The Skeleton Man

The bar was cool and smelled of rotting wood. A large frosted window, engraved with the words ‘The New Ferry Inn’ had remarkably survived the years and the army’s wayward shells. Beyond it the village filled with the sound of running water. The room itself was half panelled in wood to a height of about five feet. Someone had sprayed TROOPS OUT with a can on one wall – further evidence that Jude’s Ferry had been visited over the years since the evacuation by more than troops in training. Movable furniture had been shipped out but a built-in settle ran round the room. A large brick fireplace was empty except for the featherweight corpse of a rook. On the wall the only picture left was of the England football team covered in mimeographed signatures. Dryden noted the date: January 1990. In the dartboard a single dart stuck out of double-tops, and a tin ashtray on the mantelpiece held a single piece of chalk and what looked like rat droppings. The scorer’s blackboard held two words, scrawled in chalk: GAME OVER.

If you strained against the silence, Dryden thought, you could almost hear it: the sound of that last night; the last bell, an ironic cheer perhaps, the drunken voices, hoarse with drink and nicotine. And tears in a corner, ignored.

‘Military police will be here in twenty minutes,’ said Broderick. ‘There’s a chopper coming in – God knows why, but if you’ve got a big toy why not play with it? They’re off to Basra next month, so I guess they need the practice, poor bastards. CID at Lynn’s been notified,’ he said.

With the police notified Dryden knew now that the story was only his for a few hours before the rest of the media picked it up. His own paper didn’t come out for another two days and he’d been forced to leave his mobile at the firing-range gatehouse. It looked like he’d got a scoop, but no paper to run it in. Not for the first time he cursed the frustrations of working on weekly newspapers.

‘When they get here you should mention the church. Someone’s been in recently – a hole’s been dug by one of the tombs.’

‘Grave robbers?’ asked Broderick.

‘Perhaps. Everyone knew that there was no shelling while the court case was being heard. So it wasn’t a bad time to make a visit – there was a good chance the villagers weren’t coming back, so perhaps they thought no one would care. But it’s not the first time – there are signs of vandalism. You must have seen them too?

‘I need to get to a phone,’ he said when the major didn’t answer. ‘Any chance?’

‘I can patch in a call to your mate in the cab – get him back early.’

‘Thanks. That’s a big help.’ Dryden planned to call the local radio station and see if he could get on air with the story, making sure his paper got credit, and promising a full version in the Tuesday edition. It was the only way he was going to get anything out of the story before it broke for the competition.

He took a deep breath, wishing he had a pint in his hand. ‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘Suicide, right?’

Broderick’s soft face creased in a frown. ‘I guess. Hands are bound, but in front, which she could have done herself to prevent a reflex attempt to loosen the noose. Feet are unbound, so she could have just stood on the stool, and then stepped off and kicked it away.’

‘She? No doubts about that?’

Broderick shrugged. ‘Well, we know there was a missing woman. You can’t tell much from the bones until they get them in the lab, but anything’s better than calling her it…’ He’d removed the heather from his tunic and turned the silver-paper bouquet in his hand, placing it carefully on the map.

‘That call?’ prompted Dryden.

‘Sure,’ said Broderick, turning away to use a mobile.

Dryden took out the map Broderick had given him and spread it on the bar top. When the major returned he tapped his finger on the outhouses next to the New Ferry Inn.

‘There’s no cellar shown,’ he said.

Broderick studied the plan carefully. ‘Well that can’t be right – a lot of time and effort went into making these things. They’re based on a series of surveys taken in the three months after the final evacuation – and on questionnaires the villagers had to fill in.’

‘So that’s kind of weird, isn’t it?’ said Dryden. ‘Not only did the cellar not crop up on the questionnaire, the engineers missed it when the surveys were done after the evacuation. Whereas the cellar under the pub is clearly marked,’ he said, stamping his foot on the bare floorboards.

Dryden looked at the key to the map and the legend which carried the name Col. Flanders May.

‘Who’s Flanders May?’ he asked.

‘CO for the engineers, the map-makers. That’s why it was a work of art. Perfectionist – but then even they make mistakes, right?’

They heard the thwup-thwup of the approaching helicopter and stepped outside.

Dryden looked up into the falling rain, watching the black underbelly of the helicopter emerge from the grey cloud base.

‘The questionnaires – they still in the records?’ asked Dryden.

But Broderick pointed at his ears as the rotors screamed over their heads.

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