The Skeleton Man

At the open doors of St Swithun’s he stopped, aware now that he was close enough to be heard if he stumbled, and unable to push aside the image of what he now assumed was Jason Imber’s corpse, the smoke still drifting from the charred clothes he had stolen from the orderlies’ room at the hospital. He waited a full minute, listening, and then edged away into the churchyard. He moved from buttress to buttress until he was beside the window the army had blown out just a week earlier. The rain had already buckled the chipboard so that he could see through a gap into the church. Directly opposite in the far wall was the small Victorian door to the ossuary Fred Lake had described. From within came the sudden, violent sound of wood being wrenched, rusted nails finally breaking free. Dryden stood, waiting, compelling himself to remain still despite an overwhelming need to know why this small child’s bones had meant so much.

Then the door swung open and he saw Jimmy Neate surrounded by bones, blood spattered on his overalls. At his feet the small coffin lay, shattered now. The far wall of the ossuary was covered in rough shelves, once white-washed, now grey with dust. Skulls filled them, and in the apex of the roof were stacked to the rafters. The floor, but for a narrow stone path, was made up of skeleton bones, thigh bones emerging from shattered ribs and a dusty weathered compost of medieval fingers.

Jimmy Neate looked about him, surveying his work. He picked up the shards of wood, stepped unsteadily outside and through the little Gothic door, and then closed it firmly. The sun, as pale as butter, glinted on the old key as he turned the lock, and Dryden remembered that Walter Neate had been sexton at St Swithun’s for forty years. Neate didn’t look back, walking quickly down the nave carrying the coffin and lid, awkwardly now, like lumber. Dryden waited until he’d left the graveyard and saw that he’d dumped the wood, probably amongst the rubble and burnt roof timbers the army had collected in a skip by the lychgate.

Then, overhead, in the blue sky, which was being stretched clear and pale as the mist fled, he saw the purple scar like a synapse, then heard the dull percussion of the maroon. A warning – the bombardment postponed was to begin at last. Dryden guessed they had five minutes, perhaps less. He saw Neate stop, watching the signal fade in the breeze, and then bow his head, holding the wound, before changing direction, doubling back around the graveyard wall towards the old water tower on Telegraph Hill, keeping below the skyline.

Dryden gave him two minutes and followed, and as he ran across the open grass he looked up and saw the red target flag flying from the pole at the top of the tower, above the whitewashed wooden dovecote. The door of the three-storey brick tower stood open and stepping inside Dryden heard footsteps ascending a metal ladder somewhere above. The room he was in was twenty-five-feet square and had once held a diesel pump for the village’s drinking water. A small modern electric pump stood in its place, dusty and unused now that the army had its own supply to tackle fires after each bombardment. In one corner pipes ran in and out of the brick walls, and then upwards to the tank above. Equipment, mothballed now, stood against one wall for testing water quality. Four large elegant windows flooded the room with light. Against one wall was an open metal stairway with handrail, and Dryden climbed it, waiting for the moment when his eyes rose level with the second-storey room. This was empty too, littered with the tiny dry carcasses of thousands of greenfly born into the fetid, damp, atmosphere of the enclosed tower. He climbed again, a shorter flight this time, to another empty room; but not quite: at its centre was a single metal twisting staircase rising, enclosed in circular safety bars, up through a circular shaft in the middle of the black metal tank above.

A footfall, perhaps above.

Dryden considered his options, sensing the weight and mass of the dark water above his head. He could slip away. He knew now where Jimmy Neate had hidden the bones of his sister’s child. But why? Had he murdered Jason Imber? His own sister too? And why now was he seeking death, beneath the crimson red target flag?

How long since the maroon? Three minutes perhaps, more. He took a step back, preparing to climb down to the safety of the earth.

But the voice was behind him, not above.

‘Dryden.’ Jimmy Neate stood by the top of the stairs, the light from one of the windows leaving half his face in shadow. The other half was caked in blood, and where the wound was deepest, the light glistened on exposed flesh and a hint of shattered bone beneath. Outside, through the frosted glass, they could just see the distant shape of the church.

‘You followed me here?’ said Neate, and the effort made his knees buckle so that he had to lean against the wall.