The Skeleton Man (13 page)
Authors: Jim Kelly
‘Sorry,’ said Dryden, knowing he was about to push his luck, delving into someone else’s past. ‘I thought you were married – there was a woman with you on that last morning, outside the inn, and we found kids’ stuff in the cellar.’
‘You were there? What – back in 1990?’
Dryden nodded. ‘Like I said, it was one of my first decent assignments so I’m not likely to forget.’
Woodruffe watched a pleasure boat slip past, the portholes lit. ‘Jill Palmer – we weren’t married. A lot of things didn’t survive the move, you know – that was one of them. She went north – Lincoln, I think. A new life. Haven’t seen her since we left.’
One of the waitresses came out with a ham sandwich and salad and put it in front of Woodruffe. He watched her leave and then tossed the lettuce into the reeds, biting without enthusiasm into the white processed bread.
‘I didn’t ask for this. They think I need mothering,’ he said. Then, almost without a beat, he went on, ‘So you were there when they found him. Anything else… ? The police don’t seem to know what it was all about… this bloke’s skeleton just hanging there all those years. I mean, that’s fucking weird.’
The children sniggered at the language. Woodruffe dropped his head, sipping from the mug. The scent of the whisky hung about them now in the evening air and Humph sniffed loudly.
‘I think it’s all in the paper,’ said Dryden, nodding at the rolled-up copy. ‘All that they know.’
Woodruffe unfurled the
Express
but didn’t even try to read it, and Dryden guessed he’d been through it several times.
‘So the police have been round?’ Dryden asked.
‘Could say that. Two hours this morning. I had to go in this afternoon, all the way to soddin’ Lynn. I’ve got a business to run.’
‘You can see why they’re worried,’ said Dryden carefully. ‘He was hanging in your cellar. A cellar you hadn’t registered with the army. I’ve seen the questionnaire – nothing’s listed. It’s your mother’s signature, right? But I guess they think you would have checked the place out. What are they supposed to think?’
Woodruffe nodded. ‘I don’t want this in the paper,’ he said.
Dryden held his hands up as if that constituted a promise, wondering again why Woodruffe had agreed to talk, what was in it for him.
‘We never used that cellar, it floods in winter. I told ’em. When the form came round there was loads to do – it just slipped by. I’ve told ’em I’m sorry. And then they didn’t find it after anyway, did they? When they did a survey. It’s not all my fault.’
Dryden let the answer peter out. ‘So, who do you think he is, our Skeleton Man?’
Woodruffe pushed the gum packet away, turning the now-empty sandwich plate with his other hand.
‘God knows,’ he said, and Dryden found he wanted to believe him. But the landlord’s hand shook slightly as he sketched a line on the rough wooden tabletop.
‘But it was your cellar. There was stuff down there. You must have used it.’
‘Must I?’ Dryden saw a flash of anger in the eyes and watched as the muscles on Woodruffe’s arm bunched, adrenaline pumping round his blood system.
He pushed himself back from the table, creating more distance again between them.
He ripped open a piece of chewing gum and his jaw began to work at it manically. ‘Like I said, it flooded most winters. We used the bottle store above, but the cellar was useless. Everyone knew it was there – back in the eighties they tried running a folk club in it in the summer. Some kids formed a group and hired it for practice. It was no secret. There was no key, and you didn’t need to be the Pink Panther to get into the bottle store upstairs. Mum had put some things down there from when I was a kid because she didn’t want to chuck them, but that was it. That and some old bottles.’
‘Why d’you think the army never found it then?’
Woodruffe stretched his arms above his head, the joints clicking.
‘We stored stuff over the trapdoor, timber, logs for the inn. I guess they didn’t look very hard,’ he said, avoiding Dryden’s eyes.
‘When d’you go down last?’
He shrugged again, running a hand through the thinning hair. ‘Last day, perhaps second to last, to make sure there was nothing worth taking away with us.
There were some glasses I think – but we left most of them because they were old-fashioned straights. Worth a fortune now,’ he laughed. ‘And Mum wanted some kids’ books, a few wooden toys.’ Dryden looked him in the eyes, which were small but calculating. So he’d remembered to check the cellar out. He could see why the police wanted another word.
‘That last night in the pub. It must have been extraordinary, knowing that you might not come back. Any of you. What was it like – party or wake?’
‘Bit of both,’ said Woodruffe, tipping the mug back. ‘There was certainly a party on by the time I closed the place, no point in leaving half-filled barrels, was there? We’d saved one for the next morning but they drank the rest and I wasn’t charging. MoD had put enough cash behind the bar to keep them happy for a week. A few lads had too much, and we had the old boys from the almshouses in – kinda guests of honour, if you like, and they can put it away. But then they didn’t have far to stagger home.’
‘No trouble? No scores settled?’
‘I’ve told the police everything, OK?’ Dryden noticed he hadn’t answered the question.
‘Punch-up?’
‘Nothing that wouldn’t have been out of place in most pubs on a Saturday night. A family dispute, there’s nothing like brothers for falling out.’
Dryden was mildly drunk, the effects of the third pint multiplying his natural intuition. With fifty people left in the village there can’t have been that many
siblings in the bar that night. ‘Twin brothers?’ he asked, remembering the list he’d compiled from the TA records.
Woodruffe watched a couple kiss at a table in the shadows. ‘Like I said, the police are on to it.’
Dryden decided not to push; he could track down the Smith brothers soon enough, although he suspected DI Shaw would have got there first.
On the river a boat went past, its engine spluttering, the portholes lit.
‘That last morning there was some trouble, when one of the old women was dragged out of her home. But you helped calm everybody down, didn’t you? People seemed to respect you.’
Woodruffe held his face in a mask.
‘I’ve always wondered why,’ said Dryden, allowing the ambiguity to remain unclarified.
‘What was the bloody point?’ he said. ‘We’d sold up, taken their money, and now they wanted us out. If there’s one thing running a boozer teaches you it’s to give up on anything if you think you’re coming second.’
Dryden opened his notebook at the page where he’d listed his eight potential victims, turning it so that Woodruffe could read. ‘We know the victim was average height – five-ten, eleven – something like that. Any of these a lot bigger, or a lot smaller?’
Woodruffe read the list too quickly. ‘Nah. Paul Cobley wasn’t a big lad – but, it’s difficult to tell. And Jimmy Neate looked six foot.’
Dryden closed the notebook. ‘Ellen Woodruffe, your mother. Did I speak to her that last day? Is that possible?’
He stood. ‘Doubt it. Mum didn’t want to go and she didn’t make a secret of it, but she was very ill that summer, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew the army would do what it wanted to do. She’d had a coupla strokes the year before, paralysed her left side, so she knew she was on borrowed time. She wanted to die in Jude’s Ferry; in fact that’s all she wanted. But she didn’t die, that took longer, a lot longer than she wanted. Anyway, she left quietly enough. She’d given up the fight.’
‘I’m sorry – what happened to her?’
‘I got her into a nursing home on the coast. Lowestoft. Cost a fortune, of course, but we’d banked the money when we sold the pub to the army back in the nineties. The price was good, very good. We know why now, of course – so they could chuck us out for good.’
The landlord pulled out a wallet and flicked it open. It was her again, a hand held to ward off the sun, the arcaded front of a Victorian seaside villa behind. In discreet letters above the bay window a sign read ‘Royal Esplanade’.
‘She died in ’97, that winter. But she did come home in a way. I scattered her ashes at St Swithun’s – on the feast day. I didn’t ask. I just did it. So she came home in the end.’
They’ve told me to write a letter, every day, setting down what I have remembered.
But a letter to whom? I know I loved someone once, because I can feel the ring now, cool, solid, and gold, but I’ve forgotten her with almost everything else.
So this is for nobody. A message on a computer screen, tapped out with the fingers of my one good hand, for no one to read.
And this is what I have remembered.
At first there was a place, Jude’s Ferry, lying beneath the two hills, the spotless Georgian windows of a house looking out towards the single brick chimney of an old factory. On one hill the church, on the other a water tower with a wooden painted dovecote.
I was a child then, thrilled by the sight of the two hills glimpsed through the windscreen of a car, bumping along a road without a single turn.
And then, like a gift, there was another name.
Kathryn.
I knew something about Kathryn. I knew she didn’t give me the ring that I wear.
Where do I see her? I see her first sitting with the others at the back of a classroom. No proper wooden desks, just those plastic seats with the flip-over rest. She’s what? Sixteen
perhaps, maybe not. There are no uniforms, no clues. Outside a vast concrete playground disfigured by puddles. I see her hair, lustrous black, under the neon light, and the small ripe mouth partly hidden by the hand.
And although I can’t see it I know her body beneath; the long limbs curled effortlessly in mine, the thin white neck arched with pleasure.
What am I to her? I’m outside looking in, a porthole meshed with wire, and then the door opens and I find the desk at the front, sitting on the edge, a lesson begun, while I watch her with peripheral vision.
So we know now what I did. And was this what was wrong?
Now the nurse comes with the painkillers. I can see her through the porthole window, like the one in the classroom door, checking, just as the others have done, waiting for me to finish. To rest.
But there is too much fear for sleep. And I still have work. I must set down what I know now to be true, even as I write it: that Kathryn is dead and guilt, like the dusk, fills my room.
14
He took the call on the deck of
PK 129
in the early morning rain, his voicemail ringing him back with a message left overnight. The river, cratered with big fat storm drops, gave off the exhilarating aroma of dawn.
A voice echoing in an enclosed space, cars swishing past, a whisper close up. ‘Listen.’ The menace in the word, the cruelty, made his heart freeze for a beat. ‘Jude’s Ferry, you were there. We were there too. We opened the tomb, at St Swithun’s. We’ve taken her bones. If Peyton doesn’t shut down Sealodes Farm – stop the breeding – he’ll never get them back…’
There was the rustling of paper and, approaching, the sound of a light aircraft.
‘Our aim is to inflict economic damage on those who profit from the misery and exploitation of innocent animals…’ he read on, another voice cajoling in the background. A prepared statement, larded with the stilted language of the true fanatic. Then he said it again: if they didn’t shut down Sealodes Farm, announce it in the press, then they’d ditch the bones down a sewer. There was a brief silence in which Dryden could hear the light aircraft returning.
‘We’ve told them. Now we’re telling you. We want it in the paper that they’re closing down the business. Otherwise this is just the start. We gave them a little visit a couple of weeks ago. This time no police, until it’s in the paper. Tell ’em that.’
Dryden timed it – less than thirty seconds. A public call box. He got a notebook and took the call down verbatim in case he lost it from the mobile’s memory. Then he listened to it five times, noting the double return of the aircraft, and the jittery voice, the strain of disguise audible. He wondered what they’d done on their visit to Sealodes Farm, and why they felt they needed to fool him about the voice. Did he know him – or did they think they’d trace a recording? At least he now knew why he should have recognized the name on the tomb. Henry Peyton was a well-known local farmer and owner of a highly controversial business: breeding animals for laboratory experiments.
Humph appeared out of the rain at 8.00am with two fried-egg sandwiches wrapped in foil. Dryden took out the coffees and they watched the dog run through the wet grass. Laura had got herself in her shower seat and dressed by the time they went down for her, lifting her just as far as she couldn’t go herself, into the waiting wheelchair on the deck. The ambulance would call at 10.00am to take her for the regular sessions: physiotherapy, hydrotherapy and speech therapy. Dryden arranged the tarpaulin cover so that she was dry and made sure the laptop and the mobile were within reach.
‘What yer gonna do?’ he said, curling a loop of hair off the nape of her neck.
‘Lines to learn – twenty-three words,’ she said, the tongue still lazy as if she was recovering from a dentist’s needle. Dryden kissed her and refilled the coffee cup at her elbow. Then, making an effort, he knelt by the chair. ‘You can do a reading for me tonight – OK? I’ll play the rest of the cast, you do your stuff.’
He kissed her again and got into the Capri, Humph pulling away immediately, hooting the horn twice before they swung out of sight.
‘Take the Manea road, over the Levels at Welney,’ said Dryden, then he left a message on the news desk answerphone asking Charlie to send Garry to the magistrates’ court in his place. He had a story, a good one, and he’d be back by lunch with it in the bag. It was the kind of message he loved to leave.
He’d never been to Sealodes Farm. It wasn’t the kind of place that welcomed publicity. It was poor land, below the dyke which kept the tidal water out of the richer peat fen. Over the years, in the dry summers, the water had welled up in the fields, leaving behind a deadly rime of salt. Sealodes was good only for turnips and beet, not the cash crops which underpinned the fortunes of the big corporate-owned farms of the Black Fen. So twenty-five years ago Sealodes had turned to a less conventional crop: breeding guinea pigs and rats for big companies and universities.