Dryden drew back a foot and saw that the head was not the only bone uncovered. The fingers of the right hand were clear of the earth as well, giving the impression that the skeleton was emerging from its grave. A snail, its shell threatening to topple it forward, descended the cranium towards the unseen jaws.
Dryden backed out, feeling with relief the caress of the cool moist air.
‘And that?’ said the archaeologist, kneeling down and using a long metal pointer to gently tap the exposed bones of the finger. Something man-made caught the light, something folded into the exposed finger bones. Valgimigli stepped into the opening and, reaching forward, lifted it gently out of the creeping earth. The rest of the digging crew had climbed down into the trench using a portable ladder and had laid a clear plastic artefact sheet on the floor. Valgimigli placed the object centrally with the kind of meticulous care reserved for a religious ikon. It was a folded wax pouch, the kind smokers use for tobacco but much larger, A4 size. The archaeologist prised it open using one gloved hand and the metal probe.
A string of milk-white pearls spilled onto the plastic sheet. The clasp, in silver, untarnished. Valgimigli put his hand into the envelope and extracted a large candlestick, also untarnished silver, with an inlaid ebony collar. He placed it beside the pearls.
‘It’s a tunnel,’ said Josh redundantly. He was standing against the opposite wall of the trench where a corresponding square of loose earth could be seen. ‘We sliced through it. The digger smoothed the clay across the opening – it looks like it had already collapsed.’
‘Killing our friend here,’ said Valgimigli. ‘The bones, Josh? What’s your guess?’
Josh, flattered by the question, thought for ten seconds. ‘Fifty years?’
Valgimigli nodded. ‘Indeed. A man in a tunnel on the site of an old PoW camp,’ he said. ‘A mystery solved, Dryden?’
Dryden put a knee on the tunnel edge and pressed his body to the side, allowing the floodlight’s white-blue beam to light the skeleton. The loose earth moved again, exposing the forehead and a shoulder blade, and a corroded ID disc hanging from the neck by what looked like a leather thong.
‘Hardly,’ he said, stepping back and taking the probe. ‘I’d say that was a bullet hole.’ He indicated a neat puncture in the cranium just below the brow. ‘The ID disc will help, of course. But there’s still another mystery here…’
Dryden waited for someone else to spot it too. In Valgimigli’s eyes he saw a flash of anger at being treated like a student.
Dryden took the metal pointer. ‘As I understand it the PoW camp huts are behind us over there…’ A few of the students peered into the thick mist to the north.
He waited another few seconds. ‘And the perimeter wire would have been over there,’ Dryden swung the pointer 180 degrees. ‘So our prisoner of war was on a very unusual journey indeed: he was crawling in, not out.’
3
Ely’s town dump was marked by a landfill site eighty feet high – the Fens’ own Tabletop Mountain. Seagulls circled it constantly, scavenging for food, and occasionally swooping to dive-bomb the tipper truck which climbed like some Sisyphean robot with its latest batch of rotting spouts, fish bones and lawn shavings. When the mists obscured it, as they had with depressing regularity that autumn, you still knew it was there: you could smell it from the town square.
At the foot of this man-made hill lived the little community which eked out an existence beside the line of bright green recycling bins and the wooden pens stacked with discarded electrical trash, fridges brimming with CFCs, and waste metal. Two caravans up on bricks provided office accommodation. The workforce lived in a scattering of post-war bungalows built on the surrounding fen: the far-flung hamlet of Dunkirk.
Humph pulled the Capri up short of the gates, aware that if he went inside he might never get his cab back. Dryden had an hour and a half before The Crow’s final deadline in which to phone over the story of the unearthed skeleton. He’d save the rein rings for The Crow’s sister paper, The Ely Express, which published on Tuesdays – there being little point burying a decent tale on a day when there was some real breaking news.
But the big story of the week was the town smog. The mist around the dump was off-white with patches of purple-brown, like diseased phlegm, and indicated clearly that the current theory as to the cause of polluted fog was probably right: pollution, the experts suspected, was leaking out of the fifty-year-old landfill site and combining in a chemical cocktail with the autumn mists rising from the nearby river. Dryden had written a story ready for this week’s edition of The Crow, but he needed to get the latest as close to deadline as possible so he could do an update. Given that the smog affected almost all the paper’s dwindling band of 17,000 readers the story would probably make that week’s splash – despite the mysterious find on the site at California.