by Jim Kelly
‘What did he do?’
‘Made himself a cocktail. Barium and tonic. Mixed it up himself after stealing the key to the fume cupboard. Then he sat down and wrote emails to his parents, friends, a girl. Left them on his laptop screen filed under LAST MESSAGES. Then he drank the barium. The cleaning woman found him, unconscious, and when she sat him up he vomited the poison. He was carried off to the sick bay while they got a doctor in. When they got back he was gone.’
‘Shit. Name?’
‘Julian Amhurst. But everyone called him Stinks, because of the chemistry. Children, they don’t really have that much imagination, do they? Everyone’s really worried he’ll try again. The head told the school assembly that they were looking for him and everyone was worried. So they’re all looking. Parents have split up, by the way – the boy lives with the mother in Ely and the father’s out your way. Welney Reach.’
Dryden had done a Golden Wedding there, a hamlet of half-a-dozen interwar houses, with bank-top views of Ely.
There was something in Vee’s tone of voice which suggested Julian’s plight had affected her personally. ‘Are you OK with this, Vee? I can write it.’
‘No, no. Sorry, I knew the family years ago. Julian’s dad was in the Labour Party. He used to bring him to meetings and he’d play on the floor while we talked nonsense about trade union rights. I suspect the interest in politics was a cover for a lack of interest in being at home with Julian’s mum. The child was just obsessed with whatever he had: Meccano, Lego. I suppose that’s the root of numbers – shapes. A nice, predictable, safe world to escape to.’
‘Is there a picture?’ asked Dryden.
‘From the school magazine, in a white coat. He’s smiling, of course – why is that? The tragic ones are always smiling.’
‘OK. Here’s what we do, Vee. Boil it down to one par, no more, but put it on the front with the picture. Don’t mention the suicide attempt, just plain missing teenager, parents worried, et cetera. Get Josie to blow up the face so we can see him.’
Dryden thought of what the kid must have been through to drink barium, to actually feel the poison flowing down his throat. The sun shone in through the window of his office, and a brimstone fluttered into the room. Somehow it gave Dryden hope. He thought of young Julian out on the fen, perhaps, battling with demons. The wandering scholar.
He had an idea. ‘And add this, Vee – The Crow will pay one hundred pounds to any reader assisting police to find Julian Amhurst. Cash.’
Sometimes, he thought, it was fun being editor.
SIXTEEN
Humph parked the Capri on the verge 100 yards beyond the school. The cabbie had a packed lunch which he picked up every day from the Brimstone Café: full English breakfast bap, a pork pie, an avocado pear, and a packet of cheese and onion crisps with a pickled egg in it – a fen delicacy. Lunchtime for Humph was three o’clock, allowing time for two (occasionally three) breakfasts in the run-up to the midday meal. He had a thermos which the café staff filled for him with the soup of the day. Today it was cabbage and kale, so he’d given it to Dryden. Eating inside the cab, Humph left only the passenger-side window open, as the wind was still blowing a hot gale.
The cabbie had parked facing directly west so that they had a clear view of the seventeen turbines of Coldham’s Farm, now effectively reduced to fifteen. A thin wisp of smoke still rose from the stump of the burnt-out turbine. Humph had expressed the hope, having missed the blaze, that it might spread to the others. But they were all now stationary, locked still, blades feathered to offer no resistance to the wind. So the cabbie put a draughts board on the passenger seat and set out the counters, remembering precisely the latest position in the game he was playing with Grace. A game he was losing.
Dryden sat on the hood of the cab, partly blocking Humph’s view. He swigged from a bottle of water. The laptop on his knees was set at an angle so that he could see the screen. He’d managed to do a quick bit of research on agricultural kites, the object of Jock Donovan’s noise complaint. He’d promised himself he’d make that call to the kite factory at Barrowby Drove. It wasn’t the biggest story on his list but it was only Wednesday. He had time, especially for an old soldier.
And there was something about the story, or rather Jock Donovan, which intrigued him. He’d once written a piece for the daily paper in York about noise pollution which had helped get him the job on The News, on Fleet Street. The paper had printed a stream of complaints from residents in a certain area of the city known as Huntington Road about a mysterious night-time noise which became known as the ‘Huntington Hum’. The usual suspects had all been set aside: power lines, local businesses, aircraft. Then they’d got the Department for the Environment in to do a study. Dryden had been given a sneak preview of the final report, which concluded that the problem wasn’t a noise at all, but the lack of noise.
York was just too quiet. No motorways, no twenty-four-hour factories, no all-night clubs or bars, no high-rise buildings brimming with heating systems, no multi-storey car parks, no subways, no all-night transport. After midnight it was pretty much devoid of noise. So there was no background sound at all, no so-called ‘white noise’, to drown out deep-rooted vibrations that in most towns and cities nobody ever heard: water mains, power lines, the river flowing, a single HGV on a distant road.
The real fascination for Dryden had been the psychological factors identified in the report. The authors had reviewed the science on human hearing. Once the brain found a noise, it could lock on to it like a self-tuning radio, then amplify it, so that the victim’s mind became a giant receiver, a dish taking incoming signals. A large minority of those suffering from tinnitus, for example, were simply amplifying their own body noises: blood flowing, the heart beating. It terrified Dryden, the discovery that you could bring that nightmare upon yourself. So much for the sound of silence.
He had sympathy for Jock Donovan whichever way the story played out: either he was being tormented by a real noise, or his brain was searching out some tiny, insignificant sound and then relaying it back to his over-sensitive brain. Or, perhaps the worst outcome of all – he had tinnitus. Which meant he had a noise in his head which would torment him forever.
Agricultural kites were, according to his twenty minutes of online research, big business. Fact: a kite in the shape of a hawk keeps pigeons and other birds off the fields. The government estimate for bird damage to UK crops was £450m a year. Several high-tech companies were trying to develop kites that would stay up in very low wind speeds. Mostly kites were silent, but those with ‘tails’ did flutter. The biggest operator was Helikites, specializing in kites built round small helium balloons. The company on Barrowby Airfield was a newcomer, a Cambridge Silicon Fen spin-off called Silent Hawk.
Clearly, for Jock Donovan, not silent enough.
Dryden looked up. Above him, a hundred feet high, was a kite. Hawk-shaped, silent, almost stationary. One in the field to the north had several ‘tails’, each one twisting, emitting a crackling like fire. That wasn’t Donovan’s problem: he could live with the tail fluttering, it was the high-pitched wailing call that was robbing him of sleep.
Whatever their sonic qualities, there was little doubt the kites worked. The field on the far side of the road was weedless, studded with lines of green shoots, salad crops just appearing. There wasn’t a real bird in sight.
There was a landline number on the Silent Hawk website, plus a mobile number and an email address. Dryden ran into a message service on the landline, so he switched to the mobile. A man answered and Dryden said quickly he was press, and that he was following up a complaint of noise pollution. There was a pause, then: ‘I’m Doctor James Barnard. I’m in charge of research and development. The kites are silent, Mr Dryden. A few have the tails which crackle, but that’s supposed to happen.’
‘I know. The man who’s complaining is fine with the tails. As I said, it’s a high-pitched note that’s the problem. And I admit it is a note I can’t hear. I’m about a
couple of miles away from your unit on Barrowby Drove and there are lots of kites flying and they’re silent. But Mr Donovan isn’t making it up – at least I don’t believe he is. I think he may be picking up a specific high-frequency noise from another source. But it is causing him a lot of distress. He’s an old soldier, from the Korean War, and I said I’d help. It would give him some peace of mind to rule the kites out.’
Dr Barnard asked Dryden to write a letter or send an email. He added that the fluttering tail noise came from some experimental kites and would not be a long-term feature of Silent Hawk’s test programme. Dryden got the impression Dr Barnard wasn’t listening very carefully to what was being said.
‘The fluttering isn’t the problem. This is a high-pitched, intermittent, but regular call.’
‘Well, that’s not possible,’ said Dr Barnard, which was an interesting response. Not impossible.
‘He’s highly sensitive to noise,’ offered Dryden.
‘That’s interesting.’
‘Why?’
‘We do have experimental kites aloft at the moment which emit a noise pitched well beyond the range of human hearing – hence our brand name, Silent Hawk. That’s our USP: we scare birds with a silent noise. It’s designed to mimic the call of several raptors. But as I say, it’s not audible to humans.’
‘Mr Donovan’s from Scotland, not Alpha Centauri. He can hear something, believe me.’
‘How far away from Barrowby Airfield does he live?’
‘Just under two miles, according to my OS map. But that’s from the factory unit, and some of the kites are much nearer.’
Dryden could hear paperwork being shuffled. ‘We’ve had no complaints from anyone else in Brimstone Hill.’
Again, he’d moved on from the possible/impossible issue, without actually addressing it.
‘The kites are silent,’ repeated Dr Barnard.
‘Mr Donovan lives in the large art deco house near Christ Church. Perhaps you know it?’ That was a detail which would work in his favour, thought Dryden, because it implied Donovan had money, and influence, and couldn’t just be dismissed. Most of all, it meant he could afford a lawyer. ‘I can’t just ignore him,’ said Dryden. ‘I’ll probably do a story. I thought it was only fair to touch base.’
Dryden heard a slight inhalation. It was an effective tactic, telling people the story was inevitable, giving them the stark choice between being part of that story or being part of the follow-up.
‘Look,’ said Dr Barnard. ‘I’m out at Barrowby now on a regular site visit. We could test fly a few of the kites and see if he can pick out the experimental ones, the ones emitting the ultrasound call. He won’t, which will prove my point. But I’m willing to give him the chance.’
Dryden checked his watch: ‘OK. Well, I’m here, you’re there. If he’s about, then why not now?’
Dr Barnard said yes, but that he’d have to contact Silent Hawk’s owners in Cambridge, although he was ninety-nine per cent certain they’d be relaxed about a test. It was an issue, it needed dealing with. They were either Silent Hawk or they weren’t. If there were any problems he’d text Dryden, but otherwise he’d expect him at Barrowby Airfield within the hour.
Humph tapped on the windscreen and offered him another cup of the cabbage and kale soup. It was hot, tasted of iron, and made Dryden feel instantly nourished.
He rang Jock Donovan. According to one of Dryden’s OS maps, there was a footpath to Barrowby Airfield from the back of Donovan’s house. They could walk there together. Dryden didn’t give him time to make any other arrangement, because he wanted to see where he lived. He said he’d be round in thirty minutes and cut the line.
Dryden scanned the horizon and watched the smoke rising from the gutted wind turbine, catching the wind. It made him think of a battlefield and of Donovan’s traumatic time as a rifleman in Korea. He tapped ‘Battle of the Hook’ into Google on the laptop.
What had Donovan called it: the Forgotten War? The casualty figures made Dryden’s skin go cold even under the baking sky: 180,000 dead on the UN side, up to 750,000 Russians, Chinese and North Koreans, plus more than two million civilians. It occurred to Dryden just how bitter he’d be if he’d fought in such a war and come home to find that hardly anyone knew it had been waged. It seemed to be a war without a timeslot, buried somewhere in the pages of modern history. His disorientation only increased when he found a description of the battle on a military history site. It sounded like the First World War: trenches, artillery bombardments, hand-to-hand fighting. The ‘Dukes’ had repelled a force five times superior in numbers during the battle. They were given the battle honour: The Hook. He thought of Jock Donovan’s mundane description of what he could recall of the battle. The 5,000 shells that had rained down on his section of the front line. And the realization that came with the dawn: I was the only one alive.
SEVENTEEN
Brimstone House was alabaster white, a curved wing with long Crittall windows, and a two-storey central entrance with tapering vertical lines which reminded Dryden of an Odeon cinema. The paintwork around windows and doors and along a balcony rail was a very light green. The garden, full of flowering bushes, stood in relief against the building itself. Over the door was the name of the house, stencilled in the concrete, with the date: 1931.
Donovan was at the door before Dryden got up the path. ‘Come through. Excuse, you know, the mess. I live alone.’
The hallway, wooden floored, ran straight ahead. The amount of light funnelling down and through the house was blinding. There was nothing on the white walls, nothing on the floors; no rugs, no carpets.
They passed two rooms off the hall. Both were almost entirely devoid of furniture, but both had obvious practical uses. One was a toilet, all steel and enamel, with a bidet. The second was an office: one desk, a wide-screen computer, a printer, and a clock which appeared to show the time in New York, London and Sydney. Dryden saw the word ORIENTO in blue letters on the face. And under that word in smaller letters: Established 1962.
The main room had a sofa, a flat-screen TV, and speakers. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out across the Fens.
‘I watch sport,’ said Donovan, as if he needed to explain the presence of anything in the house that wasn’t wall or floorboard. ‘I’ve got Sky One, Two, Three and Four. The disc is on the roof but you can’t see it from the street. The council wouldn’t let me put it up anywhere on the front because the house is listed. Grade two.’
‘It’s quite something,’ said Dryden. ‘I’ve never seen so much light indoors.’
‘I like space. I’ve lived a lot in Japan, Korea, with work. They do the light thing really well, but we’re rubbish. Dark and dingy, that’s our forte.’
The main wall held a single picture, a photograph of an eastern city full of pagodas and lakes, Buddhas and intricate willow-pattern bridges, all in a startling Technicolor photograph.
‘Kyongju,’ said Donovan. The twisted syllables seemed to fall easily from his mouth. ‘They call it the museum without walls. South Korea’s a great country. Great people.’
‘You visited the city in the war?’
‘There was a battle there, fighting on the outskirts. We were held in reserve miles back, so we didn’t see any action. I’ve been back many times, always for work. It’s an incredible city. You been?’ Donovan didn’t wait for an answer to his question. There was a boot room at the back of the house and he led the way in.
‘You didn’t say what kind of work you did,’ said Dryden, as Donovan selected a pair of heavy shoes, then a hat.
‘Just business,’ he said. ‘You do what you know. I picked up some Korean in the war, so I built on that. I can speak the language pretty well now. So: I was in trade, import export. Boring, really. Too boring to talk about.’
The boot room was ultra-modern, more in keeping with the Chelsea-on-Sea set of the north Norfolk coast than the Fens. Wooden benches, a shower-room, lots of expensive outdoor wear, a rack of binoculars. This room, of a
ll those he’d seen, felt lived-in.
The house itself wasn’t a surprise to Dryden; it was the fact that it was the house of a man who must be nearly eighty years of age. Because what was missing was the past – his past, any hint that he’d accrued objects, or mementoes, or tokens; anything that might spark a memory.
‘I spend most of my time out. Walking. Watching. The skies are good,’ said Donovan, standing, a hand to the small of his back.
The garden was all grass and mowed in those neat alternate strips which drove Dryden to despair, as if someone had some demented scheme to tame nature. He wondered if that was why Donovan liked the Fens, because it was man-made, and appeared to be a mathematical landscape.
They set off along a well-worn path. It was two miles to the old airfield and the industrial units at Barrowby Airfield where Silent Hawk had its factory. It took them forty minutes, zigzagging over the fields, quickly finding themselves under some of the flying kites.
They reached a rare fen stile where the old man stopped. He took the step up and listened. ‘I can hear it, the noise. Actually, it’s not bad here. Less piercing than usual. But it’s there. Can you hear it?’
Dryden shook his head.
‘I remembered something, too – that I’d heard something like it before. When I was a kid in Glasgow we had a doctor come to the school. Like the nurse that looked for nits, but more scary. They had a machine for testing hearing. They played these notes into your ear and you had to say what you could hear. He’d start low, then gradually rise. In the end there’d be just these tiny, high-pitched, fleeting notes. It’s just like one of those notes. One of the top ones, almost beyond range.’