The Funeral Owl

by Jim Kelly

Haig took a note while a kettle boiled. He spread out the maps again, weighting the corners, and Dryden noticed again the missing fingertip.

  ‘How’d that happen?’ he asked, holding up his own fingers.

  ‘Art school. I had an argument with a paper guillotine.’

  Dryden winced in sympathy, then switched on his phone and paraphrased the email he’d got from Temple-Wright about Sexton Cottage. ‘She won’t budge,’ he said. ‘I’ll run a story. I can’t stop the sale but she might make an offer to rehouse your grandfather. It’s the best I can do. Has she spoken to you?’

  ‘Sure. I think all this stuff about a place in an almshouse is a distraction. She can’t promise that, it’s not in her gift.’ Haig’s eyes flooded with what looked like tears. ‘Christ. It’ll kill him, moving out. Not this year, maybe not next, but it’ll kill him. Sure as poison.’

  ‘What’re your options?’

  ‘The rich have options,’ said Haig. ‘We rent this place and the lease controls the number of people we can have. I could try and get it changed. There’s a spare room, but we are planning a family, and he knows that, so I don’t think he’d come.’

  Dryden tried to imagine a partner for Haig but the image wouldn’t come.

  ‘There’s a council home in Peterborough for the blind. I’ve got the paperwork in the house.’ He looked Dryden in the eye. ‘It’s down a back street near the ring road. There’s a big waste-burning plant planned, that’ll be opposite.’ He laughed. ‘But that’s OK – it’s a home for the blind.’ He shook his head. ‘We’ve looked at other places but he doesn’t want to go too far away. There’s St Dunstan’s at Cromer – he went there for occupational therapy, and they take people on a residential basis.’

  He was talking quickly now, and he slurred the word ‘Dunstan’s’ and repeated it.

  ‘I drove him over with Kath. It’s brilliant, on a cliff top, best view on the Norfolk coast. And that’s right, cos you don’t need eyes to feel the space. And if you tell him what’s there, paint a picture, he can see. He knows what he’s lost. But he won’t go there. Brimstone Hill is his home. Why should he leave?’ He gave Dryden a tin mug of tea. ‘So you’ll run a story?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. We need to go up the chain of command. I’ve lobbed in a question to the media desk at Church House in London. Let’s see what ripples that creates. They won’t comment but they might ask her what the hell’s going on. They might even tell her to stop the sale, but as I say, that’s a very long shot.’

  Smiling and nodding, Haig put his tea down on the workbench beside an etched glass which held a yellow liquid. The contents must have been viscous, because the inch of glass above the level of the liquid was blurred.

  Dryden turned away as Haig went to drink from it but he caught the definite edge of alcohol on the air.

  The opposite wall to the framed pictures was covered in canvases, unframed, on stretchers, mostly landscapes of the Fens. They were all by the same artist, there was no doubt of that: blocks of colour deliberately using a limited palette, but one perfectly matched to the Fens – russet, and several greens, from iceberg lettuce to leek tops. The skies were extraordinary, each one embellished with violent clouds. The lines in each picture were mathematical, lattice-works of ditches and drains, wind turbines, droves. And in each there was a constant small symbol, like a signature, in one corner or another: the unmistakable shape of Christ Church, in three dimensions, in jet black.

  Haig was looking too, his body moving less erratically than when he’d first met Dryden at Sexton Cottage. The shoulders still circled in that wheedling way, but now the motion was oily, almost sensuous. It occurred to Dryden that he might be high, or drunk. It was nine thirty in the morning.

  ‘I work at night – through the night,’ said Haig. It was as if he’d answered Dryden’s unspoken accusation. He picked up the glass with the yellow liquid and swilled it round before downing it in one swallow.

  ‘These pictures are by you?’

  Haig nodded, kept nodding, walking towards the nearest picture until it must have filled his vision. ‘They don’t sell,’ he said.

  They talked about art. Haig had been to Ruskin College, Oxford. He’d won a scholarship, from one of the Wisbech grammar schools. And that helped paint his picture. A gilded youth, but an under-achiever.

  ‘Now I put frames round other people’s work instead,’ he said.

  He seemed to try and shake himself free of the note of self-pity. ‘That’s where I met Kath. Ruskin. She did art too, then after graduation she went into graphic design.’ He turned towards Dryden and the contempt he clearly felt for that decision actually curled his lip. ‘She’s out all day. She works for an advertising firm in Peterborough. It’s a tough world.’

  He shrugged, clearly happy to let her struggle with her own life.

  ‘Does that stuff help?’ Dryden pointed at the yellow liquid in the etched glass.

  ‘Sure.’ He took the glass up and drained a drop, as if daring Dryden to find fault. ‘Like I said, I’ve been up since midnight. I sleep after lunch.’

  He reached under the table for a bottle. It had a beautiful label, a yellow woodprint of reeds, exactly the same as the three the coroner had produced in evidence at the inquest into the deaths of Spider Russell and Archie McLeish.

  He held it to the neon light. The yellow was, thought Dryden, reminiscent of urine.

  ‘Where’d you get the vodka?’ he asked.

  Haig’s eyes dimmed, literally faded. It was extraordinary but Dryden had an image then of him as a cat, with a translucent third eyelid, which could act like a shutter.

  ‘A gift,’ he said, pleased with himself to have found an answer that simply asked more questions.

  ‘Be careful. Bottles like that have been turning up in the West Fens contaminated with methanol and lead. If you drink a lot it’s going to make you ill. I mean, really ill.’

  The paper-thin confidence in Haig’s face bled away. As if to divert attention from his discomfort, he picked up the blowtorch and with a Zippo lighter sparked it back into noisy life.

  As Dryden left the barn he noticed an easel by the door, so he paused and eased the dustsheet off a corner to look. It was a shock to find a portrait, not a landscape. Haig’s work again, there was no doubt, given the same mathematical style. The picture made Dryden’s skin cool in the shock of recognition. A woman, the face made up of colour blocks again, but this time the palette was violent – red, and black, and a kind of sickly pale cream. The eyes reflected the rust-brown background. It was the vicar of Christ Church, Jennifer Temple-Wright. He thought that if Haig had done it from memory then what a dark memory it must be. She held out a hand, palm flat, and on it was a miniature three-dimensional model of Christ Church, Brimstone Hill.

  THIRTEEN

  The farmhouse was Georgian, its facade as balanced as a beautiful face: four windows, and a fine door under a simple portico. Dryden found it difficult to imagine that it was here, a decade ago, that a man had bled to death in his own kitchen, his hands pinioned to the table top by knives. The crime had a ritualistic flavour which made it hard to imagine it happening anywhere, let alone within this idyllic farmhouse, sheltered by a ring of pines. A vine had recently been cleared from the facade of the house and he could see still the intricate pattern of the leaves, tendrils and branches. There was an original gas lamp over the door, inside of which was a light bulb, which was on, but only just visible in the sunshine. No electric bell was on offer, a sign, he always felt, of old money. There was a knocker, instead, in brass, of the Lincoln Imp.

  Dryden rapped twice and turned his back on the door. In the distance, through a gap in the pines where the drive snaked in from the fen, he could see Humph’s Capri heading back towards Ely along a bank-top, the cab’s long rear aerial making it look like a radio-controlled car, which, in an odd way, it was.

  Muriel Calder opened the door with a polite smile lodged in place. PC Stokely Powell had said she was now sixty-eight, but Dryden
thought she looked to be in her late fifties. Another victory then, and this time over time itself. She wore a stylish dress in grey, stud earrings in lapis lazuli, and a watch with a tan leather strap.

  Dryden showed his press pass and said that he’d spoken to PC Powell and she might be expecting him?

  Calder invited him in, but as he crossed the threshold she delivered what sounded like a prepared statement. She’d agreed to help, in fact she wanted to help, but she didn’t think it would do any good: all this as he followed her down the hall towards the kitchen. She moved with a sinuous elegance, and her footsteps were silent on the polished floorboards.

  The house wasn’t grand, just comfortable, but with one grandiose feature: a polished wooden staircase, in a hard wood, which rose to a landing, then turned back on itself beneath a large multi-paned window. A red patterned carpet climbed the stairs, held down by brass runners.

  There was one portrait on the landing wall, in a military style, of two young men standing in profile together, rifles held vertical. There was a regimental badge in wood mounted above, an Indian elephant, identical to the one on Jock Donovan’s tie.

  ‘The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment,’ said Dryden, making connections, recalling Donovan’s haunted recollections of the night he survived the Battle of the Hook.

  Muriel Calder came back from the kitchen door to stand beside him. ‘Yes. That’s very clever of you. They’re my brothers; they died when I was very young. Dad had that painted from a photograph.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Dryden. ‘There’s a memorial in the churchyard. They died in Korea?’

  Muriel’s slender fingers adjusted one of her earrings. ‘Yes. They were very young. As I say, I was younger – just a kid. They’ve rather overshadowed my life, I’m afraid. Well, that’s not fair, is it? Their deaths have, not their lives. I remember them both very clearly. I was their favourite. We played together.’

  Dryden noted a display cabinet on the landing. He could see medals, cups and military caps. Also a gun, with a wooden stock, polished so that it drank in the sunlight, and then radiated it back out.

  ‘I met Jock Donovan – he told me the story. The Davenport brothers. That was your maiden name?’

  She nodded, studying Dryden’s face. ‘Yes. There’s no one better than Jock to tell that story. How is he? He doesn’t visit any more. I think it upsets him. He worked here – did he say? That was immediately after the war when he was trying to get back on his feet. He had problems sleeping, just being still. Nerves were shot, I suppose.

  ‘Mum couldn’t hide what she felt. Jock was a reminder of the boys, her boys. That’s the curse of the survivor, isn’t it? A living token of those who are not here. That must be a terrible burden. So Jock left us in the end, and I don’t blame him. And he did well, ran his own business, quite the jet-set entrepreneur.’ Her eyes widened in mock surprise. ‘Then he came back to retire. I’m glad he did. I’d like to think he feels that he’s come home in a way. And he visits the grave every week, which is a comfort really, because I can’t. It brings too much back.’

  She walked on down the corridor to the kitchen.

  Dryden followed her and took a seat at the large old deal table which stood in the middle of the quarry-tiled floor. He tried not to examine the surface of the wood. On the way to the house he’d reasoned that she’d have got rid of the table. Now he’d met Muriel Calder, he thought that wasn’t right. He guessed instead that she’d made a point of keeping it, denying the killers who’d broken into her home that day in 1999 an additional victory. So it was still here, old and weathered, a kind of family hearth, and a symbol that she could live with the memory.

  He sat down and the moment passed in which she might have offered him tea.

  ‘Three men killed my husband in this room,’ she said.

  Dryden tried to say something but the words didn’t get past his tongue. For the first time he wondered if this woman’s outward serenity was an elegant facade as thin as the one on the house.

  ‘I saw one of them last week. In a car in Brimstone Hill.’

  Dryden slipped out his notebook. ‘Constable Powell said that back then, after the murder, you couldn’t remember anything?’ He flipped through the pages, not to find the facts, but to remind her this was for real, that her words would appear in print.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ The way she said it made it clear she meant a real drink.

  No decent reporter turns down a drink. Alcohol loosens the tongue. And it was noon, so just about acceptable in polite circles.

  She uncorked an open bottle of white wine from the fridge. While her back was turned he ran a hand over the table, but stopped when he thought he’d felt a narrow slit-like hole.

  ‘It’s not nice out – but shall we?’

  So perhaps, for her, the kitchen did still harbour a ghost.

  A line of poplars screened the garden on two sides but the third was open to the south. In the far distance he could see the industrial estate on the old airfield at Barrowby, on the edge of Euximoor Fen. Over the fields several kites hung on the wind – two or three were ‘hawk’ shaped; one looked like a miniature airship with extra-sized owl eyes painted on the fabric. Two or three of the kites trailed tails which fluttered. Dryden strained his ears but he couldn’t catch a note of Jock Donovan’s mysterious high-pitched wail. He’d promised the old soldier he’d take up the issue but he’d yet to find the time for the call, which made him feel guilty, so he made a promise to himself he’d ring that day.

  They sat on metal chairs at a round metal table. Dryden explained that while he’d heard the story of her husband’s murder from PC Powell, it would be a great help if she could tell him in her own words.

  ‘It was June the first, nineteen ninety-nine,’ she said, sipping the wine. ‘The first thing I could recall was the hospital ward at Wisbech. It’s still there, isn’t it, the General? Dreadful Dickensian place, blackened bricks, and those awful narrow windows. They were ashamed of illness. Or were the patients ashamed of taking charity, perhaps?’

  Dryden just held her gaze.

  ‘Yes. Well. I woke up in the hospital but I didn’t open my eyes; something told me I shouldn’t, that there was something there I would regret seeing. But I felt this hand, holding mine, and I thought it would be Ronald’s. That was my husband, Ronald. I just lay there, they said it was for hours, and every time I came round I could feel his hand. Then I heard my son’s voice by my ear. He works in Brussels, he’s a linguist, and he’d had to fly in to Stansted. He’s very clever. I heard the word “Mum”. And then he said that Ronald was dead. So I opened my eyes and I was holding his hand. But he’d only just arrived.’

  She sipped her wine and let him consider this small miracle. Dryden was trying to assess just how reliable this woman’s memory might be. If PC Powell was so interested in the cold case, why didn’t he release an official statement? Why use Dryden as a cat’s paw? Did Powell doubt her testimony? And then there was his initial suspicion that Powell had conjured up the cold case at precisely the moment when his own performance in tracking down the West Fen illicit still had come under scrutiny.

  The wine was very light, almost colourless, crisp and cold.

  ‘It’s local,’ she said. ‘From the vineyard at Ely, the one the monks founded before the Conquest. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’

  ‘And that was all you remembered until now?’ prompted Dryden.

  ‘Yes. All these years. They, the family, insisted I went to a counsellor. She tried to get me to remember but I couldn’t, and to be frank, I didn’t want to. I know what happened. They killed Ronald. I asked and they told me how they killed him. I live in the real world. I have accepted that it happened. Why do I need to relive it? I’ve got on with my life.’

  She touched one of the earrings. ‘A week ago I was sitting on the bench by the level crossing in town.’

  ‘My son’s in the crèche there,’ said Dryden, nodding, wondering why she sat on the bench in town. H
e didn’t see her as a gossip. Perhaps it was for the company, or just to see the trains go by, the faces at the windows. Had she, subconsciously, always been searching for that face?

  ‘A goods train came through – there’s a lot more now; they’ve upgraded the line to Ely so they send trains through for Felixstowe and the docks. They’re endless. That’s an odd illusion I’ve experienced before, that it’s a circular railway, and it’s going to go on going past and that eventually I’ll start seeing trucks again.’

  She sipped at her glass but Dryden noticed the glass was empty.

  ‘The barriers were down and this car drew up. A Ford, I think, small, a bit battered, in blue. There was a driver in the front, a passenger in the back – which is a bit odd, isn’t it? Why wasn’t he in the passenger seat? I think, while the barrier was down, he was asleep, or resting. Anyway, that’s supposition. I wouldn’t do very well in the witness box, would I? Let’s stick to the facts. He had his eyes closed.’ She smiled and Dryden mirrored the facial expression exactly.

  ‘And I knew instantly that it was one of those three men who killed Ronald.’

  ‘But they wore stockings over their heads?’

  ‘Yes. I remember them coming into the house, I’ve always recalled that bit of what happened, and yes, they wore stockings over their faces. But as soon as I saw this man in the car, with his eyes closed, I saw him in my memory too. It’s just a few seconds long, the memory, but very clear. It’s like one of those little films on YouTube. My grandson shows me the funny ones. Just a clip. And in this clip in my head he’s standing in the kitchen alone, my kitchen. I can hear Ronald’s voice, but I can’t see him. And this man has rolled the stocking up over his face and he’s drinking from Ronald’s whisky decanter. It was Edinburgh crystal, and he was very fond of it. And this …’ Her mouth, for the first time, took on an ugly straight line. ‘This lout just drank from the mouth of it. I don’t think he could see me. Or at least, at that moment, he wasn’t bothered about me. Constable Powell said that according to the case notes when they found me I was on the floor. So perhaps that’s where I am in this memory, and it’s just a fleeting moment of consciousness. It’s not just the sounds. I can smell something, too, iron, like rust. That’s the blood, of course, I know that now.’