The Moon Tunnel(33)

They lined them up inside the wire and barked something in pidgin German. He laughed back, senior officer in charge, and the men laughed too, finding their pride despite the rags of their uniforms. So they marched them past the food hall and straight into the huts.

They stood, after the guards had gone and locked the doors, wondering why they were still alive. The beds were unmade, slept in, and dishevelled. On the walls memorabilia crowded, newspaper cuttings, old photographs, letters from home, all in Italian. In the shower block they could smell them: the people who had gone before. By the stove a group shot nailed to the wall, a crude sign painted with a figure 8 held in the front row like a football trophy, the faces sunburnt, smiling.

But where had they gone? They’d all heard what was happening in Germany, in Poland, in the camps. Could it happen here? Had they made room for them with a firing squad? This was the fear that hung over Hut 8. He took the bunk furthest from the door and sat quietly while the others talked. On the window ledge a pine cone stood, reminding him again of home, bringing tears of pity to his eyes. He pressed his face into the rough blanket on the bunk and smelt it again: the scent of those who had gone before.





Monday, 25 October



13


When Humph cut the Capri’s engine the street was utterly silent. Out of the fog the silhouette of a mother appeared, dragging a child towards the primary school on the edge of the fen. Just past 8.30am on the Jubilee Estate, Monday morning, and nothing else moved except stolen goods.

Dryden peered out of the Capri’s passenger side window. He had twenty-four hours before the Express’s deadline and only one way of proving a link between Osmington Hall and the body found in the tunnel, which looked likely to be that of Serafino Amatista, a PoW last seen working in the fields around Ely in the autumn of 1944.

‘Next street on the left,’ he said, glimpsing a road sign in the swirling mist. ‘Number 29.’

Humph didn’t ask why, but nudged the Capri through the fog. He came to a stop at the junction and peered ahead. ‘Can you see that?’

Dryden cleared some condensation. ‘Yup. Give it a wide berth, they kick.’

The Jubilee had been built on once-flooded land on the edge of the town. The open, puddled fields beyond were home to travellers’ horses. One of them had wandered in, and stood now as bemused and sightless as the cabbie. They left it snuffling the wet grass at the edge of the road and turned into the next street.

They passed two cars up on bricks and an abandoned supermarket trolley containing a soaking blanket and a can of Carlsberg Special Brew. Overhead the streetlamps failed to penetrate the gloom, a necklace of cold amber.

They inched past a parked car, a burnt-out Vauxhall Corsa with a ‘Police Notified’ placard inside its windscreen. The end of the cul-de-sac was a bit more upmarket: from what Dryden could see the fences were up, gardens were neat and the household rubbish was in the bins, not in the road. Number 29 was a ground-floor flat in a two-storey house. The door was solid, without glass, and after knocking Dryden waited a full minute before flipping up the letterbox to peer in. Nothing, but he sensed movement and felt the warmth of central heating within, so he knocked again and waited.

He heard a door open and the sudden sound of Radio Four’s Today programme. He heard a chain rattle and fingers rounded the edge of the door.

‘Yes?’ The voice was feminine but muscular, with plenty of confident strength.

‘Miss Hilgay?’

She let him in after he showed his press card. The front room was a surprise. Modern furniture, mostly Ikea, with none of the usual forest of framed family snapshots which seem to trail the elderly like small dogs with coats on.

On the table there was a pile of Labour Party fliers for the forthcoming local election. She’d been sticking them in envelopes and addressing them to post.

This didn’t seem right. Dryden checked his notebook. ‘Miss Viola Hilgay?’

She must have been seventy, more, but she stood her ground, one hand on the bare mantelpiece above the electric fire.

‘They call me Vee. Always have done, I’m afraid – but it’s better than Viola, don’t you think? Terrible affectation. Tea – I was just…’

Dryden shook his head. ‘It was just a brief enquiry about Osmington Hall.’ He told her about the discovery of the body at the PoW camp, the Italians questioned about the spate of robberies in late 1944, and the last unsolved case – the robbery at the Hall.

‘Yes. The police came,’ she said.

Dryden, surprised the local police had matched the stolen goods so quickly with Osmington, cursed silently beneath a smile.

Miss Hilgay bowed her head. ‘Look. I’m going to make that tea – you’ll join me?’