The Skeleton Man

There was something in the raft, something that didn’t respond to the shuffle and bump of the waves. A dead weight. When he saw the hands – both bare – and the feet, in light trainers swollen with sea water, he knew it was the body of a man: the black hair on the hands, a chunky signet ring. He felt his pulse suddenly thump in his ears as his body reacted to the sight of death. He felt the atavistic urge to flee, to run from danger. And there was the sensation that time had stopped, as if he’d been caught in the middle of an accident, unfurling around him in agonizingly slow motion.

He forced himself to observe; to step out of the scene.

Dead: but for how long? Less than forty-eight hours. The arms and legs were askew, locked in ugly angles, so rigor had yet to pass.

He put a hand on the side of the raft to steady it, his fingers gripping a raised handle at the prow. Jeans, a T-shirt, a heavy fur-lined jacket only half on, leaving one arm free. The limb was thick, knotted with muscle, the hidden shoulder broad. He avoided looking at the face. In the bottom of the boat there was an inch of swilling bloody seawater.

Valentine met him on the dry sand, and they pulled the raft round so that what was left of the sunset caught the dead man’s head; unavoidable now, lifeless, despite the movement of the waves. The face: Peter Shaw’s passion, the unique balance and im balance of features; as individual as a fingerprint. He noted the bloated, profound pallor, like cold fat, with an almost iridescent tinge of blue and green. A young man, stubble on the chin, the eyes half-open but flat, lightless, one eye closed down further than the other. The muscles beneath defined the skin, like the surface of a piece of beaten metal. But it was the mouth that drew the eye. The lips, uneven lines, were peeled back from the teeth, which were smeared with blood.

‘Shit,’ said Valentine, turning, taking three steps and vomiting into the sand. He came back, dabbing at his lips. ‘Sight of blood,’ he said, avoiding Shaw’s eyes.

Shaw tried to reanimate the face in his mind as he’d been trained to do. He tightened up the jaw, balanced the eyes, replaced the graceful bow of the lips. Not a cerebral face, a muscular face.

It was Valentine who first saw the mark on the arm. The sea water had washed it clean and so it bled no more, but there was no mistaking the shape: a bite, a human bite, the teeth puncturing the skin deeply, viciously driving into the sinew and muscle, almost meeting in a crisp double incision.