The Skeleton Man

18

The rain was setting in, falling in curtains of newsprint-black from a low grey sky. They walked up the street towards the hump-backed bridge over The Dring which trickled now with water from the hill. A rat scuttled in the gutter beside them, slipping effortlessly down a drain with a languid splosh. Birds’ wings fluttered amongst the exposed roof beams of Palmer’s Store, where Magda Hollingsworth had so painstakingly written her diary.

Dryden caught his own reflection in the broken window of a house by the bridge. Startled, he jumped visibly, and Shaw stopped. ‘There always seems to be something moving in the shadows in this village,’ said Dryden, and a sparrowhawk took up position high above their heads, as if listening.

They turned south towards Neate’s Garage as Magda had done that last evening seventeen years earlier, but then cut up through the allotments to the church. A single uniformed PC stood guard at the oak doors of St Swithun’s, a radio set on the graveyard wall helping to break the suffocating silence.

The shattered stained-glass window had been boarded up and the hole the shell had ripped through the roof had been patched. But somewhere water fell, plashing on stone, reviving the smell of winter’s damp and on the altar steps a crow lay dead, a wing sticking up like an arrow. In the draught from the door the feathers twitched, making Dryden’s stomach tighten.

They walked to the Peyton tomb, which lay now in the depressing shadow of the boarded window. Dryden took a torch and tried again to peer inside the shattered top of the burial chest – which brought his own face close to the mutilated cheek of the reclining crusader. Up close the genius of the medieval sculptor made the alabaster face almost human, and Dryden had to suppress the uncanny fear that it was about to move.

‘So what was in here?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. Memorial funeral chests like this are always empty – I’m an expert now, believe me. Just a bit of conspicuous consumption after death apparently, something for the neighbours to gape at. The body is usually buried beneath or near the tomb, or there’s a crypt underneath for multiple burials.’

Shaw went behind the monument, to the space between the stone chest and the nave wall. The neat pyramid of sand, soil and loose stones Dryden had found on the day the church had been hit by Broderick’s wayward bombardment seemed larger, and had been moved to one side.

‘We had a look at this right at the start, of course – after you’d found it. But it didn’t seem to mean much more than a bit of gruesome vandalism until our friends made their telephone calls.’

The two large stones which had been taken up from the floor were now laid neatly on wooden pallets. The inscription of P above an etched sunflower had been washed clean to reveal the precision of the original workmanship. The hole itself seemed deeper, cutting down through the foundations into grey, damp clay; the shadow at the bottom impenetrable.

‘They had to work for it then?’ said Dryden, kneeling at the stone edge.

‘We dug down a bit further – just to check it out, and we’ve tidied up the spoil. They broke one of the covering stones, in fact they made a right bodge-up of the whole job. We’ve sieved the soil and there’s little to report, some splinters of wood, a churchwarden clay pipe fragment. But, our grave robbers did leave this…’

It was an entrenching tool, bagged in cellophane. ‘Isn’t that army issue?’ said Dryden.

‘Originally yes. But you can get them anywhere. This one’s got a truly staggering six sets of fingerprints on it. My guess is they lacked a bit of muscle and needed to do the job in shifts. We’ve put all the prints on the national computer but there’re no matches, which may explain their carefree methods.’

Dryden imagined them, working by night, the light of a lantern splayed across the medieval vaulting above. They might lack the cool intelligence of the real extremists, he thought, but there was no doubt they had guts.

‘And all that confirms they’re amateurs on a first job?’ said Dryden.

‘Possibly.’

Shaw squatted by the open grave and picked up a handful of soil. ‘They must have taken some coffin wood too – if there was any left. We could be talking several centuries since the last burial – so I doubt there was much to get hold of but some thigh bones and a skull.’

But Shaw looked worried.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Dryden.

‘Probably nothing. The Peytons were rich – you’d expect a few bits of metalwork off a coffin – nails, screws, handles, that kind of thing.’

Dryden nodded. ‘Perhaps they took them.’ But he didn’t believe that either, so he checked his watch. ‘Look, I need to get back. So if they ring, they’ll ring tonight? My mobile?’

Shaw smiled, and Dryden realized that the question implied he’d agreed to the detective’s plan. ‘Yup. Then you ring me. Like I said, if we’re lucky they’ll go for a meeting rather than just dumping the bones somewhere. I don’t think they’ll be able to resist trying to talk to you in person. Publicity again, and they’re after thrills. That’s if they fall for it, of course – but they’ve got very little to lose if they believe you haven’t been to the police and the prospect of it working for them would be a triumph. They’d make national news and they know it. Clearly, if they say no, that they just want to dump them, don’t push them too hard. There’s always a chance we’ll get them anyway – so back off if they insist.’

Outside the rain still fell softly, leaving Shaw’s black Land Rover covered in jewels of water. Dryden again felt uneasy in the ordered interior, the footwells litter-free, an air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror where Humph’s fluffy dice should be.

Shaw got in and, hitting the ignition, set Johnny Cash in motion as well, the sound system making Dryden’s inner ear buzz.

‘Sorry,’ said Shaw, killing the CD.

Dryden, unthinking, flipped down the glove compartment and found a collection of shells within – a bone-white nautilus and several studded sea urchins. And a packet of Silk Cut, unopened.

‘My DS,’ said Shaw. ‘She has to smoke outside.’

They bumped down the track off Church Hill towards the open mere, the rain cutting visibility to a few hundred yards, a line of distant poplars reduced to grey silhouettes. Dryden watched the outline of the village fade in the side mirror, the crescent of council houses where the Smiths had lived the last to dissolve into the mist.

As they drove the breeze made the fabric of the windsurfer on the roof flutter. ‘Yours?’ said Dryden, nodding up.

Shaw shook his head, ‘Wife’s business, our business. We live on the coast, run a water sports academy, rent out huts and stuff.’

‘Where?’

‘Old Hunstanton, in the dunes; there’s a house too.’ He retrieved a snapshot from the sun visor in front of him. A clapboard house set amongst marram grass and sand, the distant lighthouse at Hunstanton in the background. A woman on the beach with long legs as brown as the sand. Dryden guessed the chair and the rod were there, unseen, down by the distant water’s edge.

‘Wow,’ said Dryden, genuinely envious. Hunstanton’s principal claim to fame was that it was the only west-facing east coast resort – giving it a monopoly on holiday sunsets. ‘Great in summer,’ he added.

‘Great anytime,’ said Shaw, looking at it once before he put it back.

Dryden nodded. ‘So, Jack Shaw, any relation? DCI, right?’

Shaw gave him a long look, as cold as one of St Swithun’s showers. ‘Yes. My father, he died in 2000.’

‘Sorry. You on the force when he retired?’

Shaw nodded. ‘Yup. Youngest DS in the county, which everyone said was down to him, of course, not me. You can’t win with these people. And he didn’t retire, they forced him out.’

‘Fabricating evidence, wasn’t it? A child murder case – what was the boy’s name?’

‘Tessier. Jonathan Tessier. He was six.’

‘Guess there’s a lot of pressure in cases like that, to get a conviction.’

Shaw swung the Land Rover through the gates of the range. ‘Dad always said he hadn’t done it, hadn’t planted the evidence. That was good enough for me. Good enough for everyone who knew him – it just wasn’t good enough for him. He was a good copper, an honest copper.’

Dryden nodded. ‘But it’s given you something to prove,’ he said, not unkindly.

Humph pulled up in the Capri, fluffy dice gyrating from the rear-view.

‘I’ve got lots of things to prove,’ said Shaw, flicking Johnny Cash back on.