‘And these,’ said Mann. ‘We recovered these from the site.’ Some small gardening tools, handmade from broom handles and reworked metal. Mann packed them all carefully in a large Red Cross box, adding the cleaned ID disc with the deference of ceremony.
About to leave, Dryden had a sudden afterthought. ‘If the tunnel they found at the dig started in one of the huts – which is probable – where would the entrance have been, do you think?’
Mann surveyed the hut and a smile curled the corner of his thin lips. ‘Under the stove? Difficult, but ideal if you could keep the fire going twenty-four hours day – not many search parties would have gone to the trouble of trying to lift it red-hot. Under a bed? The shower block?’
‘Where was that?’
‘There were four. You can tell they are different – they were built with a special kind of porous brick to stop the damp. The dormitory huts are in concrete, and they had the stoves. There was no heating in the shower blocks.’
A vision of enforced school cross-country runs flashed before Dryden’s eyes and he shivered. ‘Thanks,’ he said, buttoning up his greatcoat and fishing a half-eaten sausage roll out of the folds of one pocket.
Dr Mann helped him carry the Red Cross box to the cab outside. He gave Dryden his card as he left: Dr S. V. Mann. Curator, East Cambridgeshire Museums. It was the home address that caught the reporter’s eye: Vintry House was a Georgian pile on the edge of the town, with fine views over the Black Fen, views recently enhanced by the demolition of the nearby PoW camp huts, separated from the house by a single copse of pine trees.
11
The sun was low in the late-afternoon sky and the mist beyond the city banished, leaving the light to shine across their path as they turned south on the zigzag route to Osmington Hall, the wartime scene of the burglary and murder Roger Stutton had recalled. The light made the freshly harvested peat-fields glimmer a marmalade orange; across them stretched the impossibly long shadows of the roadside poplars. The overarching sky relegated the landscape to a footnote. The sense of space was intoxicating and Dryden felt his mood lift. Humph hummed in tune with his socks as he watched seagulls in his rear-view mirror, trailing the cab like a trawler leaving port. Dryden thought of Dr Mann and the oppressive museum and kicked out his feet, annoyed by the lack of leg room in the rust-jammed passenger seat. He thought of the dead PoW, struggling forward in the nightmare of his escape, encased in clay. He looked up at the sky and drank in the space like an antidote.
Humph pushed his full weight on the accelerator as they passed the last outlying cottages of the town and sped into the wider fen, exploding into the sunshine like a bullet fired from inside the wall of mist they left behind. Dryden checked the map: ‘Head for Southery, then take the back road past the sugar beet factory, then turn back south towards the Lark.’
The PoW had been found with what looked like part of a burglars’ haul. Could he have been part of the gang that raided the house in 1944? But by that time the Italians were billeted out on the farms – so what was he doing in an escape tunnel under the old camp? If he could find any solid link between the body in the tunnel and the burglary it would give him a decent story for the Express. Friday afternoons were otherwise an ocean of lost time he needed to fill: The Crow published, the next paper days away, and a weekend beckoning unpunctuated by work, measured only by the listless ticking of clocks.
It was only 4.00pm when Humph swung the cab into the gravelled car park of the hall but the damp was already rising from the moat which surrounded the fortified Tudor house. Beyond the National Trust café and the herb garden – both deserted – a bridge spanned the water and entered the house under a portcullis reminiscent of a Cambridge college. A peacock strutted in the parterre, its screech echoing back from the surrounding woods. The inner courtyard was empty save for a few wooden benches, some potted trees and a sports car in lipstick red.
A National Trust volunteer appeared from a cubby hole in the gatehouse brandishing a clipboard.
‘The entrance is straight ahead,’ she said in an accent dipped in something posh. She had perfect white hair carved into a filigree helmet and appeared expertly dressed as Celia Johnson’s double from Brief Encounter. A blue enamel badge proclaimed her to be an ‘authorized guide’. Dryden cocked a thumb at the parked-up sports car, which radiated wealth like a diamond.
‘Family still live here?’
‘No, no. I’m afraid the family is gone. The late forties. Death duties, you understand.’
Dryden nodded as though this was a common problem in his own family.