The Skeleton Man

Lunch for the press was laid out in the orchard below the church, in the shadow of a foursquare Georgian mansion surrounded by a gravel drive. The words ‘Orchard House’ were carved into the stone pillars which guarded the gates. The window tax had robbed the building of some of its grandeur but it was still a cut above, the upper floor looking out over trimmed hedges at the village beyond. Lawns ran down to the river, across which a deep ditch ran parallel with the towpath, the remnants of an old moat. Dryden had spread himself out on the grass checking his notes, passing time before the bus was due to take them back to Ely, trying to imagine what the village had been like in its heyday in the 1800s, when the wharf had been busy with sugar beet, the factory belching acrid smoke from the pencil-thin chimney.

The rest of the press were clustered near where the army was serving drinks so he’d been the only one to hear the creak of the shutter, and looking up had seen a young man at an upstairs window of the mansion, surveying the orchard below. A hand on the windowsill, the other shading the light from his eyes, he had the languid movements of the rich. Then he’d retreated into the shadows and Dryden wondered what final act of farewell had taken place within. He heard voices then, a light had come on, and another man had hurriedly closed the shutters. He’d been shocked to recognize the landlord again, talking over his shoulder to those unseen within.

Then they’d heard the clanking gears of the council bus, and the press corps had stood silently to watch the last villagers leave, many of them turning their heads away from the windows as it drove past on Church Street, an amber dustcloud marking its progress out onto Whittlesea Mere. A few minutes later three army trucks rolled into the village from the west carrying the troops who would search the houses, survey the infrastructure and prepare the targets for the first live firing.

Dryden looked down on the scene as it was today, the old allotments engulfed in late-summer raspberries, the ruined sheds just breaking the surface like flotsam on a green sea. Across the village the only sounds were inhuman: rooks called from a line of poplars by the river and somewhere the warm breeze rattled a garden gate on rusted hinges. The hum of bees was like the bass note of a soundtrack.

He looked across into the orchard in which they’d had lunch that day. The fruit trees, unpruned for nearly two decades, were heavy with buds, the old moat a waterlogged ditch. The old shuttered mansion was still standing, but the roof had holes and was sagging in the middle, a chimney stack leaning perilously. At one of the windows the wood of the shutter had rotted and Dryden’s heart contracted as he saw something move on the sill, something black which caught the light. But as he watched a rook struggled out through the gap, shaking its feathers. It flew low over the garden wall and down to the river.

He ran ahead to join Major Broderick and his platoon as they moved into the village, the road patched in tarmac by army sappers who’d filled shell holes over the years. A row of Victorian cottages had been propped up with brutal concrete frames. Several buildings here had been completely replaced with breeze-block boxes, punched through with crude holes for windows and doors. Dryden reflected that the villagers’ annual return to St Swithun’s must have been a sad experience, presenting ample evidence that as the years passed there was increasingly less for them to return to. As he walked forward Dryden tried to stop himself scanning the black, empty holes where the windows had once been, sensing that somewhere in the village he’d glimpse a face, waiting just for him.

They moved north, over a hump-backed bridge, to a T-junction where they turned west into what had been the main street. Dominating the turning was an ugly 1950s two-storey building, its windows boarded, but a painted fascia proclaimed ‘Palmer’s Store’. The red logo of the post office was still visible, and on the second floor a derelict neon sign hung which read ‘Mere Taxis’ and was dotted with bullet holes. Somewhere inside the building a door creaked rhythmically in the breeze.

Ahead they could see the slight rise of the main bridge over the Sixteen Foot, a drain which carried water off the reclaimed mere and sent it seawards – all that was left of the original ‘river’ over which Jude’s Ferry had crossed. Beyond, on the far bank, the old sugar beet factory burned. But in the foreground another column of smoke rose, tinged with acrid black, with flashes of livid red running through it like lightning.

Broderick stopped to take a radio message from the men he’d sent ahead to recce the village. ‘Right,’ he said, thrusting the receiver back at the radio operator: ‘Not a good day for the Royal Artillery. They’ve hit some outbuildings down by the New Ferry Inn. A fire too.’