The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  Vee ran through everything she had on her diary for the Ely Express. Then they went through what they thought they’d have for The Crow later in the week, earmarking the planning decision on a new southern bypass as the paper’s potential lead story. The Ely edition could take a picture of the dust storm on its front page too, while the new West Fen edition could lead with the story and picture. Events might upset their news decisions – it was still a long time until the final deadline – but it was always good to have a plan.

  Dryden was gratified that his hunch that Vee would make an excellent reporter had been vindicated. She was curious, organized and bloody-minded. He’d leave her to work up the by-pass story. He cut the line and walked back towards the Capri.

  Humph was propped up against the side of the cab, finishing a call on his mobile. When he stood the suspension gave out a twang.

  Back in the bungalow, Grace was swaddled in a huge duvet, still lying on the sofa. Her grandmother was reading snippets out loud from last week’s paper. The girl’s eyes looked heavy and she was still bloodless, with skin the colour of lard.

  Humph waved the mobile at his daughter. ‘Mum’s on her way. She says you can stay here if you want, maybe till Sunday. So that’s a week off school. Then it’s back home. It’s the best I could do. She wants to know why you left home. Just so you know. So even if you won’t tell me or Gran I’d recommend you tell her.’

  Humph sat down and the kitchen chair he’d chosen disappeared entirely from sight.

  ‘She said there’d been a fight, with Barrie’s boys?’ he asked.

  Barrie was her stepfather. He had two teenage sons who lived at home.

  ‘They went in my room,’ said Grace. ‘They didn’t ask. He said I should forget it.’

  ‘Barrie?’

  ‘Yeah. Him.’ She almost spat it out but Dryden felt she had faked the disgust in her voice, that she was play-acting, falling back on a cliché to portray her relationship with her stepfather.

  She shivered and her grandmother tucked in the duvet under her feet. ‘I bet she didn’t tell you what happened, did she?’ said Grace. ‘Not all of it.’

  Dryden noticed that she had a lazy left eye, which seemed to follow the right after a one-second delay.

  ‘We had a barbie – we’re always having barbies. There isn’t even a real fire – it’s gas. So this woman turns up by car, because that’s the only way you can turn up at our house, and Barrie says – like out loud – that he’d lived with her after he left his first wife. This is out at Isleham. Wherever that is …’

  Places like Isleham were mythical to Grace. Deep-Fen. Places where inbreeding led to webbed feet and IQs so low as to excite academic interest.

  ‘“My common-law wife”, that’s actually what he called her, like he was proud of it, and it hurt Mum. I could see that because she started laughing about it. And then this woman starts telling him how the kids are. His kids. Other kids. Kids he had with this woman. And they were coming too. Mum said later that she knew they were invited, but I don’t believe her.

  ‘And then they were there too, in a souped-up Vauxhall. A car again – it’s like car city out at our house. And the boy’s just like Barrie, only I don’t think he’s so cruel. And the girl didn’t want to be there so she just sat on the step with a bottle of lager. She smoked too, one after the other, like Barrie.

  ‘So suddenly we’re a fen joke. There’s me, there’s Barrie’s two boys, there’s an extra boy and an extra girl who came with the common-law wife. Everyone’s related to everyone else but it takes you twenty minutes to work out how.’

  Humph laughed and then realized it wasn’t supposed to be funny.

  ‘The party was Saturday night, right? Monday I’m walking home from the college with Jilly.’

  She looked at Dryden: ‘She’s my friend, right? She lives in the village. And she says she heard this joke in the canteen. How do teenagers in Witchford say hello when they meet each other in the street?’ She left it a beat before providing her own answer: ‘Give me six.’ She held up her own hand to explain the joke. ‘So I laughed, and then I thought, that’s me now. I’m a living fen joke. So like, why’s that funny? I hate them.’

  There was no doubt in Dryden’s mind that Grace was telling the truth. But was it the whole truth? In an odd way it was what Humph and Meg wanted to hear, because it reflected badly on her stepfather and his family, not her father and his family. And if it wasn’t the whole truth, then what was she hiding?

  THREE

  Christ Church, Brimstone Hill, was late Victorian, with a brick nave and no transepts, but a fine curved apse, and a single splinter spire in lead on the roofline, the pinnacle that Dryden had seen disappear in the advancing front of the fen dust storm. The building had a pleasing, smooth line, like a boat: another ship-like silhouette on the flat seas of the Fens, a tug perhaps, steaming towards the Ship-of-the-Fens itself: Ely Cathedral, which lay on the far horizon on clear days. There was a patch of missing lead on the roof over the apse, revealing wooden rafters. A pigeon clattered out of a gap as Dryden walked up the gravel path.

  Christ Church was the heart of Brimstone Hill. But what was Brimstone Hill? Bigger than a village, smaller than a town, more like a Midwest township, with its buildings scattered along three unwinding roads which met at the church. The Victorians had founded these strange fen communities, draining the land, bringing machines on to the fields. Such places never seemed to have enough buildings to justify their streets, which occasionally just opened out, the gaps revealing a distant horizon. What was left was the bones of a town, but most of the flesh was missing.

  The rectory was almost as imposing as the church, a rambling villa set back beyond the graveyard, now privately owned and screened from the road by a line of spruce. The rest of Brimstone Hill had most of the services expected of a town, but none of them was quite in the right place. The eye of the storm had missed it but the air was murky with dust, cutting visibility to a few hundred yards. Dryden could still see the village pub, The Brook, just off the junction, hidden behind a line of poplars. There was a mini-market corner shop along the March Road, but nothing actually on the corner where the roads all met. There was a memorial hall which everyone had forgotten, on a back street running out to the fen, and the stub of an original windmill behind a row of labourers’ cottages. A row of shops stood down by the level crossing: a pet parlour, a video shop, a carpet shop which was never open, and a ladies’ hairdressers called Curl Up And Dye. The social hub was a set of benches under a cypress tree by a bus stop, which was next to the automatic rail crossing. The train line was mostly freight, and services intermittent. Just beyond the crossing was the Brimstone Hill Café, its inappropriate neon sign flashing at all hours. Half a mile out of town was a wind turbine farm: seventeen gently turning windmills in antiseptic white.

  Dryden loved the place, especially the church, which seemed to hold the far-flung elements of the town together like a magnet. Most of all he loved the name: Brimstone Hill, with its hint of sulphur. He’d found the story behind that name online, buried in one of the local history sites. One day back in the fourteenth century, the vicar of Upwell, ten miles away, had found the Devil in his church and chased him out, over the fields. When they got to this spot – a slight rise in the silt fens and marshes – the Devil gave up and fled, disappearing in a puff of his own smoke. So the vicar put up a cross to mark the victory of good over evil. And that was where the church was, and that was why they’d called it Brimstone Hill. The entrance to hell was here, the Devil’s secret door to the underworld.

  But there was another story. As he walked through the graveyard, Dryden spotted a single butterfly with sulphur-yellow wings. According to a friend at the nearby nature reserve at Welney, it was this butterfly which gave all other butterflies their name. It was an image of beauty to set against the Devil. The sight of it, dancing around a headstone, put a spring back in Dryden’s step after the stress of tracking down Humph’s missing daughter.
He felt the day lighten, as if he’d been able to shake off the memory of a bad nightmare.

  A clock struck noon.

  Rev. Jennifer Temple-Wright stood by the war memorial waiting for the reporter. The stone, an Egyptian needle about ten feet high, was covered in names from the Great War, with those lost in the Second World War listed on a flat stone addition at its foot. Dryden had counted them one day, the dead of the two wars. There were thirty-one. The community of Brimstone Hill, beyond the churchyard wall, looked pathetically small against such a death toll.

  Temple-Wright was in her mid-forties with greying hair cut in a helmet-style which seemed to be CoE default for a certain class of female vicar. Even the steady, warm wind didn’t put a hair out of place. Her husband made up another third of a team ministry which now cared for Brimstone Hill, Welney and Friday Bridge. She wanted people to call her Jen.

  The churchyard was in shadow so that the screen of her iPhone glowed.

  Greeting Dryden’s arrival with an index finger held upright, she tip-tapped a message with her other thumb. Dryden’s view was that a human being took priority over a digital communication of any kind. What really made such bad manners so infuriating was that people like Temple-Wright would have been stunned to discover they’d caused any offence.

  ‘Right,’ said Temple-Wright. ‘What do you want to know?’

  Again, the effortless bad manners in presuming it was up to her to indicate when their conversation could begin. Dryden had a leather satchel for his laptop which he swung round off his shoulder and laid at his feet, extracting a notebook. He rarely took notes, but it was a signal at least that the conversation to follow was firmly on the record.

  She dusted silt from her hands and used her cuff to clean the screen of the iPhone. ‘Dust storm was a bit biblical, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t really complain. It must be good for business.’

  She meant her business: that was how she saw the Church of England, as a going concern.

  She tried to brush the dust off her cassock, looking up at the roof where the lead had been stripped off. The vicar seemed preoccupied, but Dryden doubted it was the fate of her church that worried her. She’d made it clear to him, and anyone else who wanted to listen, that she had little time for the church of bricks and mortar. Her project was an internet church, centred around an online website for the three parishes that came under the ministry. She needed cash for website design, online sermons, upkeep of a Facebook page, Twitter and iPhones for all three vicars. She seemed to begrudge every minute spent under a roof, so it was hardly surprising that she was unmoved by the disappearance of one. Her own house was in another township, a modern sixties semi with a digital dish. God’s message was delivered in person through the medium of a kind of ongoing tour. She travelled the Fens, like an ice-cream seller, in a converted VW camper she called her mobile church. A speaker broadcast the sound of bells. Her four-wheeled chapel had made frequent appearances on local radio stations, even regional TV. She was making a name for herself – a double-barrelled one. She was, for Dryden, the worst kind of English eccentric. A calculating one.

  ‘How much will the lead cost to replace?’ asked Dryden, getting back to his business.

  ‘God knows.’ She smiled. It was a joke she’d used on Dryden before. ‘My last church we lost about the same one week, cost us about £4,000 to replace. But I’m not going to replace it. I’ll take the insurance money, of course – but long term we’re cutting our buildings’ cover. I’m going to get something up there to keep out the water, maybe some plastic sheeting. We’re already holding services in the apse. Take a look if you’ve got a sec – they’re working on it now. For the winter I’m putting up a screen. Fewer draughts, and I can heat a smaller space. A stopgap, of course – nothing more.’

  Dryden looked up at the church. ‘So long term the building’s not got a future?’

  ‘That’s a fair comment.’ She nodded rapidly. ‘Absolutely fair. Long term.’ She made eye contact with Dryden. ‘Watch this space.’

  ‘How did they get on the roof?’

  ‘There’s a spiral staircase which takes you up to the gutters; it’s on the far side of the church. There’s an exterior door, which they’ve just knocked off its hinges. I got a call this morning from the sexton. His grandson’s made it secure but I’m going to get an iron grill with a lock. Which is more cost; more money we could better use.’

  She took a step backwards and nearly fell over the corner of a grave. Like a lot of people who think they’re smooth and efficient, she was oddly clumsy. The burial plot she’d stumbled over was marked by a marble plinth with its own lead angel, one foot raised, as if it was about to fly.

  ‘What do the police say – any suspects?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘The thieves? The usual, I guess. You know, metal theft is the flavour of the month. They’re all at it. They didn’t just take lead off the roof – they’ve prised it off graves as well – metal railings, sculptures, crosses. If it’s not nailed down these days it’s gone, and if it is nailed down it’s gone too, with the nail! They muttered something about migrant workers: Poles, Portuguese, Irish from Lynn. If you ask me that’s a default excuse for not catching anyone.’

  Metal theft was like an outbreak of potato blight, not just across the Fens, but throughout most of rural England. The latest victims locally included the mothballed signal box up at Manea, several BT manhole covers, an entire street’s worth of iron front gates from Euximoor Drove, and a three-foot-high copy of Eros from a front garden out on the Wisbech Road. Rising black market prices for metal were driving the crime rate up. Government attempts to crack down on licensed scrap metal merchants buying stolen goods off crooks didn’t seem to be biting.

  ‘Kids or a gang?’

  ‘Getting up there isn’t child’s play. The stairs make it easier, but you’ve still got to get the stuff off the rafters and down. Then you’ve got to take it away. So, transport was organized. I’m sure our local constabulary can spin you some theories. I need to get on.’

  ‘Increased security?’

  ‘Think of the cost, Dryden. If they want to take metal they will. I’m sure they’ll be back for more lead off the roof. What am I going to do? Mount a vigil? I lost an angel last week, off one of the Victorian graves at the back. I didn’t even report that.’

  She turned and went, not bothering with a handshake, or a second look at the church. Dryden thought that summed her up beautifully: that she, the priestess of Brimstone Hill, could be untroubled by the loss of an angel.

  FOUR

  Dryden stood out in the road and watched the vicar drive away in her VW camper. The heat was building and the sun was high, so the image of the van buckled in the heat before Temple-Wright turned left at the T-junction a mile out of town. At the same moment a car turned into the road, heading for Brimstone Hill. As it got closer Dryden recognized the red Fiat 500 with whitewall tyres.

  It came to a halt outside the church with a theatrical skid.

  His wife Laura waved through the windscreen. He found it impossible not to mirror her wide Italian smile, which told him she’d got his text telling her Grace had been found and was fine. Laura retrieved their son, Eden, from the child seat and hoisted him expertly into a papoose.

  ‘How’s Humph?’ she asked as he kissed her, one hand cupping the child’s head.

  ‘All over the shop, but what do you expect? He’s angry, largely with himself, and guilty that he didn’t make the marriage work. Guilty he doesn’t see enough of his daughters. He’s a sponge, soaking up guilt. He loves it really.’

  She bounced Eden in the papoose. ‘I rang the nursery; they’ll take Eden after lunch.’

  While Dryden was working at Brimstone Hill they’d put Eden in a crèche at the local school. Normally Dryden dropped him off by cab at eight but their routine had been shattered by Grace’s disappearance. Usually Tuesday was a working day for Laura.

  ‘Sorry – it’s ruined your schedule,’ said Dryden.

 
; ‘I rang in and they sent a script over. I worked on the laptop; it’s fine.’ Laura had a job as a story-liner for a BBC soap opera called Sky Farm, an East Anglian rival to Emmerdale. Her job was to work with the scriptwriters, keeping them in line, making sure the ‘big picture’ made sense, monitoring continuity, helping develop consistent characters. Three days a week she had a fifty-mile commute to the BBC studios in Norwich.

  ‘Well. Thanks, anyway,’ said Dryden. ‘It made a big difference to Humph. He was so stressed he had to stop driving.’

  Laura’s mouth fell open. She had large features, dominated by the curves which formed her lips, and the eyebrows above the luminous brown eyes. ‘So you drove?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Well done.’ She hugged him, pressing her lips into his hair. For a moment they shared the memory of the ditched car, the darkness of the water, the sudden pain.

  The Fiat lacked air conditioning and Dryden could feel Laura’s body heat. ‘You’re broiling. Let’s get some shade.’

  ‘This dust is horrible,’ said Laura.

  She ran a finger along her lips, then touched it to Dryden’s. ‘Pah!’ she said. ‘Look at Tano.’

  ‘Tanooo,’ echoed Eden, enjoying the sound of one of his favourite words.

  Tano was the car, named for her father, Gaetano. It was covered in a silty film.

  ‘I could write your name in the dust,’ she said. ‘I brought coffee.’ She had a flask in the pocket of the papoose. She patted the other pocket. ‘Sandwiches.’

  The Brimstone Hill Café’s menu was circa 1950s, and the only coffee you could get was instant, or a whipped-up confection from a vending machine that was meant to be espresso but was actually powder and hot water. They called it fenspresso.