The Skeleton Man

by Jim Kelly

  Dryden rubbed his hands together. ‘Right – now I need to tell her all of this if we’re going to get her out to visit. Would that be OK?’

  Dryden took out his wallet, making sure McNally could see the chequebook. ‘It’s odd though,’ he said, letting his pencil hover over a scrap of paper he’d got out of the wallet. ‘She’s got such a great memory Miriam – and that’s certainly not fading. She was sure she came here in ’90. That’s the year Uncle Bernard died.’

  McNally nodded as if he knew who the fictional Bernard really was, while he flicked nervously through the box file.

  ‘Yes. Well it does look like she was meant to be with us then. According to the file she was booked in for that year, and she was examined by the medical staff here and assessed for her needs. But there was a late change of plans. The contract was cancelled in May 1990. Looks like she went abroad with her son – Kenneth. Spain – Sitges on the Costa Dorada. They reapplied from there, that was in ’92, and we undertook a fresh medical examination on her arrival. Her condition had deteriorated further. Stomach ulcers, and some early signs of diabetes setting in, alongside the chronic heart condition.’

  He nodded, closing the file.

  Dryden looked out of the window. ‘We stopped getting Christmas cards in – what was it? Late nineties?’

  McNally held his eyes for just a second beyond the point of politeness. ‘Ninety-seven. She died here, in fact – I recall her now actually. Wonderful woman, terrible illness, but bravely borne.’

  Dryden guessed he’d been sussed but went through the charade of fixing up a visit. Miriam would have been proud of him. McNally left him in the office while some forms were printed out off the computer in a side room.

  He was looking out the window watching Humph complete his daily exercise by walking round the Capri when he saw a woman reflected in the glass. Dryden thought she was in her seventies, small sparrow-like frame, but her movements were quick and fluid. She edged in through the door clutching her hands together and Dryden guessed she’d been listening outside.

  He turned to face her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Rosa, the nurse – said someone had called asking about Ellen. It’s nearly ten years, isn’t it? I just can’t believe the time has gone so quickly. I miss her terribly. We were in cahoots, Mr Dryden: partners. I’m Joyce, Joyce Cummings.’

  Dryden took the paper-dry hand. ‘Cahoots about what?’ he asked, smiling, but she didn’t seem to hear. ‘My aunt was an old friend of Ellen’s. They’d lost touch. She’s hoping to come here too – Ellen recommended it.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, the hand vanishing back into the folds of her dress. ‘I’d very much doubt that. Ellen hated it here, every moment, so I can’t imagine where you got that idea. We both hated it but, well, you know, we were dumped here so that was that. It’s like the old joke – the food’s dreadful here, but the real problem is that you get such small portions.’

  She laughed, her eyes dancing around the room, and Dryden tried not to think what it took to keep a sense of humour alive for a decade in a place like the Esplanade. He could hear the printer still clattering in the back office. ‘Did you meet Kenneth too – her son?’ asked Dryden

  ‘He more or less ran the pub, didn’t he?’ Dryden nodded. ‘Never. She didn’t want to see him. She always said that he’d let her down very badly. That he’d promised she’d never come to a place like this, that she’d never leave her home, that she could die in her own bed. But people break promises when you’re old – that’s something you’ll discover for yourself.’

  McNally came back in the room with a plastic folder, his irritation at the intrusion palpable.

  Joyce Cummings put a finger to her lips, smiled beautifully at the doctor and fled.

  30

  By the time they got to the edge of the Fens night had fallen and a full moon was climbing into the sky behind the distant cathedral tower. They stopped for tea at a mobile café in a lay-by. Humph swung his door open to take in the night air, but Dryden sat on a plastic chair set up on the verge, watching the car lights strung out across the landscape. The tea was acrid and stewed, the taste further marred by the stringent smell of exhaust gas in the air.

  He thought about St Swithun’s, its tower silhouetted against the setting sun that last night. In the New Ferry Inn the free beer was flowing, while in the nave of the church Kathryn Neate struggled with her grief. And George Tudor, leaving home in St Swithun’s Cottages below the allotments, climbing the hill to take his place beside the child’s grave. He was Kathryn’s cousin after all, nobody could have disputed his right to be at Jude’s funeral. But why had he not been there at the start? Why the theatrical entry, the pointed solidarity?

  What had really happened when they all got back to Neate’s Garage? Had they turned on George Tudor then and made him pay with his life for giving Kathryn a son? But the scene Fred Lake had described in the Neates’ kitchen that evening didn’t sound like the prelude to murder. Something else had happened to prompt the killing and he needed a clear view of that evening from outside the family ring to see what it was.

  He walked to the cab and got the OS map for the eastern fens, tracking a route across country to Sedge Fen and Paul Cobley’s cottage. Fortified by a double hot dog, Humph agreed to the diversion, leaving the main road at Mildenhall and skirting the floodlit runways of the US base before the cab emerged into open country beyond, the distant lights of cottages and farmhouses studding the night, lightless now that the moon had risen to be obscured by rain clouds.

  Sedge Fen was a hamlet flung across both banks of the Little Ouse. At its heart was a now abandoned industrial site, a miniature Manhattan of silos and storage warehouses which had once provided grain, potatoes and salad crops for the London market. A grubbed-up railway line ran across the open fields. A signpost directed Humph to Sedge Fen Methodist Church, a wooden ark next to a modern bungalow from which light flooded out onto a large American car. Dryden knocked and a woman with perfect teeth and big hair knew the way. ‘End of the lane, turn right – ’bout a mile. There’s just two cottages. They’re in the one with the new windows. They’ve got a flashy BMW, and a van, but we’ve seen neither for a week. They go on holiday a lot – for the tan. You a friend?’ she asked, and Dryden, who didn’t bother to answer, could see that she was trying to stop the smile turning into a sneer.

  The drove ended at the cottages: the deadest of dead ends. The houses stood in darkness but as Dryden got out of the cab the downstairs lights in one came on. He walked up the short drive, stamping on the gravel, trying to flush out any dogs, but nothing moved. The lights were on in the modernized house so he went to the door and knocked loudly, listening to the echo bounce back off a brick barn half a mile away. A dog barked then, but to the north, where a security light lit the foot of a pylon.

  He stepped to the side and looked in at the front room. The overhead light was on and so was the TV, although the sound was down. He worked his way down the side of the house through a gate to the kitchen door. Inside he could hear a radio playing and the light over the hob was on.

  There was a custom-built wooden studio in the garden, beside the double garage, and through the window Dryden could see two computer work stations with flat screens big enough for design and make-up. The lights, which had been on, flicked off. On the door was a company logo and sign: DesignSolutions.

  The studio lights flicked back on. ‘Time switches,’ said Dryden, and went back to the car. ‘Looks like they’re away, like the woman said,’ he told Humph as the cab trundled a three-point turn. Dryden watched the lights in the rear-view mirror, so that he almost missed the post box a hundred yards down the lane where there was a lay-by for the van to park up.

  ‘Hold on,’ he jumped out and flipped up the unlocked cover to reveal a bundle of letters which he took back to the cab and examined by the vanity light.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Humph. ‘And you reckon estate agents have no moral compass?’

&nbs
p; There were some utility bills marked for Mr P. R. Cobley and Mr M. James, and what felt like some brochures and freesheets for the ‘occupiers’. But there was one package, in a jiffy bag, marked for Cobley & James and stamped PHOTO POST.

  ‘Look the other way,’ he said to Humph, and ripped it open. It was a set of holiday snaps, Dryden guessed Greece. Paul Cobley was in most, pictured in cafés, bars and neck deep in a blue pool. But there was one of them both, slightly off-kilter so Dryden guessed it had been taken with a timer, kneeling in the sand. Dryden recognized Cobley’s partner immediately and there were several things he didn’t know about him: he didn’t know what he’d been doing with his life for the seventeen years since he’d left Jude’s Ferry, he didn’t know how he’d earned his living, he didn’t know how many times he’d been in love. But he knew one thing. He had a twin brother.

  31

  They saw the fairy lights on the pub as soon as they turned off the main road half an hour later – shuffling white and red bulbs neatly outlining the building. But the car park was nearly empty now that darkness had driven the evening trade home, or back to the boats. When Humph killed the engine they could hear a party somewhere out on the water amongst the floating gin palaces, the clash of glasses punctuated by overloud voices.

  Dryden left Humph enjoying a nightcap from the glove compartment and found Woodruffe in the bar reading the Licensed Victualler. A barmaid moved to serve Dryden but Woodruffe waved her back, pulling the reporter a pint and then helping himself to a large whisky delivered direct into the pottery mug.

  Dryden looked around. There were half a dozen customers at one table and two teenagers at the bar talking about Top Gear. Woodruffe’s hands, trained by a lifetime behind the bar, effortlessly rearranged the bar towels and respaced a row of glass ashtrays.

  ‘I’ve just been out to Lowestoft for the day,’ said Dryden, dropping his voice to conspiratorial. ‘Had a chat with one of your mother’s old friends; a close friend actually. That’s the thing about old age, it loosens the tongue, sweeps away inhibitions.’

  Woodruffe walked to the barmaid, slipping a hand around her narrow waist, whispering in her ear. It was an intimate gesture and Dryden looked away. The publican flipped up the bar top and led the way to the patio doors which opened onto the riverside. There was a short jetty here for cruisers to use during the day. They walked to the end and Woodruffe stood at the rail, sipping his drink, his back to the water. The night was silent but for the ducks in the reeds and the rumble of generators from the cruisers moored on the bank.

  ‘You dug the grave for her, didn’t you?’ said Dryden, looking downriver towards the cathedral. ‘In the cellar.’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ A denial without enthusiasm, Dryden sensed that Woodruffe was already aware how weak it sounded.

  ‘Right. Spain always a favourite holiday spot, was it? That’s when you started smoking Ducados? When’d you give up? The day you read about the forensic evidence they’d found in the cellar?’

  Woodruffe shook his head. ‘This is crap.’ He turned round, looking out into the night. On the far side of the river a flock of birds rose off the distant fen and crossed the moon.

  ‘But they’ve asked for a DNA check, haven’t they – so they’ll know soon. They’ll match you with the stub. That puts you in the cellar digging the grave. What was it going to be: pills? A pillow over the face?’

  Woodruffe looked away but in the darkness Dryden could see the moonlight reflecting off the tears.

  ‘You’d promised her, promised that if it came to it you’d end her life there, in Jude’s Ferry, to save her the pain, and to give her the peace she wanted. So you got it all ready – the grave in the cellar, the concealed trapdoor, the booking at the Esplanade in case anyone asked where Ellen was going. You’d always planned to cancel it. But then you lost your nerve. What was Spain – a holiday to buy her off?’

  He tried to gulp the whisky but fumbled with the mug so that it fell into the river without a splash.

  ‘I bought a bar, back in the eighties. Sitges, down the coast. I’d always planned a long break and I said she should come too. I’d arranged nursing care, everything. If we liked it we could stay, flog the licence on this place.’

  He bowed his head. ‘But she wanted me to end it for her, then, at the Ferry. Her whole life had been in that village, she was born down along The Dring, moved to the pub when she married Dad, I was born there. It’s like the place was part of her, like a limb. She used to say she could close her eyes and see it all, every door, every tree, and all the people who’d been there, even the ones who were dead.

  ‘But I couldn’t kill her. That’s what it is, even if she said it wasn’t. When I told her about Spain she cried all night, begged me to end it. She said that Dad would have done it for her, which I guess was true. Next day she started packing, and we never mentioned it again.’

  He held a hand wet with sweat to his forehead. ‘And it was a new life, a new life for me. Mum had her own flat and everything, a balcony, the sea near by, the nurse was good, the doctors. I said she could stay and I’d come out every month, see her, check on the bar. Winters it wasn’t too hot, I said she’d get used to it; she said she couldn’t take the pain, that she was just sick of living really and why didn’t she just go home, see England again. She said if I wanted a new life why didn’t I just stay in Spain.’

  He knelt on the boards, fishing with his right hand in the dark green water for the mug. Then he stood, black strands of weed curled round his elbow.

  ‘So you came back,’ echoed Dryden. ‘And the years went by and nobody found the Skeleton Man. But the police aren’t going to stop asking questions, are they? Not if it is your DNA on that butt. And they’re gonna keep asking you. They need to find out who killed George Tudor. Perhaps they think you helped. Kathryn was your cousin, if the family turned on George they’d expect you to back them up, right?’

  Woodruffe wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, his eyes on Dryden. ‘Paper said they think Mark Smith killed his brother. They fought that night, we saw them out in the yard at the Ferry. It’s Matthew in the cellar – got to be.’

  ‘Bad news,’ said Dryden. ‘Matthew James Smith is alive and well and living with Paul Cobley – he’s changed his name – fixed himself up with a new life. They run a business out on the Fen – by the looks of it pretty successfully. One Greek holiday this year already – my guess is they’re just on another. To use a quaint term, they’re an item. But my guess is you knew that. That was what that argument was really about, wasn’t it? Mark wanted to set up a business with his brother but his brother had a better offer. Dirty linen in public, never a pretty sight.’

  Dryden could see Woodruffe calculating. ‘It’s not George Tudor,’ he said. ‘I talked to Georgie by phone three days ago. He’s running a smallholding in the Swan Valley near Perth, Western Australia. Three hundred sheep, a grove of olive trees and a vineyard. Sounds like paradise.’

  Dryden was thinking fast. ‘Why’d you ring him?’

  ‘We kept in touch.’

  ‘You told him what we’d found in the cellar, didn’t you? Why did he need to know that, Ken? There was a murder in that cellar and you’re shaping up as one of the main suspects. You need to tell the truth, and you need to tell it quickly. The police are gonna put you in that cellar – your cellar. And they’re going to ask questions, questions like did you provide the rope as well.’

  Woodruffe’s head jerked up and Dryden saw for the first time the desperation he’d been hiding. The publican sank down to the wooden planking and sat, cradling his knees. ‘I didn’t go down. The others did but I didn’t.’

  Dryden fished in his pockets for a packet of Gauloise and offered one. Woodruffe took it with a steady hand, the prospect of confession calming his nerves.

  ‘They’re not George Tudor’s bones,’ he said, his throat full of fluid. ‘They’re Peter Tholy’s. George was six foot, a carthorse. That sound right to you?
’

  Dryden tried to put the jigsaw back together, trying to picture the frail boy with learning difficulties Elizabeth Drew had described. ‘But Peter Tholy went to Australia – Fremantle,’ he said. ‘He sends cards back to Fred Lake, he visits his local church. Why would he end up on the end of that rope – he wasn’t a danger to anyone.’

  Dryden took a step closer and saw that Woodruffe was still sweating in the moonlight. Under the jetty the river glugged and the cool stench of rotting weed was heady.

  Woodruffe put the cigarette between his lips and hid his hands. ‘Peter Tholy killed Kathryn Neate because she wouldn’t go with him to Australia.’

  Dryden sucked in some night air. ‘You’re saying Kathryn Neate was murdered?’

  Woodruffe nodded, chin down.

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ interrupted Dryden, struggling to take it in. ‘It was George Tudor who wanted Kathryn to go with him to Australia. Peter Tholy just made up the party – because George looked after him.’

  Woodruffe shook his head, exasperated. ‘Sure, George wanted Kathryn to go with him, because he wanted her to have a life away from the Neates. But it was Peter that wanted to love her, wanted her as a wife. George went back to Neate’s Garage that night to plead for Peter. George was like a big brother to that kid, always had been since school. George likes to protect people – he tried to protect Kathryn, for her mother’s sake. Christ, she needed it. She’d never really grown up. After Marion died she went back in her shell and Walter didn’t help, couldn’t help. He couldn’t look at her sometimes, it was like Marion had come back to life.’ Woodruffe raked in some more night air. ‘And Jimmy isn’t the type to give someone a shoulder to cry on. So she didn’t really have anyone. But she was beautiful, and I don’t think she understood, you know…’ He looked at Dryden. ‘What they were after. She was too lonely to keep them away.’