‘Get a second opinion. So, where next, then?’
It was a good question, and one which would have haunted Dryden if he had allowed it to. Humph, a divorcee who pined for his daughters, was stalked by the same ghost. They shared an aimless life punctuated by the relief of regular movement. Today, tomorrow, for the rest of my life, thought Dryden: where next?
There was no copy in the shop opening. The Crow’s deadline was just a few hours away. The mountaineer was strictly C-list celebrity status. Dryden couldn’t remember what he’d said if he tried. He’d taken a shorthand note, but like all his shorthand notes, it was unreadable. In fact, come to think of it, he’d forgotten the bloke’s name.
‘Let’s check the dig,’ he said, running a hand back through his close-cropped black hair. Humph swung the cab out into the traffic, its headlights scything through the gloom. The dig. Dryden had picked up a series of decent tales that summer from a team of archaeologists working in a field on the western edge of town. The onward march of the Barratt Homes generation threatened the site – indeed the whole western side of the town.
‘The invasion of the little boxes,’ said Dryden as they swept past the latest outcrop of executive homes, their carriage lamps dull orange in the gloom.
‘You’re an executive,’ said Dryden, turning to Humph. ‘An executive operator in the rapid transit sector.’
Humph burped. The Capri turned off the tarmac road onto a gravel drive and trundled forward, mistwrapped pine trees just visible on either side. As they crawled forward Dryden felt they were leaving the world behind: the world of shop-openings, deadlines and doctor’s appointments. Ahead lay the past, buried for more than a thousand years in the sticky clay of the Isle of Ely, and around them the trees dripped rhythmically, like clocks.
2
The cab edged its way forward, lifting and separating the folds of smog like some ghostly snowplough, its lights dim replicas of the invisible sun. Dryden, his head back on the passenger headrest, closed his eyes and thought about his new nightmare, which had woken him now each morning for a month. The one it had replaced was hardly a Freudian mystery. For the last five years his wife, Laura, had been in a coma following a car crash. They’d both been in the car, forced off a lonely Fen road at night-time by a drunken driver. It had plunged into Harrimere Drain, one of the placid pebble-black sheets of water which criss-crossed the marshlands. Dryden had been pulled clear by the drunk, unconscious, and came to outside the hospital, abandoned in a wheelchair. Laura had been left, trapped in a diminishing pocket of air in the total darkness of the submerged car. When they got her out she was in the coma, locked away from a world which had deserted her. Locked away from him.
The nightmare had been brutally graphic. A river of blood in black and white, with Laura floating by, her outstretched hand always, always, just beyond his reaching fingertips.
And then it had changed, for the first time, a month ago. Childhood, summer, on the beach at Lowestoft. His parents, distant figures by the beach hut they always rented for the two weeks after the harvest. He had been five, perhaps six, and enticed away from his modest castles by the bigger children playing down by the waterline. They’d dug a pit, the base of which was black with shadow. Beside it, an identical one, and between them the tunnel. He’d watched, hypnotized by the children crawling through. Then they caught his eye and he looked wildly for an adult nearby who might step in and save him. But his parents gazed skywards in their deckchairs. So he’d gone down, feeling sick, egged on by the girls who said he shouldn’t.
Even now, in the overheated cab, he could feel the damp sand around him, the distant sounds of the beach growing dimmer as he crawled forward to the smiling faces by the tunnel exit.
Then came the crump of the falling sand above, the sudden weight on his back, and the sand in his mouth as he tried to scream.
He’d wake screaming, his rescue postponed, screaming with his mouth full of sand. Even now the sweat broke out, trickling down by his nose towards his dry lips.
‘Claustrophobia,’ he said, kicking out his heels in irritation at the cramped space inside the Capri: the passenger seat had rusted solid in a forward position, radically reducing the leg room.
Out of the mist loomed a signpost with one sagging arm: ‘California’, the name of the farm which had once covered the site. The farmhouse and outbuildings had been demolished in the early years of the war, opening up the space for a PoW camp. The area was dry, and good for fruit trees, the clay preserving it from the damp, black layers of fenland peat just beyond the site perimeter.
A year earlier builders, ripping up the old PoW huts and their concrete bases to make way for a housing development, had found a tiny amulet amongst the rubble. It was a figure of a charioteer, beautifully executed in a soft, yellow gold. They’d tried to hush the find up, fearing it would wreck their timetable, but Dryden’s half-hearted band of local contacts had, for once, come up trumps. Taking half a whisper and a series of ‘no comments’ Dryden had written a story in The Crow headlined ‘Secret Treasure Unearthed at Ely Dig’, and the council had put a stop to building for six months, later extended to a year as more was uncovered: a gold pin and a silver pommel from a sword amidst a ton of broken Anglo-Saxon pottery.
Over a newsless summer Dryden had drummed up various experts to muse on the chances of finding a fabulous treasure in the clay of the Isle of Ely, perhaps to rival the famous Suffolk Viking burial site at Sutton Hoo. Dryden, who had an eye for detail even if the other one was largely focused on fiction, had supplied plenty of copy for Fleet Street. He’d stretched the truth but never consistently beyond breaking point. The nationals had finally moved on, leaving him with the watching brief, so he’d added a visit to the dig office to his necklace of weekly calls to places which just might give him a story in a town where a car backfiring can warrant a radio interview with the driver.
Humph’s Capri clattered through the site gates towards the dig office – a Portakabin flanked by two blue portable loos, all pale outlines in the shifting white skeins of mist. A radio mast, rigged up to provide a broadband internet link for the office, disappeared into the cloud which crowded down on the site. An off-white agricultural marquee, like some wayward beached iceberg, covered an all-weather work area. Here pottery and other artefacts were cleaned and categorized by the diggers if bad weather had forced them off the site.
The cab’s exhaust pipe hit a rut with a clang like a cow bell and Humph brought the Capri to a satisfying halt with a short skid. Dryden got out quickly, as he always did, in a vain attempt to disassociate himself from his mode of transport. The Capri was a rust bucket, sporting a Jolly Roger from the aerial and a giant red nose fixed to the radiator grille. It was like travelling with a circus.
Humph killed the engine and silence descended like a consignment of cotton wool. Clear of town, visibility in the smog was better, but still under fifty yards. The site was lit by four halogen floodlights at the corners, an echo of the original guard towers of the PoW camp. The lights were on in the gloom, but failed to penetrate with any force to ground level. The Portakabin was open, and inside a neon light shone down on a map table on which were some shards of pottery.
‘Professor Valgimigli?’ called Dryden in a loud voice damped down by the mist. Nothing.
Luckily Dryden had a plan of the site in his head: the archaeologists had dug two trenches which met like the cross-hairs of a gunsight at the centre of the old PoW camp. The trenches avoided the concrete bases of the twenty-four original prisoners’ huts – six of which lay within each quarter of the site. The Portakabin stood at the southern end of the main north-south trench. Dryden surveyed the ditch ahead, which seemed to be collecting, and condensing, the mist. He found the top of a short ladder, took three steps down and jumped the rest, effortlessly pulverizing a shard of sixth-century pottery as he landed.