40
When Dryden came to he thought the nightmare was over, but it had only begun. He could smell the sweat, and the iron in the soil, like blood. How long had he been unconscious? His ribs creaked, supporting the earth above. He shook his legs, the panic making his muscles spasm, and heard the splintering of wood, making him freeze. He had to free them, but how? Forward, he must go forward. He clawed at the earth, dragged himself inch by inch, clear of the fall. He felt water from the clay trickling over his face and then the cool play of air on his skin. Opening his eyes wide he searched for light, but found none. Somewhere, deep in the earth above, he heard a groan as the pressure shifted, but the panels above his head held, creaking as they twisted.
He shuffled forward another foot and let his eyes widen again. But all was black: he was buried. His eardrums fluttered violently as they dealt with the sudden rise in his blood pressure. And then there it was, the barely perceptible long slow curve of the tunnel, unfurling ahead of him. A light, somewhere ahead. He didn’t think, didn’t remember where he was, only where he was going; didn’t remember what was above, the dense earth, waiting to fall. He thought about daylight, and a wide Fen sky, and it calmed his heartbeat. Behind him he thought he heard a sound, but ahead of him he definitely knew there was a light, and it saved his life, just when he would have twisted in his panic, bringing down the earth he feared.
Only the dim beam of the light showed itself, striking the outside wall of the curve, its source still hidden beyond. He scrambled on, his knees locking under the strain, until the light became a sharp rectangle, the glare obscuring any detail beyond. As he moved agonizingly slowly towards it, he knew he would be free of the tunnel soon, free of the nightmare that he would be buried alive, forced to drink in the soil when his lungs screamed for air. He lunged for the light, unable to stop himself, until his muscles went into cramp and he had to stop, crying out as the pain built, and then passed. Behind him he thought he heard the sound again, the clash, perhaps, of splintered pine panels and the rasp of metal on wood. But ahead there was silence: silence and light.
He fell into the room head first, tumbling forward, the sudden freedom bringing exquisite relief to his tortured joints. He sat up, blinded by the light from a single unshaded bulb which swung from a cellar roof. He held up a hand to protect his eyes, looking round at the roughly plastered walls. The room had a single door at the top of a short flight of stone steps. He forced his eyes shut, trying to restore normal vision, but the bright rectangle of the light he had crawled towards impinged on everything, alternately electric red and Day-Glo blue.
He held his head in his hands and waited, listening, crouched down on his knees. There was a sound, a scuffling, sticky noise close at hand. When he opened his eyes at last he saw books: hundreds of books in an assortment of old bookshelves covering three walls of the spacious cellar. Along the fourth stood filing cabinets, industrial size, each with a neat printed card in the slot provided on the face of each drawer. A threadbare carpet, mock Persian, almost covered the concrete floor.
Set at an angle in the centre of the room was a desk, in an exotic hardwood inlaid with dust, and behind it, in a captain’s chair, sat Dr Louise Beaumont. She brushed loose earth from her hair and returned to cleaning the pistol she held, working her fingers along the metal, easing out the grey-green clay of the moon tunnel.
Dryden, calculating, walked briskly to the steps, climbed them, and tried the door. It didn’t move a centimetre, so he banged loudly with his fist. Somewhere above he heard a clock chime.
When he turned back she was twisting a silencer onto the pistol barrel.
He thought of the noises he’d heard in the tunnel. ‘They’re just behind me. The police know too,’ he said.
‘Know what?’ she said, and Dryden could see she was sweating, her lower lip trembling despite the extraordinary force and confidence of the voice. She looked towards the tunnel opening, the rough rectangle surrounded by the ragged edge of the chipped-away bricks.
‘The tunnel’s collapsed,’ he said, knowing it had cut off her retreat, and his escape.
Dryden felt his knees give momentarily so he sat, abruptly, on the lower step.
‘You came back for the gun,’ he said.
There was silence then, but distantly they could hear the murmur of the crowd.
She put the gun down quickly on the desk. ‘That night,’ she said. ‘I heard you in the trench, coming. I thought – if they find the gun it’s over. We were right by the tunnel. It seemed the perfect place to hide it, above the head panels, where Jerome had said they’d stashed the stuff. I pushed it into the clay, embedded it like one of his precious Anglo-Saxon coins.’
She tried to stand but failed, her legs buckling, so she sank back into the seat. Dryden knew why the gun was on the table now, to disguise the shaking hands she held below the desktop.
‘You always knew about the tunnel, didn’t you?’ Dryden strained to hear movement above, his only route out.
‘Azeglio, the fool,’ she said. ‘He made Jerome promise not to tell me he was going down. But he told me, that last afternoon, when we were together for the last time. So I kept the secret. When Azeglio uncovered the body, as he knew he would, he thought I too would be fooled. That is why he is dead.’
