The Skeleton Man

‘It was bizarre,’ he said, setting the coffee, with two ice cubes, down beside her with a straw.

He looked at his wife, realizing that her face was recapturing the beauty it had once had. The eyes open fully now, the mouth beginning to recover from the ugly jaggedness it had held since she’d been injured. And her skin, in the sun at last, had regained the rich olive tones which betrayed her Italian ancestry. Her hair, auburn and full, had lost the stagey lifelessness of a shop-window mannequin’s.

‘You look great,’ he said, touching her cheek.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Bizarre?’ she asked, the consonants slurred.

‘Right, sorry. Yeah. I just stood there in this cellar watching this skeleton turn in the breeze. They think it’s suicide – I guess that’s the easy bit. The trick’ll be finding out who he or she was. Seventeen years is a long time to be missing without anyone noticing. There is a woman who ran the village shop, she went missing at the time of the evacuation, but I don’t know, I just don’t think it’s her, it just doesn’t ring true. For a start the cellar wasn’t marked on the plans villagers had to submit to the army – which is an odd oversight, and hardly one a potential suicide victim would take the time to arrange.’

Laura turned her head towards him and he saw the excitement in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. Jesus,’ said Dryden. He stood looking down at the laptop she had perched almost constantly on her lap. When he’d left that morning she was expecting an e-mail from her agent. The message stood open:

Laura. It’s good news. The part in The Silent Daughter is yours if you want it. I enclose script. 23 words in all – I’ve told them, no last minute changes. It’s those 23 words. Well done – we’re all proud of you. The schedule has you over in Leeds the week beginning 12 August. Car will pick you up in Ely. Talk soon. Love. R.

Dryden kissed her on the neck, but he knew she’d detected the hesitation.

‘I’m happy,’ she said. ‘You should be too.’ The words were indistinct, but audible nonetheless. The part was in a play for Granada TV in which Laura would play a woman recovering from an horrific car crash. The audition had taken place in Cambridge earlier that year, her first journey away from Ely since the accident. It would be her only work in seven years. She saw it as a triumph, the beginning of a new career. Dryden felt the role was demeaning, a very public statement that this was now the limit of their ambitions.

‘Let’s celebrate,’ he said, trying too hard. ‘I’m proud of you too.’ He went below, put two bottles of champagne in the icebox and texted Humph to pick up a Chinese takeaway. Then he put chairs out on the bank and built a fire, breaking up the wooden crates they had their food delivered in, direct from the farm up the lane where Dryden paid the mooring fee.

Humph, who had been sleeping in a lay-by when the summons came, arrived at high speed in the cab, the dog sitting up with excitement in the passenger seat. The cabbie parked up, the two doors open, and switched the radio to a local channel which specialized in 70s and 80s music at that hour, knowing it was Laura’s favourite.

They ate by the light of the fire as the sun set, watching Boudicca run along the riverbank after the lurid green balls Humph fired – from a sitting position – using the tennis machine Dryden had given him one Christmas. It had been a truly unselfish present. The reporter harboured a deep-seated fear of dogs, which could stun his nervous system in the shape of a snarling Alsatian. But the greyhound’s good nature had disarmed him, and familiarity had softened his fears. It was a small consolation, but a consolation nonetheless, to know that he now had a pathological fear of every dog in the world except one. They ate, Humph producing a small bone for the greyhound. Finished, they burned most of the takeaway packaging on the fire.