The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

  Dryden collected Humph’s empty mug. ‘And where did Vincent Haig get his £125,000 to buy Sexton Cottage? How many pictures have you got to frame to notch that up?’ As he walked back to the bungalow, Dryden recalled the handprint he’d seen on the apse door at Christ Church. A multi-coloured hand, with a fingertip missing.

  The presser in Wisbech was at noon. He had an hour to kill.

  After breakfast they left Grace with Boudicca and drove down to the Old Forge. As they parked Humph had one hand on the fluffy steering wheel cover, the other back between the seats, searching for the dog that wasn’t there. He’d been planning his early morning exercise: three times round the cab with the dog, then a short stint with the green ball and the plastic thrower.

  They sat in silence. The thunder was fading away. There was no helicopter now over Brimstone Hill, no roadblocks on the road in from Ely. In fact during the ten-minute drive they hadn’t seen a single policeman. Dryden thought he could smell rain in the air.

  Humph settled into his seat. ‘I’ll wait here then.’

  ‘Why don’t you spend some time with Grace, like you said you would? I’ll call when I need you.’

  ‘She’ll be all right now …

  ‘No she bloody won’t,’ said Dryden, enjoying a rare flash of temper. He was out of the cab so he squatted down to look his friend in the eyes, trying to keep the loss of control alive – the freedom of it. ‘You can’t live in this little bubble world, Humph.’ He put a hand on the cab’s frame. ‘She’s fifteen, she’ll be sixteen soon. Talk to her. About what you want, about what she wants.’

  Humph started to whistle tunelessly, so Dryden walked away, up the track. On the field by the road another miniature red twister was dancing like a living scarecrow. When he got to the gate he looked back and saw the Capri trundling away.

  The sliding wooden doors of the Old Forge stood open. Haig was inside, holding a painting up with arms wide, clasped on the frame. It was a picture of a group of shepherds walking through a ford, shades of Constable in the grey water ripples catching the light, and Turner in an evening sky full of light and clouds.

  For a second Dryden saw his face, for once, not composed for effect. There was a genuine critical interest there, a kind of desperate focus, as if the picture was more important than the reality around him – the workshop, with its tool bench, the wall of gilt frames, his own work opposite, dominated by the landscapes with their blocked colour and mathematical edge, and his leitmotif – the little three-dimensional replica of Christ Church.

  Haig heard Dryden’s footstep and turned, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘Sorry, you’re busy,’ said Dryden.

  Haig put the picture down and his hands to his hips as if to make a judgement on the work. ‘It’s easy to despise the unoriginal,’ he said.

  There was a mug of tea on the bench; Dryden could see the deep-brown builders’ colour of the liquid within.

  ‘Too early for the Zabrowka? Or has the supply run dry? If you know anything about the operation out there, on the airfield, you should tell the police.’

  Haig jinked his shoulders, a hand searching for his pocket. ‘Thanks for the lecture. I didn’t know it was illegal. They said they paid taxes, they said they had a licence.’

  ‘Right. So you did work for them, or were you a customer, or a distributor?’

  ‘I’ve told the police. I gave a statement. Your mate Friday not tell you that?’ Again, the sneer.

  There was a large set of wooden drawers by the workbench. He slid one out and took out a sheet of printed labels: the amber-yellow brand of the flavoured vodka, the woodcut of the reeds.

  ‘My design. I’ve got a small hand press. HGOGNAV. That’s the business name – Van Gogh backwards.’

  So that was Vincent’s Haig’s little sideline. He printed the labels, and presumably got a free supply of the hooch in payment.

  ‘I do Barrowby Oilseed as well.’

  ‘Any cash for the job – or just booze?’

  ‘They paid. Not much, but it all helps.’

  ‘But you’d want more, a lot more. When Sexton Cottage came up you needed thousands.’

  ‘Christ, not this again.’ A look of sudden disbelief crossed Haig’s face, as if he’d just seen the implications of Dryden’s question. ‘You think I did it, don’t you? Took their money, then took a pot shot at the lock-up. Left them there, all of them, dead inside. You think I did that?’

  Dryden was surprised how quickly Haig had jumped to self-accusation. ‘No, I didn’t. Now I’m wondering.’

  The wind outside buffeted the old barn and the beams creaked.

  ‘You got the money from somewhere.’

  ‘That it? You all done?’

  He picked up the mug of tea but it shook as he lifted it to his lips, so he held it with both hands.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Dryden. ‘I wondered what you’d been doing in Christ Church. You left a multi-coloured handprint on the apse door, the little coffin-shaped one. Easy to get in, of course, because Albe has a key.’

  Haig’s attempt to look innocent of any knowledge of Christ Church was almost comical. Dryden thought again that it was the man’s face that gave him away – that if you couldn’t see him, you might like him.

  Dryden held up his own hand, the fingers splayed.

  Haig held up his. The fingers were smeared with paint. ‘Occupational hazard. There’s been kids about, smoking, drinking, God knows what else in the porch. The place was locked because of the Masaccio. I went in a few times to check everything was OK. I actually care about the place, right? I don’t want some idiot burning it down. And I don’t really want a blind OAP checking up on a bunch of louts. Do I?’

  ‘Paint would be dry by the time you got to the church,’ said Dryden.

  ‘I’m painting something for Grandad, of Sexton Cottage, at Sexton Cottage. You saw it. I do a little most evenings. It’s a good excuse to keep an eye on the old man.’

  Dryden had to nod.

  ‘The paint’s laid on with a trowel, thick, sticky gouts of reds and greens in the garden, black for the roof tiles. When we thought he’d have to leave I started it, as a keepsake. When it dries he can touch it. Feel the shapes.’

  It was such a bizarre explanation Dryden instantly believed him.

  ‘I’ve never been in the church after dark,’ said Haig. ‘There’s a safety light on an automatic switch but it’s been cutting on and off; the wiring’s probably rotten. I could have told Powell that, if that’s why he went in.’

  He put the landscape painting back on the wall.

  Dryden walked to one of the canvases and turned it round. It was the portrait of Temple-Wright. ‘I guess you’re not a fan,’ he said.

  ‘She’s got the cash from the sale of Sexton Cottage; she’ll get the money for the Masaccio. I doubt it’s an original, that’s just greed talking, but even the copy’s worth a bit. She’ll have enough for her virtual church. It’s like a rival to the real one. It’s a war she’s waging. She thinks virtual is spiritual. Does that make sense?’

  Dryden, embarrassed by the question, looked away into the corner of the barn. He saw a statue there, in plaster, about four foot tall, a rough model of a soldier in a boot-length cape.

  ‘That’s the statue on the war memorial at Christ Church, for Jock Donovan’s pals.’

  ‘The Davenport boys. Sure. I’ve always known Jock.’

  ‘You did it?’

  Haig nodded, helping Dryden pull aside some lengths of framing board.

  ‘How d’you know Jock?’

  Haig shook his head, pulling a welding cylinder out on wheels. ‘You’ve got to live out here to know what it’s like. In the city people live in crowded streets, well, they did. Tenements. Back-to-backs. We’re as close out here, it’s just that there’s space between us, but there’s nothing in the space, so we’re close. I’ve known Jock for years. He taught me and half the kids on the fen to shoot. Rabbits, muntjac, crow. He was a rifleman too.’

 
Dryden had reached the statue so he knelt down to look under the helmet at the soldier’s face. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ he said, genuinely impressed.

  For once Haig’s eyes were on his. ‘Yes. Jock’s got pictures from the war. There’s something about the cape, right? It’s the shape, it kind of echoes. And both sides wore them, and Jock liked that, the idea that it was a memorial to the dead on both sides. He’s not a bitter man at all. I like that.’

  They both considered the statue for a moment.

  ‘There’s something about the way the cape hangs,’ said Haig. ‘I didn’t know what it was until I’d finished. They look like angels, don’t they?’

  And that was right, Dryden could see. Angels, with folded wings.

  He left him then, walking into Brimstone Hill. Haig had brought Jock Donovan back into Dryden’s mind. He saw him that day of the explosion, standing outside his house just moments after the blast, disorientated, shocked. And he thought about the cool interior of his art-deco home with its whitewashed walls, the neat office, the clock with its lettering in blue.

  The single word: ORIENTO.

  He’d emailed his friend on the Financial Times and asked him to track down the company, find out what it made, and where it sold what it made.

  He punched in a text. Oi! Where’s my info on ORIENTO?

  He’d walked less than 100 yards before there was an answer. Whoops. Busy here – you won’t know what that means now you’re out in the sticks. Info just sent to your inbox. Sorry. Love to L.

  Dryden thought he’d walk to his office and access the email on his desktop PC.

  The centre of Brimstone Hill was busy, the level-crossing barrier down, a line of traffic waiting, a customer outside the café. His office was hot and stale so he threw open the windows. The Word document from the FT was not compatible so the computer had to convert the text, which took thirty seconds. He told himself later that he’d guessed the truth, or part of it, before the computer had finished. While he waited he went to his pictures file and found a snap he’d taken of the war memorial to the Davenport brothers. He read the lettering again, remembering what Donovan said: they’d all been brothers. Brothers in arms. Then he read the Word document and knew who had fired the bullet that killed three men.

  FORTY-THREE

  Wisbech General Hospital stood on the edge of the town, a former Victorian workhouse, perched on a high bank over the river. The tide was out, and a few boats sat, tilted over, in the silver mud. Humph did his usual circumnavigation of the rabbit roundabout: three times, notching up a total of twenty-one sightings. The rest of the town was suitably down-at-heel. All the pubs had Day-Glo stickers in the shape of starbursts in their windows advertising cut-price shots and happy hours. Dryden liked the place if only for the fact that he could always smell the unseen sea, six miles down the muddy channel to the Wash. Humph, who found almost nowhere interesting, slipped his earphones on as soon as they’d come to a stop. So Dryden stood outside, looking down into the deep cut in which the river lay, waiting for the clock on the town hall tower to reach noon, the appointed time for the press conference on the killing of Stokely Powell.

  He studied the windows in the facade of the old hospital’s main building. The General, as it was known, was humming like hospitals do: vents, heating systems, water towers all vibrating, creating a soundtrack. Steam dribbled from various pipes and gratings all over the old building, making it look as if it was boiling on the inside. Behind one of those windows was Will Brinks, making a second attempt to recover from the blast on Barrowby Airfield, the injuries compounded by ditching his car in the New Bedford River. Pulling him out of the water felt like a page from history to Dryden, someone else’s history.

  PC Powell’s body, and those of the three victims of the Barrowby Oilseed blast, and indeed Sima Shuba’s corpse, would all be in the police morgue, a single storey concrete block to the rear of the main hospital. It was fifties in style, strictly utilitarian, with cracked tiles, and always reminded Dryden of a wholesale butchers.

  The press conference was to be held in the hospital. Dryden thought he’d let Friday deliver his forensic results on Powell to the media before telling him what he knew about ORIENTO. The detective would resist Dryden’s solution to the mystery of Barrowby Airfield, because it shattered his neat assumption that gang warfare lay at the root of all the murders. He’d have to follow the trail himself, piecing it together as Dryden had done. But there was little doubt where it would lead. Perhaps Friday would be able to find the last, missing link in the story: the motive.

  The town hall clock struck noon. By the time Dryden got to the hospital’s old dining room – the venue for the press conference – there were about twenty members of the press in the front two rows. Everything echoed in this vast Victorian space beneath a wooden neo-Gothic roof. The place reeked of sadness and soup. There were no TV crews, and no national newspapers, a sure sign Friday had nothing interesting to say. CID tried to keep on the good side of the major news networks, and dragging them halfway across East Anglia for a ‘no comment’ was considered bad form. The press who had turned up were all local evenings and weeklies, plus local radio. Whatever preliminary advice had been given to the nationals – what in the trade was called a ‘steer’ – had clearly been withheld from the provincial press.

  DI Friday sat behind a desk and drank a glass of water. The double wooden doors were shut behind the last reporter. Silence fell, and the detective began reading a prepared statement:

  ‘The preliminary autopsy on PC Stokely Powell has revealed that in all probability he died of accidental electrocution.’

  One of the reporters forgot himself. ‘Shit,’ he said, tossing a notebook into a shoulder bag.

  Friday outlined the key facts: Powell’s fingerprints had been found on the light switch by the door, and then his palm print on the switchboard in the vestry. His torch was found beside the body, the switch in the ‘on’ position, but the bulb shattered. It seemed clear that he had entered the church after dark to investigate reports that children had been seen hanging around the building and that the lights had been switching, erratically, from on to off. The light switch by the door did not work when tried by DI Friday, the officer present when the body was discovered. It seemed likely that PC Powell therefore made his way to the vestry, by torchlight, where the main power switchboard was located. It seemed that he tried some of the switches. What he did not realize was that the church had been visited by metal thieves who had removed lengths of cabling and several pieces of electrical equipment, including earthing wires. As a result the switches in the vestry were ‘live’. The full mains power had coursed through his body and killed him instantly. ‘Death,’ concluded Friday, ‘would have been instantaneous.’

  So that, thought Dryden, was Powell’s unseen killer.

  The church, reported Friday, had been locked for several days. It was possible, therefore, that the metal thieves responsible had died in the explosion at Barrowby Airfield and that Powell had simply been unlucky: the first person, in all probability, to try and use the lights since the wiring had been tampered with. The reckless crime had cost PC Powell his life. The force wished to express its condolences to his wife and children.

  The hacks scrawled notes. It wasn’t a bad story, just not as good as having a real live cop-killer manhunt. Now they knew why the TV crews were absent.

  Friday began to outline the series of events which had occurred in the Erebus Street area of Lynn on Sunday. This had led to several arrests. But Dryden wasn’t listening. The doors to the old hall opened briefly as one of the reporters made an early exit and Dryden was able to glimpse the lift out in the reception area. He saw Muriel Calder standing, holding a pot plant which was partly obscured by wrapping paper, waiting for the lift doors to open.

  Dryden slipped out of his seat and through the doors, his heartbeat picking up. Who was Muriel Calder intending to visit? There was one obvious possibility. Dryden doubted she was there to wish him
a speedy recovery. So why was she there? The entry lobby was vast, a Victorian shrine of carved stone and mosaic. The lift doors had closed. There was a desk, but the woman behind it was speaking into a telephone headset. So he chose an elderly man behind a desk marked: VISITOR INFORMATION.

  There was a charity box labelled TocH in front of him.

  Dryden stuffed a fiver in the tin. ‘Hi. Sorry to bother you. I’ve got to get a message to a couple of police officers …’ He pointed at the lifts. ‘They’ve got their mobiles off. They’re guarding that bloke who got blown up out on the fen. Could you take it up …’

  ‘I don’t move,’ said the man. ‘That’s not my job. Never has been. The kids do messages but they’re not on till five.’

  Dryden looked at the tin as if he might try and get the fiver out.

  ‘It wouldn’t take you a second,’ added the old man. ‘You’ve got young legs. Sixth floor, go on up.’

  Dryden strolled over to the lift and got on with a patient in a bed being pushed by a porter. When the doors opened on the sixth he saw a copper reading a paper by a coffee machine.

  The corridor straight ahead ran the entire length of the hospital. One of those grand Victorian gestures – 200 yards of diminishing sight lines, a textbook lesson in the concept of the vanishing point. He saw Muriel Calder walking steadily away carrying the pot plant. She was lost, suddenly, in a gaggle of nurses, as a bed was wheeled across the corridor.

  Dryden started to run. His boots slapped on lino. In retrospect he could have just raised the alarm then and there, but he doubted anyone would have believed what he had to say, and certainly not in time.

  When he was just fifty yards behind her, he was so sure he knew what she was going to do he stopped and shouted her name. Just her first name: Muriel. She looked back, then sideways at the door she was level with, before stepping out of sight.