The Funeral Owl
Page 14
Brinks wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘Don’t bother, thank you. Don’t.’
So Dryden went, the fear making his own hackles rise.
NINETEEN
Thursday
Dryden had a dream riddled with images of the Funeral Owl. He was walking by the river, and it was his river, south of Ely, although he’d been overcome by the sense that he’d never been on the path before. It was both somewhere that didn’t exist, and also the most familiar place in his memory: a bend in the river, slow and to the left, and then a pool overhung with willow trees. The pool, and the grotto, were dominated by colour, although he knew that in dreams you don’t see colour. He sensed a deep green, a mixture of water reed and shadow. And inside the depths of the shadows there was the owl, on a branch, looking out at him. Yellow eyes, slow blinking, and drawing him in despite the effort he was making not to walk that way on the towpath, but to turn round and walk away. He’d lift a foot and go to set it down as if to turn back, only to find that in its downward fall the foot would be drawn round, and back, towards the waiting owl.
The dream, at least this remembered sequence of it, had begun in the sunlight. A brimstone butterfly darted above the cowslips. Each step took Dryden further into the shadow, the green-black, cool, shadow, and into an almost underwater world beneath the willows. Briefly, he found himself in a dappled place between the sun and the shadow, but then the light and heat were gone, and he was in the grotto, alone with the owl. From the outside the green-black world under the willow had been impenetrable, but now he could see the surface of the river turning slowly in a circle where the pool had worn away the bank. On the surface was a reflection of the owl on its branch. His eyes penetrated beneath the surface and he discerned the shape of a pike, hung in the water, holding its position in the current as precisely as a hawk in the sky. And beneath the pike a hubcap, still silver, glinting dully. And a sudden shoal of tiddlers, synchronized, moving as one in a three-dimensional design of layers and rows.
And then he saw Grace’s face: Humph’s daughter, the white flesh somehow lit within.
He screamed in his sleep. But the muscles of his face wouldn’t respond and he couldn’t wake himself out of the nightmare. She lay on the muddy bottom of the river, eyes closed, tinted green.
He seemed to get closer without moving his feet. Closer; falling down towards the face, through the water but not feeling its touch, until he was very close, and the whole of her face filled his vision. And at the last moment, just before their faces touched, she opened her eyes, and they were the eyes of the owl.
And then her lips moved and she said one word: ‘ORIENTO.’
He screamed, and this time the muscles did work, so that he was jolted awake and heard an echo of his shout in the narrowboat cabin where he lay.
‘Go back to sleep, it’s just a dream. It’s not real,’ said Laura, finding his head with one hand and laying the palm of it across his forehead.
He got up instead and climbed into the small outside cabin area. In summer he always kept a small gas stove here, so he lit the flame and boiled water in the kettle, standing by it to make sure the whistle didn’t sound.
It was an hour before sunrise and there would have been light in the sky but for a deep mist. There were few trees out here at Barham’s Dock, no willows, no riverside pool possible, because the river ran between high man-made banks, so that the water was above the fields. There was no echo here of his dream, but the image lingered, and he shivered as he made his tea.
Flipping open his laptop, he took comfort from the blue glow. He conjured up a memory of the clock in Jock Donovan’s house, over his desk, the word ORIENTO printed in light blue script: stylish, vague in a way that suggested concealment. He should have checked it out before. He fed the word into Google but got nothing intelligible. So he wrote an email to a friend who had worked with him on The News and moved on to the Financial Times:
Clay,
Hi. A favour. I’m writing a story and a company has come up – at least I think it’s a company. The name is ORIENTO and it was established in 1962. If you need to go to a company search I’m happy to pay the fee. Sorry to call in a favour without prior notice. Hope all is well.
Dryden
PS I need it quick.
He sent it, and listened for the bong that signalled it had flown into the ether. Perched in the bow of the narrowboat, he looked north towards Ely. The effect of the featureless mist, the straight line of the near bank, the oily, motionless water, was to play tricks with the eye, which searched for something, anything, upon which to fix. He found himself at the centre of a grey world, and the feeling of floating within it made him feel nauseous.
Then he heard a voice. A word was said, something banal, like ‘plastic’.
A figure appeared almost immediately, on the far bank, swishing a stick through the grass, rhythmically. A policeman, caped, like one of the Korean heroes, with a peaked cap.
And then an identical figure on his side of the river.
A burst of radio static confirmed the identification, as another sound intruded on the landscape: an outboard motor. It sounded as if the boat was downstream coming up, but Dryden knew that the mist was a bizarre and baffling reflector of noise. And then it appeared, to prove him right, upstream going down. A rubber rescue craft, two divers aboard, ten to fifteen knots, leaving a wide V-shaped wake.
The boat went past. Dryden stepped off the narrowboat and walked quickly along the dockside to the junction with the river. He must have loomed out of the phlegm-coloured mist, because the policeman jumped.
‘Jesus. Where did you come from?’
Dryden laughed and they heard dogs barking. ‘I live here,’ he answered, by way of explanation. ‘I couldn’t sleep. You’ll need to go in along the dock, there’s a footbridge.’
‘Thanks. You’re awake early. Hear something?’
‘No. Just your boat. What’s up?’
This policeman was cap-less and had black hair which was saturated with tiny drops of mist. He shook his head, like a dog, and water flew off. ‘Just routine,’ he lied.
Dryden knew they didn’t search the riverbanks, or the river itself, as routine. ‘You’re looking for the missing boy – Julian Amhurst?’
‘Why would it be him, sir? Did you know him?’
‘No, no. I’m a reporter. The Crow. I remembered the name.’ He looked at the river. ‘He tried to kill himself once. It’s only logical that you might think he’d try again …’
‘And you’ve seen nothing?’
‘No.’
‘Good. No news is good news,’ he said, delighted at the joke, in a cruel way. ‘If you do see anything, ring us, please. Right away.’
‘Do they know why he tried to kill himself? Drinking poison is a bit more than a cry for help.’ Dryden was determined not to be intimidated. It was one of the police methods he despised the most, this inference, that if you weren’t with them, trying to save the desperate life of young Julian, then in some malign way you were against them, obstructing justice.
‘I suppose that’s private,’ said the copper, putting a cap on at last.
‘This isn’t very private is it, dragging the river?’
‘We’re not dragging it. Sir.’
And then he was gone.
Dryden followed him over the wooden bridge across the dock and looked down into the water. There was more light now. He could see green weed and looked away before he could conjure up the white face of his nightmare.
TWENTY
Dryden sat behind the editor’s desk in the main newsroom of The Crow in Ely. Through the open bay window he could hear the sound of market day. The West Tower of the cathedral was just visible over the shop roofs opposite, circled by wheeling crows. A man who always played the accordion under the arch which led to the shopping precinct struck up ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. He had a repertoire of two tunes. One was ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, the other was not, but was otherwise unrecognizable.
It was a first-class newslist.
SPLASH: murder at Brimstone Hill. Police throw dragnet over Lynn Chinatown.
LINK TO TURBINE EXPLODES: metal thieves steal cables and start blaze at Coldham’s Farm.
BYPASS LATEST: county council faces mass demo over plans for flyover close to cathedral.
ELY TEENAGER MISSING: latest on search for Julian Amhurst.
DUST STORM: picture special (on front for West Fen edition).
Miriam Barkham, junior reporter, took notes. She was that rarity, a sexy nerd. She’d picked up three A-levels in maths, computing, and physics and she’d built The Crow a website in less than two weeks. Miriam was one of those people who always feels hot. Dryden’s degree had been in geography and he’d been taught how to estimate cloud coverage in an open sky in terms of eighths: so 8/8 was overcast, 0/8 a perfect summer’s day. He always judged what Miriam was wearing, or rather what she wasn’t wearing, in the same way: today was 2/8 – shorts, a midriff-revealing top, and sandals, one kicked off.
Josie Evans, photographer, completed the staff. Josie had sent in pictures to The Crow for use on the sports page since the age of eleven; mainly football and rugby, under the name Jo Evans. Her work was first rate because she understood the golden rule of press photography: get close, then get closer. She was well built, just short of solid. A long line of boyfriends were referred to only by the name of their favoured football club. She’d gone out with Norwich for a year, but he’d just been dumped for Fulham.
Vee Hilgay finished her run-down on the stories for that week’s paper. It was still only Thursday, so nobody wanted to set anything in stone, but Dryden thought it was important that they all knew what was planned.
Miriam had a wide-screen iMac on her desk and she called up the website to talk them through the digital edition. All the stories would go up on the website on Friday night, giving the actual newspaper several hours’ advantage. So the first edition you could read was always the paper one – a bonus for those prepared to pay the cover price: the loyal, if dwindling, readership.
‘A reader out beyond Brimstone sent us a link to some video of the storm,’ said Miriam. ‘So I’ve put the link in. Plus all your pictures. And a link to the Met Office and the NFU site.’
She listed websites, using the exotic codes of the internet as casually as Dryden used words. She then hit a series of keystrokes without looking at her laptop and wheeled it round so they could see a ‘hit’ counter on the site for last week’s paper. Total: 263,567. More keystrokes. Week 13 – 21,450. The Crow only sold 17,500 copies. The website was the future, even if it made Dryden weep for the days of hot metal and newsprint.
‘I’m gonna tweet on the missing boy, description only,’ added Miriam. ‘We’ll use the Facebook site for the fêtes this week: Wilburton, Isleham and Little Thetford. Nice pics. That should work.’
‘Talking of pictures,’ said Dryden. ‘Josie?’
‘This for the front,’ she said. ‘Best I could get off your phone. I’ve increased the contrast and cleared up some of the pixel wash and all the colour is artificial, but then all colour is.’
It was the Coldham’s Farm turbine alight, in colour. A bright flame, the white turbine, a blue sky. It looked sharp as a pin.
‘Terrific. OK, we’ll go with that. And the splash?’
Josie had a set of black-and-white stills taken in Christ Church graveyard. The best showed the body bag being carried past the headstones of the dead.
‘That’s it,’ said Dryden. ‘So for Ely we’ll take the churchyard with the splash, a pocket version of the wind-farm turbine in the masthead, and the storm on page three. Great stuff. For Brimstone Hill and the West Fens we’ll stick with the splash, but use a nice big pic of the dust storm. The bypass story can go inside. Right, I’m out of here.’
It was all over. The only scheduled meeting of the week and only one rule was sacrosanct: that it had to be over in under twenty minutes. That was one of the great things about being a newspaper editor. It was like being captain of a ship. You were a dictator, never questioned. Dryden’s career had shown him good editors at close range, and bad ones. Good ones took decisions fast – lots of them, even if a percentage were wrong.
TWENTY-ONE
Humph had the Capri bowling along the Fen Motorway beside the Forty Foot Drain heading for Brimstone Hill when they hit a traffic jam. The memory of Dryden driving the cab along the same terrifying stretch of road seemed to belong to another life. The cab came to a stop behind an HGV, brake lights flashing, at the tail-end of a line which seemed to stretch ahead unbroken towards the village of Ramsey Forty Foot; the water on one side, the open fen fields on the other. Dryden, keen to get back on his patch and check in with the police on the murder inquiry, was in no mood to sit and swelter on a back road for hours. Jumping out, he ran down the side of the lorry to the cab at the front.
The window was down, revealing the driver wreathed in cigarette smoke and tattoos.
‘What’s up?’ Dryden asked, realizing only then that he was talking to a woman.
‘Level crossing gates are down at Ramsey, have been for twenty minutes. So, no idea. If I could turn round I would.’ She lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last, which she lobbed out the window.
Humph, anxious to spend an hour with Grace while Dryden worked, had a better idea than sitting tight in a line of traffic. They’d been stationary for seven or eight minutes and not a single vehicle had come past them the other way. So he pulled out on to the right-hand carriageway and hit sixty, then seventy, making the junction in a minute.
The road was now clear to Brimstone Hill, but across country, towards the western horizon, Dryden could see a goods train, a big one, standing still. He counted fifty wagons before he gave up.
His mobile buzzed with an incoming email. The sender was the Rev. Temple-Wright.
Dryden,
Busy week. Made busier by your unnecessary inquiry about Sexton Cottage to the press office at Church House, Lambeth. They simply passed it on to me. So back to square one. You know what I think.
So, can we move on?
A story. You’ll hear gossip because the church is going to be locked, so you might as well know the facts.
Christ Church was named for two oil paintings which hung in the nave. Copies of originals by the Italian master Masaccio. One was taken down about fifteen years ago, by which time it was disfigured by damp. It sat in the vestry until Christmas this year when the church council agreed to destroy it, although we sold the frame. The remaining picture – The Crucifixion – is insured for £1,000. The insurance premiums are an annual drain on our meagre resources. And the damp is getting to it. I asked Conways, the auctioneers, to see if we could put the picture up for sale. They did some preparatory work, and someone came to have a look, and they now inform me that there is a small chance – well, a very small chance – that the picture is original. Clearly, this is the opinion of their local expert only. They are prepared to take on the costs of having the picture taken down for a proper examination in London in their laboratory. (I think this tells us all we need to know about what they think of their local expert!) Apparently they have an Italian agent and he’s over next month. So they will rope him in as well. They’ll also cover the short-term insurance cover to the tune of £100,000 as long as they can write it off against their fee if the picture is genuine and they sell it. I have taken the precaution of having the church locked at all times until the painting is taken away. Albe Haig at Sexton Cottage has a key in case anyone wants access for prayer. I haven’t given this to anyone else. I’d be grateful if y
ou could delay publication for a week. That way, by the time the paper is out the picture will be gone. Perhaps you could make that clear.
Can I pre-empt one question? This makes no difference to my decision on Sexton Cottage. The church estate must be rationalised. We can do so much of real VALUE in the community with the cash liberated from the sales.
Best, etc.
They were passing Christ Church. Dryden let his eyes play on the brickwork, baking in the sun, and thought of Christ on the Cross within. Opposite was Jock Donovan’s snow-white house. The sun, low now in the sky, glinted off the rounded corner windows.
Humph hit the brakes and they executed an unnecessary skid, coming to rest at the tail of another line of cars going nowhere. Dryden got out and strolled forward. A goods train was stationary on the level crossing, blocking the road. A group of drivers had gathered by the lowered barrier. They seemed to agree that there had been a derailment.
The goods train had come through at just before four o’clock. One of the HGV drivers said he always counted the wagons through and that he’d got to sixty-three when there was a screeching noise from the wheels and the train’s speed diminished rapidly: another ten wagons went past, but then the whole thing ground to a halt.
Dryden looked down the track and could see the line of trucks bending away from him so that the distant engine was out of sight. Each truck was identical – a hopper, emblazoned with the word HARDCORE. Paper stickers on the truck nearest to Dryden carried a series of numbers and the word FELIXSTOWE. The train had been stationary for an hour and was emitting heat, and that distinct aroma of baking metal and paint.
Dryden ducked under the barrier, climbed over the couplings between two trucks, and reached the far side. Now he could see the engine, a half-mile distant; the long curve of the stranded trucks revealed to the eye. In the mid-distance he could see three men in Day-Glo jackets beside a series of trucks which appeared to be tilting over, angled away, out of the curve, about to tip from the embankment, but held in place by the wagons coupled on either side.