Skeg stood. ‘We should take our chance, let’s go.’
Dryden was about to scramble down when he saw across the fields that the rain was lifting and that the grey shadow of Neate’s old garage could be seen on Church Street. The house was lifeless, the windows black, the glass long fallen from rotten frames. But there was an outhouse, a workshop, and through the windows of the double doors Dryden saw clearly the sudden flash of an orange-red torchlight, sweeping once, twice, in the shadows.
He watched, his eyes aching with the effort of seeing through the falling greyness of the morning.
But there: again, this time from an upstairs window, the sudden flash of electricity, as unmistakable as lightning.
Someone was searching Walter Neate’s garage. He decided then, before he could assemble his fears. When he looked back Skeg’s head was at the parapet, waving, but Dryden turned and ran on through the wet field, exhilarated by the sudden motion, the rain running down his face. Ahead of him the light had gone, but he didn’t doubt what he had seen. Someone else had returned to Jude’s Ferry.
39
Up close Neate’s Garage was almost entirely obscured by ivy, the bole of which was as thick as a man’s torso and had split the façade of the Edwardian house, bursting out to fill the eyeless windows. The rain had stopped suddenly and the landscape was still, trapped in a paperweight.
Dryden moved towards a downstairs window and looked in. The ceiling had collapsed and the floor was obscured by distended lumps of plaster, rotting timber and the remains of a dead sheep, the lines of the skull softened by alpine-green moss.
From the back of the house came the thin creak of a door, and boots on floorboards. Dryden circled the building and came to the corner around which lay the rear garden. A blackthorn bush had burst out of the concrete path and writhed against the brickwork. Through the black maze of the branches Dryden could see a man standing with his back to the house, his head turned up into the grey sky. In one hand he had a spade and the other a garden fork, both flaked with rust. He retrieved what looked like a quarter bottle of whisky from his coat and took a long drink, wiping his eyes and mouth afterwards with the back of his hand. He seemed to be orientating himself to the main features of the old garden – an oak tree in the far corner, a path made from circles of York stone and a trio of apple trees which had once been expertly intertwined but which were now suffocating each other, the stunted fruit diseased on the branch. And close to where he stood the frost-shattered remains of a stone bird table.
One of the blackthorn twigs broke and the man turned, giving Dryden a half second to duck back behind the corner of the house. There was a silence, punctuated by the sound of a match struck, then unmistakably the gritty slice of the spade cutting through the blue clay upon which the village lay, and the slight sucking sound of the clod being lifted from the wet earth. And another noise, less rhythmic, the sharp intake of breaths which accompany spasms of pain. The methodical work continued, and Dryden thought of the graves which had dominated the story of Jude’s Ferry – from Peyton’s tomb to the cellar itself in which Peter Tholy’s frail body had been left to hang. And then there was another noise, unmistakable in that still air, the sound of metal on wood. Dryden peered round the corner and saw the man kneel, plunge his arms down into the trench that he’d dug and lift something free of the earth. He didn’t stand but sank onto his heels, amongst the loose soil he’d turned out of the grave. Beside him on the ground he’d laid out a mildewed blanket which Dryden guessed he’d found in one of the old bedrooms, but he didn’t place the object down. With his back to Dryden he rocked silently, cradling it to his chest, one hand rising to hold his head. Then he stood and turned and Dryden saw clearly what he held: a small wooden coffin caked in black earth, its white paint flaking. And Dryden saw the face of the man who’d reclaimed the body from the earth. The face was disfigured by dried blood, an ugly black wound cutting up between the forehead and the hairline. For a moment he thought it was indeed Jason Imber, returned to bury his son. But the skin was paler, the face dominated by the Celtic brow, the muscles knotted on the arms, the broken body seemingly supported by the blue mechanic’s overalls. And so he saw the face before him for what it was – that of Kathryn Neate’s brother, not hanging charred on the wire, but alive, a fresh gout of blood oozing from a wound on his head and trickling through his fingers.
40
In the silence a wood pigeon cooed and then footsteps sounded, leading away from the house, along the old road towards the village. Dryden crept from the ruins in time to see the grey silhouette fading into the mist, the angular coffin still held across Neate’s chest, wrapped in the blanket, just visible from behind.
Dryden padded along the grass verge, keeping him within sight until he reached the allotments at the foot of Church Hill, where Neate turned off the road and out of sight. Dryden waited until he saw him reappear by the old church before following, threading his way uphill through the tangled berries and the ramshackle huts. Rain still trickled from the Victorian gutters of the church roof, and a rook cracked its wings between the battlements of the tower.
At the open doors of St Swithun’s he stopped, aware now that he was close enough to be heard if he stumbled, and unable to push aside the image of what he now assumed was Jason Imber’s corpse, the smoke still drifting from the charred clothes he had stolen from the orderlies’ room at the hospital. He waited a full minute, listening, and then edged away into the churchyard. He moved from buttress to buttress until he was beside the window the army had blown out just a week earlier. The rain had already buckled the chipboard so that he could see through a gap into the church. Directly opposite in the far wall was the small Victorian door to the ossuary Fred Lake had described. From within came the sudden, violent sound of wood being wrenched, rusted nails finally breaking free. Dryden stood, waiting, compelling himself to remain still despite an overwhelming need to know why this small child’s bones had meant so much.
Then the door swung open and he saw Jimmy Neate surrounded by bones, blood spattered on his overalls. At his feet the small coffin lay, shattered now. The far wall of the ossuary was covered in rough shelves, once white-washed, now grey with dust. Skulls filled them, and in the apex of the roof were stacked to the rafters. The floor, but for a narrow stone path, was made up of skeleton bones, thigh bones emerging from shattered ribs and a dusty weathered compost of medieval fingers.
Jimmy Neate looked about him, surveying his work. He picked up the shards of wood, stepped unsteadily outside and through the little Gothic door, and then closed it firmly. The sun, as pale as butter, glinted on the old key as he turned the lock, and Dryden remembered that Walter Neate had been sexton at St Swithun’s for forty years. Neate didn’t look back, walking quickly down the nave carrying the coffin and lid, awkwardly now, like lumber. Dryden waited until he’d left the graveyard and saw that he’d dumped the wood, probably amongst the rubble and burnt roof timbers the army had collected in a skip by the lychgate.
Then, overhead, in the blue sky, which was being stretched clear and pale as the mist fled, he saw the purple scar like a synapse, then heard the dull percussion of the maroon. A warning – the bombardment postponed was to begin at last. Dryden guessed they had five minutes, perhaps less. He saw Neate stop, watching the signal fade in the breeze, and then bow his head, holding the wound, before changing direction, doubling back around the graveyard wall towards the old water tower on Telegraph Hill, keeping below the skyline.
Dryden gave him two minutes and followed, and as he ran across the open grass he looked up and saw the red target flag flying from the pole at the top of the tower, above the whitewashed wooden dovecote. The door of the three-storey brick tower stood open and stepping inside Dryden heard footsteps ascending a metal ladder somewhere above. The room he was in was twenty-five-feet square and had once held a diesel pump for the village’s drinking water. A small modern electric pump stood in its place, dusty and unused now that the army had its own supply to tackle fires after each bombardment. In one corner pipes ran in and out of the brick walls, and then upwards to the tank above. Equipment, mothballed now, stood against one wall for testing water quality. Four large elegant windows flooded the room with light. Against one wall was an open metal stairway with handrail, and Dryden climbed it, waiting for the moment when his eyes rose level with the second-storey room. This was empty too, littered with the tiny dry carcasses of thousands of greenfly born into the fetid, damp, atmosphere of the enclosed tower. He climbed again, a shorter flight this time, to another empty room; but not quite: at its centre was a single metal twisting staircase rising, enclosed in circular safety bars, up through a circular shaft in the middle of the black metal tank above.