The Skeleton Man

Wednesday, 18 July

14

He took the call on the deck of PK 129 in the early morning rain, his voicemail ringing him back with a message left overnight. The river, cratered with big fat storm drops, gave off the exhilarating aroma of dawn.

A voice echoing in an enclosed space, cars swishing past, a whisper close up. ‘Listen.’ The menace in the word, the cruelty, made his heart freeze for a beat. ‘Jude’s Ferry, you were there. We were there too. We opened the tomb, at St Swithun’s. We’ve taken her bones. If Peyton doesn’t shut down Sealodes Farm – stop the breeding – he’ll never get them back…’

There was the rustling of paper and, approaching, the sound of a light aircraft.

‘Our aim is to inflict economic damage on those who profit from the misery and exploitation of innocent animals…’ he read on, another voice cajoling in the background. A prepared statement, larded with the stilted language of the true fanatic. Then he said it again: if they didn’t shut down Sealodes Farm, announce it in the press, then they’d ditch the bones down a sewer. There was a brief silence in which Dryden could hear the light aircraft returning. ‘We’ve told them. Now we’re telling you. We want it in the paper that they’re closing down the business. Otherwise this is just the start. We gave them a little visit a couple of weeks ago. This time no police, until it’s in the paper. Tell ’em that.’

Dryden timed it – less than thirty seconds. A public call box. He got a notebook and took the call down verbatim in case he lost it from the mobile’s memory. Then he listened to it five times, noting the double return of the aircraft, and the jittery voice, the strain of disguise audible. He wondered what they’d done on their visit to Sealodes Farm, and why they felt they needed to fool him about the voice. Did he know him – or did they think they’d trace a recording? At least he now knew why he should have recognized the name on the tomb. Henry Peyton was a well-known local farmer and owner of a highly controversial business: breeding animals for laboratory experiments.

Humph appeared out of the rain at 8.00am with two fried-egg sandwiches wrapped in foil. Dryden took out the coffees and they watched the dog run through the wet grass. Laura had got herself in her shower seat and dressed by the time they went down for her, lifting her just as far as she couldn’t go herself, into the waiting wheelchair on the deck. The ambulance would call at 10.00am to take her for the regular sessions: physiotherapy, hydrotherapy and speech therapy. Dryden arranged the tarpaulin cover so that she was dry and made sure the laptop and the mobile were within reach.

‘What yer gonna do?’ he said, curling a loop of hair off the nape of her neck.

‘Lines to learn – twenty-three words,’ she said, the tongue still lazy as if she was recovering from a dentist’s needle. Dryden kissed her and refilled the coffee cup at her elbow. Then, making an effort, he knelt by the chair. ‘You can do a reading for me tonight – OK? I’ll play the rest of the cast, you do your stuff.’

He kissed her again and got into the Capri, Humph pulling away immediately, hooting the horn twice before they swung out of sight.

‘Take the Manea road, over the Levels at Welney,’ said Dryden, then he left a message on the news desk answerphone asking Charlie to send Garry to the magistrates’ court in his place. He had a story, a good one, and he’d be back by lunch with it in the bag. It was the kind of message he loved to leave.

He’d never been to Sealodes Farm. It wasn’t the kind of place that welcomed publicity. It was poor land, below the dyke which kept the tidal water out of the richer peat fen. Over the years, in the dry summers, the water had welled up in the fields, leaving behind a deadly rime of salt. Sealodes was good only for turnips and beet, not the cash crops which underpinned the fortunes of the big corporate-owned farms of the Black Fen. So twenty-five years ago Sealodes had turned to a less conventional crop: breeding guinea pigs and rats for big companies and universities.

The farm looked like a battery-hen unit. The old farmhouse, a Victorian London-brick cube, had been abandoned and cracks veined its façade, the roof sagging like a hammock strung between the chimneys. Next to it stood a tasteless Southfork-style bungalow with four garages and a bristling mast of TV dishes and aerials. An ugly brick wall encircled a garden crowded with pots, a water feature and a line of palm trees in containers. Against the ugly brick wall was a line of three ugly brick kennels, but there was no sign of the ugly dogs within.

Dryden got out of the Capri, slammed the door and listened to the echo bouncing off the distant bank of the dyke. The rain had stopped but the cloud was low and oppressive, a grey lid on a grey landscape. A large corporate flag hung limp from a flagpole, but Dryden could just discern the logo of a pale sunflower. A man in a one-piece green overall appeared from one of the battery sheds with a pet carrier in his hand. He stood his ground, waiting for Dryden to close the space between them. Up close he still had a farmer’s face despite the green wellington boots and a Mediterranean tan. He said nothing so Dryden introduced himself, squatting down to get a closer look at the black guinea pig in the carrier.

The man was nodding as he removed a newspaper cutting from a zip-up pocket. It was Dryden’s feature piece on Jude’s Ferry written ahead of his return to the village with the TA, illustrated by the picture taken from files of the nave of the church, dominated by the crusader’s tomb.

‘So I have you to thank for this, do I?’ He held it up, his thumb on the picture. ‘The name’s Peyton. Henry Peyton.’

‘Right,’ said Dryden. ‘OK. So you got the call too.’

‘Indeed. Last night actually. They saw the picture in last week’s paper, knew the range was still closed until firing started again on St Swithun’s Day, that the church was wide open, so they went in and took what they wanted from the tomb.’

Dryden made a point of never apologizing for anything he’d written unless it was inaccurate. ‘Look. I’m sorry this has happened but…’ He held out his hands, palm up. ‘If these people want to make life difficult they will.’

‘Let’s talk,’ said Peyton, walking away before he got an answer.

Dryden followed him towards a distant hut, distrusting the invitation to chat. Up close the huts were bigger than he’d imagined, crisply painted, exter ior heating- and water-pipes gleaming aluminium. When he stepped inside the heat and smell made him choke. It wasn’t unpleasant, just too close, like pushing your face into cat’s fur.

The guinea pigs covered the floor area, with a few patches of exposed sawdust. A network of pipes ran water to small troughs and automatic feeders. Dryden realized there was a noise, a multi-note high-pitched squeal.

‘’s OK,’ said Peyton. ‘They don’t like strangers. They’ll calm down.’ As they moved down a central corridor fenced off from the animals the noise died down to be replaced by a gentle cooing.

‘How many are there?’ asked Dryden.

Peyton stopped, surveying the hut with proprietorial pride. ‘About three thousand in here. There’s eleven huts. Work it out. Then two huts for the rats, two thousand in total.’

At the far end there was an office with glass panels down to floor level to give an uninterrupted view of the animals. Peyton made coffee in a cafetière.

The guinea pigs cooed more insistently, some of them gurgling with pleasure as the feeders automatically released pellets of food. The seething mass of twitching fur seemed to vibrate at a common frequency.

‘See how we torture them,’ said Peyton, smiling again. Dryden didn’t smile, aware that the artificial lighting and the gentle hum of institutional happiness were his idea of hell.

‘Who do you sell them to?’ asked Dryden, tired of being patronized. ‘Aren’t they the ones that do the torturing?’

Peyton shrugged, ignoring the bait. ‘Biggest customer prefers to remain anonymous. Commercial drugs developer. But there’s universities too, plenty, that’s why we started up, to meet the academic demand.’

Dryden got out a notebook but left it on his knee unopened. ‘So they rang?’

On the desk a mobile phone buzzed, but Peyton pressed a button quickly to silence it. Outside the animals, startled, chattered their teeth.

‘Yes. Some lunatic extremist faction of the animal rights movement. I am to expect a campaign of terror unless I use your newspaper to announce the closure of the business.’ He laughed, handing Dryden a mug. ‘They haven’t made a good start. They seem to be under the impression they’ve got some bones for which I will consider giving up this business, a business I have fought hard to establish over a quarter of a century. Well, they’re a bit wide of the mark. First. We are a minor branch of the Peyton family. I wish it was otherwise. The money went to America shortly after the Pilgrim Fathers. If I was one of the Peytons I might be worried, but then I’d be rich, so not a bad trade off, eh? We use the family crest – the Jerusalem artichoke…’

Dryden pointed outside. ‘On the flag. The sunflower?’

‘Indeed. Same biological family. But as I say, the link is tenuous, we’ve got nothing to do with the American Peytons. Suffice to say any bones they’ve plundered from this tomb are more likely to be carrying your DNA than mine. My first wife died in 1983, clearly something these idiots did know, because they think it’s her bones. Fact is, when Sandra died she was cremated.’

He put his boots up on the desk. ‘So they can turn their precious bones into cuppa soup if they like. They might get a few bob off the Yanks, but they won’t get Sealodes Farm closed.’

‘When they called me, the animal rights people, they said they’d given you a warning, a couple of weeks ago?’

Peyton’s eyes glazed, the bluster frozen out in an instant. ‘They took our dogs. Sorry. Liberated is the term used. We called the police. They got nowhere and we heard nothing from…’ He drank his coffee, which seemed to add to the bitterness in his voice. ‘From these people. I guess they wanted us to stew in our own juices.’

‘Dogs. Family pets or security?’

‘My wife is a breeder of Alsatians. I am, actually, very keen to get the dogs back, as is she. But not keen enough to close the business down.’ Peyton nodded rhythmically, thinking about what he wanted to say. ‘Which I think confirms two things. That while we are dealing with nasty bastards, we are also dealing with amateur nasty bastards. This business means more to me – and incidentally to the fourteen staff here at Sealodes – than three pedigree Alsatians and a pile of old bones.’

‘How’d they get the dogs? Doesn’t sound like an amateur operation to me.’

Peyton met his gaze. ‘No. That is worrying. The dogs are controlled by key words – it doesn’t matter who says them. We did that so that Rosie, my wife, could be away. So – “Saverne” ensures docility. It’s a small town in Alsace. My guess is they knew the word, which means they’ve talked to someone who works here.’

‘Or they work here.’

Peyton ignored him. ‘And they took some stock when they took the dogs.’

‘Stock? You mean animals?’

‘About a hundred of the rats from one of the outside sheds.’

‘And nobody heard anything, saw anything?’

‘I was away on a sales trip. Security staff found a hole in the fence in the morning and the door on the animal shed forced.’

Dryden stood. ‘So what should I say, then – what’s the official line from Sealodes Farm Ltd?’

‘Why would you need a line from me?’ He put the pet carrier on his desk and looked balefully at the ball of fur within.

‘For the paper. It’ll make the front of The Crow. The nationals will pick it up. They may be a bunch of amateurs but they’ve raided a medieval tomb in the middle of a military firing range. They’re news.’

Peyton stood too. ‘Do you really think I’d be sat here talking to you like this if I thought all this was going in the paper?’ He fished in his pocket and found a card, tossing it down on the desktop. Dryden recognized the raised crest of the West Norfolk Constabulary above the name Detective Inspector Peter Shaw.

‘They told me no police,’ said Dryden.

‘Forgive me, I have a mind of my own. Take that with you. Ring him. I’m afraid your little scoop is going to have to wait, Mr Dryden. The inspector’s instructions were quite clear. A news blackout. I understand your editor has already agreed.’

Peyton’s voice had risen, fuelled by anger, and the guinea pigs responded, their squeals rising an octave, swept by fear and anxiety.