The Skeleton Man

by Jim Kelly

  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.

  ‘But then in the next entry the tone changes. I think she felt she couldn’t leave the village without discharging her responsibilities. She says that she feels she must say something after all, confront the mother I suppose, or the family, and perhaps report the matter to the authorities. That’s the meaning I took from it anyway, although it’s not completely clear. That bit wasn’t in the official MO document, you see, but in her private diaries – and they’re written in a much more subjective and emotional style.

  ‘But what is clear is that she suddenly saw the child’s death as partly her own fault. It’s awful to see this guilt surfacing on the page. And to that she had to add this dilemma; that she’d been entrusted with this confidence, but felt a duty to the child that had died. I think it was entirely personal for Mother, I think she felt burdened with this secret and she wanted to either pass it on, or throw it back so that the mother could deny it if she could. I think she hoped passionately that it would be denied, because of course that would alleviate her guilt as well.’

  She paused, breathing deeply.

  ‘Do you know who this young woman was, Mrs Lisle?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘Well. The initials in the text are L.O., but I’m afraid that means nothing. And the private diary follows the same notation. But yes, I do know, I think, and I contacted the university – there’s an advice desk there – to ask what I should do. They seemed to think I should tell the police but ask them to respect the confidence as far as is possible, so I’ve put a note with the photocopies.’

  Dryden tried to break in but she spoke over him. ‘The skeleton in the cellar is that of a man, isn’t it? So I don’t think we’ll ever find my mother.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Dryden, aware that part of her had wanted her mother to find peace at last.

  ‘Mrs Lisle, if I asked you to tell me…’

  ‘I’d have to say nothing, Mr Dryden. The young woman would be – what – in her mid-thirties now. I don’t think it’s any time for the press to be asking questions again. The rules laid down by MO are quite clear – there must be no general identification. The police are an exception, and although I suppose technically I’m not bound by the rules, I think Mother would have wanted me to respect them. So I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Dryden, lying. ‘But can you tell me what day this was, when she talks about confronting the mother of the child? About going to the family?’

  ‘It’s the last entry, the night before the evacuation, the night she went missing.’

  20

  The car park of Richardson’s cash ’n’ carry held three large Volvo estates, three super-size abandoned trolleys, a forklift truck and a squashed hedgehog. Dryden pushed open a large metal swing door and found himself in the swaddled hush of the vast store, the silence polluted only by the tinny, bassless crackle of muzak. There was one woman in a cubicle till waiting for a customer to appear. She had red hair piled high and held in place by clips and she was reading something just below the counter. Dryden’s footsteps made her look up through myopic eyes, her squint drawing together the wrinkles in her face. She shuffled the book sideways and Dryden saw it was a romance, a heroine fleeing a house with battlements.

  ‘Hi. Sorry – I’m looking for someone.’

  ‘Only trade customers. I’m sorry – you know, you have to have a card,’ she smiled. She flicked a finger across a pile of forms. ‘You can fill one in now if you like, but we need the VAT number of the business.’

  ‘My name’s Philip,’ he said, ‘Philip Dryden.’

  ‘I’m Ena, but you still need a card.’

  ‘I don’t want to shop.’

  Ena looked sideways like she was planning something. At the far end of the aisle of empty till boxes was a glass office, and within that the cone of light from a desk lamp pointing down.

  ‘Mr Newall’s doing the books,’ she said.

  ‘It’s Elizabeth, Elizabeth Drew. I wanted to talk to her.’

  Ena pulled the wrinkles together again, the shortsighted eyes searching his face for a clue. ‘She’s in charge at the back – Goods In – through the store. I shouldn’t let you really.’

  She retrieved a pair of spectacles from around her neck and began to shuffle with the forms.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Dryden, setting off down an aisle flanked by metal shelving twenty feet high loaded with catering packs of soup, tinned vegetables and beans. At the end there was a crossroads where one aisle cut the store in two – a clear vista 150 yards long. In the distance a shelf stacker in khaki overalls was drop-kicking empty boxes over the top of the shelving. As Dryden watched a shopper crossed the aisle pushing a large flatbed trolley piled with boxes, cans and film-
wrapped packs. Something flapped over Dryden’s head and looking up he saw a pigeon in the metal rafters of the roof, shaking free a fall of dust. The tannoy system bing-bonged and Dryden recognized Ena’s pinched voice: ‘Can I have a stacker at the tills, please. A stacker at the tills.’ Stress made her lengthen the final word into a small cry.

  The shop worker stopped his game and headed for the tills, pausing to stoop down and pick up the shredded remains of one of the boxes he’d been kicking. Dryden set off again for the back of the warehouse, the air heavy with the smell of broken soap-powder boxes and the papery scent of several thousand toilet rolls stacked in towers along the rear wall.

  Goods In was shielded by stacks of wooden pallets and a steel wall. A juggernaut was parked through a bay in the rear partition, the doors folded like a concertina, the engine and onboard refrigeration unit silent. There was another small glass-walled office dominated by a large colour calendar of Wicken Fen nature reserve, a wedge of swans caught at sunset replacing the usual splayed limbs of the Playmate of the Month.

  A woman with round shoulders was leaning over the desk checking a document, a large lunchbox open beside her revealing a neat stack of sandwiches and what looked like a pastry. Dryden leant against the door jamb.

  ‘Mrs Drew?’

  She looked up, the face without make-up, pale white Fen complexion, the brown wispy hair tucked back into an ethnic headscarf of chaotic Caribbean colours. Dryden guessed that food was a substitute for her, and wondered how long she’d been overweight.

  ‘How can I help?’ The voice was lighter than he expected, a decade younger than the fifty years he would have guessed from her face. ‘I’m interested in Jude’s Ferry – you rang in when I was on the radio. I work for The Crow.’

  She smiled. ‘How’d you find me?’

  Dryden looked around, avoiding the question. Through the HGV’s offside mirror, he could see the driver asleep in his cab. ‘Chummy on break?’

  She nodded. ‘Tachograph. He needs to stop still for an hour. So… late lunch break.’

  Dryden thought about his first question, balancing the phrases to avoid antagonizing his witness, taking time to get it right. ‘You were a rural officer for the county council. I don’t know much about the job, but it must have been a tall order keeping places like Jude’s Ferry going, getting everyone to work together. I was just trying to get a feel for the place, a picture in my head.’

  ‘I got sacked,’ she said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. ‘They probably said.’ Dryden shook his head. ‘My David died and I couldn’t really take it any more.’

  Dryden took a step back, embarrassed by the personal detail.

  ‘They were right, I wasn’t pulling my weight. David had been the manager here, so they got me in. It was good of them, it’s a family firm.’

  She stood, a kettle beginning to boil on the ground by the plug, and took two crockery mugs out of a small sink. She made Dryden tea without asking, and they didn’t say a word while she completed the little ceremony.

  ‘It’s a bit soulless,’ said Dryden, nodding towards the empty aisles and the stacks of packed food hidden by the steel wall.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and for a moment Dryden thought she was going to cry. ‘It’s better here.’

  ‘So. Jude’s Ferry, what was it like? Soulless too?’

  ‘Good God no,’ she said, hitching her feet expertly up on to the first open drawer of the desk. ‘People don’t understand about communities like that. Everyone was part of a network, you see, part of the place, and it held them together, the village, and it held them apart, far enough apart that they could live with people they sometimes didn’t like, people they might even have hated. In small communities that’s what they learn – how close to get.’

  ‘And then they had to leave,’ he said.

  ‘Yes – so all those networks fell apart. I’m not surprised someone died. It was a trigger – the evacu ation. I could feel the tension in those last few weeks.’

  ‘Did you know any of the villagers well?’

  She shook her head, tapping a finger on the desktop. ‘Not really. Once they all sold up in the eighties to the MoD it was almost impossible to get new investment to come in for any project.’

  She leant back, covering her eyes with the hand that didn’t hold her cup. ‘I tried to get some development fund money behind a project to put start-up units in the old beet factory, small manufacturing enterprises. I know one of the micro-brewers was interested. But you couldn’t take it forward because there was always that question: what if the Army cuts the lease? So you couldn’t blame the banks, although we did, of course.’

  Dryden nodded, setting the cup down on a coaster with a picture of a barn owl.

  She looked towards the internal window and Dryden guessed she was looking at her own reflection. ‘My only real contact with the village was through SEN.’

  ‘Special needs?’

  ‘Yes. That was part of my remit. I had to make sure any children in the village who needed support got it. So we had to coordinate social services, education, transport, the lot. You’d be surprised at the kind of problems you find in a place like Jude’s Ferry.’

  Dryden looked her in the eyes. ‘I was born on Burnt Fen,’ he said. ‘We had a farm.’

  She had the good grace to look down. ‘Sorry. I guess you wouldn’t be surprised then. I took the accent for London.’

  Dryden, sensing he had the advantage, pressed forward. ‘In those last few months a baby died in the village, do you remember that?’

  She shook her head. ‘If it was natural causes that’s not our bag, the health trust in Whittlesea might have a record.’

  Dryden made a note. ‘So, SEN kids – how many were there at the end?’

  She buried her face in her hands trying to remember. ‘Two I think. There was Peter Tholy of course…’

  ‘Right,’ said Dryden, recalling his list of eight potential identities for the Skeleton Man.

  ‘He went to Australia after the evacuation,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure? I thought George Tudor was the one who emigrated.’

  ‘Both of them, friends of course, so it was a joint project. We helped with Peter’s application because there were obvious difficulties. He had quite severe learning difficulties, dyslexia, and some communication problems, some dysfunctional speech patterns, although his IQ was actually very high. Didn’t stop everyone treating him like the village idiot, of course – that’s a rural tradition I’ve never tried to protect. The only friends he had were amongst the girls, who mothered him, and George.’

  ‘Why were they friends?’

  She shrugged. ‘Workmates, I guess; landwork and the flower fields. They both got decent references from the vicar, and from Blooms, the wholesale nursery business.’

  ‘So you knew Colonel Broderick then?’

  ‘Yes. One of the few local businesses with any kind of potential. Broderick generated a lot of local employment, it was a good thing it was there in those last years.’

  ‘What was he like – Peter?’ Dryden thought of the Skeleton Man, wondering if Peter Tholy had ever really left the village in which he was born.

  ‘I met him once, twice perhaps, most of the hands-on stuff was done by social services. But, you know, cute I guess. He wasn’t your typical farmhand – strong in the arm, thick in the head. He’d taken some hard knocks growing up in the village, but he’d come through.’

  Looking through him she remembered another face. ‘And there was Martyn Armstrong. He’d have been about fifteen when the family finally left – well, I say family, there was the father, the watchman at the beet works. The mother was still officially resident but in fact she’d walked out. Which was one of Martyn’s problems. They had a house in the middle of the factory, it was a bit creepy actually, just the two of them, surrounded by all those empty buildings.’

  ‘And Martyn needed help?’

  ‘Yeah. He wasn’t cute. I’m not an expert in educa
tional needs but he definitely needed help. I interviewed the father – briefly – just to see where we could find him a place.’

  ‘So, nasty, violent?’

  She nodded. ‘He came to our attention – isn’t that a dreadful euphemism – thanks to the police in Whittlesea. There’d been nothing in the village, or at least they said there’d been no complaints, but you can never tell with a place as close as Jude’s Ferry. But he was one of the kids we taxied over to the college, and that’s when the problems started. His dad kept dogs on the factory site and Martyn had cats, mice, a ferret, you name it. Bit of an animal nutter. Vegetarian too, which you know, for the Fens, is like as weird as it gets.’

  ‘So what did he do – steal a goldfish, couple of pound of curly kale?’

  ‘Not quite. There was a pet shop in the town and apparently Martyn went in and complained about the conditions, said it was cruel the way they kept the rabbits in small cages. He’d turn up most afternoons and berate the owner in front of the customers. Then the police got called and they chucked him out, told him to keep clear of the shop.’

  The hair on the back of Dryden’s neck had begun to bristle. ‘What’d he do?’

  ‘One night he got himself a milk bottle and a tin of paraffin and made a Molotov cocktail, which he lit and lobbed through the window of the owner’s flat above the shop. When he ran out Martyn sprayed floor polish in his eyes.’

  ‘Jesus. So then what happened?’

  They heard a groan from the driver’s cab as a small alarm pulsed, and a round, bald head appeared with sleep lines in red running across one cheek.

  ‘Juvenile court and a spell in a secure unit. That’s the last I heard of him, I’m afraid. There were psychiatric reports too. They didn’t throw the key away or anything, people wanted to help. But in terms of life chances I think Martyn’s were running out fast. I don’t think a happy ending was on the cards, do you?’

  She ushered Dryden out of the door as the driver ran the back of the container up to reveal a row of butchered sides of beef hanging from hooks, the meat red and bloody where the circular saw had split the bodies open, the bones caressed by the ice which hung in the refrigerated air.