The Skeleton Man (2 page)

‘Dryden?’ he asked. ‘Philip Dryden – from
The Crow
?’ They shook hands, the soldier’s grip was surprisingly weak, the voice higher than he’d expected but holding some warmth, despite the clipped tones. ‘Broderick. Major John Broderick.’ He seemed embarrassed by the informality of the first name and turned
to scan the horizon. ‘You’ve signed the blood sheet?’ he asked.

Dryden nodded. At the gate he’d been presented with an official form for signature which effectively removed his right to claim compensation if some idiot with a long-range peashooter turned him into a human jigsaw.

The major smiled, taking five years off his age: ‘Just routine. Only with live firing we insist. Regulations. You lot in the press would be the first to get on our case if we broke the rules.’

Laughter rolled along the line of men by the ditch, and Dryden wondered what was funny. Excluded, he looked towards the north where the guns must be, hidden beyond the horizon.

‘So they’ll fire over our heads, right?’ he asked, realizing immediately that there was little alternative. ‘Sorry. Stupid question.’

The major nodded.

‘When does the shelling start?’ Dryden asked.

‘Maroon – that’s the signal flare – goes up 10.50am. They’ll hit it on the pip. Ten minutes later they open fire with an eight-minute bombardment, then we go into the first line of attack and stop. Then, 11.20, another maroon, followed by a further five-minute bombardment at 11.30. Then we move forward to the targets.’ Broderick rubbed his hands together. ‘Pictures?’

Dryden swung round a digital camera. ‘I’m a one-man band.’

‘Great.’ The major smiled. That was all the military was ever interested in, thought Dryden – pictures to send home, pictures for the scrapbook, pictures for the mess wall, pictures in the local paper, pictures for the MoD. Sod the words.

Broderick looked up at the sky. ‘St Swithun’s Day,’ he said. ‘Looks like we could have a good month.’ The battleship cloud was a distant smudge to the east, and the rising sun was already compressing their shadows around their boots.

Dryden slapped a mosquito against the back of his hand. ‘You Territorial Army too?’ he asked, keen to talk about something other than the weather.

‘Sure, sure. These are my men,’ he said, managing not to make it sound proprietorial.

‘So what do you do in Civvy Street?’

The major looked him in the face. ‘Business,’ he said, ducking the question.

A maroon thudded from the direction of the checkpoint, the signal that they had ten minutes before the bombardment began. The dull percussion in the sky was marked by a purple blotch and matched by a solid jolt through the earth.

The men stood and gathered round, following Broderick up onto the top of the old tank. The billycan was passed around, the tea inside reeked of tannin, had been sweetened with Carnation milk, and was the colour of liquid cattle manure. Dryden took a gulp, casually, knowing he was being watched.

Broderick sat on the turret, spreading out a map
for the men. ‘Right. Listen up. Today’s exercise is live firing. This range was requisitioned in 1907. That’s a century. So far the number of soldiers who have left Whittlesea Mere in a body bag is four. There is absolutely no law of nature which says one of you can’t make it five, so listen.’

Dryden imagined the crumpled body bag, his own hand peeping from the folds of black plastic, blood under the fingernails. ‘War games,’ he thought, realizing what an obscene juxtaposition of words it was.

The major’s briefing was brutally short. The Royal Artillery would bomb the two targets – twice – then the company would move in, conduct house-to-house searches, flush out insurgents, secure the target and replace the red target flags with blue. All shells would be live, all personal ammunition blank. Blue helmets denoted Blue Force – those attacking. Red Force, the enemy, was in position. Its soldiers, wooden cutout targets with concentric rings running out from the heart, wore red hats; a helpful designation Dryden could not help feeling undermined the integrity of the exercise. His own yellow armband proclaimed him a non-combatant.

‘And this is our target,’ said Broderick, stabbing a finger at the heart of the Fen wasteland shown on the map. ‘The lost village of Jude’s Ferry.’

When the first shell ripped overhead Dryden threw himself into the peaty soil, unable to stop his fingers digging down. He knew now why so many corpses in pictures of the carnage that was the trenches of the First World War seemed to be trying to bury themselves, clawing a way down, seeking the only route of escape. Dryden had no illusions about his reserves of courage. He was running on an empty tank and always had been. He was scared of loud noises, scared of pain, scared of dogs to the point of petrification, scared of heights, scared of small spaces and, crucially, scared of looking scared – a final twist which had ironically secured him a reputation for courage.

Sweating silently into his unfamiliar kit he could smell the fear, a pungent aroma normally associated with a loose drain cover. As each volley of shells wailed overhead he hugged the earth, drinking in the smell of warm grass and cow parsley.

The first salvo complete, Broderick got his men to their feet and they moved forward a mile over rough country, taking cover along a dyke dotted with Flanders poppies.

The second maroon sounded and Dryden counted
the minutes, lying on his back, watching swallows overhead. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and smelt the salt. Broderick made a makeshift pillow with his hands behind his head.

Dryden broke the tension with a question. ‘How can you be sure there’s no one in the village?’

Broderick brought his hands round and held them up against the sky. ‘Well, strictly speaking, we can’t. There’s a perimeter fence, and the MoD’s spent a lot of money in the last few days catching up on repairs, but animals get through, so I guess people could too. There are regular warning boards on the fence, and the old roads are all gated with signs. Quite a bit of the perimeter is bordered with open water – there’s the Sixteen Foot Drain, Whittlesea Drain and Popham’s Eau. Red flags fly at various points on the fence and there are several over today’s targets in the village. Frankly, you’d have to wilfully ignore all that to get into danger.’

The shells began again and Dryden flipped over onto his stomach, his eyes closed, counting, until finally there was silence, and for the first time the distant hiss of a wind over Whittlesea Mere. When he opened his eyes he found Broderick still beside him, making some wild heather into a small bouquet using silver cigarette paper, and trying to fasten it to his tunic with a pin. Dryden could imagine the major chasing butterflies along the trenches of the Great War.

For the first time Dryden looked ahead, south, towards a low hill crowned by a medieval church. Beyond it a
cluster of rooftops and the pencil-thin chimney of a long-abandoned sugar beet factory marked the site of the old village. And to the east another low hill, this one dominated by a Victorian water tower in brick with a black metal tank crowned by a whitewood dovecote. The village of Jude’s Ferry: a community of not much more than a hundred souls, abandoned seventeen years earlier to accommodate the army and its allies, keen to train for foreign wars.

Artillery had rained down on the targets ahead and smoke rose from a point west of the village itself, while occasional fire flickered amongst the ruins of a house about a hundred yards east of the church, which Dryden took to be the old vicarage. Somewhere automatic gunfire crackled like a party-popper.

‘OK?’ said Broderick.

Dryden nodded, lifting himself up on his elbows. ‘I’m always surprised there’s so much left,’ he said. ‘I guess…,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You’d think after ten years it would be like Baghdad. Looks more like Camberwick Green.’

‘Yup. That’s what we need. It’s about skills for urban warfare,’ said Broderick, and Dryden sensed that this was a subject that failed to make the major’s heart sing as sweetly as the wild heather.

‘You might as well have one of these,’ said the soldier, handing him a map.

It was a large-scale plan of Jude’s Ferry, each building etched in, complete with ground-floor windows, doors, yards and gates.

‘Only you and I have one of these today. The red dots show the exact positions of the defending targets – the cutout soldiers. That way, hopefully, you can see if these guys can do their job. The dotted lines mark cellars, and they’ll need to flush out targets during house-to-house searches. Clearing, entering and making safe, that kind of thing – all vital skills.’

He scanned the horizon ahead with binoculars. ‘So you can see that the last thing we want is to flatten the place. Artillery targets today are the old vicarage and the factory: not for the first time. Ordnance is light, even if they hit they won’t wipe anything out. Plus the engineers go in every few months and replace basic structures – nothing fancy, just so the cover is there. And there’s a network of water pipes which were fed from that water tower, so we’ve always been able to fight fires.’ He licked his upper lip. ‘We’ve got a new pump now, by the river, so the water tower’s redundant – which is a good job coz the water stank. The rats up there are the size of dogs.’

He scanned the village with the glasses again. ‘When you get up close you’ll see that the years have taken their toll all right. It ain’t Merrie England, believe me.’ He turned aside, adding quietly. ‘Never was.’

A radio operator ran up, bent double. A request had been made for permission for another bombardment. Broderick surveyed the line of men along the dyke and the village ahead before giving his OK and sending a command along the ditch to sit tight until
the signal to advance was given by word. Then he knelt down in the grass and gave Dryden his field glasses.

‘Try looking – the shells can spook people out, but watching helps.’

Dryden smiled, accepting, studying the outline of the village church, the distant rooftops beyond down by the river. Above them the maroon thudded a third time. Broderick rolled over and lay on his back, checking his watch, a pair of swifts engaged in a dogfight high above them.

‘So,’ he said, finally. ‘This is big news, is it?’

‘Jude’s Ferry?’ said Dryden. ‘Sure. It’s been a big story since the start. When the villagers were shifted out in 1990 they were told they might be back in a year – not just for the annual church service on St Swithun’s Day, but back for good. They moved out in the July and the Gulf War started in August – so that was the end of that optimistic scenario. It was never going to happen. They tried everything they could to get back. Now the legal action in the High Court’s been thrown out it’s finally over. Frankly, I’m amazed the courts stopped the shelling while the case was still live… how long’s it been?’

Broderick twiddled a fen violet: ‘Must be eighteen months since we’ve been on the range – perhaps more.’

Dryden nodded. ‘You know the rest. The MoD’s announced there’ll be no return to Jude’s Ferry – not even for the annual service. But they rang us, wanted
to know if we’d like to interview the top brass – why the village was a vital resource for training in the modern army – the familiar pitch. Charm offensive. Least they could do was let us go in one last time. So here I am.’

Broderick laughed. ‘We’ve been using a range up near Lincoln, so the lads are pleased to be back – most of ’em are local and this way they get home for tea.’

‘Yeah,’ said Dryden, failing to smile.

‘You think it was rough justice?’ asked Broderick.

‘At the time, a lot of people didn’t see why the army couldn’t go back to using the range half a dozen times a year like they had done since – what did you say? – 1907. The village was never a target. They’d always made sure the damage to agricultural land was minimal – most of the big exercises were timed for after the harvest. They’d close the road in for a day, clear livestock, but otherwise it didn’t make much odds to the village.’

Broderick sighed. ‘I’ll think you’ll find that no definite promises were made, you know, when we moved them out…’

‘I was there,’ said Dryden, cutting in.

The major’s eyes, watery brown, failed to hold Dryden’s. He bit his lip and, flipping over on to his stomach, checked his watch again. ‘Thirty seconds,’ he said.

‘I was there the day of the evacuation,’ Dryden repeated. ‘My first paper was over at Bedford, it was
a big story so I went in to do a colour piece. There were promises made all right, otherwise they wouldn’t have got some of them out. Nothing in writing, of course. White lies. Khaki lies.’

The major stayed silent, outranked by an eyewitness.

‘Anyway, that’s history now,’ continued Dryden. ‘Nine/eleven, Madrid, London, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, who knows where next… ? They need the village. And the Americans want to join the party too. So game, set and match. Like you said, urban warfare. Jude’s Ferry’s too valuable to give back.’

Before the major could reply another gout of flame erupted briefly at the edge of the churchyard, and then they heard the scream of the shell overhead.

‘Shite,’ said Broderick, waving up the company radio operator. ‘Tell ’em they’re fifty yards off the vicarage to the west. Tell ’em quick.’

Dryden used the digital camera and a telephoto to get some snaps. He had the church in centre focus when the final volley came in, and he saw clearly the moment when a shell punched a hole through the roof before exploding in the nave; a window of multicoloured glass bursting out into the churchyard, a flame glimpsed within.

Broderick was standing: ‘Last sodding shell. Typical.’ He glanced at the reporter and Dryden guessed he was weighing up the possibility of sending him back. But Dryden, they both knew, had seen enough.

‘Right. Radio Red Centre, tell ’em the urban phase
is off. We’ll assess the damage, report back.’ He stood, produced an umpire’s whistle and blew it. Along the line of the dyke the men stood, stretching, and a few removed their tin hats. Dryden half expected them to start playing football in no-man’s-land. Broderick jogged down the dyke bank and vaulted the drain below, leading the way across a field pitted with old shell holes and thorn bushes.