19
Dryden had been in the incident van for three hours. It was windowless and preternaturally white: heaven’s waiting room. Apart from two hard chairs, a single interview table provided the only furniture. It was attached with brass hinges to the wall and on it stood a row of six polystyrene coffee cups, marking Dryden’s imprisonment in half-hour instalments. The WPC who had stood watching him had opened the door once, revealing that the fog had returned with the dawn, and that in a featureless landscape the only detail was the distant dull reflection of the scene-of-crime tape, and faintly, a silent revolving blue emergency light. The cold frost had rushed in too, making him shiver more violently. But he could not fool himself: the sudden jolting of his limbs was due to fear, and his inability to mask it. His nervous system hummed, as if permanently attached to a low-voltage power source. A muscle below his eyelid fluttered and his stomach lurched, oiled by the coffee.
He looked at the statement he had dictated to DS Bob Cavendish-Smith. He had stated the bald facts in a monotonous style he felt suited the occasion. No time for rhetorical flourishes, just the mechanical details of his arrival on the site, his failure to find Professor Valgimigli in the office and his discovery of the corpse, kneeling but roped to the wooden post. He was unsure how long these events had taken, and especially how long he had stood, rooted, before the butchered body. He’d fled the site eventually, energized by the fear that he was not alone in the trench. Then he’d phoned Humph from a call box, pathetically, telling him everything at once, spilling it out to try and distance himself from the reality of death. Humph had phoned the police before driving to the dig, where they’d waited, the Capri’s dim interior light providing some solace until the patrol car pulled up alongside, the two PCs clearly certain they were dealing with a hallucinating drunk. Once they’d seen the corpse at close range the picture rapidly changed. By the time they’d got Dryden into the mobile interview unit there was a helicopter overhead and a mobile canteen just outside the gate. Humph’s cab was unseen, but Dryden knew he’d be there, just out of sight.
The door opened and Dryden smelt the distant aroma of bacon, thought immediately of Valgimigli’s steaming, riven, head and gulped some more cold coffee. Cavendish-Smith gave him a replacement cup and pulled up a seat on the opposite side of the table. Dryden noted he had his own takeaway version: the aroma of café latte was in the air, with nutmeg. The cold neon beat down on them like a fridge light, an industrial freezer perhaps, waiting for a consignment of split carcasses to hang on hooks.
He shivered again, setting off a series of involuntary jerks which made him put the coffee down hurriedly. Cavendish-Smith read the statement again. ‘Fine. Thanks. Bit of a detective, aren’t we?’
‘More than some,’ said Dryden. ‘It’s my job. Finding stories. We’re the same in that respect.’
Cavendish-Smith looked horrified at the comparison. He stood, holding a second statement lightly in his hand. ‘You were unlucky. According to his wife, she dropped him off at the site at 8.30 – half an hour earlier you’d have found him alive.’
‘Where did you find her?’ asked Dryden, already mapping out how he could wrap up the story for that day’s paper. An interview with the widow was the top priority.
‘Never mind that. I want you to walk me through every inch of what you did last night. Every last inch. Come on.’
‘Right,’ said Dryden, tired of the neon-lit room. The WPC had left the unit first when the DS had arrived, and now Cavendish-Smith led the way, giving Dryden just enough time to get sight of Louise Beaumont’s statement on the interview table. Dryden, now familiar with the layout of the standard witness form, noted the address.
Outside the fog was thinning, moved on by a light wind. Across the site a line of police officers were down on their hands and knees, edging forward, putting anything which caught the eye into evidence bags.
‘So,’ said Cavendish-Smith. ‘Where do we start?’ Dryden retraced his steps: his entry into the camp, the knock on the caravan door, and up to the point when he heard the shot, then to the edge of the trench, dropping down using the foot ladder and jumping the last three feet. They went north to the crossroads, passing the spot where Valgimigli had found the chariot rein rings. A larger trench had been dug since Dryden’s last visit, with various protruding pieces of metal and wood marked with fluorescent number tags. Two PCs stood guard.
Cavendish-Smith beckoned one of the PCs closer: ‘Once the scene-of-crime team has been through, and the pathologist has removed the body, I want one of the diggers brought here. Right here. I want to know if anyone has dug down here – if anything is missing.’