The Moon Tunnel

19

Dryden had been in the incident van for three hours. It was windowless and preternaturally white: heaven’s waiting room. Apart from two hard chairs, a single interview table provided the only furniture. It was attached with brass hinges to the wall and on it stood a row of six polystyrene coffee cups, marking Dryden’s imprisonment in half-hour instalments. The WPC who had stood watching him had opened the door once, revealing that the fog had returned with the dawn, and that in a featureless landscape the only detail was the distant dull reflection of the scene-of-crime tape, and faintly, a silent revolving blue emergency light. The cold frost had rushed in too, making him shiver more violently. But he could not fool himself: the sudden jolting of his limbs was due to fear, and his inability to mask it. His nervous system hummed, as if permanently attached to a low-voltage power source. A muscle below his eyelid fluttered and his stomach lurched, oiled by the coffee.

He looked at the statement he had dictated to DS Bob Cavendish-Smith. He had stated the bald facts in a monotonous style he felt suited the occasion. No time for rhetorical flourishes, just the mechanical details of his arrival on the site, his failure to find Professor Valgimigli in the office and his discovery of the corpse, kneeling but roped to the wooden post. He was unsure how long these events had taken, and especially how long he had stood, rooted, before the butchered body. He’d fled the site eventually, energized by the fear that he was not alone in the trench. Then he’d phoned Humph from a call box, pathetically, telling him everything at once, spilling it out to try and distance himself from the reality of death. Humph had phoned the police before driving to the dig, where they’d waited, the Capri’s dim interior light providing some solace until the patrol car pulled up alongside, the two PCs clearly certain they were dealing with a hallucinating drunk. Once they’d seen the corpse at close range the picture rapidly changed. By the time they’d got Dryden into the mobile interview unit there was a helicopter overhead and a mobile canteen just outside the gate. Humph’s cab was unseen, but Dryden knew he’d be there, just out of sight.

The door opened and Dryden smelt the distant aroma of bacon, thought immediately of Valgimigli’s steaming, riven, head and gulped some more cold coffee. Cavendish-Smith gave him a replacement cup and pulled up a seat on the opposite side of the table. Dryden noted he had his own takeaway version: the aroma of café latte was in the air, with nutmeg. The cold neon beat down on them like a fridge light, an industrial freezer perhaps, waiting for a consignment of split carcasses to hang on hooks.

He shivered again, setting off a series of involuntary jerks which made him put the coffee down hurriedly. Cavendish-Smith read the statement again. ‘Fine. Thanks. Bit of a detective, aren’t we?’

‘More than some,’ said Dryden. ‘It’s my job. Finding stories. We’re the same in that respect.’

Cavendish-Smith looked horrified at the comparison. He stood, holding a second statement lightly in his hand. ‘You were unlucky. According to his wife, she dropped him off at the site at 8.30 – half an hour earlier you’d have found him alive.’

‘Where did you find her?’ asked Dryden, already mapping out how he could wrap up the story for that day’s paper. An interview with the widow was the top priority.

‘Never mind that. I want you to walk me through every inch of what you did last night. Every last inch. Come on.’

‘Right,’ said Dryden, tired of the neon-lit room. The WPC had left the unit first when the DS had arrived, and now Cavendish-Smith led the way, giving Dryden just enough time to get sight of Louise Beaumont’s statement on the interview table. Dryden, now familiar with the layout of the standard witness form, noted the address.

Outside the fog was thinning, moved on by a light wind. Across the site a line of police officers were down on their hands and knees, edging forward, putting anything which caught the eye into evidence bags.

‘So,’ said Cavendish-Smith. ‘Where do we start?’ Dryden retraced his steps: his entry into the camp, the knock on the caravan door, and up to the point when he heard the shot, then to the edge of the trench, dropping down using the foot ladder and jumping the last three feet. They went north to the crossroads, passing the spot where Valgimigli had found the chariot rein rings. A larger trench had been dug since Dryden’s last visit, with various protruding pieces of metal and wood marked with fluorescent number tags. Two PCs stood guard.

Cavendish-Smith beckoned one of the PCs closer: ‘Once the scene-of-crime team has been through, and the pathologist has removed the body, I want one of the diggers brought here. Right here. I want to know if anyone has dug down here – if anything is missing.’

They walked on. ‘Nighthawks?’ asked Dryden. ‘Do you really think this is about pilfered pottery?’

‘Any better ideas?’ said Cavendish-Smith, not expecting an answer.

They reached the crossroads. ‘There has to be a link with the body in the tunnel,’ said Dryden. ‘We’re almost certain it was Serafino Amatista, we know about the robbery at Osmington Hall. Valgimigli has local links – to the Italian community. There must be a connection.’

They walked on to the taped-off area where Dryden had found Valgimigli’s corpse. A team in full-length polythene suits was working at intervals along the gully. They stopped short of the corpse, which now lay sprawled, bizarrely, under a square plastic tent.

But Cavendish-Smith was watching something else. Dryden could see in the distance, further along the trench, the spot where they’d uncovered the tunnel. A group of policemen were listening to a briefing, and kitting up in what looked like potholing gear – complete with miner’s hats.

‘What are they are up to?’

The detective stopped. ‘As you so astutely point out, Mr Dryden, we need to know everything we can about the body in the tunnel. We’re digging it out – might as well see what’s in the rest of it.’

Cavendish-Smith nodded at the body. ‘Did you touch him?’

Dryden shook his head. ‘I walked around, once. Then the ropes went, and he fell forward like this.’ He took a few steps backwards, as if judging the scene. ‘It’s an execution – isn’t it?’ he said, thinking of the day Serafino Amatista had fled the village of Agios Gallini.

The pathologist stood and Dryden saw a thin smudge of blood along his white forensic suit. ‘Gunshot wound delivered at close range – under six feet,’ he said. ‘The skin is seared and there’s some cordite in the wound.’ Dryden recognized the suited figure: Daniel Shawcross, a Home Office pathologist based in Cambridge. His presence indicated that bells had rung all the way down the line to Whitehall. Dryden guessed that the death of a well-respected foreign academic, together with the involvement of the international archaeological team and the University at Cambridge, had resulted in Shawcross’s early morning appearance at the crime scene.

‘And there was this,’ he said, removing an evidence bag from his suit pocket and lifting out a piece of blue material using tweezers. The cloth was blood-soaked and burnt at one end. ‘My guess is it’s a blindfold. The impact of the bullet blew half of it away. I expect to find threads impacted into the brain just here.’ He bent down and lifted aside the plastic sheet.

Dryden counted pine trees on the edge of the site. Cavendish-Smith was unmoved. ‘How about footprints, evidence of the killer’s exit?’ he asked, wrapping a waxed Barbour more closely to his suit.

Shawcross laughed. ‘It’s like the entrance to a football turnstile down this gully. We’ve found at least a dozen separate trails. But the most recent belong to Mr Dryden here – that’s them,’ he said as one of his assistants pointed to a plaster cast being taken behind the corpse.

‘Then there’s these…’ Shawcross pointed to some boot marks in front of the body.

‘The archaeologist’s?’ asked Dryden.

‘Sure. Right from the caravan and along the gully. And these…’

They gathered round a set of Wellington boot prints. ‘These are fresh, and unaccounted for. They enter the site by the Portakabin, mimic Valgimigli’s to this spot, and then exit that way…’ He pointed along the trench towards the distant pine trees.

‘No sign of a struggle?’ asked Cavendish-Smith. ‘No sign his body was dragged?’

‘Nothing,’ said Shawcross, ducking under the tape and resuming work with the tweezers in the archaeologist’s wrecked skull.

‘Why would a man walk to his own execution? And why would the executioner tie his hands after he was dead?’ said Dryden, but the detective was gone, asking himself the same questions.

Dryden was dismissed, with instructions to keep in contact. Cavendish-Smith retreated to the mobile canteen and a full English breakfast. Dryden found Humph and the Capri, parked up amongst the trees by the call box he’d used the night before. In the glove compartment they found two identical bottles of Tequila. They drank in silence, the fierce warmth of the alcohol burning its way down Dryden’s throat. He checked his watch, noting that his hand still shook perceptibly. He still had three hours before The Crow’s office opened. He had a story for the Express’s front page – for anyone’s front page. But for now he would close his eyes and try not to see Valgimigli’s butchered head.