The Skeleton Man

Dryden pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the passenger-side window. Getting back into Jude’s Ferry was a trade-off of sorts. DI Shaw had two cases under his belt: the Skeleton Man and Peyton’s farm. If Dryden could get enough leverage on the detective for agreeing to the embargo on the animal rights story there might be an upside to the situation, although he very much doubted it. When it came to it he knew he had little choice. Flogging the story would earn him a couple of hundred quid and result in endless aggravation, and Shaw was right, he didn’t know the full facts. And he’d made no promises. He could hear Shaw out and then go back to Plan A – flogging the story.

‘We’ve got two hours,’ he said to Humph, rummaging under Boudicca’s tartan blanket to find his notebook. He checked the eight names he’d dug out of the TA records Broderick had shown him; the eight men of the right age who might have ended up on the end of a hangman’s rope at Jude’s Ferry. ‘It’s got to be one of them,’ he said.

He knew DI Shaw had, like Dryden himself, interviewed Ken Woodruffe, whose mother had run the New Ferry Inn, and that there had been a fight that night between the twin brothers Mark and Matthew Smith; but he knew the police would have got to them quickly if there was anything like a clear trail.

Dryden needed to focus on the rest of the list. There was Paul Cobley, for example, whose parents might well still be running a cab firm, although Dryden guessed that healthy old age and sitting in a taxi office for twelve hours a day were not always compatible.

He leant forward and cut the power to the tape deck, bringing a Faroese lesson to an abrupt halt.

‘Sorry. Know of a taxi firm run by people called Cobley? It was mentioned on that tape we listened to on the riverbank, the one about Jude’s Ferry.’

Humph puckered his lips into a small bow. ‘Nope.’

‘If you get a chance, can you ask around?’ asked Dryden, flicking the tape back on.

After Cobley his best bet was James Neate, the son of the garage owner Walter, who had made a claim for compensation which included a forwarding address: the Stopover Garage, Duckett’s Cross.

They were there in twenty minutes, time in which Dryden got through to the rural affairs department at the county council on his mobile. Elizabeth Drew, the woman respons ible for Jude’s Ferry who’d phoned in when Dryden was on the radio, had left her job in 1998. No, there was no forwarding address, no telephone number. Dryden hung on, asking if the secretary could find a friend who could talk; it was important, he said, something she’d be sorry to miss. The phone was dropped with a thud on a desktop and he heard voices off, then a man answered. ‘Sorry. But Elizabeth left nearly ten years ago now. Who is this?’

‘A friend,’ said Dryden. ‘It’s personal really.’ Dryden hesitated for effect. ‘It’s just that my wife and I have lost contact and we’re in the area for a few days.’

‘Right. Well – you could ask at Richardson’s – the big cash ‘n’ carry store, outside Ely. Know it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Ask there. But please, just say you’d heard from a friend, OK? We’re not supposed to give out contact details.’

Dryden went back to the list, rang 118 118 and asked if there was a Jason Imber, one of his eight possible victims, in the Ely area: nothing, but a J. H. Imber was listed in Upwell, a village out on the Fens towards Peterborough. Ex-directory.

‘Shit,’ said Dryden, killing the phone and letting it slide to the floor.

The Stopover Garage lay on a straight stretch of unclassified back road – one of the many ‘fen motorways’ which locals used to criss-cross the landscape. They could see a clear two or three miles in either direction along the arrow-straight carriageway. Mid-morning there was no traffic but come the rush hour Dryden knew the road would be a moving ribbon of commuters trailing home, avoiding the jams on the overloaded A and B roads.

The four pumps stood at a spot where two drove roads turned off from the straight, one east, one west, running into the black peatfields like lost causes. A modern canopy had been slung over the pumps but, battered and dirty, it was a symbol of hard times, not modern times. A farmhouse stood on one side, abandoned now, the windows full of shadows and shattered glass. Back from the forecourt was a stand of pine trees sheltering a small bungalow and to one side a large engine shed built of corrugated asbestos. Once crisply whitewashed it was now peeling, but the giant letters STOPOVER were still legible in black enamel.

Beside the pumps there was a wooden kitchen chair, set outside the shadow of the old canopy, on which sat a man in blue overalls drinking from a tin mug. He wore a peaked cap and held his free hand loosely in his lap. It could have been an everyday scene anywhere on the Great Plains.