The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  There was a tremble in Donovan’s neck which was making his skull shake very slightly.

  Dryden thought that it took a lot for a man like Donovan to admit he couldn’t live with something.

  ‘The military doctor back when I was demobbed said my startle reaction was bad, on account of the shells. I don’t remember the shells. But they must have made a noise and they said at the time, in the field hospital, that I would be hyper-sensitive to noise for a while. Maybe six months. That was more than sixty years ago.’

  He looked around the room, waiting for something to make a noise. Dryden thought about Brimstone House and its fourteen empty rooms. Shell shock, he thought. It was the summer of 2014 and he was sitting opposite a man with shell shock.

  TEN

  Dryden’s eyewitness account of finding the body of Sima Shuba was running on the Press Association wires by early evening; lifted word-for-word from the paper but credited in full to the Ely Express. Then the calls started: Fleet Street news desks checking if it was safe to lift the story. Dryden gave them carte blanche but asked, nicely, if they’d squeeze in a mention of the source. A few would, most wouldn’t. Journalism was a tough trade, so the majority would lift the facts and run it straight. The ‘crucifixion’ angle, plus the link into the Chinese gangs, was enough to guarantee the story what reporters liked to call ‘legs’: it would run and run. The BBC rang from Cambridge and said they were on their way out to do a ‘day two’ story from the scene. They too would lift Dryden’s copy, but in the blur and buzz of TV he’d just become an eyewitness who found the body.

  At five he shut up the office and headed for the mini-market. There was a bench outside where young mothers gathered with pushchairs to talk and smoke. Two of them were reading the first edition. Dryden bought a paper but then made himself pause on the way out and read the notices up in the window, the board advertising old beds for sale, lost cats, or offering babysitting services. His first paper, in Bedford, had once sent him to a one-horse town for a week to gather stories. The increasingly desperate efforts to find anything newsworthy had driven him to despair. A car had backfired on his last day and he’d seriously considered interviewing the driver. Then he’d stopped and read a postcard in a newsagent’s window:

  LOST: pet rattlesnake called Charlie. Venomous. If seen please ring 01235 778778. Do not pick it up.

  It wasn’t a Pulitzer prize-winning tale, but it was a story, and it had made a page lead in the paper and nearly £300 in lineage to the national tabloids. The hunt for Charlie had lasted ten days and by the climax, when Charlie was cornered in a local back-garden paddling pool, there were two TV crews there to capture the historic moment.

  Dryden’s eye flitted over the notices now but there was nothing new.

  As he was about to leave he looked back at the counter. The woman who had sold him his paper was engaged in a text conversation and hadn’t looked up when she took his money. Above her head a CCTV screen showed a picture of the shop’s alcohol aisle. The coroner had said that the late Spider Russell had bought cans of beer from the shop, not over the counter, but out the back. He wondered how and where Spider and his mate Archie had got the moonshine to supplement the cans.

  There was a spotless white-and-blue panda car at the kerb, the passenger door open. At the wheel was PC Stokely Powell, one arm swinging out the driver’s window, the Rolex catching the light.

  ‘Your friend the cab driver’s sitting outside The Brook with a pint,’ said Powell. ‘Shall we join him?’ The request was unhurried and friendly, although Dryden could see that he had a copy of the Ely Express folded into the glove compartment. One of Powell’s eyes seemed to be permanently watery, and he brushed a tear away now, with the heel of his palm.

  Dryden got in and let the law drive him the 200 yards to the pub. They passed Christ Church and saw a single squad car parked outside, police tape still looped over the gates. Dryden thought how quickly the excitement drains from the scene of a crime once the body has been removed.

  Humph was sitting at a picnic table with a book open in front of him. The cabbie had taken to the I-SPY series with enthusiasm and had just bought himself the edition on British trees.

  Powell went inside to get drinks. As the policeman opened the bar door Dryden heard the buzz of talk from within and guessed that the single topic of conversation would be the murder at Christ Church. Powell’s entrance killed the noise level dead.

  The pub was run by two Portuguese men, both ex-migrant pickers. They’d been seen holding hands during long country walks. The locals were willing to overlook this scandal as long as they kept the pub open.

  Humph studied his book. ‘How’s the runaway?’ asked Dryden.

  The cabbie shrugged. ‘She wants to stay with her grandma till Sunday. She’s got what she wants. She won’t say why she doesn’t want to go home. Apparently she’s happy here, although you could have fooled me.’

  ‘So you don’t believe her?’ he asked, sitting down.

  ‘Not really. I spoke to her mother. This barbie when she fell out with her stepfather and his boys was weeks ago. It’s something else that’s spooked her. Maybe she’ll tell her mum, but she’s taking her time.’

  ‘She might tell you,’ offered Dryden. ‘If you asked nicely.’

  Humph produced a small pair of field glasses and looked east. ‘She should go home to her little sister and her mum. That’s where she belongs.’

  ‘You don’t go home; why should she?’ said Dryden. The cabbie had lived alone since his divorce, in a rented house, yet he slept most nights in the cab. It was one of the things he shared with Dryden: a fear of domesticity.

  Humph scratched his Ipswich Town top. ‘I’m a grown-up. I’m allowed to do what I like.’

  ‘Where’s Boudicca?’

  ‘I left her with Mum. Grace likes taking care of her. It’s something to worry about that’s not her, that’s outside her.’ He pointed across the fen at a distant lonely tree. ‘Sorbus Aria – The Whitebeam.’

  Dryden followed his eyes. ‘Right. You can walk about and look for trees, you know. They don’t run away if you get near. It’s not a Big Game hunt.’

  Humph had the glasses up to his eyes again, whistling.

  Powell came back with a pint of orange squash for himself and a half of cider for Dryden. The Brook had access to a local apple press. The resulting liquid was milky and so dry it seemed to suck every particle of moisture from the body of the drinker. If Dryden held it to his ear he was just able to detect a slight effervescence. The brewers had no idea of its alcoholic strength but wrote six per cent on the label. Dryden judged they were out by a factor of at least two.

  The three drank in companionable silence. The pub looked out on the open fen from a deck, which held a gas-fired barbecue machine. In the far distance they could see lorries on the high bank of the road to Wisbech. A train trundled over the level crossing carrying sand. Humph counted the forty-one trucks out loud, then lifted his legs out from under the picnic table. ‘Back to work.’

  They watched him walk to the cab and lower himself into the front of the Capri, set the seat back, and close his eyes.

  ‘Life in the fast lane,’ said Dryden.

  Powell had brought his copy of the Ely Express with him. ‘Just an update,’ he said, laying a palm across the paper. ‘There’ll be some arrests tonight in King’s Lynn. A bit of a sweep through the vice industry. CID’s pretty certain this is gang warfare, probably one gang falling out with itself. At the moment that means it’s strictly limited gang warfare, which is where everybody wants it to stop.’

  ‘What’s at stake?’ asked Dryden. ‘What were they fighting over? It’s not a few hundred quids’ worth of lead off the church roof, is it?’

  Powell licked his upper lip. ‘No.’ The policeman seemed to deliberately relax his muscles, sinking slightly, his shoulders dropping, and Dryden wondered if it was a tactic to dissipate stress: ‘But the scrap metal trade is big money. Our information, and this is off the
record for now, is that one of the triad gangs in Lynn had this trade sewn up. We’re talking about bulk sales of stolen metal. Iron, steel, aluminium, lead, zinc, copper. Ten years ago the legal copper price was a thousand dollars a tonne. Now you’d get eleven thousand a tonne, and more. The current thinking is that this triad gang sent a foot soldier up here to discourage some members of the gang branching out on their own.’

  ‘And the crew on the roof didn’t take kindly to this discouragement?’

  ‘Right. They clearly felt that Brimstone Hill, the West Fens, was their patch and they had a right to defend it. They made their point, pretty graphically.’ He drained his orange juice, pivoting his hand to tip the glass, his elbow anchored to the picnic table top.

  ‘One thing,’ said Dryden. ‘I went to the coroner’s court this morning. Second case up after our victim on the cross was the bodies they found in the culvert earlier this year.’

  ‘McLeish and Russell.’

  ‘Ryder says it’s moonshine that was killing them and that the floodwater simply intervened. He said it’s your job to find the illicit still that’s producing the stuff. Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed to suggest you’d not been as interested as you should be in the case?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well. The police.’ Dryden spread his arms, indicating the deserted streets of downtown Brimstone Hill. ‘That looks like you for now.’

  Powell laughed, and for the first time Dryden thought it wasn’t a genuine response. There was something wary in the eyes, too, as if he’d really like to talk about something else.

  ‘It’s a turf war,’ said Powell. ‘Health and safety, trading standards, CID in Wisbech, us on the ground. Interpol. Everyone’s just a little bit responsible. Which means nobody is. It’s sorted now – we’ll find the coroner his illicit still. We’re close enough. It just needs a few pieces of the jigsaw to complete the picture.’

  PC Stokely Powell had just told a lie, thought Dryden. He didn’t know why, but he was pretty sure a copper of his calibre wouldn’t let bureaucracy stand in the way of closing down a poisonous distillery on his own patch. There was a subtext to what he’d said, and Dryden had no idea what it might be.

  Dryden deliberately let the silence stretch out, wondering if Powell had sensed he sounded less than convincing. The sun was just setting beyond the roof of Christ Church. Dryden half-closed his eyes so that diamonds sparkled in his eyelashes.

  ‘Before all this blew up I was planning to ask for a favour,’ said Powell. He covered his face with both hands, then drew them away, stretching his skin. ‘This is incredibly bad timing for you and me. The last thing I need is to be caught up in another case when I’ve got a gang war on my patch. The last thing you need is another story. This can keep – but not for long, Dryden. I need publicity, and I need it quickly. It’s a cold case. Interested?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Dryden, although he couldn’t help feeling that this new story had been introduced, in part, to divert attention from further conversation on the subject of the illicit still. The police manipulated the press, that was a fact of life, but that didn’t mean Dryden had to enjoy the experience. ‘I’ll get us a refill,’ he said.

  At the bar Dryden stood looking at a large framed black-and-white picture of Brimstone Hill taken, according to a scrawled whitewash note, in 1889. He admitted to himself that he had an almost unhealthy interest in cold cases, so for now he was prepared to let drop the subject of the trade in lethal moonshine. There was something about an unsolved crime which seemed to intensify with the passing years, as if it became more vivid, less mundane. For the victim, time simply replaced the fear and trauma of the moment with an accumulation of bitterness, or a determination for revenge.

  Back at the picnic table Powell had a briefcase open: worn, light leather, classy. He took out a newspaper cutting from The Daily Telegraph, Friday, 13 June 1999. The headline read:

  US-STYLE ‘HOT’ BURGLARY LEAVES

  ONE DEAD IN FENLAND ART SPREE

  ‘“Hot burglary” was what they called it back then. I guess they’d go for house invasion now. Breaking in when the owners are home, and using violence to intimidate. It’s almost always a gang crime; they go mob-handed to maximise the threat. You’ve read In Cold Blood?’

  Powell shook his wrist so that the gold watchstrap jangled, a mannerism Dryden had noted before. He couldn’t decide if it betrayed stress or a need to draw attention to the bling.

  ‘Sure,’ said Dryden. Although brought up in the Fens, Dryden had spent most of his working life in London, which was where he’d have been in June, 1999. Dimly he recalled this cold case, and as Powell had pointed out, the echoes of Truman Capote’s classic true-life crime novel In Cold Blood, which told the story of the brutal killing of a Kansas farmer called Herbert Cutter and his wife, and two of their children, by two armed robbers.

  ‘That left four dead, of course,’ said Powell. ‘This could have been as bad. They did four properties in one day, a gang of three. First one was at Welney, a cottage. I’ve been down the lane to take a look and you can see why they chose it. There’s nothing else for miles, just the reed beds, the fields, the river. Owner was a widow in her sixties. They just burst in, tied her up. Then they searched the place, every room, clearly looking for something specific. It could have turned nasty because they couldn’t find it, so they asked her straight. She talked. It was right there, in the kitchen, hanging on the wall, so small they’d missed it. And that was all they took, an oil painting eight inches by six.’

  ‘Experts then, art thieves?’

  ‘You’d think.’ Powell used the heel of his palm to clear the watery eye. Dryden wondered how long he’d gone without sleep. With a murder on his patch he must be under pressure to give CID as much of his local knowledge as possible.

  ‘The painting was by an artist called Louis Grimshaw,’ said Powell. ‘His father is more famous – I think Louis was Atkinson’s son. The two of them specialized in nineteenth-century scenes of industrial cities. This one was of Liverpool docks by moonlight. Worth fifteen thousand pounds.’

  Dryden whistled. ‘Not bad in nineteen ninety-nine. A decent’s day’s work by anyone’s standards. How was the woman?’

  ‘They left her tied to the chair. Neighbours found her the next day. She said she’d been screaming for help for six hours. So she wasn’t great. Hospitalized, then released. She never went back to the house, not even to pack her things.’

  One of the Portuguese owners came out to clear their drinks. He talked them through the menu, even though they said they hadn’t come for food. They said they’d think about it.

  Once he was out of earshot Powell took up his story once again.

  ‘Second one was at Friday Bridge. One elderly resident, a man this time, wheelchair bound. A terraced cottage, but the houses on both sides were empty in the day, which is when they called. This time they were after a watercolour. A moonlit scene of the Coliseum in Rome, half-buried in ivy and ancient trees. Victorian artist called Pether. Very collectible. Twenty thousand pounds.’

  ‘So they always recce the house, and they know their art market,’ said Dryden.

  ‘Turns out they’d got hold of an auction room catalogue plus the names and addresses of the owners of each item. Neat trick. So in each case they had the address and then the description of the item. Needless to say, a major breach of security on the part of the auction house. And yes, there was – in retrospect – evidence that they’d visited the scene before the day of the crime.

  ‘Third one was a farmhouse at Upwell. Owners were out but their daughter was upstairs. She panicked when she heard them coming up the stairs so they coshed her, broke her skull. Then they took six paintings, all by an Italian artist of the nineteenth century, a series of rural scenes. Insurance cover was for two thousand pounds.’

  ‘What age was the girl they coshed?’ he asked.

  Powell checked his notes. ‘Fifteen.’

  Dryden pushed the cutting aside and
covered his eyes. Sometimes crime crept under his radar, brought a darkness into his life. He looked down the street towards the school and the crèche.

  ‘Last call of the day was here, out at Barrowby Drove. A big Georgian farmhouse set on its own in a stand of pines. This time things really turned nasty. Broad daylight, Friday evening. The couple – the Calders – were at home. They’d planned to auction one picture, a miniature portrait of the Duchess of Bedford by a Regency artist named Hargreaves. The estimated sale price was thirty-five thousand pounds. They were selling to meet the costs of running the house, which had been in the wife’s family for three generations. He wouldn’t tell them where it was. Point-blank refusal. Our robbers didn’t take it well. They knocked him down with a length of iron piping and then dragged him into the kitchen. He was sixty-eight.

  ‘The wife, she was younger, by ten years or more. She passed out when the violence started. Lucky she did. So that left him. They got his hand and put it on the kitchen table and drove a nine-inch kitchen knife through it, pinned him to the top.’

  Powell left that image to linger for a second.

  ‘I guess they wanted him to talk. But he still wouldn’t tell them where it was. It was a miniature, and the house was a rambling maze of rooms and cupboards. So there was no way they were going to find it. So they did the other hand. Then he passed out. They must have left then, cutting their losses. When the wife came round her husband was dead. There was a lot of blood under the kitchen table. Coroner said heart failure got him before the blood loss, which was probably a blessing.’

  There was a look in Powell’s eyes which reminded Dryden that it took guts to be a copper in the Fens, a black copper even more so. A rarity in West Cambridgeshire, Powell could look forward to rapid promotion. All he needed was to get noticed. Maybe that was what this was about. Solving an infamous cold case after a decade would earn him valuable career points. Playing second-fiddle on a murder investigation which was likely to lead to organized crime looked less promising.