then.’
‘You mean you didn’t keep well away when the Italians were inside?’
‘Nah. Even then they was popular. Sundays they had a choir and they sang by the wire and we chucked pennies through. Honest,’ he shook his head, unable to believe his own story. ‘And there were some girls that were keen. Even before ’43 they let the boys out in the day to work. The woods up by California was a courting spot. In fact they used to say only reason there was a wire was to keep the girls out.’
They both laughed and Dryden looked up, trying to pick out the details painted into the high arch.
‘Did any of the Germans get out?’
‘Doubt it. They really clamped down on ’em. They had camps up-country as well – Peterborough, I think. They lost a couple there – reckoned they slipped out through the docks at Lynn. And one got away from Norwich I’m sure, a pilot, he bashed some poor sod’s brains out at the aerodrome there and took a trainer to Ireland. Big stink about that. Scared us kids, that did.’
‘But the Italians were no trouble?’
‘Didn’t say that. Most just wanted a quiet life.’
‘Most? But not all?’
Stutton lit up again, his face theatrically illuminated by the match and then lost in a plume of white smoke. ‘There was something – that was after the Germans had arrived, must have been late in ’44. The police rounded up the Italians for questions. Came here one day with an open truck and took the lot. They woz back in twenty-four hours, nothing said.’
‘But there was gossip?’
‘Yeah. Oh yeah. Always in the war. They never told you anything so it was all there was. A burglary is what was said. A big house on the Fen edge, something classy. That’s why they came here – the police – coz our boys had been working out there. Anyway, it was artwork they got away with. You hear people now, you’d think there was no crime in the war, but there was plenty, what with all the men away and the police all over the shop expecting invasions and finding spies everywhere. A burglary, like I said, and they got most of it back that time, but they never got anyone for it. I think they found most of the stuff over at Friday Bridge – a turnip store or something. There was a big clampdown on the Italians, though – checks and stuff, ID rings, a proper curfew. No more Saturday nights in town. A lot got moved to internment camps. All ours were gone within a month.’
‘The house? Can you remember which house?’
Stutton shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago – it might have been Osmington.’ Dryden knew it, a Tudor fortified hall surrounded by a wide moat in a village to the north. It was National Trust now and
‘And someone died,’ said Stutton, his face in shadow. ‘I remember Mum talking about it. That was it – one of the servants found ’em lifting the stuff so they clumped the bloke, split his head open. Bled to death down the stairs, that was the story. They found him in the morning, at the top, bled dry.’
10
‘It’s supposed to be haunted,’ said Humph, ripping the cellophane off a pre-packed Big British Breakfast triple sandwich. The cabbie surveyed Ely Gaol, home to the town’s museum, with evident relish. ‘You wouldn’t get me in there.’
‘Right,’ said Dryden. ‘So we can add the museum to almost every other building in the town, can we?’
Humph ignored him, inhaling a sausage from the sandwich filling with a slight popping sound.
‘I get about,’ he added, looking through the window away from Dryden at a tractor attempting a U-turn in Market Street.
‘What was the last thing you were in besides this car or your house?’ said Dryden, relentlessly pursuing the point, despite the knowledge that Humph’s immobility was a symptom of some psychological need to hide from the world while travelling through it.
Humph dabbed his lips with a page he had callously ripped from
Dryden, point made, searched his pockets for a snack. He discovered an individual pork pie wrapped in a till receipt. ‘Haunted by whom?’ he asked eventually.
‘Food rioters. Hanged for theft. They rattle their chains,’ said Humph, clearly an ear-witness.
Dryden checked his watch: 1.45 pm. The smog was still thick, and shredded, clawing the gaol walls like ghostly fingers. He walked through a wrought-iron gateway into the old exercise yard, now used as an activity area, with a set of replica stocks and life-size cut-outs of onetime prisoners looking suitably desperate. A party of schoolchildren sat huddled on wooden benches shivering, attacking lunch boxes after an enforced two-hour tour of the museum.
Dryden had telephoned ahead and the assistant curator for the museum and archives was in the foyer to meet him. Dryden needed a boxful of wartime memorabilia to bury with the bones unearthed at California, a promise he had been willing to fulfil for Azeglio Valgimigli. He felt a bond with the victim, and was determined to make his second burial in some way atone for the brutality of his first.
Dr S. V. Mann was, Dryden guessed, in his late seventies at least. A former Cambridge academic historian, he was seeing out his retirement amidst the ticking silence of the museum service as a volunteer. He was extremely tall, perhaps an inch beyond Dryden’s six foot two inches, and only slightly stooped by age. His hair had thinned, revealing a capacious skull. Otherwise he was an identikit of the English hearty outdoor type, his face, perpetually wind-tanned and marred by liver spots. A slightly worn dark blue bow-tie was tied casually under his chin, and a tweed jacket hung from his bony shoulders, the elbows patched with leather. Dryden imagined that at home he had a walking stick emblazoned with those little metal shields which record the triumphs of long-distance walkers. There was about him the faint odour of Kendal mint cake and pipe tobacco.
‘We have the place to ourselves, Mr Dryden,’ said Dr Mann, smiling, his voice steady. The manners were always punctilious, even if they edged dangerously towards the patronizing. The full-time staff at the museum
