The Moon Tunnel

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.

Ma ignored Dryden and turned to the suit. ‘You are kidding me?’ The accent belied her looks. There was a distinct edge of upper-class elocution, and the confidence of money.

The man looked at the clipboard, which Dryden noted was bereft of paper. ‘No. I’m afraid not, Mrs Trunch. Public access to the site will have to be suspended while we take a closer look. This…’ and he indicated a rising cloud of poisonous-looking steam literally billowing out of the side of the landfill, ‘This,’ he repeated, ‘is a cause of legitimate concern, you’d have to agree.’

Garry was listening intently and taking notes, a sure sign he had no idea what was going on. His mouth hung open like the back of a ro-ro ferry and his spots glowed.

‘Jesus,’ said Ma, turning to Dryden. ‘What do you want?’

‘Just checking,’ he said by way of defence.

‘And there are other irregularities,’ said the suit.

‘Irregularities,’ said Garry slowly, taking time on the shorthand outline. He turned to Dryden. ‘The inspector found them while checking the site for the sources of pollution…’

‘Found what?’ said Dryden, forever surprised at Garry’s ability to miss key facts.

Garry pointed to the edge of the flat platform where a green tarpaulin lay over what looked like a pallet of sandbags. Dryden flipped the edge back, then the whole sheet. There were three dogs, all Alsatians, with identical collars. Death is always ugly, but in this case it had excelled itself. Dried blood had trickled from the mouths of two of the dogs, and all three were tangled in tortured knots, teeth exposed in agony.

‘Dump-truck driver says he didn’t see the dogs in the rest of the refuse and didn’t look down after he’d dropped the load,’ said Garry. ‘They reckon they were dumped in one of the household waste skips. What ya reckon?’

Dryden shrugged. ‘Guard dogs?’ he asked the PC. ‘Alsatians. Identical collars. What time did the site close last night?’

The PC tried to pretend he’d thought of this and walked off to radio the station in Ely.

‘Eight,’ said Ma, reining in the greyhound which had picked up the scent of the dogs.

‘Poison is my guess,’ said Dryden. ‘Ma?’

She nodded sadly, patting the greyhound’s long, equine head.

‘Bit odd,’ added Dryden. ‘If you wanted to knock out the dogs to get in somewhere – why not leave the dogs on site?’

Ma, watching a short line of cars making its way across the fen towards the household skips to dump their rubbish, heaved her massive shoulders. ‘Some people are bastards. Perhaps someone won the pools and decided they didn’t want the dogs any more. People are like that sometimes – callous. Working dogs don’t get redundancy.’

Redundancy. That was another ugly word. The dump-site workers in their reflective jackets shifted uneasily on their feet.

‘OK,’ said Ma, ‘let’s close her down.’

4

Humph’s cab stood in the thickening mist, a grey cutout of a Ford Capri, emitting the perfectly enunciated vowels of a Polish peasant. Dryden opened the door, put one knee on the passenger seat and rested an elbow on the roof, cradling his mobile in the other hand.

He got through to Jean first time. ‘Fudge Box,’ he said.

‘Righto,’ yelled Jean, and he heard her typing swiftly as he dictated.

‘The corpses of three Alsatian dogs were discovered at Ely’s Dunkirk refuse site late yesterday (Thursday). Police are investigating the possibility that the animals were poisoned and dumped by burglars. All three animals wore ID collars which have been removed by police for investigation. They carried code numbers, not names, and the single word RINGFENCE. Any member of the public with information should ring Ely 66616.’