The Skeleton Man (6 page)

The drove road brought them into town through a line of pre-war semis and a play park, the sun glinting now off the water pooled under the swings and slide, a woman smoking on a bench as a single child clambered over a wooden fire engine. Half a mile later they were in the town centre, the sudden sunshine throwing the shadow of the cathedral half-way across Market Square. A pair of seagulls splashed in a wide puddle, rocking a floating ice lolly wrapper.

They dropped down Fore Hill, Dryden drinking in the distant view across the lazy river to a blue horizon as straight as a spirit level. On Waterside holidaymakers were beginning to appear on the decks of the white boats moored by the bank. Wine bottles long uncorked, they emerged blinking into the late-afternoon sunlight.

Humph dropped him by the town bridge and drove off without a word, concentrating with unnatural excitement on repeating the Faroese for a wide range of chocolate puddings.

Dryden began to walk the towpath south. He flicked open his mobile and did a quick round of calls, the schedule of numbers already logged into the phone’s memory. His position as chief reporter brought with it a modest set of duties, in return for which he received an even more modest salary, currently one sixth of that he’d drawn during a Fleet
Street career which had spanned a decade. So, twice a day, every day, and three times on press days, Dryden made the ritual round of telephone calls: county police, local police, county fire brigade, local fire brigade, ambulance control – then repeated it for West Norfolk and Peterborough. In return for such extra duties the editor had agreed a small guaranteed weekly expense account which Dryden diverted exclusively to Humph, whose role as the reporter’s unofficial chauffeur was punctuated with more lucrative contracts ferrying school children in the mornings and nightclub bouncers after midnight. The Capri’s meter was stuck permanently reading £2.95, the wires hanging loose and disconnected beneath the dashboard.

West Norfolk police confirmed that the body discovered at Jude’s Ferry had been transferred from the jurisdiction of the Royal Military Police to King’s Lynn CID. A pathologist would undertake an initial examination at 10.00am the following morning. Inquiries had begun in an attempt to trace the identity of the victim, and Lynn CID appealed for anyone with information helpful to the police to come forward. A number was provided for the purpose, and an assurance given that all communications were in strictest confidence. Dryden noted that, while a brief statement confirmed the circumstances of the discovery of the body, there was no mention of possible causes of death, or the sex or age of the victim.

Dryden stopped walking and climbed the flood bank to look south. Ahead the river met Barham’s Dock, a 100-yard cut-off channel once used to load vegetables and salad crops direct from the fields into barges for the London markets.
PK 129
, Dryden’s floating home, was moored just off the main river. A former inshore naval patrol boat, which had played a small part in the great events of the last century, it had retained its camouflage grey, distinguishing it from the ubiquitous white hulls of the floating gin palaces of the holiday trade. On deck Dryden could just see Laura sitting in the shade of the tarpaulin which he’d rigged over the boat’s cockpit.

She raised a hand in welcome, and Dryden was thrilled by the unfamiliarity of the gesture. His wife had suffered severe injuries in a car crash seven years earlier and been left in a coma from which she was only now slowly recovering. Dryden had left his Fleet Street job to be near her, while her own career as a TV soap opera actress had become a briefly celebrated tabloid newspaper tragedy, now long forgotten.

Dryden vaulted the space between the bank and the boat and, kneeling, took his wife’s head in his hands. He’d fixed up a spot on the wooden decking where he could secure her wheelchair, a symbol of her slow recovery. But for his wife the chair provided a vital system of support, being fitted with a swing-across desk where she kept her laptop, connected by a wireless link to the internet. Beneath the seat she kept a mobile phone, books, an iPod and drinks and
snacks so that she could feed herself. With the crutches she’d begun to master she could get to the galley and bathroom below, although the journey back up the boat’s steep ladder-like stair was still a struggle which could leave her exhausted.

Dryden felt again the novelty of her physical reaction to his touch, a hand grasping his hair at the nape of his neck. Her emergence from the coma had been glacial but the summer had seen a series of breakthroughs, her limbs at last freed from the rictus which had blighted the years since the crash.

‘Coffee,’ said Dryden, throwing open the doors to the galley below. Before he dropped down the ladder he ran his fingers over the brass plaque set above the wheel which read, simply: dunkirk 1940.

‘Did you hear on the radio?’ he shouted up.

She made the sound that they recognized now for yes; a sound that neatly delineated the different ways in which they had come to terms with Laura’s accident. He saw it as the first articulation of the voice that she had once had, the voice he wanted to hear again. She saw it as a triumph in itself, and if it had to be, an end in itself.

‘It was bizarre,’ he said, setting the coffee, with two ice cubes, down beside her with a straw.

He looked at his wife, realizing that her face was recapturing the beauty it had once had. The eyes open fully now, the mouth beginning to recover from the ugly jaggedness it had held since she’d been injured. And her skin, in the sun at last, had regained the rich
olive tones which betrayed her Italian ancestry. Her hair, auburn and full, had lost the stagey lifelessness of a shop-window mannequin’s.

‘You look great,’ he said, touching her cheek.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Bizarre?’ she asked, the consonants slurred.

‘Right, sorry. Yeah. I just stood there in this cellar watching this skeleton turn in the breeze. They think it’s suicide – I guess that’s the easy bit. The trick’ll be finding out who he or she was. Seventeen years is a long time to be missing without anyone noticing. There is a woman who ran the village shop, she went missing at the time of the evacuation, but I don’t know, I just don’t think it’s her, it just doesn’t ring true. For a start the cellar wasn’t marked on the plans villagers had to submit to the army – which is an odd oversight, and hardly one a potential suicide victim would take the time to arrange.’

Laura turned her head towards him and he saw the excitement in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. Jesus,’ said Dryden. He stood looking down at the laptop she had perched almost constantly on her lap. When he’d left that morning she was expecting an e-mail from her agent. The message stood open:

Dryden kissed her on the neck, but he knew she’d detected the hesitation.

‘I’m happy,’ she said. ‘You should be too.’ The words were indistinct, but audible nonetheless. The part was in a play for Granada TV in which Laura would play a woman recovering from an horrific car crash. The audition had taken place in Cambridge earlier that year, her first journey away from Ely since the accident. It would be her only work in seven years. She saw it as a triumph, the beginning of a new career. Dryden felt the role was demeaning, a very public statement that this was now the limit of their ambitions.

‘Let’s celebrate,’ he said, trying too hard. ‘I’m proud of you too.’ He went below, put two bottles of champagne in the icebox and texted Humph to pick up a Chinese takeaway. Then he put chairs out on the bank and built a fire, breaking up the wooden crates they had their food delivered in, direct from the farm up the lane where Dryden paid the mooring fee.

Humph, who had been sleeping in a lay-by when the summons came, arrived at high speed in the cab, the dog sitting up with excitement in the passenger seat. The cabbie parked up, the two doors open, and switched the radio to a local channel which specialized in 70s and 80s music at that hour, knowing it was Laura’s favourite.

They ate by the light of the fire as the sun set,
watching Boudicca run along the riverbank after the lurid green balls Humph fired – from a sitting position – using the tennis machine Dryden had given him one Christmas. It had been a truly unselfish present. The reporter harboured a deep-seated fear of dogs, which could stun his nervous system in the shape of a snarling Alsatian. But the greyhound’s good nature had disarmed him, and familiarity had softened his fears. It was a small consolation, but a consolation nonetheless, to know that he now had a pathological fear of every dog in the world except one. They ate, Humph producing a small bone for the greyhound. Finished, they burned most of the takeaway packaging on the fire.

‘Wait,’ said Dryden before Humph could contrive an early exit. He went below to the forward cabin where he had stored his records from nearly twenty years in journalism. All reporters are told to keep their notebooks in case of legal action, a piece of advice widely honoured in the breach. A barely legible scribble is unlikely to be of great use a decade after it was first written, so Dryden usually dumped them after a year. The cabin was a chaotic archive of cuttings, pictures he’d printed up from his more illustrious stories, books, a few microtapes from celebr ity or political interviews, and a case of video-taped TV programmes he’d amassed at the
News
when he’d been the stand-in critic. The walls boasted two framed awards for reporting – one in his specialist area of crime, another for feature writing when he was starting out in newspapers after university. And there
was a picture from his first evening newspaper of a young reporter accepting an award. The intervening years had taken their toll but there was no mistaking the shock of black hair cut short, the narrow gangly frame and the handsome but immobile face.

Outside he could still hear the Capri’s sound system and the murmur of Humph’s voice – no doubt re-enacting for Laura her husband’s comic appearance in combat uniform. He heard laughter and was thrilled to hear his wife’s once familiar giggle.

He sat in his captain’s chair and tried to remember where he had last seen the tape he was looking for. There were two ideas wrapped up in the concept of ‘filing system’ and both were strangers to Dryden’s innate sense of informality. He’d always told himself that if he couldn’t remember something there was probably a good reason, and that every forgotten fact made way for a memorable one. There was absolutely no chance he still had his notebooks from July 1990 when he’d covered the evacuation of Jude’s Ferry. He doubted he even had the cutting from the resulting feature he’d written on the village’s last day. But over the years he was sure he’d bundled together stuff which had appeared in the media on the village – keeping a watching brief in case the story reignited.

He knelt down and shifted a pile of books, revealing a little avalanche of paper which had slewed across the deck. He pushed a hand in amongst the notebooks and foxed cuttings. It took a minute of
sustained gleaning before his fingers closed on the tape cassette.

‘The Village that Died for Us,’ he read. The front showed a telephoto shot of St Swithun’s seen across the mere from the east, the beet factory chimney in the background.

Humph was pouring Laura wine when Dryden reappeared with the tape and a portable cassette player. He waited for the commentary to begin before adjusting the volume so they could all hear. The evening was quiet now except for the flutter of marine engines on the main river as an armada of pleasure boats slid past heading south for moorings and a pub dinner.

The tape was a history in voices recorded in the summer of 1990 by the local history unit at Cambridge University and released commercially a year after the evacuation. The title was taken from a quote from the then minister of defence who had defended the decision to evacuate the village as vital to national security and the proper training of a modern army. Dryden had bought the tape on a whim and then stashed it, unheard, with other memorabilia.

‘This was 1990, in the run-up to the evacuation,’ he said, adding more wood to the fire. The sky was still blue despite a misty sunset, but studded now with emerging stars. A vast flock of birds rose from the reserve at Wicken, beyond the river, and wheeled over them, caught against the backdrop of the moon.

The sound of wind filled the air, buffeting a microphone, and then came the church bells.

‘My name is Fred Lake, and I guess I may be the last vicar of St Swithun’s here at Jude’s Ferry.’

‘I met this guy,’ said Dryden. ‘He was OK. First parish I think, and a bit lost, but he tried to hold it together.’

The sound of bells swelled, then faded, to be replaced by the crunch of footsteps on gravel. Reverend Lake walked round his church accompanied by the sound of swifts flying from the eaves, then came the sound of a key turning in an ancient, oiled, lock.

‘We’ve got loads to do before the final service on St Swithun’s Day,’ he said, the words echoing slightly in the stone interior, and Dryden noted the voice was unstuffy, laced with the remnants of a South African accent. He imagined the wide skies of the High Veldt and wondered if Lake had felt at home on Whittlesea Mere.

‘The MoD tells us the church is not a target and isn’t in danger. But they can’t make any promises. The graveyard, the vicarage, who knows? We all make mistakes, it’s part of being human, so I’m expecting the worst. Everything we can move we will move, to St Anthony’s at Whittlesea, our sister church. They’ve been great about it, so who knows, we may be back in a year and all this will just be behind us like a bad dream.’

A sigh. ‘And perhaps we shouldn’t be too concerned with material loss. I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen the story of St Swithun…’

Another door creaked and steps echoed, climbing the tower of the church. A gust of wind hit the microphone as they emerged at the top, a seagull screeching overhead.