The Skeleton Man

‘No. I was a rural officer for the county council, and it was my job to keep communities like this alive. So,’ she laughed, ‘I know I may be biased. I’m not saying it wasn’t a struggle and the beet factory closing was a dreadful blow but there were plans for the future – growing flowers was a developing local niche market, and the RSPB was interested in a reserve, the river could have been dredged for pleasure boats, the shop was thriving really. We had this group, which I ran, which tried to encourage enterprise – we got all the school leavers together, for example; there were start-up funds for small businesses, free skills training, a mentoring scheme. I know it wasn’t an idyllic thatched village, but what you couldn’t see was really special, you know – there was a community there, and I said then that once you cut the ties between the people and the place where they’d lived all their lives, then those networks, those ties, would be gone, gone for ever; and that’s what’s happened, hasn’t it? And now they’ve found this poor woman. And what’s it all been for? I –?’

‘I guess some people would say we can all sleep easier in our beds knowing the army’s well trained,’ offered Diprose, cutting in.

‘Well I can’t,’ she said bluntly. ‘What’s the point of going half-way round the world to defend freedom when we do this kind of thing on our own doorstep?’

Diprose moved quickly on, reading out a few e-mails, most in support of the army. Finally he wrapped Dryden back into the item. ‘So what was Jude’s Ferry really like, Philip? Paint us a picture.’

Dryden hugged his knees, beginning to feel the cramped space in the passenger seat. ‘Jude’s Ferry? You could argue the Fens are full of places like it. Lonely, forgotten, one-horse towns. That last day there were just fifty people left – something like that anyway. A pub, a shop and post office, a garage, a taxi firm, a redundant factory, a wharf that hadn’t seen a cargo in sixty years. And a church, of course. It was fifteen miles to anywhere else, and there was hardly any through traffic.’

Diprose cut an imaginary line across his throat with his pen.

‘But it was famous for two things, Jason,’ said Dryden, expertly taking his cue to wrap up. ‘Your listeners will no doubt correct me but… I think you’ll find the village was originally called Nornea. The name changed sometime in the sixteenth century to Jude’s Ferry – a reference to the man who bought the ferry over the new drain and started charging villagers a stiff price for the crossing. Jude’s a derivation of Judas, of course – so it was all about betrayal. That’s the story anyway.’

They laughed. ‘And the other thing it’s famous for?’ asked Diprose.

‘The claim was made – and it’s difficult to test this one out – but the claim was made that in its thousand-year history the village boasted not a single recorded crime. But that may change, of course.’

‘Sounds idyllic,’ said Diprose.

‘Sounds like they never got caught,’ said Dryden.

6

When the rain cleared, the landscape was crisp and clear, the distant silhouette of Ely cathedral a pinsharp medieval model on a toy horizon. They drove towards it through a mathematical landscape of right angles, ditches, drove roads and flood banks, intersecting with unnatural precision. The Capri echoed to the sound of Faroese, Humph’s latest eccentric choice of European language tape; a Nordic tongue which offered the comforting certainty of being totally redundant in the middle of the English Fens.

Dryden wound down the window and took in the intoxicating freshness of the black peat, soaked with the sudden downpour. He considered the hanging skeleton in the cellar. An impromptu radio interview had not been the place to mention Flanders May’s map and the implication that whoever had owned the outbuildings next to the New Ferry Inn in 1990 had failed to indicate that the building had a cellar. It suggested, at the very least, the possibility of premeditation, and even collusion. Dryden presumed that the outbuildings were part of the complex of buildings linked to the village pub – and he wondered how long it would take CID to track down the licensee, presumably the young man Dryden had seen on the doorstep that last morning in the village.

And then there was that partly open grave…

The drove road brought them into town through a line of pre-war semis and a play park, the sun glinting now off the water pooled under the swings and slide, a woman smoking on a bench as a single child clambered over a wooden fire engine. Half a mile later they were in the town centre, the sudden sunshine throwing the shadow of the cathedral half-way across Market Square. A pair of seagulls splashed in a wide puddle, rocking a floating ice lolly wrapper.