The Skeleton Man

Summers at Jude’s Ferry. Always an outsider however hard I tried. Dad didn’t tell me he’d sold up to the MoD. I found a letter, about the rent. He said it was a nest egg for me, but he’d sold the only home we’d ever had. And then a heart attack at Sunningdale lecturing to a room full of bored civil servants on a pale afternoon. I scattered his ashes on the beach at Holkham, trying to recall even then what he looked like.

I was alone, so I came back for that last summer to Orchard House. There was nothing else, just a bank account, blinking black on the screen. I was owed it – a year of my own, at home, at last, even if the family had gone.

And I felt a sense of liberation too. So I thought I’d teach. Whittlesea. A new scheme, for graduates, learning on the job. A windswept comprehensive built of concrete and glass with a playground like a supermarket car park. But I loved it; so different from my life until then, chaotic, raw, on the edge. And that’s where I met her, Laura. Something’s stopping me crossing that line, to what happened next, because there’s something there I don’t want to remember. But I know the emotions that match the missing pictures: passion first, then guilt. And then anger at last. I’m clinging to these because all I feel today is fear. Which is why it’s so important that I know you’re there.

Thursday, 19 July

24

‘Imber,’ said Garry, covering the mouthpiece. ‘Jason Imber. He writes scripts for TV – comedy, radio, he’s sort of half-famous really. Won a Bafta in ’99. Wife turned up this morning – saw his face on the TV. She’d been away, seeing friends, and he’d said he might go to London, so she hadn’t missed him till yesterday. House out at Upwell by the Old Course.’

‘Imber?’ repeated Dryden, knowing instantly where he’d seen the name. But he double-checked the notes he’d made from the TA records Broderick had let him see and there it was: Jason Imber, Orchard House, Jude’s Ferry. He wrestled with the chances of a coincidence, but only briefly. Jason Imber had been fished out of the river less than forty-eight hours after the accidental shelling of St Swithun’s and the outbuildings by the New Ferry Inn. There had to be a link.

Dryden checked the clock: 10.30am.

DI Shaw was due to ring on the hour with the latest on the animal rights activists. Dryden stood at the coffee machine studying his face in the chrome as the mechanical innards churned. He’d cracked a cheekbone and severely bruised his skull in the scuffle on Thieves Bridge – a set of injuries which had kept him in A&E overnight while they X-rayed his head. Shaw had come to see him in hospital during the night, but would say only that they’d caught one of the men who had met him at the bridge – the one in the boat.

‘One?’ Dryden had said. ‘Oh great. Well, that’s a result. So now the other one is out there telling his mates I doubled-crossed them. Well done, well done. I can look forward to some mindless act of cruelty, can I?’