The Skeleton Man (18 page)

They turned south towards Neate’s Garage as Magda had done that last evening seventeen years earlier, but then cut up through the allotments to the church. A single uniformed PC stood guard at the oak doors of St Swithun’s, a radio set on the graveyard wall helping to break the suffocating silence.

The shattered stained-glass window had been boarded up and the hole the shell had ripped through the roof had been patched. But somewhere water fell,
plashing on stone, reviving the smell of winter’s damp and on the altar steps a crow lay dead, a wing sticking up like an arrow. In the draught from the door the feathers twitched, making Dryden’s stomach tighten.

They walked to the Peyton tomb, which lay now in the depressing shadow of the boarded window. Dryden took a torch and tried again to peer inside the shattered top of the burial chest – which brought his own face close to the mutilated cheek of the reclining crusader. Up close the genius of the medieval sculptor made the alabaster face almost human, and Dryden had to suppress the uncanny fear that it was about to move.

‘So what was in here?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. Memorial funeral chests like this are always empty – I’m an expert now, believe me. Just a bit of conspicuous consumption after death apparently, something for the neighbours to gape at. The body is usually buried beneath or near the tomb, or there’s a crypt underneath for multiple burials.’

Shaw went behind the monument, to the space between the stone chest and the nave wall. The neat pyramid of sand, soil and loose stones Dryden had found on the day the church had been hit by Broderick’s wayward bombardment seemed larger, and had been moved to one side.

‘We had a look at this right at the start, of course – after you’d found it. But it didn’t seem to mean much more than a bit of gruesome vandalism until our friends made their telephone calls.’

The two large stones which had been taken up from the floor were now laid neatly on wooden pallets. The inscription of P above an etched sunflower had been washed clean to reveal the precision of the original workmanship. The hole itself seemed deeper, cutting down through the foundations into grey, damp clay; the shadow at the bottom impenetrable.

‘They had to work for it then?’ said Dryden, kneeling at the stone edge.

‘We dug down a bit further – just to check it out, and we’ve tidied up the spoil. They broke one of the covering stones, in fact they made a right bodge-up of the whole job. We’ve sieved the soil and there’s little to report, some splinters of wood, a churchwarden clay pipe fragment. But, our grave robbers did leave this…’

It was an entrenching tool, bagged in cellophane. ‘Isn’t that army issue?’ said Dryden.

‘Originally yes. But you can get them anywhere. This one’s got a truly staggering six sets of fingerprints on it. My guess is they lacked a bit of muscle and needed to do the job in shifts. We’ve put all the prints on the national computer but there’re no matches, which may explain their carefree methods.’

Dryden imagined them, working by night, the light of a lantern splayed across the medieval vaulting above. They might lack the cool intelligence of the real extremists, he thought, but there was no doubt they had guts.

‘And all that confirms they’re amateurs on a first job?’ said Dryden.

‘Possibly.’

Shaw squatted by the open grave and picked up a handful of soil. ‘They must have taken some coffin wood too – if there was any left. We could be talking several centuries since the last burial – so I doubt there was much to get hold of but some thigh bones and a skull.’

But Shaw looked worried.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Dryden.

‘Probably nothing. The Peytons were rich – you’d expect a few bits of metalwork off a coffin – nails, screws, handles, that kind of thing.’

Dryden nodded. ‘Perhaps they took them.’ But he didn’t believe that either, so he checked his watch. ‘Look, I need to get back. So if they ring, they’ll ring tonight? My mobile?’

Shaw smiled, and Dryden realized that the question implied he’d agreed to the detective’s plan. ‘Yup. Then you ring me. Like I said, if we’re lucky they’ll go for a meeting rather than just dumping the bones somewhere. I don’t think they’ll be able to resist trying to talk to you in person. Publicity again, and they’re after thrills. That’s if they fall for it, of course – but they’ve got very little to lose if they believe you haven’t been to the police and the prospect of it working for them would be a triumph. They’d make national news and they know it. Clearly, if they say no, that they just want to dump them, don’t push them too
hard. There’s always a chance we’ll get them anyway – so back off if they insist.’

Outside the rain still fell softly, leaving Shaw’s black Land Rover covered in jewels of water. Dryden again felt uneasy in the ordered interior, the footwells litter-free, an air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror where Humph’s fluffy dice should be.

Shaw got in and, hitting the ignition, set Johnny Cash in motion as well, the sound system making Dryden’s inner ear buzz.

‘Sorry,’ said Shaw, killing the CD.

Dryden, unthinking, flipped down the glove compartment and found a collection of shells within – a bone-white nautilus and several studded sea urchins. And a packet of Silk Cut, unopened.

‘My DS,’ said Shaw. ‘She has to smoke outside.’

They bumped down the track off Church Hill towards the open mere, the rain cutting visibility to a few hundred yards, a line of distant poplars reduced to grey silhouettes. Dryden watched the outline of the village fade in the side mirror, the crescent of council houses where the Smiths had lived the last to dissolve into the mist.

As they drove the breeze made the fabric of the windsurfer on the roof flutter. ‘Yours?’ said Dryden, nodding up.

Shaw shook his head, ‘Wife’s business, our business. We live on the coast, run a water sports academy, rent out huts and stuff.’

‘Where?’

‘Old Hunstanton, in the dunes; there’s a house too.’ He retrieved a snapshot from the sun visor in front of him. A clapboard house set amongst marram grass and sand, the distant lighthouse at Hunstanton in the background. A woman on the beach with long legs as brown as the sand. Dryden guessed the chair and the rod were there, unseen, down by the distant water’s edge.

‘Wow,’ said Dryden, genuinely envious. Hunstanton’s principal claim to fame was that it was the only west-facing east coast resort – giving it a monopoly on holiday sunsets. ‘Great in summer,’ he added.

‘Great anytime,’ said Shaw, looking at it once before he put it back.

Dryden nodded. ‘So, Jack Shaw, any relation? DCI, right?’

Shaw gave him a long look, as cold as one of St Swithun’s showers. ‘Yes. My father, he died in 2000.’

‘Sorry. You on the force when he retired?’

Shaw nodded. ‘Yup. Youngest DS in the county, which everyone said was down to him, of course, not me. You can’t win with these people. And he didn’t retire, they forced him out.’

‘Fabricating evidence, wasn’t it? A child murder case – what was the boy’s name?’

‘Tessier. Jonathan Tessier. He was six.’

‘Guess there’s a lot of pressure in cases like that, to get a conviction.’

Shaw swung the Land Rover through the gates of
the range. ‘Dad always said he hadn’t done it, hadn’t planted the evidence. That was good enough for me. Good enough for everyone who knew him – it just wasn’t good enough for him. He was a good copper, an honest copper.’

Dryden nodded. ‘But it’s given you something to prove,’ he said, not unkindly.

Humph pulled up in the Capri, fluffy dice gyrating from the rear-view.

‘I’ve got lots of things to prove,’ said Shaw, flicking Johnny Cash back on.

Dryden stood in front of Curry’s window looking at the faces. He counted them: he could see twenty-six, but he knew there were more because of the reflections bouncing off the white goods at the rear of the shop. Every TV screen held the same image, the man’s face pale against the luxuriant black hair, framed by hospital pillows. Overlaid was Dryden’s own reflection, and beyond it the Capri, parked up for lunch with Humph partly obscured by a baker’s bap. Dryden walked in through the open doors to get close enough to hear the commentary from the local BBC news team.

‘… and police are hopeful that releasing the man’s picture will lead quickly to his identification. As we reported earlier this week he was fished from the River Ouse near Ely on Tuesday after what looks like an accident involving a pleasure boat on the river. His right hand was badly injured after becoming entangled in machinery, possibly a propeller. Police say he is suffering from amnesia and is unable to recall his name or address. Anyone with information which may lead to his early identification should ring Ely police on 01353 555321. And now, the local weather…’

High Street was damp, steam rising from puddled
pavements as the sun broke through. Dryden cut down Chequer Lane, around the back of the Indian takeaway, and out into Market Street.
The Crow
’s reception was crowded with people placing late adverts in the paper. Jean, the paper’s long-serving front office dogsbody, caught his eye as he slipped through and up the bare wood stairs to the newsroom. Splash, the office cat, ran a figure of eight round his legs as he climbed.

Other than a trapped wasp lying dead on Dryden’s keyboard, the room was empty. He felt a pang of loss for the
News
, his Fleet Street home for more than a decade. Its newsroom had held 200, and was wired by adrenaline.
The Crow
’s newsroom rarely held double figures and had been on Valium since the death of Queen Victoria. Dryden checked his watch: 2.35pm. He’d put money on Charlie Bracken being in The Fenman with the rest of the production team, and checking the diary he saw that Garry Pymoor was still in court, marked down for the committal hearing for a fraud trial involving a local accountant. Embracing the rare silence Dryden got a coffee from the machine by the news desk and sat at his PC, trying to think. The attempt failed and instead he booted up the screen and began tapping his thoughts out as copy, a favourite ploy which seemed to work.

Dryden drank some more coffee and read what he’d got. Then he deleted the lot and started again.

Dryden stopped typing and, standing, stretched. The plastic click in his back brought relief and he
walked over to the shelf behind the subs’ bench and retrieved a copy of
Crockford’s Clerical Directory
. He sat on the bay window seat and flicked through until he found the ‘L’s.

Frederick Rhodes Lake. Rev. St Bartholomew’s, Fleetside, King’s Lynn.

‘Right. So that’s where you’ve gone. Very downmarket.’ He made a note of the telephone number and returned the book.

He read what he’d written on screen and remembered someone else who could help him write about the Skeleton Man: Elizabeth Drew. She was a valuable witness to the death of Jude’s Ferry because she wasn’t an insider, but stood outside the close network of family and friendship which seemed to wrap the village in a cocoon. Her workmates had said to try the cash ’n’ carry on the edge of town – an MFI-style double box the size of an airport terminal.

Dryden checked his watch: he had time to try and find Elizabeth Drew, a ticking miniature eternity of time before he could expect a call from the animal rights extremists. On his desk his mobile sat waiting for the incoming call. Typically, as the moment drew nearer his fears grew more acute. They’d meet after dark, some godforsaken stretch of fen, delivering grey bones. Picturing cruel teeth, seen through the slash of a balaclava, his guts tightened. He’d keep Humph near by, he promised himself that, Humph and his four-wheeled security blanket.

He grabbed the mobile, stuffed it deep in a pocket and left the office.

By the time he got downstairs the phone had rung, so he ducked into one of the small interview cubicles the sales staff used for taking adverts and answered the mobile.

It was Ruth Lisle, Magda’s daughter. ‘Mr Dryden?’

He wondered if she was calling from the mobile library but somewhere in the background a clock chimed and whirred in its casement and so Dryden imagined a very English Victorian hallway, and the tall, cool figure of Magda Hollingsworth’s daughter standing in the splash of coloured light from the fanlight over the door.

‘I promised, and you were kind. I’ve found something in the diaries. I made some photocopies and dropped them in at the police station here at Ely and they said they’d pass them on to the right people, although they didn’t see them as relevant. In fact they were a bit dismissive actually, which made me quite angry. So, I certainly don’t see why I shouldn’t share this with you. Do you have a moment?’

‘Please,’ said Dryden.

‘Well, on top of my mother’s diary, which she filled out each day, Mass-Observation asked its correspondents to write on specific subjects. During the winter of 1989 they requested contributions on the subject of women and depression. Mother talked privately to many of her friends about this and the entry is copious, a very important document in
itself, I would say. There was one girl in particular, a teenager, and she was very depressed during a pregnancy – an unwanted pregnancy. She’d turned to an aunt for help, and Mum had found out about it that way – indirectly, I suppose. The aunt was ill herself and Mum visited, it was the sort of thing she was good at. This girl said, apparently, that she’d thought about killing the child when it was born. Dreadful, isn’t it? Yes,’ she added, answering herself. ‘Anyway, later in the diaries she says that the child did die, a few days after a premature birth, and she wonders if the girl had carried out her threat. At first she talks about going to the police but puts that aside, and concludes – characteristically – that she should think the best of her, especially as there was a post mortem which found the death was due to natural causes.