The Skeleton Man

They dropped down Fore Hill, Dryden drinking in the distant view across the lazy river to a blue horizon as straight as a spirit level. On Waterside holidaymakers were beginning to appear on the decks of the white boats moored by the bank. Wine bottles long uncorked, they emerged blinking into the late-afternoon sunlight.

Humph dropped him by the town bridge and drove off without a word, concentrating with unnatural excitement on repeating the Faroese for a wide range of chocolate puddings.

Dryden began to walk the towpath south. He flicked open his mobile and did a quick round of calls, the schedule of numbers already logged into the phone’s memory. His position as chief reporter brought with it a modest set of duties, in return for which he received an even more modest salary, currently one sixth of that he’d drawn during a Fleet Street career which had spanned a decade. So, twice a day, every day, and three times on press days, Dryden made the ritual round of telephone calls: county police, local police, county fire brigade, local fire brigade, ambulance control – then repeated it for West Norfolk and Peterborough. In return for such extra duties the editor had agreed a small guaranteed weekly expense account which Dryden diverted exclusively to Humph, whose role as the reporter’s unofficial chauffeur was punctuated with more lucrative contracts ferrying school children in the mornings and nightclub bouncers after midnight. The Capri’s meter was stuck permanently reading £2.95, the wires hanging loose and disconnected beneath the dashboard.

West Norfolk police confirmed that the body discovered at Jude’s Ferry had been transferred from the jurisdiction of the Royal Military Police to King’s Lynn CID. A pathologist would undertake an initial examination at 10.00am the following morning. Inquiries had begun in an attempt to trace the identity of the victim, and Lynn CID appealed for anyone with information helpful to the police to come forward. A number was provided for the purpose, and an assurance given that all communications were in strictest confidence. Dryden noted that, while a brief statement confirmed the circumstances of the discovery of the body, there was no mention of possible causes of death, or the sex or age of the victim.

Dryden stopped walking and climbed the flood bank to look south. Ahead the river met Barham’s Dock, a 100-yard cut-off channel once used to load vegetables and salad crops direct from the fields into barges for the London markets. PK 129, Dryden’s floating home, was moored just off the main river. A former inshore naval patrol boat, which had played a small part in the great events of the last century, it had retained its camouflage grey, distinguishing it from the ubiquitous white hulls of the floating gin palaces of the holiday trade. On deck Dryden could just see Laura sitting in the shade of the tarpaulin which he’d rigged over the boat’s cockpit.

She raised a hand in welcome, and Dryden was thrilled by the unfamiliarity of the gesture. His wife had suffered severe injuries in a car crash seven years earlier and been left in a coma from which she was only now slowly recovering. Dryden had left his Fleet Street job to be near her, while her own career as a TV soap opera actress had become a briefly celebrated tabloid newspaper tragedy, now long forgotten.

Dryden vaulted the space between the bank and the boat and, kneeling, took his wife’s head in his hands. He’d fixed up a spot on the wooden decking where he could secure her wheelchair, a symbol of her slow recovery. But for his wife the chair provided a vital system of support, being fitted with a swing-across desk where she kept her laptop, connected by a wireless link to the internet. Beneath the seat she kept a mobile phone, books, an iPod and drinks and snacks so that she could feed herself. With the crutches she’d begun to master she could get to the galley and bathroom below, although the journey back up the boat’s steep ladder-like stair was still a struggle which could leave her exhausted.

Dryden felt again the novelty of her physical reaction to his touch, a hand grasping his hair at the nape of his neck. Her emergence from the coma had been glacial but the summer had seen a series of breakthroughs, her limbs at last freed from the rictus which had blighted the years since the crash.

‘Coffee,’ said Dryden, throwing open the doors to the galley below. Before he dropped down the ladder he ran his fingers over the brass plaque set above the wheel which read, simply: dunkirk 1940.

‘Did you hear on the radio?’ he shouted up.

She made the sound that they recognized now for yes; a sound that neatly delineated the different ways in which they had come to terms with Laura’s accident. He saw it as the first articulation of the voice that she had once had, the voice he wanted to hear again. She saw it as a triumph in itself, and if it had to be, an end in itself.