The Skeleton Man (16 page)

As they drove off Dryden watched them in the rear-view mirror. Jimmy Neate broke away quickly, his head and shoulders back beneath the hood of the pick-up. But Julie Watts watched them go, her weight on one leg, a hand shading her eyes from the sun.

DI Shaw spread the pictures on the wooden trestle table, which was the only furniture in the detective’s office – the old bottle store behind the bar of the New Ferry Inn. Each print was set precisely and neatly apart, a gallery of disfigurement. Dryden sipped bitumen-strong coffee from a mug that Shaw had given him marked THE TEAM. At the firing-range gate he’d got a lift in Shaw’s car, an immaculate black Land Rover with the multicoloured sail of a windsurf board and a beach-kite furled on the roof like emerging butterflies. The interior had been unnervingly neat and well ordered, a characteristic which made Dryden anxious. The pictures made him anxious too, calling up an unspecific sense of guilt. He didn’t lean forward but his eye was drawn to that first print, which Shaw was tapping rhythmically with a ballpoint.

‘Daughter of the company’s on-site assistant chemist,’ he said. Shaw was early-thirties, white open-necked shirt and an outdoor tan, the skin like slightly creased quality leather.

‘Mary Christine’s the name. The company, Lincoln Life Sciences, tests cosmetics for the big corporates, using rabbits, guinea pigs, rats and dogs. It’s been the subject of low-level animal rights interest for some
years. We knew that extremists based in the East Midlands had become interested and so security at the site was increased.’

He tapped the picture again. ‘Unfortunately that wasn’t where they struck. Mary Christine opens the post at home just one day a week – Saturday. Rest of the time she’s at boarding school. She’s thirteen years old, thirteen years and two months. So that morning there was a parcel with her name on it with the rest of the letters on the mat. A thin parcel, just the right size for the letterbox. No stamp, delivered by hand, but there’s no CCTV.

‘She sits on the doormat to open it up. She’s excited because she doesn’t get post often and when she does it’s usually a present from her gran. It’s June, but it’s Christmas for Mary Christine, until she gets the bubble wrap off. Then it explodes in her face.’

The burn covered the forehead and left cheek, the ear on the left side reduced to a trace of crackling, the upper eyelid raw.

Dryden felt sick and looked around for a chair but the room was otherwise empty.

‘Sorry,’ said Shaw. He seemed genuinely flustered. ‘I don’t seem to use chairs,’ he laughed. ‘I can get you one from the incident room?’

Dryden shook his head. ‘What was in it? The package.’

‘The chemical was phosphorus,’ said Shaw, looking at Dryden, not the picture. ‘It was mixed with various other common ingredients to create an effective
incendiary. I can give you the exact chemical composition if you want. The company’s based in Sleaford, forty miles up the road.’

Shaw’s eyes were an extraordinary light blue, like falling water, creating the illusion for Dryden that he was looking through him. He had the impression he was dealing with someone with a well-ordered mind, and it was spooking him out. So far he hadn’t asked a question to which the detective inspector had not been able to give a precise answer.

And Major Broderick had been wrong about the hair; it was cut short and blond, but Dryden guessed it had been dyed by immersion in the salt of the sea. He’d been right about the tie, though, which was missing from the immaculately white shirt. Shaw’s face was broad and open, and Dryden could imagine him looking out to sea. It was the kind of face that’s always searching a horizon. Above the trestle table was a notice board with rotas and pictures taken in the cellar and at St Swithun’s. There was one personal note, a snapshot of a beach, a single empty chair by the water’s edge, a sea rod beside it. Perhaps it was the one chair he did use.

The detective’s mobile rang and he snapped it open quickly. ‘Shaw,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ve checked,’ he said quickly, laughing as if the reverse was an impossibility.

Dryden stepped out of the office into the public bar of the New Ferry Inn, which had been commandeered as an operations room and was
almost unrecognizable from the one in which he and Broderick had talked just three days earlier. Shaw had explained that the scene of crime forensics team had swept the upstairs rooms in the pub on the first night of the investigation and found nothing of significance. An industrial sized coffee maker gurgled on the bar, and six new darts stuck out of the old board. A wad of insulated cables had been fed in through the front window and provided telephone links and a broadband connection running to a radio car parked up on the town bridge. At a desk two plain-clothed detectives were on phones, tapping at laptops. Plastic sheeting had been draped over the door to the snug bar, beyond which Dryden could see two white-coated scene-of-crime officers working at a trestle table. Box files ran the length of the bar top. It was exactly the kind of operation you didn’t set up to deal with a decade-old suicide victim, and now Dryden knew why. DI Shaw’s interest was in animal rights extremists, and it was pretty clear he was under pressure to catch them quickly before they decided to send another deadly surprise by post.

The detective followed Dryden out of his office and ended the call. He took a couple of paces away before turning on his heel to return. Shaw was still holding the picture of Mary Christine.

Dryden sighed. ‘Look, can we skip this stuff? I’ve seen enough pictures. You want me to sit on this story. The question is, why – it’s a simple one and
I think I deserve an answer which is a little more sophisticated than trading on any sympathy I might have for a damaged child.’

A rook called from somewhere in the village and Dryden was aware of the deserted buildings which surrounded them, the empty street outside, and the just audible trickling of water down the ditch beside The Dring. Something rat-like scuffled over their heads in the room above.

Shaw said the forensic team had slept overnight at the inn to get an early start, a night’s rest Dryden couldn’t imagine attempting.

The detective leant against the wall, one knee bent up so that he could place a foot flat against the flaking plaster.

‘All right. An answer then.’ He looked at a point on the ceiling where the wires of the light fitting still hung loose and Dryden guessed he was framing the answer, ordering his thoughts. He recalled the reference he’d found online to Shaw’s role as a visiting lecturer in forensics. He could imagine him pacing a stage, deftly holding an audience with the authority in his voice.

‘My job,’ said Shaw, ‘initially, at least, was to clear up the case of the Skeleton Man. Chances are it was suicide. Chances are we’ll never know who did it. Chances are very few people care.’

He pushed himself away from the wall and went to the bar to look again at the picture of Mary Christine.

‘Then Henry Peyton gets his call from the animal rights extremists and we find that the tomb here at St Swithun’s has been emptied. There’s a unit at King’s Lynn – made up of personnel from across the East of England forces – which is about tracking down the leadership of these groups. It’s a big deal, Dryden, a lot bigger than sweetie snatching from a corner shop, which was my last major arrest of any note. This unit’s job is to track down the people who cooked Mary Christine’s face.

‘And now that’s my job too because I’ve been seconded in to that unit as I’m on the spot – thanks to our friend in the cellar. The line from the team in Lynn is that it looks like this local cell of activists, the one that’s contacted you, is indeed a renegade band. That’s why none of the CID team is here in person – although they’ve sent down their forensics people. No. They’ve got bigger fish to fry keeping an eye on the really nasty bastards. But it is just possible the people who contacted you may lead us to the same people.’

Dryden didn’t understand. ‘So we’re saying these people are taking orders from someone smart? You reckon? They’ve kidnapped some dogs, a herd of rats, and they’ve mustered enough loose change for two telephone calls. It’s not al-Qaeda, is it?’

The heat in the room was fetid, a layer of dust drifting in a box of sunlight which fell through the frosted glass of the bar windows. Shaw produced a cold box from behind the bar and extracted a can
of sparkling mineral water. Dryden accepted another coffee. The can finished, Shaw lobbed it perfectly through a toy basketball hoop which had been fixed to the wall above an oil-drum dustbin. An electric gizmo in the hoop produced the sound of a crowd cheering.

‘I agree. But despite being inadequate, and possibly violent, they are also clearly ambitious. They’re trying to get noticed, Dryden. They wouldn’t have phoned you otherwise. But they don’t just want to be famous in the local paper, or even the national papers. I think they want to be admired by the nasty bastards, the leadership. Yes, they’re out of their depth, and they’ve already made a string of mistakes, but it would actually be in our interests if they did attract the attention of the people we’re really after. And they’ll do that if they succeed, or at least think they’re going to succeed. Which is where you come in.’

Dryden held up both palms by way of surrender.

‘So this is the deal. They have your mobile number. They told Peyton they would ring you for his decision and expect a story in
The Crow
. We want you to tell them Henry Peyton will shut Sealodes Farm down, and go into early retirement, but only if he gets back the bones of his beloved wife first, or more accurately the old bones they think are his wife’s. He also wants the dogs – up front and unharmed – before he makes any irreversible decisions about Sealodes Farm. Peyton’s in his late sixties, there’s been talk of
him retiring anyway. Tell ’em he’s had an offer for the land and he’s going to take it. In effect they’ve struck gold, they hit him just at the moment he was at his weakest.’

‘And we expect them to swallow that, do we? They can’t really be
that
stupid,’ said Dryden.

‘Well, I wouldn’t count on it. I’ll talk you through the forensics on the Peyton tomb later but I think we can say that we’re dealing with some consummate idiots here; they’re only still at large thanks to beginners’ luck. But as I say, there’s evidence they are not just a renegade group – there are links up the chain. And that’s where we need to get, Dryden, up the chain.’

‘Evidence?’

‘Phone taps. There was some local radio coverage of the first raid on Sealodes Farm, a bit in the evening papers. One of the men in the East Midlands the central unit is tracking was followed shortly afterwards to Ely. Our guess is he was checking the locals out, trying to get a handle. Either they’d contacted him or he’d seen the story.’

‘Where’d he go?’

Shaw’s blue water eyes were unblinking. ‘Local surveillance lost him.’ The detective brought his hands together in a church.

‘Anyway, our friends want an answer. And they want you to give it to them. They told Peyton they’d ring you tonight – before
The Crow
’s Thursday deadline. They’ll use a call box again. If you give me your
details we’ll try to get it traced – presuming they’re still under the impression you haven’t talked to the police. I think we’re pretty safe here.’ He smiled, and Dryden found it difficult not to respond.

‘When they call I’d like you to tell them there’s nothing going in the paper about the closure until they hand over the bones. I’d like you to ask to meet them to hand over the goods. Perhaps you could tell them you want a brief interview – that it isn’t much of a story without it, just try and make it clear that if they want publicity you want to meet. We have local ALF sympathizers under surveillance, all run from here. If one of them is involved we’ll get the lot, and the bones, and you get the story.’

Dryden tried to think it through, knowing something was wrong. ‘But why would Henry Peyton play ball? You catch ’em and there’s a court case, then every animal rights nutter in the country will be heading for Sealodes Farm. They haven’t got his wife’s bones, just the dogs. Why not call their bluff?’

Shaw got himself another mineral water. ‘Well, firstly because that might not work. Does he really want a long slow war of attrition? He’s no spring chicken but he’d like to leave the business to his son, or possibly sell it as a going concern to one of his big customers, and neither of those options is that attractive if the farm is an ongoing target. He’d like to solve the problem. We’ve offered him a solution.’

‘Which is?’

‘Well, think about it. Getting the local people into
court will serve little long-term good. The idea is to trade them in for information. They walk if we get the names, and the evidence, we need to move against the leadership in the East Midlands. We get one of them to start talking then we can crack the lot, including the people who did this.’

He held the picture up so Dryden could see it again. ‘We think they’ll have more to worry about than tracking the trail back to Ely. When it comes to court there’ll be no mention of Sealodes Farm. Peyton’s willing to take the chance, he’s smart enough to know it may be the only chance he’s got if he wants a happy, and wealthy, old age. So that’s our game.’

‘Yours. Or the people running this unit back in Lynn?’ asked Dryden.

‘That’s the plan,’ said Shaw, not answering, lacing his fingers across his eyes and rubbing the sockets.

‘But if it works we might see a timely promotion for DI Peter Shaw, a few less burglaries in future, right?’

Those water blue eyes again, giving nothing away.

Dryden stood. ‘OK. And if they don’t call?’

‘You can run the story – but no names. The farm is just that – a farm, somewhere near Ely. The story’s good enough without the detail.’

Dryden ran a hand along the files, fighting an urge to tell Shaw to stuff his plan. But there was always the other story. ‘And matey in the cellar? It still looks like a suicide, surely? There’s no link with animal rights there?’

Shaw smiled, and again it was difficult not to join in. ‘Take a look at this,’ he said. The childlike enthusiasm was infectious, and they hunched over a plan drawn on graph paper – about three foot by four foot. There was an etched outline of a room, expertly drawn.