The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  A familiar figure dragged a lame foot towards him across the grass. DI George Friday carried two cups of coffee in plastic beakers.

  ‘Accident, then?’ asked Dryden. ‘It’s a still, right? For making alcohol?’

  Friday put the coffee cups down on the grass and sank his hands deep in his raincoat pockets. Dryden guessed that he wasn’t allowed to smoke at a crime scene, which was unlikely to improve his mood. ‘You’ve seen the statement. Forensics will take twenty-four hours. I’m going to wait for the results; I suggest you do the same.’ Friday studied the reporter’s face. ‘And I’d look after yourself. You’ve had a shock. You look like death warmed up.’

  Dryden searched in his pocket and produced one of the fifty-pound notes they’d found near the body of Will Brinks. ‘You better have this.’

  ‘It’s touch and go whether our survivor will make it, by the way,’ said Friday. ‘Nasty internal injuries.’

  ‘The kid’s called Brinks – Will Brinks,’ said Dryden. ‘Lives over on the travellers’ site at Third Drove.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The survivor.’

  ‘Christ.’ Friday flapped his arms inside his raincoat. ‘We’ve spent the last hour trying to get something off what’s left of his wallet. Why didn’t you fucking well tell us you knew who he was?’

  ‘I did. I told the constable who asked me to stick around and give a statement.’

  Friday threw his head back, looking up at the stars, which had started to pop out in the sky. He kept that pose for about thirty seconds and Dryden guessed he was counting, slowly, trying to keep his temper in check, his anxiety levels under control.

  ‘Anything else?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Strange kid. Learning difficulties, maybe Asperger’s, but I’m no expert. A keen bird-watcher. The travellers left him behind each summer to look after the site on Third Drove while they went off flogging stuff. Maybe they sold one-hundred-and-twenty per cent proof vodka on their travels? That would work.’

  Friday patted his raincoat against his thighs. ‘Anything else?’

  He was joking, but the smile fell off his face as Dryden stood. ‘Yes. But I need to show you. In there.’ Nodding at the burnt out lock-up, he felt something tighten in his throat. It was the last place on earth he wanted to see again. It was the first circle of hell.

  For a moment Dryden’s world spun round in a circle and he thought he was going to keel over.

  Friday stepped in and took his arm: ‘Steady, soldier. It can wait.’

  ‘No, it can’t. Believe me.’

  It took ten minutes to get clearance from the forensic team, and then get togged out in the forensic overshoes and hairnet.

  A few minutes later, standing in the unit by the metal bench, where the petrified corpses had lain in their shroud of broken glass, Dryden thought he could detect a smell, something which reminded him of a kitchen. He closed his eyes and tried to think of clear water, the smell of ozone.

  ‘Don’t throw up,’ said Friday. ‘Not in here, anyway.’

  ‘Can they cut the lights in here? I want darkness.’

  They got a forensic officer in and he pulled a set of plugs off a lead. Dryden noted a strange effect: that as soon as he was deprived of sight his other senses were sharper. That smell was meat, specifically pork. Saliva flooded his mouth.

  He forced himself to try and recall precisely his movements when he’d first entered the unit. ‘Here,’ he said, walking round the bench. ‘I was right on this spot. Just by the corner. That’s when I saw them on the floor.’ He stood at the point. ‘There!’ He didn’t mean to shout but he was relieved that it hadn’t been an illusion. ‘And I saw that too.’

  Electric light leaked in through cracks and gaps where the blast had distorted the roll-up door. But there was one clean, crisp hole. Dryden walked forward to put his finger close to the edge. This was where the dying sunlight had glinted in his eyes in the second before he’d seen the bodies.

  The hole was at the centre of a pit in the metal which had bent the door inwards. Friday got his nose up close and sniffed.

  ‘It’s a bullet hole, right?’ asked Dryden. ‘Something triggered the explosion. This would do it. One shot – then the place explodes.’

  Friday didn’t say a word. One of the forensic officers came through the side door and stood at the detective’s shoulder.

  ‘Thoughts?’ asked the detective.

  ‘We’d have got it in daylight.’ He had the honesty to look away. ‘Sorry. Looks like a bullet hole, and it looks fresh, but we’ll have to do tests. But it all fits.’

  ‘Get a floodlight round the back and see if there’s an exit hole,’ said Friday.

  The detective’s eyes had narrowed and something in his calm, suppressed anxiety told Dryden that the discovery of the bullet hole wasn’t the surprise it should have been.

  ‘I guess this changes things,’ said Dryden.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. It could be a year old, five years. Last week.’ Friday eased his leg, lifting his bad foot off the ground for a second of relief. For the first time Dryden wondered if he lived in pain. It would explain a lot.

  They went back outside.

  ‘I owe you one,’ said Friday.

  ‘OK. Answer me one question, then. Your mate from forensics said something interesting. But it all fits. Fits what?’

  Friday looked at his feet. ‘Three dead men. If you asked me what we knew about them I’d have to tell you that two of them are ethnic Chinese, one a Pole. No names yet.’

  Dryden made a series of connections in half a second. ‘So the gun that put a bullet through that lock-up door could have been the gun that put a bullet in the guts of Sima Shuba, the man I found hanging from the cross in Christ Church graveyard? It’s a gang war.’

  ‘That’s not an inexpert summary,’ said Friday. ‘We found a gun. Over on the grass. It could have been blown out of Brinks’ hand. In fact we rather thought it had been blown out of his hand. So maybe he was the shooter. Another job for forensics.’ Friday slipped off his forensic gloves. ‘Now, if you don’t mind me saying so, you and I are quits. And everything you’ve heard is off the record. Just stick to what you saw.’

  Friday walked off without another word.

  Dryden took his seat again while the medic gauged his blood pressure. A final check, he said, and then the reporter could go, although he should see his GP in twenty-four hours to check there were no long-term effects from the shock of finding the bodies. Dryden hated the feeling of the rubber band around his arm, the way it seemed to create pressure in his blood vessels, as if they might burst. To distract himself, he tried to imagine what had happened in those few seconds before the blast. Friday’s theory that this was all about a gang war made sense, but for a few loose ends. How could the single gunshot have been designed to produce the fatal explosion? Why was Will Brinks, the principal suspect, carrying a holdall packed with fifty-pound notes? Why was he holding a dog lead? Where was the dog?

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Friday

  The first hour after midnight brought a mist creeping out of the ditches and drains of Barrowby Fen. It seemed to boil up, spilling out over the black peat. Even in the dark Dryden could see its pale fingers spreading out on the fen. The forensic teams were working through the night beneath the unforgiving lights. Dryden wondered how the story was playing in the outside world, so he rang Laura. Humph had rung her earlier, to reassure her that Philip was not seriously injured, but she had been worried nonetheless. She was obviously relieved to hear his voice now. She told him that the local radio was running the news of the explosion, as had regional TV. Both mentioned the current police theory that the blast was due to an exploding illicit still. The news had just made the late-night bulletin on Radio Four. All the reports said there were three dead, one in intensive care. She said the shock wave of the explosion had reached Ely, nearly fourteen miles to the east. A single stone gargoyle had fallen from the North Transept, according to BBC Radio Cambri
dgeshire, and car and shop alarms had been set off in their hundreds. But no sound: just the silent shock through the earth, like the distant echo of an earthquake.

  Dryden said he’d be home in a few hours and he’d try not to wake her or Eden. It occurred to him that he might walk back into Brimstone Hill and ring Humph for a lift. The cab wasn’t in sight, but he suspected it would be in a lay-by in the area. Walking might clear his mind, expunge the corrosive images from within the lock-up. On the way he could check on Jock Donovan. The last time he’d seen the old soldier he’d been standing outside his house just after the explosion, hands to his ears. The blast must have been a terrible shock: traumatic for a man sensitive to sound.

  Strolling across the grass runway, he came to the gap in the hawthorn hedge where the path began. The Fens at night defied logic. By daylight they seemed empty and lifeless: no sheep, no cows, no serried rows of pig styes. But above all no people. A chimney pot here and there amongst a windbreak of trees, but no one moving. At night the darkness pulsated with lights. Every house had a security light, every farm building was lit, cars crept at all hours along zigzag droves. He could see a blinking neon light in Brimstone Hill, probably on the roof of the café. The light pollution was appalling, staining the clouds, creating an ambient orange glow.

  Ahead Dryden could see a path crossing a field of sweetcorn, picking out the track he’d walked along only the day before with Donovan. The moon had risen and its pale light lit the way forward. There was something theatrical about the scene, and as that thought formed in his mind a muntjac – one of the small fenland deer – sauntered out of the corn and stood in the light. A ghost, in silver grey, so pale that Dryden thought he could see right through it. It turned and walked a few steps away, then bolted, diminishing to a vanishing point.

  It seemed like an invitation to follow, so Dryden did.

  The moon rose quickly over the crops. It was to the north, low in the sky, like a headlamp, and Dryden experienced the odd illusion that he could feel its heat. He wondered what a moon tan would be like: he imagined a pale, silvery spider web on his skin. Beyond the fields of sweetcorn he saw a horse standing stock still on grassland, its legs in the mist up to its forelocks. Then, after twenty minutes’ steady plodding, he saw Brimstone House, the white Artex vivid in the moon shadows.

  A ditch ran along the boundary between Donovan’s garden and the open fen. Dryden crossed it using a wooden bridge shaped like a leaping horse. He could just see Donovan standing on the far side of the plate-glass window, holding field glasses.

  By the time Dryden reached the back door Donovan was there to meet him, clutching the lapels of a greatcoat to his thin neck: ‘I’ve been safe,’ he said, a thin echo of a Glaswegian accent polluting the mid-Atlantic vowels. Dryden saw that he was holding on to the doorframe and that when he took his hand away it was shaking violently.

  Dryden took him by the arm. The kitchen was in darkness so Dryden searched for a light switch, but the neon was movement-sensitive and flickered on by itself. Donovan’s face was bloodless and he looked his age, as if the bones beneath the skin were working their way out.

  Dryden put the kettle on, then helped Donovan through to an armchair in the main room, lit by the half-light from the kitchen. There was a crack in the window, cutting diagonally right across from top left to bottom right, a brilliant diamond-white line.

  ‘The blast did that,’ said Donovan. ‘It rocked the house.’

  Outside, two miles away, they could see the helicopter still spiralling over the scene.

  ‘What was it?’ asked the old man. ‘The radio said an illegal still?’

  Dryden told him what he knew, and a hint of what he’d seen.

  Despite the overcoat the old man was clearly shivering.

  There was an open fireplace, a basket with logs and kindling, and newspaper. Dryden knelt down and conjured up a blaze, borrowing a lighter from Donovan, so that the room was full of the noise and flickering of flames. The kettle whistled. Dryden searched neat cupboards for tea bags and sugar, and found milk from the fridge, which was stocked up with pak choi, chicken livers, white fish, fresh prawns, white wine and a bottle of saki.

  He put a mug of tea before Donovan on a low table.

  Donovan hauled himself up out of the chair and went to a small inlaid wooden cabinet in the corner of the room and retrieved a bottle of malt whisky: Tallisker.

  He shot some into his tea, then Dryden’s, without asking.

  Dryden watched him sip the liquid, the hands curiously steady, before a single jolt spilt an inch of the brew down his shirt. He didn’t seem to feel the hot water on his skin.

  Dryden sat and took a gulp of the fortified tea. For a minute they were both silent, watching the fire burn, the alcohol warming them from the inside out. For the first time since he’d found the corpses in the lock-up, Dryden felt alive; he could feel the blood in his cheeks and the exquisite pain of stress seeping out of his muscles.

  ‘I went to ground,’ said Donovan. ‘If a shell lands, that’s what you do, you go to ground. I ran out to the ditch by the bridge.’

  Dryden guessed that the shock had disrupted the old man’s memory, because he hadn’t gone to ground at all – at least, not at first – because he’d seen him outside in the road just after the blast.

  ‘See anything?’ asked Dryden.

  He shook his head. ‘I kept my head down. An hour, two, or three. I got cold; now I can’t warm up. Can’t stop shivering.’

  Then the eyes dimmed and it was there, as palpable as the heat from the fire, the thousand-yard stare. They weren’t here, in Brimstone Hill, they were in Donovan’s memory.

  ‘I remembered,’ he said. ‘That night in the trench in Korea. For the first time in half a century. I couldn’t stop it. It just came back to me, the whole thing, perfect, like some terrible jewel.’

  He gulped tea and whisky. Dryden thought what a striking metaphor that was: the terrible jewel. The last thing he wanted to hear, given what he’d just had to live through out on Barrowby Airfield, was a story of carnage from the past. But he was powerless to move. Whisky and delayed shock were making his limbs heavier, as if his whole body was sinking under a crushing gravity.

  ‘I remembered what happened the night my friends died,’ said Donovan.

  ‘The Davenport brothers?’ prompted Dryden.

  ‘We’d built trenches,’ he said. ‘Ours was a crescent, the tails of the crescent facing away from the Chinese lines. We dug it that day, our company, because we knew they’d use the night. And they did. I’ve read the books and they’ve got the numbers – five thousand five-inch shells. Like I said before: five thousand.’

  Dryden turned away to add a log to the burning fire. ‘The Battle of the Hook?’ he said.

  ‘It didn’t have a name then.’

  ‘You’re safe now, in here.’

  A blue light flashed out on the fen as an emergency vehicle left Barrowby Airfield.

  ‘Before it started we talked, me and the boys,’ said Donovan. ‘They were a mile away, the Chinese. So it didn’t matter if we raised our voices. And the moon was up like a light. So Pete read a letter from home, for his brother, and for me. It was from his mum. She hadn’t met me but they’d talked about me in their letters home. So I got a mention. Like family. And Paulie read another, about the farm, from his dad. About kale, and beet, and chickens and ditches to clear. And I listened. And then the first shell came. Just like the one today. At evening time. No noise – just the impact. I was scared.’ He forced his hand across his mouth.

  Dryden waited.

  The air flooded out of Donovan’s lungs as if he’d been winded. ‘This is why I go to the churchyard. To stop this memory coming back. If I go there and touch the stone I don’t have to relive it. But tonight I couldn’t stop it. I was a coward.’ Both hands to his mouth now. ‘Tonight, again. I couldn’t move. I didn’t look over the edge. I tried to get under the earth. I clawed at it. I dug down. I went back along the cresce
nt and left them at the front.’

  In his mind he seemed to be reliving both nights at the same time.

  He held out a free hand, dark with peat and smeared green with weed, where he’d been in the ditch. ‘Again, tonight.’

  Dryden reached out and refilled his own mug with whisky.

  ‘I closed my eyes because that’s like being under the earth,’ said Donovan. ‘The guns stopped at dawn. The first thing I saw was my own hands.’ He looked at them now, clutching the tin mug. ‘And then I saw the bodies of the rest around me. All dead. I looked along the trench we’d dug, but because it was crescent-shaped I couldn’t see the boys. I knew they were there because I’d heard them firing in the night. And talking, to each other, and to me. I remember my name – hearing my name, in their voices.

  ‘So I stood up, and then I fell down because my legs wouldn’t work. I crawled down that trench. And within a few yards it became a shell hole, full of water and blood, but I kept going, calling out their names, until I came round the corner of the crescent to the front of the trench. And standing there was a Chinese soldier. Just one. He’d got forward to loot the bodies. He was smoking a cigarette and he’d got Pete’s wallet and was flicking through the pictures, of his dad, his mum, his sister. I raised the gun I’d never fired but I was shaking so badly I couldn’t aim it. I couldn’t pull the trigger. He laughed. Then he just dropped the wallet and the pictures into the water and the blood, climbed the face of the trench, and ran back.’

  Donovan’s eyes were fixed on the distant lights of Barrowby Airfield.

  ‘An officer arrived, one of ours. He said the Chinese had run. Later I went forward and we found their trenches. The Chinese dead, hundreds dead, thousands. Dead in their capes. I never said what had really happened. I got a medal.’

  The helicopter approached the house and flew low over the rooftop, forcing Donovan to pause and grip the arms of his chair.

  ‘They made me write the letter home to the boys’ mother.’