The Moon Tunnel

They walked on. ‘Nighthawks?’ asked Dryden. ‘Do you really think this is about pilfered pottery?’

‘Any better ideas?’ said Cavendish-Smith, not expecting an answer.

They reached the crossroads. ‘There has to be a link with the body in the tunnel,’ said Dryden. ‘We’re almost certain it was Serafino Amatista, we know about the robbery at Osmington Hall. Valgimigli has local links – to the Italian community. There must be a connection.’

They walked on to the taped-off area where Dryden had found Valgimigli’s corpse. A team in full-length polythene suits was working at intervals along the gully. They stopped short of the corpse, which now lay sprawled, bizarrely, under a square plastic tent.

But Cavendish-Smith was watching something else. Dryden could see in the distance, further along the trench, the spot where they’d uncovered the tunnel. A group of policemen were listening to a briefing, and kitting up in what looked like potholing gear – complete with miner’s hats.

‘What are they are up to?’

The detective stopped. ‘As you so astutely point out, Mr Dryden, we need to know everything we can about the body in the tunnel. We’re digging it out – might as well see what’s in the rest of it.’

Cavendish-Smith nodded at the body. ‘Did you touch him?’

Dryden shook his head. ‘I walked around, once. Then the ropes went, and he fell forward like this.’ He took a few steps backwards, as if judging the scene. ‘It’s an execution – isn’t it?’ he said, thinking of the day Serafino Amatista had fled the village of Agios Gallini.

The pathologist stood and Dryden saw a thin smudge of blood along his white forensic suit. ‘Gunshot wound delivered at close range – under six feet,’ he said. ‘The skin is seared and there’s some cordite in the wound.’ Dryden recognized the suited figure: Daniel Shawcross, a Home Office pathologist based in Cambridge. His presence indicated that bells had rung all the way down the line to Whitehall. Dryden guessed that the death of a well-respected foreign academic, together with the involvement of the international archaeological team and the University at Cambridge, had resulted in Shawcross’s early morning appearance at the crime scene.

‘And there was this,’ he said, removing an evidence bag from his suit pocket and lifting out a piece of blue material using tweezers. The cloth was blood-soaked and burnt at one end. ‘My guess is it’s a blindfold. The impact of the bullet blew half of it away. I expect to find threads impacted into the brain just here.’ He bent down and lifted aside the plastic sheet.

Dryden counted pine trees on the edge of the site. Cavendish-Smith was unmoved. ‘How about footprints, evidence of the killer’s exit?’ he asked, wrapping a waxed Barbour more closely to his suit.

Shawcross laughed. ‘It’s like the entrance to a football turnstile down this gully. We’ve found at least a dozen separate trails. But the most recent belong to Mr Dryden here – that’s them,’ he said as one of his assistants pointed to a plaster cast being taken behind the corpse.

‘Then there’s these…’ Shawcross pointed to some boot marks in front of the body.

‘The archaeologist’s?’ asked Dryden.

‘Sure. Right from the caravan and along the gully. And these…’

They gathered round a set of Wellington boot prints. ‘These are fresh, and unaccounted for. They enter the site by the Portakabin, mimic Valgimigli’s to this spot, and then exit that way…’ He pointed along the trench towards the distant pine trees.

‘No sign of a struggle?’ asked Cavendish-Smith. ‘No sign his body was dragged?’

‘Nothing,’ said Shawcross, ducking under the tape and resuming work with the tweezers in the archaeologist’s wrecked skull.

‘Why would a man walk to his own execution? And why would the executioner tie his hands after he was dead?’ said Dryden, but the detective was gone, asking himself the same questions.

Dryden was dismissed, with instructions to keep in contact. Cavendish-Smith retreated to the mobile canteen and a full English breakfast. Dryden found Humph and the Capri, parked up amongst the trees by the call box he’d used the night before. In the glove compartment they found two identical bottles of Tequila. They drank in silence, the fierce warmth of the alcohol burning its way down Dryden’s throat. He checked his watch, noting that his hand still shook perceptibly. He still had three hours before The Crow’s office opened. He had a story for the Express’s front page – for anyone’s front page. But for now he would close his eyes and try not to see Valgimigli’s butchered head.

Marco Roma had fought death all that summer of 1983, but now the winter had come and his body embraced the failing light of a new year, even as he fought to stay alive. He’d had the bed raised on bricks and could turn and see out from the window of Il Giardino, across the high bank, towards the distant cathedral. In the foreground his garden wilted, nipped black by the frost. Ice held the reeds on the river, and snow lay untouched across the lifeless landscape of the Black Fen. Increasingly now, perhaps every minute, perhaps every hour – he had lost the ability to judge time – he thought of home, of Italy, and the sun on the whitewashed wall of the schoolroom in Mestre. A childhood memory, preparing him for death.

Alone, he watched his breath fog the window, obscuring the winter scene, only for the cold outside to wipe it clean before he could breathe again.

His life ticked away, measured by the snowflakes which fell occasionally from a sky the colour of steel.

Then he heard voices below, the griddle hissing and finally the slow, reluctant footsteps on the stairs. He turned away from the light and considered his three sons.

It had been the same question now for eight months, since a string of hospital visits had ended in the surgeon’s consulting room. He remembered the X-rays, and the long medical lecture. His patience had finally snapped and he had extracted his death sentence in language unencumbered by euphemism. Then he had come home to tell his wife and his sons: Pepe had cried, and he’d loved him more for it than the stoic courage of his brothers. And he’d cried too, later, when he knew that Mamma was glad it would not take long.