The Funeral Owl (33 page)

Dryden had never liked it; there was something mechanical – steely – about its clockwork power. The old wooden sluices had long been replaced by two industrial steel sets of gates. Perhaps, secretly, it wasn't the aesthetics of the gates which unsettled him, more that he yearned for the water to come back and flood the land, to turn the landscape back into a waterscape.

There was a pub by the sluice and the car park was emptying. Lights played on a lawn which ran down to the towpath. A tinny loudspeaker played a Bee Gees track. They left the Capri on the verge and ran along the lane which climbed, then turned, crossing the sluice itself high above the water. Floodlights lit the whole structure, but the water below was in shadows, although the churning of white foam showed where the gates stood open a few inches, letting the water out to sea.

‘Gracey.' He heard Humph shout the word but when he turned he found the roadway behind him deserted. It hadn't been a pleading call, but one of soft recognition. But where had Humph gone?

Black tarmac, a white line, nothing else. Everything was wet because the churning water had created a mist. A miniature rain forest micro-climate. It was a surreal scene in that tinder-dry summer, and it was heightened by a sudden movement: a bright green frog on the road, jumping once, then freezing.

The thunderous vibration of the water below came up though Dryden's legs.

He ran to the parapet and looked down on to the top of one of the three sluice gates in the set. Grace's head was there, no body visible, except her legs and feet, hanging down. Looking along the narrow steel edge of the gate he saw Humph, moving out from a metal stairwell at the side, small, nimble feet shuffling sideways.

Humph stopped, held up the brown envelope, and said, ‘Grace. You have to read this, OK? Do this for me, sweetheart. Read it.'

But the raising of one arm unbalanced the cabbie, and one of his feet slipped away from the steel edge. Dryden saw him begin to fall, so he turned away from the sight and ran, along the road, to the far end of the parapet to see if he could get down to the water.

He found the handrail of the steel staircase, and dropped down three corkscrew turns, to a small maintenance platform beside the sluice. Looking down he could see nothing of Humph. Then he looked back at the ledge and realized the cabbie was still there; somehow he'd avoided a fall, and sat down instead, winded. Grace had backed off, into the shadows at the edge of the gate, where the metal cogs dovetailed with iron runners, smeared with glinting grease. It was as if she was sinking back into the machine itself, a human cog.

Dryden stepped out on to the ledge and reached his friend in three sideways strides.

‘Sit tight,' he said, and took the envelope, stuffing it inside his shirt.

‘I'll get help,' said Humph, and looked back at the bank, but didn't move.

Dryden looked down. The magnetic pull of the wavelike, boiling pool below was as real as if he'd felt the tug of ropes. But the paralysing fear he usually felt was absent. He felt afraid, but in a way which seemed proportional to the real world. He was – after all – on a narrow sluice gate above several thousand tonnes of churning water. He might fall. He might drown. What he had to do was reach Grace.

Breaking eye contact with the water, he looked at Grace's face, just visible in the shadows, and edged towards her.

The oily dark corner in which she hid was dry. Once out of the floodlights' glare, Dryden had to stand still, letting his eyes switch to night-time vision. Grace was crying, her knees drawn up to her chin. ‘Your dad's upset,' he said. She couldn't have heard him because she didn't react, so he shouted it out.

He didn't think she'd jump but when he took an extra step she tried to stand, her legs scrabbling on the oily ledge.

He knelt quickly. ‘It's OK. I just wanted you to have this.'

He gave her the envelope. The floodlight above cast a single rectangle of bright light into the dark corner. She held the A4 sheet within it, very close to her face, scanning the words.

She read it twice, then folded it all up without putting it back in the envelope and gave it back. In taking it, Dryden edged closer.

‘I'm glad he wrote that,' she said. ‘He asked me out. I said no – he was a nerd really. So I don't know why I said no because I'm not a stranger to being a nerd, am I? He liked draughts, just like Dad. He said the strategy involved was much more complex than chess. That's what Dad says too. So we could have played draughts. But he wanted to go to the cinema so I thought I'd just say no. Not interested. It
was
a bit cruel.

‘When I heard he'd gone missing, that he'd tried to kill himself, I did feel guilty. A bit. But like, I didn't know him. I think, like, he was one of those people who think that a relationship can
be
just by thinking it is. Like it's not about two people. That it can exist in just one head. It can't.'

She looked at her father, who had now reached the end of the floodgate and was winching himself over an iron railing on to the spiral stairs.

Dryden was breathing in ozone, and negative ions, from the water below, and it was making him light-headed, and almost euphoric. ‘This isn't about the boy, is it?' he said. ‘But the letter helps?'

‘Yes. Thanks.' She looked down at the water.

‘It's about you,' said Dryden.

‘It's about Dad. And Mum. And now I'm fifteen it's going to be about me because I can't choose between them, and they want me to.' Grace laughed, which undid whatever emotional locks she'd put in place, so that she started to cry again, pushing her face into her knees.

‘You live with your mum, that's OK. He understands,' said Dryden.

‘I live with Mum because I have to. Because the court said I had to. That's why he's OK with it. But when I'm sixteen I get to choose, and he won't understand it if I stay. And Mum wouldn't understand if I went. And I don't want to live in the back of a smelly cab with a dog. And I don't want to live with Barrie and his stepsons with their webbed feet. And I'm only fifteen, and I want to go to sixth form college, not get a job, so I can't live on my own. So there's no way out.'

The water thundered.

‘And they won't say what
they
want. If I told them it was up to them they'd think I didn't care, about either of them.'

Dryden thought the more she talked the better she'd be so he didn't answer.

‘I do care. I wouldn't have jumped because I know they'd never get over that. Dad's never got over the divorce. I thought he was going in just then …' She tried a smile. ‘Big splash.'

Dryden leaned over and took her hand.

‘I thought it would take him longer to find me anyway, that nobody would see me till it was light. I don't know why I did it. I thought I could tell Grandma, but I couldn't. It's cold, isn't it?'

They both stood, on the edge, and Dryden gave her a kind of stiff hug. ‘I'll sort it out,' he said.

T
hunder rolled round Euximoor Fen like a bowling ball. Dryden had slept on the sofa at Meg Humphries' bungalow and the sound of a storm brewing only added to his sense of disorientation. The day threatened rain at last. The thunder ushered in lightning which crackled in the air. Dryden saw a single forked bolt through his closed eyes. He had the window open and the wind was steady and warm; a fenland sirocco. It blew under the door of the house and hit a note: woodwind section, a bassoon maybe, unwavering. Dryden tuned the radio on the mantelpiece to KLFM at Lynn and picked up the forecast for the day: soil and dust storms across the region, with the NFU warning farmers to pin down plastic fleece where they had it on the fields, and to postpone harvesting. Finally, by nightfall, rain. Real rain, a harbinger of autumn.

Dryden found Meg in the kitchen, and took Humph a cup of tea in the Capri. The cabbie was asleep, despite the thunder, wrapped in a full-length Ipswich Town picnic blanket. He got out of the cab to take his mug of tea. They'd talked the night before until nearly dawn about Grace, so the subject was exhausted. Neither of them had the energy to rerun the arguments in the light of day.

‘Radio says there's a press conference on PC Powell's death at Wisbech mid-morning,' said Dryden. ‘It'll be on the gang wars. That's Friday's big idea. Big city crime hits the Fens. And they'll have the forensics.'

‘No problem,' said Humph, nodding. He patted the roof of the Capri as if the cab was a dog. The real dog was in the house on Grace's bed. The cabbie sipped his tea. He missed Boudicca, but he wasn't going to say so.

Dryden's mobile rang. ‘Talk of the devil,' he said, as the phone displayed the caller's name.

It was DI Friday. Outdoors, because Dryden could hear traffic.

‘Just so you know,' said Friday, ‘we found your sodding gun. At Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, due to be melted down next week in the incinerator. It's engraved with the name of the kid who won it, so that helped. Hasn't been fired for twenty years, probably longer. So that's Muriel Calder out of the frame. Not that she was ever really in it, in my book. According to the paperwork, the gun was handed in at Brimstone Hill on the date she specified. So Powell played it by the book too, took it to Wisbech that night.'

‘So who killed Powell?' asked Dryden.

‘Presser later,' said Friday and rang off.

Dryden walked away from the cab and Humph followed. They could see Christ Church in the far distance.

‘It's always felt as if the roots of this were here, in the soil, even,' said Dryden. ‘Right here. I don't trust the police when they're involved with these gangs. They spend months, years, not being able to lay a hand on them, but knowing they're responsible for a lot of crime. Then they get their chance and they jump in feet first. Nothing is going to stop DI Friday charging some of the gang members – one of the soldiers – with murder, or murders. But has he got the evidence? He's not telling me if he has.'

There was a double thunderclap and sheet lightning overhead and the wind, for the first time, gusted, rocking the car on its springs. On the bare field a miniature tornado sprang into life and whirled for a few seconds before blowing itself out.

Dryden felt tired, dried out. He searched for the right word: desiccated. ‘Maybe Friday's right – maybe it is a gang killing,' he said. ‘But there're so many loose ends. I'm still not convinced about Powell. He's got an ex-wife and two kids to keep, plus a fast car. Whatever Friday says, he could have been playing the easiest game of all. He was an expert in river crime. Why did he fail to track the barges full of stolen metal back to the source – along the Twenty Foot Drain to Barrowby Airfield? Was he really a gamekeeper, not a poacher?'

Dryden collected Humph's empty mug. ‘And where did Vincent Haig get his £125,000 to buy Sexton Cottage? How many pictures have you got to frame to notch that up?' As he walked back to the bungalow, Dryden recalled the handprint he'd seen on the apse door at Christ Church. A multi-coloured hand, with a fingertip missing.

The presser in Wisbech was at noon. He had an hour to kill.

After breakfast they left Grace with Boudicca and drove down to the Old Forge. As they parked Humph had one hand on the fluffy steering wheel cover, the other back between the seats, searching for the dog that wasn't there. He'd been planning his early morning exercise: three times round the cab with the dog, then a short stint with the green ball and the plastic thrower.

They sat in silence. The thunder was fading away. There was no helicopter now over Brimstone Hill, no roadblocks on the road in from Ely. In fact during the ten-minute drive they hadn't seen a single policeman. Dryden thought he could smell rain in the air.

Humph settled into his seat. ‘I'll wait here then.'

‘Why don't you spend some time with Grace, like you said you would? I'll call when I need you.'

‘She'll be all right now …

‘No she bloody won't,' said Dryden, enjoying a rare flash of temper. He was out of the cab so he squatted down to look his friend in the eyes, trying to keep the loss of control alive – the freedom of it. ‘You can't live in this little bubble world, Humph.' He put a hand on the cab's frame. ‘She's fifteen, she'll be sixteen soon. Talk to her. About what you want, about what she wants.'

Humph started to whistle tunelessly, so Dryden walked away, up the track. On the field by the road another miniature red twister was dancing like a living scarecrow. When he got to the gate he looked back and saw the Capri trundling away.

The sliding wooden doors of the Old Forge stood open. Haig was inside, holding a painting up with arms wide, clasped on the frame. It was a picture of a group of shepherds walking through a ford, shades of Constable in the grey water ripples catching the light, and Turner in an evening sky full of light and clouds.

For a second Dryden saw his face, for once, not composed for effect. There was a genuine critical interest there, a kind of desperate focus, as if the picture was more important than the reality around him – the workshop, with its tool bench, the wall of gilt frames, his own work opposite, dominated by the landscapes with their blocked colour and mathematical edge, and his leitmotif
–
the little three-dimensional replica of Christ Church.

Haig heard Dryden's footstep and turned, his eyes narrowing.

‘Sorry, you're busy,' said Dryden.

Haig put the picture down and his hands to his hips as if to make a judgement on the work. ‘It's easy to despise the unoriginal,' he said.

There was a mug of tea on the bench; Dryden could see the deep-brown builders' colour of the liquid within.

‘Too early for the Zabrowka? Or has the supply run dry? If you know anything about the operation out there, on the airfield, you should tell the police.'