The Skeleton Man (3 page)

It took them twenty minutes to reach the church. As the village unfolded itself to Dryden he kept expecting to see movement: washing perhaps, flapping on a line, a stooped figure hoeing in a garden, a trundling tractor encircled by seagulls. But except for the rooks over the water tower and the limp target flags the village was lifeless, the shadows untroubled.

At the graveyard wall the major split the company, sending half on to make sure that at least the second target – the old sugar beet factory – had been hit according to plan. The rest were told to check out the graveyard and the exterior of the church and then assemble at the church doors to gauge the damage inside.

Dryden retrieved the digital camera from the webbing inside his tunic and moved amongst the headstones. The stray shell which had punched out the window had sent glass and stone fragments spraying out. He noticed graffiti on some of the reverse faces of the stones, including two sets of ‘TROOPS OUT’ and one reading ‘GIVE OUR VILLAGE BACK’. A snake of grey smoke rose from the roof of
St Swithun’s. Oak doors in the porch stood at an angle, their locks ruptured by the blast, and Dryden squeezed through.

Outside he could hear the soldiers moving through the long grass around the building. But in the nave he was alone, and for the first time he felt the presence of the ghosts of the past, crowding into the pews which had long gone. It was cool in here, surrounded by stone, shielded from the sun, and he felt the sudden iciness of the sweat on his neck. He moved down one of the side aisles to a Gothic door which he tried, but found it locked. Turning towards the main body of the church he watched as a shaft of sunlight fell to the bare stone floor of the nave. The shell had pitted the stone like the impact of a meteor on the moon. The only fire was in the roof beams, which spluttered blue flames. The sound of falling glass filled the ringing silence. As he walked forward he felt exposed, the subject of watchful eyes, and it made his skin creep.

He stood in the jagged pool of light and looked up into the blue sky above, then down at his boots. A finger, porcelain white, lay on the flagged stone floor. For a moment his stomach turned, he was unable to be sure it was what it must be, a shattered fragment of statuary. But the tomb stood close by, a reclining crusader in stone on the top, the hands once held in prayer reduced to two stumps of chipped marble by the explosion.

The oak doors behind him crashed open and Broderick pushed his way into the church, followed
by a dozen more of his men. They fanned out, silent now they could see the damage to the roof, sharing some of the gunner’s guilt.

Dryden touched the cool stone tomb. Shrapnel had damaged the top of the funeral chest on which the knight lay – the corner of the stone lid had broken away and lay shattered on the floor. He edged closer to the hole, trying not to block any light which might show the contents within, but he could only glimpse cold stone, just on the margin of vision. Closer, he sniffed the fetid air, laced now with the acrid edge of scorched stone.

He walked behind the chest, recognizing the crusader’s tomb from a picture
The Crow
had run the previous week when he’d written a feature hooked on the decision by campaigners to abandon their legal fight, and previewing the return of live firing to the range.

The centuries had worn the name on the side of the tomb but it was still legible: PEYTON.

As he rounded the stone box Dryden glimpsed a spade leaning against the nave’s outer wall, and black peaty earth scattered over the cool grey stones of the floor. He froze, suddenly feeling that despite the voices of the soldiers near by he was still alone in the church. He could see that one of the large gravestones set into the floor had been lifted to reveal a hole, most of the earth from which lay in a neat pyramid hidden from wider view by the funeral casket of the Peytons. The grave was just three feet deep and empty, a few
damp pebbles reflecting the light from the rich coffee-black soil.

The gravestone removed stood on end, leaning by the spade, and showed a heraldic device like a sunflower with the clear etched letters spelling the name again: PEYTON.

The crackle of a radio startled him and he saw Broderick directly below the hole in the roof with his radio operator.

‘Mr Dryden… We’re moving on into the village. There’s nothing we can do here now. I need you close to hand. My men have to run a hose in here – they don’t want you in the way.’

Dryden looked around the church and noted signs of earlier damage. One window was boarded up, and parts of the triple-tiered wooden pulpit were charred by a fire long cold. But why the opened grave?

‘You should see this…’ he said. ‘St Swithun’s has had visitors.’

Broderick shrugged. ‘First things first, if you please. I presume they’re not here now. We need to check the second target, another wayward shell, I’m afraid.’

Dryden knelt by the pile of soil and ran some of it through his hands. Despite the heavy heat of the summer’s day it still felt cool so he plunged his hand in, pulled it back, and examined the moisture visible on his skin.

‘Recent visitors,’ he said, knowing there was no one to hear.

But he felt the hairs on his arm prickle and,
standing, fought against the irrational conviction that he was being watched. Then he ran a finger in the dust along the edge of the tomb and along the ten-inch-high letters etched in its side, wondering why the name was familiar, pushing aside the creeping anxiety that he should know the answer.

From the church porch Dryden looked down on Jude’s Ferry. St Swithun’s stood on a hill thirty feet high, a peak in the billiard-table landscape of the Fens, the highest point on a low island of clay which had been inhabited for more than 1,000 years. He realized with a shock that he had stood on this precise point seventeen years earlier, the day of the evacuation, looking down on a village bustling with removal vans, army trucks, cars, livestock, the press, radio and TV cameras and a small but vocal band of children. Flags had flown from the army tents set up on the old recreation ground, and along the old Whittlesea Road the last of the sheep were herded, their bleating insistent and alarmed.

It had been an unforgettable assignment. Initially the army’s PR men had tried to keep all contact between the villagers and media to a mid-morning press conference in the Methodist Hall. The print media had agreed to stay away on the Sunday, the feast of St Swithun, to let the villagers enjoy the last saint’s day in privacy. But that Monday morning a bus had taken the press and TV crews from Ely in through the firing-range gates and straight to the Methodist Hall – packed with most of the surviving
villagers. It had been a stilted affair dominated by one old soldier who’d clearly been encouraged to stand up and announce that he was proud the village was going to play its part in fighting for freedom. He’d got his medals on for the occasion so the TV boys had fêted him, happy they’d secured their picture story in time for the lunchtime news bulletins. A couple of women, both widows, said they would always remember what the village had done in two world wars – a statement which prompted another photocall at the war memorial at the top of The Dring, the little high street which ran beside an open ditch clogged with tall reeds.

Dryden had gone along to watch, and had noticed a man he presumed was the landlord of the New Ferry Inn, sitting on his doorstep drinking tea, watching with tired eyes, rimmed red. A young man with thick brown hair in a lopsided agricultural cut, shoulders slumped in defeat. Beside him sat a woman, legs bare and folded under her, hair brushed back from a pale face, T-shirt crumpled. She rubbed the heel of her hand into an eye socket, trying to drive away the tiredness, or a memory. He caught her eye and smiled but she fled, the open pub door revealing packing crates on the quarry-tiled floor of the bar.

The man let her go, spilling his tea out in the dust.

The rest of the villagers, sullen and wary, watched the half-hearted little theatre put on for the media: the old soldier arranged before the memorial like a living
prop, flanked by the widows. Opposite the inn was a terrace of four stone almshouses, little Victorian castles complete with stone windows and Gothic ironwork. The residents, four elderly men and a woman, sat on a bench outside, stoic in the face of an unseemly invasion of their village. Then a shout went up, from down The Dring, where two soldiers were trying to get an old woman through her cottage door, failing to disguise the fact she didn’t want to leave.

The woman was crying, unsteady on her feet. ‘Please,’ she kept saying, ‘Please, no.’ Her features had dissolved into a mask of anxiety, like a child’s.

The crowd, milling, began to boo and someone lobbed a brick towards one of the army Land Rovers, where it landed on the bonnet. Pebbles and dirt began to fly in the air and the TV camera lights thudded into full action. The elderly woman had fainted and had to be half carried to a waiting ambulance, but behind her the front door of her home was already being boarded up. Further along The Dring an army detail was moving past the old cottages, padlocking doors and closing windows. Glass shattered, prompting more boos from the crowd.

‘You might have the decency to fucking wait,’ shouted a man, his face red and damp with alcohol.

‘Come on, boys,’ said another voice, and the crowd visibly shrank back. ‘Beer’s free – don’t waste it.’ It was the young man from the doorstep of the pub,
his tea mug still in hand. ‘It’s too late for trouble – it’s over.’

Dryden tried to judge his age – mid-twenties perhaps, but with a kind of world-weary authority which made him seem older. He led them away, down by the inn where the army had provided lunch in boxes on trestle tables and a last barrel stood out in the shade on blocks. There was a bit more shouting but it was clear now that they didn’t have the heart for a real fight. It was their pride which was at stake, not their homes. They were gone.

The soldiers, sensing the mood, regrouped and slipped away to the tents, neat rows of bleached white, like a Boy Scout camp. Dryden tried to gather some quotes from the men by the inn but most shook their heads, ashamed of their impotence now that the end had come.

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.