The Skeleton Man by Jim Kelly

marked by a complete absence of any recall of their accident. The hours spent trapped in the lightless car beneath the winter water was literally a black box; a memory too terrifying to allow a replay. His wife’s recovery had been marked by many advances. But not a single shaft of light had fallen into that lost world.
    Ely, bathed in sunshine now, had come to life. In Market Square he spotted that one newspaper vendor was already on his pitch. The Express and The Crow were printed a mile out of town, and the editor had recently introduced an early print run for both in order to catch sales before the shops closed. The seller was a man known as Skeg, thirty perhaps, his face punctured with a single cheek stud, the hair cut savagely short, emphasizing a small triangle of dyedred stubble below his lip, but above his chin. Skeg’s job was on the bottom rung of the employment ladder, a career normally reserved for a band of outcasts.
    Dryden had to admit that Skeg was not quite so easy to pigeonhole. He lived on one of the dilapidated river boats which took up cheap moorings in the town’s clay pits, and he’d come across him several times working at Wicken Fen nature reserve, clearing weed from the waterways, tagging and counting birds. And always, at his heels, the half-drowned short-haired terrier, tugged along on a blue rope. Sometimes Skeg would disappear from his pitch for months, trying another job, but he always reappeared.
    Dryden bought a paper, even though he could have waited and got a free one back at the office, and flicking it open at the fold enjoyed the sight of his double front-page bylines. The thrill, even after twenty years on newspapers, was palpable.
    Skeg had sensed the inner smile: ‘Done all right then,’ he said, and Dryden remembered instantly why he didn’t like him as much as he normally liked outcasts. There was sarcasm beneath the conviviality, and something cruel about the eyes. At his feet the dog lay curled, ribs showing. Skeg had his own copy open to the feature on Jude’s Ferry, and the picture Dryden had taken inside St Swithun’s, the now shattered crusader’s tomb beside an inset of what it had looked like before the wayward shelling.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Dryden. ‘Decent day’s work.’
    Skeg took his pound coin and rummaged for thechange in a wooden tray. The dog edged forward to snuffle at Dryden’s feet and he felt the first wave of panic as it bared its teeth. He drew in breath, fighting the impulses which were coursing through his nervous system.
    ‘Wow,’ said Skeg, bending down and pulling the dog back. ‘You’re not a big fan of dogs, are ya?’
    Dryden tried a smile that failed, aware that his phobia was painfully apparent.
    ‘Think of something else,’ he told himself. So he checked the space on the back page where his fudge box on the man in the river should have been and found it blank: either he’d bought one of the earliest copies off the run or they’d failed to get it in at all.
    Dryden scanned the badges on Skeg’s quilted poacher’s jacket as he took his change: Troops Out of Iraq, Shelter, RSPCA, a sticker which proclaimed Green Planet, and another in support of a campaign to stop Cambridge University building a laboratory for animal testing of new drugs.
    ‘Just found the bloke in the river without the fingers,’ said Dryden, trying to mask his dislike of someone less fortunate than himself, and edging back still further from the dog.
    Skeg nodded. ‘That’s good. That’ll keep the story going then.’ That smile again: mocking.
    In The Fenman bar he found the entire newspaper staff – minus the editor and Jean from reception – engaged in the ritual press-day binge. Garry was counting peanuts on a tabletop while Charlie Brackenwas retelling an anecdote about a riverbank flasher, complete with hand movements. Dryden was unable to catch the mood of timeless celebration. He was bothered by a bizarre double image: the marble broken finger on the