The Skeleton Man (34 page)

One of the blackthorn twigs broke and the man turned, giving Dryden a half second to duck back behind the corner of the house. There was a silence, punctuated by the sound of a match struck, then unmistakably the gritty slice of the spade cutting through the blue clay upon which the village lay, and the slight sucking sound of the clod being lifted from the wet earth. And another noise, less rhythmic, the sharp intake of breaths which accompany spasms of pain. The methodical work continued, and Dryden thought of the graves which had dominated the story of Jude’s Ferry – from Peyton’s tomb to the cellar itself in which Peter Tholy’s frail body had been left to hang. And then there was another noise, unmistakable in that still air, the sound of metal on wood. Dryden peered round the corner and saw the man kneel, plunge his arms down into the trench that he’d dug and lift something free of the earth. He didn’t stand but sank onto his heels, amongst the loose soil he’d turned out of the grave. Beside him on the ground he’d laid out a mildewed blanket which Dryden guessed he’d found in one of the old bedrooms, but he didn’t place the
object down. With his back to Dryden he rocked silently, cradling it to his chest, one hand rising to hold his head. Then he stood and turned and Dryden saw clearly what he held: a small wooden coffin caked in black earth, its white paint flaking. And Dryden saw the face of the man who’d reclaimed the body from the earth. The face was disfigured by dried blood, an ugly black wound cutting up between the forehead and the hairline. For a moment he thought it was indeed Jason Imber, returned to bury his son. But the skin was paler, the face dominated by the Celtic brow, the muscles knotted on the arms, the broken body seemingly supported by the blue mechanic’s overalls. And so he saw the face before him for what it was – that of Kathryn Neate’s brother, not hanging charred on the wire, but alive, a fresh gout of blood oozing from a wound on his head and trickling through his fingers.

In the silence a wood pigeon cooed and then footsteps sounded, leading away from the house, along the old road towards the village. Dryden crept from the ruins in time to see the grey silhouette fading into the mist, the angular coffin still held across Neate’s chest, wrapped in the blanket, just visible from behind.

Dryden padded along the grass verge, keeping him within sight until he reached the allotments at the foot of Church Hill, where Neate turned off the road and out of sight. Dryden waited until he saw him reappear by the old church before following, threading his way uphill through the tangled berries and the ramshackle huts. Rain still trickled from the Victorian gutters of the church roof, and a rook cracked its wings between the battlements of the tower.

At the open doors of St Swithun’s he stopped, aware now that he was close enough to be heard if he stumbled, and unable to push aside the image of what he now assumed was Jason Imber’s corpse, the smoke still drifting from the charred clothes he had stolen from the orderlies’ room at the hospital. He waited a full minute, listening, and then edged away into the churchyard. He moved from buttress to buttress until he was beside the window the army
had blown out just a week earlier. The rain had already buckled the chipboard so that he could see through a gap into the church. Directly opposite in the far wall was the small Victorian door to the ossuary Fred Lake had described. From within came the sudden, violent sound of wood being wrenched, rusted nails finally breaking free. Dryden stood, waiting, compelling himself to remain still despite an overwhelming need to know why this small child’s bones had meant so much.

Then the door swung open and he saw Jimmy Neate surrounded by bones, blood spattered on his overalls. At his feet the small coffin lay, shattered now. The far wall of the ossuary was covered in rough shelves, once white-washed, now grey with dust. Skulls filled them, and in the apex of the roof were stacked to the rafters. The floor, but for a narrow stone path, was made up of skeleton bones, thigh bones emerging from shattered ribs and a dusty weathered compost of medieval fingers.

Jimmy Neate looked about him, surveying his work. He picked up the shards of wood, stepped unsteadily outside and through the little Gothic door, and then closed it firmly. The sun, as pale as butter, glinted on the old key as he turned the lock, and Dryden remembered that Walter Neate had been sexton at St Swithun’s for forty years. Neate didn’t look back, walking quickly down the nave carrying the coffin and lid, awkwardly now, like lumber. Dryden waited until he’d left the graveyard and saw that he’d
dumped the wood, probably amongst the rubble and burnt roof timbers the army had collected in a skip by the lychgate.

Then, overhead, in the blue sky, which was being stretched clear and pale as the mist fled, he saw the purple scar like a synapse, then heard the dull percussion of the maroon. A warning – the bombardment postponed was to begin at last. Dryden guessed they had five minutes, perhaps less. He saw Neate stop, watching the signal fade in the breeze, and then bow his head, holding the wound, before changing direction, doubling back around the graveyard wall towards the old water tower on Telegraph Hill, keeping below the skyline.

Dryden gave him two minutes and followed, and as he ran across the open grass he looked up and saw the red target flag flying from the pole at the top of the tower, above the whitewashed wooden dovecote. The door of the three-storey brick tower stood open and stepping inside Dryden heard footsteps ascending a metal ladder somewhere above. The room he was in was twenty-five-feet square and had once held a diesel pump for the village’s drinking water. A small modern electric pump stood in its place, dusty and unused now that the army had its own supply to tackle fires after each bombardment. In one corner pipes ran in and out of the brick walls, and then upwards to the tank above. Equipment, mothballed now, stood against one wall for testing water quality. Four large elegant windows flooded
the room with light. Against one wall was an open metal stairway with handrail, and Dryden climbed it, waiting for the moment when his eyes rose level with the second-storey room. This was empty too, littered with the tiny dry carcasses of thousands of greenfly born into the fetid, damp, atmosphere of the enclosed tower. He climbed again, a shorter flight this time, to another empty room; but not quite: at its centre was a single metal twisting staircase rising, enclosed in circular safety bars, up through a circular shaft in the middle of the black metal tank above.

A footfall, perhaps above.

Dryden considered his options, sensing the weight and mass of the dark water above his head. He could slip away. He knew now where Jimmy Neate had hidden the bones of his sister’s child. But why? Had he murdered Jason Imber? His own sister too? And why now was he seeking death, beneath the crimson red target flag?

How long since the maroon? Three minutes perhaps, more. He took a step back, preparing to climb down to the safety of the earth.

But the voice was behind him, not above.

‘Dryden.’ Jimmy Neate stood by the top of the stairs, the light from one of the windows leaving half his face in shadow. The other half was caked in blood, and where the wound was deepest, the light glistened on exposed flesh and a hint of shattered bone beneath. Outside, through the frosted glass, they could just see the distant shape of the church.

‘You followed me here?’ said Neate, and the effort made his knees buckle so that he had to lean against the wall.

‘Jason Imber said he was coming here to bury his son. I thought you were dead on the wire at the Stopover.’

Neate nodded. ‘You followed me here,’ he said again, and Dryden guessed that he wanted to know if he’d seen him slip into the ossuary.

‘No. I saw you climbing the hill, I was down by The Dring looking for Jason.’

‘You should go,’ said Neate, standing aside, the tension ebbing from his body.

Dryden didn’t move. ‘This was Jason’s plan,’ said Neate. ‘To kill me, and then kill himself. He should be standing here, but he’s hanging on the wire.’ He stopped and turned away, and Dryden wondered if he was crying.

‘You tried to kill him at Cuckoo Bridge,’ said Dryden. ‘There was a witness who saw your car. They said there was something odd, that they thought there was just a passenger on board, parked up. But it was left-hand drive of course, one of the American cars from the garage. He wanted to go to the police, didn’t he, to tell them he’d been there when Peter Tholy was lynched?’

‘Yes. I couldn’t let him do that. He said he’d take all the blame, that he wouldn’t name names. But they’d have got to him. We couldn’t take the chance. And he’d promised to keep the secret, as we’d all
promised that morning at Orchard House. When you found Peter’s skeleton we checked around, making sure we’d got it straight; who went down, and who stayed up in the bar. Ken said if they identified Tholy then he’d go to the police, tell ’em our story, make sure we got in first. But he told you, which kinda worked better.’

He smiled, forgetting the pain.

Dryden cut in. ‘So you threw him off the bridge. But he lived. As long as his amnesia lasted you were safe. But you couldn’t bank on it, so you were going to make a run for it – the suitcases were ready. And you tried to send us off on a false trail, telling me all about Ken Woodruffe’s plans for Ellen. But you ran out of time. Jason Imber did remember and he came looking for you. He didn’t want revenge for himself, did he, Jimmy – he wanted it for Kathryn. Because he knew then that you’d killed her, that you’d let him think all those years that he’d been the one who’d snuffed her out that night. Laura told him we’d found Kathryn’s bones and that she’d been stabbed, that the ribs were chipped by a blade to the heart. But if you’d found the body then you must have seen the knife wound. It didn’t make any sense unless you’d been the one who’d killed her. And you’d taken the body away so that nobody could see, wound it in the carpet to hide the blood and got Walter to help bury her quickly. You didn’t want to bury her in the tomb, did you, because that might draw attention one day to Jude’s bones. You wanted to bury her out on the mere
– but it was Walter’s word that counted that night. So when you had the chance you took the child. And that’s what Jason Imber couldn’t understand, what he desperately needed to understand.’

‘It’s time,’ said Neate. ‘You should go, Dryden. Why bother with questions now.’

‘Because I want an answer. An answer to the question Jason Imber came to ask: why hide Jude’s bones? Well?’

They felt the explosion of the first shell before the searing sound shook the old water tower. Dust fell on them in a cloud and one of the windows imploded, a jagged pain registering in Dryden’s ears.

When he lifted his head from the floor, where he’d fallen, Dryden saw that Neate was against the brick wall, his head cradled in his hands.

Then he looked up, the open wound now caked in dirt. ‘You’ll die here too if you stay. They’ve gone for the factory first, but they’ll hit the tower. Go.’

Dryden knelt on the floorboards. ‘The answer?’ he said simply.

Neate smiled, deciding at last. ‘Christ. He didn’t like the answer,’ he said. ‘And neither will you. She killed him, Dryden. Kathryn killed him, with poison. Ethylene glycol – antifreeze. That’s why I took the bones, took them that night down to the garage and buried them in the garden – it wasn’t safe enough, but it was all I could do. I couldn’t risk it, people were gossiping about Jude, saying Kathryn had wanted him dead. But Dad hadn’t heard, no one had the
guts to gossip to him, so I couldn’t stop him burying Kathryn in the tomb.

‘So I had to do it. I didn’t want them to know, for Dad to know, what she’d done. And it would have been all right if you hadn’t found Kathryn’s bones. Jason found out about the chipped ribs, the knife that took her life. So I knew I had to move Jude again – that the police might come looking, so it had to be somewhere safer. They won’t find them now. And that means they’ll never be able to prove what she did.’

Dryden felt the truth had been twisted. ‘You did all that for her? I don’t think so.’

The pressure clicked in Dryden’s ears and he threw himself to the floor as the second shell hit home down by the factory. Above them the old iron tank twisted, and a gush of water fell down one wall, swamping the floor. A wooden beam fell, bouncing once on its end, before crashing to the floor.

Dryden crawled towards the stairwell. ‘I think it was you and Walter who didn’t want the child,’ he said, the room dense now with dust and debris. ‘She might have given him the poison; did she? Perhaps. But you were holding her hand, because it’s what you thought Walter wanted. And it’s what she’d said she’d wanted, so she couldn’t escape. But what I can’t work out is why you wanted it, Jimmy? Why did you want Jude dead?’

The wind blew through the shattered window, and Dryden imagined the guns being reloaded, the hot shell cases smoking in the grass.

‘And then, when the funeral was finally over, she’d made that appointment to see her social worker. You found out about that when Lake came to say she couldn’t have a lift. She was going to tell them what you’d done, what you’d helped her do. Isn’t that right, Jimmy?

‘And Magda Hollingsworth had called as well. She knew about the rumours that the child had been killed. She’d put it in her diary and my guess is she was going to tell the police, to clear her conscience before she left the Ferry. And if they’d interviewed Kathryn she’d have told them the truth, that you and Walter had helped her kill the baby – to kill Jude.’

Neate stood, staggering to the blown-out window and looking out over the village.

‘Magda,’ he said, spitting the word out. ‘We told her to go, to keep out of other people’s lives, told her she didn’t belong, that she’d never belonged. An outsider. A gyppo. A fucking pikey. She didn’t like that, didn’t like it one bit. Coming round sticking her nose in our business. We told her to go – she wouldn’t be missed. She cried.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘Said she wanted to do right by the baby, said it over and over again. The police tracked me down after she went missing – they’d seen the diary and worked out it must be about Kathryn. I told them the truth – so did George – that we turfed her out and that was that.’