The Funeral Owl (16 page)

Clearly, for Jock Donovan, not silent enough.

Dryden looked up. Above him, a hundred feet high, was a kite. Hawk-shaped, silent, almost stationary. One in the field to the north had several ‘tails', each one twisting, emitting a crackling like fire. That wasn't Donovan's problem: he could live with the tail fluttering, it was the high-pitched wailing call that was robbing him of sleep.

Whatever their sonic qualities, there was little doubt the kites worked. The field on the far side of the road was weedless, studded with lines of green shoots, salad crops just appearing. There wasn't a real bird in sight.

There was a landline number on the Silent Hawk website, plus a mobile number and an email address. Dryden ran into a message service on the landline, so he switched to the mobile. A man answered and Dryden said quickly he was press, and that he was following up a complaint of noise pollution. There was a pause, then: ‘I'm Doctor James Barnard. I'm in charge of research and development. The kites are silent, Mr Dryden. A few have the tails which crackle, but that's supposed to happen.'

‘I know. The man who's complaining is fine with the tails. As I said, it's a high-pitched note that's the problem. And I admit it is a note I can't hear. I'm about a couple of miles away from your unit on Barrowby Drove and there are lots of kites flying and they're silent. But Mr Donovan isn't making it up – at least I don't believe he is. I think he may be picking up a specific high-frequency noise from another source. But it is causing him a lot of distress. He's an old soldier, from the Korean War, and I said I'd help. It would give him some peace of mind to rule the kites out.'

Dr Barnard asked Dryden to write a letter or send an email. He added that the fluttering tail noise came from some experimental kites and would not be a long-term feature of Silent Hawk's test programme. Dryden got the impression Dr Barnard wasn't listening very carefully to what was being said.

‘The fluttering isn't the problem. This is a high-pitched, intermittent, but regular call.'

‘Well, that's not possible,' said Dr Barnard, which was an interesting response. Not
impossible.

‘He's highly sensitive to noise,' offered Dryden.

‘That's interesting.'

‘Why?'

‘We do have experimental kites aloft at the moment which emit a noise pitched well beyond the range of human hearing – hence our brand name, Silent Hawk. That's our USP: we scare birds with a silent noise. It's designed to mimic the call of several raptors. But as I say, it's not audible to humans.'

‘Mr Donovan's from Scotland, not Alpha Centauri. He can hear something, believe me.'

‘How far away from Barrowby Airfield does he live?'

‘Just under two miles, according to my OS map. But that's from the factory unit, and some of the kites are much nearer.'

Dryden could hear paperwork being shuffled. ‘We've had no complaints from anyone else in Brimstone Hill.'

Again, he'd moved on from the possible/impossible issue, without actually addressing it.

‘The kites are silent,' repeated Dr Barnard.

‘Mr Donovan lives in the large art deco house near Christ Church. Perhaps you know it?' That was a detail which would work in his favour, thought Dryden, because it implied Donovan had money, and influence, and couldn't just be dismissed. Most of all, it meant he could afford a lawyer. ‘I can't just ignore him,' said Dryden. ‘I'll probably do a story. I thought it was only fair to touch base.'

Dryden heard a slight inhalation. It was an effective tactic, telling people the story was inevitable, giving them the stark choice between being part of that story or being part of the follow-up.

‘Look,' said Dr Barnard. ‘I'm out at Barrowby now on a regular site visit. We could test fly a few of the kites and see if he can pick out the experimental ones, the ones emitting the ultrasound call. He won't, which will prove my point. But I'm willing to give him the chance.'

Dryden checked his watch: ‘OK. Well, I'm here, you're there. If he's about, then why not now?'

Dr Barnard said yes, but that he'd have to contact Silent Hawk's owners in Cambridge, although he was ninety-nine per cent certain they'd be relaxed about a test. It was an issue, it needed dealing with. They were either
Silent
Hawk or they weren't. If there were any problems he'd text Dryden, but otherwise he'd expect him at Barrowby Airfield within the hour.

Humph tapped on the windscreen and offered him another cup of the cabbage and kale soup. It was hot, tasted of iron, and made Dryden feel instantly nourished.

He rang Jock Donovan. According to one of Dryden's OS maps, there was a footpath to Barrowby Airfield from the back of Donovan's house. They could walk there together. Dryden didn't give him time to make any other arrangement, because he wanted to see where he lived. He said he'd be round in thirty minutes and cut the line.

Dryden scanned the horizon and watched the smoke rising from the gutted wind turbine, catching the wind. It made him think of a battlefield and of Donovan's traumatic time as a rifleman in Korea. He tapped ‘Battle of the Hook' into Google on the laptop.

What had Donovan called it: the Forgotten War? The casualty figures made Dryden's skin go cold even under the baking sky: 180,000 dead on the UN side, up to 750,000 Russians, Chinese and North Koreans, plus more than two million civilians. It occurred to Dryden just how bitter he'd be if he'd fought in such a war and come home to find that hardly anyone knew it had been waged. It seemed to be a war without a timeslot, buried somewhere in the pages of modern history. His disorientation only increased when he found a description of the battle on a military history site. It sounded like the First World War: trenches, artillery bombardments, hand-to-hand fighting. The ‘Dukes' had repelled a force five times superior in numbers during the battle. They were given the battle honour:
The Hook.
He thought of Jock Donovan's mundane description of what he could recall of the battle. The 5,000 shells that had rained down on his section of the front line. And the realization that came with the dawn:
I was the only one alive.

B
rimstone House was alabaster white, a curved wing with long Crittall windows, and a two-storey central entrance with tapering vertical lines which reminded Dryden of an Odeon cinema. The paintwork around windows and doors and along a balcony rail was a very light green. The garden, full of flowering bushes, stood in relief against the building itself. Over the door was the name of the house, stencilled in the concrete, with the date: 1931.

Donovan was at the door before Dryden got up the path. ‘Come through. Excuse, you know, the mess. I live alone.'

The hallway, wooden floored, ran straight ahead. The amount of light funnelling down and through the house was blinding. There was nothing on the white walls, nothing on the floors; no rugs, no carpets.

They passed two rooms off the hall. Both were almost entirely devoid of furniture, but both had obvious practical uses. One was a toilet, all steel and enamel, with a bidet. The second was an office: one desk, a wide-screen computer, a printer, and a clock which appeared to show the time in New York, London and Sydney. Dryden saw the word ORIENTO in blue letters on the face. And under that word in smaller letters: Established 1962.

The main room had a sofa, a flat-screen TV, and speakers. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out across the Fens.

‘I watch sport,' said Donovan, as if he needed to explain the presence of anything in the house that wasn't wall or floorboard. ‘I've got Sky One, Two, Three and Four. The disc is on the roof but you can't see it from the street. The council wouldn't let me put it up anywhere on the front because the house is listed. Grade two.'

‘It's quite something,' said Dryden. ‘I've never seen so much light indoors.'

‘I like space. I've lived a lot in Japan, Korea, with work. They do the light thing really well, but we're rubbish. Dark and dingy, that's our forte.'

The main wall held a single picture, a photograph of an eastern city full of pagodas and lakes, Buddhas and intricate willow-pattern bridges, all in a startling Technicolor photograph.

‘Kyongju,' said Donovan. The twisted syllables seemed to fall easily from his mouth. ‘They call it the museum without walls. South Korea's a great country. Great people.'

‘You visited the city in the war?'

‘There was a battle there, fighting on the outskirts. We were held in reserve miles back, so we didn't see any action. I've been back many times, always for work. It's an incredible city. You been?' Donovan didn't wait for an answer to his question. There was a boot room at the back of the house and he led the way in.

‘You didn't say what kind of work you did,' said Dryden, as Donovan selected a pair of heavy shoes, then a hat.

‘Just business,' he said. ‘You do what you know. I picked up some Korean in the war, so I built on that. I can speak the language pretty well now. So: I was in trade, import export. Boring, really. Too boring to talk about.'

The boot room was ultra-modern, more in keeping with the Chelsea-on-Sea set of the north Norfolk coast than the Fens. Wooden benches, a shower-room, lots of expensive outdoor wear, a rack of binoculars. This room, of all those he'd seen, felt lived-in.

The house itself wasn't a surprise to Dryden; it was the fact that it was the house of a man who must be nearly eighty years of age. Because what was missing was the past – his past, any hint that he'd accrued objects, or mementoes, or tokens; anything that might spark a memory.

‘I spend most of my time out. Walking. Watching. The skies are good,' said Donovan, standing, a hand to the small of his back.

The garden was all grass and mowed in those neat alternate strips which drove Dryden to despair, as if someone had some demented scheme to tame nature. He wondered if that was why Donovan liked the Fens, because it was man-made, and appeared to be a mathematical landscape.

They set off along a well-worn path. It was two miles to the old airfield and the industrial units at Barrowby Airfield where Silent Hawk had its factory. It took them forty minutes, zigzagging over the fields, quickly finding themselves under some of the flying kites.

They reached a rare fen stile where the old man stopped. He took the step up and listened. ‘I can hear it, the noise. Actually, it's not bad here. Less piercing than usual. But it's there. Can you hear it?'

Dryden shook his head.

‘I remembered something, too – that I'd heard something like it before. When I was a kid in Glasgow we had a doctor come to the school. Like the nurse that looked for nits, but more scary. They had a machine for testing hearing. They played these notes into your ear and you had to say what you could hear. He'd start low, then gradually rise. In the end there'd be just these tiny, high-pitched, fleeting notes. It's just like one of those notes. One of the top ones, almost beyond range.'

Donovan strode ahead until they got close to the old airfield. The water tower was still standing, and the ruin of the control tower. Access to the site was by an old road which ran off the airfield, crossing the Twenty
-
Foot Drain by a low humped bridge. At the junction with the road there was a set of automated barriers.

The old runway was just close-cropped grass until you got to the concrete apron where they'd built the industrial units, six of them, each with a roll-up door, single storey, with a long aluminium roof which radiated heat, so that the air above buckled as if gently simmering.

The kite maker's was the first unit, marked by an outline of a hawk on the roll-up door. Outside the next were parked four old grey Rovers, one of them up on blocks. At the far end from Silent Hawk there was a unit with a butter-yellow painted door and a large white van parked alongside. The noise of machinery running came from inside, and a complex sound of glass tinkling, like a milk float.

The roll-up door of Silent Hawk rose to the sound of an electric motor. Inside they could see steel racking, kits packed into shelves, spools of guideline on the wall.

A man Dryden presumed to be Dr James Barnard came out to meet them. He didn't look like a scientist, or more accurately, he didn't look like the scientist who'd spoken to Dryden on the phone. He was in his twenties, wearing designer shorts and a T-shirt which said ‘CAPTURE THE WIND' and featured a picture of a kite which looked like a cross between a zeppelin and a giant jet engine.

Barnard did the small talk well, thanking Donovan for his time, Dryden for making contact. ‘A lot of journalists wouldn't have bothered. I appreciate it.'

Which was bullshit, thought Dryden, because he'd never met a journalist who wouldn't have rung the company to get their side of the story. They might not have printed their side of the story, but they'd have rung.

‘OK. A quick test, Mr Donovan,' said Barnard. ‘If you're ready.'

Donovan hadn't said a word but he gave Barnard his Scottish eyebrow. ‘They make a noise, your kites. Like a squeaky trolley wheel. I can hear it now.'

Barnard held up both hands as if for silence. ‘I'm not saying you don't hear
something
. But we need to do the science. So I've set up an experiment. There are eight kites flying in the far field, do you see? The field by the road.' He turned on his heel and pointed along the access road, over the bridge, towards the B-road which ran between Brimstone Hill and Wisbech. ‘I've lowered all the rest we're testing today. One of these eight kites emits an intermittent high-pitched ultrasound note inaudible to humans.' He smiled at Donovan. ‘The field is dry and there's no crop on it at the moment, so it's OK to wander around. If you can hear this noise, try and identify which kite is responsible, and count the interval between the pulses of sound. None of them have crackling tails – so there should be no confusion.' He smiled again, even more broadly this time.