The Skeleton Man

1

The Alfa Romeo ran a lipstick-red smear across a sepia landscape. To one side snow flecked the sand and dunes at the edge of the crimped waters of The Wash, a convoy of six small boats caught in a stunning smudge of purple and gold where the sun was setting. To the landward side lay the salt marsh, a weave of winter white around stretches of dead black water.

The sports car nudged the speed limit and Sarah Baker-Sibley watched the first flake of snow fall on the windscreen in the middle of her field of vision. She swept it aside with a single swish of the windscreen wipers and punched the automatic lighter into the dashboard, her lips counting to ten, the cigarette held ready between dry teeth.

Ten seconds. She thrummed her fingers on the leather-bound steering wheel.

It was two minutes short of five o’clock and the Alfa’s headlights were waking up the cat’s eyes. She pulled the lighter free of the dashboard. The ringlet of heated wire seemed to lift her mood and she laughed, drawing in the nicotine enthusiastically.

She turned up the heating to maximum as a spiro-graph of ice began to encroach on the windscreen. The indicator showed the outside temperature at 0°C, then briefly -1°C. She dropped her speed to 50 mph, and checked the rear-view mirror for following traffic: she’d been overtaken once, the car was still ahead of her by half a mile, and there were lights behind, but closer, a hundred yards or less.

She drew savagely on the menthol cigarette, swishing more snowflakes off the windscreen. Attached to the passenger-side dashboard by a sucker was a little pink picture frame enclosing a snapshot of a girl with hair down to her waist, in a school uniform complete with beret. She touched the image, as if it was an icon, and smiled into the rear-view mirror; but when she saw the lipstick on the filter of the menthol cigarette, and the imprint of her thin dry lips, her eyes filled with tears.

Rounding a bend she saw rear lights ahead again for a few seconds. And a sign, luminous, regulation black on yellow, in the middle of the carriageway, an AA insignia in the top-left-hand corner.

DIVERSION

FLOOD

An arrow pointed bluntly to the left – seawards down a narrow unmetalled road.

‘Sod it.’ She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her palm, then brushed a tear from her eye. Ahead, the road ran straight for a mile but there was no traffic either way.

She slowed and looked at her watch: 5.09pm. Throwing her head back she let the smoke dribble out of her nose, as if the day had delivered its last fatal blow.

Looking in the rear-view again she saw that the following car was close, so she put the Alfa in first, and swung it off the coast road on to the snow-covered track. The headlights raked the trees as she turned and fleetingly lit a figure, stock-still, dressed in a full-length dark coat flecked with snow, the head turned away. Then the lights swung further round and she saw a road sign.

SIBERIA BELT

Ahead, immediately, were the tail lights of the car in front. There was a sudden silence as a snow flurry struck; muffling the world outside. For the first time she felt afraid, haunted by the sudden image of the lone figure, behind her now, somewhere in the dark. The wind returned, thudding against the offside, fist-blows deadened by a boxer’s glove. She searched the rear-view mirror but there were no lights behind, no trace of the figure following. The tail lights ahead were still visible; warm, glowing and safe. She pressed on quickly in pursuit.