The Skeleton Man (11 page)

‘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.

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:

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.

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 which 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.

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.