and the suicide of her brother had been enough to bring the Fleet Street pack to Whittlesea Mere; they had a few facts, but as yet no story to link them all together.
DI Shaw stood by his black Land Rover, a white shirt open at the neck, enjoying the cool rain. On the dashboard Dryden glimpsed a row of seashells and a package, rolled roughly in newspaper. A brace of sea rods was bound expertly to the roof rack, ready for a trip.
‘The beach?’ asked Dryden.
Shaw nodded. ‘A few days off.’ He looked towards the church. ‘I came to talk to Ruth Lisle,’ he said. They moved into the lee of the tower out of the wind, looking down on the village, monochrome in the flat afternoon light.
‘They’re all inside,’ said Dryden. ‘Why Ruth?’
DI Shaw looked towards Telegraph Hill. ‘The shelling punctured the tank in the water tower. It took some time but the 600 gallons finally seeped out this morning. There were some bones at the bottom, human bones, weighted with stones in an overcoat pocket. It’s difficult to say, but there was a silver anklet above the right foot.’
Dryden saw her again, walking along the road to Neate’s Garage, relieved perhaps that she had finally taken the decision to unburden herself of her debt to Jude. And then the brutal rejection at the hands of Jimmy Neate and George Tudor – the final confirmation that she was still an outsider, would always be an outsider. So she’d run, suddenly overcome by the depression which had haunted her that summer, run up to Telegraph Hill where she had always found peace. She knew where Bob Steward kept the keys so she’d got them, climbed up as he had done through the empty brick rooms and then further, past the point where Dryden had stopped – up the spiral staircase to the platform above the black dripping water, below the dank wooden roof.
Then she’d let gravity take her life.
Dryden shivered. ‘Magda called at Neate’s Garage that last night to say there was a rumour in the village that Kathryn had poisoned the baby, and so she was going to go to the police, and that she wanted the family to be prepared for that. An honourable woman, foolish too. All she wanted was a home.’
Dryden leant back against the rough stone wall. ‘They drove her out. A hundred years ago they’d have done it with clods of earth. But they knew her, they knew how to hurt her – with words. How to make her feel exactly what she didn’t want to feel – rejected like an eternal outsider, carrying the stigma of the newcomer who doesn’t belong. It was what she’d always feared. It was enough.’
They both looked towards the distant ruin of the water tower on Telegraph Hill, a grey silhouette in the rain.
‘I doubt she ever suspected the truth; that Jimmy had poisoned the child, or at least harried his sister into giving the child the dose,’ said Dryden. ‘God. Imagine it.’
Dryden looked into Shaw’s water-blue eyes and saw the first hint that the truth was worse.
‘Jude’s bones,’ said Shaw, looking down at the grass. There was a stone tomb chest behind him and for the first time since Dryden had met him he sat – a small act of respect.
Dryden felt the slight nausea which always told him he’d got something wrong, that some fundamental truth had eluded him. ‘Jimmy said they’d used ethylene glycol – that there’d be traces,’ he said.
Shaw returned his gaze. ‘I don’t want this used – not yet. You can have it first when we’re ready. The forensics aren’t signed off.’
Dryden stepped closer. ‘Tell me.’
‘We had a series of test results. The DNA on the Ducados in the grave matched up to Jimmy Neate.’
‘What?’
Shaw shrugged. ‘Real life’s like that. Perhaps Ken Woodruffe offered him one while they dug the grave. It’s a lucky break for Ken, although he neither deserves nor needs it. I wouldn’t get a murder charge past a committal with the evidence we’ve got, and the alibis they’ve manufactured are pretty watertight. But a DNA match would at least have given us a chance of breaking him down, peeling him away from the rest. But no go, I’m afraid.’
Dryden nodded, knowing that wasn’t the news Shaw had brought. ‘What else?’
‘Jude’s bones. The toxicology is clean, which it wouldn’t be with that kind of poison. It lodges in the bones, and it’d still be there if it had killed Jude Neate seventeen years ago.’
Dryden pushed himself away from the stone wall of the nave.
‘And I checked with the death certificate,’ said Shaw. ‘The doctor who attended was a locum from Peterborough, near retirement, and now dead. But he kept decent notes. The baby had been born with severe jaundice and a blood transfusion had been recommended. There was a rapid deterioration, they tried to get him into hospital, but he died before leaving the house. Natural causes. There was a full post mortem, which wouldn’t have detected the antifreeze, but then we now know he hadn’t been dosed with that. I think he died of natural causes, Dryden.’
Dryden looked up into the sky, trying to work it out, to see what could have driven Jimmy Neate to hide his nephew’s bones that night in 1990, and then to return to try and make sure they’d never be found.
‘But the answer
‘There must be…’ said Dryden.
Shaw held up a hand. ‘We used Kathryn’s DNA and found him quickly enough. But it was Jude’s DNA which told the truth.’
‘Meaning?’
‘The science is a bit of a nightmare, but broadly we’ve found that it is probable, certainly beyond doubt in my mind, that Jude’s birth was the result of an incestuous relationship – a very close incestuous relationship. Practically speaking, the father was one of two people – either Kathryn’s brother or her father, Walter. So we matched up
