The Funeral Owl (15 page)

‘Can you film it?' he asked Laura. ‘I can try with the mobile but the quality's poor.'

The turbine gondola was ablaze now, like a struck match. One of the turbine blades sheared at the base within a minute, falling, a dead weight, less than fifty yards from the turbine shaft. The fire above spurted, like a faulty firework, pieces of machinery flying out, but landing well short of the crowd.

It struck Dryden then that the thieves had made an error of judgement in targeting the wind farm. Their other sources of precious and semi-precious metal were low profile: water pipes, manhole covers, church roofs. This was high impact, visible, and would make the local, if not the national news. The police would respond by rapidly switching resources into hunting them down. Coupled with the murder at Christ Church, it had turned a series of petty thefts into a major news story.

Then a windscreen broke on one of the parked cars beyond the unit. Dryden imagined a nut or bolt, a screw, thrown clear of the revolving hub of the turbine. He grabbed Laura and they ran with the rest of the crew to the perimeter of the farm, two hundred yards upwind of the turbine.

A crewman had brought his gear with him, a hand-held equipoise camera, plus telephoto lens. He set up a tripod and continued filming. One of the two remaining blades sheared and flew downwind, striking the blades of the next turbine and wrapping around it, like a sweet wrapper in the wind.

Laura was watching, fascinated, but smiling. ‘I can write this in. It's great stuff.'

‘It's an ill-wind …' said Dryden.

Laura shook her head. ‘The cynical press.'

The police arrived in the form of PC Powell's blue panda. Dryden borrowed binoculars off one of the crew and focused on the base of the burning turbine. A set of steps led up to a circular gallery, and a single door. Rather than a conventional lock, it had an electronic keypad. So not keys at all but coded numerical passwords, presumably unique to each turbine.

As he tried to focus on the security pad, the door itself blew open, blasted out by the pressure within, and a gout of flame licked out like a dragon's tongue.

D
ryden left the front door of the office open and took the stairs in sets of two, leaving the inner door ajar. A breeze blew through the window, once he had it propped open, but the heat was still unbearable. He thought he could hear tar bubbling on the flat roof above his head. A thermometer he'd put up on the wall in the heatwave of early summer now read eight-five degrees Fahrenheit, which just made him feel hotter. He stood on a chair so he could catch the breeze in his face. In the distance he could see the stricken wind turbine, smoke trailing away to the south. Its damaged neighbour was motionless, one blade broken.

The landline was ringing but he ignored it.

Switching on the laptop, he found BBC News 24. And there it was: Turbine 13, Coldham's Farm, burning like a giant sparkler. The TV crew had got the footage straight to the newsroom in Norwich via Wi-Fi, and from there it had gone national in minutes. Which was why his landline was ringing.

The BBC would sell on the footage. The media world was dominated by an insatiable demand for moving pictures. He imagined people watching it in some deadbeat Midwest town, or a South African township, or a petrol station in the outback. The BBC would sell words, too, a ‘fat caption' as it was called in the trade. But Dryden could provide more: he'd collected quotes out at the site. And he could write in a reference to the metal thieves and the murder hunt, all of which added to the picture's media shelf-life. He needed to bash it all out and get it to the Press Association, the main UK-based wire service, making sure they credited
The Crow.
Brimstone Hill was always going to be world famous for a day. This was that day.

He cut the ringing phone and rang out, clipping on headphones so he could lean back in his chair.

Vee Hilgay picked up on the first ring in
The Crow
's main office in Ely. ‘Hi,' she said. ‘Philip. You're famous. Well – Brimstone Hill is. I didn't call because I knew you'd be out there.' She was the only person left in the world who called him Philip, other than Laura.

They talked through the newslist for the Friday edition. By the end of the week there was every chance there would be charges in the Christ Church murder case, so that would give them a lead story, even if it was dry as dust due to legal restrictions on what they could print.

‘Let's build up the whole metal theft story, the wider picture,' said Dryden. ‘Anything you've got, let me have. If a nut and bolt goes missing, chuck it in. We need to throw the story forward. Check out other wind farms in the area. There's that huge one out towards Chatteris – ring them. Then there's the pylons. Do they ever get targeted? Ring the power companies for me, will you – increased security around pylons, et cetera, risk of death. You know the score.

‘There's one thing on this story we might have over the competition,' he went on. ‘The thieves got the doors open on the turbines without forcing them. They're controlled by security touchpads, a numerical square, ten numbers, two symbols, I think. So that suggests this might be an inside job, or at the very least it suggests they had someone on the inside. Let's keep that to ourselves. The police might withhold that, too, while they check the staff, suppliers, security guards. Let's keep our fingers crossed.'

He heard Vee scratching out a note and reminded himself she'd only been a journalist for just over eight months. He should slow down, give her time, let her learn.

He took a deep breath and tried to release the stress in his neck. ‘This time next week we'll be desperate for stuff, so anything that can keep – keep.'

But there were some stories that had to run. The coroner's warning on the illicit moonshine being top of the list. All the competition would run with it, and it was right on their doorstep:
hell
, it
was
their doorstep.

‘One other thing,' said Vee. ‘A child's gone missing from the Cromwell.'

The Cromwell was one of Ely's two comprehensives: a big, brutal, concrete campus on the far side of the ring road. Dryden had done a story there only a week earlier on a sixth former winning a national maths competition – a story he'd got off Humph, who'd heard it from Grace, who was in the same school.

‘All a bit weird,' said Vee. ‘And sad. I don't know if you'll want this in the paper.'

Dryden's spirits flagged. While Vee had taken to the trade of journalism with alacrity, she was never going to develop the necessary mindset that went with it – not cynicism exactly, but a kind of brutal scepticism. If she felt it was worth telling Dryden the story, it was worth putting in the paper.

‘He got into one of the chemistry labs,' continued Vee. ‘I rang the head and it seems the boy was a scholar. Head was willing to talk, but off the record. He was studying chemistry, maths and double maths. Apparently he just wrote in chemical symbols all day. Brilliant with it, predicted A-star grades across the board. Reading between the lines, he had personality issues. Anyway, he applied for Cambridge and they turned him down after interview. Head says
he
wasn't surprised. On the other hand the boy was devastated.'

‘What did he do?'

‘Made himself a cocktail. Barium and tonic. Mixed it up himself after stealing the key to the fume cupboard. Then he sat down and wrote emails to his parents, friends, a girl. Left them on his laptop screen filed under LAST MESSAGES. Then he drank the barium. The cleaning woman found him, unconscious, and when she sat him up he vomited the poison. He was carried off to the sick bay while they got a doctor in. When they got back he was gone.'

‘Shit. Name?'

‘Julian Amhurst. But everyone called him Stinks, because of the chemistry. Children, they don't really have that much imagination, do they? Everyone's really worried he'll try again. The head told the school assembly that they were looking for him and everyone was worried. So they're all looking. Parents have split up, by the way – the boy lives with the mother in Ely and the father's out your way. Welney Reach.'

Dryden had done a Golden Wedding there, a hamlet of half-a-dozen interwar houses, with bank-top views of Ely.

There was something in Vee's tone of voice which suggested Julian's plight had affected her personally. ‘Are you OK with this, Vee? I can write it.'

‘No, no. Sorry, I knew the family years ago. Julian's dad was in the Labour Party. He used to bring him to meetings and he'd play on the floor while we talked nonsense about trade union rights. I suspect the interest in politics was a cover for a lack of interest in being at home with Julian's mum. The child was just obsessed with whatever he had: Meccano, Lego. I suppose that's the root of numbers – shapes. A nice, predictable, safe world to escape to.'

‘Is there a picture?' asked Dryden.

‘From the school magazine, in a white coat. He's smiling, of course – why is that? The tragic ones are always smiling.'

‘OK. Here's what we do, Vee. Boil it down to one par, no more, but put it on the front with the picture. Don't mention the suicide attempt, just plain missing teenager, parents worried, et cetera. Get Josie to blow up the face so we can see him.'

Dryden thought of what the kid must have been through to drink barium, to actually feel the poison flowing down his throat. The sun shone in through the window of his office, and a brimstone fluttered into the room. Somehow it gave Dryden hope. He thought of young Julian out on the fen, perhaps, battling with demons. The wandering scholar.

He had an idea. ‘And add this, Vee –
The Crow
will pay one hundred pounds to any reader assisting police to find Julian Amhurst. Cash.'

Sometimes, he thought, it was fun being editor.

H
umph parked the Capri on the verge 100 yards beyond the school. The cabbie had a packed lunch which he picked up every day from the Brimstone Café: full English breakfast bap, a pork pie, an avocado pear, and a packet of cheese and onion crisps with a pickled egg in it – a fen delicacy. Lunchtime for Humph was three o'clock, allowing time for two (occasionally three) breakfasts in the run-up to the midday meal. He had a thermos which the café staff filled for him with the soup of the day. Today it was cabbage and kale, so he'd given it to Dryden. Eating inside the cab, Humph left only the passenger-side window open, as the wind was still blowing a hot gale.

The cabbie had parked facing directly west so that they had a clear view of the seventeen turbines of Coldham's Farm, now effectively reduced to fifteen. A thin wisp of smoke still rose from the stump of the burnt-out turbine. Humph had expressed the hope, having missed the blaze, that it might spread to the others. But they were all now stationary, locked still, blades feathered to offer no resistance to the wind. So the cabbie put a draughts board on the passenger seat and set out the counters, remembering precisely the latest position in the game he was playing with Grace. A game he was losing.

Dryden sat on the hood of the cab, partly blocking Humph's view. He swigged from a bottle of water. The laptop on his knees was set at an angle so that he could see the screen. He'd managed to do a quick bit of research on agricultural kites, the object of Jock Donovan's noise complaint. He'd promised himself he'd make that call to the kite factory at Barrowby Drove. It wasn't the biggest story on his list but it was only Wednesday. He had time, especially for an old soldier.

And there was something about the story, or rather Jock Donovan, which intrigued him. He'd once written a piece for the daily paper in York about noise pollution which had helped get him the job on
The News
,
on Fleet Street. The paper had printed a stream of complaints from residents in a certain area of the city known as Huntington Road about a mysterious night-time noise which became known as the ‘Huntington Hum'. The usual suspects had all been set aside: power lines, local businesses, aircraft. Then they'd got the Department for the Environment in to do a study. Dryden had been given a sneak preview of the final report, which concluded that the problem wasn't a noise at all, but the
lack
of noise.

York was just too quiet. No motorways, no twenty-four-hour factories, no all-night clubs or bars, no high-rise buildings brimming with heating systems, no multi-storey car parks, no subways, no all-night transport. After midnight it was pretty much devoid of noise. So there was no background sound at all, no so-called ‘white noise', to drown out deep-rooted vibrations that in most towns and cities nobody ever heard: water mains, power lines, the river flowing, a single HGV on a distant road.

The real fascination for Dryden had been the psychological factors identified in the report. The authors had reviewed the science on human hearing. Once the brain found a noise, it could lock on to it like a self-tuning radio, then amplify it, so that the victim's mind became a giant receiver, a dish taking incoming signals. A large minority of those suffering from tinnitus, for example, were simply amplifying their own body noises: blood flowing, the heart beating. It terrified Dryden, the discovery that you could bring that nightmare upon yourself. So much for the sound of silence.

He had sympathy for Jock Donovan whichever way the story played out: either he was being tormented by a real noise, or his brain was searching out some tiny, insignificant sound and then relaying it back to his over-sensitive brain. Or, perhaps the worst outcome of all – he had tinnitus. Which meant he had a noise in his head which would torment him forever.

Agricultural kites were, according to his twenty minutes of online research, big business. Fact: a kite in the shape of a hawk keeps pigeons and other birds off the fields. The government estimate for bird damage to UK crops was £450m a year. Several high-tech companies were trying to develop kites that would stay up in very low wind speeds. Mostly kites were silent, but those with ‘tails' did flutter. The biggest operator was Helikites, specializing in kites built round small helium balloons. The company on Barrowby Airfield was a newcomer, a Cambridge Silicon Fen spin-off called Silent Hawk.