The Skeleton Man

work are being considered by her agent.

Major Broderick resigned his commission shortly after witnessing the bombardment which had killed Jimmy Neate. The family business – Blooms – continues to blossom, and the major has diversified further, returning to his father’s first love – the breeding of roses. A deep red variety, with an almost black heart, sells extremely well and won a silver medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. It is called ‘Jude’s Ferry’.

The death of Jimmy Neate marked the end of any campaign to reclaim Jude’s Ferry as a living village. The range at Whittlesea is now in use throughout the year, training soldiers for active service in the Middle East. Joint operations with the US army are a regular feature of these exercises. The church has suffered no more wayward shells but dry rot has attacked the roof beams and a storm severely damaged the louvres surrounding the bell chamber. The church has been deconsecrated. There was no last service.

The hunt for Philip Dryden after his disappearance from the hide at Wicken Fen, and the story he had to tell once he’d walked to safety out of Jude’s Ferry two days later, made national news. But soon the media circus had rolled on and he returned to The Crow’s diet of petty crime and parish pump. But not all has remained the same: he now has a more flexible contract with the paper so that he can sometimes be with his wife during rehearsals and filming. Laura’s speech has improved remarkably, although her doctors still consider a full recovery unlikely. She has, however, mastered crutches and the wheelchair has been stowed below decks.

Ruth Lisle has written a book based on her mother’s observations of life in Jude’s Ferry. It has, as yet, failed to attract a publisher.

The Peyton Society of Pittsburgh paid $360,000 for the transfer and restoration of the family tomb to St John’s Church, Boston, Lincs. An action for compensation against the MoD was settled out of court for a sum understood to be in the region of ?60,000.

Humph enjoyed Christmas in the Faroe Islands and is now learning Sami, having booked Christmas 2008 in Lapland.

Dryden has built Boudicca a wooden kennel on the bank beside PK 129.

DI Peter Shaw sits beside his sea rod on the beach at Old Hunstanton, waiting for his next case.

If you enjoyed The Skeleton Man, look out for

DEATH WORE WHITE

by Jim Kelly

(Published in Penguin paperback in January 2009)

Introducing a police partnership as memorable as Morse and Lewis, as delightfully mismatched as Gene Hunt and Sam Tyler in Life on Mars…

In the middle of a heavy snowstorm, eight cars stand on a lonely Norfolk coast road, as night draws in. A fallen pine tree stops them from going forward, the snowbound road prevents them going back.

Two hours later no car has moved – but one driver has met a violent end. Except no one has had the means or the opportunity to commit the murder, and there are no incriminating footprints in the snow.

For Detective Inspector Peter Shaw and Detective Sergeant Valentine it is an extremely puzzling case – made all the more disturbing by the distorted corpse that washed up on the beach only hours earlier. A man who appears to have died from a human bite mark on his arm…

Read on for a taster…

1

The Alfa Romeo ran a lipstick-red smear across a sepia landscape. To one side snow flecked the sand and dunes at the edge of the crimped waters of The Wash, a convoy of six small boats caught in a stunning smudge of purple and gold where the sun was setting. To the landward side lay the salt marsh, a weave of winter white around stretches of dead black water.

The sports car nudged the speed limit and Sarah Baker-Sibley watched the first flake of snow fall on the windscreen in the middle of her field of vision. She swept it aside with a single swish of the windscreen wipers and punched the automatic lighter into the dashboard, her lips counting to ten, the cigarette held ready between dry teeth.

Ten seconds. She thrummed her fingers on the leather-bound steering wheel.

It was two minutes short of five o’clock and the Alfa’s headlights were waking up the cat’s eyes. She pulled the lighter free of the dashboard. The ringlet of heated wire seemed to lift her mood and she laughed, drawing in the nicotine enthusiastically.

She turned up the heating to maximum as a spiro-graph of ice began to encroach on the windscreen. The indicator showed the outside temperature at 0°C, then briefly -1°C. She dropped her speed to 50 mph, and checked the rear-view mirror for following traffic: she’d been overtaken once, the car was still ahead of her by half a mile, and there were lights behind, but closer, a hundred yards or less.

She drew savagely on the menthol cigarette, swishing more snowflakes off the windscreen. Attached to the passenger-side dashboard by a sucker was a little pink picture frame enclosing a snapshot of a girl with hair down to her waist, in a school uniform complete with beret. She touched the image, as if it was an icon, and smiled into the rear-view mirror; but when she saw the lipstick on the filter of the menthol cigarette, and the imprint of her thin dry lips, her eyes filled with tears.

Rounding a bend she saw rear lights ahead again for a few seconds. And a sign, luminous, regulation black on yellow, in the middle of the carriageway, an AA insignia in the top-left-hand corner.

DIVERSION

FLOOD

An arrow pointed bluntly to the left – seawards down a narrow unmetalled road.

‘Sod it.’ She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her palm, then brushed a tear from her eye. Ahead, the road ran straight for a mile but there was no traffic either way.