The Skeleton Man (12 page)

The unit was in one of the old convalescence wings at the back of the hospital, an elegant two-storey 1930s art deco building with views over neat lawns still tended by the RAF Association. Dryden always imagined the wartime pilots within, swaddled in bandages, listening as their comrades flew overhead towards Germany.

He could see Laura at one of the metal-framed picture windows now, on the second floor, resting after her regular session of physiotherapy. The difference in her posture in the last few months was startling. In the years after the accident she had been held in her wheelchair by supports, her limbs at ugly angles. Now she sat elegantly, her neck held straight,
one ankle hitched over the other, her tanned legs stretched out in the sun, her feet bare on the window ledge.

Once inside the unit Dryden was struck again by the quality of the light. The windows at ground level fell full-length to the floor. This far from town the sun’s rays were unimpeded and flooded in, glancing off the polished linoleum and the white walls. Dryden considered again the irony that the architects had designed the building as a receptacle for light, while so many of the patients in those early years had sat, their heads swathed, denied the joys of sight.

He climbed the stairs and passed a group of young men and women in white coats accompanying a surgeon, bow tie just visible beneath a grey jumper. On the top floor several patients sat in wicker chairs, an echo of the building’s original thirties decor. He walked towards Laura from behind but she recognized his steps, accepting his head as he stooped to kiss her neck. Her right hand tapped at the laptop.

The screen lit, revealing her message. LOOK. ROOM 118.

‘A story,’ she said, the voice nasal and still sluggish.

He squeezed her shoulders and walked the length of the observation gallery to a door at the end. Laura had been married to Dryden throughout his ten years on Fleet Street, a decade in which she had developed as acute a news sense as her husband’s. Many able-bodied nurses and doctors made a serious mistake in
her company, which was to presume that the lingering symptoms of coma extended to a poor grasp of her immediate environment. In fact she was hyper-alert, and attuned to the subtle euphemisms of gossip and scandal. Since she had become a regular at the unit she had tipped Dryden off on several good tales – most of which had found their way into the nationals. All had reflected positively on the unit, and he’d actively stifled a couple of less wholesome exclusives, a luxury which had not been available to him during his years on the
News
.

Laura had briefly been admitted to the Zangwill for appraisal when she’d transferred to the NHS from private care a year before. She’d been in Room 106. So Dryden found his way to the corridor quickly and at the door of Room 118 glanced in through the porthole provided.

‘Well, well,’ he said, and jumped as a hand touched his shoulder. ‘Jesus. Don’t do that, Desmond.’

Desmond Samjee was the senior unit physiotherapist. He was close to Dryden’s height, with the unhurried movements which inspire confidence, and a voice entirely free of the inflexions of his Kenyan-Asian heritage. Dryden’s impassive face creased slightly in a smile: ‘Caught me,’ he said. ‘What ya gonna do?’

‘Firing squad,’ said Desmond, leaning in to take a look himself.

Sitting with her back to the porthole window was a female PC, while in the bed was the man the
police divers had pulled from the reeds by the river that morning. His arm lay on the counterpane, the hand bandaged. A drip fed into his arm and his head was as immobile as his pillow, and just as pale. His hair flopped over his eyes. For the first time Dryden noticed a ring, a single gold band on the wedding finger of the uninjured hand.

‘Why’s he here?’ asked Dryden.

Desmond took his arm. ‘All I know is he was brought over straight from A&E once they’d dealt with his hand and given him a blood transfusion. He’d got hypothermia but he’s recovered well, he’s pretty fit, and he’s asked for police protection. We’re not involved so I don’t know the real details, which I wouldn’t give you anyway.’

As they watched the man woke and started, rising into a sitting position. His head jerked around the room, checking the view through the two windows, and finally he grasped the hand of the PC, who had stepped forward. Comforted, he subsided back on to the pillows, his eyes pressed closed as if trying to shut out the world.

Desmond looked into Dryden’s eyes. ‘Desperately sad. Can’t remember anything, they say. Just imagine that, Philip, waking up with no past.’

Dryden thought about it again and wondered if it would be so bad.

His friend knew him well enough to guess his thoughts. ‘But imagine wanting that past. And it’s there, just out of reach. Now that’s a nightmare.’

They retraced Dryden’s steps back to the observation gallery. Laura was alone in her wicker seat. Desmond walked round to face her. ‘Good work today, Laura, you know that, don’t you? That neck’s supporting your head beautifully now. Let’s keep up the hard work.’

Dryden pulled up a stool and sat, letting the sunlight fall on the side of his face. ‘So he’s said nothing, the guy from the river? He can’t recall a single thing?’ asked Dryden. They looked out over the sunlit fen to the west, the horizon pin-sharp at twenty miles.

‘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.

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.

The sun died and customers began to trickle away, back to the boats from which the smells of cooking were drifting downstream. Humph, distracted by the view, delicately broke open a crisp packet and began to cherry-pick the contents. Dryden sipped the beer, trying to imagine the New Ferry Inn on that last night in 1990. The newspapers had been asked to leave the villagers alone, in return receiving an open invitation instead to a press conference the next morning and the promise of a tour of Jude’s Ferry. But they’d been told, in retrospect, the lengths to which the army had gone to try and soften the blow which had fallen on these people. There’d been a dance in the Methodist Hall, free drinks and
food at the inn – all paid for by the MoD, and fireworks set up on the town bridge. But even the army spokesman had been forced to admit that not all the villagers had been up for a celebration. Many had stayed at home, boycotting the festivities, quietly packing away their things in the tea-crates provided.

And beneath perhaps, in the cellar, the Skeleton Man.

‘Let’s eat,’ said Dryden suddenly, standing. ‘Properly. My shout.’

Humph was silent, his cheeks full of pork scratchings. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘On a plate?’

The bar was packed now, almost exclusively with a coach party of OAPs. They sat at two long tables set with glasses and cutlery, a middle-aged woman with a clipboard moving amongst them checking choices pre-ordered for dinner. A group of young waitresses fluttered around them like sparrows around a garden feeder. Dryden noticed that all the girls were dark-haired and pretty, and wondered if it was a qualification for employment at the pub. He recalled seeing Woodruffe on that final morning in Jude’s Ferry, sitting in the sun with the girl in the crumpled T-shirt. Tonight the publican was on the customers’ side of the bar, drinking from a pottery mug, and reading the
Ely Express
.

Dryden ordered food and included Woodruffe in the round. He offered his hand: ‘Philip Dryden. I wrote that…’ he said, tapping the front-page story
on Jude’s Ferry. ‘You’re Ken Woodruffe? Your mother was the licensee of the New Ferry Inn?’

Up close Dryden could see that Woodruffe was younger than he first looked but the hair was thinning fast, revealing a high, frail skull, the thin neck rising out of a brutally white shirt buttoned up to take a sober blue tie. His skin was pale, as if he’d spent a lifetime under the bar’s neon strip light, thin wrinkles grey with other people’s cigarette smoke.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘Today, you know. I’ve had enough. It’s all been very difficult and I’ve answered the police questions. I’ll bring your food out, OK? But I really don’t want to talk.’

He stood suddenly, his hands readjusting the bar mats, ashtray and a newspaper. Dryden could see that the mug held an amber liquid rather than tea or coffee and he guessed it was whisky. Even here, on the right side of the bar, Woodruffe seemed anxious to preserve some distance from strangers, stepping back from his seat and taking the mug with him.

Dryden nodded, backing off and giving him room. ‘No problem. I was just interested. I was there, like I said in that piece, in the cellar when they found him.’

He retreated with the drinks and they waited in the dusk, watching the river turn violet under the first stars.

‘Are they catching that fish?’ asked Humph. ‘We could have had chips in town by now.’

Woodruffe brought the food on a tray and set it out,
then retreated without a word only to return a minute later with the pottery mug. He sat, placing a large packet of chewing gum on the table, which he began to rotate in 45-degree instalments.

‘Bar staff are on now – it’s eight. I can talk, for a bit.’

Dryden pushed a plate of chips towards him, noticing the sheen of sweat on his forehead even in the cool night air. He wondered what had changed his mind. ‘Help yourself,’ said Dryden.

Woodruffe shook his head. ‘Off me food.’

‘Big party in?’

Woodruffe’s shoulders sagged. ‘Every Tuesday. We do a cut-price meal for OAPs; it’s all linked to the heart unit at the West Suffolk. I did their Christmas bar last year, girls came too. They looked after Mum – the West Suffolk – did a great job so it’s the least we can do.’

A hand strayed across the table and rearranged the ketchup and salt.

Dryden nodded, thinking about the woman in the picture in the bar. Looking round he saw that a couple of children were still playing on a climbing frame set back from the riverbank.

‘Your kids?’

‘No. No.’ He flipped the gum packet and took some and Dryden guessed he was trying not to think of a cigarette, the moment when the nicotine hits the nervous system a second after the first deep breath.