The Skeleton Man

22

By the time he’d reached the Capri the call was over. It was the same man, unable to disguise the voice or the triumph within it, once he heard that Henry Peyton didn’t want a fight, that he’d shut down Sealodes Farm and retire quietly with the fortune he’d already made. Then the suspicions had kicked in: had Dryden called the police? Had Peyton? One blue uniform, he said, and they’d dump the bones in a ditch and Peyton would never see the dogs again. And then they’d be back: they’d be back every day of every week of every month of every year until his business was ruined and his life was a living nightmare. Dryden imagined the face on the other end of the line, a glove over the mouthpiece, spit in the wool.

They fixed a point to pick up the bones and the dogs. Thieves Bridge, Ten Mile Bank, at dusk – 9.45pm that evening. He was to come alone, leave the cab in the village, and walk out to the river. Dryden didn’t have time to say no. He rang DI Shaw with the details and the detective outlined his plans. He’d put a team on the river in a boat, and a helicopter would be ready on the ground at Downham ten miles to the north, where they had a helipad for the holiday traffic snarl-ups on the A10. Shaw and the team would maintain a cordon half a mile from the bridge. They were a professional unit, he said, and no one would spot them. He promised it would be all right; in the way that people always do when they think it might not.

Dryden cut the call and tried a big smile. ‘Shit,’ he said, feeling his guts tighten. ‘Tonight, Ten Mile Bank,’ he said to Humph. He covered his face with his hands and wished he wasn’t such a coward as to always agree to anything that proved he wasn’t. Now he had hours to contemplate his fear before his appointment with the balaclavas.

‘Where’s Laura?’ said Humph.

‘She’s got to work out. We do the coast another day – the Reverend Lake’s not going anywhere fast.’

Humph, sensing an unhealthy silence, took control. He swung the cab out onto the old A10 and headed north. ‘I’ve got someone you should meet,’ he said by way of explanation.

At Southery they pulled off the road and into the village. The high street was blocked by two tractors, travelling in opposite directions, which had stopped to allow the drivers to enjoy a chat. Humph deftly mounted the pavement, crossed a grass verge, and left them to it.

Clear of the last house they burst out onto a wide fen flattened by a vast sky. This was Methwold Severals, a tract of peat distinguished by nothing but a single sugar beet factory, a plume of smoke from its giant modern chimney trailing across the late afternoon sky. They zigzagged towards it using a maze of drove roads, navigating by sight, leaving in their wake the abandoned farmsteads which had given way to the big commercial farming companies which dominated the whole of the Black Fen.

They inched closer, impeded by a series of right-angle bends, until they came to the factory gates. This was a modern industrial site, a 1960s beet plant, as removed from the small-scale operation in Jude’s Ferry as Stephenson’s Rocket is from an Inter-City 125. Four towering silos blocked the view north towards the sea, each linked to its partners by an overground complex of pipes, cables and conveyor belts. Steam leaked from various valves and Dryden could feel the hum of the machinery vibrating through the cab once Humph had parked up by the entrance.

The factory had replaced an older one on the same site, the only remnant of which was a pair of two-up, two-down brick cottages to one side of the new plate-glass reception and security building. Across the façade of both was a neon sign which read TAXIS.

Humph adjusted his headphones and flicked on his language tape. ‘This is it. You did ask – the Cobley family? Used to run the cab firm in Jude’s Ferry. This is them.’ He closed his eyes, job done.

Dryden got out and considered the inappropriate extravagance of the neon, which flickered slightly, emitting a trembling buzz. One door was bricked up, the other was half glass, reinforced with wire, and had been slammed shut a million times by people who didn’t care. Inside was a waiting room, with three armchairs of tattered leather and a wall map of the Black Fen.

Behind the glass sat a woman smoking a cigarette, her flesh piled on itself to produce a torso the shape of a Walnut Whip. Beside her was an old TV showing a video of Shrek 2. Shelves held the black cartridges of hundreds of others.

‘Mrs Cobley?’ asked Dryden, inadvertently drawing in a lungful of smoke.

‘If you want a car it’s a wait. The shift’s just finished and we’re ferrying the regulars home.’

Dryden nodded: ‘Sure. How many work here now?’ The sugar works was the biggest employer within thirty miles.

She killed the sound on the video. ‘Two hundred, in the season it’s nearly three. A lot of ’em live out nowhere. Shall I book you one? It’ll be an hour now.’ As she said it she looked in a mirror up by a security camera and saw Humph’s Capri idling at the kerb.

‘Oh. What is it then?’

‘My name’s Dryden – from The Crow. I’m writing something about Jude’s Ferry – you’ve probably heard?’

She flicked off the microphone in front of her. ‘Sure. That skeleton they found. The police have been anyway. You’ve wasted a trip.’ Dryden thought that must be the ultimate crime in the taxi trade.

Behind her on the wall was a notice board with snapshots pinned up over a rota. Several showed a teenager with thick black hair and adolescent lips, plus a fringe which had been out of fashion for more than a decade.

Dryden looked at her face, a study in neutrality. ‘It’s your son,’ he said. ‘I know it sounds daft but I’m just tracking down all the lads from the village whose age would fit the body they found. Sorry. I know it sounds ghoulish – but I guess he’s OK, yeah? Police probably asked the same question.’

But he knew then, because all the snapshots were of the same age.

She took her time lighting a fresh Silk Cut, half of which she appeared to inhale in one draw, the ash falling unnoticed on her bare arm.

A light flickered on her console. She flipped the button on the microphone. ‘OK, Sam. Sam. Picked up?’ He recognized her voice now from the tape they’d listened to on the riverbank. The intervening years had simply shredded it some more, nicotine smoking the vocal cords.

Static filled the room, a burst of sound as raw as whale song. She listened and seemed to get the sense. ‘Number, 134. That’s one, three, four, Sam. Customer still waiting.’ She killed the noise and began to fiddle with an electric kettle on a table beside her.

‘Paul was the name, wasn’t it?’ asked Dryden carefully.

‘It’s not him,’ she said, dropping her chin into the folds of fat around her throat. ‘I told the police the same. Told them not to bother. They thought it might be but I’d know. I know I’d know.’ She held her hand to her chest where Dryden guessed the pain was sharpest.

He studied the snapshots. ‘But you haven’t seen him since – when?’

They watched the video in silence as Shrek talked to a giant gingerbread man. ‘He had an argument with his father, it’s a long time ago now. He hated the cabs, the late nights. Computers was his thing, design and that. We didn’t know what he was talking about. So he left.’

‘Right. But when?’

‘When we left the Ferry. We stuck around – there was loads of business, carting everyone about, taking the soldiers around too. Then we’d moved in ’ere. He had a room and everything but he had this friend, he said, a boy.’ She blew a smoke ring with exaggerated finesse. ‘That was the final straw really. They were more than friends – you know,’ she laughed bitterly. ‘We didn’t understand. And Sam wouldn’t have it. He was angry, really angry.’ She caught Dryden’s eye and remembered to add something. ‘We both were.’

Dryden could see why the police were interested in the whereabouts of Paul Cobley, and he didn’t believe they’d taken mother’s intuition as evidence he was still alive.

She looked at him then, unable to sustain the lack of emotion in her face, and Dryden could see what the years between had done to her. ‘We didn’t bring him up like that,’ she said, but it sounded like a formula she’d used before.

‘You must wonder, you know – how he is, where he is? It’s seventeen years – more.’

‘Thanks. I can count.’ She nodded, looking at the winking lights on her console. ‘If you don’t want a cab…’

‘Sorry.’ But he held his ground, remembering his motto – there’s always time for one more question.

‘There was a death in the village in those last months, a baby. I don’t expect you remember?’

She dealt with the winking lights, confirming children dropped off at home, directing cabs to pick up those coming off the afternoon shift, and those coming in.

‘Of course I remember. Do you think there’s anything else to talk about in a place like Jude’s Ferry? But then it was our business in a way, our community. And it’s not your business, is it, Mr Dryden?’

The room was silent then and Dryden thought that there was nothing that caught a sense of not going anywhere more precisely than a taxi office. Everything moved, but nothing changed.

‘Mrs Cobley,’ Dryden looked down, reluctant to turn the knife, guessing that Sam Cobley had never been reconciled to his son’s sexuality. ‘I don’t believe the police took your word for the fact Paul’s still alive. Perhaps your husband knows where he is… I could wait?’ He turned his back and looked out over the sunlit fen.

She took her time making a cup of tea without offering him one. Dryden took a seat opposite the counter and watched her setting down her cup and then opening the office’s one battered filing cabinet. She retrieved a cheap plastic wallet and put the picture within, a coloured snapshot, on the counter. Dryden stood and touched it, setting it straight; a man leaning on a gate with a pair of cottages in the background – the kind of isolated semis they built all over the fens in the fifties for tenant workers. It was Paul Cobley, mid-thirties perhaps, a red setter at his heels, the hair still extravagant.

‘Sam doesn’t know. He stayed local for me, you see, so I can pop over when Sam’s fishing or on a long trip. That’s helped me forgive him.’ Her eyes moved to the window where the sugar beet factory was belching white smoke into the evening sky. ‘But Sam doesn’t know and I’d ask you to keep it that way,’ she said, lighting up another Silk Cut.

‘Sure,’ said Dryden, studying the picture. ‘I only want a word.’

‘I’ll ask, but there’s no promises. Leave your number. I’d like you to go now, I don’t want this opened up again. So go. Please.’

Dryden nodded, studying the picture one last time. The house had been modernized with PVC windows and a conservatory latched on the side, but its twin next door was dilapidated and a For Sale sign had been nailed across the front door. Dryden noted the name of the estate agent: Foster & Co., Land Agents.

‘Did he have much to tell the police?’ asked Dryden, pushing the snapshot over the counter.

‘He was there that last night – in the New Ferry Inn.’

The radio crackled and Sam said he was on his way home.

Dryden took his last chance. ‘This was a lynching – they turned on someone, didn’t they, Mrs Cobley. Why would they do that?’

She looked at him then, the small dark eyes set deeply in the flesh. ‘Paul wouldn’t do that. He knows what it’s like to be a victim.’

Dryden noted the present tense. ‘The landlord, Ken Woodruffe, says there was a brawl, about money apparently. The Smith twins?’

She laughed. ‘Mark was a nasty bit of work.’

‘And Matthew?’

She shrugged, her eyes watching the road outside for signs of her husband’s return. ‘Gentler, smarter. They might have been identical to look at but in here…’ She tapped a finger to her temple. ‘Chalk and cheese.’

‘And your son saw them fight?’

She shook her head. ‘No, that was later. He got home about eleven, I was still up in case we got any calls.’

‘Right. So Paul got home and then what?’

‘We broke open a bottle of whisky. His dad was already in bed. Took it out in the garden and toasted the old place. By midnight we were all in bed. Dead to the world.’

Dryden said goodbye, knowing that wasn’t the only lie she’d told.