The Skeleton Man

‘Nothing that wouldn’t have been out of place in most pubs on a Saturday night. A family dispute, there’s nothing like brothers for falling out.’

Dryden was mildly drunk, the effects of the third pint multiplying his natural intuition. With fifty people left in the village there can’t have been that many siblings in the bar that night. ‘Twin brothers?’ he asked, remembering the list he’d compiled from the TA records.

Woodruffe watched a couple kiss at a table in the shadows. ‘Like I said, the police are on to it.’

Dryden decided not to push; he could track down the Smith brothers soon enough, although he suspected DI Shaw would have got there first.

On the river a boat went past, its engine spluttering, the portholes lit.

‘That last morning there was some trouble, when one of the old women was dragged out of her home. But you helped calm everybody down, didn’t you? People seemed to respect you.’

Woodruffe held his face in a mask.

‘I’ve always wondered why,’ said Dryden, allowing the ambiguity to remain unclarified.

‘What was the bloody point?’ he said. ‘We’d sold up, taken their money, and now they wanted us out. If there’s one thing running a boozer teaches you it’s to give up on anything if you think you’re coming second.’

Dryden opened his notebook at the page where he’d listed his eight potential victims, turning it so that Woodruffe could read. ‘We know the victim was average height – five-ten, eleven – something like that. Any of these a lot bigger, or a lot smaller?’

Woodruffe read the list too quickly. ‘Nah. Paul Cobley wasn’t a big lad – but, it’s difficult to tell. And Jimmy Neate looked six foot.’

Dryden closed the notebook. ‘Ellen Woodruffe, your mother. Did I speak to her that last day? Is that possible?’

He stood. ‘Doubt it. Mum didn’t want to go and she didn’t make a secret of it, but she was very ill that summer, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew the army would do what it wanted to do. She’d had a coupla strokes the year before, paralysed her left side, so she knew she was on borrowed time. She wanted to die in Jude’s Ferry; in fact that’s all she wanted. But she didn’t die, that took longer, a lot longer than she wanted. Anyway, she left quietly enough. She’d given up the fight.’

‘I’m sorry – what happened to her?’

‘I got her into a nursing home on the coast. Lowestoft. Cost a fortune, of course, but we’d banked the money when we sold the pub to the army back in the nineties. The price was good, very good. We know why now, of course – so they could chuck us out for good.’

The landlord pulled out a wallet and flicked it open. It was her again, a hand held to ward off the sun, the arcaded front of a Victorian seaside villa behind. In discreet letters above the bay window a sign read ‘Royal Esplanade’.

‘She died in ’97, that winter. But she did come home in a way. I scattered her ashes at St Swithun’s – on the feast day. I didn’t ask. I just did it. So she came home in the end.’

They’ve told me to write a letter, every day, setting down what I have remembered.

But a letter to whom? I know I loved someone once, because I can feel the ring now, cool, solid, and gold, but I’ve forgotten her with almost everything else.

So this is for nobody. A message on a computer screen, tapped out with the fingers of my one good hand, for no one to read.

And this is what I have remembered.

At first there was a place, Jude’s Ferry, lying beneath the two hills, the spotless Georgian windows of a house looking out towards the single brick chimney of an old factory. On one hill the church, on the other a water tower with a wooden painted dovecote.

I was a child then, thrilled by the sight of the two hills glimpsed through the windscreen of a car, bumping along a road without a single turn.

And then, like a gift, there was another name.

Kathryn.

I knew something about Kathryn. I knew she didn’t give me the ring that I wear.