The Skeleton Man

by Jim Kelly

  Valentine wondered if that was Peter Shaw’s idea of a joke. He dabbed his nose, the physical need for nicotine almost tangible. He’d had a sense of humour once, but he was tired of being laughed at, even if most people didn’t do it to his face.

  Out at sea the sandbanks had all gone but Shaw could just see the cockle-pickers’ boats in the purple gloom of the sunset, rising and falling on the swell. Valentine looked inland, along the curve of the high water mark. ‘There,’ he said, taking a bare hand reluctantly from his coat pocket.

  A yellow metal oil drum, on its side now, rolling in with the waves.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Shaw, already jogging; a compact, nearly effortless canter. He got there a minute before Valentine, the older man’s arthritic amble making his sallow skin redden alarmingly.

  The lid of the drum was rusted and crinkled so that the contents had begun to seep out. From six foot you could smell it, the edge of ammonia almost corrosive. The liquid spilling down the side was Day-Glo green, the paint of the drum blistering on contact.

  ‘Get the coastguard. The boat could be out there – and they’ll have dumped others,’ ordered Shaw.

  Six weeks earlier three drums had come ashore on Vinegar Middle, a sandbank just off the coast near Castle Rising. Shaw had been on the early shift at St James’s Police HQ in Lynn – his daughter Francesca played on the beach sometimes, so he’d taken a parental interest. Plus he’d been out on the lifeboat that week, searching the creeks for the toxic drums, so he knew what he was after. When he got down on the beach there was a five-year-old poking a stick into the top of the drum where it had ruptured.

  Shaw had told her to drop the stick but he couldn’t keep the urgency out of his voice, the note of command. Reading a child’s face wasn’t a textbook exercise. He’d spotted the sudden fear, but missed the anger. The kid didn’t like being told what to do, so she’d waved the stick in Shaw’s face as he’d grabbed her, pulling her clear of the liquid pooling at her feet. She hadn’t meant to do it, but the single thrust as Shaw bent down had caught him in the eye.

  He touched the dressing, moving it slightly to relieve the pressure. The chemical had proved a mystery: an unstable mix of residual sulphuric and nitric acid, the by-products of some poorly monitored manufacturing process. A ‘class eight’ substance: highly corrosive, with a ferocious ability to attack epithelial tissue. Skin.

  Shaw had checked out the costs of legal disposal through a landfill site: nearly £200 a barrel, plus a carriage charge of half as much again. Far better to get a trawler skipper to dump the drums at dusk. Most had probably sunk, but some had air trapped beneath the lid, making them float in and out of the coastal creeks with the tides.

  ‘And call St James’s,’ said Shaw, wondering if George Valentine ever did anything without being prompted. ‘They need to get a chemical team out to make this safe and get it off the beach. We better stay till they get here. Give them the grid reference.’ Shaw read out the numbers from his handheld GPS.

  As Valentine worked on the radio Shaw squatted down, picking up ten butter-yellow limpet shells and placing them in a line on the sand. ‘We could do with a fire,’ he said, out loud. The breeze was dropping; a frost in the air now that night was falling.

  He imagined the brief dusk, the fire on the high water mark, and felt good. Pocketing the shells he began collecting flotsam, a beer crate, a few lumps of bog oak, the dried-out husk of a copy of the Telegraph, then turned with his arms full.

  Which is when he saw something else in the waves. The beach shelved gently out to sea on Ingol Beach, so even though it was a hundred yards away it was already catching the bottom, buckling slightly, flexing in the white water. An inflatable raft, a child’s summer plaything in Disney colours. Shaw stood for a few seconds watching it inch ashore. Thirty yards out it ran aground, snagged.

  Valentine watched his DI pulling off his boots and socks. ‘Jesus,’ he thought, looking around, hoping they were still alone, hoping most of all that he’d stop at the socks. When he’d come back to St James’s he’d asked around, knowing Peter Shaw was back on the force. At the wedding he’d been Jack Shaw’s best man. So he’d seen his only son grow up, in fact he was pretty sure he’d changed his nappy. The last time he’d seen him had been at Jack Shaw’s funeral, a twenty-one-year-old fresh out of police college. So he’d tried to get an update, the word amongst the ranks. And he’d discovered three things he thought he wouldn’t like: the crisp white ironed shirt (always tie-less), the smart-arsed degree, and a reputation for checking everything: twice.

  Now, as he watched him wading out, he could add the fact that he was one of those bushy-tailed outdoor types. It wouldn’t take him long to dislike that.

  Shaw waded on, the jolt of the icy water almost electric, making his bones ache. A wave splashed up into his trousers but he pushed forwards, lifting his feet like a moonwalker.

  There was something in the raft, something that didn’t respond to the shuffle and bump of the waves. A dead weight. When he saw the hands – both bare – and the feet, in light trainers swollen with sea water, he knew it was the body of a man: the black hair on the hands, a chunky signet ring. He felt his pulse suddenly thump in his ears as his body reacted to the sight of death. He felt the atavistic urge to flee, to run from danger. And there was the sensation that time had stopped, as if he’d been caught in the middle of an accident, unfurling around him in agonizingly slow motion.

  He forced himself to observe; to step out of the scene.

  Dead: but for how long? Less than forty-eight hours. The arms and legs were askew, locked in ugly angles, so rigor had yet to pass.

  He put a hand on the side of the raft to steady it, his fingers gripping a raised handle at the prow. Jeans, a T-shirt, a heavy fur-lined jacket only half on, leaving one arm free. The limb was thick, knotted with muscle, the hidden shoulder broad. He avoided looking at the face. In the bottom of the boat there was an inch of swilling bloody seawater.

  Valentine met him on the dry sand, and they pulled the raft round so that what was left of the sunset caught the dead man’s head; unavoidable now, lifeless, despite the movement of the waves. The face: Peter Shaw’s passion, the unique balance and im balance of features; as individual as a fingerprint. He noted the bloated, profound pallor, like cold fat, with an almost iridescent tinge of blue and green. A young man, stubble on the chin, the eyes half-open but flat, lightless, one eye closed down further than the other. The muscles beneath defined the skin, like the surface of a piece of beaten metal. But it was the mouth that drew the eye. The lips, uneven lines, were peeled back from the teeth, which were smeared with blood.

  ‘Shit,’ said Valentine, turning, taking three steps and vomiting into the sand. He came back, dabbing at his lips. ‘Sight of blood,’ he said, avoiding Shaw’s eyes.

  Shaw tried to reanimate the face in his mind as he’d been trained to do. He tightened up the jaw, balanced the eyes, replaced the graceful bow of the lips. Not a cerebral face, a muscular face.

  It was Valentine who first saw the mark on the arm. The sea water had washed it clean and so it bled no more, but there was no mistaking the shape: a bite, a human bite, the teeth puncturing the skin deeply, viciously driving into the sinew and muscle, almost meeting in a crisp double incision.