Mann showed his card. ‘I’m the curator from the museum. Mr Alder has asked me to attend – he said he’d leave the name. We have to remove some items from the coffin…’ He nodded towards the box Dryden held. ‘It’s Siegfried Mann. Dr Siegfried Mann.’
The constable checked a clipboard by torchlight and waved them through, giving Dryden only a brief second look. ‘He’ll regret that,’ thought Dryden, keeping close to Mann as he wove his way between headstones towards the distant, dimly lit incident tent.
Someone removing a white forensic coat approached from the shadows: Dr John Holbeach, the local pathologist. Dryden guessed he had been called in to take the DNA sample, a task mundane enough to excuse the Home Office expert who had attended the scene of Valgimigli’s murder. Dryden had covered many of Holbeach’s cases, none had been controversial.
‘Ah, Dr Mann. Thanks. I’m done in there,’ he said, breathing in the night air. ‘The coffin’s open, if you’d remove the items we can re-inter.’ The pathologist lit a cigarette, gave the reporter a nod, but asked no questions.
Inside the tent the coffin stood on a trestle table, beside a second empty table. The bones were arranged carefully within the silk material of the coffin, but Dryden noticed a clean white hole which had been drilled in the thigh. The jaws of the skull gaped, apparently indignant at being hauled back into the world a second time.
Mann reached into the coffin and removed the purple felt bag which had contained the artefacts he had collected to mark the burial of the unknown PoW, tipping the contents into the Red Cross box.
‘I don’t think all this is appropriate now,’ said Mann, carefully removing the furled Italian flag and the heavy brass military shield donated by the German Embassy, both of which had lain beside the felt bag. ‘Or these,’ he said, running his hand over the coins, badges and other memorabilia from the bag.
Dryden nodded, his skin prickling slightly as he heard the voices outside the tent. ‘I don’t want to read about this in the paper, Dryden,’ said Mann. ‘I took your help as a kindness.’
‘Sure. I was never here,’ said Dryden. He could leave Mann out, and the coffin’s contents. He had enough for a great piece already, even better if he could get to the graveside.
Mann began to extract some coins which had fallen from the bag into the silk lining of the coffin.
‘Just one thing,’ said Dryden. ‘You said you were good friends with Azeglio Valgimigli – it’s not really important but I’m curious. I met his wife. Would you say they were happily married?’
‘Louise was a beautiful woman,’ said Mann, straightening up and beginning to seal the Red Cross box with duct tape.
‘I can see that,’ said Dryden. ‘But did they seem suited?’
‘I don’t know. They say all marriages are different when viewed from the inside. I stayed with them once – in Lucca. They lived well, but perhaps worked too hard? I don’t know – it seems uncharitable now to say this – but it seemed a cold place. Though I never heard an argument between them… How many can say that of their own marriage?’
‘But Azeglio was unhappy?’ said Dryden.
‘Yes,’ said Mann as he finished sealing the box. ‘Yes. I think he felt very lonely, actually. Perhaps they both were… Now,’ he said, heaving the box around so that they could lift it between them. ‘Wait a minute, please – I need to find someone to close the coffin before we leave.’
He slipped out through the folds of the tent. Dryden peered into the coffin in case Mann had missed anything. When he saw the button he felt his blood run deliciously cool, and he pocketed it quickly, a brief spasm of guilt making him glance at the skull exposed in the coffin beside him. He shivered then, not because he was in the presence of death, but because he felt very close to a killer. He held the button tight in his hand within his pocket, knowing it told him the truth.
The silence in the next tent was profound, and tempting. He lifted the flap, saw that the space was empty and walked in. The scene-of-crime lamps were nearly blinding, and accentuated the darkness of the letterbox opening of the grave, which was neatly surrounded with plastic turf. Dryden moved to the edge and looked down. The overhead light penetrated to the bottom, where Dryden saw his reflection in water. The slender trench, the ultimate claustrophobic nightmare, made his knees weak and he swayed, perilously close to tumbling forward.
He heard voices again approaching the tents, but found it extraordinarily difficult to break away from the graveside. The tent flap opened. ‘Dryden?’ It was Mann, his voice breaking the spell. ‘We should be gone now, please…’
Wordlessly they lifted the Red Cross box as one of Alder’s assistants screwed down the coffin lid. They fled quickly to the car, passing only the priest returning to the graveside, his surplice catching the moonlight.
Mann shook his hand. ‘Thank you. I’m sorry – about Azeglio – I shouldn’t have said those things. I’m sure they loved each other. I have no cause to doubt that.’
Dryden nodded, discounting the retraction. As he watched Dr Mann drive away his mobile rang. It was one of Cavendish-Smith’s junior flunkeys. There had been a major development in the hunt for the killers of Professor Azeglio Valgimigli and a press briefing would be held at the local nick in the next ten minutes – a fact which explained the detective’s absence from the exhumation. Dryden pocketed the mobile, retrieving the button he had found in the coffin. He held it up to the moon, which shone through the mother-of-pearl with a ghostly light, illuminating the lion-and-bell motif.
33
Gladstone Gardens was a street of Edwardian terrace houses a short walk from the railway station, the decorated red brick and stucco work advertising the ambitions of the original builders, while each house bore a name etched into a keystone over the door: Balmoral, Windsor, Hampton, Sandringham… But by each front door, inset with stained-glass panels depicting sailing boats and rising suns, a vertical line of bell pushes proclaimed that the visitor was now in Bedsit Land, that dreary corner of the suburbs where every hallway is crowded with bicycles and junk mail festers on the doormat. But Gladstone Gardens was not just one of thousands of such streets shackling a great city, it was Ely’s only excursion into grotty suburbia – an outlier from the town centre itself, and a brief precursor to the Barratt lands beyond.
The black police van into which the press had been packed was parked at the top of the street, with a decent view through the tinted windows at the façade of No. 56. The pre-raid briefing had been just that: brief. Cavendish-Smith reiterated his belief that the nighthawks were undoubtedly linked to Professor Valgimigli’s murder. The object of the operation codenamed Albert – was to raid a house known to be used by the nighthawks in the trafficking of stolen artefacts. The press and TV were in on the raid because the pictures would get the investigation plenty of airtime the next day.
Detectives had infiltrated the nighthawks’ network in Lincoln, posing as London agents seeking Roman artefacts for non-institutional buyers – rich individuals prepared to enjoy their purchases in private. An officer working undercover had obtained a list of the gang’s contacts across the region. The name of Josh Atkinson, the late Professor Valgimigli’s senior digger, had headed the list. A small team had tailed Josh for a week, moving rhythmically between the site, The Frog Hall, his girlfriend’s shared house in the town centre and his ground-floor flat at 56a Gladstone Gardens. Visitors photographed entering Josh’s home in the last forty-eight hours had included two well-known members of the nighthawks network and a teenager with bright red hair and a dragon tattoo on his neck, known to local police. According to information received the nighthawks had some merchandise to selclass="underline" and an appointment with a buyer at 1.00am.