The Moon Tunnel(6)

But first he needed to get the story of the discovered bones over to copy. A decade on Fleet Street had taught him to write fast, and write now. He’d chatted to the newsdesk in the shape of the The Crow’s reliably unreliable news editor Charlie Bracken: he wanted 350 words an hour ago, but in the circumstances twenty minutes would do. Dryden got him to read back some facts and figures about the site from one of the previous stories they’d run to help pad out the copy.

Then he got out of the cab, wrapping himself in his heavy black overcoat, closed his eyes, leant on the roof and told himself the story: ‘“The skeleton of a man was yesterday found in an old tunnel underneath Ely’s wartime PoW camp.” How does that sound?’ he asked, bending down to Humph’s level.

The cabbie tried a yawn, feeling the exciting onrush of his daily siesta. He didn’t answer, still aggrieved that he had been interrupted while trying to memorize the ten different types of Polish sausage helpfully listed on his language tape.

‘It’ll have to do,’ said Dryden, answering his own question, and punching The Crow’s switchboard number into his mobile. He braced himself for the ordeal of filing to Jean, the paper’s deaf copy-taker. His real problem was stretching the story to 350 words; he’d have to use up all the facts in the intro.

‘Right!’ bellowed Jean, when he got through. ‘Off you go.’

The skull and bones of a man were unearthed yesterday in an old tunnel underneath Ely’s one-time PoW camp.

Archaeologists who found the grisly remains – while excavating Ely’s Anglo-Saxon site – said there appeared to be a bullet hole in the skull.

Police at Ely are investigating the find and confirmed that an initial investigation suggested the victim was trying to enter the camp when he died, not escape from it.

Professor Azeglio Valgimigli, head of the international team working on the site at California, said, ‘This was a shock for the young diggers who unearthed the remains – it is quite clear that this is not an Anglo-Saxon find.

‘We intend to try and excavate the tunnel to see if it can be traced back to the camp huts – and out beyond the perimeter. Presumably it was used as an escape tunnel during the war.’

The PoW camp was opened in October 1941 to accommodate Italian prisoners taken in the Western Desert during the Allied invasion of North Africa. In 1944 the Italians were moved to an internment camp on the fen and the PoW camp was used for German prisoners taken after the D-Day landings.



Dryden added a further 200 words of drivel, confident it would be read only by the few who bothered to turn from the front page to page 15, and then let Jean read the story back – he could have stood thirty yards away. Humph had settled down for a nap and a sickly smile had creased his surprisingly neat, childlike face.

The story filed, Dryden turned his attention to the town dump. From behind the recycling bins a path led up the slope of the artificial mountain, and as Dryden climbed he heard voices drifting in the mist. At the top Dryden found Garry Pymoor, The Crow’s junior reporter, half a dozen of the site workers in reflective jerkins, a man in a suit carrying a clipboard, and a young PC. Garry had been sent out by the newsdesk to keep a watching brief on the dump story and make sure the paper’s photographer was called in if the council turned up. The man in the suit looked like he had a bad smell under his nose, which of course he did, though Dryden suspected the expression was perpetual, and not the result of standing on a giant compost heap.

And there was Ma Trunch. Dryden had known her since he’d started on The Crow five years earlier, after Laura’s accident. Ma was considered a bizarre character by Fen standards – which meant that she’d have been locked up anywhere else. She was a mountain of a woman, a human echo of the landmark which had helped, reputedly, to make her fortune. She wore several layers of loose-fitting T-shirts and jumpers and what looked like two pairs of ski-pants which had never seen the Alps. Around her waist she always wore a rope, from which hung an impressive array of keys, a dog’s lead attached at the other end to a dog – a greyhound with dreamlike grey eyes. What appeared to be a tractor-engine rag held her bright red hair in a high top-knot. Her face was an arrangement of several slabs of flesh, many of them nipped by the outdoor air a cherry red. She was a common enough sight around the town, ambling the fields with her metal detector while the dog ran rings round her.

‘Ma,’ said Dryden, eyeing the dog. The reporter was a physical coward of commanding range and a fear of dogs was up there with his fear of heights. He tried not to watch as the dog dribbled over its exposed teeth.