The Moon Tunnel

24

‘Sleep,’ said Dryden getting in the cab, throwing his head back against the passenger headrest. The mist had thickened towards noon, stifling the light, and the Capri now lay marooned on the damp, glistening tarmac of the hospital car park. He rang Jean on the mobile and put over two paragraphs of quotes from Louise Beaumont for the Express’s splash.

Then he closed his eyes and said it again. ‘Sleep.’

‘Here or home?’ asked Humph, literal to the last.

‘Home,’ said Dryden, hating the word. He closed his eyes but saw only Valgimigli’s head, the exposed arteries running red. ‘Sleep,’ he said again, and felt its welcoming onrush.

Then, as Humph pulled the Capri in a long lazy circle towards the exit, Dryden’s mobile rang. It was Charlie, the stress apparent in The Crow’s lightly soused news editor. Septimus Kew, the paper’s usually silent editor, had been reading the early page proofs for the inside pages of that week’s edition of The Crow and didn’t like Dryden’s inside filler on the expected demonstration to mark the eclipse at California on Thursday night. The site was now the scene of a murder. Would they really go ahead? Wasn’t this just free publicity for a bunch of New Age nutters? The editor wanted the story backed up – and a judgement made on whether the demo would ever happen. Dryden had an hour to allay the editor’s fears, otherwise the story would be spiked and replaced by a report on Littleport Autumn Fayre.

Dryden killed the mobile and swore. He was doubly annoyed because Henry was right. ‘The riverside – Padnal Fen,’ he said, fishing in his pocket for food. Humph flipped down the glove compartment and found two bottles of malt whisky. Dryden sipped as he ate a sausage roll, feeling his spirits rise as they dropped down off the Isle of Ely onto the open fen by the river, where the mist thickened, bringing a premature dusk.

Speedwing, the radical druid, lived on the river in a narrow boat called The Prancing Pony. At water level the Ely smog was less poisonous, but thick enough to obscure the far bank where the watermeadows normally stretched to the horizon and the city’s nearest neighbouring ‘island’ of Stuntney. Today just the far bank was visible, and as Dryden watched a river rat slipped out of the grass and into the black water with an oily, audible plop.

The Prancing Pony smelt of damp despite the acrid smoke pouring from a tin chimney. Various scenes from Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings had been expertly recreated along its wooden cabin panels. On the roof two bikes were chained, alongside a herb garden contained in various terracotta pots. A plump white cat sat amongst them: its fur shivering with the imposition of the water droplets deposited by the mist. It saw Dryden with its pale pink eyes but declined to move.

In another age, thought Dryden, they’d have hanged these people as witches.

Speedwing was a Water Gypsy, one of a small and almost entirely innocent group of thirty- and forty-somethings who tried to live an alternative life along the river bank in a necklace of narrow boats ranging from the chichi to the dilapidated. Local gossip attributed to them all manner of crimes, from naked moonlight dancing to peddling heroin. But the truth about the Water Gypsies was much more mundane, as Dryden had discovered in the weeks after Laura’s accident when, walking aimlessly by night, he had come upon them around a camp fire out by the clay pits. Drunk himself from a desperate raid on Humph’s glovebox bar he had found their anarchic party deeply satisfying. He’d sat, smoked and talked about a lifestyle which offered escape – a commodity which he savagely desired. And he’d flirted with Etty, the lonely but beautiful Water Gypsy who had made it clear Dryden could seek more than solace on the riverside. For that one night he joined them, and not only did they accept him, they let him back in when he needed them. But for Dryden the escape was only intermittent, for even from the watermeadows he could see the Gothic crenellations of The Tower Hospital, and the responsibilities it represented. And while their brand of alternative lifestyle embraced freedom and nonconformity, it also included alienation, loneliness and envy – a not entirely attractive cocktail.

But Speedwing was different. Speedwing was a druid, and the dish aerial on the roof of The Prancing Pony linked him via the internet to the rest of the druid world. Speedwing’s finest hour had come a few years earlier when the retreating tide had revealed Sea Henge – an Iron Age wooden ring, exposed on the beach at Holme, directly north of Ely on the Norfolk Coast. Speedwing had led the resistance to the decision to remove the ring to a museum for preservation and display. He had recited druidical verses, danced and paraded for the TV cameras, brandishing a staff decorated with feathers; and at the key moment had broken through a ring of bemused police constables to throw himself on the exposed central wooden plinth, where the archaeologists believed the bodies of the Bronze Age victims, exposed to be eaten by birds, had rotted in the sun. He hadn’t stopped the dig, but he’d established himself as the druid to watch. Dryden wasn’t the only journalist to have Speedwing’s mobile phone number: it was in the contacts book of half the hacks on Fleet Street. But only Dryden knew that his real name was Brian.

Dryden shivered, sensing an unseen sunset beyond the grey mist. Fatigue washed over him and he wanted desperately to lie down, close his eyes in the dim crepuscular light. Instead he knocked loudly with his knuckles on The Prancing Pony’s forward hatch, and the boat rocked in response. He looked along the river bank and strained to see anything earthbound: a line of pollarded willows floated on the mist, leading the eye into the white nothing of the open fen, and between the two a figure hung, one arm held out towards the water with the rigidity of a statue.

‘Brian?’ Dryden was thirty yards away when he said it but the mirrored water offered perfect acoustics.

The arm began to pull in a long line, which slipped, dripping, out of the water.

By the time Dryden got to him the eel trap was on the grass, a long wicker basket closed at one end, which enticed the eel in without allowing it the space to reverse out. A grey brown eel twisted inside, effortlessly flipping the trap from side to side.

‘Dinner?’ said Dryden.

Speedwing had a whiskered face, like the eels. His red hair was blanching to grey. His eyes were slate-black like the river.

‘Nah. Can’t stand ’em. But the restaurants in town’ll pay. Visitors like ’em.’

They walked back towards The Prancing Pony.

‘I got your press release,’ said Dryden. ‘But is this one really going to happen? A man’s been murdered.’

Speedwing caught hold of one of the lapels of Dryden’s overcoat: ‘I heard. That’s our point, isn’t it? Desecration. Perhaps he paid the price. So yes, we are up for it. That site is a sacred burial place. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t just pick any old spot, Dryden – it had probably been a place of worship for thousands of years. Now it’s a murder scene. We owe it to the ancestors to reclaim it. We owe it to the victim.’ Dryden recognized some of the tired phrases with which the true aficionado is at ease.

He let the druid ramble on while another, more interesting, question formed. At Sea Henge Speedwing had been a constant spectator, sleeping in the dunes behind the beach and haunting the archaeologists’ every move. Had he mounted a similar vigil at California? There were plenty of places amongst the pine trees from which he could have spied on Professor Valgimigli’s last days.

Speedwing was still talking. ‘And the police are taking it seriously even if you aren’t. They’ve been in contact and they’re putting officers out on the night. We don’t want trouble. I told ’em…’

That was good enough for Dryden, and should be good enough for the editor. He’d check with the station to make sure Speedwing was telling the truth. If he was, The Crow could hook the story on that, and then run Speedwing’s comments. That way everyone was covered.

‘Have you been on the site?’ asked Dryden, and knew immediately it was the right question.

The black eyes flashed. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He thrust a hand into the trap, extricated the eel, and with a sharp twist of his wrists broke the cartilage of the backbone. The scrunch of crushed vertebrae echoed under the mist.

‘Was that why the police really came round?’

Speedwing began to walk back to his boat. ‘We’ve tried to keep a vigil. I spent a night up there, in the pines. Saw nothing and we’ve got nothing to hide.’

‘Get on the site?’

‘No. Never. Why?’

Dryden shrugged. ‘Someone did. The body in the tunnel, there was something buried with it, I think, something valuable.’

‘Valuable to whom?’ asked Speedwing. ‘All property is theft,’ he said, consulting what looked like a Rolex watch.

‘Did they ask about the nighthawks?’

‘Yup. We told ’em what we knew.’

They’d got to the boat. Dryden was tired pulling answers out like teeth. ‘Look – do you want something in The Crow about the demo?’

Dryden knew that without pre-publicity Speedwing’s event would be reduced to the usual suspects. But a good show in the paper might pull in new members, middle-class sympathizers who’d otherwise never think of demonstrating.

Speedwing checked the watch again. ‘’Course.’

‘Right. I need help too. And not just for a story. What did you see?’

Speedwing looked at his hands, over which was smeared the eel’s blood: ‘The night the dogs were killed – the night before they found that poor bastard in the tunnel? Well, we went up after the pubs closed and we saw ’im…’

‘Saw who?’

‘The professor. Working in the trench. By torchlight. That’s what we told them, OK? And that’s all I’m telling you,’ he said, walking away, the twitching eel held by its shattered spine.