The Skeleton Man

by Jim Kelly

  ‘A knife wound?’

  ‘Yeah. Or an accident. Could have been inflicted long before death of course, that’s the problem. We need to talk to the vicar and to Peyton, find out if there were any later burials from the Peyton family. If not we’ve got another puzzle on our hands.’

  Shaw rang off while Dryden checked the clock: he had half an hour to write up the story on Jude’s Ferry for the front page.

  But an image hung before him – those metal fillings catching the floodlight on Thieves Bridge. A woman’s bones? Magda Hollingsworth perhaps? But hardly a suicide in that case – unless it was a very tidy suicide. Murder? Had someone decided Magda knew more than she should – and that she’d written it all down in her diary? He glugged some coffee, focusing instead on the blinking cursor of the computer screen, and attacked the keyboard…

  EXCLUSIVE

  By Philip Dryden

  Detectives were yesterday (Thursday) interviewing a 41-year-old man in connection with the discovery of the so-called ‘Skeleton Man’ found hanging in a cellar in the abandoned village of Jude’s Ferry.

  ‘We are hoping this man may be able to give us information which will help us identify the victim quickly, and even give us a lead to the identity of his killer, or killers,’ said a detective helping to lead the inquiry.

  Mr Jason Imber, a TV scriptwriter from Upwell, will be questioned by detectives from the inquiry team now based in the village of Jude’s Ferry, which was evacuated in 1990 to make way for military exercises.

  Mr Imber was rescued from the River Ouse two days after the Skeleton Man’s remains were revealed in a cellar in the village following a live artillery firing exercise involving Ely TA soldiers.

  He was taken to the Oliver Zangwill Centre at Ely’s Princess of Wales Hospital where he is being treated for amnesia under police protection. A hospital spokesman said his memory was slowly returning.

  Mrs Elizabeth Imber identified her husband after the police released pictures taken at the unit to the media. She travelled to Ely yesterday to visit her husband but was not available for comment.

  Mr Imber lost fingers from his right hand during his ordeal and it is believed he may have become entangled with a boat propeller after falling from Cuckoo Bridge, north of the city.

  Mr Imber was a teacher at Whittlesea High School before becoming a TV scriptwriter.

  Meanwhile police are keen to talk to Matthew Smith, a former builder and decorator who was involved in a violent argument in Jude’s Ferry on the night before the final evacuation.

  ‘Mr Smith was seen leaving the village pub that last evening and we are very keen to contact him so that we can eliminate him from our inquiries,’ said the detective.

  Police have released a picture of his brother – Mark – in the hope that he still bears a strong likeness to his twin. It is understood the brothers were involved in an argument over setting up a new business. It is possible that Matthew Smith is now known by a different name.

  Detectives based at King’s Lynn are working on the hypothesis that the victim, a man aged 20–35, was murdered by a lynch mob in the final days before the village’s evacuation in 1990.

  A thorough examination of the cellar in which the Skeleton Man was found has revealed another bizarre twist – an empty grave, dug and refilled.

  ‘Perhaps it was designed for the victim,’ said the detective, who declined to be named. ‘But instead it was neatly filled in. It is a bizarre development in a difficult case.’

  Forensic scientists are examining a cigarette butt found in the refilled grave. It is of a common Spanish brand, another example of which was found in the cellar itself. Samples have been sent for DNA analysis.

  Several other items found at the scene, including a twist of fibreglass and some ornamental gravel, are being examined further.

  Police are working on the initial premise that the victim is a former resident of Jude’s Ferry. They are trying to contact men of the right age to eliminate them from their inquiries.

  Any reader who might be able to help them should ring Freephone 0700 800 600.

  Dryden pressed his fists into his eye sockets and thought about the rope tightening around the Skeleton Man’s neck. He tried to imagine the years passing, the body rotting in its undisturbed tomb. Why had the cellar lain undiscovered for those years?

  ‘Flanders May,’ he said out loud, remembering the ‘perfectionist’ Major Broderick had said oversaw the survey of the village in the months after the evacuation. He Googled the name and found two references, the first to the regimental history and his role in mapping several British military installations in India in the months before independence, and the second to the Royal Society of Cartographers. Colonel Flanders May DSO had been president in 2003 and an e-mail address was provided. Dryden jotted down two questions and sent the message, betting himself he’d never get an answer.

  He picked up a photocopy of the picture of Mark Smith that DI Shaw had released. They were not, apparently, identical twins but there was enough in the face to help prompt an ID: the narrow skull, the heavy jaw which seemed to throw the whole off balance, the weak fleshy nose. Dryden reread his story and filed it.

  Then he added an extra paragraph:

  Police have said that their inquiries at the scene will be completed by Saturday morning. The range will reopen for live firing on Sunday. All roads into the range area are already closed to traffic. A maroon will sound at 9.30am and 9.55am from the firing range HQ at Whittlesea Lane End. Artillery will begin live shelling at 10.00am. A combined forces exercise will follow involving units from the TA and US forces based at nearby RAF Lakenheath. Live ammunition and artillery will be used.

  25

  Humph and Dryden headed north through a curtain of St Swithun’s rain towards Jason Imber’s home at Upwell. The village was deserted except for a murder of crows tearing at the squashed flesh of a large rat in a gutter. The house lay along a drove by the church behind an ugly high wall and a protective ring of pines. At the gate an expensive, polished intercom panel appeared to work, but there was no answer.

  ‘Scriptwriting pays then,’ said Dryden, flopping back into the passenger seat after briefly inspecting the gates. ‘There’s a car in the drive that looks like a Porsche.’

  ‘What else do we know?’ asked Humph, a single yawn threatening to suck all the air out of the cab’s damp interior.

  ‘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 are
a 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.

  26

  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.’