The Skeleton Man

35

Back in the cab Dryden tracked down his mobile under the passenger seat, wrapped in a greasy pork-pie wrapper. Humph said it had rung but he’d given up the search.

‘You’d be amazed at what’s under that seat,’ said the cabbie, sniffing a mini Scotch egg he’d found amongst the debris.

Dryden scrolled down to find he’d got a text message:

MEET TEN POACHERS HIDE WICKEN FEN MATT SMITH

Dryden looked at the name long and hard. Matthew Smith, the missing brother and Paul Cobley’s partner. The police had used the media to try to find him, including The Crow, but why had he used the media to get back in touch? What story did he have to tell? Had his mother persuaded him to talk to the reporter as Dryden had asked? Or was this an impostor, looking for a brief splash of the limelight?

He handed the phone to Humph, who read the message, nodded, and fired up the Capri.

They drove silently in the soft summer rain, the horizon never more than a sodden field away. Pickers out with the salad crops stooped amongst the vivid green heads of broccoli and lettuce.

Dryden hit the return call button on the mobile but got transferred to voicemail. He cut himself off and sent a text instead: WHY?

Wicken was a last precious corner of the old fenland, a maze of pools and rivers hidden in a wilderness of briar and reeds, the water mottled by surfacing fish and side-winding grass snakes. The National Trust had a lodge at the entrance, a bitumen black wooden teepee surrounded by a verandah. An elderly couple weighed down with binoculars and packs were setting out down one of the duckboarded pathways as they arrived but otherwise the fen was quiet: the small car park empty and the café closed. The dense fine rain had reduced the landscape to the ghosts of trees and reeds, and a single windmill. Dryden thought about ringing Shaw and telling him about the message, filling him in on the whereabouts of Matthew Smith. But what was the point before he found out what Smith wanted to say?

Dryden paid for a ticket at the counter and found a map mounted on a board showing the paths through the reserve. Poacher’s Hide was the most distant of the many which dotted the winding waterways, a single cabin overlooking a wide lake marked as the habitat of migrating swans. Access was by the duckboard walkways maintained by the Trust, although there were plenty of other ways into the reserve for those who knew the lie of the land. Dryden trudged out into the fen, the visibility falling as he moved deeper into a world dominated by water. Twenty minutes later he was at the hide, deftly hidden in a thicket of thorns on the edge of the lake.

He paused for a few seconds, wondering if there was any danger, aware that he’d made himself come this far to prove to himself, yet again, that he wasn’t a coward after all. He waited, listening, for ten minutes to make sure he’d got there first, then unlatched the door and slipped inside. There was a single bench up against a long observation hatch, its wooden shutter raised on the inside and suspended from hooks. Hanging from a string was a laminated pamphlet illustrating the birds commonly sighted from Poacher’s Hide, as well as butterflies, moths, and insects. Dryden scratched himself uneasily and sat, acutely aware for the first time that there was only one door to the hide.

Outside the rain had intensified so that the dripping of water from the trees provided a soundtrack. A bird, dull and brown, alighted on the windowsill and looked at Dryden with one eye. Something large and covered in fur plopped into the water and left a trail like a speedboat through the weeds.

He smiled at the bird. ‘Sod off,’ he said, searching in his pocket for some wine gums he’d left there a week earlier.

The footsteps, when they came, were confident and multiple. Two people at least, perhaps more. He heard one set of feet circling the hide at his back while another approached the door. For the first time he thought of the hide as a trap, and fumbled with his mobile, trying to key in a text message for Humph to get help.

But too late. A man came in, keeping his eyes on the floor, and closed the door carefully behind him. He was thin, below average height, the face strangely oval and plump, like a child’s. A face Dryden would never forget, but at that moment one he’d never seen before. The lips too, full in the middle, were pursed in a cupid’s bow, out of place in the rough middle-aged stubble of the chin. Dryden didn’t know who he was, but he knew who he wasn’t. He wasn’t Matthew Smith.

The man smiled just once, but Dryden knew then he had to get out.

‘Questions, I know,’ the man said, holding up his hands.

He walked forward confidently and took the mobile from Dryden’s hands. Outside they heard a match strike, an inward breath, the smoke expelled.

‘I thought you might respond to our text. How clever of me. But that’s journalists, I find: ever hopeful, even trusting. It’s rather uplifting in its way, and everyone seems to think it’s a cynical profession.’

Dryden considered the open hatch and what would happen if he jumped through.

‘How can I help?’ he said, surprised by how emotionless his voice was.

The man laughed. ‘My name’s Roland,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s one of my names and will have to do for our purposes. How can you help me? Well, interesting question, Mr Dryden. Do I have a problem? Yes. I do. At this moment in time a plain-clothes police team is mounting a round-the-clock surveillance operation on my home, and my business, in Coventry. They are, I’m told, under the impression I am some kind of mastermind of crime. Ridiculous, but there it is. I apparently coordinate horrific attacks on innocent people engaged in the breeding and torture of animals.’

‘And that’s not true?’ said Dryden, his jangling nerves making him dizzy.

‘Well, I didn’t say that. No. Oh no. My real problem is that the police – last night actually – arrested a colleague of ours. I use the term loosely; he was a member of our organization, something we now regret. They are threatening to charge him in connection with a series of incidents involving Sealodes Farm. This man will betray me. Because if he does not then he will go to jail, and that’s something he fears very much. And he will go to jail because he was stupid enough not to wear a balaclava on Thieves Bridge.’

Dryden couldn’t stop himself reacting.

‘Indeed. And it will be your evidence of identification which will be crucial. And I’ve no doubt you will give it, Mr Dryden – after all, you’ve betrayed us once already. I need to persuade you to decline to give that evidence.’

The gun, when he took it out, was at first a comfort to Dryden. It was made of a dull smudged metal like pewter and he knew it wasn’t designed to fire bullets. There was a large aperture in the side of the barrel for loading something, but something that wasn’t lethal.

‘So you’re the man they’re after?’ said Dryden, only just succeeding in stilling the vibrato in his voice.

‘Indeed.’ The bird on the sill began to sing and the man stepped forward, genuinely captivated.

‘Meadow pipit,’ he said. ‘What a gift to hear it call.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ said Dryden, aware that the question betrayed his fear.

‘Well – on a purely personal level, Mr Dryden, I’d like to see you suffer like some of the animals do: perhaps a few days of enforced smoking, or a quick course of detergents applied to the eyes? Revenge – an unsavoury human emotion, but what the hell, eh? And then we’d very much like to persuade you that giving evidence in the forthcoming legal process – which I think is now inevitable – is something we’d like to ask you to reconsider. But we’ll ask nicely, when the time comes.’

That smile again, and laughter outside. He took out the bolt quickly, a small phial with a feathered tail, and slid it into the gun. ‘We use these to upset our fox hunting friends,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought a horse down with this – very effective. The fall broke the rider’s leg – an excellent outcome.’

From outside there was a low whistle. The man raised the gun and pulled the trigger. Dryden watched the bolt fly, in slow motion, turning like a winning dart from a TV replay. He felt the thud in his thigh and looked down to see the dart hanging out of his flesh. He lunged towards the open window and tried to raise his arm to the sill but found it disturbingly heavy, unresponsive to the repeated electrical orders he was frantically sending from his brain. He could see the pool outside, and the still reed heads, but they seemed to be at the end of a tunnel, drawing away from him, the sound of the dull bird singing beautifully fading quickly. His knees buckled and he slumped to the floor, his head thudding without pain against the bench on the way down. He could see a man’s boot close up, and the small desiccated corpse of a mouse, and then nothing.