The Skeleton Man

‘Didn’t say that.’ Desmond sighed, acutely aware of Dryden’s profession, and dropped his voice. ‘I had tea with the A&E nurses coming off shift. It’s a perk of their job, hot gossip, but it doesn’t mean they get it right, OK – just remember that. Anyway, they had him under observation for the first few hours and he said quite a lot, even if it didn’t make much sense. But there were fragments. And a name – Jude’s Ferry. He thinks that’s where he might have come from.’

Dryden let the words sweep over him. A coincidence? Dryden distrusted the word, seeing by instinct a world in which events were interwoven, like the threads of the hangman’s rope. The discovery of the skeleton in the cellar at Jude’s Ferry had clearly set in motion a series of events. Violent events. Dryden shuddered as he failed to suppress a single Gothic image. A man, head and arms emerging first, struggling free through the shattered stone lid of a funeral chest.

13

Humph drove away from the sun. Dryden watched it touch the fen horizon in the rear-view mirror, bleeding into the earth. They crossed the river at Ely, a convoy of holiday boats beneath breasting waves raised by the evening breeze. On Bridge Fen a herd of cattle stood as still as a child’s toys on a tabletop, casting shadows half a field long. They drove in silence, Dryden still trying to fit the sad figure in Room 118 into the emerging jigsaw that was Jude’s Ferry. His appearance, forty-eight hours after the gruesome discovery of the skeleton beneath the storeroom beside the New Ferry Inn, was profoundly unsettling.

But for now Dryden had to leave him to struggle with the past alone in his hospital room. He must return to his list of potential victims and the task of putting a name to the Skeleton Man. The Five Miles From Anywhere stood between the Ouse and the Cam on a lonely peninsula between the two rivers, at the point where they ran forward on a broad sinuous path towards Ely, the cathedral standing clear above its own reflection. Picnic tables crowded the grass down to the riverbank, and in the pub’s small marina white boats jostled for a mooring. Dryden preferred the spot in the winter, when the river could freeze if they closed the sluices to the sea at Denver, leaving the pub trapped in ice on three sides. But today the scene was given grandeur by the sky. North towards the sea clouds were building a mythical landscape of mountains tinged with evening colours.

Humph extruded himself from the cab and set off for a table. Balanced on surprisingly nimble feet he was a human gyroscope, desperately seeking a seat before toppling to the ground. They found a spot at the point where the rivers met: the view before them, all the people behind them. Dryden left his friend with his Faroese phrasebook, announcing a wide range of alcoholic beverages to no one.

In the bar a small scrum had formed waiting for drinks, a lone barman working efficiently to meet the rush. As soon as Dryden saw the face he knew it was Woodruffe: the shock of brown hair had gone but the slump of the shoulders and the narrowly set eyes marked him out as the young man he’d seen on the step of the New Ferry Inn that last morning. Judging the moment, he decided to leave the questions for later. Instead, waiting his turn, he studied the bar. One wall was decorated with a collection of flamenco fans and on a notice board by the food hatch there were pictures of various sunburnt faces sitting outside a bar, the façade draped in Union Flags.

Above the pub’s french windows out to the riverbank was a framed picture: the New Ferry Inn at Jude’s Ferry, a group of villagers before it in two ranks like a football team, beside them a 1950s motor coach. Dryden squinted at some words scratched on a chalkboard held by a boy with unruly hair in the middle of the front row: Lowestoft, 1973. Behind the boy a man stood, rigid in a suit, one hand on the youngster’s shoulder. At an upstairs window a woman’s face, a pale oval, was half hidden, a hand raised to brush back her hair. And one other picture, in pride of place over the brick fire-place: the New Ferry Inn again, in black and white, a woman in her fifties snapped pruning a rose beneath the bar window, the smile genuine enough, suffused with affection for whoever was behind the camera.

He took two pints of bitter and a large G&T out to Humph, an assortment of bar snacks tucked under his arm and in his pockets.