The Moon Tunnel(21)
Alder grinned, unable to conceal the rapid calculation of profit. ‘One last detail. As a burial is your preference you have some time before the stone can be placed on the grave – settlement, I’m sure you understand. And of course we may then know the name of the deceased. But you might like to think of an inscription, something appropriate?’
Valgimigli’s eyes appeared to fill. ‘Libero ultimo, Mr Alder. Libero ultimo.’
The archaeologist retrieved his coat from the stand by the door, having paid by American Express for the casket, stone and cross. Alder hovered, the smile a living advert for toothpaste. Dryden helped himself to a business card from the counter. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I understand you value items.’
‘Items?’ said Alder, trying to ignore the reporter but clearly intrigued.
‘Yeah. Antiques, artefacts. It’s just, you know, we have some in the family and I thought…’ Alder opened the door. ‘I’m afraid not. House clearances, perhaps, that we can offer as part of our service. But for… artefacts… I think perhaps a reputable auctioneer?’
On the doorstep they buttoned their overcoats, suddenly plunged into the poisonous smog. ‘Free at last?’ said Dryden. ‘Libero ultimo.’
Valgimigli nodded, pocketing his wallet. ‘A favour, Mr Dryden. The dig, I have to be back. Could you visit the museum for me? You could drop the items by…?’
Dryden nodded, oddly flattered, and tried one last question. ‘Do you know if anyone escaped from the camp?’
Valgimigli looked up, letting the moisture of the mist settle on his jet-black eyelashes.
‘I doubt it, Mr Dryden. An Italian – I doubt that even more. It was not a popular war, these men were conscripts. By the end it was a lost war. Why escape? They were well treated, that’s why so many stayed behind.’
Dryden choked slightly, the smog’s acrid poison catching in his throat: ‘So what was he free from? Mr Libero Ultimo?’
The archaeologist buttoned up his overcoat and walked off, disappearing into the mist within a dozen strides.
9
Out on Hasse Fen, nearly fifteen miles from the cathedral, the mist was knee-deep and pillow-white. By the river cattle stood, dropping dung into the snow-like blanket. The Capri sailed on, its tyres turning in the fog, its faded 1970s sky-blue roof cutting a swathe, leaving a ship’s wake across the fen. The city lay behind them, wrapped in its daytime shroud of purple-cream smog. Ahead, along the arrow’s flight of the drove road, lay the hamlet of Buskeybay and a return to Dryden’s childhood.
The fate of the man found in the PoW tunnel had awakened Dryden’s sense of injustice, and he was impatient to learn more. The police were indifferent, Valgimigli seemed keen to get the bones buried so that he could get back to the dig, and no one appeared to care that the victim had no name. Who had ended this man’s life so brutally? Dryden wanted to know more about California, and the lives of those who had spent the war behind its barbed-wire fences, and more about their lives out in the wide-open Fen fields: prisons without walls. And he wanted to know more about anyone brave enough to crawl down that escape tunnel: to bury themselves, willingly, alive.
Which is why he was going back to Buskeybay, revisiting a single remembered image from a lonely childhood.
He kicked out his feet, his leg joints complaining at the first hints of winter rheumatism. ‘Here,’ he said redundantly, a second after Humph had already begun to slow the cab, pulling off the drove into a lay-by where cattle hoofs had created a mudbath by a five-bar gate. The sign said ‘Buskeybay Im’ and the track led off on a zigzag route towards the distant River Lark. His uncle’s house, or more precisely its upper storey, stood above the mist, a pre-war farmhouse which had begun to sink into the peat, forcing the door and window frames into agonized parallelograms. It looked like the kind of house a child draws, but never lives in.
As Dryden closed the Capri’s door he heard the cab’s tape deck thud on, the sound of a Polish wedding filling the air. He noticed for the first time that the Capri’s paintwork had become oddly mottled and he ran a finger across the blemish on the bonnet.
Humph wound the window down. ‘It’s the smog. I heard it on the short-wave. Pollution. The rank’s talking about compensation.’
‘Terrific,’ said Dryden. ‘More good news for Ma Trunch.’
He took the path and quickly reached a narrow drain, ten feet wide and brimful of snow-white mist. A railway sleeper bridge crossed it in a single span and Dryden knew that if he’d waded below and examined its underside he would have found his own name laboriously carved into the wood with the date 1977. He’d been eleven, and on one of a countless number of childhood visits the tiny Fen hamlet of four houses, the uncle’s cottage being an outlier about half a mile from the other three.