The Skeleton Man

Dryden read the first three e-mails quickly, moving swiftly through Imber’s early life and the intimation that guilt lay in the future and that the girl called Kathryn was the victim. For Dryden the name Kathryn came ready laden with association, with the selfish manipulations of the men who had surrounded her. Finally he reached the e-mail sent the previous night at 8.45.

When you read this, Laura, I’ll be gone. There isn’t much time so I’ll be brutal, because it was a brutal night, and now I’ve remembered it all. Kathryn was in my class, one of my pupils. I didn’t want to sleep with her, although I’d watched her, wondering what life would do to her face, her body. But she got close to me, bringing me her problems, because she was scared of something and I can see now that she thought I would protect her.

And I can’t hide it, once she was within reach I wanted her.

So we met in the village at Orchard House that last summer. She’d come along the towpath and I’d lead her through the apple trees into the cool shadowy kitchen. We used the big bedroom overlooking the garden, and I can see her now at the window that last time, the time she told me there was going to be a baby.

I didn’t want the child and I know she knew that. I made lots of excuses – that my career would be over, that the police would be involved. But the real reason was that I would have had to start a life I didn’t want. That’s selfish but it’s what I felt. So I offered her the money to get rid of the child, but she said it was too late, that nothing could stop it now. And after that she never spoke a word to me again except on that last evening of her life.

She went away and made her plans. She found that boy – Peter – to cover up, to play the father. I didn’t think she had that in her, to use him like that. I think he thought the baby – the boy – was his. I think she let him believe it. It took my breath away when I realized what she was doing, how she could manipulate anyone who loved her, anyone who cared.

And so Peter began to love the child that hadn’t yet been born.

Jude. My son.

And then, unseen, at home, she became a mother. And what did I feel? I tried to ignore the sense of loss, the jealousy, the almost overwhelming physical need to hold him, to feel his weight, and the chaotic energy of his limbs. I went the first night after he’d been born into the water meadow opposite the old garage and watched the light burning at the upstairs window. And that’s when I knew I’d lost the life that could have saved me, when I heard his crying from the half-opened sash window of the bedroom.

I knew he was ill, the village talked. But still the shock was visceral when it came. I was in the post office talking to Magda when her daughter came in with the news. Jude Neate was dead, dead in the night, and they wanted to bury him in Jude’s Ferry. I don’t know if I’d have been able to hide the way I felt if Magda hadn’t cried. So we held her, comforting her, and I wondered why she’d cry for a child she’d never seen.

And so when the chance came, Laura, I tried to get Kathryn back, tried to redress the balance of right and wrong. I was standing at the bedroom window thinking about the past, about that last summer, drinking from a bottle of whisky I’d found in Dad’s desk when we were clearing the house. I’d arranged to go down to the inn that last night but I still felt like such an outsider – so Dutch courage, I guess.

Then I saw Kathryn. She was coming along the towpath at the bottom of the garden in the dusk so I went out to meet her, as I’d always done. We could hear the crowd at the Methodist Hall, spilling out into the night. They put some fireworks up into the dusk and it seemed to make the shadows darker. I saw her face then, and realized what she’d been through alone.

I said I loved her, I said I should have been with her. I said I loved her again but I think it was grief talking, not love but loss, and I think she knew. She said I’d killed him, the baby, that he knew he wasn’t wanted and that’s why he hadn’t fought. She said she was happy the boy was dead.

It was a cruel thing to say and I hit her. She went down in the dust, and I remember the fireworks exploding overhead, and I saw the colour of her face change. But she stood up and came towards me, her arms out to comfort me and then when our heads were together she whispered it in my ear.

‘I hate you.’ Just for me, like a blessing.

I don’t know how long I had my hands round her neck. When I looked at her again, her eyes reflecting a bursting rocket in the sky, I think I knew she was dead. There’s long grass by the towpath and I let her fall into it, and it closed over her, like water.