The Skeleton Man Read online

  The reporter grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. ‘We may have the owner of the fingers,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone.’

  10

  Cuckoo Bridge crossed the river a mile north of the town, a wooden arch built in the fifties to link Quanea Fen with the towpath. Its pitch-soaked timbers had warped over the decades so that its once graceful lines were tortured now, a miniature nightmare of twisted boards over the wide expanse of the grey river, its surface pockmarked with the falling rain. The river ran through thickets of thorn here, and the only sign of humanity was the distant cathedral tower, just visible over the flood bank. It was here, more than a thousand years before, that the monks had come ashore with the body of St Etheldreda. Dryden always imagined the scene – the mist cloaking the little procession as it dragged the coffin on a cart along the old green lane by the river.

  Dryden had hauled Mitch out of the darkroom and commandeered his van for the brief journey. They parked at the river authority depot and walked the last hundred yards along the narrow, single-track drove. Humph was alone on the bridge, the Capri beyond on the other bank beside the emergency vehicles, the cabbie’s weight prompting creaks from the woodwork. The safety rail on the downriver side was broken at its central section, the snapped timber ends raw and pale.

  The main river pooled here in a wide reed marsh, a clear channel for the tourist boats cut through the middle. The search and rescue team were twenty yards from them on the east bank. A whining inflatable dinghy nosed its way forward through the rushes while four divers squirmed in the shallows like tadpoles.

  Humph handed Dryden a set of field glasses, stowing the camera now that the professional had arrived. Mitch, manically equipped for all eventualities, had retrieved waders from the back of his van and was making his way along the opposite bank to get a shot of the action. Dryden could see the victim now, spreadeagled in the reeds, a lifeless starfish. Up close through the field glasses the man’s face looked impossibly pale, and his body entirely motionless. One of the divers was trying to bag his right hand, securing a watertight knot at the wrist.

  ‘Looks bad,’ said Dryden, trying to feel something for a nameless victim, aware that his profession could produce a disfiguring cynicism.

  The dinghy was alongside now and a metal stretcher was manoeuvred under the body. As Dryden watched he saw the victim lift an arm so that he could cover his eyes with his uninjured hand.

  ‘Hold on. Bloody hell. It’s a live one,’ said Dryden, flicking open the mobile. He got through to Jean – The Crow’s half-deaf receptionist and copy-taker. He gave her a three-line paragraph and told her to pass it straight to the editor’s screen as a suggested fudge box – an item of late-breaking news which could be added to the back page after the presses had started to run. Then he got her to read it back and corrected the six errors which had crept into less than fifty words.

  ‘Looks like he fell in here,’ said Dryden to Humph, edging towards the gap in the safety rail. ‘Hard to believe he got caught by a boat – unless it was night time. Surely you’d see him, or hear him. Mind you, half the skippers on the white ships are pissed by ten.’ Dryden thought about it – the drifting gin palaces tinkling with wine bottles.

  Humph took a step towards the edge and they both felt the planks twist under their feet. ‘He might have hit those,’ said the cabbie, pointing down. Directly below the missing safety rail the bridge’s central support was buttressed with timbers. ‘That would have knocked him out; he could have drifted into the slipstream and then…’ He used one hand like a cleaver to cut down on the fingers of the other.

  They walked over towards the ambulance and stood a respectful distance away as they slid the stretcher on board. The victim’s hair was black, cut stylishly short at the back, the jawline military-straight, hinting at a good diet and inherited wealth, a solid build without being athletic, and despite the pallor – a tan which hadn’t come out of a bottle. His clothes were casual but expensive – an olive-green linen shirt, moleskin trousers and one remaining brown leather shoe. Dryden could see a watch and what looked like the trailing lead of a mobile phone’s handsfree set entangled with the arm. The sock on the shoeless foot hung loose, the exposed skin ribbed from the long immersion in the river water. He looked away, disturbed by the intimacy and vulnerability of a semi-naked foot.

  The stretcher was half-way in when he turned his head towards them, and as the sun broke through the clouds Dryden glimpsed the eyes: pale green against the skin, and in the blast of light he was sure that, while water trickled down from the hairline, tears fell as well. As they slid him into the rear of the ambulance the man grabbed one of the paramedics by his fluorescent jacket and Dryden heard him choke and then the voice, forced out, ragged with stress.

  ‘Don’t leave me alone.’

  Dryden waited for them to go, light blinking silently, before approaching the diving team, who stood now in a circle inhaling ritual cigarettes. The Express’s last edition was long gone so there was no need to push for more information, a luxury which ironically made his job that much easier. Boudicca padded up with him and lay at his feet like a croissant.

  Two of the divers were sharing a cigarette, their wetsuits unzipped to the waist and turned back and out of the arms, revealing pallid white muscle and damp hair. One was tall, his long arms painfully pale and hairless, the other squat and tanned, with black curly hair over much of his torso. The support team were smoking too, diligently checking equipment as they repacked it into the unit van. Dryden felt excluded from this aggressively male club and fiddled ineffectually with the top button of his white shirt.

  The sudden sunlight had transformed the landscape and revealed a wide sky of chef’s-hat clouds. ‘You boys got here quick,’ said Dryden, making sure they saw him pocket his notebook. ‘We got some pix, so if you want copies shout.’

  ‘Eel catcher spotted him,’ said the tall diver, speaking expertly while holding the cigarette between his jaws. Ely still boasted a council waterman, and Dryden had often seen him moving stealthily on the river at dawn by Barham’s Dock in a low-sided fowlers’ punt.

  ‘How long you reckon he’s been in there?’ said Dryden, waving as Mitch drove off.

  The tanned diver shrugged, squeezing water from his hair. ‘With a bit of luck, just overnight. There’s some hypothermia, any longer than that and he may have trouble recovering. Plus there’s a bump on the head – it’s a three-inch gash and it’ll need stitches. Guess he tumbled in off the bridge. We’re gonna close it, by the way, at least until they repair and strengthen the rails. It’s in a pretty dangerous state.’

  ‘Nobody noticed the broken handrail then? Not yesterday, not this morning?’

  A shrug again. ‘It’s a lonely spot.’

  They tried to turn away, cutting short the interview, but Dryden took a half step in. ‘Did he say much? He looked upset – distraught really. Does he remember what happened? Think he jumped?’

  An exchange of glances: ‘We don’t want to see any quotes in the paper, OK?’ said the tall one. Dryden nodded. ‘At the moment he can’t remember his own name.’

  Dryden thought about that. ‘Amnesia? Believe him?’

  They both nodded, but it was the tanned one, squatting down now to remove his leggings who added: ‘Sure. Mostly. But he must remember something because that’s not just pain in his eyes. He’s terrified of something.’ They turned then to go. ‘Or he’s terrified of someone. Nightmare is he can’t remember who.’

  11

  Dryden checked with the news desk that the paper had gone and then walked back into town in the sun, tourists beginning to appear as he walked the towpath south. The Isle of Ely rose up from the fens ahead, the cathedral trailing a pennant of low cloud, all that remained of the morning’s leaden sky.

  He wondered what it was like not to have a memory. A blessing, perhaps. Laura’s coma had been marked by a complete absence of any recall of their accident. The hours spent trapped in the lightless car beneath the win
ter water was literally a black box; a memory too terrifying to allow a replay. His wife’s recovery had been marked by many advances. But not a single shaft of light had fallen into that lost world.

  Ely, bathed in sunshine now, had come to life. In Market Square he spotted that one newspaper vendor was already on his pitch. The Express and The Crow were printed a mile out of town, and the editor had recently introduced an early print run for both in order to catch sales before the shops closed. The seller was a man known as Skeg, thirty perhaps, his face punctured with a single cheek stud, the hair cut savagely short, emphasizing a small triangle of dyed red stubble below his lip, but above his chin. Skeg’s job was on the bottom rung of the employment ladder, a career normally reserved for a band of outcasts.

  Dryden had to admit that Skeg was not quite so easy to pigeonhole. He lived on one of the dilapidated river boats which took up cheap moorings in the town’s clay pits, and he’d come across him several times working at Wicken Fen nature reserve, clearing weed from the waterways, tagging and counting birds. And always, at his heels, the half-drowned short-haired terrier, tugged along on a blue rope. Sometimes Skeg would disappear from his pitch for months, trying another job, but he always reappeared.

  Dryden bought a paper, even though he could have waited and got a free one back at the office, and flicking it open at the fold enjoyed the sight of his double front-page bylines. The thrill, even after twenty years on newspapers, was palpable.

  Skeg had sensed the inner smile: ‘Done all right then,’ he said, and Dryden remembered instantly why he didn’t like him as much as he normally liked outcasts. There was sarcasm beneath the conviviality, and something cruel about the eyes. At his feet the dog lay curled, ribs showing. Skeg had his own copy open to the feature on Jude’s Ferry, and the picture Dryden had taken inside St Swithun’s, the now shattered crusader’s tomb beside an inset of what it had looked like before the wayward shelling.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dryden. ‘Decent day’s work.’

  Skeg took his pound coin and rummaged for the change in a wooden tray. The dog edged forward to snuffle at Dryden’s feet and he felt the first wave of panic as it bared its teeth. He drew in breath, fighting the impulses which were coursing through his nervous system.

  ‘Wow,’ said Skeg, bending down and pulling the dog back. ‘You’re not a big fan of dogs, are ya?’

  Dryden tried a smile that failed, aware that his phobia was painfully apparent.

  ‘Think of something else,’ he told himself. So he checked the space on the back page where his fudge box on the man in the river should have been and found it blank: either he’d bought one of the earliest copies off the run or they’d failed to get it in at all.

  Dryden scanned the badges on Skeg’s quilted poacher’s jacket as he took his change: Troops Out of Iraq, Shelter, RSPCA, a sticker which proclaimed Green Planet, and another in support of a campaign to stop Cambridge University building a laboratory for animal testing of new drugs.

  ‘Just found the bloke in the river without the fingers,’ said Dryden, trying to mask his dislike of someone less fortunate than himself, and edging back still further from the dog.

  Skeg nodded. ‘That’s good. That’ll keep the story going then.’ That smile again: mocking.

  In The Fenman bar he found the entire newspaper staff – minus the editor and Jean from reception – engaged in the ritual press-day binge. Garry was counting peanuts on a tabletop while Charlie Bracken was retelling an anecdote about a riverbank flasher, complete with hand movements. Dryden was unable to catch the mood of timeless celebration. He was bothered by a bizarre double image: the marble broken finger on the stone floor of St Swithun’s and the pale stumps of human flesh and bone in the fisherman’s net.

  He challenged Garry to a game of pool, beat him twice, and then slipped away. Zigzagging across town he reached an acre of empty tarmac now baking in hot afternoon sun, a mirage contorting the image of a cat tip-toeing towards the shadows. On one side stood an ugly red-brick Victorian barracks. Gold letters over a tall pointed doorway read: 36th (Eastern) Signal Regiment. The interior was cool and clinical, walls whitewashed, and the drill-hall floor waxed to a military shine. A raised stage at one end had a crude pro scenium arch carrying a regimental crest and the words ‘The Territorial Army in East Anglia’. Dryden examined the silence and could almost hear the precise thud of boots coming to attention.

  The drill hall had been radically reduced in size to accommodate a suite of offices on one side, glass partitions shielding an array of high-tech computers. Dryden had his nose pressed against the glass when a cough made him jump.

  It was Major John Broderick.

  ‘Hi,’ said Dryden. ‘What’s all the gear?’

  ‘This stuff? Signals. It’s what the TA’s got to offer these days – qualifications. IT, computer maintenance, communications. Popular stuff. And the army needs it; we’ve got people out in Iraq now on active service. People from here.’

  They went into Broderick’s office: a sad room, cold despite the sun and dominated by an oak desk which looked too important for the building. Attached to the blotter was a small silver photo frame containing three shots: wife, wife and son, wife and daughter. On one wall was a framed sepia portrait of a soldier in the Indian Army. Dryden touched the frame: ‘And this… ?’

  ‘It’s my father; 1944.’

  Dryden declined a seat. ‘The evacuation of Jude’s Ferry. The army organized everything, yes? You said there were records. Those questionnaires the villagers had to fill in?’

  Broderick closed a book on his desk in which Dryden glimpsed a line drawing of an orchid. ‘I had a visit yesterday. CID from Lynn. DI Peter Shaw. Same question. Which is good news for you because I think he did most of the work.’

  The major led the way along a painted brick corridor to a staircase. At the bottom was an iron door with a double lock. Inside they were blinded by an array of hanging, naked light bulbs illuminating half a dozen metal bookcases packed with box files. The room smelled of old newspapers and something stringent, possibly rat poison or disinfectant.

  ‘Regimental records,’ said Broderick. ‘The 36th took the key security role for the 1990 operation, organized the evacu ation, the final convoy out and then a complete search, for obvious reasons.’

  Dryden recalled reports at the time that opponents of the evacuation were threatening to get through the wire and hide in the village, a human shield against bombardment.

  ‘Then the Royal Engineers got stuck in, mapped the place, ran up an inventory of what was there in terms of the built environment: homes, commercial premises, cellars, drains, electrics. That was Colonel Flanders May and his men.’

  ‘You in the TA then?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘Yup. Cadet. We did the transport on the day – big job actually, nightmare to organize, especially when dealing with civilians. That wasn’t in the village though, it was my job to help run the depot here in Ely. You can tell a soldier where to go but these people had to be eased out in front of the press with cameras everywhere. Up until the passing of the deadline we had very little actual jurisdiction. Persuasion, not force. As I say, bloody good training.’

  Dryden saw again the old woman being dragged from her home on The Dring.

  ‘There was trouble on the day,’ said Dryden.

  Broderick nodded, but made no response.

  At the end of the room a trestle table held a few spilled box files.

  The major picked up one of the sheets of paper, covered with the archaic jumble of a manual typewriter’s letters.

  ‘This is the stuff on Jude’s Ferry?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘Yup. The CID man – Shaw – brought a warrant but I told him he’d wasted his time. What with freedom of information and everything we’d have to allow public access – hardly needed the power of the courts behind him. Thorough kind of policeman. Anyway, nice bloke. Bit odd – dyed hair. Blond.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Dryden, trying for irony, and reflecting
that a career as a part-time soldier seemed to have aged Broderick well beyond his thirty-something generation.

  Broderick bristled. ‘Still. Seemed to know what he was up to. No tie, mind you, which was a bit sloppy. I bet he makes his DS wear one.’

  There was a long silence into which a kettle whistled somewhere on the ground floor above.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said the major. ‘Clearly, you can’t take anything away, and I’d ask you to use a pencil to take notes. Sounds like my corporal is making tea – I’ll get him to bring you some.’

  Dryden wondered if he was being nice to head off a bad press over the Jude’s Ferry bombing.

  ‘The paper’s out,’ he said, handing him the copy he’d bought from Skeg.

  Broderick took it, snapping the front page flat. ‘Right. I’d better sit down and read this.’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  The major closed the door crisply behind him and Dryden settled at the table with his back to it and the rest of the room. The hair on his neck bristled and he kept hearing the tiny shuffle of paper creaking in the box files, so he pulled out the table and took a seat on the far side. Under the crude, unshaded lights dust drifted like blossom in May.

  DI Shaw had indeed made his job simple. The documents had been sorted into four separate sets, the first being the questionnaires the villagers had filled in to assist the engineers in mapping Jude’s Ferry. Dryden flipped through until he found the New Ferry Inn, Woodruffe, Ellen – Licensee. Tick-boxes and sketches indicated the position of rooms, attic spaces, main services, building materials and, finally, cellars. Those beneath the inn were clearly shown, three rooms, with electric and water supplies. No cellars were marked for the outbuildings. The signature was Ellen Woodruffe’s, although the hand was shaky and irregular.