The Skeleton Man Read online

  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:

  Laura. It’s good news. The part in The Silent Daughter is yours if you want it. I enclose script. 23 words in all – I’ve told them, no last minute changes. It’s those 23 words. Well done – we’re all proud of you. The schedule has you over in Leeds the week beginning 12 August. Car will pick you up in Ely. Talk soon. Love. R.

  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 s
een 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.

  ‘It’ll be my last sermon – but they know it well. My wife says I bang on about it, but it’s relevant, even now, and these days if you want to get something across to people, past the distractions of the TV, and video games, and the rest, well you’ve got to bang on. So – St Swithun, the great bishop of Winchester, said he wanted to be buried out of doors so that, he said, the “sweet rain of heaven” could fall on his grave. There was a deeper message, a political message really…’ Dryden noted how strong the accent had suddenly become, the guttural nasal vowels distinct in the word ‘political’.

  ‘He was saying that he didn’t want to be buried alongside the great and the good inside the cathedral, all the posh people. He wanted to be outside with us, the also-rans.’

  He laughed and Dryden thought how little bitterness there was in the voice. ‘But then of course the people who came after him thought they knew better. They decided to dig up his bones and put them in a fancy tomb inside. And that, of course, is when it rained, ruining their plans, filling the grave as they dug it. For forty days and forty nights it rained, a mark of just how disappointed God was with their attitude, the way they’d forgotten this wonderful lesson they’d been given by Swithun, this great example.’

  A cough, a fresh gust of wind… ‘OK. I think the ringers are ready for us.’ The deep note of a tenor bell sounded, being rung down.

  ‘Bubbly?’ asked Humph, firing another green tennis ball despite the gathering darkness. They watched as Boudicca moved like a shadow over the field, and the cabbie refilled their glasses. To the north, over the cathedral, a brace of US fighters wheeled, the roar of the engines swelling suddenly, rattling the boat’s portholes.

  Laura looked towards them, shielding her eyes awkwardly with her hand. ‘Much more now,’ she said, and Dryden understood her. Since the invasion of Iraq the US air bases at Mildenhall and Lakenheath were busier; a steady stream of transport planes bringing in fuel and stores for shipment on to the Middle East, while the fighter pilots trained before being posted to the skies over the Gulf.

  The tape moved on, through the voices in the belfry to an elderly farm labourer who recalled, beside the slow-crackling peat fire in his cottage, the day the beet factory opened – the steam whistle which marked the shifts salvaged from a transatlantic liner. Then came the village baker, long retired to a cottage over The Dring – the village’s narrow high street flanked on one side by a culvert – where he tended an allotment of berries, the gentle clip of the pruning shears marking his progress along a hedge.

  Then the tape filled with static, the irritating clatter of a taxi firm’s radio network.

  ‘OK, Sam. You picked up yet?’

  ‘Two minutes. Two minutes.’

  ‘OK. Next, can you pick up from Peterborough railway station? That’s forecourt Peterborough. Back to the New Ferry, Sam. Back to the New Ferry.’

  The static faded. The woman’s voice was throaty and scarred by cigarettes.

  ‘My name’s Jan Cobley. We’ve run the firm now for twenty-six years, Sam and me. I do control, here, and he’s out in the cab. We’ve got two, and our son’s in the other. He’s worked hard, but these days they expect more, don’t they? We think we’ve done all right, really – there’s a roof over our heads and we get a holiday, that’s more than some here. People said we’d fold, of course. But Jude’s Ferry’s miles from anywhere and when the factory was running we was off our feet. And the bus don’t run at all now, so that’s more trade when it’s about. And we have to do the school runs – primary and for the college in Whittlesea.’

  A kettle whistled and there was the sound of a teapot filling. ‘And you’d be surprised where you can get trade,’ she said. Humph blew air out of the tiny bow of his mouth. ‘Take the army. They might get marched out to the gate posts on the range but they don’t mind a lift home.’

  She laughed then and Dryden imagined a mouth with wrecked teeth, and cellulite arms.

  ‘We’ll keep going, move the business, Sam’s got some ideas. We’ll be all right, the two of us.’ Dryden noted that the Cobleys’ son was not included in their plans. Clearly running a mini-cab wasn’t top of his career ladder.

  Humph left, kissing Laura and ignoring Dryden, gathering the dog into the Capri and swinging it out along the road to Barham’s Farm and the A10.

  ‘I wonder who she was,’ said Dryden to Laura as he stood on the riverbank watching the tail-lights dim. ‘The woman we found in the cellar.’

  The swinging skeleton held the focus of his memory, and he was struggling to erase its image. He thought of the cellar now, as night fell, and the cruel hook driven into the beam to take the rope.

  From the tape came the unmistakable mewl of a kitten, and distantly, the bark of a dog. Metal cage doors were shut and opened and there was the sound of a bucket on a stone floor.

  ‘My name’s Jennifer Smith and I work here at the boarding kennels in Jude’s Ferry.’ There was another pause for an edited-out question.

  ‘Yeah. There’s no problem having dogs and cats together. They have separate compounds and they never see each other. I like the cats best, yes…’ The sound of purring suddenly filled the soundtrack.

  ‘We’re full tonight – that’s nearly thirty cats and twenty-five dog
s – plus two kittens in the house. It’s been here – the business – for nearly forty years, so I guess it’s the reputation that brings people. Mrs Verity, that’s the owner, she says it’s because we’re so far away from towns and noise and things.

  ‘I’m not clever enough to be a vet but Mrs Verity has a friend, Mrs Royle, who runs a cattery the other side of Peterborough – so I might go there. My brothers are leaving home, and Dad died last year – so Mum said she’d come too. There’s some money, from Dad’s insurance, so the twins might set up a business of their own, building like Dad, but they can’t make up their minds. Brothers, right?’

  She laughed, covering something else that she wanted to hide. ‘It’s a new start, isn’t it, and I’m looking forward to the animals. It’ll be good, it will.’

  The wind buffeted the microphone again and Dryden could hear the sound of a dog straining at a leash. ‘I love walkin’ them. That’s Ely cathedral over there, do you see? That’s twenty-two miles – and you don’t see it that often. And that’s the power station at Flag Fen – that’s just eighteen. There’s nothing else, just space I guess, and sky.’

  Seagulls calling swelled before fading out as the tape moved on to its final talking head. Dryden’s fire crackled, dying down to the last orange embers.

  The sound of a tractor clattered close, then died. ‘My name is George Tudor and I work on Home Farm here in the village, or out in the flower fields.’ The voice was light and young, heard against the backdrop of the seagulls which had trailed the plough. ‘They say we’ll be back here in a year but that’s too long for me, too long for a lot of us. I can’t live on their promises. I know they need the village and we shouldn’t fight it. So I ain’t fighting it… I’m leaving. Western Australia – they need people out there on the land and I’ve got my exams. So I’ve filled out all the forms, and people have said the right things about me, that I work hard and that. Fred, the vicar, he’s put his name down for us. So we’re off. For good.’