The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  Dryden rang DI Friday from the Capri, the four neat Georgian windows of the Calder place visible still across the shadowy fen. They weren’t the only lights. Euximoor Drove was like an impossibly long trans-Atlantic liner in the night, a ribbon of lights a mile from start to finish: porch lights, barn lights, yard lights, floodlights, even the single green illuminated cross on the Methodist Chapel. A satellite crossed the sky and Dryden wondered if it was his celestial friend from that morning.

  His call to DI Friday switched to an answerphone, then the detective cut in. ‘Dryden?’ In the background he could hear birdsong, and a dull, random thud. He imagined a garden in Ely, or perhaps a park, a ball being kicked around by streetlight.

  He told DI Friday everything in a neat series of causal links: the original murder of Ronald Calder in 1999, the sighting of Will Brinks at Brimstone Hill, the Lee Enfield in its display cabinet, now an empty display cabinet. Muriel Calder’s studied antagonism. Her skill with a rifle. And her alibi, or rather the gun’s alibi.

  ‘If she didn’t give the gun in then she might be our killer,’ said Dryden. ‘I think she went out there to administer summary justice. I think she tried to shoot Brinks with the rifle. The bullet did the rest …’

  ‘She’s an old woman,’ said Friday. ‘It’s a bit fanciful.’

  ‘If she did give the gun over as part of Powell’s amnesty, where will it be?’

  ‘Standard procedure is clear,’ said Friday. ‘No overnight storage. So if she gave it in at Brimstone Hill, Powell would have taken it in to Wisbech to be locked up. Next stop would be the incinerator at Cambridge; they do a weekly burn for several police forces. Melt them down. Not just guns; knives, clubs, baseball bats. Then any drugs which have been seized, any contraband. Up goes the smoke, we get the scrap if there’s anything left. It’s three hundred degrees Celsius so it’s mostly smoke. Let me call Powell. There may be a quick answer. Where are you?’

  They arranged to meet at The Brook, the pub in the village, in forty minutes.

  Humph dropped him in the centre of Brimstone Hill and went home to his mum’s to see Grace. Dryden bought a pint of Pickled Pig in the bar of The Brook and went outside. He sat alone, at a picnic table, under the weak beam of a security light. The space around him – the empty streets, the sky above, the open fen – felt oppressive. He drank the cider, felt better, and got another pint.

  Then he felt odd. He hadn’t entirely recovered from the shock he’d suffered hauling Will Brinks from the river. The result was a very strong sense of dislocation: not physical, but sensory. The idea that Muriel Calder was a killer suddenly seemed laughably improbable. But she was hiding something, he was certain of that. Then he had a bizarre thought, that she wasn’t hiding something in the past, but something in the future. It was a surreal idea, so he put it down to the cider, which was stealing over his brain like an anaesthetic.

  From the picnic table he could see all there was to see of downtown Brimstone Hill. There were seven streetlights, four this side of the level crossing, three on the far side. The lights left circles of amber on the pavement.

  It was very quiet. A combination of the cider and the silence produced another line of thought. It was unsettling the degree to which PC Stokely Powell seemed to hover at the edge of events in Brimstone Hill. What if Muriel Calder had given him the gun and he hadn’t taken it into the station at Wisbech? It was a thought which led to another suspicion. Powell’s lifestyle hardly suited that of a lowly police constable. Had he been tempted, perhaps, to make sure his inquiry into the illicit trades in scrap metal and moonshine ran into the sand?

  DI Friday had a black Ford and Dryden saw it a mile and a half away, turning the corner by The Jolly Farmers. The headlights got imperceptibly brighter and closer until the car slid in to the kerb by Christ Church.

  Friday hauled his bad foot out of the nearside door and pointed at the church. The building looked cold and dead. Dryden downed his pint and walked steadily towards the graveyard gates. The movement broke the spell he’d been under, and yet the sense that he was walking on to a stage was so real he could almost feel unseen eyes watching him, just out of sight, in the darkness beyond the church.

  ‘Powell’s inside,’ said Friday. ‘Someone saw kids hanging around. And there’s been lights apparently, on and off. He’s checking the place out. The station at Wisbech says he rang in half an hour ago.’

  Friday checked his mobile. ‘I’d ring him but the signal’s dodgy.’

  ‘What about Calder’s gun?’ asked Dryden.

  ‘Wisbech will check tomorrow. Desk sergeant was off last week so he doesn’t know if Powell took anything in for them. The amnesty has been a success, so maybe. Or she may have taken it to Peterborough, or Ely. But you know the terms: any police station, no names, no questions. So it could take some tracking down if she won’t give us details. But it’s not been incinerated, the date for that is next week. Nothing this week.’

  ‘But there are police records?’

  ‘You’d think,’ said Friday. ‘But of the guns. Not the owners. That’s the whole point of an amnesty.’

  They’d reached the porch. The inner door was just open.

  ‘How’s Will Brinks?’ Dryden asked.

  ‘Fine,’ said Friday, adopting a whisper appropriate for a church. ‘Given he’s sharing his hospital room with three uniformed coppers. I’d have got one in his bed if they’d let me.’

  Friday pushed open the door; it was oak, with lozenge-shaped iron studs. A modern stone font stood under a functional chandelier inside, dead light bulbs on steel circles. Friday flicked a few switches but nothing happened. Then the lights came on, but went out immediately. He shouted Powell’s name. There wasn’t an echo; the space seemed to snuff out the sound like a candle.

  The torchlight beam swung across the nave and caught the gilt on the frame of the Italian master. They walked down the aisle until they were opposite the canvas.

  ‘Well, that’s still here,’ said Friday. ‘That’s something.’

  Dryden thought there was a strange smell in the church, competing with the funereal reek of the lilies on either side of the altar: turps, perhaps? He saw that the workmen had finished creating Temple-Wright’s new meeting room – the chipboard had been painted white; a door stood open.

  Friday went down the aisle shouting Powell’s name, then round the altar following the graceful curve of the outer wall of the apse. Dryden walked to the opposite side and through a door marked ‘vestry’ in copperplate gold script.

  He’d been behind the door once before, to see the verger about a spate of vandalism in the graveyard – kids using a spray can on headstones. It wasn’t really a room at all, just an area of the side-aisle partitioned off with wooden panels, black now with age.

  ‘Stokely?’ said Dryden. He took out his mobile and clicked on the torch beam.

  He knew what to expect: a whitewashed wall with three framed photographs of Victorian rectors, and a large colour shot of Temple-Wright. There was an old vestments holder, a kind of huge sideboard with narrow drawers. A tape deck. Some silver candlesticks they never used on the altar. A Sunday school table crammed with toys. A Baby Belling portable gas fire. On the wall an ugly circuit board with the switches for the lights. And the church chest, a copy of a medieval original, in wood, with brass hoops.

  Friday shouted from the main body of the church: ‘Dryden. Here.’

  The sound came to Dryden easily, looping over the partition wall. There was a note of interest in the command, of brisk authority, but no sense of threat or danger.

  But Dryden didn’t move.

  He was looking at the body of PC Stokely Powell on the parquet floor. His arms, legs and torso were twisted into a human knot. His head was thrown back so that it actually seemed to arch his spine off the floor. His eyes were wide open, as was his mouth, gaping to reveal back teeth. The torchlight caught a filling. His face was so different from his living expression that it added to the shock, as if he’d been
physically desecrated, even mutilated. But his skin was untouched, smooth – almost ageless.

  He was aware of DI Friday shouting again but the sound, this time, seemed to come from far away. There was a smell in the vestry, too. A gunshot?

  But Dryden could see no blood. If he had been able to see blood he would have felt less fear himself. Powell was dead, he could see that without touching that caramel skin, without feeling for the petrified pulse. The lack of a wound, the absence of cause, made the corpse seem surreal, almost supernatural. It was as if he’d fallen here, from another life. If Christ Church had boasted a medieval roof, supported by angels, Dryden would have looked up, searching for the gap.

  Someone touched his shoulder and Dryden’s entire nervous system seemed to short out so that he fell to his knees.

  DI Friday knelt beside him and Dryden heard the air flooding out of the detective’s lungs in a kind of reverse gasp. Friday’s torch made the dead man’s body spring to life, in stark black and white, transforming a scene-of-crime chalk outline into a three-dimensional corpse.

  The detective edged forward, taking one of the thrown-back arms. He felt for the pulse, but he was looking at the eyes. They were both looking at the eyes. Dryden had always been haunted by the legend that a murder victim holds the image of the killer in their dead eyes, so he forced himself to look. The whites were clear, startling, the brown irises flat and lightless. Powell seemed to focus on a point in the air, as if his killer had been weightless, maybe even unseen. There was no picture in those eyes, just a look of dismal surprise that his life had ended here, like this.

  THIRTY-NINE

  A helicopter hung over Brimstone Hill like a night hawk, a single searchlight appearing to tether it to the shard-like miniature spire of Christ Church. The village had been ‘locked down’ within an hour of the discovery of PC Powell’s corpse: three roadblocks, the freight trains – which had begun to run that day – halted. Powell had phoned his station sergeant twenty-eight minutes before his body had been found. The corpse was still warm, stiffening with the onset of rigor. If his killer was on foot he was within a few miles of Brimstone Hill. If. Further roadblocks had been set up out on the Fens along the radial routes leading out of Brimstone Hill towards Peterborough, Ely and Lynn.

  Once the bare facts were released to radio and TV, Dryden’s mobile was flooded with calls, which he didn’t answer, setting the ringtone to silent. The TV companies were all trying to get footage on air for the ten o’clock local bulletins. Dryden’s next paper, in contrast, was three days away. He didn’t like to appear cynical, even to himself, but PC Powell’s death couldn’t have come at a worse moment in the journalistic week. He’d sent Vee Hilgay a text saying he was in Brimstone Hill and could cover the story, then he’d shut down the mobile. The Press Association had someone on the ground with a camera, so they were covered for pictures. All Dryden could do was watch. He’d found the body, which might prove a valuable ‘scoop’ when his own deadline finally arrived. He was already framing an ‘eyewitness’ account, trying to consolidate the details of what he’d seen by listing them in his head: the shape of the body, the whiff of gun smoke, the discarded torch.

  The rest of the press was being ferried in by squad car from the roadblocks and corralled under a cypress tree in the churchyard for a press conference, timed for nine fifteen. A few of the hacks smoked inside the roped area for press, a haze drifting from the scrum of figures, as if they were cattle sweating. A burst of laughter marked them out for what they were: professionals, dealing with death.

  Dryden sat on the steps of the war memorial. The glare of floodlights obscured the stars.

  DI Friday made his way towards him, picking his way between the graves. ‘We need to talk,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not going to dump me, are you? After all these years? Think of the kids.’

  ‘Just shut up and listen. I’ve got the Regional Crime Squad en route. The Met’s got an organized crime branch and they want reports on the hour. I’ve been asked at least three times by people above my pay grade to explain why I was looking for Powell in the company of a local journalist.’

  Dryden went to protest. They were looking for Powell because they were on the trail of the gun. They were on the trail of the gun because Dryden had found a link between Barrowby Airfield and the Calder killing. Questioning Dryden’s presence in Christ Church was a bit rich.

  ‘I know,’ said Friday, anticipating Dryden’s response. ‘I know. But I need to play this by the book. You’re an eyewitness. I’m the investigating officer. I need to establish a bit of professional distance. OK?’

  ‘I was there. What’d you want me to do, forget I found him?’

  ‘No. Although it would be a smart move not to print too many details. I’m sure you know that for us this is family. Plus, he has a family.’

  ‘Really? He never mentioned one. What kind of family?’

  ‘Ex-wife, two kids. She’s a PC too, so don’t even go there.’

  Dryden recalled Powell’s penchant for bling, the gold watch, the low-slung sports car. None of that matched up to paying maintenance on two kids on a constable’s salary.

  ‘They know, do they?’

  ‘Sure. They’re being looked after.’

  Dryden found the surge of emotion which gripped the police, or any of the emergency services, on hearing the words ‘officer down’ mildly irritating. It was as if they felt the need to re-enact a not very well-written episode of Hill Street Blues. The tribalism didn’t do them any favours; it felt primitive, and knee-jerk. And for him it always begged the question: why don’t they go into overdrive when the victim is just a member of the public?

  ‘How did Powell die?’

  ‘What information I have will be given at the forthcoming press conference, Dryden. I’d recommend you come and listen to what I have to say. Some of it will be news to you.’

  ‘Sir.’ A uniformed PC stood at Friday’s shoulder. ‘The TV people are on their toes. They say they need to get something now …’

  Friday straightened his tie and turned on his heels.

  The press conference was businesslike. Friday said that PC Powell’s death was almost certainly linked to the outbreak of gang warfare in the Fens which had been sparked by the murder of Sima Shuba. He revealed that Powell had transferred to Brimstone Hill specifically to track triad trade in both scrap metal and alcohol. He had begun his career with the Thames River Police. The force’s serious crime squad believed large quantities of scrap metal were being moved out of the area by barge. Alcohol was being sold to intermediaries – shopkeepers, car boot sale traders, pubs. Powell’s investigation was strictly undercover and would have culminated in a raid on the gang once its storage and production site had been identified. Events – in the form of the Barrowby Airfield explosion – had overtaken the inquiry. The results of a preliminary autopsy would be known within twenty-four hours.

  Friday walked away without taking questions. The press dispersed to cars and vans, eager to get the details on to late evening broadcasts and into morning papers.

  Dryden followed the detective back towards Christ Church. ‘One question, because you do owe me,’ said Dryden. ‘Just before I found Powell’s body you called out, like you’d found something. What was it?’

  Friday straightened his back, then dropped his head back, holding the arc until there was a plastic click from his spine. ‘There’s a rear door, in the apse. Little wooden Victorian door, painted white. There was a handprint on it, in colour. Lots of colours. Vicar says it’s workmen and it was there yesterday. The place reeks of paint. No big deal. We’ve taken pictures, we’ll look for a match. But it’s a sideshow.’

  ‘Colours?’

  ‘Forget it.’ But Dryden couldn’t forget it, because the workmen had used only white paint to build the vicar’s partitions in the apse. So whose hand had made the print?

  FORTY

  DI Friday was halfway to the cypress tree and the pool of halogen-white light
s when he stopped, wheeled round and walked back. Up close Dryden realized he had a brown envelope in his hand.

  ‘I forgot. We did a quick check through Powell’s paperwork at the station. He kept a punctilious diary. But he was behind on a lot of routine stuff, because of the CID work. He was due to make a call on Meg Humphries, out on Euximoor Fen. Some business from Ely. A delivery. It’s for your mate.’

  ‘Humph.’

  ‘The fat bloke.’

  ‘That might be him.’

  ‘Sorry. We had to read it, standard procedure. Give it to him, will you?’

  It was an envelope with a long history. There was no stamp but a watermark in the top right corner which read: Ely Coroner’s Court Office. And a crest of the Royal Arms.

  The first address was a suburban street in Witchford, Grace’s home. That had been scratched out and replaced with Humph’s name and address. Then that had been crossed out and replaced with Humph’s name again, but his mother’s address on Euximoor Drove. Various scrawled signatures marked the front of the letter.

  ‘Good job it’s not urgent,’ said Dryden, out loud, but Friday had gone.

  Dryden walked to the wall of Christ Church so that he could stand in the splash of red and blue light coming out through the narrow stained-glass window. A white card, with the letterhead of the coroner, was attached to a page of A4.

  Dear Mr Humphries,

  I attach an email message left on the computer of a seventeen-year-old boy at Ely’s Cromwell School. The young man, Julian Amhurst, died in the river at Ely this weekend. A tragic case. He took his own life. It was clear that he was largely motivated by stress over exams and trying to win a place at Cambridge University. Emotional problems had also begun to emerge. He left a whole series of messages for friends and family, but they were never sent, one of the details which persuaded me to record an open verdict, rather than one of suicide. This message is for your daughter, Grace. I know that anyone left behind after the death of a young person in these circumstances feels a certain amount of guilt. This is only natural. In this case it seemed it might be helpful to Grace if she was able to read the message. I thought I would, however, leave the final decision to you.