Out of the mist loomed a signpost with one sagging arm: ‘California’, the name of the farm which had once covered the site. The farmhouse and outbuildings had been demolished in the early years of the war, opening up the space for a PoW camp. The area was dry, and good for fruit trees, the clay preserving it from the damp, black layers of fenland peat just beyond the site perimeter.
A year earlier builders, ripping up the old PoW huts and their concrete bases to make way for a housing development, had found a tiny amulet amongst the rubble. It was a figure of a charioteer, beautifully executed in a soft, yellow gold. They’d tried to hush the find up, fearing it would wreck their timetable, but Dryden’s half-hearted band of local contacts had, for once, come up trumps. Taking half a whisper and a series of ‘no comments’ Dryden had written a story in The Crow headlined ‘Secret Treasure Unearthed at Ely Dig’, and the council had put a stop to building for six months, later extended to a year as more was uncovered: a gold pin and a silver pommel from a sword amidst a ton of broken Anglo-Saxon pottery.
Over a newsless summer Dryden had drummed up various experts to muse on the chances of finding a fabulous treasure in the clay of the Isle of Ely, perhaps to rival the famous Suffolk Viking burial site at Sutton Hoo. Dryden, who had an eye for detail even if the other one was largely focused on fiction, had supplied plenty of copy for Fleet Street. He’d stretched the truth but never consistently beyond breaking point. The nationals had finally moved on, leaving him with the watching brief, so he’d added a visit to the dig office to his necklace of weekly calls to places which just might give him a story in a town where a car backfiring can warrant a radio interview with the driver.
Humph’s Capri clattered through the site gates towards the dig office – a Portakabin flanked by two blue portable loos, all pale outlines in the shifting white skeins of mist. A radio mast, rigged up to provide a broadband internet link for the office, disappeared into the cloud which crowded down on the site. An off-white agricultural marquee, like some wayward beached iceberg, covered an all-weather work area. Here pottery and other artefacts were cleaned and categorized by the diggers if bad weather had forced them off the site.
The cab’s exhaust pipe hit a rut with a clang like a cow bell and Humph brought the Capri to a satisfying halt with a short skid. Dryden got out quickly, as he always did, in a vain attempt to disassociate himself from his mode of transport. The Capri was a rust bucket, sporting a Jolly Roger from the aerial and a giant red nose fixed to the radiator grille. It was like travelling with a circus.
Humph killed the engine and silence descended like a consignment of cotton wool. Clear of town, visibility in the smog was better, but still under fifty yards. The site was lit by four halogen floodlights at the corners, an echo of the original guard towers of the PoW camp. The lights were on in the gloom, but failed to penetrate with any force to ground level. The Portakabin was open, and inside a neon light shone down on a map table on which were some shards of pottery.
‘Professor Valgimigli?’ called Dryden in a loud voice damped down by the mist. Nothing.
Luckily Dryden had a plan of the site in his head: the archaeologists had dug two trenches which met like the cross-hairs of a gunsight at the centre of the old PoW camp. The trenches avoided the concrete bases of the twenty-four original prisoners’ huts – six of which lay within each quarter of the site. The Portakabin stood at the southern end of the main north-south trench. Dryden surveyed the ditch ahead, which seemed to be collecting, and condensing, the mist. He found the top of a short ladder, took three steps down and jumped the rest, effortlessly pulverizing a shard of sixth-century pottery as he landed.
Light levels in the trench were very low, the mist denser, and he felt his flesh goosebump as he walked slowly forward straining to find a recognizable shape in the chaos of the shifting air. Disorientated by the lack of visual landmarks he tried to estimate visibility, but looking down realized he could barely see his feet. The acrid mist made the back of his throat ache, and he covered his mouth with his hand as he edged forward.
Ahead of him, funnelled along the trench, he could hear the susurration of the distant pine trees, and then something else: the brittle tap-tap of a digger’s trowel on clay and pebbles. He moved north and the sound grew suddenly clearer, preternaturally close, almost – it seemed – in his own head. He coughed self-consciously, and suddenly a figure in grey outline stood before him.
‘Dryden. Welcome to the kingdom of the mist.’
‘Professore,’ said Dryden, recognizing the voice of Azeglio Valgimigli, the academic leading the dig, an international collaboration between Cambridge, Lucca, Prague and Copenhagen. He was a deeply cultured man, a facet of character that bewitched Dryden, who was not. But there was something of the charlatan about him as well, something a little too mannered in the precise academic movements of the slim hands, and the perfectly manicured fingers. Dryden imagined him working in a cool, tiled museum expertly caring for the artefacts in glass-fronted exhibition cabinets which, like him, had been arranged for effect. He was lean, but slightly too short to carry off the half-moon professorial glasses, and the deep, terracotta, Tuscan tan. Dryden knew his age thanks to a press release issued when the dig began. The Italian was thirty-nine but looked older, the academic manners slightly archaic, the constant attempts at gravitas strained.