The Skeleton Man

The tanned diver shrugged, squeezing water from his hair. ‘With a bit of luck, just overnight. There’s some hypothermia, any longer than that and he may have trouble recovering. Plus there’s a bump on the head – it’s a three-inch gash and it’ll need stitches. Guess he tumbled in off the bridge. We’re gonna close it, by the way, at least until they repair and strengthen the rails. It’s in a pretty dangerous state.’

‘Nobody noticed the broken handrail then? Not yesterday, not this morning?’

A shrug again. ‘It’s a lonely spot.’

They tried to turn away, cutting short the interview, but Dryden took a half step in. ‘Did he say much? He looked upset – distraught really. Does he remember what happened? Think he jumped?’

An exchange of glances: ‘We don’t want to see any quotes in the paper, OK?’ said the tall one. Dryden nodded. ‘At the moment he can’t remember his own name.’

Dryden thought about that. ‘Amnesia? Believe him?’

They both nodded, but it was the tanned one, squatting down now to remove his leggings who added: ‘Sure. Mostly. But he must remember something because that’s not just pain in his eyes. He’s terrified of something.’ They turned then to go. ‘Or he’s terrified of someone. Nightmare is he can’t remember who.’

11

Dryden checked with the news desk that the paper had gone and then walked back into town in the sun, tourists beginning to appear as he walked the towpath south. The Isle of Ely rose up from the fens ahead, the cathedral trailing a pennant of low cloud, all that remained of the morning’s leaden sky.

He wondered what it was like not to have a memory. A blessing, perhaps. Laura’s coma had been marked by a complete absence of any recall of their accident. The hours spent trapped in the lightless car beneath the winter water was literally a black box; a memory too terrifying to allow a replay. His wife’s recovery had been marked by many advances. But not a single shaft of light had fallen into that lost world.

Ely, bathed in sunshine now, had come to life. In Market Square he spotted that one newspaper vendor was already on his pitch. The Express and The Crow were printed a mile out of town, and the editor had recently introduced an early print run for both in order to catch sales before the shops closed. The seller was a man known as Skeg, thirty perhaps, his face punctured with a single cheek stud, the hair cut savagely short, emphasizing a small triangle of dyed red stubble below his lip, but above his chin. Skeg’s job was on the bottom rung of the employment ladder, a career normally reserved for a band of outcasts.

Dryden had to admit that Skeg was not quite so easy to pigeonhole. He lived on one of the dilapidated river boats which took up cheap moorings in the town’s clay pits, and he’d come across him several times working at Wicken Fen nature reserve, clearing weed from the waterways, tagging and counting birds. And always, at his heels, the half-drowned short-haired terrier, tugged along on a blue rope. Sometimes Skeg would disappear from his pitch for months, trying another job, but he always reappeared.

Dryden bought a paper, even though he could have waited and got a free one back at the office, and flicking it open at the fold enjoyed the sight of his double front-page bylines. The thrill, even after twenty years on newspapers, was palpable.

Skeg had sensed the inner smile: ‘Done all right then,’ he said, and Dryden remembered instantly why he didn’t like him as much as he normally liked outcasts. There was sarcasm beneath the conviviality, and something cruel about the eyes. At his feet the dog lay curled, ribs showing. Skeg had his own copy open to the feature on Jude’s Ferry, and the picture Dryden had taken inside St Swithun’s, the now shattered crusader’s tomb beside an inset of what it had looked like before the wayward shelling.

‘Yeah,’ said Dryden. ‘Decent day’s work.’

Skeg took his pound coin and rummaged for the change in a wooden tray. The dog edged forward to snuffle at Dryden’s feet and he felt the first wave of panic as it bared its teeth. He drew in breath, fighting the impulses which were coursing through his nervous system.

‘Wow,’ said Skeg, bending down and pulling the dog back. ‘You’re not a big fan of dogs, are ya?’

Dryden tried a smile that failed, aware that his phobia was painfully apparent.

‘Think of something else,’ he told himself. So he checked the space on the back page where his fudge box on the man in the river should have been and found it blank: either he’d bought one of the earliest copies off the run or they’d failed to get it in at all.

Dryden scanned the badges on Skeg’s quilted poacher’s jacket as he took his change: Troops Out of Iraq, Shelter, RSPCA, a sticker which proclaimed Green Planet, and another in support of a campaign to stop Cambridge University building a laboratory for animal testing of new drugs.