The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  ‘I heard them,’ said his grandfather. ‘The voices travel because they’re light – like when we had a choir. Not English, something different.’ He struggled to find the right word. ‘Girlish. But men. Chinese, I reckon, like the copper said.’

  ‘How many?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘Three, I think. Unless others didn’t speak.’

  ‘But no argument? You didn’t hear shouting?’

  Albe Haig sat down. ‘No – just voices.’ He pressed his hands to his ears as if he could hear them now. ‘I can’t believe someone is dead. Murdered. It’s such a peaceful place.’

  Dryden tried out a few of his own theories as to what had happened, hoping they’d share theirs, but they said they had none.

  ‘I better get to work,’ said Dryden eventually. He put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘Good to meet you, Mr Haig. Hope this all quietens down. Gives you some peace.’

  The grandson walked him to the edge of the Clock Holt.

  ‘And Temple-Wright knows he’s blind?’ asked Dryden before they parted. ‘I could do a story if your grandfather wants me to. Can you ask him? Not now. He’s tired. But let me know.’

  They swapped cards. Haig’s said he was a picture restorer and framer. Dryden looked at his hands again, seeing this time that they were long, even elegant, with dry paint under the nails.

  ‘I’ll ask him. You know what I think? I think the vicar doesn’t care about Grandad because he loves the place, the church, and because he was the guardian, the keeper. She hates that, hates the idea that we might love this place. I know.’

  Something in the way Vincent Haig said it implied a darker knowledge.

  ‘I’ll talk to her if your grandad wants me to,’ said Dryden. He felt a thrill for the power of his trade. If she backed down he could run a story anyway, saying the church had shown mercy. But something told him Temple-Wright didn’t do backing down.

  The ambulance into which they put the victim’s body still stood on the road, the light flashing. Dryden thought they’d leave with the forensic unit when the job was done. It was sad, poignant even, that they felt no need to hurry away with the body.

  ‘You know the legend, about the Devil and Brimstone Hill?’ asked Haig. He had a way of sharing information which Dryden found deeply annoying. First the question, then his own, pre-prepared and calibrated answer.

  ‘Sure. He was chased here by the vicar and went up in a puff of smoke to hell.’

  ‘Perhaps the Devil’s back,’ said Haig.

  EIGHT

  Tuesday

  The Jolly Farmers had been closed for thirteen months, but it might as well have been thirteen years. It stood at a T-junction two miles from Christ Church, out on the fen. The smell of winter damp ran through it like the spreading fingers of dry rot. A single lavatory had been sluiced down with Domestos, adding an astringent note to the fetid air which had been trapped behind boarded windows and bricked up doorways. There was nothing quite as dispiriting, thought Dryden, as a dead pub. It was like an empty theatre; all the more desolate for the fact that it had once been so alive.

  The atmosphere suited the occasion. The Ely coroner, Dr Digby Ryder, had decided to hold his court in the old pub – as was his right under the law – because the case he wanted to deal with was local, involving the deaths of two tramps earlier that year, whose bodies had been discovered in a flooded ditch. A local case, of local interest, so Dryden had put it in the diary a week earlier. But now the pub was crammed with journalists because Ryder was also due to formally open the inquest into the death of the man found in the churchyard at Christ Church. Given that the police had issued such a short statement the day before, and Dryden’s eyewitness account had yet to hit the streets, the rest of the media were keen to cover the coroner’s court, even if proceedings were limited to a few formalities.

  The coroner’s officer, DS Stan Cherry, had removed the boards over some of the windows so that indirect sunlight filled the old public bar. Dust didn’t hang in the air – it clogged it, like cigarette smoke. Three darts stuck out of the dartboard, a handwritten Xmas Draw board hung on the wall beside a Pirelli calendar featuring Miss April 2010, and Dryden spotted four plastic rat-traps on the lino, each edged into a shadowy corner. A TV crew had set up in one corner at the back, and there were two radio reporters with microphones in the second row. The front row was reserved for local people who had an interest in the local case, which would now come on after the Christ Church killing. They looked bemused at the media circus around them.

  DS Cherry was stout, in his early sixties, with skin like the surface of a week-old party balloon. He was a northerner, from Bolton, with an affected air of continuous good humour which had survived his tenure as coroner’s officer; a job designed to see him to retirement.

  ‘Now then, Philip,’ he said, handing Dryden a printed sheet. ‘This one’s nasty.’ Dryden read a name and address on the sheet.

  Sima Shuba

  34B Erebus Street

  King’s Lynn

  ‘This the victim?’

  ‘Certainly is. Not a nice way to die, as you’re about to hear.’

  Dryden prayed that the coroner was not about to divulge too many of the details from the scene of the crime.

  ‘Nice day out for you then,’ he said. ‘A bit of a change from Ely, plus a big fat expense claim?’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ said Cherry, straightening his back. ‘It’s the glamour, the poolside parties, the paparazzi. That’s Brimstone Hill.’

  Outside they heard a vehicle come to an abrupt halt on the pub gravel, followed by dogs barking. The coroner had two lurchers and Dryden had seen him hunting with a shotgun on the water meadows at Ely. He had that outdoor complexion which seems to be a hallmark of public schools; as if the skin has just been scrubbed with a wire brush. In court he affected green tweeds. In private his persona was less of a cartoon; the country-squire manners a screen for extreme shyness. Dryden had once looked him up online. He was a member of the Royal Society, a medical doctor, with research interests in public health.

  Ryder breezed in, concentrating on his brown brogues, not the court. He didn’t once make eye contact with the public or the members of the press. The lurchers were on leads, their claws skittering on the boards. He sat at the bare table at the front and the dogs collapsed around his feet.

  Cherry called for the court to be upstanding. There was a cacophony of chairs grating, repeated as everyone settled back down.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ryder. ‘I will now formally open the inquest into the death of Sima Shuba, aged thirty-two, of Erebus Street, King’s Lynn. I can say Mr Shuba worked as a kitchen porter and that he was unmarried. The Foreign Office and UK Border Agency are examining his papers. I will adjourn the case itself while the police complete their inquiries. I do wish, however, to put on the record the results of an initial autopsy carried out last night at Wisbech. Mr Shuba died of a gunshot wound to the abdomen between one and five o’clock yesterday morning. The shot was fired at point-blank range. There would have been very little noise as a result. He was found at just after one thirty in the afternoon. His body was in the churchyard of Christ Church, here in Brimstone Hill. There are some indications that Mr Shuba died after a struggle. The immediate cause of death was loss of blood. Death took place at the scene. Mr Shuba’s family has been informed.’

  Ryder shuffled some papers and the TV crew made moves to dismantle their camera.

  Ryder tidied his papers into a neat pile. ‘Once these facts are known I would encourage anyone who knows anything which might help the police find the killer, or killers, of Sima Shuba, to contact them immediately. I have been asked to stress that any information offered will be treated in confidence.’

  The coroner smiled inappropriately. ‘Case adjourned. There will now be a brief pause in proceedings before we move on to today’s scheduled case. Thank you.’

  Most of the journalists made a bolt for the door.

  Dryden sat tight, opened his
laptop, and wrote a fifty-word paragraph to email to the office so that they could add it to the story he’d already written for the Ely Express. It changed little of what they knew of the case.

  The press pack had now been reduced to the usual suspects: two or three of the local dailies, and the weeklies. Dryden’s instinct was to leave and follow up his own leads on the big story, the murder in Christ Church graveyard. But he had three clear days before the next front-page deadline. His immediate priority was the coroner’s second case.

  Sgt Cherry called for order and Ryder launched directly into a summary of the known facts concerning the sudden and unnatural deaths of Anthony James Russell and Archibald Donald McLeish.

  A fen blow, nearly as bad, according to the coroner, as the one that had hit the area the day before, had struck Brimstone Hill one Sunday evening that spring. The next day, 8 April, the rain had fallen. A cloudburst had thundered down for two hours between 6.30 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. When the air cleared, the village’s main drain, the Brim, was clogged, water lapping over and into the road beyond Christ Church. The problem was presumed to be a blocked culvert where the brook ran under the railway. The Fen Waterways Board turned up next day to dig out the silt. They expected to find something in the hole besides silt: a tree stump, a supermarket trolley, a dead badger. Instead they found the bodies of two men.

  Identification was nearly instantaneous. The men were, in that telling phrase, ‘well known to the police’. One was a thirty-two-year-old former land worker who had been born in the village. He’d been known, since school, as Spider Russell. He was six foot two inches tall.

  ‘Spider for his long legs and arms, I think?’ Ryder smiled at thin air.

  Several heads in the front row nodded in agreement.

  Russell began drinking at fourteen, said Ryder, starting with cider, usually in plastic bottles, consumed in private down by the railway line. By sixteen he was barred from both The Brook, the pub in the centre of Brimstone Hill, and The Jolly Farmers.

  Ryder spread his hands out wide. ‘The Jolly Farmers,’ he repeated, as if they’d missed the reference.

  He took up his story again.

  Spider Russell didn’t let being barred stop him drinking. He’d walk the six miles into Friday Bridge on a Friday night with his agricultural wages and blow it all in the pubs there.

  Two women in the front row began to discuss this fact and Ryder paused until they were embarrassed by the silence into which they were talking.

  ‘Drink eventually cost young Russell his job,’ said Ryder. ‘Although it appears he’d tell anyone who listened that he’d been pushed out of the labour market by migrant workers who’d do the work for half the money.’

  After becoming unemployed, Russell’s life took a predictable route, continued Ryder. His mother moved to the East Midlands when he was nineteen to start a new life. There was no other family locally. Russell had a room above the mini-market in Brimstone Hill, paid for by his mother, using a banker’s standing order. He smelt so badly they wouldn’t let him in the shop, but they would sell him cans at the back door. He lived off benefit which he collected from Peterborough on a Monday.

  ‘But for the most part he seems to have lived the life of an affable beggar,’ concluded Ryder. He reached down under the table and ruffled the fur of one of the dogs.

  Spider Russell’s friend, whose body was found alongside his in the ditch, was called Archie McLeish. Ryder said Russell met him in Wisbech on market day and brought him back to Brimstone Hill. He was from Ayr, Scotland. McLeish was nineteen, a former heroin addict, who’d switched back to alcohol. Russell let McLeish sleep on his floor. The Scot was clean, almost fanatically so, and he washed his clothes in the laundrette at Friday Bridge once a month. He didn’t claim benefit, but he did have a debit card, which he used in the hole-in-the-wall in Wisbech. The coroner’s officer had been able to get his bank records and they showed McLeish had a current account credit of £13,800 – the remainder of the estate of his father, a solicitor, who had died when he was just sixteen. His mother had remarried and did not wish to attend the inquest. Ryder’s lip curled slightly, perhaps indicating what he thought of the absentee mother. McLeish, he added, had no siblings.

  McLeish’s and Russell’s bodies were found together in the flooded culvert with two empty vodka bottles and some food wrappers from the corner shop: pork pies, pasties, and apples. McLeish had three twenty-pound notes in his pocket; Russell thirty-eight pence in coppers.

  ‘This is a very unusual case,’ said Ryder, with a hint of the intellectual curiosity that he so often concealed.

  ‘The cause of death in both cases was drowning. McLeish had sustained a head wound before he died. It was late evening when the cloudburst struck the area. Witnesses had seen them both out on the fen, drinking, apparently in good humour. This was on the Wisbech Road, near the bus stop. They were sitting on the grass verge. What happened when the rain fell and the ditches filled with water? It is easy to speculate, but we will almost certainly never know the truth.

  ‘It is not difficult to imagine the scene. When I say that the ditch was full of water, I mean – of course – the Brim. Hardly a ditch. A river, running in a deep culvert, and on this day probably churning with water. I think that the most likely scenario is that McLeish fell into the floodwater, possibly sustaining the head injury, and that Russell tried to save his friend. There is a chance that they argued, possibly blows were exchanged, but none of the evidence supports that view and there is not a single recorded instance of either man using violence. So, I am happy to speculate that they were both the victims of an accident. But it is speculation. Once they fell in the water they had very little chance of survival due to their general physical condition, which is the real point of calling this inquest at this time, and in this place.’

  Ryder tidied his notes. ‘Each day of our lives we all move closer to our deaths,’ he said. ‘But these young men were moving very quickly towards an early death when they had their accident. I doubt either would have lived for more than a few months longer. Both were being poisoned by drinking contaminated illicit alcohol. “Moonshine” is a euphemism – especially in this case.’

  DS Cherry came forward and put three vodka bottles on the table. Two were empty, one full of a golden liquid. They had yellow labels, with a picture of what looked like wheat or reeds on the front. The brand name was Zabrowka.

  Dryden was pleased by the thought that the national newspapers had quit the court and missed the story. A much better story than anyone could have predicted from the bare details of the case.

  ‘Zabrowka is a type of vodka made widely in Eastern Europe,’ said Ryder. ‘Usually at eighty per cent proof. The key, distinguishing ingredient is Buffalo Grass. This contains coumarin, and that’s the secret, because it gives it an extraordinary scent and taste. These two empty bottles were found in the ditch with the victims. This third bottle has been obtained by Trading Standards officials.’

  Dryden raised a hand and asked the coroner to spell the ‘secret’ ingredient.

  He spelt out COUMARIN letter by letter.

  ‘It flavours the vodka, as I say, so you get this amazing …’ Ryder unscrewed the cap on the full bottle and flourished his fingers under his nose. ‘Coumarin is what makes new-mown hay smell sweet. Plus there’s vanilla, coconut, almonds. And there’s the colour. The gold, like living gold. It is rather beautiful, isn’t it?

  ‘Unfortunately this is bootleg Zabrowka. The smell is reproduced, but little else. The label may fool some, and provide assurance for many, but the contents, when imbibed, are redolent of anything but new-mown grass.’

  The coroner wandered into some arcane detail, but Dryden tracked the central thread of relevant facts: the autopsies revealed that both the victims had been ingesting two toxic substances over a long period of time. One was lead; the other was methanol, or wood alcohol. Both were present in the empty bottles in minute traces, detected with a spectrometer in the forensic lab. The full bo
ttle was tainted with both.

  ‘Methanol is produced by using wood chippings to distil alcohol. It is cheap and dangerous. One of the symptoms of poisoning is disturbed vision, even blindness, and I think this should be kept in mind given the circumstances of the deaths. Other symptoms include stomach pains and seizures. Lead is a common by-product of illicit stills because bootleggers often use old machinery to help in the distilling process. The most common, in rural areas, being old tractor radiators. Lead poisoning brings about headaches, delirium and convulsions.’

  Ryder nodded to Cherry, who handed a further statement to the coroner which he read out: ‘It is clear that the victims had access to a source of illicit alcohol in the West Fens which is severely contaminated and is a threat to public health. I have notified the police of my findings in advance. No one should buy alcohol which is not sold through licensed outlets and properly branded. Drinking so-called “moonshine” can seriously harm your health, precipitate mental health problems and eventually lead to death. I am also releasing pictures of the Zabrowka brand label. Consumers should avoid bottles with this label at all costs. Genuine bottles do not have these yellow labels.’

  Ryder moved a foot and one of the dogs yelped.

  ‘Given the complexities of this case, and the poor health of the victims prior to the events which led to their deaths, I am going to record an open verdict in both instances. I have passed the files to the West Cambridgeshire Police and I have asked them to identify the source of the poison in this case; for poison it most certainly was.’

  He looked up from the prepared statement.

  ‘I have asked them to treat this issue as a priority and I shall be monitoring the investigation.’ He looked straight at Dryden when he read out this final sentence. There was an unmissable inference that the police had so far not been giving the case the attention it deserved. It crossed Dryden’s mind that PC Powell, his local friendly contact in the constabulary, had failed to give him any hint of the story.