The Moon Tunnel

Jean read it back. ‘OK, thanks. Put me through to the desk.’ The Fudge Box was a survivor from the days when newspapers were newspapers – a blank space on the front page into which late news could be stencilled. Most evening newspapers used it for the truly sensational. The Crow was quite capable of using it for flower-show results.

Charlie picked up the phone and burped. Dryden could smell the stale ale, even down the line.

‘Hi. Look – they’ve closed the dump site. You’ll have to go into the inside story and tinker a bit – and rewrite the intro on the splash – OK?’

‘Sure. No problem,’ he said. ‘Can you do it?’ Dryden could hear the electricity of panic buzzing on the line.

Dryden looked at his watch. ‘Jesus. All right. Give us ten.’ The radio crackled to life as the BBC pips marked two o’clock. The Crow’s deadline was past by fifteen minutes, but the printers were friendly and flexible.

‘The Crow,’ said Dryden, buttoning the black great coat high to his neck and fiddling ineffectually with the Capri’s heating system.

Market Street was empty but for the damp queue at the bus-stop and a single boy racer, parked up on the taxi rank, his stereo blasting out a bass beat which made the nearest shop window flex. The market on the square was packing up already, the smog having sent people home early. Steam from the mobile burger bar added to the fug, burnt onions complementing the tang of soap.

Jean smiled, displaying budget dentures, as Dryden bounded in and thudded up the wooden stairs to the newsroom. A dedicated spinster, she had taken on the role of Dryden’s moral guardian since the crash which had put Laura in a coma. In her mind their tragedy had only one happy ending: a miracle recovery and a return to the life they had lost. In the meantime she was determined to keep Dryden’s life chaste and otherwise spotless.

Dryden did not resent his unbidden chaperone, sharing with her as he did the dream that one day his life would be as it had been before that damp, misty, evening five years earlier. Jean’s best smile, reserved for Dryden, compressed a lifetime of sympathy into a single facial expression.

After ten years in the echoing chaos of the News’s offices on Fleet Street The Crow’s version always gave Dryden a pang of childish comfort – it was like going to work in a doll’s house. Six workstations had been crammed into the room, part of which had been partitioned off with opaque glass to protect the privacy of the editor: Septimus Henry Kew. Spikes bristled on each desktop, weighed down with press releases and discarded council agenda papers, and Splash – the office cat – was curled up on the bare boards of the floor where the hot-water pipe ran to the boiler. An air of barely suppressed panic gripped the room, which was full, and strewn with the detritus of press day – polystyrene coffee cups, two overflowing ashtrays on the subs’ bench and a discarded portion of fish ’n’ chips.

Dryden had left Garry at Dunkirk to complete a short feature on what the closure meant for the company and its workforce. Dryden’s desk sported a ‘laptop’ PC which the editor had snapped up in a sale. It was portable only in the sense that you could move it around with a block and tackle. The newspaper’s editorial operations were entirely accommodated within the one room – in one corner of which was an acoustic hood, salvaged from the demolition site when they’d knocked down the old post office, from which Dryden was officially sanctioned to phone over any breaking big news story to the Press Association in London, a source of extra income which boosted all their wages by ?5 a week. Dryden picked a press release off his spike and drop-kicked it over the screen and into a distant wastepaper bin, a childish routine which gave him huge satisfaction.

The Crow, datelined Friday, was published Thursday afternoon by a small printer on the outskirts of town; the circulation was 17,000 and falling, but it had once sold 21,000 across the Black Fens. The chief sub, a wizened elf of a man known universally as Mack, walked over and slipped a proof of the front page onto Dryden’s desk. His story on the skeleton found at the archaeological dig took up the ‘basement’ – the bottom of the front page under the smog splash, with a file pic of Professor Valgimigli and an archive shot of the PoW camp in 1944 credited to the town’s museum. A group of Italian prisoners were at the perimeter wire, apparently laughing at a guard shouldering a rifle for the cameraman. Dryden was always pleasantly surprised by the way in which even the most cynical of hacks would respond to a good story. The page looked great, the headline ‘Mystery Corpse Found at Town Dig’. The Fudge Box on the dogs found at the town dump had made it to the bottom left-hand corner.

Dryden had five minutes to rewrite the splash. ‘I’ll put the stories back in your PC basket,’ said Mack, retreating to the half-open bay window to inhale a roll-up.

By Philip Dryden

Government boffins have solved the mystery of Ely’s ‘pea souper’ – the thick polluted fog which has shrouded the city since the weekend.

They have traced the cause to the city’s Dunkirk refuse dump where an underground fire is believed to be spewing sulphur dioxide into the air.

Visibility in the town centre for Saturday’s weekly market was reduced to 50 metres and at times traffic came to a complete standstill as drivers tried to negotiate the crowded streets.

‘It’s worse out where we live,’ said Mrs Marjorie Halls of West Fen Road, Ely. ‘I tried to take our daughter to school yesterday and we couldn’t see our feet it was that thick.’

While the city is notorious for autumnal mists, experts agree the thick, off-yellow cloud which forms at dawn and usually lasts until dusk is almost certainly the result of industrial pollution.

Officials from the Department for the Environment in Whitehall have been concentrating their enquiries at Dunkirk, the tiny hamlet that surrounds the large dump, which is run privately under contract from the local council.

‘The compacted waste at this site, which began operation in 1964, has ignited below ground,’ said Dr John Towner, a government scientist speaking for the DfE.

Smoke can be seen billowing from the western edge of the landfill site. Sensors have been set around the perimeter of the man-made hill, especially where it follows the course of the River Ouse.

Dr Towner said early results showed extremely high emissions of sulphur dioxide. ‘The smoke particles provide nuclei on which the sulphur dioxide gas can combine with water to form sulphurous acid,’ he said.

The eastern side of the site, where members of the public can dump rubbish in recycling bins, has remained open throughout the pollution scare, despite health warnings.