The Funeral Owl (7 page)

‘Sir.'

‘It was a warning, of course,' said Dryden. ‘Why leave the wooden sign nailed up if they didn't want us to find the victim quickly? Takes some doing, getting a body up on a cross like that. Two people, at least, maybe three or four. Why go to all that trouble? Why not just hang him off a tree in the churchyard if you want to make a point?'

But Friday was gone, so he didn't get an answer.

T
hey took the body away after the sun had set. Rigor mortis had passed, because the black body bag was sinuous, buckling as two forensics officers in white brought it out of the trees and laid it on a stretcher. A small crowd of villagers had gathered by the church, hemmed in by a long stretch of police tape. As the body was carried through the headstones a flashlight went off. When Dryden's eyes recovered he saw
The Crow
's photographer, Josie Evans, up on top of one of the box tombs, weighed down with camera gear.

‘I'll leave you to it,' said PC Powell. ‘If you remember anything I need to know, ring the mobile, you've got the number.'

Dryden watched Powell walk across the field that led up to the edge of the graveyard and he thought he heard him whistling. Dryden recognized the melody – Bach, he thought, expertly tuneful. It occurred to him that, given the circumstances, Powell, a lowly PC, seemed particularly unfazed by a murder inquiry on his patch.

Dryden had his laptop on his knee and he began to knock out the news story he'd have to file overnight. He thought that if he wrote it here and now, its principal virtue – that it was in part an eyewitness account – would shine through. The front page of the paper had to be designed and laid out in the morning, the presses would roll by noon, and the story would be out on the streets by teatime. The piece needed to read as if it had been written in the moment of discovery. That was the secret to reportage. Only tell the reader what you saw, heard, smelled and touched.

‘Laptop's smart,' said a voice which made him jump.

It was the young man PC Powell had described as the grandson of the householder of Sexton Cottage. He'd been about all afternoon. He wore a grubby white T-shirt, splashed with paint and what looked like turps. His hair was fair and unruly, his frame spindly, and there was a tattoo on his right arm of an intricate Celtic design.

‘Sorry,' said Dryden. ‘Do you mind if I do this here? I've got a deadline.'

‘Make yourself at home. Everyone else has.'

‘Sorry. You're the owner's grandson?'

‘He's upstairs resting. Yeah – Grandad was the sexton, best part of thirty years. House comes with the job, least it did. The last vicar said he could stay for life. That's the point of being sexton; you're the keeper of sacred things. It's a vocation. Not just a job.'

Dryden stood and offered his hand. ‘I'm Philip Dryden, from
The Crow.
'

‘Vincent Haig. People call me Vinnie.'

Dryden felt rings in the handshake – two, maybe three. Looking into Haig's eyes, he reassessed his age as being somewhere in the late thirties, maybe slightly older. The middle-aged trying to look young are never attractive.

‘You spotted the lead missing off the roof?' asked Dryden, recalling his earlier conversation with the Rev. Temple-Wright.

‘No. Grandad spotted it. Well, he heard them in the night. Not much he could do – he's blind, has been for five years now. Cataracts. He rang the nick at Wisbech and Powell's number; this was three o'clock in the morning. Left messages. They did fuck all.'

‘I guess no one thought it was going to end in murder, did they? Hindsight's a wonderful thing,' said Dryden.

‘Whatever,' said Haig. ‘Grandad phoned me first thing to say he'd heard something in the night and I came over to check it out. I saw the lead had gone so I made it secure and rang the vicar. She rang Powell; he came round and bunged some tape over the doorway, said he'd report it, give us a crime number for the insurance claim. That should have been it, done and dusted. Like you said, none of us knew that poor sod was up in the trees on the cross.'

They heard a cat flap bang and a trail of three kittens ran out across the yard. Then the back door opened and an old man came out. Eighty years old, perhaps even more, with thin grey hair, outdoor skin and a wind tan, common in the Fens, which gave the face a leathery appearance. Both his eyes were clearly sightless, flat and dull, focused on a point out in the field. Dryden was troubled by the blind because he couldn't read character in their eyes. They could hide so much.

‘I can hear your language inside. You might respect the dead,' he said, his eyes searching for his grandson.

A sneer disfigured Vincent Haig's face. Dryden disliked him immediately because he knew the calculation that lay behind it; that the old man couldn't see it, but that Dryden could.

The old man held a hand out into thin air. ‘I'm Albe Haig,' he said, the first name pronounced to rhyme with bumblebee. Dryden introduced himself. Haig said he could stay as long as he liked and that he was making more tea and would bring the pot out.

Dryden sat with the grandson in silence. On the roof of Christ Church they could see lights moving in the dusk as the forensic team finished their work. A single PC stood at the entrance into the pine trees where they'd brought out the victim's body.

Haig licked his lips. ‘See this field – the one between us and the church?'

Dryden counted twenty sheep still on the rough pasture.

‘It's called the Clock Holt in the village, although there's nothing on the map. Story is that when they built the church, one of the local gentry gave this field to the parish on the understanding that any rents or income would go to the vicar to pay for the upkeep of the church clock. Back then a clock would have been rare in a place like this. Everything would have run by the bell: the working day, services, shops. That's the Victorians for you – they ran on clockwork.'

‘I've never heard chimes,' said Dryden. In the dusk he could see a small exterior bell arch on the roof.

Haig leaned forward and looked into Dryden's face. ‘That's because they decided it was more important to use the money for this cottage, a home for the sexton. So the rent covers all the costs. They promised Grandad, the last vicar did, that he could have it for life. Now she wants him out. She's gonna sell it, and the rent from the Clock Field's going to help meet costs. That's what she said to his face: help meet costs. Nice woman.'

There was something wheedling about Vincent Haig that set Dryden's nerves on edge. When he spoke his shoulders moved as if he was trying to flex an arthritic neck. His manner annoyed Dryden; he was like one of those charity workers who insist on shaking their collecting tin in your face.

‘Was the promise made in writing?' asked Dryden.

Vincent Haig looked sideways. ‘That's not how these things work. For Grandad's generation your word was good enough.'

Dryden's sympathies were with Albe, but he wondered what they would find if they could spool back to the moment the promise was made. What would they really hear? A cast-iron promise, or just a form of words? It was only human nature, after all, to hear what you wish to hear, and to miss the get-out-clause.

But there was a story here.
Hard-hearted vicar evicts blind man from his home of thirty years.
What made Dryden uncomfortable was the feeling that Vincent Haig had fed him the information, like bait on a hook. It was also an oddly calculating thing to do as they sat surveying a murder scene. Was this really the right time to discuss a row over who paid the rent on Sexton Cottage?

The old man came back with a pot of tea on a tray with three mugs. His movements in the small garden were perfectly calibrated, shuffling between chairs and plant pots without error. As he set the mugs down, his free hand checked the flat surface.

Then he stood looking across the Clock Holt to the church. Dryden wondered what he could see in his mind: a jigsaw of memories, perhaps, in black and white.

‘So you heard the thieves in the night?' asked Dryden.

‘But I didn't hear a gunshot,' said Albe. He shook his head. ‘That's not right, is it? I hear everything.'

Vincent Haig stiffened in his seat and set his hand on the table edge, the fingers splayed. Dryden saw that the top of his right index finger was missing – just a half-inch.

‘What
did
you hear?' asked Dryden.

‘They were good; I said to that copper they were professionals. I didn't hear a van, nothing on the road at all. But to get the lead off they needed to lever it off the rafters, where it's been pinned down. I heard that.' He pulled the lobe on his right ear.

‘Did you look?'

It was the wrong thing to say but the old man was nodding. ‘I went to the bedroom window. They were up and down in ten minutes. They tried to keep quiet, but there were a few words.'

‘English?'

Albe Haig shook his head. ‘Foreigners. People want easy lives now,' he added, and Dryden thought he was searching for his grandson's face. ‘As if God owes them that. 'Specially foreigners.'

Dryden stiffened, hoping that this man who he liked – admired, even – wasn't going to reveal a bitter prejudice.

‘You don't know that, Grandad,' said Haig, an easy, mocking swagger in his voice. ‘Just because the one that died was ethnic Chinese, doesn't mean they all were.' Dryden noted Vincent Haig's careful political correctness.

‘I heard them,' said his grandfather. ‘The voices travel because they're light – like when we had a choir. Not English, something different.' He struggled to find the right word. ‘Girlish. But men. Chinese, I reckon, like the copper said.'

‘How many?' asked Dryden.

‘Three, I think. Unless others didn't speak.'

‘But no argument? You didn't hear shouting?'

Albe Haig sat down. ‘No – just voices.' He pressed his hands to his ears as if he could hear them now. ‘I can't believe someone is dead. Murdered. It's such a peaceful place.'

Dryden tried out a few of his own theories as to what had happened, hoping they'd share theirs, but they said they had none.

‘I better get to work,' said Dryden eventually. He put a hand on the old man's shoulder. ‘Good to meet you, Mr Haig. Hope this all quietens down. Gives you some peace.'

The grandson walked him to the edge of the Clock Holt.

‘And Temple-Wright knows he's blind?' asked Dryden before they parted. ‘I could do a story if your grandfather wants me to. Can you ask him? Not now. He's tired. But let me know.'

They swapped cards. Haig's said he was a picture restorer and framer. Dryden looked at his hands again, seeing this time that they were long, even elegant, with dry paint under the nails.

‘I'll ask him. You know what I think? I think the vicar doesn't care about Grandad because he loves the place, the church, and because he was the guardian, the keeper. She hates that, hates the idea that we might love this place.
I know
.'

Something in the way Vincent Haig said it implied a darker knowledge.

‘I'll talk to her if your grandad wants me to,' said Dryden. He felt a thrill for the power of his trade. If she backed down he could run a story anyway, saying the church had shown mercy. But something told him Temple-Wright didn't do backing down.

The ambulance into which they put the victim's body still stood on the road, the light flashing. Dryden thought they'd leave with the forensic unit when the job was done. It was sad, poignant even, that they felt no need to hurry away with the body.

‘You know the legend, about the Devil and Brimstone Hill?' asked Haig. He had a way of sharing information which Dryden found deeply annoying. First the question, then his own, pre-prepared and calibrated answer.

‘Sure. He was chased here by the vicar and went up in a puff of smoke to hell.'

‘Perhaps the Devil's back,' said Haig.

T
he Jolly Farmers had been closed for thirteen months, but it might as well have been thirteen years. It stood at a T-junction two miles from Christ Church, out on the fen. The smell of winter damp ran through it like the spreading fingers of dry rot. A single lavatory had been sluiced down with Domestos, adding an astringent note to the fetid air which had been trapped behind boarded windows and bricked up doorways. There was nothing quite as dispiriting, thought Dryden, as a dead pub. It was like an empty theatre; all the more desolate for the fact that it had once been so alive.

The atmosphere suited the occasion. The Ely coroner, Dr Digby Ryder, had decided to hold his court in the old pub – as was his right under the law – because the case he wanted to deal with was local, involving the deaths of two tramps earlier that year, whose bodies had been discovered in a flooded ditch. A local case, of local interest, so Dryden had put it in the diary a week earlier. But now the pub was crammed with journalists because Ryder was also due to formally open the inquest into the death of the man found in the churchyard at Christ Church. Given that the police had issued such a short statement the day before, and Dryden's eyewitness account had yet to hit the streets, the rest of the media were keen to cover the coroner's court, even if proceedings were limited to a few formalities.

The coroner's officer, DS Stan Cherry, had removed the boards over some of the windows so that indirect sunlight filled the old public bar. Dust didn't hang in the air – it clogged it, like cigarette smoke. Three darts stuck out of the dartboard, a handwritten Xmas Draw board hung on the wall beside a Pirelli calendar featuring Miss April 2010, and Dryden spotted four plastic rat-traps on the lino, each edged into a shadowy corner. A TV crew had set up in one corner at the back, and there were two radio reporters with microphones in the second row. The front row was reserved for local people who had an interest in the local case, which would now come on after the Christ Church killing. They looked bemused at the media circus around them.