by Jim Kelly
The hook which had held the Skeleton Man had fallen to the floor with his bones, but the broken screw end was still embedded in the overhead timber. They stood beneath it.
Shaw took a breath and Dryden sensed again that he was framing what he would say next.
‘We noticed as we worked our way across the floor that the bricks over here, in this far corner, were loosely laid down without cement, just bedded in the clay beneath. So we took up the bricks, as you can see.’
On the floor a white line edged a rectangular shape set into the cellar corner, the bricks that had been removed being piled in a neat heap to one side.
‘We dug them up and dug down. We dug down six feet – into the clay subsoil. Then we put it all back.’
The hair on the back of Dryden’s neck prickled and he felt sure the temperature had dropped.
‘What was in the hole?’
‘Nothing. The point is that the hole had been dug before, and then filled in. The stuff we took out was jumbled up peat, topsoil and some building hardcore. We’ve taken a look down elsewhere using an auger and the soil profiles are undisturbed. You’ll know yourself that if you’ve ever dug a hole the big problem is that there is always more to put back than you took out. And we found the excess; in the crates up against the far wall which we’ve moved out. So. It’s pretty clear that someone dug the hole, then filled it in, replacing the bricks.’
‘It is a grave, isn’t it?’
Shaw shrugged. ‘It’s difficult to come up with another sensible suggestion. It’s about five foot six long – which is a bit short – and five feet deep, which is a bit shallow, and two foot wide, which is narrow. A chest maybe? But I doubt it. No. A grave has to be the working hypothesis. Which prompts two questions. Who was it dug for, and why aren’t they in it?’
Dryden laughed, shaking his head. The officer working in the corner sat back on a small stool, massaging her hands.
‘The Skeleton Man, surely,’ said Dryden.
‘But then why leave him hanging?’
‘Perhaps there wasn’t time,’ suggested Dryden.
‘They had time to fill it in, put the bricks back. It was neat work. So either they abandoned a plan to bury someone in the grave, or – outside chance – they buried someone and then dug them up. It’s possible the infill has been used twice – there’s no real way of telling, although the experts seem to think it’s unlikely as the material is still roughly stratified, whereas if they’d done it twice it would be more mixed up. Make sense?’
Dryden nodded. ‘And there’s something else,’ said Shaw, nodding to the SOCO before leading Dryden back upstairs into a splash of sun. In a dry corner of the storehouse above plastic sheeting had been wrapped round various bits of timber and brick.
‘When the shell exploded it blew bits of the cellar roof out into the street. We’ve found these pieces, bits of the jigsaw. We found this too.’
Shaw drew back some sheeting. It was a trapdoor, about three foot square, made of wood.
‘This would have been at the top of the steps down to the cellar?’ asked Dryden.
‘Indeed. But look at the other side.’ He flipped it over and what would have been the top side was covered in small floor tiles – many of them shattered, but which matched those on the storehouse floor. In one was a small slot, cut through to the other side.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Dryden.
‘I can’t pretend we do either. It’s not that unusual – but it might be significant. The trapdoor has been concealed by blending it with the rest of the floor – the hole is for a crude key, you just drop it down through the slit, turn it, and pull up.’
‘Which is why it was never found during the military exercises?’
‘Right – plus the fact that the people running the exercises thought there was nothing here to find, so I doubt the squaddies were given much time to search the building anyway – certainly not long enough to find a door like this, and Woodruffe says the storeroom was full of packing cases and there’s still loads of them around.’
‘And what’s the explanation for the trapdoor being concealed?’ asked Dryden.
‘He says it was like that for as long as he can remember. He was brought up at the inn – his mother was the licensee, the father before that. He says he thinks the building might have been a shop at one time – hence the tiles, which are Victorian. In that context, tiling over the trap isn’t that bizarre.’
They walked out into the street.
‘But it adds to the picture, doesn’t it?’ asked Dryden. ‘The Skeleton Man, an empty grave, a hidden door.’
‘Yes,’ said Shaw.
‘I said the grave was empty,’ said Shaw. ‘But that’s not quite true. We found this.’ Another evidence bag, a cigarette butt inside. ‘Ducados,’ said Shaw. ‘Our exotic
friend again – and because the water hadn’t soaked down that far there’s some DNA material this time, enough for an ID if we’re lucky.’ Shaw smiled. ‘And I feel lucky.’
18
The rain was setting in, falling in curtains of newsprint-black from a low grey sky. They walked up the street towards the hump-backed bridge over The Dring which trickled now with water from the hill. A rat scuttled in the gutter beside them, slipping effortlessly down a drain with a languid splosh. Birds’ wings fluttered amongst the exposed roof beams of Palmer’s Store, where Magda Hollingsworth had so painstakingly written her diary.
Dryden caught his own reflection in the broken window of a house by the bridge. Startled, he jumped visibly, and Shaw stopped. ‘There always seems to be something moving in the shadows in this village,’ said Dryden, and a sparrowhawk took up position high above their heads, as if listening.
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 – ju
st 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.
19
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.
What have I got?
Two stories.
The Skeleton Man and the grave robbers.
Three stories – the man in the river.
<
br /> What do they all have in common? Jude’s Ferry.
Are they linked?
We know the link between the Skeleton Man and the grave
robbers because they saw the picture with my story about the
village and spotted the Peyton tomb – an opportunity they felt
they couldn’t miss.
But the man in the river. Coincidence? Hardly.
Dryden drank some more coffee and read what he’d got. Then he deleted the lot and started again.
Where next?
The grave robbers. I wait for the call.
The man in the river. We check to see if the TV appeal
works.
The Skeleton Man.
Who is the Skeleton Man? I started with eight possible victims. Jimmy Neate is still alive. Ken Woodruffe is still alive. Shaw is on the case of the Smith brothers – one of whom may be our man. I can use that, but I’d have to be careful. I could probably contact another two at least before deadline tomorrow. George Tudor, the farm labourer, said on the tape he’d got the vicar to sign his emigration request. Then there’s Peter Tholy. Not that common a name – I’ll hit the directories just in case he’s back.
And I’ll nag Humph to track down the Cobleys – if they’re still in the taxi business they can’t be that hard to find.
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.