The Skeleton Man

The cellar, uncorked like a buried bottle, gave off the stale breath of the years. While a military radio crackled with traffic they stood silently in a circle and Dryden tried to make himself memorize the scene, stilling the urge to ascend into the light.

The floor and three walls were old brick and lime, the fourth obscured by stacks of bottle crates. In one corner was a packing case of pint glasses, the top layer lying on newspaper, damp and yellow. By the far wall, opposite the stone steps, was a cupboard, doorless, the shelves within stacked with paint tins, tubes of various DIY kit, brushes stiff with dried turps sticking out of jam jars. Cobwebs hung in tresses to the floor and from the rough brickwork of the walls. The webs shimmered slightly, catching the light, as spiders dashed for the safety of the shadows in the rafters above.

Close to the centre of the room were the shattered remains of a child’s high stool, one leg broken away, small pale-yellow teddy bears still just visible painted on the wood. Stacked with the beer crates were some other cast-offs from a child’s nursery: a changing mat in plastic almost completely rotted, a wicker Moses basket, a set of wooden bowling pins, a small child’s dresser, painted to match the broken high stool.

The corpse sat now, the descent to ground having driven the shattered spine down into the rest of the bones like a javelin so that the torso remained vertical, the head back, revealing the bones of the neck and the hollow underside of the jaw. Defying gravity, the skeleton seemed to demand one last chance to bear witness. Dryden could see now that the corpse had been reduced almost completely to bone, just a few shreds of tendon and cartilage remaining, and that the threadbare clothes had been all that had held it together in the still air of the cellar. Dryden tried to imagine the years of darkness it had spent in the breathless tomb.

But now light filtered and spilled in from above as the sound of the hail subsided. Reflections of the skeleton filled the black water.

Broderick stepped forward and examined the twine that had tied the wrists together in front of the body.

‘I wouldn’t touch anything,’ said Dryden.

Broderick stood, thinking. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave it. The military police will be here soon enough.’ The soldiers filed up the stairs towards the light.

Dryden circled the skeleton before leaving, noting the legs splayed within the rotting cloth. The rags gave no clue to the sex; the build was perhaps slight for a man, average for a woman, but it was difficult to judge from the jumble of bones.

‘Looks like a woman,’ said Broderick, reading his mind from the top of the steps.

Something stirred in Dryden’s memory. ‘Wasn’t there a woman who went missing after the evacuation? Didn’t she keep the shop and the post office – Palmer’s, along The Dring?’

Broderick sat on the step. ‘Yup. Magda Hollings-worth. She’d have been sixty-three in 1990. It could be her. She’d been depressed, but there was no note, no last goodbye. She just wasn’t there any more.’

‘That’s a good memory…’

Broderick dusted his palms together. ‘Press office at the Army Desk sent me the cuttings on the evacuation – just in case you asked any awkward questions. The story was in there. They searched the village a couple of times – delayed the first shelling by a week or more. But they never found the body and she never turned up, no sightings at all. And she was not the kind of woman who’d have blended in. Romany family; Hungarian, I think. Not exactly a conformist by all accounts…’

‘Although she was the postmistress, that’s hardly eccentric.’

Broderick shrugged. ‘Anyway, some people suggested she’d cracked up under the strain of the evacuation and had gone back on the road. Joined the travellers. It kinda makes sense, or at least it did at the time.’

Dryden followed him up into the abandoned bar of the New Ferry Inn. The story of Magda Hollingsworth was a sad coda to the drama of those last days in Jude’s Ferry. Her family hadn’t reported her missing until after the evacuation and by then the media circus had moved on. There was little interest in the fate of the missing woman even locally, especially as the presumption was she’d taken her own life after a bout of depression, suicide note or no suicide note.