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
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
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
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
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
‘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
