The Skeleton Man

4

The cellar, uncorked like a buried bottle, gave off the stale breath of the years. While a military radio crackled with traffic they stood silently in a circle and Dryden tried to make himself memorize the scene, stilling the urge to ascend into the light.

The floor and three walls were old brick and lime, the fourth obscured by stacks of bottle crates. In one corner was a packing case of pint glasses, the top layer lying on newspaper, damp and yellow. By the far wall, opposite the stone steps, was a cupboard, doorless, the shelves within stacked with paint tins, tubes of various DIY kit, brushes stiff with dried turps sticking out of jam jars. Cobwebs hung in tresses to the floor and from the rough brickwork of the walls. The webs shimmered slightly, catching the light, as spiders dashed for the safety of the shadows in the rafters above.

Close to the centre of the room were the shattered remains of a child’s high stool, one leg broken away, small pale-yellow teddy bears still just visible painted on the wood. Stacked with the beer crates were some other cast-offs from a child’s nursery: a changing mat in plastic almost completely rotted, a wicker Moses basket, a set of wooden bowling pins, a small child’s dresser, painted to match the broken high stool.

The corpse sat now, the descent to ground having driven the shattered spine down into the rest of the bones like a javelin so that the torso remained vertical, the head back, revealing the bones of the neck and the hollow underside of the jaw. Defying gravity, the skeleton seemed to demand one last chance to bear witness. Dryden could see now that the corpse had been reduced almost completely to bone, just a few shreds of tendon and cartilage remaining, and that the threadbare clothes had been all that had held it together in the still air of the cellar. Dryden tried to imagine the years of darkness it had spent in the breathless tomb.

But now light filtered and spilled in from above as the sound of the hail subsided. Reflections of the skeleton filled the black water.

Broderick stepped forward and examined the twine that had tied the wrists together in front of the body.

‘I wouldn’t touch anything,’ said Dryden.

Broderick stood, thinking. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave it. The military police will be here soon enough.’ The soldiers filed up the stairs towards the light.

Dryden circled the skeleton before leaving, noting the legs splayed within the rotting cloth. The rags gave no clue to the sex; the build was perhaps slight for a man, average for a woman, but it was difficult to judge from the jumble of bones.

‘Looks like a woman,’ said Broderick, reading his mind from the top of the steps.

Something stirred in Dryden’s memory. ‘Wasn’t there a woman who went missing after the evacuation? Didn’t she keep the shop and the post office – Palmer’s, along The Dring?’

Broderick sat on the step. ‘Yup. Magda Hollings-worth. She’d have been sixty-three in 1990. It could be her. She’d been depressed, but there was no note, no last goodbye. She just wasn’t there any more.’

‘That’s a good memory…’

Broderick dusted his palms together. ‘Press office at the Army Desk sent me the cuttings on the evacuation – just in case you asked any awkward questions. The story was in there. They searched the village a couple of times – delayed the first shelling by a week or more. But they never found the body and she never turned up, no sightings at all. And she was not the kind of woman who’d have blended in. Romany family; Hungarian, I think. Not exactly a conformist by all accounts…’

‘Although she was the postmistress, that’s hardly eccentric.’

Broderick shrugged. ‘Anyway, some people suggested she’d cracked up under the strain of the evacuation and had gone back on the road. Joined the travellers. It kinda makes sense, or at least it did at the time.’

Dryden followed him up into the abandoned bar of the New Ferry Inn. The story of Magda Hollingsworth was a sad coda to the drama of those last days in Jude’s Ferry. Her family hadn’t reported her missing until after the evacuation and by then the media circus had moved on. There was little interest in the fate of the missing woman even locally, especially as the presumption was she’d taken her own life after a bout of depression, suicide note or no suicide note.

The bar was cool and smelled of rotting wood. A large frosted window, engraved with the words ‘The New Ferry Inn’ had remarkably survived the years and the army’s wayward shells. Beyond it the village filled with the sound of running water. The room itself was half panelled in wood to a height of about five feet. Someone had sprayed TROOPS OUT with a can on one wall – further evidence that Jude’s Ferry had been visited over the years since the evacuation by more than troops in training. Movable furniture had been shipped out but a built-in settle ran round the room. A large brick fireplace was empty except for the featherweight corpse of a rook. On the wall the only picture left was of the England football team covered in mimeographed signatures. Dryden noted the date: January 1990. In the dartboard a single dart stuck out of double-tops, and a tin ashtray on the mantelpiece held a single piece of chalk and what looked like rat droppings. The scorer’s blackboard held two words, scrawled in chalk: GAME OVER.

If you strained against the silence, Dryden thought, you could almost hear it: the sound of that last night; the last bell, an ironic cheer perhaps, the drunken voices, hoarse with drink and nicotine. And tears in a corner, ignored.

‘Military police will be here in twenty minutes,’ said Broderick. ‘There’s a chopper coming in – God knows why, but if you’ve got a big toy why not play with it? They’re off to Basra next month, so I guess they need the practice, poor bastards. CID at Lynn’s been notified,’ he said.

With the police notified Dryden knew now that the story was only his for a few hours before the rest of the media picked it up. His own paper didn’t come out for another two days and he’d been forced to leave his mobile at the firing-range gatehouse. It looked like he’d got a scoop, but no paper to run it in. Not for the first time he cursed the frustrations of working on weekly newspapers.

‘When they get here you should mention the church. Someone’s been in recently – a hole’s been dug by one of the tombs.’

‘Grave robbers?’ asked Broderick.

‘Perhaps. Everyone knew that there was no shelling while the court case was being heard. So it wasn’t a bad time to make a visit – there was a good chance the villagers weren’t coming back, so perhaps they thought no one would care. But it’s not the first time – there are signs of vandalism. You must have seen them too?

‘I need to get to a phone,’ he said when the major didn’t answer. ‘Any chance?’

‘I can patch in a call to your mate in the cab – get him back early.’

‘Thanks. That’s a big help.’ Dryden planned to call the local radio station and see if he could get on air with the story, making sure his paper got credit, and promising a full version in the Tuesday edition. It was the only way he was going to get anything out of the story before it broke for the competition.

He took a deep breath, wishing he had a pint in his hand. ‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘Suicide, right?’

Broderick’s soft face creased in a frown. ‘I guess. Hands are bound, but in front, which she could have done herself to prevent a reflex attempt to loosen the noose. Feet are unbound, so she could have just stood on the stool, and then stepped off and kicked it away.’

‘She? No doubts about that?’

Broderick shrugged. ‘Well, we know there was a missing woman. You can’t tell much from the bones until they get them in the lab, but anything’s better than calling her it…’ He’d removed the heather from his tunic and turned the silver-paper bouquet in his hand, placing it carefully on the map.

‘That call?’ prompted Dryden.

‘Sure,’ said Broderick, turning away to use a mobile.

Dryden took out the map Broderick had given him and spread it on the bar top. When the major returned he tapped his finger on the outhouses next to the New Ferry Inn.

‘There’s no cellar shown,’ he said.

Broderick studied the plan carefully. ‘Well that can’t be right – a lot of time and effort went into making these things. They’re based on a series of surveys taken in the three months after the final evacuation – and on questionnaires the villagers had to fill in.’

‘So that’s kind of weird, isn’t it?’ said Dryden. ‘Not only did the cellar not crop up on the questionnaire, the engineers missed it when the surveys were done after the evacuation. Whereas the cellar under the pub is clearly marked,’ he said, stamping his foot on the bare floorboards.

Dryden looked at the key to the map and the legend which carried the name Col. Flanders May.

‘Who’s Flanders May?’ he asked.

‘CO for the engineers, the map-makers. That’s why it was a work of art. Perfectionist – but then even they make mistakes, right?’

They heard the thwup-thwup of the approaching helicopter and stepped outside.

Dryden looked up into the falling rain, watching the black underbelly of the helicopter emerge from the grey cloud base.

‘The questionnaires – they still in the records?’ asked Dryden.

But Broderick pointed at his ears as the rotors screamed over their heads.