The Skeleton Man (8 page)

Dryden leant back in his chair and studied the stained ceiling of the office, from which hung a single wisp of cobweb. ‘I need more,’ he said.

He needed to find her children. He tried Google for both and found a Jacob Hollingsworth listed as a lecturer at Stoke University, in the Department of Eastern European Languages. Calling the number given he ran into an answerphone – Dr Hollingsworth was in Budapest and would be for a further ten days. Urgent messages by e-mail. Dryden tapped one out and dispatched it with little hope of getting an answer. Ruth Hollingsworth did not appear online, but she was described in one of the subsequent articles in
The Crow
on her mother’s disappearance as working at Littleport Library. Dryden rang, discovered she was now married and had taken the surname Lisle, and was last heard of working for the Fenland Mobile Library Service. They had a website listing the villages to be visited by the fleet of eight mobiles – each one with a librarian. Mrs R. Lisle was given as attending for the service that day in Coveney, just west of Ely.

Dryden checked his watch. He had time for the
round trip but he left the news editor an e-mail explaining where he was, and when he’d be back. He grabbed his mobile phone, summoned Humph and met him by the war memorial at the bottom of Market Street. The rain had fallen steadily overnight, soaking the distant landscape into winter colours, illuminated now by a milky sun. They left the cathedral and zigzagged over West Fen towards the low hill that had once been the island of Coveney. En route Dryden phoned his press contact for the Friends of the Ferry to see if the shelling of the church had changed their decision to drop all attempts to win the right of return to the village. There was an answerphone, so he left a message.

The mobile library, decked out in 1950s cream and blue, sat in a lay-by at the village’s central T-junction. A Methodist chapel was the only building of any size, leaving the village green to be dominated by a netball court and social club with four ugly halogen floodlights. There was a children’s playground, empty at this hour except for an elderly man whistling tunelessly. Somewhere a hammer struck wood rhythmically, but nobody else was in sight. The village’s principal asset was the distant view of Ely cathedral, like a battleship steaming head-on, flag flying.

Ruth Lisle was stamping a small pile of large-print books for a woman with grey hair and a stiff back who held a polished stick. Dryden hung back, flicking through some pamphlets on local history, wondering if places like Coveney had a trove of secrets to match
that of Jude’s Ferry. Humph, bored with the cab, appeared at the door, considering the flight of four metal steps. He took the banister and the whole vehicle tilted a foot, the woman with the stick seeking safety by gripping the counter. Once on board the cabbie tiptoed down to the travel section and began, Dryden guessed, to search for a book on the Faroe Islands to complement his language tape.

Dryden leaped forward to help the elderly reader down the steps and noticed with a flood of relief that Ruth Lisle was wearing a round green badge with white letters proclaiming: Friends of the Ferry.

Alone, except for the snuffling figure of Humph, Dryden decided to try absolute honesty for a change.

‘My name’s Philip Dryden, from
The Crow
. I’m sorry to bother you – perhaps the police have been in touch already – it’s about Jude’s Ferry.’ He nodded at the badge.

‘You mean it’s about my mother.’ She didn’t say it unkindly, and she offered Dryden a seat in the small reading area by the counter.

The mobile library squeaked on its hinges as Humph edged along the travel section.

‘I’m so –’ Dryden tried to say, but she cut in.

‘No. It’s OK. They seem to think they might have found her, in this cellar near the inn. I told them I think they’re wrong, Mr Dryden. I just don’t see her there, not like that. I’ve never believed that she killed herself. But they’ll do some tests, and then we’ll know. I’m prepared to be wrong, and in some ways it
would be a relief. I gave them a, what do you call it? A swab – yes, a swab of cells from inside my cheek. It’s a miracle really, isn’t it, DNA? Twenty years ago we’d have never known.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dryden. He paused, forcing himself to keep the pace of the interview languid and informal. ‘Magda – it’s an unusual name.’

‘Hungarian gypsies,’ she said quickly, smiling almost wickedly. ‘Not a popular ancestry in the Fens, as I’m sure you may know.’

Dryden nodded, trying to suppress the clichéd image of the roadside caravans, the rusted gas bottles and the half-hearted washing lines. Every year saw a fresh outbreak of hostilities between travellers and Fen farmers. The open, fenceless Fens provided an ideal landscape for the itinerant. And each summer saw a fresh influx of Irish travellers, modern-day tinkers, equipped with the local knowledge and the cash to buy up land before moving the rest of the caravans into view. Several long-running planning disputes were wending their way towards the High Court while villagers seethed, watching house prices stagnate, then fall.

‘Mum’s father, my grandfather, was in a concentration camp at Terezin in Bohemia before the war; we were active, you see – politically. We’d got out of Hungary when it was obvious what was coming – but Czechoslovakia was worse. The Nazis started with the Roma, a fact that’s sometimes forgotten. A million died in the camps before ’45. Mother got
out in ’38; they sold everything they had for her train ticket.’

Dryden laughed, unable to comprehend the sacrifice.

‘My grandmother died within a few months. They say heartbroken, don’t they, and I never believe that, but she was only fifty.’

Dryden thought what an extraordinary looking woman she was – perhaps six foot, in her late thirties, with large long bones and a broad face out of which the skull seemed to press, the cheekbones stretching the leathery skin. She’d moved easily but with a slight effort, as if her body was a burden to her, but now, seated, she seemed to relish the stillness.

‘Mum was always very careful to say that it was the family decision for her to leave – that she didn’t flee, or seek refuge. The idea that the Nazis had succeeded in forcing her out of her home, even if it was a caravan, made her very angry, but of course it was the truth. She stayed with an uncle in the suburbs – Croydon – but they got bombed out when they attacked the airport in the Blitz, so they moved out to Harlow in Essex. It was just villages then, of course. That’s where she met Dad, he was a farmer, although I think that’s actually a bit grand. A smallholder perhaps, with pigs. I always think that was so important for Mum – that he was of the land, as it were, something she’d never had. He belonged, didn’t he? In a way she never could. Jacob, my brother, was born in the farmhouse – a cottage really, but very idyllic.’

She stopped herself, suddenly worried. ‘You can’t have something that’s just a bit idyllic, can you?’

‘I guess not.’

She patted her knee. ‘So. Idyllic then. But Dad died in 1970 after a long illness, which was not the kindest of deaths.’

Dryden wondered how much suffering was salted away in that casual phrase. A breeze blew open the door of the mobile library and they could see that the rain was falling steadily now, the playground deserted.

‘No one will come now,’ she said. ‘Would you like a coffee?’ There was an automatic cuppa-machine behind the counter and Humph accepted one too, retreating with it to the cab.

She sat eventually, one of her large hands almost encircling the plastic cup, and looked Dryden flatly in the eye.

‘I was there when they found the skeleton – she was a slight woman, your mother?’ said Dryden.

Ruth laughed. ‘I take after my father, Mr Dryden – the Hollingsworths are all country stock, big boned. Although I’m relying on mother’s descriptions and the photographs of course. I was born at the Ferry six months after he died. We never met – like Posthumous in the Greek story.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dryden, trying to think of something else to say.

‘So am I,’ she said, smiling and tilting her chin. Dryden could see how strong she was, how she never used the past as an excuse for weakness.

‘Mother,’ she said with emphasis, ‘was petite by comparison. She was also very depressed about losing her home again. Such an irony, to be driven out by the fascists, then the Luftwaffe, and then the MoD. She was quite calm about it, quite accepting, and devastated in a way. She’d found a place for herself at the Ferry. People liked her – well, most people liked her. And she hadn’t compromised much at all. My mother was a flamboyant character, Mr Dryden, not a trait much prized in the Fens. But we were certainly part of the community – Jake and I. So I think that after all that anguish – the flight to England, the bombing, Dad’s death – she had this notion that she’d found a place that belonged to her. And then they took it away. It was profoundly depressing for her and I think the idea of starting again really frightened her. After all, she didn’t want us around, she wanted us to use our educations and get on. But what was she to do?’

‘Do you mind if I quote you in the paper? I don’t have to,’ asked Dryden, unsettled by her frankness.

‘It’s kind of you to ask but it’s OK. The library service sent me on a course, on how to deal with the press. So I know that if I don’t want it in the paper I should just not say it. But I’m proud of Mum, what she achieved, and what she left behind.’

Dryden tilted his chin by way of a question, sipping the gritty coffee.

‘The diary,’ she said, something like arrogance in the square set of her shoulders. ‘When Dad died she took the store at Jude’s Ferry. Grief led to depression
even then and she needed something to focus on, something that wasn’t inside her. I think what she really wanted was to go back on the road, to take the comfort of motion, which I can really understand,’ she added, looking fondly around the mobile library. ‘The comfort of just being on the way somewhere, without the disappointment of ever arriving. But she stayed for us. Have you heard of an organization called Mass-Observation, Mr Dryden?’

Thunder rolled out on the Fen and the rain came in gusts, rocking the suspension under them and clattering on the metal roof.

‘Sort of. Wasn’t that during the war – people kept diaries of everyday life and then sent them in to a government department as part of a sort of national chronicle? Morale, crime, sex, families, grief, all of human life.’

‘Indeed. Well, it wasn’t a government department actually. It’s all held at the University of Surrey now and they started again in the eighties. Mum applied to be a correspondent and they accepted her. She wrote well, with a real eye for detail. So every day she chronicled village life – no names, just initials for all the characters. They insist on that because they want the entries to be as candid as possible. Then she’d make a copy and send it in.’

Dryden finished the coffee, crunched the cup and checked his watch.

‘Have you read the diary?’

‘Bits of it. In fact, I’m working my way through the
whole thing right now. The police asked if I would read it and see if there might be anything which would help explain what happened in the cellar.’

She waited for him to ask. ‘And is there?’

‘Nothing and everything. The diary is full of tales of the kind of petty maliciousness which marks out a small community – little feuds, stifling marriages, secrets which are interesting only because they’re secrets. And the prejudice against us, against the family, which was always there but which faded I think, as the years went by.’

‘But no names,’ said Dryden.

‘No. Just initials. And this is all – the bits I’ve read so far – back in the early eighties, so I can’t even guess the real identities. I was a teenager, all I was interested in was other teenagers.’

She closed her eyes for a second. ‘It’s very good, the quality of her description. I thought I might put it all together as a book, and the people at Mass-Observation are ready to release the material for publication. So who knows.’

She raised her cup to her dry lips and let her eyes run along the bookshelves. Dryden wondered if that had been what had drawn her to the library – the prospect of writing a book herself.

‘She loved books?’ asked Dryden.

‘It was the only thing she brought to this country – that and the clothes she stood up in. A Magyar Bible, some poetry and a blank notebook from her father. Books were almost sacred.’

‘And she filled in her diary… well, religiously?’

They laughed together.

Dryden watched the rain bouncing on the tarmac outside. ‘The police looked at the diaries when she disappeared, didn’t they?’

‘Yes. Mum didn’t send everything she wrote to MO, the stuff about her own thoughts and the family she kept separately. The police did look briefly and I think she’d been honest about how she felt, how the prospect of leaving was like a kind of death approaching – but they had to admit she never mentions harming herself. Not once.’

Dryden stood and climbed down the metal steps, letting the cool rain wash against his face. He took out his card and handed it over. ‘If you do find something of interest you might call? I know there’d be no names, but let me know if you can.’

She nodded, reading the card, and Dryden thought she’d never ring. He imagined her mother, working diligently at her diary in the bedroom above the shop, listening perhaps to the life of Jude’s Ferry outside – a dog barking, a voice raised in anger, feet running home.

‘Did anyone know she kept this diary while she was alive?’

‘No. It was a secret, and that was certainly the rule. But then…’

Dryden waited.

He stood on the doorstep of Ely police station, the automatic doors of which refused to open, and looking up watched the drops plunging from a low grey cloud, falling into his eyes. A police communications mast rose into the low cloud, held in position by a series of steel hawsers – home to a flock of chattering starlings. Otherwise the squat two-storey 1970s building appeared to be devoid of life – uniformed or plain clothed. Five squad cars were parked up, smartly washed and waxed, like exhibits in a museum of the motor car. There was a persistent rumour in the town that the station was often completely empty – all semblance of activity being created by a series of time-switch lights. It was where the sleeping policemen worked.