The Funeral Owl (10 page)

‘Do you visit the grave?'

‘Couple of times a week, usually at dusk. I don't leave flowers. I don't take anything. I bear witness. It's not a big deal. No one else goes, not even the sister; she says she'd rather forget. That's fine. She doesn't even shoot any more because it reminds her of them. And she was a fine shot, as good as them. I don't go out there to remember. In fact, it's the opposite. It helps me not to remember. I've never remembered …'

His Adam's apple bobbed in his throat.

‘As I say, I can't remember. Not that night. It's a cliché, I know; my generation, we don't seek to deal with our problems. We just get on with life. Touching the memorial stone helps. I can live another day.' He smiled. ‘I've bought the plot next to the memorial, so one day I'll stop out there.'

He'd gone too far, Dryden could see that, as he watched him suddenly gulp.

‘Do you want me to write a story about them? Is there an anniversary, of the battle, of the day they died? Is that why you're here?'

‘No. I don't want a story about that.' He looked appalled that Dryden could be so stupid. ‘No. I came about the noise.'

He pressed a button on the machine. A noise played. A kind of whistling crackle. It brought an image to Dryden's mind of a beach, empty of people, but dotted with miniature toy windmills turning. ‘Kites,' said Donovan. ‘The farmers use 'em to keep birds off the fields when they've sowed seed. They're shaped like birds of prey and they keep the pigeons off. They're all round my place. There's a factory out on Euximoor Fen that makes the things, tests them as well. They'll fly twenty-four-seven now, cos they're so light. It's all high-tech.'

‘Where is this factory exactly?'

‘Coupla miles to the west. The old airfield at Barrowby. There's a line of industrial units and they've got one of those. But the kites are all over the place. They make that crackling noise a lot, the one you can hear, but that's OK, I can live with that. I'm not some nutter. It's the other noise. A kind of high-pitched call. I can't sleep through it; I can't think through it either. It's a torment.'

‘Tell me more about the noise. What kind of high-pitched call?'

‘Like the squeak from a rusty gate – but higher – and pulsing, at a set interval of two or three seconds.'

‘I can't hear it,' said Dryden.

Donovan turned off the machine. ‘I know, but I can. I complained to the council and they gave me this machine to monitor the noise but it doesn't show up. I think the frequency is too high. It picks up the crackling, but that's all. See?'

He gave Dryden a paper printout which had, presumably, rolled out of the machine. It was like the record of an earthquake produced by a seismograph. It showed a jittery line, but there were no real peaks.

‘Tractors, combines, all the heavy stuff, that's no bother to me. I live in the country; I don't expect silence, especially at harvest. But this, this is in
here
.' He poked a finger at his temple, and when he took his finger away the pressure left a mark.

‘Perhaps it's tinnitus?'

‘Doctor says my hearing's perfect. He thinks maybe I can hear higher frequencies than normal people. That I'm sensitive to the higher spectrum because of damage to my ears in the war. That's possible, isn't it?'

‘What about the kite company, did you try them?' countered Dryden.

‘Answerphone. I left a message, and they never got back. I thought you could help. I have to do something because it's very difficult to live with. In fact, it's not possible to live with it. It can't go on.'

There was a tremble in Donovan's neck which was making his skull shake very slightly.

Dryden thought that it took a lot for a man like Donovan to admit he couldn't live with something.

‘The military doctor back when I was demobbed said my startle reaction was bad, on account of the shells. I don't remember the shells. But they must have made a noise and they said at the time, in the field hospital, that I would be hyper-sensitive to noise for a while. Maybe six months. That was more than sixty years ago.'

He looked around the room, waiting for something to make a noise. Dryden thought about Brimstone House and its fourteen empty rooms. Shell shock, he thought. It was the summer of 2014 and he was sitting opposite a man with shell shock.

D
ryden's eyewitness account of finding the body of Sima Shuba was running on the Press Association wires by early evening; lifted word-for-word from the paper but credited in full to the
Ely Express
. Then the calls started: Fleet Street news desks checking if it was safe to lift the story. Dryden gave them carte blanche but asked, nicely, if they'd squeeze in a mention of the source. A few would, most wouldn't. Journalism was a tough trade, so the majority would lift the facts and run it straight. The ‘crucifixion' angle, plus the link into the Chinese gangs, was enough to guarantee the story what reporters liked to call ‘legs': it would run and run. The BBC rang from Cambridge and said they were on their way out to do a ‘day two' story from the scene. They too would lift Dryden's copy, but in the blur and buzz of TV he'd just become an eyewitness who found the body.

At five he shut up the office and headed for the mini-market. There was a bench outside where young mothers gathered with pushchairs to talk and smoke. Two of them were reading the first edition. Dryden bought a paper but then made himself pause on the way out and read the notices up in the window, the board advertising old beds for sale, lost cats, or offering babysitting services. His first paper, in Bedford, had once sent him to a one-horse town for a week to gather stories. The increasingly desperate efforts to find anything newsworthy had driven him to despair. A car had backfired on his last day and he'd seriously considered interviewing the driver. Then he'd stopped and read a postcard in a newsagent's window:

LOST: pet rattlesnake called Charlie. Venomous. If seen please ring 01235 778778. Do not pick it up.

It wasn't a Pulitzer prize-winning tale, but it was a story, and it had made a page lead in the paper and nearly £300 in lineage to the national tabloids. The hunt for Charlie had lasted ten days and by the climax, when Charlie was cornered in a local back-garden paddling pool, there were two TV crews there to capture the historic moment.

Dryden's eye flitted over the notices now but there was nothing new.

As he was about to leave he looked back at the counter. The woman who had sold him his paper was engaged in a text conversation and hadn't looked up when she took his money. Above her head a CCTV screen showed a picture of the shop's alcohol aisle. The coroner had said that the late Spider Russell had bought cans of beer from the shop, not over the counter, but out the back. He wondered how and where Spider and his mate Archie had got the moonshine to supplement the cans.

There was a spotless white-and-blue panda car at the kerb, the passenger door open. At the wheel was PC Stokely Powell, one arm swinging out the driver's window, the Rolex catching the light.

‘Your friend the cab driver's sitting outside The Brook with a pint,' said Powell. ‘Shall we join him?' The request was unhurried and friendly, although Dryden could see that he had a copy of the
Ely Express
folded into the glove compartment. One of Powell's eyes seemed to be permanently watery, and he brushed a tear away now, with the heel of his palm.

Dryden got in and let the law drive him the 200 yards to the pub. They passed Christ Church and saw a single squad car parked outside, police tape still looped over the gates. Dryden thought how quickly the excitement drains from the scene of a crime once the body has been removed.

Humph was sitting at a picnic table with a book open in front of him. The cabbie had taken to the I-SPY series with enthusiasm and had just bought himself the edition on British trees.

Powell went inside to get drinks. As the policeman opened the bar door Dryden heard the buzz of talk from within and guessed that the single topic of conversation would be the murder at Christ Church. Powell's entrance killed the noise level dead.

The pub was run by two Portuguese men, both ex-migrant pickers. They'd been seen holding hands during long country walks. The locals were willing to overlook this scandal as long as they kept the pub open.

Humph studied his book. ‘How's the runaway?' asked Dryden.

The cabbie shrugged. ‘She wants to stay with her grandma till Sunday. She's got what she wants. She won't say why she doesn't want to go home. Apparently she's happy here, although you could have fooled me.'

‘So you don't believe her?' he asked, sitting down.

‘Not really. I spoke to her mother. This barbie when she fell out with her stepfather and his boys was weeks ago. It's something else that's spooked her. Maybe she'll tell her mum, but she's taking her time.'

‘She might tell you,' offered Dryden. ‘If you asked nicely.'

Humph produced a small pair of field glasses and looked east. ‘She should go home to her little sister and her mum. That's where she belongs.'

‘You don't go home; why should she?' said Dryden. The cabbie had lived alone since his divorce, in a rented house, yet he slept most nights in the cab. It was one of the things he shared with Dryden: a fear of domesticity.

Humph scratched his Ipswich Town top. ‘I'm a grown-up. I'm allowed to do what I like.'

‘Where's Boudicca?'

‘I left her with Mum. Grace likes taking care of her. It's something to worry about that's not her, that's outside her.' He pointed across the fen at a distant lonely tree. ‘
Sorbus Aria
– The Whitebeam.'

Dryden followed his eyes. ‘Right. You can walk about and look for trees, you know. They don't run away if you get near. It's not a Big Game hunt.'

Humph had the glasses up to his eyes again, whistling.

Powell came back with a pint of orange squash for himself and a half of cider for Dryden. The Brook had access to a local apple press. The resulting liquid was milky and so dry it seemed to suck every particle of moisture from the body of the drinker. If Dryden held it to his ear he was just able to detect a slight effervescence. The brewers had no idea of its alcoholic strength but wrote six per cent on the label. Dryden judged they were out by a factor of at least two.

The three drank in companionable silence. The pub looked out on the open fen from a deck, which held a gas-fired barbecue machine. In the far distance they could see lorries on the high bank of the road to Wisbech. A train trundled over the level crossing carrying sand. Humph counted the forty-one trucks out loud, then lifted his legs out from under the picnic table. ‘Back to work.'

They watched him walk to the cab and lower himself into the front of the Capri, set the seat back, and close his eyes.

‘Life in the fast lane,' said Dryden.

Powell had brought his copy of the
Ely Express
with him. ‘Just an update,' he said, laying a palm across the paper. ‘There'll be some arrests tonight in King's Lynn. A bit of a sweep through the vice industry. CID's pretty certain this is gang warfare, probably one gang falling out with itself. At the moment that means it's strictly limited gang warfare, which is where everybody wants it to stop.'

‘What's at stake?' asked Dryden. ‘What were they fighting over? It's not a few hundred quids' worth of lead off the church roof, is it?'

Powell licked his upper lip. ‘No.' The policeman seemed to deliberately relax his muscles, sinking slightly, his shoulders dropping, and Dryden wondered if it was a tactic to dissipate stress: ‘But the scrap metal trade is big money. Our information, and this is off the record for now, is that one of the triad gangs in Lynn had this trade sewn up. We're talking about bulk sales of stolen metal. Iron, steel, aluminium, lead, zinc, copper. Ten years ago the legal copper price was a thousand dollars a tonne. Now you'd get eleven thousand a tonne, and more. The current thinking is that this triad gang sent a foot soldier up here to discourage some members of the gang branching out on their own.'

‘And the crew on the roof didn't take kindly to this discouragement?'

‘Right. They clearly felt that Brimstone Hill, the West Fens, was
their
patch and they had a right to defend it. They made their point, pretty graphically.' He drained his orange juice, pivoting his hand to tip the glass, his elbow anchored to the picnic table top.

‘One thing,' said Dryden. ‘I went to the coroner's court this morning. Second case up after our victim on the cross was the bodies they found in the culvert earlier this year.'

‘McLeish and Russell.'

‘Ryder says it's moonshine that was killing them and that the floodwater simply intervened. He said it's your job to find the illicit still that's producing the stuff. Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed to suggest you'd not been as interested as you should be in the case?'

‘Me?'

‘Well. The police.' Dryden spread his arms, indicating the deserted streets of downtown Brimstone Hill. ‘That looks like you for now.'

Powell laughed, and for the first time Dryden thought it wasn't a genuine response. There was something wary in the eyes, too, as if he'd really like to talk about something else.

‘It's a turf war,' said Powell. ‘Health and safety, trading standards, CID in Wisbech, us on the ground. Interpol. Everyone's just a little bit responsible. Which means nobody is. It's sorted now – we'll find the coroner his illicit still. We're close enough. It just needs a few pieces of the jigsaw to complete the picture.'

PC Stokely Powell had just told a lie, thought Dryden. He didn't know why, but he was pretty sure a copper of his calibre wouldn't let bureaucracy stand in the way of closing down a poisonous distillery on his own patch. There was a subtext to what he'd said, and Dryden had no idea what it might be.