The Skeleton Man

‘It was your sister I was interested in,’ he said. ‘Kathryn. She had a baby, didn’t she?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. So?’ But Dryden had seen the glance, out of the door into the bungalow’s gloomy hallway. There was a hardwood chest of drawers there in the shadows, the top crowded with framed photos.

Dryden took a chair. ‘Picture?’

Neate ran a hand through thick unwashed black hair and then stood, coming back with a small snapshot in an older wooden frame.

Despite the studied air of indifference Dryden could sense the pride Neate felt.

‘She’s beautiful – when was this taken?’

‘At the Ferry, before the end,’ said Neate. She was by a hedgerow, a summer’s view behind her of the allotments running down to The Dring, the ditch clogged with reed heads.

She had her brother’s hair, but the face was softer, an oval, the forehead high and pale, the hands long and white. An uncertain smile seemed to emphasize the fleeting nature of the moment in which she’d been captured, a single summer between childhood and the rest of her life.

‘You in touch?’

He shook his head. ‘She didn’t come when Dad fell ill. I couldn’t forgive her for that. She took a car in ’92 – said she’d send us the money. That was the last time I saw her – she was standing right there,’ he said, nodding at Dryden. ‘She said she wanted a new life. So that’s fifteen years ago, the November. We asked her what her plans were, who she knew, but she just went. I got a letter from Dorset, a farm down there. Married and that, but no kids. Well, no more.’

‘And George Tudor?’

He laughed. ‘George wasn’t the father if that’s what you’re thinking. George thought he knew what was best for Kath – which didn’t go down too well in our house. Family feuds, Dryden – Mum was a Tudor, and they always thought they were better than us. Ellen Woodruffe was Mum’s sister, another Tudor. It’s like the Mafia, only nastier. So George just tried to take over, said he wanted to take Kath with him to Australia, start a new life. Perth I think. Along with little Peter Tholy, just the three of them.’ Dryden sensed the ritual denigration of the runt, the village scapegoat. ‘Dad nearly killed him when he asked. Like we couldn’t look after our own.’

Dryden let that hang in the air.

Neate shrugged, taking the picture from Dryden and, replacing it in the hall, he brought back another – a large black and white picture of a man standing in front of the old garage at Jude’s Ferry.

‘Dad,’ said Jimmy simply.

Dryden nodded, taking the picture, sensing it was an icon. ‘You’re gonna look like him,’ he said, knowing it would work.

Jimmy smiled. ‘I miss her. Dad missed her – but it’s too late for all of us now.’

Dryden thought he was trying to reassemble a memory, studying the picture himself as if it was new to him, but then he asked, ‘Forensics, you said?’

‘Yeah. It’s all in the paper. They’ve found a grave.’

Neate picked up the beer can in a single fluid movement. ‘Where?’

‘In the cellar, where we found the Skeleton Man,’ said Dryden, taking a last gulp of beer.

Neate leant forward, elbows on the newspaper. ‘And I bet I know what they found in the grave,’ he said.

‘Go on.’

Dryden could see he wanted to say it but that the calculation was complex, and for a moment he hesitated. ‘Bones,’ he said, finally. ‘Old bones.’

‘And whose old bones would they be?’

‘Ask Ken Woodruffe, it was his cellar.’

A woman’s bones. Dryden recalled the picture behind the bar at The Five Miles from Anywhere, the oval face at the upstairs window.

Neate licked his lips. ‘Ellen Woodruffe, Aunt Ellen, was dying – she’d had a couple of strokes and her heart was failing. Ellen begged Ken, begged everyone, to end it. She wanted to die in her own home. I know for a fact she asked Dad to do it – give her some pills or something. Ken told everyone there was no way she’d leave, he reckoned they’d have to drag her out, or she’d do it herself. And there was the pain. You could hear her some nights, upstairs at the inn, trying to stop herself crying out. It tore Ken up because he wanted her to die then, but the doctors said it could go on for years. She was a strong woman, Ellen, and it was like her body wouldn’t give up, even when she wanted it to. So I wouldn’t blame him if he did it for her, I’d have done it. After we got fixed up in business here Dad rang the home Ken said he’d put her in – out on the coast – but she wasn’t there.’

Neate leant back in his chair, tilting it on to two legs. ‘But like I say, good luck to him…’

Dryden finished the can. ‘Actually, there was nothing in the grave. It had been dug, then filled in. Not a chicken bone, nothing.’

Neate didn’t miss a beat. ‘So where did Ellen go?’

In his mind Dryden was back on Thieves Bridge, cradling the skull in his hands again, the dark sockets lightless.

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