The Skeleton Man Read online

  The principal set of documents was a census of Jude’s Ferry taken after the MoD gave the villagers notice to quit three months before the evacuation. The announcement was made on Friday 20 April – each household receiving a letter that day. A copy was on the file. Dryden took a shorthand note of the key line:

  While there is a pressing military need for the village to be evacuated to allow unhindered use of the surrounding firing range there is every expectation that the international situation will allow a return of the civilian population in due course.

  Dryden’s tea arrived, a half pint in a tin mug, ferried down by a sullen corporal.

  Alone again he considered the details of the first census. The number of inhabitants was listed as 112, including forty-six women and eight children. These were distributed in fifty-one households – including the four single-occupancy almshouses on The Dring. There were sixteen commercial properties, including the then defunct beet factory, which still had a watchman/caretaker on site. It took Dryden only a few minutes to work out that there were just twenty-one men aged between twenty and thirty-five in the village at that point – early May 1990. Any one of them could have ended up on the end of a rope in the cellar.

  The second census narrowed the search. It had been taken six days before the final evacuation. It listed all those people from the first document, but most had left by that point and were marked as NON RESIDENT. The total population was given as just forty-three – of which only seven were men in that age bracket. Dryden took the names down:

  Paul Cobley, Mere Taxis, Bridge Street

  Jason Imber, Orchard House, Church Street

  James Neate, Neate’s Garage, Church Street

  Mark Smith, 14 The Crescent

  Matthew Smith, 14 The Crescent

  Peter Tholy, 3 The Dring.

  Ken Woodruffe, New Ferry Inn

  Seven names, a few quick phone calls and, with luck, he could have an ID for the victim. But it was hardly ever that easy, and Dryden suspected that this time would be no exception.

  The police had said the estimation of age could be stretched, either way, due to the state of the remains. He checked the file again and found one other to add to the list.

  George Tudor, 8 St Swithun’s Cottages, Church Street

  His age was listed as thirty-six.

  So, a list of eight potential victims, as long as they were all of average height – and he couldn’t tell that until he tracked them down. He jotted down the names and addresses. Four of the names he recognized immediately. On the tape they’d listened to on the riverbank they’d heard Jan Cobley talking about the taxi business she ran with her husband. So Paul was presumably the reluctant son who didn’t fancy taking the business on to a new village. And George Tudor was on the tape too – talking about his prepar ations to emigrate to Western Australia with the help of a testimonial from the vicar, Fred Lake. And there were the Smiths; The Crescent was a small council estate on the edge of the village to the north. The brothers’ ages were both given as twenty-three. There’d been a Jennifer Smith on the tape and she’d mentioned that her brothers were thinking of setting up a new building business after the evacuation, so they should be easy to trace. And there was Ken Woodruffe, of the New Ferry Inn. If he was the young man Dryden had seen on the doorstep of the pub that last morning then there seemed every chance he was not the victim, and if he’d stayed in the pub trade he should be easy to find as well.

  Was the Skeleton Man one of those on his list? It was only an assumption, but there seemed little point in considering the other option – that the victim was an outsider. If he was then they might never know his name. And it was a well-founded assumption, for if the Skeleton Man was a victim of murder then surely his death would have been best timed to coincide with the evacuation of the village – the perfect moment in which to remove someone from the daily pattern of village life, when family and friends were on the brink of a diaspora – thrown out to new jobs, new homes and new futures. No doubt DI Shaw would be thorough, but Dryden needed to concentrate on the eight. It was the only way he could get results.

  And if it was suicide? Well, then it made sense again to look amongst the likely candidates in the final census. The moment of leaving would have been an emotional one. Perhaps the pain of going had pushed the Skeleton Man towards his own death. The newspapers found at the scene made it likely that he had met his death in the final days of the village. There was only one other scenario – that the death in the cellar had come during the long years the village had lain deserted, an option Dryden suspected the pathologist would soon largely discount.

  So he needed to track down the eight quickly. He had good leads on four, but the others were unknown to him. So he turned to the third set of documents DI Shaw had left on the table with the two census books. This was a large ledger listing claims for expenses from residents, and compensation for loss of earnings. Dryden leafed through them, each one given a separate page.

  It took just ten minutes to reach the form for Neate’s Garage – the listed address of James Neate, one of his eight potential victims. Dryden remembered the building, set back from the road in from the south, a foursquare Victorian villa with a single pump on the roadside and a wooden lean-to workshop at the side. Walter R. Neate, proprietor of the business and listed as a widower, had claimed £2,600 in lost earnings and removal costs of £800, plus personal costs of £200 for himself, son and daughter. The new business address was listed as the Stopover Garage, Duckett’s Cross. The claims were backed up with an envelope of bills, estim ates and a Xeroxed copy of the previous year’s accounts. Dryden noted that both claims had been met in full and guessed that in the glare of publicity surrounding the evacuation the MoD had erred on the side of generosity in their dealings with the residents of Jude’s Ferry.

  He worked through the entries diligently until he reached the New Ferry Inn. Ellen Mabel Woodruffe was listed as licensee and she had claimed £1,200 in lost earnings and removal expenses for stock and household goods of £600, and personal costs for both herself and her son Ken, who was described as the manager. There was no mention of a wife, children, or other dependants. Again there was an envelope of documents to back up the claims, including a letter from the Royal Esplanade nursing home, Lowestoft, accepting Ellen Woodruffe and giving the expected date of arrival as 15 July 1990 – the date of the evacuation of Jude’s Ferry. Fittings from the pub – including tables, chairs and kitchen equipment – were also shipped by the army. The address given for removal was the Five Miles from Anywhere, a pub on the river near Ely.

  He tracked down claims for the other names on the list. George Tudor and Peter Tholy both entered similar amounts for loss of earnings as general farm labourers. Neither gave a forwarding address or made any attempt to get compensation – except a joint request for £360 for storage of household goods and furniture. Lastly, Dryden found Jason Imber, listed as the sole occupant of Orchard House. His profession was not listed. Removal costs to an address on the edge of Ely were given as £1,300, and there was no claim for compensation. Imber was not a common name, so perhaps he might be found quickly too.

  There was a special entry for the old sugar beet factory which had closed in 1988. On site there was still a watchman – Trevor Anthony Armstrong – with the address given as The Lodge. He, his wife June and their son Martyn were shown as residents in those last few weeks, but their forwarding address was marked ‘unknown’. For the first time Dryden understood that, for many residents, holding out to the final day at Jude’s Ferry had not been a choice: people like Trevor Armstrong didn’t have anywhere else to go. Removal costs were a paltry £58, the address for shipping the TA barracks in Ely – no doubt a temporary measure to keep families like the Armstrongs off the streets.

  Back with the list a name caught Dryden’s eye. On the edge of the village a nursery had been included, the business description being retail cut flowers. Lost earnings were a hefty £14,000 – due to lost sales from flowers wh
ich would be ready for market in the late summer. Personal removal costs were given as £360. The company was called Blooms and business removal costs were £3,500, the new address given as Ten Acre House, near Diss in Norfolk. The proprietor, and the only occupant of the house – The Pines – was given as Colonel (Retired) Edmund John Broderick. Dryden heard a footstep above on the drill-hall floor and thought of the picture on the major’s desk; the professional soldier standing proudly for the camera in the last year of the war. Dryden respected privacy, understood its humane values, but he wondered if there could be another reason the young Major Broderick appeared to have kept his links with Jude’s Ferry to himself.

  12

  Humph was waiting in the car park, the Capri broadcasting the final notes of a Faroese folk song. The cabbie had a brochure on his lap outlining the attractions of Tórshavn, the capital. After the song came a recitation of endangered fish which inhabit the waters around the islands, to which Humph listened while consuming double cod and chips. A warm wrapped packet lay on the passenger seat, and Dryden unfurled the paper to eat the steak and kidney pie within. They sat watching the sun slowly reduce the puddles of rainwater still lying on the tarmac. Dryden considered the cathedral’s Octagon Tower, and wondered what chance there was he could whittle his list of eight down to one by the time he next went to press.

  ‘Slim,’ he said, and Humph ignored him, thinking it might be an instruction.

  The cathedral bells chimed the hour.

  ‘We should pick Laura up,’ said Dryden, balling up the greasy paper.

  Humph swung the Capri in a languid arc and set off towards the town centre. Shops were dropping shutters and taking up awnings, a tradition of early closing having survived the influx of household names along the high street. A sunlit siesta was descending, and the rooks clamoured to roost.

  A mile and a half north on the old main road to the coast stood the Princess of Wales Hospital, its buildings crowded around a Victorian water tower. The hospital, originally run by the RAF, had specialized in the treatment of burns victims during the Second World War, serving the pilots who flew bombing raids from the airstrips of the Isle of Ely. Now it was a general hospital, with one specialist unit: the Oliver Zangwill Centre for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. Laura Dryden was a regular outpatient, and received private additional sessions paid for by the Mid-Anglian Mutual Insurance Company, which had agreed a schedule of care for Dryden’s wife after her accident.

  The unit was in one of the old convalescence wings at the back of the hospital, an elegant two-storey 1930s art deco building with views over neat lawns still tended by the RAF Association. Dryden always imagined the wartime pilots within, swaddled in bandages, listening as their comrades flew overhead towards Germany.

  He could see Laura at one of the metal-framed picture windows now, on the second floor, resting after her regular session of physiotherapy. The difference in her posture in the last few months was startling. In the years after the accident she had been held in her wheelchair by supports, her limbs at ugly angles. Now she sat elegantly, her neck held straight, one ankle hitched over the other, her tanned legs stretched out in the sun, her feet bare on the window ledge.

  Once inside the unit Dryden was struck again by the quality of the light. The windows at ground level fell full-length to the floor. This far from town the sun’s rays were unimpeded and flooded in, glancing off the polished linoleum and the white walls. Dryden considered again the irony that the architects had designed the building as a receptacle for light, while so many of the patients in those early years had sat, their heads swathed, denied the joys of sight.

  He climbed the stairs and passed a group of young men and women in white coats accompanying a surgeon, bow tie just visible beneath a grey jumper. On the top floor several patients sat in wicker chairs, an echo of the building’s original thirties decor. He walked towards Laura from behind but she recognized his steps, accepting his head as he stooped to kiss her neck. Her right hand tapped at the laptop.

  The screen lit, revealing her message. LOOK. ROOM 118.

  ‘A story,’ she said, the voice nasal and still sluggish.

  He squeezed her shoulders and walked the length of the observation gallery to a door at the end. Laura had been married to Dryden throughout his ten years on Fleet Street, a decade in which she had developed as acute a news sense as her husband’s. Many able-bodied nurses and doctors made a serious mistake in her company, which was to presume that the lingering symptoms of coma extended to a poor grasp of her immediate environment. In fact she was hyper-alert, and attuned to the subtle euphemisms of gossip and scandal. Since she had become a regular at the unit she had tipped Dryden off on several good tales – most of which had found their way into the nationals. All had reflected positively on the unit, and he’d actively stifled a couple of less wholesome exclusives, a luxury which had not been available to him during his years on the News.

  Laura had briefly been admitted to the Zangwill for appraisal when she’d transferred to the NHS from private care a year before. She’d been in Room 106. So Dryden found his way to the corridor quickly and at the door of Room 118 glanced in through the porthole provided.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, and jumped as a hand touched his shoulder. ‘Jesus. Don’t do that, Desmond.’

  Desmond Samjee was the senior unit physiotherapist. He was close to Dryden’s height, with the unhurried movements which inspire confidence, and a voice entirely free of the inflexions of his Kenyan-Asian heritage. Dryden’s impassive face creased slightly in a smile: ‘Caught me,’ he said. ‘What ya gonna do?’

  ‘Firing squad,’ said Desmond, leaning in to take a look himself.

  Sitting with her back to the porthole window was a female PC, while in the bed was the man the police divers had pulled from the reeds by the river that morning. His arm lay on the counterpane, the hand bandaged. A drip fed into his arm and his head was as immobile as his pillow, and just as pale. His hair flopped over his eyes. For the first time Dryden noticed a ring, a single gold band on the wedding finger of the uninjured hand.

  ‘Why’s he here?’ asked Dryden.

  Desmond took his arm. ‘All I know is he was brought over straight from A&E once they’d dealt with his hand and given him a blood transfusion. He’d got hypothermia but he’s recovered well, he’s pretty fit, and he’s asked for police protection. We’re not involved so I don’t know the real details, which I wouldn’t give you anyway.’

  As they watched the man woke and started, rising into a sitting position. His head jerked around the room, checking the view through the two windows, and finally he grasped the hand of the PC, who had stepped forward. Comforted, he subsided back on to the pillows, his eyes pressed closed as if trying to shut out the world.

  Desmond looked into Dryden’s eyes. ‘Desperately sad. Can’t remember anything, they say. Just imagine that, Philip, waking up with no past.’

  Dryden thought about it again and wondered if it would be so bad.

  His friend knew him well enough to guess his thoughts. ‘But imagine wanting that past. And it’s there, just out of reach. Now that’s a nightmare.’

  They retraced Dryden’s steps back to the observation gallery. Laura was alone in her wicker seat. Desmond walked round to face her. ‘Good work today, Laura, you know that, don’t you? That neck’s supporting your head beautifully now. Let’s keep up the hard work.’

  Dryden pulled up a stool and sat, letting the sunlight fall on the side of his face. ‘So he’s said nothing, the guy from the river? He can’t recall a single thing?’ asked Dryden. They looked out over the sunlit fen to the west, the horizon pin-sharp at twenty miles.

  ‘Didn’t say that.’ Desmond sighed, acutely aware of Dryden’s profession, and dropped his voice. ‘I had tea with the A&E nurses coming off shift. It’s a perk of their job, hot gossip, but it doesn’t mean they get it right, OK – just remember that. Anyway, they had him under observation for the first few hours and he said quite
a lot, even if it didn’t make much sense. But there were fragments. And a name – Jude’s Ferry. He thinks that’s where he might have come from.’

  Dryden let the words sweep over him. A coincidence? Dryden distrusted the word, seeing by instinct a world in which events were interwoven, like the threads of the hangman’s rope. The discovery of the skeleton in the cellar at Jude’s Ferry had clearly set in motion a series of events. Violent events. Dryden shuddered as he failed to suppress a single Gothic image. A man, head and arms emerging first, struggling free through the shattered stone lid of a funeral chest.

  13

  Humph drove away from the sun. Dryden watched it touch the fen horizon in the rear-view mirror, bleeding into the earth. They crossed the river at Ely, a convoy of holiday boats beneath breasting waves raised by the evening breeze. On Bridge Fen a herd of cattle stood as still as a child’s toys on a tabletop, casting shadows half a field long. They drove in silence, Dryden still trying to fit the sad figure in Room 118 into the emerging jigsaw that was Jude’s Ferry. His appearance, forty-eight hours after the gruesome discovery of the skeleton beneath the storeroom beside the New Ferry Inn, was profoundly unsettling.

  But for now Dryden had to leave him to struggle with the past alone in his hospital room. He must return to his list of potential victims and the task of putting a name to the Skeleton Man. The Five Miles From Anywhere stood between the Ouse and the Cam on a lonely peninsula between the two rivers, at the point where they ran forward on a broad sinuous path towards Ely, the cathedral standing clear above its own reflection. Picnic tables crowded the grass down to the riverbank, and in the pub’s small marina white boats jostled for a mooring. Dryden preferred the spot in the winter, when the river could freeze if they closed the sluices to the sea at Denver, leaving the pub trapped in ice on three sides. But today the scene was given grandeur by the sky. North towards the sea clouds were building a mythical landscape of mountains tinged with evening colours.