The Funeral Owl (11 page)

Dryden deliberately let the silence stretch out, wondering if Powell had sensed he sounded less than convincing. The sun was just setting beyond the roof of Christ Church. Dryden half-closed his eyes so that diamonds sparkled in his eyelashes.

‘Before all this blew up I was planning to ask for a favour,' said Powell. He covered his face with both hands, then drew them away, stretching his skin. ‘This is incredibly bad timing for you and me. The last thing I need is to be caught up in another case when I've got a gang war on my patch. The last thing you need is another story. This
can
keep – but not for long, Dryden. I need publicity, and I need it quickly. It's a cold case. Interested?'

‘Sure,' said Dryden, although he couldn't help feeling that this new story had been introduced, in part, to divert attention from further conversation on the subject of the illicit still. The police manipulated the press, that was a fact of life, but that didn't mean Dryden had to enjoy the experience. ‘I'll get us a refill,' he said.

At the bar Dryden stood looking at a large framed black-and-white picture of Brimstone Hill taken, according to a scrawled whitewash note, in 1889. He admitted to himself that he had an almost unhealthy interest in cold cases, so for now he was prepared to let drop the subject of the trade in lethal moonshine. There was something about an unsolved crime which seemed to intensify with the passing years, as if it became more vivid, less mundane. For the victim, time simply replaced the fear and trauma of the moment with an accumulation of bitterness, or a determination for revenge.

Back at the picnic table Powell had a briefcase open: worn, light leather, classy. He took out a newspaper cutting from
The
Daily Telegraph
, Friday, 13 June 1999. The headline read:

US-STYLE ‘HOT' BURGLARY LEAVES

ONE DEAD IN FENLAND ART SPREE

‘“Hot burglary” was what they called it back then. I guess they'd go for house invasion now. Breaking in when the owners are home, and using violence to intimidate. It's almost always a gang crime; they go mob-handed to maximise the threat. You've read
In Cold Blood
?'

Powell shook his wrist so that the gold watchstrap jangled, a mannerism Dryden had noted before. He couldn't decide if it betrayed stress or a need to draw attention to the bling.

‘Sure,' said Dryden. Although brought up in the Fens, Dryden had spent most of his working life in London, which was where he'd have been in June, 1999. Dimly he recalled this cold case, and as Powell had pointed out, the echoes of Truman Capote's classic true-life crime novel
In Cold Blood
, which told the story of the brutal killing of a Kansas farmer called Herbert Cutter and his wife, and two of their children, by two armed robbers.

‘That left four dead, of course,' said Powell. ‘This could have been as bad. They did four properties in one day, a gang of three. First one was at Welney, a cottage. I've been down the lane to take a look and you can see why they chose it. There's nothing else for miles, just the reed beds, the fields, the river. Owner was a widow in her sixties. They just burst in, tied her up. Then they searched the place, every room, clearly looking for something specific. It could have turned nasty because they couldn't find it, so they asked her straight. She talked. It was right there, in the kitchen, hanging on the wall, so small they'd missed it. And that was all they took, an oil painting eight inches by six.'

‘Experts then, art thieves?'

‘You'd think.' Powell used the heel of his palm to clear the watery eye. Dryden wondered how long he'd gone without sleep. With a murder on his patch he must be under pressure to give CID as much of his local knowledge as possible.

‘The painting was by an artist called Louis Grimshaw,' said Powell. ‘His father is more famous – I think Louis was Atkinson's son. The two of them specialized in nineteenth-century scenes of industrial cities. This one was of Liverpool docks by moonlight. Worth fifteen thousand pounds.'

Dryden whistled. ‘Not bad in nineteen ninety-nine. A decent's day's work by anyone's standards. How was the woman?'

‘They left her tied to the chair. Neighbours found her the next day. She said she'd been screaming for help for six hours. So she wasn't great. Hospitalized, then released. She never went back to the house, not even to pack her things.'

One of the Portuguese owners came out to clear their drinks. He talked them through the menu, even though they said they hadn't come for food. They said they'd think about it.

Once he was out of earshot Powell took up his story once again.

‘Second one was at Friday Bridge. One elderly resident, a man this time, wheelchair bound. A terraced cottage, but the houses on both sides were empty in the day, which is when they called. This time they were after a watercolour. A moonlit scene of the Coliseum in Rome, half-buried in ivy and ancient trees. Victorian artist called Pether. Very collectible. Twenty thousand pounds.'

‘So they always recce the house, and they know their art market,' said Dryden.

‘Turns out they'd got hold of an auction room catalogue plus the names and addresses of the owners of each item. Neat trick. So in each case they had the address and then the description of the item. Needless to say, a major breach of security on the part of the auction house. And yes, there was – in retrospect – evidence that they'd visited the scene before the day of the crime.

‘Third one was a farmhouse at Upwell. Owners were out but their daughter was upstairs. She panicked when she heard them coming up the stairs so they coshed her, broke her skull. Then they took six paintings, all by an Italian artist of the nineteenth century, a series of rural scenes. Insurance cover was for two thousand pounds.'

‘What age was the girl they coshed?' he asked.

Powell checked his notes. ‘Fifteen.'

Dryden pushed the cutting aside and covered his eyes. Sometimes crime crept under his radar, brought a darkness into his life. He looked down the street towards the school and the crèche.

‘Last call of the day was here, out at Barrowby Drove. A big Georgian farmhouse set on its own in a stand of pines. This time things really turned nasty. Broad daylight, Friday evening. The couple – the Calders – were at home. They'd planned to auction one picture, a miniature portrait of the Duchess of Bedford by a Regency artist named Hargreaves. The estimated sale price was thirty-five thousand pounds. They were selling to meet the costs of running the house, which had been in the wife's family for three generations. He wouldn't tell them where it was. Point-blank refusal. Our robbers didn't take it well. They knocked him down with a length of iron piping and then dragged him into the kitchen. He was sixty-eight.

‘The wife, she was younger, by ten years or more. She passed out when the violence started. Lucky she did. So that left him. They got his hand and put it on the kitchen table and drove a nine-inch kitchen knife through it, pinned him to the top.'

Powell left that image to linger for a second.

‘I guess they wanted him to talk. But he still wouldn't tell them where it was. It was a miniature, and the house was a rambling maze of rooms and cupboards. So there was no way they were going to find it. So they did the other hand. Then he passed out. They must have left then, cutting their losses. When the wife came round her husband was dead. There was a lot of blood under the kitchen table. Coroner said heart failure got him before the blood loss, which was probably a blessing.'

There was a look in Powell's eyes which reminded Dryden that it took guts to be a copper in the Fens, a black copper even more so. A rarity in West Cambridgeshire, Powell could look forward to rapid promotion. All he needed was to get noticed. Maybe that was what this was about. Solving an infamous cold case after a decade would earn him valuable career points. Playing second-fiddle on a murder investigation which was likely to lead to organized crime looked less promising.

‘The wife's never spoken about what happened,' he said, draining the squash. ‘In fact, she always said she couldn't remember anything after the thieves got through the front door. They knocked the lock out, by the way – one blow with a hand-held pile driver. Doctors said she'd developed protective amnesia. We had descriptions from the other victims, at the other houses. Problem is, the gang wore stockings over their heads, so what we got was minimal. All three were dark, very dark. Heads shaved. Only one spoke and he had an accent which was consistently described as heavy east European. Remember, this was nineteen ninety-nine, so EU migration was kicking off. The presumption was they were Poles.'

‘Anything since?'

‘Not really. It's still on the books. They kept tabs on migrant gangs but never heard a whisper.'

‘The paintings?'

‘Only thing that ever turned up was the Pether, at an auction in Cork, Ireland. Forged papers. Trail was cold, so we never got anywhere.'

‘But now?'

‘The wife, Muriel Calder, still lives at the house. A week ago she was sitting on the bench by the level crossing when a car pulled up. In the back was a man, his head against the glass, asleep. Seeing that face triggered a memory she'd suppressed for years. When the thieves were in the kitchen she must have regained consciousness for a few seconds lying on the floor. She saw one of the robbers roll up the stocking over his face and drink some of her husband's malt whisky from a decanter. That was the face she said she recognized. A few seconds, then the train went through, and the car drove off at speed. She's willing to swear the man in the back of the car was the man in her kitchen that day. We got a forensic artist up from Cambridge to try and produce a likeness, but it's pretty hopeless.'

He slid a glossy reproduction of a pencil drawing of a face out of the briefcase. Dark hair, glossy and unkempt, over a pale face, with dark eyes and a heavy brow.

‘Could be anyone, to be fair,' said Powell. ‘The thing is, she remembered something about the car he was in. A Ford, she thinks, two doors, blue. In the back passenger-side window where this man leaned his head there was a sticker. A round white disc, about six inches across, with a black dragon in the middle belching red fire. Question is can we track down the car using the sticker? It's the kind of detail people notice. A neighbour, perhaps – someone who parks next to it every day, the garage where the car gets an MOT, the petrol station they use.'

Powell stretched his arms out. ‘This is about speed, Dryden. It's possible the killer knew Calder had spotted him. She says the car drove off at high speed. If that's true, he'll dump the car or hide it, then disappear. Memories fade. So this needs to run next week at the very latest.'

Powell edged closer, his dark eyes shining. ‘If we find this car, Dryden, we find the killer.'

I
n a narrow inlet off the river two miles south of Ely lay
PK 122
, a former inshore naval patrol vessel converted to a houseboat. Barham's Dock was overgrown with reeds, the water ink-green with algae. Dryden had bought the boat for the small wooden plaque in the wheelhouse which read with heart-breaking simplicity:
Dunkirk 1940
. It had a panelled cabin, portholed sleeping berths, and a shower and bathroom he'd had adapted for Laura when she'd first come out of hospital after the accident. The paintwork was still naval grey, the letters and numbers of
PK 122
three-foot high on the prow.

Eden's birth had prompted them to abandon the boat and experiment with a more domestic life. They'd lived for a year in an old tied cottage on Feltwell Anchor, a vast expanse of dry fen to the north of Ely. The landscape had been an inspiration to them both: huge skies over vast fields, ingrained with a sense of isolation. They'd been happy, but only despite the house. The dull predictability of rooms and doors and windows seemed to weigh them down under the wide fen sky. It had, wonderfully for Dryden, been Laura who had come up with a solution. They'd decided to buy a narrowboat, named the
Rosa Jane
, and moor it alongside
PK 122
. Within hours of its purchase, Laura had set to work to re-christen it the
Lunigiana
after her native Italian province, the land of the moon-worshippers. A series of moons, from crescent to full, decorated the woodwork around the name. The two vessels, side-by-side, fitted snugly between the banks of the grassy dock. They slept in the narrowboat, lived in the naval launch; a chaotic existence which they both found thrilling. There were downsides: the naval launch was damp, they had to keep an eye on Eden, the ducks kept Laura awake, and Dryden had nightmares about waking up underwater. But overall, on balance, it beat domesticity.

In the wardroom below the deck of
PK 122
Dryden could hear Laura working, the dull tap-tap of the computer keyboard resonating through the steel deck. Eden was asleep in a child seat at his feet. The sun was touching the horizon, the red light interrupted every few seconds by the turning blades of the thirty-foot wind turbine they'd had erected on the bankside to supply power to the boats. The blades created a stroboscopic effect at sunset, a hypnotic light show, which Dryden enjoyed.

He had a glass of cider in his hand, his third of the day, and he was making a physical effort to let the memory of the last twenty-four hours fade with the light. The image of the murder victim hanging from the cross in the churchyard at Christ Church was still vivid, but it no longer flashed, unbidden, across his mind. According to Powell there would be arrests tonight in Lynn, as CID looked for the killers amongst the migrant Chinese community. Dryden would pick up the details in the morning, but if the arrests led to charges he'd only be able to print the bare details in
The Crow
– although the story would still make the ‘splash' on the front page. After that all he had to do was to wait for the defendants to appear in the magistrates' court. Then there'd be the long wait while the case edged its way towards the Crown Court in Peterborough.