The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  Later, walking back along the arrow-straight road which led back into town, Dryden looked down into the Brim. A trickle-line of damp earth ran along the bottom of the ditch. He imagined the flood on that day, the water churning, powering its way towards the culvert by Christ Church, carrying the bodies of Russell and McLeish. Given the evil nature of the drug they were addicted to, he couldn’t help thinking they’d been given a gift that day by the gods of the sky: a swift and tumultuous death.

  NINE

  Dryden walked through the centre of Brimstone Hill, past Christ Church, heading for his office – a modest single room with a landline, over the little parade of shops hidden in a cul-de-sac by the level crossing. When he’d gone for the job of editor of The Crow, he’d told the interview panel that they needed to expand the circulation area. Stop trying to change the paper to make more people buy it in Ely, and take the same paper wider afield. Create new editions, gather more news, make The Crow something people couldn’t live without. Customize it. Print separate editions for local areas. Then put it all up on the web on publication day, a few hours after the paper hits the streets. The West Fens was a prime area for expansion: small Victorian towns dotted on the silty, flat landscape all the way to Peterborough and Wisbech. Towns just like Brimstone Hill, right bang in the middle of nowhere, but in the middle nonetheless. And if you were going to move in to a new area you had to have a presence on the ground; you couldn’t do it from a desk twenty miles away. They needed a new office, and he was prepared to run it for the first three months.

  The mini-market above which Spider Russell had lived was in the same parade of shops as Dryden’s office. It sold The Crow and the Ely Express and, despite the fact the paper wasn’t yet out, a billboard outside carried the splash headline:

  GUNSHOT MURDER

  IN BRIMSTONE HILL

  Dryden thought if that didn’t flog a few copies then nothing would.

  On the roof of the parade of shops Dryden had rented a space to set up a neon advertising sign which read:

  The Crow – YOUR local newspaper

  The Fens had a lot in common with the American Midwest: the wide open fenceless farms, the love affair with the motor car, a certain taciturn mistrust of outsiders and a fascination with lights. At Christmas time some of the drove roads looked like Blackpool’s Golden Mile, each house supporting jiggling Santas and prancing Rudolphs. It was the flat landscape that was the key, because any half-decent display of illuminations could be seen for miles. Dryden had checked out The Crow’s new flashing sign and had made Humph drive nearly three miles before it fell entirely out of sight in the cab’s rear-view mirror.

  He let himself into the office at the top of a short flight of steps from the pavement. There was a certain frontier simplicity to the interior: two phones, a desk, a table with a kettle on it, a window with blinds. Dryden thought briefly of the newsroom on Fleet Street he’d worked in for a decade: 200 desktop screens flickering, flat screen TVs showing twenty-four-hour news, and that buzz – a hypnotic brew of tension and excitement. He’d chucked all that in after his accident, to be closer to Laura as she fought to recover in hospital in Ely. Oddly, he’d never missed the buzz, or the noise. The only sound here was a bee caught behind a pane of glass. He edged it to freedom with a rolled up copy of the paper.

  Then he sat down, put his hands behind his head, his feet on the desk, and looked out of the window. This was what he really loved about the life he’d chosen for himself: that he was in charge, and that nobody told him what to do or think.

  He sent a text to Humph asking how Grace was. Humph had ferried him to the coroner’s court first thing that morning but then sped off towards Euximoor Drove and his mother’s bungalow.

  The cabbie was a swift and expert thumb-texter. The answer was with Dryden in less than fifteen seconds: SHES NOT TELLING ME SOMETHING.

  Dryden, irritated by the missing apostrophe, made himself compose a reassuring response. SPEND SOME TIME WITH HER. YOU ARE IMPORTANT. PICK ME UP ABOUT SIX? Then he attacked the post with a letter-opener in the shape of a silver eel. It consisted almost entirely of advertising flyers, except for a single brown envelope marked newspapa in a child’s hand. He tore it open and found six photographs. They were of an owl, a species of the bird Dryden had never seen before. This one was chocolate brown, with white speckles, the traditional ‘surprised’ expression, and huge yellow eyes. Small, slightly huddled, and faintly exotic.

  Only one picture carried any information, in the same crude hand, on the back of the shot.

  Funeral Owl (Aegolius funereus) is very rare so you should put this in yore paper. I got this picture from my hide. I sore two – a pair – so maybe they are breeding hear.

  There was no name, and no address. But the first shot, the one taken with the least magnification, showed some fencing by a road and a sign which read THIRD DROVE. He knew the spot, out on Euximoor Fen, in a grid of back roads simply named by number.

  He had a scanner attached to the desktop iMac. Once he had the best shot in digital form he sent it to his mobile and forwarded it to a friend at the bird reserve at Welney on the edge of the Bedford Levels, just half-a-dozen miles from where he sat. The Levels, a wide area of grassland between two of the Fens’ artificial rivers, provided Europe’s biggest freshwater reserve for birds. When the sluices were opened a man-made lake twenty-five miles long was formed. Welney offered a huge hide for visitors and he’d already picked up several stories for the paper in the months running up to the launch of the new edition. They were experts in wetland birds at Welney – but it was a good place to start, if he wanted to know more about the owl.

  He added a text message to the picture. Reader picture – claims it is the FUNERAL OWL. Is it rare? Is it possible? Or is he mad like rest out here? D

  The office clock said it was fifteen minutes past noon. The Ely Express would be on the streets soon. He’d then file the same copy to the Fleet Street papers. His eyewitness stuff might make the story strong enough to run nationally. In the meantime he did a quick round of calls, picking up some facts and figures he could use in The Crow when they reran the story on the dust storm. The emergency services had dealt with eight calls from Euximoor Fen and the immediate area. Two cars had collided head-on at a junction but they’d been crawling in the gloom at under ten mph. Five calls simply reported the storm’s arrival. Two people had used mobiles to call for medical assistance; a woman pushing a pram and an elderly man who’d been on his smallholding when the cloud hit. Both had been treated on the spot by an ambulance crew from Wisbech. The storm itself had been short-lived, rising about ten miles east, dying out immediately after it had passed over Brimstone Hill. The NFU man had some insurance claim figures for one of the farms. Dryden used the desk blotter to conjure up a headline figure of £400,000. Disappointed, he redid the maths until he got to £500,000.

  He heard footsteps on the stairs. A sign on the outer door invited members of the public to drop in with news snippets, advertising copy, or just to talk to a reporter. Dryden always felt a newspaper that hid behind bricks and mortar was doomed to be irrelevant. At his first evening paper, in York, the front counter at street-level had been linked to the newsroom by an internal – public – telephone. Anyone could walk in off the street and ring the newsroom and ask for a reporter to pop down for a chat. It had been an archaic system but it had brought in a steady stream of decent news stories. In modern newspapers reporters hid behind their computer screens. Dryden was determined to be the real-life ‘face’ of The Crow in Brimstone Hill, even if that meant the occasional twenty minutes spent discussing a prize-winning turnip with an allotment gardener.

  A man appeared at the door with a raincoat over his arm, neatly folded. Around his neck hung a pair of expensive high-powered binoculars. Dryden had seen him about in Brimstone Hill but they’d never talked.

  The first thing Dryden noted was the aftershave. Something expensive and subtle but very distinctive, which strangely zigzagged in his mi
nd so that he thought of coumarin, the extract of Buffalo Grass which held the aroma of new-mown hay.

  ‘Jock Donovan,’ he said. If he’d ever had a Scottish accent it was gone now. The voice was mid-Atlantic, oddly state-less. ‘Someone said it was OK just to walk in?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dryden, offering him the seat.

  Rather than walking to it, Donovan grabbed it by the back and swung it round behind him with an easy grace. Despite his age, and Dryden estimated he was at least in his late seventies, he somehow retained the echo of a youthful physical power. Perhaps it was in the steady gaze, the ability to hold the head still and meet Dryden eye-to-eye.

  ‘Tea?’

  Donovan nodded, then produced from a rucksack a hefty black machine, like a CD player or tape deck, with a microphone attached.

  They swapped mindless banter about sugar, milk and Earl Grey. Then they talked about the murder in the churchyard. Donovan said he’d heard it was triads – Chinese criminal gangs – fighting a war. Dryden noted that his skin was tanned, and very clean – that kind of steam-blasted clean which comes from taking two showers a day in a wet room. He asked him whether he was a birdwatcher. Was that why he carried the binoculars?

  ‘Birds? Sometimes. I’m interested in whatever I can see.’

  ‘Catch the storm?’ asked Dryden, pouring boiling water into mugs.

  ‘I watched it come in,’ he said. And then Dryden did see an echo of those Scottish roots. Not in the voice, but in the face: asymmetrical eyes, one higher, wider open, and the mouth, down on the right side, up on the left – both indicative of a dip into the Northern gene pool. Or were they cultural attributes? The result of generations of hard, rational Scottish inquiry?

  Donovan leaned forward and picked up a framed picture of Eden on the desktop. ‘How old?’

  ‘Fifteen months; he’s not walking yet. He’s lazy – like me.’

  ‘Don’t worry. He will; he’s just a slow starter.’

  Dryden didn’t think he was worried. But then why had he said it? As a child he’d been tearing about at ten months, according to family legend. Perhaps he should mention that to Laura, by way of contrast. When did she take her first steps? They could compare notes.

  A train ran past over the level crossing outside, the bass rumble of the freight trucks set against the high treble of couplings squealing. Donovan turned his head aside, as if the noise upset him. He wore a white shirt, crisp, linen and ironed, and a tie – a rarity in Brimstone Hill. This tie was blue with a crest featuring an elephant over a motto.

  ‘How can I help?’ asked Dryden, giving him the tea in his best mug with the Ipswich Town crest.

  Donovan lived a few hundred yards up the Ely Road, at Brimstone House, a white, Artexed 1920s gem with a flat roof. Perhaps Dryden knew it? It was difficult to miss. Dryden recalled Crittall ironwork, and those corner windows which look two ways.

  ‘It must be great,’ said Dryden. ‘Having light from two sides in a room.’

  ‘It is,’ said Donovan. ‘There are fourteen rooms.’

  So far their conversation had been easy, relaxed, but now it seemed to have come to a sudden stop. Part of the journalist’s trade was an ability to keep people talking.

  ‘Is there a story behind the tie?’ he asked.

  Donovan touched it, running the material between finger and thumb. ‘Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. I signed up in nineteen fifty-two. Just in time for Korea. The Battle of the Hook, that was all ours. I was just a soldier, a rifleman. I ended up in a trench one night with two of my mates. The Chinese sent over five thousand shells. By morning I was the only one left alive.’

  His voice was very smooth, and there appeared to be absolutely no emotion in it at all. Dryden was struck by two thoughts: first that a simple question about a tie could lead within a few words to a scene of literal carnage; and second that only yesterday he’d stood in front of that oddly moving memorial to two brothers who’d died in that very same forgotten war.

  ‘That’s what they told me but I don’t remember,’ said Donovan. ‘Never have. I count my blessings.’

  Outside they heard an ice-cream van jingle as it parked outside the school for break time.

  ‘There’s a memorial in the local churchyard for the Korean War, two brothers.’

  ‘That’s it. The Davenport brothers – they were my mates. They were in my trench. They didn’t make it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Dryden.

  In 1954 he’d been demobbed, said Donovan, and he’d come to Brimstone Hill to see the parents of his dead comrades. Army procedure: visit the relatives, tell them it all happened very quickly, that they felt nothing, that they were heroes. ‘Heroes,’ said Donovan with glittering eyes.

  The father of the brothers had died. There was a sister; just a girl of ten or eleven. The mother made him welcome, gave him tea.

  He sniffed the brew Dryden had given him, then looked round the room as if suddenly aware of where he was.

  ‘For her, for the mother, I was a link to the boys she’d lost. She offered me a job there and then – just labouring. There’s a tied cottage down by the road and I had a room there. It was what I needed because I was in a mess. They’ve got fancy names for it now. Which way up you look at it doesn’t really matter – I was a bag of nerves, so working on the land was good for me. I stayed for two summers. It’s always been home, this place, since then.’

  Dryden drank his own tea and tried not to look at the strange machine with its microphone.

  Donovan was still thinking about his two lost comrades. Dryden could see it in his eyes, that ‘living-in-the-past’ stare. Not quite the ‘thousand-yard stare’ of the traumatized soldier, but only a few yards short.

  ‘I tried to get the boys’ name on the war memorial, the one by the church. They wouldn’t do it, the powers-that-be; it was just for the world wars, they said. As if we didn’t fight for our country. So I paid for a wooden plaque which went up inside the church. That was in the sixties. When I came back here to retire, after my wife died, I thought even more that they’d been treated like second-class soldiers. All of us had. So I paid for a memorial myself. Just for them: granite, with lead lettering. Born in nineteen thirty-three – both of them. Which is rare, of course – they weren’t twins, you see, just born in the same year. One in January, one in November. But they wouldn’t tell anyone who was younger, who was older. That would have been like breaking ranks.’

  ‘Do you visit the grave?’

  ‘Couple of times a week, usually at dusk. I don’t leave flowers. I don’t take anything. I bear witness. It’s not a big deal. No one else goes, not even the sister; she says she’d rather forget. That’s fine. She doesn’t even shoot any more because it reminds her of them. And she was a fine shot, as good as them. I don’t go out there to remember. In fact, it’s the opposite. It helps me not to remember. I’ve never remembered …’

  His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

  ‘As I say, I can’t remember. Not that night. It’s a cliché, I know; my generation, we don’t seek to deal with our problems. We just get on with life. Touching the memorial stone helps. I can live another day.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve bought the plot next to the memorial, so one day I’ll stop out there.’

  He’d gone too far, Dryden could see that, as he watched him suddenly gulp.

  ‘Do you want me to write a story about them? Is there an anniversary, of the battle, of the day they died? Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘No. I don’t want a story about that.’ He looked appalled that Dryden could be so stupid. ‘No. I came about the noise.’

  He pressed a button on the machine. A noise played. A kind of whistling crackle. It brought an image to Dryden’s mind of a beach, empty of people, but dotted with miniature toy windmills turning. ‘Kites,’ said Donovan. ‘The farmers use ’em to keep birds off the fields when they’ve sowed seed. They’re shaped like birds of prey and they keep the pigeons off. They’re all round my place. There’s
a factory out on Euximoor Fen that makes the things, tests them as well. They’ll fly twenty-four-seven now, cos they’re so light. It’s all high-tech.’

  ‘Where is this factory exactly?’

  ‘Coupla miles to the west. The old airfield at Barrowby. There’s a line of industrial units and they’ve got one of those. But the kites are all over the place. They make that crackling noise a lot, the one you can hear, but that’s OK, I can live with that. I’m not some nutter. It’s the other noise. A kind of high-pitched call. I can’t sleep through it; I can’t think through it either. It’s a torment.’

  ‘Tell me more about the noise. What kind of high-pitched call?’

  ‘Like the squeak from a rusty gate – but higher – and pulsing, at a set interval of two or three seconds.’

  ‘I can’t hear it,’ said Dryden.

  Donovan turned off the machine. ‘I know, but I can. I complained to the council and they gave me this machine to monitor the noise but it doesn’t show up. I think the frequency is too high. It picks up the crackling, but that’s all. See?’

  He gave Dryden a paper printout which had, presumably, rolled out of the machine. It was like the record of an earthquake produced by a seismograph. It showed a jittery line, but there were no real peaks.

  ‘Tractors, combines, all the heavy stuff, that’s no bother to me. I live in the country; I don’t expect silence, especially at harvest. But this, this is in here.’ He poked a finger at his temple, and when he took his finger away the pressure left a mark.

  ‘Perhaps it’s tinnitus?’

  ‘Doctor says my hearing’s perfect. He thinks maybe I can hear higher frequencies than normal people. That I’m sensitive to the higher spectrum because of damage to my ears in the war. That’s possible, isn’t it?’

  ‘What about the kite company, did you try them?’ countered Dryden.

  ‘Answerphone. I left a message, and they never got back. I thought you could help. I have to do something because it’s very difficult to live with. In fact, it’s not possible to live with it. It can’t go on.’