Cowardice rooted him to the spot, his stomach pirouetting, coupled with the familiar freezing of the heart. Dryden’s ears had captured the shot, a tiny cornered percussion, which rang still like tinnitus. Why didn’t he run? Already he’d begun to tell himself a different story. It wasn’t a gunshot but a flashgun, not a murderous bullet but an archaeologist’s photo shoot: a night-time study of uncovered remains, artistically caught by moonlight. Perhaps Professor Valgimigli had finally found the Anglo-Saxon chariot and its treasures. That was it: a further find, perhaps a sensational one that demanded instant recording. Self-deluded, Dryden shouted, ‘Professor?’ then let himself down the ladder and into the trench. He made his way towards the crossroads, passing the spot where the chariot rein rings had been uncovered just five days earlier. But there was no one in sight.
At the centre he stopped and looked east, towards the spot where they had uncovered the tunnel, and the pine forest beyond. The long slit trench ran before him like a vision of the Somme, or Passchendaele. But the men were gone and so, it seemed, were the dead. The moon, low in the northern sky, half lit the scene. Dryden let his eyes sweep forward along the arrow-straight gully, and in the far distance knew instantly that something stood in the moonlight.
He walked towards it, telling himself it was Valgimigli and waiting for him to shout out. He was twenty yards away when he stopped and forced himself to look again. The moon was rising and with each speeding kilometre across the night sky it revealed another centimetre of the dark tunnel. The archaeologist was kneeling, his head caught the moonbeams first, and Dryden saw that he looked up, his mouth gaping slightly in what looked like wonder. The face of a child, perhaps, following its first comet across the night sky.
But Dryden felt no wonder, only fear. The head was strangely insubstantial, incomplete. He walked forward again to within six feet. The head was, like the moon itself, only half lit. But the moonlit side, tilted up and slightly towards the front, showed the damage that the gunshot had wrought. Below the eye a hole gaped, sheared away from the teeth and jaw. The black blood obscured the exposed neck below, and the teeth glittered like quartz in rock. In the frosty air the head steamed, and Dryden smelt the iron of blood on the air.
One of Dryden’s knees gave way and he slumped to the side, supporting himself with a hand thrust out into the damp soil of the trench. He heard his heartbeat racing in his ears and a necklace of bright lights obscured his vision, a warning he might pass out. He willed himself to stay conscious and looked again at the corpse.
He waited as the moon’s flight shed more light on the kneeling victim. A rough rope was revealed around the neck, and just behind it Dryden could now see the square-cut end of a wooden post. That was why the corpse looked upwards, the skull carried the weight of the body below, the chin the latch which held the rope. Dryden forced himself to stand, his knees buckling out of synch, and edged himself forward to circle the body, noting the hands bound too with the same length of rope, but oddly loose, and the nail driven through the post which held the neck ropes high.
He completed the circle like a pilgrim at a sacrifice. His muscles shivered, and he tasted gall in his throat which made him retch, lose his breath and then gulp in another lungful of air, this time laced with drifting cordite from the gunshot. He gagged again, feeling the contents of his stomach fold over and lurch again. In his pocket he fingered the mobile phone he wanted so much to use. But could he speak, or would he scream?
The mutilated head dripped blood down the body’s left side, over the shoulder and forearm, until it fell from the perfectly manicured fingers to the ground. The chin held the body’s weight, but as the muscles stiffened with rigor mortis the torso twisted by millimetres, giving an illusion of creaking life. The rope twisted too, and an occasional rivulet of blood shot out obscenely from the neck. The legs were buckled in the zigzag semaphore of death, the feet turned on to their sides.
Where was the killer? It was the first coherent thought he had been able to construct for many minutes. As Dryden asked the question he saw again the pitch black crucifix of the trenches, and the floodlights. Had someone run for cover after the gunshot? After his shout? Or were they still here, with him? He spun on his heel and looked back down the long trench. Nothing. He turned back and watched Valgimigli, motionless for a second, but then the rope and nail finally gave out and the corpse fell forward, its arms swinging round in what looked like a final attempt to embrace the living, before it fell to the ground. One hand touched Dryden’s shoe, leaving a bloody fingerprint. Dryden, immobile with fear, listened to a distant scream for several seconds before realizing it was his.