The Skeleton Man

Garry talked some more and then hung up. ‘Bit more. The wrist bones were bound with garden wire – the plastic coated stuff. Pathologist believes the victim could have tied them up himself. The knots are loose, but would be – hold on, better get this dead right – “sufficient to prevent a reflex” attempt to save himself. There’s some flesh left on the torso – tendons and stuff – and what he called “atrophied” organs. They’re all being analysed but at the moment there’s nothing sinister showing up. No poisons. Stomach contents long gone. Some indications of rodent activity along the bones. And something else on dating: old newspapers in the cellar used to wrap beer glasses were mostly dated July 1990 – the most recent was the 12th, three days before the evacuation. Daily Mail.’

‘I need that story,’ said Charlie, feeling free to break the office’s no smoking policy for the third time in an hour. ‘I need it now, Dryden.’

‘Well if you have it now it’s fucking wrong…’ said Dryden, stabbing the keys. ‘So wait.’ Dryden’s junior role relative to Charlie was largely nominal. His Fleet Street track record outranked the news editor’s formal authority. An embarrassed hush fell over the office while Garry grinned hugely.

‘And one other oddity,’ said the junior reporter. ‘Clothing is in shreds, OK, but there were several layers still on the arms and beneath those, on the left arm, was the remains of what appears to be a piece of surgical gauze.’

‘What?’ said Dryden, looking up.

‘Surgical gauze. Don’t ask me. That’s what he said.’

Dryden skimmed the Jude’s Ferry piece and rewrote the intro…

By Philip Dryden

Forensic experts today (Tuesday) identified a skeleton found hanging in a cellar in the abandoned fen village of Jude’s Ferry as the bones of a young man who may have taken his own life.

He dropped down through a description of how the discovery was made to add in the new detail from the CID, and the pathologist’s judgement on the knots at the wrist. Then he dropped down further and amended three pars on Magda Hollingsworth, making it clear the police would now be able to exclude her from their inquiries and leaving in the quotes from her daughter.

‘Looks like suicide now,’ he said when he’d filed it back to Charlie.

‘Good job it’s down page,’ said the news editor, enjoying nothing more than vindication.

Dryden’s mobile trilled. It was Humph, and for a second Dryden could hear the heavy breathing of the greyhound as the cabbie fumbled with his handsfree. ‘Could be nothing,’ said Humph, his voice light, almost weightless. ‘Up by Cuckoo Bridge. I’ve just come along the back road and there’s an ambulance and a search and rescue vehicle parked up. I’ll try and get a pic.’ Dryden heard the sound of Humph extricating himself from the Capri, like a cork from a bottle.

The reporter grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. ‘We may have the owner of the fingers,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone.’

10

Cuckoo Bridge crossed the river a mile north of the town, a wooden arch built in the fifties to link Quanea Fen with the towpath. Its pitch-soaked timbers had warped over the decades so that its once graceful lines were tortured now, a miniature nightmare of twisted boards over the wide expanse of the grey river, its surface pockmarked with the falling rain. The river ran through thickets of thorn here, and the only sign of humanity was the distant cathedral tower, just visible over the flood bank. It was here, more than a thousand years before, that the monks had come ashore with the body of St Etheldreda. Dryden always imagined the scene – the mist cloaking the little procession as it dragged the coffin on a cart along the old green lane by the river.

Dryden had hauled Mitch out of the darkroom and commandeered his van for the brief journey. They parked at the river authority depot and walked the last hundred yards along the narrow, single-track drove. Humph was alone on the bridge, the Capri beyond on the other bank beside the emergency vehicles, the cabbie’s weight prompting creaks from the woodwork. The safety rail on the downriver side was broken at its central section, the snapped timber ends raw and pale.

The main river pooled here in a wide reed marsh, a clear channel for the tourist boats cut through the middle. The search and rescue team were twenty yards from them on the east bank. A whining inflatable dinghy nosed its way forward through the rushes while four divers squirmed in the shallows like tadpoles.