Dryden let the words sweep over him. A coincidence? Dryden distrusted the word, seeing by instinct a world in which events were interwoven, like the threads of the hangman’s rope. The discovery of the skeleton in the cellar at Jude’s Ferry had clearly set in motion a series of events. Violent events. Dryden shuddered as he failed to suppress a single Gothic image. A man, head and arms emerging first, struggling free through the shattered stone lid of a funeral chest.
13
Humph drove away from the sun. Dryden watched it touch the fen horizon in the rear-view mirror, bleeding into the earth. They crossed the river at Ely, a convoy of holiday boats beneath breasting waves raised by the evening breeze. On Bridge Fen a herd of cattle stood as still as a child’s toys on a tabletop, casting shadows half a field long. They drove in silence, Dryden still trying to fit the sad figure in Room 118 into the emerging jigsaw that was Jude’s Ferry. His appearance, forty-eight hours after the gruesome discovery of the skeleton beneath the storeroom beside the New Ferry Inn, was profoundly unsettling.
But for now Dryden had to leave him to struggle with the past alone in his hospital room. He must return to his list of potential victims and the task of putting a name to the Skeleton Man. The Five Miles From Anywhere stood between the Ouse and the Cam on a lonely peninsula between the two rivers, at the point where they ran forward on a broad sinuous path towards Ely, the cathedral standing clear above its own reflection. Picnic tables crowded the grass down to the riverbank, and in the pub’s small marina white boats jostled for a mooring. Dryden preferred the spot in the winter, when the river could freeze if they closed the sluices to the sea at Denver, leaving the pub trapped in ice on three sides. But today the scene was given grandeur by the sky. North towards the sea clouds were building a mythical landscape of mountains tinged with evening colours.
Humph extruded himself from the cab and set off for a table. Balanced on surprisingly nimble feet he was a human gyroscope, desperately seeking a seat before toppling to the ground. They found a spot at the point where the rivers met: the view before them, all the people behind them. Dryden left his friend with his Faroese phrasebook, announcing a wide range of alcoholic beverages to no one.
In the bar a small scrum had formed waiting for drinks, a lone barman working efficiently to meet the rush. As soon as Dryden saw the face he knew it was Woodruffe: the shock of brown hair had gone but the slump of the shoulders and the narrowly set eyes marked him out as the young man he’d seen on the step of the New Ferry Inn that last morning. Judging the moment, he decided to leave the questions for later. Instead, waiting his turn, he studied the bar. One wall was decorated with a collection of flamenco fans and on a notice board by the food hatch there were pictures of various sunburnt faces sitting outside a bar, the facade draped in Union Flags.
Above the pub’s french windows out to the riverbank was a framed picture: the New Ferry Inn at Jude’s Ferry, a group of villagers before it in two ranks like a football team, beside them a 1950s motor coach. Dryden squinted at some words scratched on a chalkboard held by a boy with unruly hair in the middle of the front row: Lowestoft, 1973. Behind the boy a man stood, rigid in a suit, one hand on the youngster’s shoulder. At an upstairs window a woman’s face, a pale oval, was half hidden, a hand raised to brush back her hair. And one other picture, in pride of place over the brick fire-place: the New Ferry Inn again, in black and white, a woman in her fifties snapped pruning a rose beneath the bar window, the smile genuine enough, suffused with affection for whoever was behind the camera.
He took two pints of bitter and a large G&T out to Humph, an assortment of bar snacks tucked under his arm and in his pockets.
The sun died and customers began to trickle away, back to the boats from which the smells of cooking were drifting downstream. Humph, distracted by the view, delicately broke open a crisp packet and began to cherry-pick the contents. Dryden sipped the beer, trying to imagine the New Ferry Inn on that last night in 1990. The newspapers had been asked to leave the villagers alone, in return receiving an open invitation instead to a press conference the next morning and the promise of a tour of Jude’s Ferry. But they’d been told, in retrospect, the lengths to which the army had gone to try and soften the blow which had fallen on these people. There’d been a dance in the Methodist Hall, free drinks and food at the inn – all paid for by the MoD, and fireworks set up on the town bridge. But even the army spokesman had been forced to admit that not all the villagers had been up for a celebration. Many had stayed at home, boycotting the festivities, quietly packing away their things in the tea-crates provided.
And beneath perhaps, in the cellar, the Skeleton Man.
‘Let’s eat,’ said Dryden suddenly, standing. ‘Properly. My shout.’
Humph was silent, his cheeks full of pork scratchings. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘On a plate?’
The bar was packed now, almost exclusively with a coach party of OAPs. They sat at two long tables set with glasses and cutlery, a middle-aged woman with a clipboard moving amongst them checking choices pre-ordered for dinner. A group of young waitresses fluttered around them like sparrows around a garden feeder. Dryden noticed that all the girls were dark-haired and pretty, and wondered if it was a qualification for employment at the pub. He recalled seeing Woodruffe on that final morning in Jude’s Ferry, sitting in the sun with the girl in the crumpled T- shirt. Tonight the publican was on the customers’ side of the bar, drinking from a pottery mug, and reading the
Dryden ordered food and included Woodruffe in the round. He offered his hand: ‘Philip Dryden. I wrote that…’ he said, tapping the front-page story on Jude’s Ferry. ‘You’re Ken Woodruffe? Your mother was the licensee of the New Ferry Inn?’
Up close Dryden could see that Woodruffe was younger than he first looked but the hair was thinning fast, revealing a high, frail skull, the thin neck rising out of a brutally white shirt buttoned up to take a sober blue tie. His skin was pale, as if he’d spent a lifetime under the bar’s neon strip light, thin wrinkles grey with other people’s cigarette smoke.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘Today, you know. I’ve had enough. It’s all been very difficult and I’ve answered the police questions. I’ll bring your food out, OK? But I really don’t want to talk.’
He stood suddenly, his hands readjusting the bar mats, ashtray and a newspaper. Dryden could see that the mug held an amber liquid rather than tea or coffee and he guessed it was whisky. Even here, on the right side of the bar, Woodruffe seemed anxious to preserve some distance from strangers, stepping back from his seat and taking the mug with him.
Dryden nodded, backing off and giving him room. ‘No problem. I was just interested. I was there, like I said in that piece, in the cellar when they found him.’
He retreated with the drinks and they waited in the dusk, watching the river turn violet under the first stars.
