The man in the moon tunnel stops and listens to the night above, shivering despite the sweat which trickles into his ears, making the drums flutter like the beat of pigeons' wings. He stops crawling forward, bringing relief to the agony in his elbows and knees, and places his torch ahead, resting his forehead on his hands, shielding his face from the damp clay floor. The ring on his finger glitters by his eye and he thinks of her, feels her skin and traces, in his imagination, the S-curve of her waist and thigh. He holds the image like a talisman, pushing back the panic which makes him choke, feeling the mass of the suffocating earth above his head. His heartbeat fills the narrow space and he tries to conjure up the image of the sky above.
At that moment, as he lays paralysed below, the shadow of the night cloud begins to drift across the moon. Over the Fens life freezes as the shadow falls on the land, bringing darkness to the soaking fields and the silent river. Rats float with the sluggish stream on the Forty Foot; and pike in the Old West, moonbathing, slip to the safety of the banks. Eels, thrashing through the long grass to forage on the rotting carcass of a sheep, turn instantly to stone. Finally, the newly shrouded moon is gone, and the world below lies still and waiting.
He must go on, or die here. So he feels for the wooden panels in the tunnel side and counts on: 185, 186, 187. He focuses only on the numbers, blocking out the reality of what he is doing, of where he is, and what is above. The camp sleeps inside its flesh-tearing wire. A village of shadows, more substantial than the men themselves had ever been, diminished by their exile. The dreams of prisoners still pushing that night at the double-locked wooden shutters.
‘Buried alive,’ he thinks, and the fear makes him cry out despite himself.
He counts again, trying to ignore the panic which constricts his throat: 230, 231, 232, 233. He stops and curls his body so that he can play the torchlight on the wood. There it is: emblazoned on the single pine board in faded stencil: RED CROSS.
He slips the jimmy from his belt and between the panel edges, easing the wood out from the earth behind. A neat chamber beyond, panelled, like a subterranean letterbox. Inside a tall waxed, oilskin pouch. He grasps it, like a tomb robber, knowing his face will be ugly with the greed that had driven him there.
He lays the torch down again and taking his penknife cuts the twine so that the pouch falls open. The candlestick catches the light, the silver tarnished. Judging its worth he sets it aside. Only the rolled canvas remains, and so his anger mixes with disappointment: is this really all? He cuts a second thread and the picture unfolds: sepia clouds, a visionary shepherd looking up, and the half obscured disc of the full moon, and lying on the picture the pearls, as white as teeth, making him smile.
“Beautiful?” asks a voice, but not his own.
He fumbles with the torch but is too slow to see his killer. The flash of gunshot lights the tunnel ahead like the arcing lightning that marks the passage of the night train. Deafened, he never hears the sound that kills him. But he feels the hand, clawing at his fingers and the ring, before the panels above his head, splintered by the percussion of the blast, begin to twist and the earth first trickles, then falls. And, as the weight of the clay crushes his ribs he hears a scream, and knows it isn't his.
The gunshot, heard above, breaks the spell. A cloud of lapwing rises, like smoke over the river and a starburst of light touches the upmost edge of the darkened moon, and time begins again for almost everyone.
CHAPTER ONE
Thursday, October 21st
Humphrey H. Holt's licensed minicab stood on Ely market square in the dense, damp heart of an early morning smog. Humph cleaned a fresh circular porthole in the steamed up windscreen and peered out: nothing, he could have been shrouded on an icefloe in an Antarctic mist. Shivering, he realised he could just see the outlines of the nearest buildings, the old Corn Exchange and the cinema, and a single postbox like a hunched figure, just on the edge of sight. Beyond them the vast bulk of the cathedral loomed, but only in the memory. A duck stood on one leg on the glistening red bricks of the square, its head tucked under a damp wing, while a cat tiptoed by and was gone.
The first leaf of autumn fell from an invisible sycamore and settled on the windscreen of his beloved Ford Capri. The cabbie considered it morosely before swishing it aside with the wipers. The smog had enveloped the town for three days now, a suffocating blanket which left an acrid taste on the tongue and made Humph’s small, baby-blue eyes water. He rubbed them, and thought about a nap, but decided the effort was too great this early in the day. Instead he turned up the cab’s aged heating system, and gently wriggled his body until every one of his sixteen stones was comfortably arranged. He was not so much sitting in his cab, as wedged into it.
He punched the “on” button of the tape deck with a nimble, lean finger. The first instalment of his latest language course flooded the cab with sound: conversational Polish for beginners. As he repeated Justina's greeting to the old village lamplighter he looked east himself, down Fore Hill, towards the Black Fen below. The mist buckled briefly, like a giant duvet being aired, and through the gap he glimpsed the blue smudged horizon as distant and flat as any on the great plains of Eastern Europe.
Philip Dryden, chief reporter on The Crow, slapped his hand on the cab roof, pulled open the passenger side door and crashed into the seat. At six foot three inches his angular frame had to be folded to fit into Humph's cab - the knees up, and the neck slightly bent. He wore a heavy black overcoat which was spangled with droplets of mist.
“Well, that was highly entertaining,” he said, by way of greeting.
He tossed his notebook into the glove compartment, swapping it for one of the tiny miniature bottles of liquor Humph collected on his regular trips to Stansted Airport. Dryden snapped off the bottle top and took a swig of Talisker, single malt. Humph, sensing a sociable moment in their otherwise adversarial relationship, helped himself to a small creme de menthe.
Dryden closed his eyes and threw his head back. His face was Early Norman, a medieval arrangement of sombre, geometric features which could have graced the back of any coin from the Conquest to Henry V: a straight brow, jutting cheekbones, and deep-set green eyes, while the black hair was thick and short. His age was thirty-something, and would be for a decade yet.
“I feel like I've been injected with concrete. I was so bored I nearly passed out,” said Dryden. “Two people did.”
Humph laughed inaudibly, emitting a vaguely suspicious odour of cabbage and curry. Dryden lowered the window despite the damp, and took a second swig. One of the shops on the square had just reopened after a decade of stately dilapidation and now specialised in camping, climbing gear and outdoor pursuits. A mildly famous Alpine climber had been drafted in to cut the red tape. Dryden had been there to find a story.
“The Fens' own mountaineering supply shop. Brilliant. That's really going to bring 'em in,” said Dryden.
“It might take off,” said Humph, firing the aged Capri into life.
Dryden considered his friend. Humph might be at conversational level in eight obscure European languages but his conversational English was as underdeveloped as the East Anglian Mountain Rescue Service.
“That's quite a recommendation from the owner of the only two-door taxi cab in Ely. That's your unique selling point, is it?” said Dryden, enjoying himself. “You have a Hackney cab accessible to only half the population. And only half of those who can get in, can get out again.”
“It's good for tips,” said Humph, defensively.
“I bet it's good for bloody tips!” said Dryden, enjoying himself.
Humph allowed his rippling torso to settle slightly, indicating an end to the subject. He scratched his nails across the nylon chest of his Ipswich Town FC replica shirt and brought the cab to a sharp halt in a lay-by in the cathedral close. The mist, suddenly thickening, obscured a buttress of the cathedral down which the damp was running in rivers.
“Where next?” said Humph, by way of a challenge.
Dryden was in no hurry, and indeed had not been in a hurry for several years. He turned to the cabbie: “So. What did the doctor say?”
Humph's physical deterioration had been almost completely masked by the fact that he never got out of his cab. But a recent bout of breathlessness had prompted a surgery visit that morning.
“Well?” Dryden foraged in his overcoat pocket, and discovering a slightly bruised sausage roll, began to munch it with the Talisker.
“He said I should lose three stone - quickly. He gave me a diet sheet. No chips.”
Dryden nodded. “What you gonna do?”
Humph swung the cab out into the street: “Get a second opinion. Where next?”
‘Where next?’ It was a good question, and one which would have haunted Dryden if he had allowed it to. Humph, a divorcee who pined for his daughters, was stalked by the same ghost. They shared an aimless life punctuated by the relief of regular movement. Today, tomorrow, for the rest of my life, thought Dryden: where next?
There was no copy in the shop opening. The Crow's deadline was just a few hours away. The mountaineer was strictly C-list celebrity status. Dryden couldn't remember what he'd said if he tried. He'd taken a shorthand note, but like all his shorthand notes, it was unreadable. In fact, come to think if it, he'd forgotten the bloke's name.
“Let's check the dig,” he said, running a hand back through the close-cropped black hair. Humph swung the cab out into the traffic, its headlights scything through the gloom. The dig. Dryden had picked up a series of decent tales that summer from a team of archaeologists working in a field on the western edge of town. The onward march of the Barrett House generation threatened the site - indeed the whole western side of the town.
“The Invasion of the Little Boxes,” said Dryden, as they swept past the latest outcrop of executive homes, their carriage lamps dull orange in the gloom.
“You're an executive,” said Dryden, turning to Humph: “An executive operator in the rapid transit sector.”
Humph burped. The Capri turned off the tarmac road onto a gravel drive and trundled forward, mist-wrapped pine trees just visible on either side. As they crawled forward Dryden felt they were leaving the world behind: the world of shop-openings, deadlines, and doctor's appointments. Ahead lay the past, buried for more than a thousand years in the sticky clay of the Isle of Ely, and around them the trees dripped rhythmically, like clocks.
CHAPTER TWO
The cab edged its way forward, lifting and separating the folds of smog like some ghostly snowplough, its lights dim replicas of the invisible sun. Dryden, his head back on the passenger seat rest, closed his eyes and thought about his new nightmare, which had woken him now each morning for a month. The one it had replaced was hardly a Freudian mystery. For the last five years his wife, Laura, had been in a coma following a car crash. They'd both been in the car, forced off a lonely Fen road at nighttime by a drunken driver. The car had plunged into Harrimere Drain, one of the placid pebble-black sheets of water which criss-crossed the marshlands. Dryden had been pulled clear by the drunk, unconscious, and came to outside the hospital, abandoned in a wheelchair. Laura had been left, trapped in a diminishing pocket of air in the total darkness of the submerged car. When they got her out she was in the coma, locked away from a world which had deserted her. Locked away from him.
The nightmare had been brutally graphic. A river of blood in black and white, with Laura floating by, her outstretched hand always, always, just beyond his stretching fingertips.
And then it had changed, for the first time, a month ago. Childhood, summer, on the beach at Lowestoft. His parents, distant figures by the beach hut they always rented for the two weeks after the harvest. He had been five, perhaps six, and enticed away from his modest castles by the bigger children playing down by the waterline. They’d dug a pit, the base of which was black with shadow. Beside it, an identical one, and between them the tunnel. He’d watched, hypnotised, by the children crawling through. Then they caught his eye and he looked, wildly, for an adult nearby who might step in and save him. But his parents looked skywards in their deck chairs. So he’d gone down, feeling sick, egged on by the girls who said he shouldn't.
Even now, in the overheated cab, he could feel the damp sand around him, the distant sounds of the beach growing dimmer as he crawled forward to the smiling faces by the tunnel exit.
Then came the crump of the failing sand above, the sudden weight on his back, and the sand in his mouth as he tried to scream.
He'd wake screaming, his rescue postponed, screaming with his mouth full of sand. Even now the sweat broke out, trickling down by his nose towards his dry lips.
“Claustrophobia,” he said, kicking out his heels in irritation at the cramped space of the Capri.
Out of the mist loomed a signpost with one sagging arm: ‘California’, the name of the farm which had once covered the site. The farmhouse and outbuildings had been demolished in the early years of the war, opening up the space for a PoW camp. The area was dry, and good for fruit trees, the clay preserving it from the damp, black layers of the peat of the fen just beyond the site perimeter.
A year earlier builders, ripping up the old PoW huts and their concrete bases to make way for a housing development, had found a tiny amulet amongst the rubble. It was a figure of a charioteer, beautifully executed in a soft, yellow gold. They'd tried to hush the find up, fearing it would wreck their timetable, but Dryden's half-hearted band of local contacts had, for once, come up trumps. Taking half a whisper and a series of “no comments” Dryden had written a story in The Crow: headlined “Secret treasure unearthed at Ely dig”, and the council had put a stop on building for six months, later extended to a year as more was uncovered: a gold pin and a silver pommel from a sword, amidst a ton of broken Anglo-Saxon pottery.
Over a newsless summer Dryden had drummed up various experts to muse on the chances of finding a fabulous treasure in the clay of the Isle of Ely, perhaps to rival the famous Suffolk Viking-burial site at Sutton Hoo. Dryden, who had an eye for detail even if the other one was largely focused on fiction, had supplied plenty of copy for Fleet Street. He’d stretched the truth but never consistently beyond breaking point. The nationals had finally moved on, leaving him with the watching brief, so he’d added a visit to the dig office to his necklace of weekly calls to places which just might give him a story in a town where a car backfiring can warrant a radio interview with the driver.
Humph's Capri clattered though the site gates towards the dig office - a Portakabin flanked by two blue portable loos, all of them pale outlines in the shifting white skeins of mist. A radio mast, rigged up to provide a broadband internet link for the office, disappeared into the cloud which crowded down on the site. An off-white agricultural marquee, like some wayward beached iceberg, covered an all-weather work area. Here pottery, and other artefacts, were cleaned and categorised by the diggers if bad weather had forced them off the site.
The cab's exhaust pipe hit a rut with a clang like a cow bell and Humph brought the Capri to a satisfying halt with a short skid. Dryden got out quickly, as he always did, in a vain attempt to disassociate himself from his mode of transport. The Capri was a rust bucket, sporting a Jolly Roger from the aerial and a giant Red Nose fixed to the radiator. It was like travelling with a circus.
Humph killed the engine and silence descended like a consignment of cotton wool. Clear of town visibility in the smog was better, but still under 50 yards. The site was lit by four halogen floodlights at the corners, an echo of the original guard towers of the PoW camp. The lights were on in the gloom, but failed to penetrate with any force to ground level. The Portacabin was open, and inside a neon light shone down on a map table on which were some shards of pottery.
“Professor Valgimigli?” asked Dryden, in a loud voice damped down by the mist. Nothing.
Luckily Dryden had a map of the site in his head: the archaeologists had dug two trenches which met like the cross-hairs of a gunsight at the centre of the old PoW camp. The trenches avoided the concrete bases of the 24 original prisoners’ huts - six of which lay within each quarter of the site. The Portakabin stood at the southern end of the main north-south trench. Dryden surveyed the ditch ahead, which seemed to be collecting, and condensing, the mist. He found the top of a short ladder, took three steps down, and jumped the rest, effortlessly pulverising a shard of 6th century pottery as he landed.
Light levels in the trench were very low, the mist denser, and he felt his flesh goosebump as he walked slowly forward straining to find a recognisable shape in the chaos of the shifting air. Disorientated by the lack of visual landmarks he tried to estimate visibility: but looking down realised he could barely see his feet. The acrid mist made the back of his throat ache, and he covered his mouth with his hand as he edged forward.
Ahead of him, funnelled along the trench, he could hear the susurration of the distant pine trees, and then something else: the brittle tap-tap of a digger's trowel on clay and pebbles. He moved north and the sound grew suddenly clearer, preternaturally close, almost - it seemed - in his own head. He coughed self-consciously, and suddenly a figure in grey outline stood before him.
“Dryden. Welcome to the kingdom of the mist.”
“Professor,” said Dryden, recognising the voice of Azeglio Valgimigli, the academic leading the dig, an international collaboration between Cambridge, Lucca, Prague and Copenhagen. He was a deeply cultured man, a facet of character which bewitched Dryden, who was not. But there was something of the charlatan about him as well, something a little too mannered in the precise academic movements of the slim hands, and the perfectly manicured fingers. Dryden imagined him working in a cool, tiled museum expertly caring for the artefacts in glass-fronted exhibition cabinets which, like him, had been arranged for effect. He was lean, but slightly too short to carry off the half-moon professorial glasses, and the deep, terracotta, Tuscan tan. Dryden knew his age thanks to a press release issued when the dig began. The Italian was thirty-nine but looked older, the academic manners slightly archaic, the constant attempts at gravitas strained.
The clothes, although caked in dust, were the finest: moleskin trousers, a leather shirt, and a faded silk bandana, the last an affectation which made Dryden wince. To combat the Fen mist he wore a thermal vest, but even this was a fashionable matt black.
Dryden, who made a point of making friends with people he didn't like, greeted him warmly with a handshake.
“What today?” he asked, peering into the hole Professor Valgimigli had dug in the trench face.
"Today, Philip, we are - what you say? Up page?"
Dryden had given the archaeologist a brief, drunken tutorial on the various gradations of newspaper story: from splash to filler, from page lead to down page. The Italian had been enticed into the Fenman Bar opposite The Crow's offices after the finding of the silver pommel - a conversation which had resulted in the headline ‘Royal Sword Found at Ely Dig’. Which was a shame, as it was almost certainly something else, but Valgimigli was unable to demand a correction due to the confusing effects of six pints of dark mild and a fervent desire for publicity of any kind. The story had, after all, got him a page lead in the Daily Telegraph, complete with a flattering picture.
‘Up page’ was encouraging, but Dryden didn't trust the academic's news judgement.
“Can I see?”
Valgimigli crouched down on the damp clay and folded back a piece of tarpaulin. Against the dark green material the archaeologist had arranged what looked like six identical rusted carburettor rings.
“I found them by this.” Valgimigli picked up a curved shard of pottery decorated with blue smudges.
“Note the design,” said the Professor. Dryden studied the pot. Heads perhaps? Pumpkins? Banjos? Was there anything duller than old pottery, he asked himself. Yes, old carburettor rings.
“It's a bull's head,” said Valgimigli, and the smile that spread across his face was a living definition of the word smug.
“And these?” said Dryden, pointing at the rings.
“They don't look like much, do they?” asked the archaeologist, not waiting for Dryden to confirm this judgement: “They're rein rings.”
“Like for horses?” asked Dryden.
“Chariots,” said Valgimigli triumphantly.
“So?” Dryden had bright green eyes, like the worn glass you can pick up on a stony beach. When he knew he had a story, they caught the light.
The archaeologist covered up the rings. Dryden whistled, knowing just how annoying that can be. “Chariots. Like Boudicca. Charlton Heston.”
“If you like,” said Valgimigli, letting him build any story he wanted.
‘I like,’ thought Dryden, disliking him even more for underestimating him so much.
They looked up as a shadow fell across the trench. The crew had appeared, and stood in grey silhouette against the white sky, ghosts on parade. Dryden had got to know them over the months, Professor Valgimigli's “muscle” - a team of six postgraduate students from Cambridge. The other senior archaeologists only made occasional visits to the site. Valgimigli ran the show, Lucca having provided the biggest single financial contribution to the costs.
There were five of them. “Josh has found something, Professor,” said a woman Dryden knew as Jayne. He noted with appreciation the curve of the hips and the tight jeans, fashionably bleached. Her voice lacked confidence and held an edge of anxiety. “Something he shouldn't have.”
The crew stepped back into the mist, leaving Valgimigli and Dryden to continue north to the central “crossroads” where the two site trenches met. Here they turned east and continued for a further twenty-five yards. They reached a large hole dug in the north side of the trench. The diggers stood on the trench lip, while a large floodlight had been set up in the ditch floor aimed into the exposed cavity.
Valgimigli stopped. “Josh ?”
“Here, Professor.” The voice was so close Dryden jumped, exhibiting the nerves which he generally hid so well. Josh backed out of the hole, dragging with him a set of trowels and a torch. Josh was tall, blond and well-built, an ensemble undermined by heavy features and weak, grey eyes. “The light's bad, but have a look.” Dryden saw now that the hole was about two and a half feet square, and the sides were roughly panelled in what looked like old pine slats.
Valgimigli emerged and handed the torch to Dryden without a word. Dryden, faced with an unknown fear, did what most children do - he ran towards it, thrusting his torso into the hole, and crawling forward three feet, bringing his trailing arm, which held the torch, around in front of his body.
His face was less than six inches from a skull. Its dull yellow surface caught the light like rancid butter. Only the top of the cranium was visible, with part of the brow exposed towards the ridges above the eye sockets. Around the head newly exposed earth trickled and shifted, a pebble dropping from the tunnel roof struck the exposed bone with a lifeless, hollow tap.
Dryden drew back a foot and saw that the head was not the only bone unearthed. 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 trench floor. Valgimigli placed the object centrally with the kind of meticulous care reserved for a religious icon. It was a folded wax pouch, the kind smokers use for tobacco but much larger, A4 size. The archaeologist prized it open using one gloved hand and the metal probe.
A string of milk-white pearls spilled on to the plastic sheet. The clasp, in silver, untarnished. Valgimigli put his hand into the envelope and extracted a large candlestick, tarnished silver with an inlaid ebony collar, placing 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 said, indicating a neat puncture in the cranium just below the brow. “The ID disc will help of course. But there's still a 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 looked, redundantly, into the thick mist to the north.
He waited another few seconds, enjoying himself. “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.”