The Skeleton Man

Neate looked out again. ‘Go, or you’ll die,’ he said, and Dryden knew then that he hadn’t told the whole truth, that he was going to let that perish with him on Telegraph Hill. ‘It might as well end here,’ said Neate, not turning away from the light.

Dryden dropped swiftly down the flights of stairs out into the now brilliant sunshine.

He stood for a second considering his options. A thick pall of smoke rose from the old factory, drifting low over the village towards the church. He ran west and then down the hill to The Dring, turning north along the old Whittlesea Road. When he got to the cattery where the Smith girl had worked he cut off the road into the open fields, finding a low ditch to take cover. Looking back he was in time to see a gout of black earth springing up from a spark of red flame just thirty feet from the old water tower, then came the percussion, the thud felt through the earth. The second shell found its mark, punching a hole beside one of the windows on the second floor and exploding within the room. The blast blew all the remaining windows out and smoke, like milk, filled the interior. The third shell fell into the roof and Dryden heard the unmistakable scream of steel being twisted out of shape, and the hiss of water falling down through the burning rooms below.

Wednesday, 1 August

41

They let the villagers back one last time to bury the bones of Kathryn Neate and her son Jude. Crowded into St Swithun’s they could hear the rain which still fell on the grey stones of the graveyard. At the lych-gate a gaggle of press photographers held a line set down by the police, shutters whirring. And over Whittlesea Mere a single tenor bell rang out sixteen times for Kathryn, once for her son, the ringers struggling with the rotten ropes and the falling dust in the bell chamber.

Inside, the villagers edged forward down the nave, past the rows of plastic seats, seeing in each other’s faces the joy and despair which had filled the years they’d been away from Jude’s Ferry, the years in which Peter Tholy’s bones had hung in the lightless cellar. Dryden sat on a stone bench by the ossuary watching them, Humph beside him, tiny hands held in a prayer over his stomach.

Matthew Smith and Paul Cobley stood together, pale beneath their summer tans, their shoulders close but never touching. Jan Cobley was with them, alone, trying to be proud of the son who had torn her family apart. Smith’s twin, Mark, stood with his wife on the other side of the nave, a lifetime apart from his brother, his eyes set on the remains of the stained-glass figure of St Swithun above the altar in the east window. And Ken Woodruffe held back, in the side aisle near the Peyton tomb, an uncertain hand pushing his thin hair over his skull, nodding to those who were prepared to acknowledge him.

And then the Reverend Fred Lake climbed the charred pulpit and looked down on the two coffins set on trestles in the nave, below the patched hole in the roof punched out by the stray artillery shell.

‘Let us pray,’ he said, and what was left of Jude’s Ferry fell to its knees.

Dryden, suddenly suffocated by a sense of being too close to a past he no longer wished to share, slipped out through the warped oak doors into the rain. The press had retreated beneath a sycamore where they huddled under umbrellas, waiting for the service to end. Laughter, barely suppressed, rippled through the group. Dryden recognized faces, a few from his Fleet Street past, and felt uneasy again, finding himself part of the story. The gruesome death of Jason Imber on the perimeter wire of the range, the identification of the bones of Kathryn Neate and the suicide of her brother had been enough to bring the Fleet Street pack to Whittlesea Mere; they had a few facts, but as yet no story to link them all together.

DI Shaw stood by his black Land Rover, a white shirt open at the neck, enjoying the cool rain. On the dashboard Dryden glimpsed a row of seashells and a package, rolled roughly in newspaper. A brace of sea rods was bound expertly to the roof rack, ready for a trip.

‘The beach?’ asked Dryden.

Shaw nodded. ‘A few days off.’ He looked towards the church. ‘I came to talk to Ruth Lisle,’ he said. They moved into the lee of the tower out of the wind, looking down on the village, monochrome in the flat afternoon light.

‘They’re all inside,’ said Dryden. ‘Why Ruth?’

DI Shaw looked towards Telegraph Hill. ‘The shelling punctured the tank in the water tower. It took some time but the 600 gallons finally seeped out this morning. There were some bones at the bottom, human bones, weighted with stones in an overcoat pocket. It’s difficult to say, but there was a silver anklet above the right foot.’