The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  Dryden lifted Eden out of the papoose and led the way into Christ Church. He’d visited before and the door was always open in daylight. Laura slipped into a pew and unscrewed the top of the thermos so that the delicious aroma escaped and seemed to overpower the usual scents of a lonely church – polish and candles. It smelt like a shrine to coffee. She had never been inside Christ Church. The chapels of her homeland, the Lunigiana, were baroque, gilded, crowded with statues and candles. Her local chapel in her home village was full of cherubs circling angels, looking down on the saints. The simplicity of this brick vessel took her breath away.

  ‘So,’ she said, nodding. ‘Beautiful. You didn’t tell me. You kept it secret so you could show it off now.’

  Dryden set the child down on the narrow carpet in the aisle. Eden lay on his back, kicking. They were acutely aware that many of the children they knew from post-natal classes were walking already. Eden hadn’t even shown an interest in crawling. He seemed to enjoy watching the world. A born observer, an outsider looking in. That there might be something wrong with his development was an anxiety which they had yet to share with each other.

  Laura sat with her head back, looking at the roof. It was decorated with simple arts-and-craft designs in bright colours. Childlike, and beautifully executed. In the apse beyond the altar the decoration extended down over the brickwork, a riot of colour. A two-decked pulpit in stone and a brass lectern were gifts from benefactors and looked out of place. Dryden knew that the local congregation had been disappointed by Temple-Wright’s refusal to preach from the lofty pulpit. She stood at the altar rail, on their level.

  They were not alone in Christ Church. Workmen were constructing a wooden screen, to the vicar’s orders, across the nave in front of the altar, creating a separate space beyond in the apse. A church within a church – somewhere cosy for the winter congregation. In many churches they’d have screened off a transept, but Christ Church had none. Its simplicity was like the living quarters on Noah’s Ark. The builders had a radio playing, tuned to one of the local commercial stations, but the volume died away as soon as the banging door marked their entry.

  ‘So what’s the plan with Grace – back to her mother’s?’ asked Laura, handing Dryden a thermos cap full of coffee and a bottle of fizzy water. The words of the question were slightly slurred. Laura had been in a coma for nearly a year after their car accident. The neurological damage had affected her speech so that the consonants were slightly dulled. It had been the one side effect of the coma which had got worse with time, and had put an end to her hopes of returning to acting.

  Dryden was studying the hole in the roof directly above their heads where the thieves had taken the lead. Gaps showed between painted rafters.

  ‘Philip,’ Laura prompted. ‘About Grace, what will they do?’

  Dryden shook his head as if coming out of a trance. ‘She doesn’t want to go home. She’s angry about something. I reckon two or three days out on Euximoor Drove will remind her of the comforts of home. Humph needs to make it clear to her that in a year she can do what she likes. Less, ten months. She can have a room at his house if she wants, right in town. He’s hardly ever there. She wants to go to the local college for A-levels, which makes sense. She can see her mum. She can avoid her stepfather. It’s her choice. She just has to put up with the way things are for a bit longer.’

  ‘She must be unhappy, very unhappy, to actually do it. Run away like that.’ Laura brushed her hair back from her forehead and pinned it back with a clasp. Her face was exceptionally animated when she spoke, a mannerism which seemed to have deepened as the clarity of her speech had declined. She was like a heroine in a silent movie, each twist of emotion clearly broadcast for dramatic effect.

  Dryden told her what Grace had said, about her ever-expanding fen family.

  ‘So it’s the Fens that are to blame,’ said Laura, her eyes widening in mock horror.

  ‘Maybe. I got the impression there was something else, something she wasn’t telling her father, or her grandmother.’

  ‘You think she’s hiding a teenage secret?’ Laura knelt down next to the baby and adjusted his jumper. Eden’s eyes were focused on the dust they’d disturbed from the pews which was rising and catching the sunlight that raked across the nave.

  Free, briefly, of the responsibility of the child, Laura let her gaze turn to a large painting which dominated the nave. ‘That could be in a church at home,’ she said.

  A heavy, dark wood gilded frame surrounded a medieval Italian landscape which showed Golgotha in the foreground and the three crosses, with Christ crucified in the central role. The canvas itself was damaged: there was a diagonal scratch, two tears in the sky, and an old damp patch above Christ’s head.

  Dryden stood and went to the painting. ‘I read about this on the village website. That’s why it’s called Christ Church, for this painting. Well, there were two originally – another one opposite. They were gifts from a local family of landowners.’

  ‘What happened to the other one?’

  ‘Destroyed by the damp and the cold. This one’s not that much better.’

  ‘That’s unfair. It’s beautiful still. Don’t be so hard on old age.’

  Dryden told her what he could remember from the website: that the works were nineteenth century, Italian, copies of two lost medieval masterpieces. In the manner of the time, the landscape was faithfully Italian, precisely of that between Rome and the sea, complete with ruins, rural scenes, villages and campanile. The background was inhabited by tiny figures acting out miniature dramas: a shepherd chasing his hat in the wind, a peasant chopping wood, children running after a horse.

  Laura stood beside him, looking into the picture intently as if her own childhood was pictured there. She laughed, extending a finger towards the hatless running shepherd. ‘I know him; he lived in our village.’

  ‘Everyman,’ said Dryden.

  She shook her head, missing the reference. ‘Stefano.’ Laura studied the painting. ‘So if it’s a copy, who painted the original?’

  ‘Masaccio.’

  Laura whistled, recognizing the name. ‘Yes, one of the masters. I think there’s something in Parma in the cathedral – a vast nativity, with the magi on camels.’

  ‘Shame this isn’t the real thing,’ said Dryden. ‘Our delightful vicar could have her internet church and still have enough left over to cover that roof with gold leaf instead of lead.’ He turned on his heels. ‘Mind you, that really would get the thieves excited.’

  As they left, Laura stole a glance back at Stefano and his flying hat.

  FIVE

  Dryden loved graveyards: there was something about their settled sadness, the sense in which they represented eternal rest, which in turn appealed to his own desire to step outside the day-to-day world of deadlines, appointments and rush. Laura had driven Eden away in Tano to the crèche, leaving him to eat his lunch. The headstones at the back of the church were older than those at the front – Victorian slabs of stone, etched with euphemism: Asleep, or Gone Before.

  Laura had left him the coffee thermos so he sat on a box tomb and poured himself a shot of acrid espresso. He was surrounded by the graves of the rich, entwined by granite ivy and laurel, and adorned with carved wrens, robins, swords, urns and the occasional skull. It reminded him of one of his favourite cartoons, by the humourist James Thurber, depicting a street full of determined men and women striding to their next appointments, against a background of a cemetery. The caption read simply: Destinations.

  The churchyard ran to a fence, and then a ditch, beyond which was meadow and pasture, dotted with sheep – a recent innovation in fen farming, which had been largely devoid of livestock for a century, thanks to the cash value of salad crops and grain on the vast, rich, open fields. Right at the edge of the church land, up against the fence, was a striking memorial: a soldier carved in grey-green stone, in a boot-length cape. There was a plinth, in marble, with lead letters which read:

  IN MEMORY OF
THOSE

  WHO FELL IN THE

  KOREAN WAR

  1933–1953

  Peter Davenport

  Paul Davenport

  Brothers in Arms

  It was the stone statue of the figure that dominated the memorial. Despite being a forgotten war, Korea did have this one potent symbol – the caped soldier. Dryden recalled pictures of the conflict in books, snippets of newsreel on the History Channel documentaries. A war of bloody attrition, with the Americans, Canadians and Australians dug in along a lonely front line with the South Koreans, facing the Russians, the Chinese and the North Koreans. Incessant, almost tropical rain had brought misery to thousands of troops in bitterly cold trenches. As a war it seemed to occupy a no-man’s-land in Dryden’s world-view of the twentieth century – lost between the bombed ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the tensions of the Cold War of the 1960s. Little had survived in the public memory other than this icon, the soldier in battlefield green, the cape big enough to cover his pack and rifle, and almost reaching down to the ground. The only part of the body to be revealed was usually the head in the helmet, and that was invariably held down, the chin on the chest, the face sheltered against the endless rain. Dryden ate his sandwich and wondered about the Davenport brothers. Twins, perhaps, given the identical dates, who had lived and died together. Perhaps both had been lost on the same day.

  A clock chimed somewhere in Brimstone Hill. Glancing back at the church, he saw the small door that the metal thieves had ripped open to get to the staircase which corkscrewed up to the roof. The door was wooden, lancet-shaped, and hung out on its shattered iron hinges. A limp stretch of scene-of-crime tape hung across the opening. Dryden could just see the worn stone steps twisting upwards.

  He walked over to investigate, carrying his coffee cup. The staircase was damp and smelt of leaves and dead birds. The thought of climbing up and looking down on the graveyard made his heartbeat pick up with a combination of fear and excitement. It was so rare to be able to look down on anything in the Fens. He looked up the spiral stairwell, trying to judge if he had the courage to face his fear of heights. The steps were splashed with guano. The thought of climbing them made his legs go weak. He decided to stop himself doing anything stupid by closing the door. He put down his coffee and lifted the door up on its hinges, then brought it round and pushed it into place.

  Which is when he saw what had been nailed to the outside.

  The door kept falling open so he had to hold it back with one hand. He reached out his other hand to touch a small wooden sign carved to mimic the shape of a piece of paper or parchment, with curling gilded edges. His mouth ran dry, not from fear, but from an overwhelming memory. He’d been brought up a Catholic, and the iconography was still potent. Crucifixes in his childhood had always been replete with the broken figure of Christ, the bleeding stigmata, the crown of thorns, and above the head the sign that Pontius Pilate had dictated to the scribes to be written in Latin, Hebrew and Greek: Iēsus Nazarēnus, Rēx Iūdaeōrum – shortened to INRI.

  Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

  And here was that sign. Nailed roughly to the door, so that the nail had split the wood. Had Temple-Wright seen this? He doubted it. Because it begged several questions: was this the work of the metal thieves, and if so, from which crucifix had it been ripped? Judging by the size of the plaque, about two feet by one foot, it was from a crucifix of some size. It was painted in gold, red and blue, and all the colours were weathered. There was something sacrilegious about the act of nailing it to the door. But the police had made no mention of it; or had they simply disregarded it as a mindless piece of vandalism? Or had the door just been discovered open, and no one had bothered to look?

  Christ Church was named for the two Italian pictures of the crucifixion which had hung in the nave. Dryden had read on the local history website that this dedication had been further cemented with the erection of a crucifix in a stand of trees to the edge of the graveyard, a kind of miniature fenland Golgotha. A wood carver from Cambridge had won the commission for the figure of Christ. Dryden had always assumed that the crucifix had failed to survive the intervening century and a half of winters. It was certainly not visible in the churchyard.

  He walked back to the box tomb he’d been sitting on by the Korean War Memorial and jumped lightly on top. He could see clearly over the headstones and memorials. There was a stand of trees in the north-east corner of the graveyard, a thick clutch of pines, set in a circle. He picked his way through the graveyard towards it, and saw immediately that a rough path led into the trees at an oblique angle. He stepped into the copse, from open sunlight to deep shadow in one stride, so that his eyes failed to make the transition. He had to stop, blinking. He heard an animal in the undergrowth scurrying for cover. Vision came to him slowly, revealing that the path wound onwards around a very low mound, the borders of the way forward once marked with whitewashed stones. Now some were missing, and those that remained were weathered and grey. The path itself was made of pavings set neatly in a slow curve, overgrown with weeds, cracked and uneven.

  A wooden sign, in the same gold, red and blue as the vandalised INRI, said: VIA DOLOROSA. A black graffito obscured part of the lettering, but was itself indecipherable.

  The air inside the ring of trees was still, but his arrival seemed to disturb it, so that he was surrounded by the pungent aroma of pine needles. It brought back memories of a summer holiday with Laura’s parents in Italy and a Sunday spent circling a mountain above the village, climbing the spiral path towards the shrine at the top, where three crosses depicted the crucifixion. This secret Golgotha seemed oddly out of place in an English churchyard. Dryden could only think that when Christ Church had been founded the Anglo-Catholic movement had been running particularly strong in the Fens, its imagery coloured by that of the rituals of Rome.

  He followed the spiral path, rising very slowly, inch by inch, but relentlessly, so that by the time he had described a full circle he could look down through the tree trunks and see the entrance to the thicket where he had walked out of the sunlight. He had climbed less than six feet, but in the two-dimensional world of the Fens it seemed as if he’d ascended a mountain. Another half circle brought him within sight of his goal. Through the trees he could see the clear shape of a large cross of the traditional design, with a small roof provided to shelter the figure of Christ from the English weather, an apex added over the head of the dying man. Dryden’s eyes were fixed on this shape, so that he did not see what lay on the path in the half-light until he tripped and fell. In the shock of the moment, he struggled to make sense of the image that was less than a foot from his face as he lay sprawled on the rough stones: a face, in agony, trickles of blood defying gravity by falling sideways, the eyes lifted upwards.

  It was a face as familiar as his own: Christ’s face.

  He stifled a yell but the sound of his fall spooked a pair of crows which clattered out of the trees. Across the path lay the scattered wooden remnants of a figure of Christ. Dryden scrambled to his knees and looked around. The head had been lopped off the body, which lay in the shadows, one arm seeming to beckon him forwards. The other arm lay higher up the path, the severed joint showing as paler wood. One of the bare legs lay across the path and had caused him to stumble. Of the other there was no sign. The sculpture had not been painted for many years so that in places the original grain of the wood showed through the flesh. Standing, he peered through the branches at the crucifix and saw that the missing leg was still on the cross, because he could just see the pale foot.

  He stumbled on quickly until the curve led into a small stone-flagged enclosure at the ‘summit’ of the mound. There were two beer cans lying in the grass, both Special Brew. A plastic Tesco bag was wrapped round the base of the cross. He looked at these items with an almost manic intensity because he had sensed – but not yet seen – what hung from the cross.

  Not the severed wooden leg of the Christ figure, but a man, one of flesh and
blood. Shirtless, the skin and muscle of the upper torso hanging down as if gravity had gained some special force within this circle of trees. In places, on the upper arms and around the neck, the skin was bruised, livid and swollen. A pair of jeans hung from the narrow waist, torn open at both knees, one of which was bloodied and caked with dust. The body sagged, only staying aloft thanks to knots of blue plastic rope at the right wrist and around the neck. The left arm hung down across the body. The head, too, was down, so that Dryden had to step forwards to see up into the face. The features seemed bloated, the skin holding a yellow tinge. The eyes were hooded with fleshy lids, the hair black and glossy. The upper lip was swollen and a trickle of blood had hardened as it fell across the chin.

  In death no face can hold the likeness of life. Dryden knew only two things about this man. He was ethnic Chinese, and he knew how he had died. Blood had flowed from a wound in the left side where, traditionally, the Roman’s lance had been thrust into Christ’s body. Flies buzzed around the wound and made it shimmer in the slated light. At the centre of the wound was a black hole. Dryden had never seen one before in once living flesh, but he had no doubt it was a bullet hole, and even less doubt that the flesh was no longer living.

  SIX

  Constable Stokely Powell was Brimstone Hill’s community policeman. Dryden had got to know him well in the few weeks he’d been in the township and found him relaxed and approachable, but it was clear he liked to preserve a certain formality: he was Constable Powell, and Dryden guessed that was because he was just a bit nervous of the Stokely. Powell was in his late twenties, early thirties – so he’d probably been named for the Stokely: the black civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael; the kind of black man a lot of white men didn’t like. The Fens were a recruiting ground for racists, energised by the influx of East European migrants. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t take time out to abuse a black man – and Powell was Caribbean black. He sat now in the last light of the sun, basking, immobile as a lizard on a stone wall. A still man, his limbs seemed effortlessly to be always at rest.