The Skeleton Man (23 page)

‘Well – back in 1990 he was twenty-four. He lived at Orchard House – which sounds posh I guess. That’s it. His wife’s called Elizabeth, there’re no kids. He says he remembers nothing. He’s got four fingers missing from his right hand.’

Humph nodded, looking at his watch. ‘I gotta give blood,’ he said, giving the large ham that was his upper arm a pre-emptive massage.

The cabbie was proud of his charitable donation
of red corpuscles, a selfless act only partly inspired by the free chocolate biscuits.

Dryden took some pictures at the gate and chatted to the shopkeeper at the post office. Imber was known locally, gave to charity, walked a dog, but in the phrase dreaded by all reporters otherwise ‘kept himself to himself ’. His wife, it was thought, was in publishing and worked in London, travelling up at weekends.

Dryden reflected that Imber had one of those lives which become more elusive as you add detail.

‘You can drop me at the unit. Laura’s in the gym and we might as well see how chummy’s doing. My guess is the police have some tricky questions for Jason Imber and that amnesia is no longer an acceptable answer to any of them.’

Dryden tried to sleep on the journey back but the injured cheekbone throbbed and his head ached behind his eyes. By the time they got back to Ely a summer mist had descended, cloaking teeming rain, wet and enveloping, the water running in broad streams down the 1930s stucco façade of the Oliver Zangwill Centre.

Dryden kept his head down as he ran from the cab to the automatic doors and was still shaking the water from his thick black hair when he saw that the reception area was empty except for one figure: Major John Broderick. He was in uniform, back straight, hands held clasped on his lap, holding the peak of his cap.

The soldier’s back stiffened as Dryden took the seat on his other side.

‘Hi,’ said Dryden, having little option than to try a jovial tone. ‘That legend about St Swithun’s Day – forty days and forty nights – that’s just an old wives’ tale, right?’

Broderick laughed. ‘There’s a long way to go,’ he said, shaking some droplets of water from the cap.

‘Visiting?’ said Dryden, aware that the question veered dangerously towards the obvious.

Broderick nodded, leaning forward and moving some tattered magazines around a tabletop like chess pieces.

‘My wife’s a patient,’ said Dryden, trying for empathy if not sympathy.

Still nothing. Dryden stretched out his overlong legs. ‘You never said what business you were in.’

Broderick ran a finger along the peak of the cap. ‘Wholesale flowers. We import exotics, distribute within eastern England from local growers.’

Dryden nodded. ‘So it runs in the family – or is it the same business? Blooms Nursery, if I recall correctly. You didn’t mention your father’s business in Jude’s Ferry,’ he said. ‘Which was odd, wasn’t it?’

Broderick turned slightly in his chair so that he could look Dryden in the eyes. The reporter didn’t like what he saw. Nor did Broderick. ‘You been in a fight?’ he asked.

‘Fell downstairs,’ said Dryden. ‘So what’s so secret about you and Jude’s Ferry?’

‘Sorry, but you don’t really have a right to ask these questions.’

‘Really? It was a free country when I got up this morning – did I miss the coup? I think you’ll find I can ask what questions I like – and you have the right not to answer them. Subtle difference, often lost on the military mind, if that isn’t an oxymoron.’

Open hostilities were interrupted by the nurse at the desk. Cupping a hand over a phone she tried to catch Broderick’s attention. ‘Mr Imber will be free in about ten minutes, Major.’

Broderick nodded, blushing.

‘He’s still with the police,’ she added, replacing the receiver soundlessly.

Dryden let the silence lengthen, sensing Broderick’s acute discomfort.

The major stood abruptly. ‘I’ll take a walk,’ he said, heading for the doors.

Dryden joined him uninvited, the rain covering his face in a refreshing layer of cool water almost instantly. The 1930s design of the hospital included a covered walkway which skirted the building at ground level. Broderick took refuge there, and Dryden followed, matching the immediate brisk pace.

‘So…’ he said.

‘I visited,’ said Broderick.

Dryden had lost the thread. ‘Sorry?’

‘I didn’t live in Jude’s Ferry. I visited. Although, as I have said, it is none of your business. I was brought up near Stamford, my mother’s house. She runs a garden centre, flowers again – it was what they had in common; as it turns out about the only thing
they had in common. My parents were separated. I was in the TA at university – Cambridge – and as I said we dealt with the transport for the evacuation. But that was in Ely. Father left home when I was three and moved, took half the business with him, and again in ’90, but he’d really lost interest by then – he couldn’t do the heavy work at all and he didn’t really like relying on other people. He spent a lot of his time in a wheelchair. He died in ’96. I inherited the business, diversified, merged it with Mum’s. We don’t grow ourselves any more.’

They stopped where the building came to an end, with a view out over a soaking field of carrot tops across which tiptoed a black cat with a tail like a question mark.

‘He must have missed you, when you were away. I’ve spoken to a few of the villagers and they said he liked having… you know… a boy around.’

It wasn’t very subtle and Dryden had the good grace to blush. Broderick laughed. ‘Village gossip, Dryden. Father’s weaknesses were far more conventional – which is why my mother threw him out. She threw him out several times in fact, and each time it was over a different woman. So your thinly veiled aspersion is wide of the mark.

‘He liked having young people around – although I can’t say that was ever that obvious when his only son visited.’

Broderick looked away, embarrassed by the sudden intimacy.

‘My visits were pretty stilted affairs, I’m afraid. I tried to make him happy.’ Broderick’s hand wandered to the sharp edge of the military cap. ‘He seemed to find happiness in other people. It’s as simple as that, sometimes life is, although people like you might find it hard to believe.’

Dryden didn’t bite, he’d been equally judgemental about soldiers.

‘And Jason Imber? What did you have in common?’ He looked up at the curving façade of the unit. ‘What do you have in common?’

‘Father knew the Imbers. They had the big house – Orchard House. It was what passed for a social set in Jude’s Ferry; that, the doctor and her husband, and a couple of old biddies out on the Whittlesea Road, and that was polite society. Jane Austen would have struggled.’

They laughed, walking round the end of the old hospital block and into the lee side out of the rain. Through the plate glass window they looked into one of the lounges set aside for patients. Several sat reading, but few turned any pages.

‘You’ve kept in touch?’ prompted Dryden.

‘Yes. When I did go to Jude’s Ferry it was often university vacation and Jason would be at home too, and that last year he was teaching in Whittlesea, up the road. We hung out together a bit. Jason’s funny – that’s why he writes comedy so well. The village wasn’t a very welcoming place for us, well, for anyone who hadn’t been born there. Being the son of a retired
colonel and a Cambridge undergraduate didn’t seem to help – odd, eh?’

Dryden smiled, wondering how bitter he really was.

‘So Jason and I had that in common: being newcomers. We’d stick together, go down the inn, see if they could ignore us all night. Things were better that last summer because Jason was teaching at the college, so he did know some of them, even if it was just to shout at them. He said the place was pretty rough, real blackboard jungle. Loved it for some reason,’ he added, shaking his head.

Broderick looked up at the clouds. ‘We lost contact in the nineties, but I saw his name often enough: in those lists at the end of comedy shows, the writers. Then I got an invite to the wedding, so we’ve kept in touch since. He moved out to Upwell, I live at Guyhirn, so by Fen standards we’re neighbours.’

‘And the wife – Elizabeth?’

‘Yes. I’ve met her a few times, wedding obviously, and she came to the regimental fundraiser with Jason. Yeah – the wives got on, she was a nice woman, smart too.’

‘Why’d you think he chucked himself off a bridge then?’

Broderick couldn’t stop a hand wandering towards his throat. ‘God knows.’

‘Ever go back to the old house, your father’s?’

‘Occasionally. The exercises utilize all the pro -perties.’

It was an oddly cold remark, Dryden thought.

‘What about the last night?’

Broderick looked through him. ‘I visited in the morning, I think, then got back to Ely. I was on the transport, like I said – a big job.’

They had their backs to the windows and they both turned as the wind, picking up suddenly, rustled the pines ahead of them and threw rain in their faces. They found themselves looking in on a long room. At one end there was a TV showing horse racing, and at a table four men played cards. In one corner there was a patient in a wheelchair. It was Jason Imber, the neatly cut hair framing the handsome face and the well-bred jawline. Laura Dryden was in her wheelchair too, holding his hand, watching tears run freely over the expensively tanned skin.

Humph was waiting for him in the Capri, a piece of surgical gauze held to his arm by a small plaster. The cabbie was listening to his language tape but still managed to exude a sense of painful self-sacrifice, one hand fluttering, but never quite touching, the wound.

Dryden got in and kicked out his long legs.

Humph disconnected the earphones and flipped down the glove compartment, retrieving two bottles of sambuca, cracking the tops of both and offering one to the reporter.

‘Lunch,’ he said, adding a packet of BBQ-flavoured crisps. ‘How’s Laura?’ he asked.

Dryden flipped down the vanity mirror and looked at his bottle-green eyes. How was Laura? It was a question he seemed, suddenly, least qualified to answer. He’d seen her briefly while Major Broderick had visited Jason Imber. She’d asked him then, again, about the bruising on his face, holding his head in her hands, and he’d told her about Thieves Bridge, the animal rights activists and the woman’s bones recovered from the Peyton grave, the ribs chipped by a blade. He talked about being afraid, and about not showing it.

‘You should tell me about these things,’ she said, her lips touching his ear. ‘We talk about what you do, but we don’t talk about you and how you feel.’

Dryden knew she was right, but he went on talking about what he did.

‘There’s this copper on the case, called Shaw, Peter Shaw. He’s kind of weird really. Young, driven, knows his stuff on the science, a real high flyer too, but then his dad was a DCI so everyone probably thinks he’s had it easy. But I don’t think so – Dad got chucked off the force a decade ago for fabricating evidence. I think it’s chewing him up, driving him on. It’s frightening you know, being around someone that focused.’

They’d laughed then and he’d taken the opportun ity to tell her what he really feared. ‘Don’t get too close to Jason Imber, Laura – we don’t know what happened to him. Help, there’s nothing wrong with that. But remember he can’t – he doesn’t know what he did, who he was. That could be a shock when he does find out.’

She shrugged, but Dryden could sense the irritation. ‘I just listen. I read the messages he sends,’ she said, touching her laptop. ‘He reads mine. I tell him about us, about your stories. It helps. He’s got nothing else to think about but missing memories, Philip.’

She closed her eyes, seeing that Dryden’s antagonism was undiminished. ‘Please, my neck.’

He’d massaged her shoulders then, knowing the long silence was a reproach.

Dryden rummaged in the glove compartment for
a refill. Laura’s relationship with a man who might be a murderer disturbed him. What he couldn’t admit was that what really troubled him was that she had a relationship with someone else at all.

He rang DI Shaw on the mobile.

‘Tell me you’ve caught the other one,’ said Dryden before the detective could speak.

‘We still think he’s on his way to Coventry. He got the National Coach out of Cambridge yesterday for Nottingham, he’s on the CCTV. We’ve lost him at the other end, but he’s getting close. We know where he’s going, we just have to wait.’

Dryden inhaled some more alcohol. ‘Anything breaking I need to know about on the Skeleton Man?’

‘We’ve got a match on the gravel we found in the cellar…’

‘Orchard House, right?’ said Dryden. ‘Jason Imber’s home.’

‘Indeed. But it isn’t good enough for a courtroom – we’d be laughed out. It just helps if we get something else that puts him at the scene. And we’ll be interviewing Imber again once he’s recovered from the wounds to his hand. Forty-eight hours, perhaps a bit longer. He’s not going anywhere in the meantime.’

‘Charges?’

Shaw laughed and Dryden could hear him tapping a computer screen. ‘Imber’s keeping a secret. But the doctors say he’s genuine about the memory loss. We
can’t push it, not now. Even if he did it we’re still short of a few crucial elements in our case, don’t you think – like a motive, the identity of the victim, the names of his accomplices, and any rationale at all which puts him in the river.’

‘Anything else on forensics?’

But Shaw did not intend to be pushed any further. Dryden’s deadline had gone, and with it some of his purchasing power. ‘I’m not aware I have a duty to update you in real time, Dryden – let’s have a chat after the weekend, OK?’

Dryden cut him off, angry that their deal had left him with one story he couldn’t print and another which made little sense. But the anger worked, as it often did, fusing two images in his memory – the gently turning bones of the Skeleton Man on his hook in the cellar and Humph, running a finger around the patch on his arm where the blood had been taken.

Dryden snapped his fingers, knowing just how much it annoyed the cabbie.

‘Surgical gauze,’ he said. ‘The Skeleton Man had a patch of surgical gauze on his arm.’