The Skeleton Man (33 page)

‘Question,’ he said, his eyes searching frantically for a way to climb up to the rafters above. ‘How long have I got before they come round?’

A heartbeat before the panic had taken hold of his reason, he knew there was a hope. With a shaking hand he ran a finger along the dog’s chin until he found a small copper disc, adjusting it in the light until he could read it clearly.

Smiling he said the single word out loud – ‘Sealodes’ – and plunging into his memory retrieved the name of a small village in Alsace.

He went back to his chair and tried to think clearly. The sun had broken through and sets of golden stripes inched their way along the rough whitewashed walls. So morning: but what day? If the dart had put him out overnight then it was Saturday.

If he was on the old airfield then the police must be close at hand. Shaw had said they had the area under surveillance, but then Dryden bitterly reflected, they’d had Thieves Bridge under surveillance as well. Could they know Dryden was a prisoner? It was possible, as Humph had dropped him at Wicken Fen and must have raised the alarm by now. But he’d probably been smuggled onto the airfield at night or in the boot of a car. So perhaps his best plan was to devise some sort of signal to say he was a prisoner.

Escape was improbable. His mobile had been taken, the windows were shuttered in iron, the door securely locked. There were no other doors and the roof rafters were too high to reach, even with the help of the chair. Roland, he sensed, was far away. But Dryden suspected someone was keeping watch. Roland had said they wanted to make him understand that he should not give evidence if the case came to court. They wanted simply to scare him, a task they
had begun efficiently and would have accomplished triumphantly if his fear of the dogs was not mitigated by the knowledge that a single word
should
render them harmless. But he could act scared if needed: it hardly needed a leap of the imagination.

He laughed to himself, trying to drive away the fear. The sudden noise disturbed the dogs and one began whimpering in a tortured half-sleep. The rats, Peyton’s rats he knew now, heaved in their pen. Dryden remained in his chair, hoping that it represented a position of authority. Remembering that dogs can smell fear he willed his nervous system into neutral, concentrating instead on how he could contrive to make a big enough noise to alert a police unit which must be within a few hundred yards of the building he was in.

He needed a tool of some sort, something he could rattle against the metal shutters. He was taking off his shoe when one of the dogs rose up suddenly and double-clamped its jaws with a hollow plastic ‘dolck’. It stood, disorientated, trying to clear the grogginess by shaking its head. When it saw Dryden its lips rolled back in a snarl. It tried to jump but its legs failed to respond and it slumped instead. Then its aggression overcame its bewilderment with frightening speed, and scrambling to its legs, its nails clattering on the concrete floor, it edged down the room until it stood before him, swaying slightly, one of its back legs occasionally buckling.

All its teeth now showed, and it began to drop its
shoulders preparatory to an attack. A second dog was standing, while the third whimpered and struggled to rise.

Dryden knew what he had to do and knew he had to do it with authority and timing. He crossed his legs, placed either hand on the arms of the chair, and said the word as calmly and clearly as he could.

‘Saverne.’

The effect was miraculously instant. The dog’s eyes left his and began to wander listlessly. Relieved of its duty it staggered to the edge of the floor and slumped down, its chin on its forepaws.

‘Good dog,’ said Dryden, and regretted it instantly as all three dogs barked, building on the noise level and until they were baying in time. Dryden sat still, hoping the police might hear, and noting that no other dog answered their call.

Outside the only noise was the snapping of the windsock and, a long way off, an aircraft, the engine note switching as it prepared for some distant landing. And then he heard the maroon and a second later felt a jolt through the earth. He imagined the purple smudge in the sky overhead.

Part of him knew then, but his conscious mind tried to hold on to the world he had constructed around himself since coming round. A signal flare on a commercial airfield? Why?

The answer was chillingly simple. Because it wasn’t a commercial airfield. And it wasn’t a windsock flapping in the wind, it was a target flag. And he wasn’t
near Coventry, he was in Jude’s Ferry, in the heart of Whittlesea Mere. But if it was Saturday, why the warning? And then he remembered something else, a fragment from the long drug-induced sleep. This room, half seen at night, moonlight at the shutters, a plate set down, an apple, some biscuits.

A voice: ‘Eat.’

And then he knew. He’d slept for two days. Yes, he was in Jude’s Ferry. But it wasn’t Saturday, it was Sunday, the day the army was due to begin live shelling again.

What had the army statement said? That there would be two signal maroons – one at 9.30am and one at 9.55am, then the first bombardment of the chosen targets would begin at 10.00am. He had thirty minutes. He checked his watch: he had twenty-seven.

He walked to the iron door and taking off his heavy boot crashed the heel into the unyielding metal – a stone stuck in the tread producing a single spark which, together with the noise, reignited the dogs’ chorus. Dryden repeated the blow ten times and then, his heart racing, returned to his seat to listen for a response.

He searched the silence, finding again a distant aircraft, and now perhaps the sound of other flags – signal flags for the distant artillery, which he imagined flying over the village, from the church, the factory chimney, and the roof of the Methodist Hall. The flag that he could hear was close, very close. Was the old fuel store a target? What if there was another wayward shell?

Suddenly the bars of sunlight were gone, and the sound of rain plashing on the sills filled the building. The light dimmed and the dogs, still confused by the drugs in their blood, flopped down
together. He closed his eyes, trying to bring relief to the tension in his shoulders, but the nerve signals from his joints seemed to buzz in time with the ticking of his wristwatch.

‘So this is their punishment,’ he thought. ‘My torture.’

When he heard the footsteps he thought he was hallucinating; they were at the door almost before he had accepted that they were real. But the clacking of the metal key in a heavy padlock was too crisp to be imaginary, and then the door swung in and he was blinded by the light around the silhouette – the figure short, stocky, with spiky hair making him look shorter still, and at his heels a wispy-haired terrier.

And before the Alsatians could react: ‘Saverne.’ He stepped in and closed the door. He looked at the docile dogs. ‘You knew the command word? Lucky man. They’d have scared you to death otherwise. They don’t bite, but you didn’t know
that
, did you?’

Dryden recognized the cruelty more than the face. ‘Skeg,’ he said, suddenly seeing what he should have seen. The lapel badges, the maudlin affection for the thin-ribbed dog.

‘I talked about my fear of dogs to you, didn’t I? Shared the confidence. Thanks for passing that on to your friends.’

Skeg was nodding his head as the terrier whimpered and slunk behind his heels away from the silent Alsatians.

‘Look. I do what I do because it’s right. I need to
do it.’ The tight-wired frame was strangely animated, releasing emotion. ‘And Skeg’s not my name, all right? It’s Martyn, Martyn Armstrong. I like to be called that now, now I know who I am.’

Dryden didn’t move, sensing his position was no longer as precarious as it seemed. Why was he being rescued? The door was unlocked, why did he need anyone’s help to escape? And the name hit a note which made him see Elizabeth Drew hunched over her desk in Goods In.

He had it. ‘Armstrong – you were born here. Your father was the caretaker at the factory.’ And then he understood him. ‘And you didn’t like seeing animals caged up, did you?’

‘No. I didn’t like that, I’m proud of what I did, what I do.’

He rounded up the dogs and carefully attached their collars to a set of leads.

Dryden knew then why he’d come for him.

‘It’s the dogs, isn’t it? You thought they might get hurt.’

‘We’re supposed to be animal rights protesters. They made me shoot ’em up.’ He laughed as if he couldn’t believe anything that had happened. ‘Bastards. And they think we’re amateurs.’

‘You’re my guard?’

He nodded. ‘I’m supposed to make sure you were in ’ere until the shelling started and then I’m to get out and let you sweat. I guess they didn’t want you getting out and wandering into a shell. In here you’re
probably safe, I think the army’ll be pretty careful for a while after the last fiasco. We’re a hundred yards from any of the targets – more. I said the noise would freak out the dogs, but they didn’t care. I don’t know what they care about.’

Dryden brushed a line of sweat from his forehead and flexed his arms where the stress was making the joints ache. Carried on the wind they heard the sound of a vehicle, caterpillar tracks whirring as it climbed a dyke bank.

‘We better go,’ said Skeg, checking his watch. ‘Twenty minutes – less – we need ten to get clear.’

‘You think I’m just gonna forget it was you?’ said Dryden.

‘Christ no. I don’t want anything to do with these people; they don’t really care about the animals, it’s a game for them, retribution. Like it’s an excuse to be cruel, to damage people. I want out. And I don’t fancy my chances with them when they find you got out. So I’m gonna do my own deal – I’d make a fucking good witness in this case they keep talking about. I got them into Sealodes in the first place, I worked there for a few months last year till old Peyton gave me the push. But he let me walk the dogs, see, that’s how I knew.’

He sucked in air, trying to keep his courage alive. ‘I’ll do it too, but I want witness protection. I got a chance that way, but you get blown to pieces it’s all over for me.’

He pulled the three dogs to their feet. ‘So we’re all going.’

They stepped outside and the soft rain was falling again in gentle folds like net curtains. The fuel store was on the very edge of the village, beyond the river, and so the cottages on The Dring and the New Ferry Inn were a distant jumble of grey shadows.

‘Will they fire in this?’ said Dryden, as Skeg tried to arrange the three dogs on the leads.

‘Probably,’ said Skeg. ‘Now they can, they will. They’re just more likely to miss.’ He led the dogs down to the river and then down some stone steps. ‘You’re gonna get soaked, the water’s up over the path, but just keep with me.’

They splashed in amongst the reeds, Skeg holding the terrier under one arm and the triple lead with the other. The water was at least six feet below the edge of the dyke so that their escape was covered from view, even without the comforting blanket of rain.

Dryden reckoned they were three hundred yards clear of the edge of the village when he felt the double percussion of the two maroons through his feet: a dull visceral thud followed by a rattling scream as the signal climbed; repeated again before the first echo had died. They scrambled to the top of the dyke and looked up into the grey sky. Above their heads the two signals exploded with a crackle like fireworks, the deep purple smudges seen for just a second through the cloud.

Skeg was beside him. ‘That’s the all-clear. They’re gonna wait for the rain to stop.’

Dryden shrugged, watching a pale sun fade behind
drifting cloud. ‘I still don’t understand why you came back,’ he said, leaning against the damp grass of the steep bank. ‘Why you’re here.’

Skeg embraced the head of one of the dogs, squatting down. ‘We took the rats two weeks ago, before Roland and his friends got involved. We needed somewhere to keep them. The range was closed then. I knew ways in, you can still get a boat to within half a mile – they never think of that, see; with a small boat you can almost get to the Ferry. Then you turned up those old bones in the cellar and the place was crawling with coppers. It didn’t bother us – so what if they found ’em? But they didn’t – they didn’t even cross the river. I had the dogs in town so they made me bring them out for you. As a present.’

Skeg stood. ‘We should take our chance, let’s go.’

Dryden was about to scramble down when he saw across the fields that the rain was lifting and that the grey shadow of Neate’s old garage could be seen on Church Street. The house was lifeless, the windows black, the glass long fallen from rotten frames. But there was an outhouse, a workshop, and through the windows of the double doors Dryden saw clearly the sudden flash of an orange-red torchlight, sweeping once, twice, in the shadows.

He watched, his eyes aching with the effort of seeing through the falling greyness of the morning.

But there: again, this time from an upstairs window, the sudden flash of electricity, as unmistakable as lightning.

Someone was searching Walter Neate’s garage. He decided then, before he could assemble his fears. When he looked back Skeg’s head was at the parapet, waving, but Dryden turned and ran on through the wet field, exhilarated by the sudden motion, the rain running down his face. Ahead of him the light had gone, but he didn’t doubt what he had seen. Someone else had returned to Jude’s Ferry.

Up close Neate’s Garage was almost entirely obscured by ivy, the bole of which was as thick as a man’s torso and had split the façade of the Edwardian house, bursting out to fill the eyeless windows. The rain had stopped suddenly and the landscape was still, trapped in a paperweight.

Dryden moved towards a downstairs window and looked in. The ceiling had collapsed and the floor was obscured by distended lumps of plaster, rotting timber and the remains of a dead sheep, the lines of the skull softened by alpine-green moss.

From the back of the house came the thin creak of a door, and boots on floorboards. Dryden circled the building and came to the corner around which lay the rear garden. A blackthorn bush had burst out of the concrete path and writhed against the brickwork. Through the black maze of the branches Dryden could see a man standing with his back to the house, his head turned up into the grey sky. In one hand he had a spade and the other a garden fork, both flaked with rust. He retrieved what looked like a quarter bottle of whisky from his coat and took a long drink, wiping his eyes and mouth afterwards with the back of his hand. He seemed to be orientating
himself to the main features of the old garden – an oak tree in the far corner, a path made from circles of York stone and a trio of apple trees which had once been expertly intertwined but which were now suffocating each other, the stunted fruit diseased on the branch. And close to where he stood the frost-shattered remains of a stone bird table.