The Funeral Owl
Table of Contents
A Selection of Titles by Jim Kelly
The Detective Inspector Peter Shaw Series
DEATH WORE WHITE
DEATH WATCH
DEATH TOLL
DEATH'S DOOR *
THE WATER CLOCK
THE FIRE BABY
THE MOON TUNNEL
THE COLDEST BLOOD
THE SKELETON MAN
NIGHTRISE *
THE FUNERAL OWL *
available from Severn House
THE FUNERAL OWL
Jim Kelly
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9â15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2013 by Jim Kelly.
The right of Jim Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Kelly, Jim, 1957
The Funeral Owl. â (A Philip Dryden mystery ; 7)
1. Dryden, Philip (Fictitious character)âFiction.
2. JournalistsâEnglandâCambridgeshireâFiction.
3. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title II. Series
823.9'2-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-049-2 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-461-4 (ePub)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
To Michael Kelly
Much-loved guardian of the family tree
I would like to thank my agent, Faith Evans, for her particular help in the writing of
The Funeral Owl
. The version which appears here is infinitely superior to the one she first read, largely due to her intervention and advice. My publisher at Severn House, Kate Lyall Grant, has been especially supportive of the final â ambitious â text. I would also like to thank my editor, Sara Porter, for her usual care and attention to detail. Here, in Ely, my thanks go to my established support team. Jenny Burgoyne read the text and provided an invaluable overview and a final, fine, edit. Rowan Haysom read the proofs to check the plot. Any surviving mistakes are all my own. My wife, Midge Gillies, found time amidst her own busy writing schedule to offer advice on a regular basis over morning toast. My daughter, Rosa, contributes her own share of ideas, and opinions.
I should point out that the township of Brimstone Hill does not exist. It may look like several fen villages and towns, but it is none of them. However, the Fen Motorway does exist, and all drivers should keep to the speed limit or risk death. The idea of building a plot around a painting hanging in a parish church came from Christ Church, Christchurch, near Wisbech. I would like to thank the church warden for showing me around. All the characters in
The Funeral Owl
are entirely fictitious.
Monday
P
hilip Dryden gripped the fluffy wheel cover of the Capri and steered the car towards the broken white line in the middle of the road. To his left was an open grass verge, which quickly dropped away down a steep bank, ending fifteen feet below in the black waters of the Forty Foot Drain â one of the Cambridgeshire Fens' endless, arrow-straight, artificial rivers. The trench in which the Forty Foot lay was like a long, grassy coffin, often sunless, a trap for mists and fog. Whatever the season â and today promised to be the latest in a series of perfect summer days â the water looked like black ice. For Dryden that was the nightmare detail; white water held nothing of the sinister tension of its black counterpart. The fear of slipping down into the river, the spectre of an airless death in a submerged car, seemed to draw him like a magnet, not of iron, but of hydrogen and oxygen. He knew it was an illusion but the Capri seemed to be tugging them towards the brink. Droplets of sweat beaded his high forehead. His knuckles were white and numb.
They passed a sign on the left. It was blue, with white letters, as high as a house:
On this road in the
last two years:
35 INJURED
4 DEAD
KEEP TO THE LIMIT
The limit was thirty mph. Dryden was doing twenty mph. If he went any slower he'd stall. He was aware that driving was one of those skills that becomes almost subconscious, like riding a bicycle. Once you start thinking about it you fall off. He'd started thinking about it.
He tried to stretch out his legs to give his six-foot-two-inch frame some release from being cramped into the front of the Capri. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the fear in his own eyes, which were green, like the worn shards of glass you find on a beach. Dryden's face radiated a kind of intense stillness, but was handsome too beneath cropped jet-black hair; a strangely medieval face, architectural, as if fashioned by a series of mason's blows. A face that should have been looking down from a cathedral roof, or up from a crusader's tomb.
Another roadside sign:
RAMSEY FORTY FOOT
8 MILES
Eight miles. An eternity in tarmac, and slide-rule straight except for a single, obtuse, almost imperceptible kink to the left, halfway to the next village.
The road, known locally as the
Fen Motorway
,
was just wide enough for two cars to pass; a rat-run linking Ely and the Black Fens to the flatlands around Peterborough, the silty expanse known as the Great Soak, a vast plain of treeless fields and ditches. The shortcut was often clogged with HGVs saving mileage, taxis avoiding rush-hour snarl-ups on the main roads, and locals who knew how to thread their way through the network of lanes which zigzagged the wetlands, clinging to the flood banks.
The road had been built nearly four hundred years earlier on clay dredged from the river. Subsidence and slippage had wrecked the original flat surface. While it was straight in a two-dimensional plane, it was anything but in three dimensions. It undulated with an almost hypnotic rhythm, like a Möbius Strip. Dryden's ear canals, as prone to flights of fantasy as the rest of him, sent him impossible signals, appearing to indicate that the cab was about to corkscrew like a roller coaster.
The cab hit a dip and Boudicca, the greyhound, crouching in the back seat, howled once, then whimpered.
Dryden gripped the wheel harder because ahead he could see a lorry, one of the big agricultural HGVs, thundering towards him. It was getting bigger at an alarming rate which suggested a speed roughly double the maximum allowed. Streamers flew from its stovepipe.
âHold on,' he said, to wet his mouth.
The HGV swept past, the wind nudging the cab another foot towards the edge of the bank. Dryden swerved back to the safety of the white line. Then the wind, which had been a torment that summer, buffeted the cab further away from the water, so that for a moment he thought he was going to put them off the road on the far side, down a twenty-five-foot bank into a field â a descent which would have killed them just as surely as plunging into the Forty Foot.
His passenger rearranged his sixteen-stone carcass in the bucket seat. Humph was the cabbie who usually drove the Capri. Always drove the car. Never left the car. Lived in it, really, if the fetid truth were told. But today, just a few miles back, Humph had pulled over and announced he couldn't drive on.
âStress,' he'd said. âYou drive. I can't see â¦' He'd waved one of his small, delicate hands in front of his face as if cleaning an invisible windscreen.
It was a big favour to ask. Dryden had not driven for more than a decade, since the day he'd pitched his car into a drain just like the Forty Foot. The two-door Corsa had sunk. He'd been pulled to safety by another driver. His wife, Laura, had been trapped on the back seat, underwater, for nearly an hour, surviving in an air pocket. She'd lived through it, and so had he, but they'd never be the same again. Which was why he hadn't driven since, and why she always travelled in the front passenger seat.
Humph's mobile buzzed in his lap. He read the text. âShe's not at school,' he said, his high voice furred with fear. Humph's voice was like Humph, lighter than you'd expect, tiptoeing out of his small, round mouth.
The cabbie's eldest daughter, Grace, aged fifteen, was missing. The call had come that morning at 7.30 a.m. from Humph's ex-wife. Grace lived with her mother and stepfather in Witchford, a village on the edge of Ely, in the heart of the Fens. She'd gone to her room on Sunday night before ten o'clock, saying she wanted to revise for an exam in bed. Usually diligent and cheerful, she'd been moody and withdrawn. Her mother had put it down to being a teenager. But at breakfast time she'd found the bed empty, still made up. Grace wasn't at her best friend's. She wasn't with neighbours. Her mother rang Humph, who was sleeping in the Capri in a lay-by near Waterbeach, having spent the night ferrying clubbers home from Cambridge. Humph checked his house, a semi on Ely's Jubilee Estate, because Grace had her own key. No sign. So he'd rung the police.
Grace was level-headed, sensible, mature beyond her years, a kind of mezzanine mother to her younger sister Alice. And that's what scared Humph. The fact that they'd found Alice, asleep, untroubled, in the box room next to her sister's. The two were inseparable. Until now. Why had Grace gone? Where had she gone? Humph had a limited emotional range, so the signals he was getting from his brain, and from his heart, were overwhelming. The simple idea that he might lose Grace, that the last time he'd seen her might be the last time he'd ever see her, made his whole body ache. He had to make an effort to remember to breathe. It was as if he was trapped in a slow-motion accident, unable to escape from this odd, echoey, world until Grace was found. And lurking in his subconscious was the alternative outcome. That the nightmare would begin
when
they found Grace.