The Skeleton Man (21 page)
Authors: Jim Kelly
Dryden could see why the police were interested in the whereabouts of Paul Cobley, and he didn’t believe they’d taken mother’s intuition as evidence he was still alive.
She looked at him then, unable to sustain the lack of emotion in her face, and Dryden could see what the years between had done to her. ‘We didn’t bring him up like that,’ she said, but it sounded like a formula she’d used before.
‘You must wonder, you know – how he is, where he is? It’s seventeen years – more.’
‘Thanks. I can count.’ She nodded, looking at the winking lights on her console. ‘If you don’t want a cab…’
‘Sorry.’ But he held his ground, remembering his motto – there’s always time for one more question.
‘There was a death in the village in those last months, a baby. I don’t expect you remember?’
She dealt with the winking lights, confirming children dropped off at home, directing cabs to pick up those coming off the afternoon shift, and those coming in.
‘Of course I remember. Do you think there’s anything else to talk about in a place like Jude’s Ferry? But then it was our business in a way, our community. And it’s not your business, is it, Mr Dryden?’
The room was silent then and Dryden thought that there was nothing that caught a sense of not going anywhere more precisely than a taxi office. Everything moved, but nothing changed.
‘Mrs Cobley,’ Dryden looked down, reluctant to turn the knife, guessing that Sam Cobley had never been reconciled to his son’s sexuality. ‘I don’t believe the police took your word for the fact Paul’s still alive. Perhaps your husband knows where he is… I could wait?’ He turned his back and looked out over the sunlit fen.
She took her time making a cup of tea without offering him one. Dryden took a seat opposite the counter and watched her setting down her cup and
then opening the office’s one battered filing cabinet. She retrieved a cheap plastic wallet and put the picture within, a coloured snapshot, on the counter. Dryden stood and touched it, setting it straight; a man leaning on a gate with a pair of cottages in the background – the kind of isolated semis they built all over the fens in the fifties for tenant workers. It was Paul Cobley, mid-thirties perhaps, a red setter at his heels, the hair still extravagant.
‘Sam doesn’t know. He stayed local for me, you see, so I can pop over when Sam’s fishing or on a long trip. That’s helped me forgive him.’ Her eyes moved to the window where the sugar beet factory was belching white smoke into the evening sky. ‘But Sam doesn’t know and I’d ask you to keep it that way,’ she said, lighting up another Silk Cut.
‘Sure,’ said Dryden, studying the picture. ‘I only want a word.’
‘I’ll ask, but there’s no promises. Leave your number. I’d like you to go now, I don’t want this opened up again. So go. Please.’
Dryden nodded, studying the picture one last time. The house had been modernized with PVC windows and a conservatory latched on the side, but its twin next door was dilapidated and a For Sale sign had been nailed across the front door. Dryden noted the name of the estate agent: Foster & Co., Land Agents.
‘Did he have much to tell the police?’ asked Dryden, pushing the snapshot over the counter.
‘He was there that last night – in the New Ferry Inn.’
The radio crackled and Sam said he was on his way home.
Dryden took his last chance. ‘This was a lynching – they turned on someone, didn’t they, Mrs Cobley. Why would they do that?’
She looked at him then, the small dark eyes set deeply in the flesh. ‘Paul wouldn’t do that. He knows what it’s like to be a victim.’
Dryden noted the present tense. ‘The landlord, Ken Woodruffe, says there was a brawl, about money apparently. The Smith twins?’
She laughed. ‘Mark was a nasty bit of work.’
‘And Matthew?’
She shrugged, her eyes watching the road outside for signs of her husband’s return. ‘Gentler, smarter. They might have been identical to look at but in here…’ She tapped a finger to her temple. ‘Chalk and cheese.’
‘And your son saw them fight?’
She shook her head. ‘No, that was later. He got home about eleven, I was still up in case we got any calls.’
‘Right. So Paul got home and then what?’
‘We broke open a bottle of whisky. His dad was already in bed. Took it out in the garden and toasted the old place. By midnight we were all in bed. Dead to the world.’
Dryden said goodbye, knowing that wasn’t the only lie she’d told.
By the time they reached Ten Mile Bank the moon was up, reflected in the broad sweep of the river as it turned north towards the sea. A swan flew upstream, black against the silver of the water. Humph parked up beneath the high bank next to the church, killing the lights. A cypress tree obscured the church clock but Dryden’s watch read 9.30pm. A flood bank ran across the fen from beside the graveyard carrying the village’s only street, two lines of houses clinging to the high ground. Three street lights out of a dozen were working, and somewhere a dog barked as the first stars appeared low to the east.
Dryden got out quickly before fear paralysed his legs as well as his brain. He cursed Shaw and the deal he’d struck, but knew now there was no way of going back which didn’t brand him a coward. Standing by the Capri in the gloom he knew he was being watched, but by whom? The DI and his team should be in place, a surveillance boat on the river, and the helicopter standing by upstream. But who else was lost in the night? Would they meet him on the bridge or did they suspect a trap and have other plans?
In the dyke below, the mist was beginning to form,
a weaving white sheet of vapour spilling out to claw at the cab’s tyres. Dryden walloped the car roof. ‘Right. If I’m not back in twenty minutes ring Shaw on the number I gave you. If you feel like it you can come looking for me as well…’
He set off up the bank and stopped at the top to look upriver. Two pleasure boats were moored on the far side, smoke snaking up from the stovepipe of one. Downriver, half a mile into the growing dusk, he could see the ugly iron girders of the bridge. Again, he started walking briskly before he could lose his nerve, trying not to imagine the face, edged in the balaclava, waiting in the shadows.
Thieves Bridge had been built by the army in the Second World War to help get food out of the fen fields and down to London quickly. It was a giant piece of Meccano, crossing the Ouse in a single span, held together with rivets and rust. Traffic was single track, with priority to the east, but most nights nothing crossed it, for now the route was faster using bridges to the north.
When he reached it Dryden climbed up to the road and looked east, then west. Nothing moved on the arrow-straight tarmac, which stretched out of sight like a runway. Dryden saw a holdall lying on the raised footpath which took pedestrians over the water, so he walked towards it, painfully aware of the sharp tap of his footsteps in the night.
The voice, when it came, was above him. ‘You don’t need to check it.’
He’d climbed up one of the girders and was sitting in the superstructure, ten feet off the ground, his back against the studded steel. His body was crooked, bent to blend with the metalwork, and Dryden wondered if Shaw’s team had spotted him at all. No balaclava, just a black woollen hat pulled down low and something rubbed into his skin so that it was dark and blotched.
‘We didn’t think you’d come – alone.’ Dryden didn’t speak, and in the silence heard the knocking of a light boat against the bridge support below.
‘Got a tongue?’ He thought he recognized the voice from the phone but couldn’t be certain.
‘Sure. What d’you want me to say?’
Dryden leant against the steelwork looking upstream where, across the moonlit water, he could see one of the pleasure boats edging out, letting the current take it downriver.
He was down quickly, and Dryden didn’t have the nerve to back off as he came forward and grabbed him by the shirt front. Up close he could see the eyes now, and where they caught the moonlight Dryden could see how scared he was. He stuffed a piece of paper into one of Dryden’s pockets. ‘That’s a statement. We want that in the story too – along with something from Peyton saying he’s packing the business up. We’ll watch developments and keep the dogs, just for insurance. When Sealodes closes down he gets ’em back.’
Up close Dryden could actually smell the fear, laced
with nicotine. He was just a few feet away now and Dryden tried to memorize the face: an oversized jaw, and small, flattened nose which looked broken.
‘Let’s go,’ a second voice, this time from below, where an outboard motor suddenly burst into life. ‘There’s a boat coming.’
The grip tightened at Dryden’s neck and the face came closer. ‘I hope that’s nothing we should be worried about, Dryden. Betrayal is a very ugly word – disfiguring.’
The engine below screamed and at the same moment a searchlight thudded into life from the deck of the pleasure boat upstream, blinding Dryden, so that he didn’t see the punch coming, the knuckles cracking against the orbital bone above his eye. He went down on the tarmac, his cheekbone hitting the ground with a thud which made him lose consciousness. But as he drifted into an internal silence he heard a loud hailer, although the words made no sense, each unrelated, evading meaning.
When he came to he didn’t know how long he’d been down, but the side of his skull was numb and pitted with grit. In the distance he could see headlights approaching along the drove, a blue flashing light above. Overhead the thwup-thwup of helicopter blades was close enough to move the night air, while a spotlight burned down, illuminating the bridge around him. In the silvery light he saw a rat panic, zigzagging over the tarmac.
They’d left the holdall, just a few feet away. So he
crept towards it, the pain in his head oddly distant. He was kneeling when he got the zip down and the helicopter was making a second run, the blazing halogen-white light suddenly electrifying the scene like a flashbulb. Inside there was some heavy mater ial, like rotted carpet, which he prised apart to reveal bones and a skull. He took the head out and held it level with his own, and looking into that lifeless face he could see the glitter of a single metal filling, so that he knew one thing only as he heard footsteps running towards him – that these were not old bones.
So now I know. I have a life, complete of itself. A name, a wife, a gift – apparently – to write. She came with the policeman this morning while I worked in the gym. Elizabeth. I call her Liz, that’s what she told me. I always have. She’s beautiful, and I can see why I might have loved her. But she’s a stranger to me now, and I wonder if I’ll ever remember what it was we had together.
Because I don’t have to remember. That’s how it works. The doctors have set the same prognosis, that the past will return but from the earliest memories first, rolling forward to the present. Flashes out of sync perhaps, no more. But there are no guarantees the process will ever be complete. It’s started already, my childhood unfurling. But it might just stop: stop short – so that I’ll never know about Kathryn, and I’ll never know why I was on that bridge. And who did I meet? And will they come for me again?
I know more about you, Laura, than I know about my wife. At least you and I have a past, however brief it’s been.
Liz told me what my life was like. I think she knew I couldn’t remember, and she wants me to remember, so that we can have something to share. But it’s like sharing ashes, and there’s not even a memory of the fire.
And then there’s what I do remember, the past revealing itself. It’s an odd feeling, not so much remembering as uncovering.
I don’t recall the past with any sense of triumph or discovery, it just appears, fully made, already stale somehow, tarnished by a thousand other rememberings I’ve forgotten.
The present is the only reality in which I feel alive.
My life so far then, in a few paragraphs, as I’ve actually remembered it. Yes, I was born in Jude’s Ferry. In Orchard House, where the garden ran down to the river. I only have the one memory before we started moving – hiding amongst the box hedges and watching a car crackle past on the gravel drive. Why that memory? I doubt I’ll ever know. My father, a diplomat, took us away. The house, mothballed, we said was home. And we did come back for the summers, and a single Christmas.
But my life was somewhere else. To Singapore – where the wonderful gardens ran down to the harbour – to Belize, to Washington. A life oddly untroubled by all that movement. English schools in exotic climates, and the poor glimpsed through the windows of the polished cars that always whisked us from the airport. And then mother died – while I was at Coniston. I was ten and a boarder and father was in Saudi Arabia where we couldn’t go. I can remember being told. I was out on the rugby pitches, the snow on the hills. I was called to a cold room, lined with books, and there was a slab of sunshine on the floor which edged away from me as the headmaster talked. University. English at Oxford. Keble, the rain running down those depressing red bricks.
Summers at Jude’s Ferry. Always an outsider however hard I tried. Dad didn’t tell me he’d sold up to the MoD. I found a letter, about the rent. He said it was a nest egg for me, but he’d sold the only home we’d ever had. And then a heart
attack at Sunningdale lecturing to a room full of bored civil servants on a pale afternoon. I scattered his ashes on the beach at Holkham, trying to recall even then what he looked like.
I was alone, so I came back for that last summer to Orchard House. There was nothing else, just a bank account, blinking black on the screen. I was owed it – a year of my own, at home, at last, even if the family had gone.
And I felt a sense of liberation too. So I thought I’d teach. Whittlesea. A new scheme, for graduates, learning on the job. A windswept comprehensive built of concrete and glass with a playground like a supermarket car park. But I loved it; so different from my life until then, chaotic, raw, on the edge. And that’s where I met her, Laura. Something’s stopping me crossing that line, to what happened next, because there’s something there I don’t want to remember. But I know the emotions that match the missing pictures: passion first, then guilt. And then anger at last. I’m clinging to these because all I feel today is fear. Which is why it’s so important that I know you’re there.