The Skeleton Man

by Jim Kelly

  ‘You might have the decency to fucking wait,’ shouted a man, his face red and damp with alcohol.

  ‘Come on, boys,’ said another voice, and the crowd visibly shrank back. ‘Beer’s free – don’t waste it.’ It was the young man from the doorstep of the pub, his tea mug still in hand. ‘It’s too late for trouble – it’s over.’

  Dryden tried to judge his age – mid-twenties perhaps, but with a kind of world-weary authority which made him seem older. He led them away, down by the inn where the army had provided lunch in boxes on trestle tables and a last barrel stood out in the shade on blocks. There was a bit more shouting but it was clear now that they didn’t have the heart for a real fight. It was their pride which was at stake, not their homes. They were gone.

  The soldiers, sensing the mood, regrouped and slipped away to the tents, neat rows of bleached white, like a Boy Scout camp. Dryden tried to gather some quotes from the men by the inn but most shook their heads, ashamed of their impotence now that the end had come.

  Lunch for the press was laid out in the orchard below the church, in the shadow of a foursquare Georgian mansion surrounded by a gravel drive. The words ‘Orchard House’ were carved into the stone pillars which guarded the gates. The window tax had robbed the building of some of its grandeur but it was still a cut above, the upper floor looking out over trimmed hedges at the village beyond. Lawns ran down to the river, across which a deep ditch ran parallel with the towpath, the remnants of an old moat. Dryden had spread himself out on the grass checking his notes, passing time before the bus was due to take them back to Ely, trying to imagine what the village had been like in its heyday in the 1800s, when the wharf had been busy with sugar beet, the factory belching acrid smoke from the pencil-thin chimney.

  The rest of the press were clustered near where the army was serving drinks so he’d been the only one to hear the creak of the shutter, and looking up had seen a young man at an upstairs window of the mansion, surveying the orchard below. A hand on the windowsill, the other shading the light from his eyes, he had the languid movements of the rich. Then he’d retreated into the shadows and Dryden wondered what final act of farewell had taken place within. He heard voices then, a light had come on, and another man had hurriedly closed the shutters. He’d been shocked to recognize the landlord again, talking over his shoulder to those unseen within.

  Then they’d heard the clanking gears of the council bus, and the press corps had stood silently to watch the last villagers leave, many of them turning their heads away from the windows as it drove past on Church Street, an amber dustcloud marking its progress out onto Whittlesea Mere. A few minutes later three army trucks rolled into the village from the west carrying the troops who would search the houses, survey the infrastructure and prepare the targets for the first live firing.

  Dryden looked down on the scene as it was today, the old allotments engulfed in late-summer raspberries, the ruined sheds just breaking the surface like flotsam on a green sea. Across the village the only sounds were inhuman: rooks called from a line of poplars by the river and somewhere the warm breeze rattled a garden gate on rusted hinges. The hum of bees was like the bass note of a soundtrack.

  He looked across into the orchard in which they’d had lunch that day. The fruit trees, unpruned for nearly two decades, were heavy with buds, the old moat a waterlogged ditch. The old shuttered mansion was still standing, but the roof had holes and was sagging in the middle, a chimney stack leaning perilously. At one of the windows the wood of the shutter had rotted and Dryden’s heart contracted as he saw something move on the sill, something black which caught the light. But as he watched a rook struggled out through the gap, shaking its feathers. It flew low over the garden wall and down to the river.

  He ran ahead to join Major Broderick and his platoon as they moved into the village, the road patched in tarmac by army sappers who’d filled shell holes over the years. A row of Victorian cottages had been propped up with brutal concrete frames. Several buildings here had been completely replaced with breeze-block boxes, punched through with crude holes for windows and doors. Dryden reflected that the villagers’ annual return to St Swithun’s must have been a sad experience, presenting ample evidence that as the years passed there was increasingly less for them to return to. As he walked forward Dryden tried to stop himself scanning the black, empty holes where the windows had once been, sensing that somewhere in the village he’d glimpse a face, waiting just for him.

  They moved north, over a hump-backed bridge, to a T-junction where they turned west into what had been the main street. Dominating the turning was an ugly 1950s two-storey building, its windows boarded, but a painted fascia proclaimed ‘Palmer’s Store’. The red logo of the post office was still visible, and on the second floor a derelict neon sign hung which read ‘Mere Taxis’ and was dotted with bullet holes. Somewhere inside the building a door creaked rhythmically in the breeze.

  Ahead they could see the slight rise of the main bridge over the Sixteen Foot, a drain which carried water off the reclaimed mere and sent it seawards – all that was left of the original ‘river’ over which Jude’s Ferry had crossed. Beyond, on the far bank, the old sugar beet factory burned. But in the foreground another column of smoke rose, tinged with acrid black, with flashes of livid red running through it like lightning.

  Broderick stopped to take a radio message from the men he’d sent ahead to recce the village. ‘Right,’ he said, thrusting the receiver back at the radio operator: ‘Not a good day for the Royal Artillery. They’ve hit some outbuildings down by the New Ferry Inn. A fire too.’

  The company moved forward in neat formation, a young soldier no more than eighteen in pole position. Dryden glimpsed from side to side the wooden cutout targets of Red Force in the shadows of derelict houses and shops. In one, behind a perspex window, a soldier in a combat hat stood transfixed beside a marble table, all that was left of the village butcher’s. Dryden caught his own reflection, the austere symmetrical face as immobile as that of the knight on the tomb in the church.

  A line of rats dashed across the sunlight in single file, swallowed by the shadows of a well-worn doorstep.

  The Dring had buildings on its north side, but along the south side a deep ditch ran, water sluggish at the bottom and overgrown with reeds. This brook acted as a culvert, taking water away from the high ground by the church and the water tower. As they walked the street the silky ‘plop’ of vermin retreating into the stream accompanied them. On the far side a tumbledown line of medieval cottages sagged, a way across the ditch provided by a series of makeshift bridges made of railway sleepers or corrugated iron. Dryden noted that one of the cottages still had its original front door, oak dotted with flaking red paint, a knocker in the shape of a leaping fox. The row was broken by a large gap, an open farmyard in which a rusted plough stood with the burnt-out frame of a tractor. On the side of the barn Dryden recognized the slogan he’d seen on that last day, sprayed by a vandal in letters three feet high: SQUADDIES FUCK OFF. Now the sentiment was almost illegible, the paint faded, but a line of dead crows hung on a wire looked like a more recent warning, a further sign that when the army wasn’t firing on Jude’s Ferry the village still had its own secret life.

  ‘Poachers,’ said Broderick at his shoulder. ‘We know they get in, but we patch up the holes, send in the occasional patrol at night, keep them guessing.’

  Above them the sunlight died and, looking up, Dryden watched as a dark bank of cloud, fringed with grey falling rain, slid over Jude’s Ferry like a coffin lid. The first drops, as fat as grapes, made the dust jump at their feet. They were just thirty feet from the bridge now and they could see where the stray shell had gone. Past the simple façade of the New Ferry Inn was a yard surrounded by outbuildings. One, more substantial than the rest, had taken a direct hit, a hole punched through the low roof, the jagged edges still smoking. Outside in the street three soldiers worked at a manhole cover, from which they had already run a hosepipe across into
the ruins of the building. Inside a soldier stood amongst the shadowy rubble, a lit torch turned down to his boots.

  He signalled to Broderick. As they picked their way over the strewn bricks and splintered wood the rain began to fall, hissing amongst the smouldering debris. The explosion had blown away the doors and destroyed the ground-floor flight of a wooden staircase which had led up to a loft, revealing a letterbox black hole and a set of steps leading down into a cellar. Dryden could see torches beneath, sweeping the darkness.

  At a shout, water gushed into the flames, cascading back down the steps.

  Broderick nodded. ‘OK. Good stuff. Where’s our problem then?’ The major looked nervous, suddenly less assured when faced with the unexpected.

  One of the soldiers directed a torch beam down the steps.

  ‘You might want to go down alone, sir,’ suggested the squaddie.

  Broderick thought about it for a second, then a few more.

  The major took off his combat helmet, a strange gesture, and led the way. ‘Who’s been down?’ he asked.

  ‘Corporal’s down, sir; half of A-platoon.’

  Broderick looked at Dryden. ‘No point being coy now – come on.’

  They dropped down the cellar steps and Dryden felt the temperature fall as they left behind the humidity of the day. His eyes switched to night vision and the scene was revealed: the floor already an unbroken glass-like sheet of water just a few centimetres deep. The cellar was large, an underground store in brick, and around the walls stood five of Broderick’s men, torches trained to the centre of the room, each immobile, stilled.

  Before them, illuminated, a body twisted slowly on a rope. The sudden rainstorm had disturbed the stale air and so the shrouded shape turned, the rope and beam creaking. The face, or what had been the face, swung towards Dryden and he saw the gleam of the lipless mouth, dull teeth and a bone-white skull. Across one cheekbone he glimpsed the mummified remains of a tendon. Clothes, perished beyond shape or colour, floated out like cobwebs.

  Outside the rain intensified and turned to hail, falling like gravel, and the wind it brought turned the hanging bones one last time in a graceful arc before the rust-weakened hook finally gave up its prisoner and the body fell to the floor.

  4

  The cellar, uncorked like a buried bottle, gave off the stale breath of the years. While a military radio crackled with traffic they stood silently in a circle and Dryden tried to make himself memorize the scene, stilling the urge to ascend into the light.

  The floor and three walls were old brick and lime, the fourth obscured by stacks of bottle crates. In one corner was a packing case of pint glasses, the top layer lying on newspaper, damp and yellow. By the far wall, opposite the stone steps, was a cupboard, doorless, the shelves within stacked with paint tins, tubes of various DIY kit, brushes stiff with dried turps sticking out of jam jars. Cobwebs hung in tresses to the floor and from the rough brickwork of the walls. The webs shimmered slightly, catching the light, as spiders dashed for the safety of the shadows in the rafters above.

  Close to the centre of the room were the shattered remains of a child’s high stool, one leg broken away, small pale-yellow teddy bears still just visible painted on the wood. Stacked with the beer crates were some other cast-offs from a child’s nursery: a changing mat in plastic almost completely rotted, a wicker Moses basket, a set of wooden bowling pins, a small child’s dresser, painted to match the broken high stool.

  The corpse sat now, the descent to ground having driven the shattered spine down into the rest of the bones like a javelin so that the torso remained vertical, the head back, revealing the bones of the neck and the hollow underside of the jaw. Defying gravity, the skeleton seemed to demand one last chance to bear witness. Dryden could see now that the corpse had been reduced almost completely to bone, just a few shreds of tendon and cartilage remaining, and that the threadbare clothes had been all that had held it together in the still air of the cellar. Dryden tried to imagine the years of darkness it had spent in the breathless tomb.

  But now light filtered and spilled in from above as the sound of the hail subsided. Reflections of the skeleton filled the black water.

  Broderick stepped forward and examined the twine that had tied the wrists together in front of the body.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch anything,’ said Dryden.

  Broderick stood, thinking. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave it. The military police will be here soon enough.’ The soldiers filed up the stairs towards the light.

  Dryden circled the skeleton before leaving, noting the legs splayed within the rotting cloth. The rags gave no clue to the sex; the build was perhaps slight for a man, average for a woman, but it was difficult to judge from the jumble of bones.

  ‘Looks like a woman,’ said Broderick, reading his mind from the top of the steps.

  Something stirred in Dryden’s memory. ‘Wasn’t there a woman who went missing after the evacuation? Didn’t she keep the shop and the post office – Palmer’s, along The Dring?’

  Broderick sat on the step. ‘Yup. Magda Hollings-worth. She’d have been sixty-three in 1990. It could be her. She’d been depressed, but there was no note, no last goodbye. She just wasn’t there any more.’

  ‘That’s a good memory…’

  Broderick dusted his palms together. ‘Press office at the Army Desk sent me the cuttings on the evacuation – just in case you asked any awkward questions. The story was in there. They searched the village a couple of times – delayed the first shelling by a week or more. But they never found the body and she never turned up, no sightings at all. And she was not the kind of woman who’d have blended in. Romany family; Hungarian, I think. Not exactly a conformist by all accounts…’

  ‘Although she was the postmistress, that’s hardly eccentric.’

  Broderick shrugged. ‘Anyway, some people suggested she’d cracked up under the strain of the evacuation and had gone back on the road. Joined the travellers. It kinda makes sense, or at least it did at the time.’

  Dryden followed him up into the abandoned bar of the New Ferry Inn. The story of Magda Hollingsworth was a sad coda to the drama of those last days in Jude’s Ferry. Her family hadn’t reported her missing until after the evacuation and by then the media circus had moved on. There was little interest in the fate of the missing woman even locally, especially as the presumption was she’d taken her own life after a bout of depression, suicide note or no suicide note.

  The bar was cool and smelled of rotting wood. A large frosted window, engraved with the words ‘The New Ferry Inn’ had remarkably survived the years and the army’s wayward shells. Beyond it the village filled with the sound of running water. The room itself was half panelled in wood to a height of about five feet. Someone had sprayed TROOPS OUT with a can on one wall – further evidence that Jude’s Ferry had been visited over the years since the evacuation by more than troops in training. Movable furniture had been shipped out but a built-in settle ran round the room. A large brick fireplace was empty except for the featherweight corpse of a rook. On the wall the only picture left was of the England football team covered in mimeographed signatures. Dryden noted the date: January 1990. In the dartboard a single dart stuck out of double-tops, and a tin ashtray on the mantelpiece held a single piece of chalk and what looked like rat droppings. The scorer’s blackboard held two words, scrawled in chalk: GAME OVER.

  If you strained against the silence, Dryden thought, you could almost hear it: the sound of that last night; the last bell, an ironic cheer perhaps, the drunken voices, hoarse with drink and nicotine. And tears in a corner, ignored.

  ‘Military police will be here in twenty minutes,’ said Broderick. ‘There’s a chopper coming in – God knows why, but if you’ve got a big toy why not play with it? They’re off to Basra next month, so I guess they need the practice, poor bastards. CID at Lynn’s been notified,’ he said.

  With the police notified Dryden knew now that the story was only his for a few hours b
efore the rest of the media picked it up. His own paper didn’t come out for another two days and he’d been forced to leave his mobile at the firing-range gatehouse. It looked like he’d got a scoop, but no paper to run it in. Not for the first time he cursed the frustrations of working on weekly newspapers.

  ‘When they get here you should mention the church. Someone’s been in recently – a hole’s been dug by one of the tombs.’

  ‘Grave robbers?’ asked Broderick.

  ‘Perhaps. Everyone knew that there was no shelling while the court case was being heard. So it wasn’t a bad time to make a visit – there was a good chance the villagers weren’t coming back, so perhaps they thought no one would care. But it’s not the first time – there are signs of vandalism. You must have seen them too?

  ‘I need to get to a phone,’ he said when the major didn’t answer. ‘Any chance?’

  ‘I can patch in a call to your mate in the cab – get him back early.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s a big help.’ Dryden planned to call the local radio station and see if he could get on air with the story, making sure his paper got credit, and promising a full version in the Tuesday edition. It was the only way he was going to get anything out of the story before it broke for the competition.

  He took a deep breath, wishing he had a pint in his hand. ‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘Suicide, right?’

  Broderick’s soft face creased in a frown. ‘I guess. Hands are bound, but in front, which she could have done herself to prevent a reflex attempt to loosen the noose. Feet are unbound, so she could have just stood on the stool, and then stepped off and kicked it away.’

  ‘She? No doubts about that?’

  Broderick shrugged. ‘Well, we know there was a missing woman. You can’t tell much from the bones until they get them in the lab, but anything’s better than calling her it…’ He’d removed the heather from his tunic and turned the silver-paper bouquet in his hand, placing it carefully on the map.