The Funeral Owl (28 page)

‘And, yes, Kath does know. Nice of you to ask, for once. And it is
Kath
, by the way. She hates Kathleen; she hates anyone calling her Kathleen. She just can't face telling you not to do it. Ten years of not telling you to shut up and call her by her real name. Do you know what that is? It's pity.'

Dryden couldn't look at the old man's face. His grandson's was flushed, the eyes full of tears. Dryden took the map and let himself out.

The sheep on Clock Holt had fanned out over the field to munch at the grass, but his arrival sent them all off into the shadowy corner again, where they bleated in a huddle.

Jock Donovan was at the gate out of Christ Church graveyard. Dryden was immediately aware that the old soldier had been waiting for him.

‘I saw you arrive,' said Donovan. Beyond him, on the far side of the road, was Brimstone House, the old man's home. In the morning sunshine the Artex-white facade was almost painfully bright. ‘I wanted to thank you for sorting out the kites. I've been sleeping. It's made a real difference to my life. This is for your son. I'm sorry, I've forgotten his name?' Donovan had a plastic bag and from it he took a ball.

‘Eden,' said Dryden.

‘He'll walk when he wants to, of course,' said Donovan. ‘But I thought this might help. He can hold it, but if it rolls away he'll have to go after it, and it's too big to swallow.'

Dryden accepted the ball. It felt like leather, but with a textured surface, and was about twenty centimetres across. The colours were very bright, reds and blues and whites, and there was a circular script in a language which looked to Dryden's eye like Japanese.

‘It's a
jokgu
ball. The South Koreans invented it in the sixties to keep the army conscripts fit. It's like volleyball, but you use your feet, and the net's low, like tennis. Great to watch.'

‘Thanks. That's a really good idea,' said Dryden. ‘Thank you. I'll run a story on the kites when they've finished the tests. Local man's super hearing solves mystery of singing kites. That kind of thing. I might need a picture.'

‘Yes, that's fine, that's what we agreed. Good luck with the ball.' With that Donovan turned on his heels, still holding the empty plastic bag, and walked stiffly back towards the house.

That left Dryden holding the ball. If he bounced it he'd scuff it, and it was brand new, so he just balanced it on one hand. Presents always took him aback, especially unexpected ones. He knew what he ought to feel: gratitude, a link with the giver, especially when so much thought had gone into the choice of the gift. Instead, he was left with a sense of unease, and he had to admit – if only to himself – that he often mistrusted the good intentions of others.

T
he Brimstone Café's All-Day Super Breakfast came on its own oval plate. Dryden had ordered one for Humph, but only a cup of tea with toast for himself. Grace said she wasn't hungry. They sat outside at the café's only table, under the shade of the London plane tree. Dryden thought Grace looked ill: pale, her face puffy, her narrow fingers clutching at her hair. She'd asked for coke when pushed. Humph sat opposite his daughter, trying to get her to talk. Grace was spending her time trying not to cry.

Then the all-day breakfast arrived and Humph concentrated on that.

Dryden had his laptop open and was looking at a digital image of the proposed page layouts for the next day's edition of the
Ely Express
. The front was reserved for the latest on the Barrowby Airfield killings, with the exclusive picture of Will Brinks taken from Rick's Tattoo Parlour. Brinks had switched from the CID's prime suspect to the last remaining victim of the Barrowby explosion, but the photograph was still worth its place on the front.

Page three featured the sad story of Julian Amhurst.

STAR PUPIL'S BODY FOUND IN RIVER AT ELY

The news had been running on the local radio bulletins since dawn. He read all the copy on the front and page three and then sent Vee Hilgay a text at
The Crow
telling her it all looked good. Any late news could be added in the morning. The advertisers liked the free-sheet to be out early, and on time, to be delivered to households and businesses in the town. Dryden didn't like the free newspaper business, but by putting his own version out on the streets, he had effectively stopped a competitor muscling in on his patch.

Humph had his knife and fork in his small hands, both pointing skywards, when he finally seemed to summon the energy to stop eating and talk. ‘I spoke to Mum on the mobile,' he said to Grace.

His daughter drained her coke, then looked away.

Dryden examined the ball Donovan had given him, trying to see order in the chaos of the Korean hieroglyphs.

‘She said a policeman called at the house,' said Humph. ‘From Ely. She said he wanted to talk to you. Why's that?'

Humph was aware that every time he spoke to Grace he was somehow adding to that centrifugal force, the one that was throwing her out, away from the centre, away from him; but he couldn't stop himself.

There was a magazine on the table and Grace had found a page with a puzzle on it, a grid. She toyed with it, trying out numbers in each square with a pencil on a length of string attached to the table leg, keeping her eyes down.

‘Grace,' said Humph. ‘I don't care what you've done. Just tell me. I can help. We can all help.'

She pressed down with the pencil until the lead broke.

Humph chased a button mushroom round his plate with his knife. ‘Mum told the copper you were staying with Grandma. So they'll be round.' Immediately he regretted the threat, realizing he'd given his daughter a watertight reason to run away again. ‘Don't even think about it,' he said, waving a fork with which he had previously skewered a kidney. Two drops of watery blood fell on the plastic white tabletop.

‘I'm getting more tea,' said Dryden. ‘Anyone?'

He left them to it for a minute. Grace's crimes were likely to be trivial. Dryden imagined a spectrum of possibilities, from mindless shoplifting at Boots to some elegant graffiti in one of the ring-road subways.

He ordered tea and turned down a third attempt by the woman behind the counter to sell him an all-day breakfast. She was ethnic Chinese, married to a Fenman who sweltered in the kitchen. The Brimstone Café had once been a butcher's shop and the walls were still tiled. A little frieze of glazed farm animals ran round the room at eye level – cows, pigs, chickens, ducks and hares. He never ate in the Brimstone because there was a strange echo even now of its past: the iron smell of blood, the coldness of the metal hooks, a raw saltiness.

Outside the Humphries family had lapsed into silence.

Dryden dunked his tea bag in his mug – ‘mashing' his father would have called it, a northern word, from the factory floor. It was a comforting ritual that reminded him of what had been a happy family.

Since his confrontation with Vincent Haig, his mind had been circling Christ Church. He couldn't shift the idea that the key to the explosion at Barrowby Oilseed didn't lie in the vicious underworld of Wisbech's triads, at least not entirely. He felt it lay here, in Brimstone Hill. Had Vincent Haig borrowed money off the triads? Dryden thought of the fifty-pound notes lying around Will Brinks' body. Had there been more cash? Had Haig, perhaps, decided to solve his problems with a single bullet? And then there was Jock Donovan. He'd been miles away from Barrowby at the moment the illicit still exploded. Dryden had seen him just after the blast in the street outside Christ Church. But images of the old man's forgotten war seemed to echo still. It hadn't been North Koreans, at least not North Koreans alone, who had sent those thousands of five-inch shells into Jock Donovan's crescent-shaped trench. It had been the Chinese, the People's Army. Had that eaten away at Donovan's soul? Was he really the forgiving man he seemed to be, free, until the moment of the Barrowby Oilseed blast, of the memory of blood and water?

The drops of kidney juice on the table were drying in the sun. Dryden's mobile buzzed, indicating an incoming text. It was from Vee at
The
Crow
.
Will Brinks does runner from hosp. Manhunt.

T
here were three people and a dog in the Capri but none of them had made a noise for an hour. Humph was asleep, despite the large fluffy earphones clamped to his head. Dryden, in the back seat, had spent the time following a zigzag chain of thought which worried away at a single question: why was Will Brinks on the run –
again
? If the lethal bullet was the result of a gang war, why was the lowly security man afraid for his life? Had he, perhaps, seen the gunman just before the fatal blast? In the front passenger seat sat John Brinks, Will's stepfather. What he was thinking was hidden behind those remarkable blue, raptor-like eyes. The cab was parked in a clump of trees on the edge of a field so large that its distant edge was lost in a buckling mirage of midday heat.

They'd found John Brinks at his stepson's caravan at Third Drove. The police had run him out there from the hospital. Mary Brinks was due to make an emotional appeal for her son to turn himself in on TV news later that evening. John Brinks, taciturn at best, did tell Dryden what had happened at the hospital. He'd been maintaining a bedside vigil but had slipped away to the canteen to get a cup of tea. The uniformed PC on duty had chosen the same moment to test the fire exit, and have a swift cigarette, in the process. When Brinks got back there'd been a warm, empty bed. His stepson had been on medication, and was in no condition to be on his feet, let alone on the road. He had to be found quickly, for his own health if nothing else.

The police manhunt was in top gear. A description of Brinks' car had gone to all units and a watch was being kept on all arterial roads out of the Fens. The ports were on alert, as were regional airports at Cambridge, Norwich and Peterborough. The police had dropped John Brinks at Third Drove with instructions to sit tight in case his stepson appeared. There was still no sign of Will's car, his dog, or most of his personal belongings – clothes, books, passport, driving licence, and field glasses. He hadn't had any of these at the hospital, so unless he picked them up from somewhere he couldn't run far.

Dryden had told Humph to drive straight to Third Drove so that he could get pictures of the caravan and the site for
The Crow
. He'd phoned Vee and told her he'd update the story for the paper overnight. John Brinks had needed little persuading to abandon his vigil at Third Drove. His stepson might have learning difficulties but he wasn't stupid. He was unlikely to turn up at the site where the police knew he lived, which was why they were parked in a clump of blackthorn trees at the entrance to a field of leeks. Across that field was a wood, scattered birch mostly, sparse enough to let light pick out each tree trunk. Inside the thicket was a bird hide, young Brinks' private hideaway since childhood. He'd taken his stepfather there once, a few years back, to show him a cygnet he was raising by hand. It had been no more than a shed built of branches, a plastic-sheeting roof, and some rough bedding, but young Will had treated it like a teenager's bedroom. Bird-spotting books and a journal of sightings were kept in a waterproof tin, a collection of feathers and hatched eggshells arranged on a shelf built of bricks.

The sun was high above the trees, Tizer-red, so that the black peat of the field was tinged orange. They'd decided to give it an hour and then investigate the hide, see if Brinks had used it to stash his valuables.

Dryden could see John Brinks' eyes in the rear-view mirror, fixed unblinkingly on the distant wood. ‘He's scared, isn't he?' said Dryden, finally breaking the spell of the silence. He thought the chances of Will Brinks turning up here were 1 in a 1000. The chances of him turning up at the caravan site had been 1 in a million, so they were still playing the odds.

‘He is now,' said John. He had a fuzzy voice and Dryden guessed he'd not long ago given up smoking. ‘Problem with the kid is he's half stupid, half genius. If I said I understood him I'd be lying. He's my son just as much as the other two, but how he thinks? Forget it.'

Humph shifted in the driver's seat and the suspension gave out a resonant twang.

‘How did he get the job at Barrowby Oilseed?' It was a question that had been worrying Dryden. He couldn't see the shy, awkward, Will Brinks just doorstepping potential employers.

‘He had an eye for picking up bits of work. We all do. It's how you make a living without a full-time job. Without a house to live in. Contacts are important, a personal link. He'd have got a tip from Dan.'

‘Daniel Fangor?'

‘Yup.'

The Pole who died in the explosion, alongside the two Chinese.

‘How'd he know him?'

Brinks' eyes flicked from the view across the field to Dryden's reflection in the rear-view. Being a Capri it was a back seat without a door. Dryden didn't like that look, and he found himself wondering if he could get his bony frame out of the open window in a hurry. His question had clearly crossed an unseen line.

He tried another. ‘It's not full time then, a job like that?'

Brinks was very still. ‘No. It's called pluralism. The holding of many jobs at the same time. It used to be standard practice in the church, the state. It was one of the reasons everyone hated the church so much before the Reformation. It's one of the ways the rich stay rich. They get paid for doing two things at the same time. If you're poor it's seen as a swindle, moonlighting. Will had other jobs. Most were casual, paid in cash, no paperwork.'

It was such a surprising answer Dryden just nodded. He wondered then if they had time to find out John Brinks' life story. Dryden had thought of him as a born tinker. But perhaps he'd married into the family. Where had the education come from – teachers or study? He sensed the almost manic focus of the autodidact, and recalled the bookcase in the caravan at Third Drove, with its volumes on history and natural history.