in sight.

At the centre he stopped and looked east, towards the spot where they had uncovered the tunnel, and the pine forest beyond. The long slit trench ran before him like a vision of the Somme, or Passchendaele. But the men were gone and so, it seemed, were the dead. The moon, low in the northern sky, half lit the scene. Dryden let his eyes sweep forward along the arrow-straight gully, and in the far distance knew instantly that something stood in the moonlight.

He walked towards it, telling himself it was Valgimigli and waiting for him to shout out. He was twenty yards away when he stopped and forced himself to look again. The moon was rising and with each speeding kilometre across the night sky it revealed another centimetre of the dark tunnel. The archaeologist was kneeling, his head caught the moonbeams first, and Dryden saw that he looked up, his mouth gaping slightly in what looked like wonder. The face of a child, perhaps, following its first comet across the night sky.

But Dryden felt no wonder, only fear. The head was strangely insubstantial, incomplete. He walked forward again to within six feet. The head was, like the moon itself, only half lit. But the moonlit side, tilted up and slightly towards the front, showed the damage that the gunshot had wrought. Below the eye a hole gaped, sheared away from the teeth and jaw. The black blood obscured the exposed neck below, and the teeth glittered like quartz in rock. In the frosty air the head steamed, and Dryden smelt the iron of blood on the air.

One of Dryden’s knees gave way and he slumped to the side, supporting himself with a hand thrust out into the damp soil of the trench. He heard his heartbeat racing in his ears and a necklace of bright lights obscured his vision, a warning he might pass out. He willed himself to stay conscious and looked again at the corpse.

He waited as the moon’s flight shed more light on the kneeling victim. A rough rope was revealed around the neck, and just behind it Dryden could now see the square-cut end of a wooden post. That was why the corpse looked upwards, the skull carried the weight of the body below, the chin the latch which held the rope. Dryden forced himself to stand, his knees buckling out of synch, and edged himself forward to circle the body, noting the hands bound too with the same length of rope, but oddly loose, and the nail driven through the post which held the neck ropes high.

He completed the circle like a pilgrim at a sacrifice. His muscles shivered, and he tasted gall in his throat which made him retch, lose his breath and then gulp in another lungful of air, this time laced with drifting cordite from the gunshot. He gagged again, feeling the contents of his stomach fold over and lurch again. In his pocket he fingered the mobile phone he wanted so much to use. But could he speak, or would he scream?

The mutilated head dripped blood down the body’s left side, over the shoulder and forearm, until it fell from the perfectly manicured fingers to the ground. The chin held the body’s weight, but as the muscles stiffened with rigor mortis the torso twisted by millimetres, giving an illusion of creaking life. The rope twisted too, and an occasional rivulet of blood shot out obscenely from the neck. The legs were buckled in the zigzag semaphore of death, the feet turned on to their sides.

Where was the killer? It was the first coherent thought he had been able to construct for many minutes. As Dryden asked the question he saw again the pitch black crucifix of the trenches, and the floodlights. Had someone run for cover after the gunshot? After his shout? Or were they still here, with him? He spun on his heel and looked back down the long trench. Nothing. He turned back and watched Valgimigli, motionless for a second, but then the rope and nail finally gave out and the corpse fell forward, its arms swinging round in what looked like a final attempt to embrace the living, before it fell to the ground. One hand touched Dryden’s shoe, leaving a bloody fingerprint. Dryden, immobile with fear, listened to a distant scream for several seconds before realizing it was his.