Dryden nodded, oddly flattered, and tried one last question. ‘Do you know if anyone escaped from the camp?’
Valgimigli looked up, letting the moisture of the mist settle on his jet-black eyelashes.
‘I doubt it, Mr Dryden. An Italian – I doubt that even more. It was not a popular war, these men were conscripts. By the end it was a lost war. Why escape? They were well treated, that’s why so many stayed behind.’
Dryden choked slightly, the smog’s acrid poison catching in his throat: ‘So what was he free from? Mr Libero Ultimo?’
The archaeologist buttoned up his overcoat and walked off, disappearing into the mist within a dozen strides.
9
Out on Hasse Fen, nearly fifteen miles from the cathedral, the mist was knee-deep and pillow-white. By the river cattle stood, dropping dung into the snow-like blanket. The Capri sailed on, its tyres turning in the fog, its faded 1970s sky-blue roof cutting a swathe, leaving a ship’s wake across the fen. The city lay behind them, wrapped in its daytime shroud of purple-cream smog. Ahead, along the arrow’s flight of the drove road, lay the hamlet of Buskeybay and a return to Dryden’s childhood.
The fate of the man found in the PoW tunnel had awakened Dryden’s sense of injustice, and he was impatient to learn more. The police were indifferent, Valgimigli seemed keen to get the bones buried so that he could get back to the dig, and no one appeared to care that the victim had no name. Who had ended this man’s life so brutally? Dryden wanted to know more about California, and the lives of those who had spent the war behind its barbed-wire fences, and more about their lives out in the wide-open Fen fields: prisons without walls. And he wanted to know more about anyone brave enough to crawl down that escape tunneclass="underline" to bury themselves, willingly, alive.
Which is why he was going back to Buskeybay, revisiting a single remembered image from a lonely childhood.
He kicked out his feet, his leg joints complaining at the first hints of winter rheumatism. ‘Here,’ he said redundantly, a second after Humph had already begun to slow the cab, pulling off the drove into a lay-by where cattle hoofs had created a mudbath by a five-bar gate. The sign said ‘Buskeybay Im’ and the track led off on a zigzag route towards the distant River Lark. His uncle’s house, or more precisely its upper storey, stood above the mist, a pre-war farmhouse which had begun to sink into the peat, forcing the door and window frames into agonized parallelograms. It looked like the kind of house a child draws, but never lives in.
As Dryden closed the Capri’s door he heard the cab’s tape deck thud on, the sound of a Polish wedding filling the air. He noticed for the first time that the Capri’s paintwork had become oddly mottled and he ran a finger across the blemish on the bonnet.
Humph wound the window down. ‘It’s the smog. I heard it on the short-wave. Pollution. The rank’s talking about compensation.’
‘Terrific,’ said Dryden. ‘More good news for Ma Trunch.’
He took the path and quickly reached a narrow drain, ten feet wide and brimful of snow-white mist. A railway sleeper bridge crossed it in a single span and Dryden knew that if he’d waded below and examined its underside he would have found his own name laboriously carved into the wood with the date 1977. He’d been eleven, and on one of a countless number of childhood visits the tiny Fen hamlet of four houses, the uncle’s cottage being an outlier about half a mile from the other three.
Roger Stutton, his mother’s only brother had been the family’s sole significant relative; his father was an only child. For Dryden his uncle had always been a painful reminder of his mother: the same tall, slightly forward-angled frame, the soft green eyes and the same brittle grey hair, white at the edge of the forehead.
Dryden saw him now, footless through the ground mist, coming home from the fields down by the river. Overhead the sky was clearing, revealing that particular shade of Fabergé blue only possible after a mist has been burnt off by the sun. A crow called from the poplars by the house and the figure stopped, shouting Dryden’s Christian name just once, but the echo came once, twice, and a third time.
A minute later they were closer. ‘Philip,’ he shouted again, raising a hand, hiding a smile, and Dryden knew it had been too long. Another debt he’d left unpaid. They were together quickly, fumbling a handshake.
‘Mum’s stuff,’ said Dryden. ‘I should have called…’
Stutton swept the apology aside. ‘You’re busy. It’s not going anywhere, is it? The barn – the old barn,’ he added, walking off towards the house.
Stutton was in his mid sixties now, and ran a car-breaking business out of the farmyard, having sold the land beyond to one of the big salad-crop companies in the eighties. The eviscerated bodies of wrecked cars littered half an acre beyond the garden. An industrial crusher stood idle in the middle, over which scurried a large water rat. Dryden could smell petrol and rotting upholstery, and he felt a pang of loss for the summers at Buskeybay.
Beyond the house stood a half-brick barn, black with creosote.
‘Business?’ asked Dryden, trying to be interested in the answer as Stutton searched for the key.
‘Better’n farming,’ said Stutton, freeing the padlock. ‘I’ll sell up one day.’
Inside the mist had crept under the doors and hung in the half-light, a thin layer of cloud a foot above the dung-caked floor. Dryden shivered, feeling a needle shot of pain between his shoulders. The barn’s layout was simple. Two haylofts, one at either end, with a two-storey storage space in the middle. A single dormer window, covered by moss, radiated a thin green light. Dryden climbed a metal safety ladder into the far loft, followed by Stutton, who threw a switch to light a neon strip in the timber roof above. Between them they lifted aside a green tarpaulin and several dust sheets, revealing what looked like the entire contents of a cheap antiques and bric-à-brac shop. Dryden threaded his way amongst the tea-crates, crammed with nicotine-brown newspaper. He picked at the rotted paper revealing dusty crockery, rusted kitchen scales, a sickly glazed Victorian vase, some candlesticks, pewterware, a large brass wall plate. Lifting a cheap gilt picture frame he studied the scene by the flickering neon: Constable’s haywain trundled towards Flatford Mill.
‘Worth a fortune, this,’ he said.
‘And these,’ said Stutton, lifting a wooden mangle in one hand, an old Singer sewing machine in the other.
‘Is it all Mum’s? I’m sorry – I should have done something sooner. It’s been years,’ said Dryden. Four years since the funeral. He had left it too long, reluctant to sever too brutally the few physical ties which remained with his own past.
Stutton shook his head. ‘It’s not just your mum’s. All the family, really – it’s just sort of collected here.’ He cleaned the dust from the brittle glass mantel of a gas lamp. ‘Dad must have chucked this out in ’49 when we got the electric. And that’s Grandad’s,’ he said, pointing at a porcelain washbowl set in a cabinet.
They stood in silence, the dust drifting across the harsh beams of neon.
‘Are you really going to sell up?’ asked Dryden.
His uncle nodded. ‘There’s an offer. Two. Why not?’
‘We should get rid of it all,’ said Dryden. ‘I know someone who does clearances. They can auction the best. Anything you want, just take. I’m done with it,’ he added, kicking a crate, but unable to stop himself stroking the mane of a threadbare rocking horse. ‘Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll get things moving,’ he added, fingering Thomas Alder’s business card in his shirt pocket.
They climbed down and stood below in the gloom, Dryden caressing his creaking knees. He stood, feeling along a wooden post in the half-light, knowing he’d find the right switch. A single bulb flickered on, startling a dove which clattered up into the rafters.