The Funeral Owl (2 page)

Dryden wound his window down, aware that his body heat was misting the windscreen. The wind, which had blown from the east since the spring, filled the car with a blast of hot air. Boudicca sat up and stared at Dryden in the rear-view mirror, panting.

The satnav told them to go straight on at the approaching junction. The electronic voice was a woman's, with a Blue Peter accent.

‘Ignore her. Take a right here,' said Humph, pulling the cable out of the gadget.

The cabbie seemed to make a decision then, flipping down the glove compartment and taking out a miniature bottle of white wine. He collected them on his frequent trips to and from Stansted Airport. He looked at the label as if the vineyard made a difference. He checked his watch: 9.34 a.m. He put the bottle back unopened.

‘Good call,' said Dryden.

He ran down through the gears, making a hash of slipping into first, then swung right, away from the lethal water. This road continued to run on a high bank, but there were fields on either side, which ran hedgeless to a hazy horizon. Dryden breathed out in a long shudder, letting tension bleed away. He flexed his neck and one of the bones in his spine cracked like a pistol shot.

They zigzagged on flood banks until they reached a long stretch bounded on one side by a line of poplars – hundreds of them, running for a mile, thrashing in the wind, as if trying to break free of their roots. The breeze nudged the car too, like a giant boxing glove, jabbing from the east.

The sun was up, already hot, and they flashed from shade to light, from light to shade, as they passed the trees.

‘She'll be fine,' said Dryden. ‘She'll have gone for a secret sleepover with a friend. Kids do that these days.'

Dryden's own son was one year old. When it came to teenage girls he didn't know what he was talking about.

‘Maybe,' said Humph, a slight lift in his spirits making the grip of his headache release just a notch.

A great change had come over the landscape within a few hundred yards. The black peat soil had gone, replaced by the silty fields of the Great Soak – pale, bleached, tinder dry. Some of the fields were dressed with fertiliser, a white powder which made it almost painful to let the light into the eye.

‘Turn by the bins,' said Humph.

The bins stood at a corner of a turning, just a dusty track, set off at precisely ninety degrees, part of the mathematical grid which seemed to underpin the landscape.

Dryden noted the name of the lane: Euximoor Drove. ‘Droves' were the narrow fen lanes, sometimes just dirt tracks, a network leading to a thousand dead ends. This one ran half a mile to the ruin of a farm. Beside it stood a 1950s bungalow, wooden window frames, double chimney pots, a pitched tiled roof. It must have been built on a concrete raft in the silt because the whole thing had tipped a few degrees from true, as if at any moment it might just slip beneath the soil.

Dryden turned off the drove towards the bungalow. Ahead the road ran on in an infinite straight line along which were strung a few more houses, a chapel, a farm. This was the hamlet of Euximoor Drove, thirty houses sprinkled along a straight line.

Dryden put the handbrake on and killed the engine, already telling himself he'd been fine driving, that he could keep the fear in check. But the air was heavy with the smell of anxiety – sweat and a hint of electricity, like a blown plug.

Humph struggled out of the Capri. The dog followed, bounding to the house.

A grey-haired woman was already on the doorstep. Overweight, fleshy, in boots and shapeless jeans. The sun caught the washing-up suds she was trying to shake from her hands.

‘Mum,' said Humph, walking towards her on balletic feet. ‘I've been ringing. You're not wearing your hearing aids, are you?' Humph's shoulders slumped and Dryden knew him well enough to sense that he was fighting the urge to blame her for the missing girl, her grandchild.

And for her, so much more than a grandchild. Humph's long and acrimonious divorce had meant his daughters had spent a lot of their childhoods out here on Euximoor Fen. Grace and her grandmother had shared tears over the collapse of what had been a happy family. Most of all they'd shared the job of shielding young Alice from too much of the brutal truth: her mother's adultery and her father's inability to rebuild a life beyond the artificial confines of a 1985 Ford Capri coupé.

Meg smiled as she strained to hear.

He took her hands and spelt it out: ‘Grace has run away from home. Is she here?'

She covered her small mouth with both of her hands, shaking her head, then looked back at the house.

‘I'll check,' he said, brushing past. ‘She might have snuck in.'

Dryden stood by the Capri.

Meg Humphries looked around her smallholding as if Grace would be there, so far unseen, amongst the beanpoles and rhubarb. ‘Where could she be, Philip?' she asked. ‘I don't understand – why? Why run away?'

Dryden shrugged. ‘She'll turn up. I know she will. The police are looking too.'

‘The police?' she echoed, drying her hands on her jeans.

Dryden was running the numbers through his head: the chances she'd turn up were falling sharply with each passing hour, each minute. A fifteen-year-old girl, missing for nearly twelve hours. Had she run away? Would she come back? There was a chance they'd never know where she'd gone. She'd been unhappy. She'd lied. She might hurt herself.

The cabbie appeared at the side of the house, pulling open an outhouse door, then walking to a coal bunker, moving quickly, balancing his weight with an almost theatrical finesse. He left doors open behind him, each one a token of how important Grace was, and how unimportant the doors.

When Humph turned back towards the Capri Dryden could see that he'd begun to accept that it might happen: that his life might be defined by this day, the day his daughter was never seen again. This had been his last shot, the last place Grace might have gone for refuge and comfort. Now they were left with a chilling alternative. That she'd taken to the road. Despite the building heat of the day, Dryden shivered at the thought of those three words, which seemed to hang in the wide fen sky:
never seen again
.

‘Can you make tea?' Dryden asked Meg. ‘Humph needs to slow down. Just wait. We all need to wait.'

Suddenly Humph raised his arm, pointing past them, back down the drove they'd driven up.

The horizon had gone. In the mid-distance the water tower at the fen township of Brimstone Hill, and the little steeple of its church, were grey ghosts. Wind bent trees back like slingshots. Above it all broiled a cloud of dust, with a dark heart, almost black, but edged in what looked like ash. A soil storm – a ‘fen blow'. The summer had been water-free and the wind had blown a constant stiff breeze, so that the telegraph wires sang all day. Dust storms wandered the Fens like giant spinning tops. Wind stripped tiny particles of dry silt off the fields and rolled them up into billowing, rolling clouds.

Meg Humphries was dragging in washing. ‘Get inside,' she said. She'd spent a lifetime living with the wind and sky. The soil storms stung the flesh, blinded the eyes, and filled mouths and noses and ears. Farm workers wore hoods and face masks. The locals ran for the house, or found any shelter they could out on the land.

‘And get the dog!' shouted Meg.

Dryden checked all the Capri's windows were up and locked the car. Humph helped his mother with the sheets, secured the bungalow's old sash windows and quickly laid three sandbags – set ready on the step – at the front door. Boudicca was last in before they shut it.

Then they stood in the bay window and watched the storm come. Dryden was aware immediately that this was unlike the ‘blows' he'd seen around Ely that summer. They'd been benign by comparison, veils of amber dust in wide tornado-like funnels, dodging over the landscape. He'd been in one once on the train, the carriage plunging from sunlight to semi-darkness in a second. He'd always recalled the sound, a kind of sizzling, as if milk were boiling over.

This was different. The wind here was strong enough, steady enough, to lift the whole surface of the soil, blotting out the sun. The cloud wasn't see-through, or thin, but thick and churning, like a smoke bomb. And it seemed alive within, sudden billows erupting upwards and outwards, the heat in the air fuelling it, dragging in more heat, self-propelling; as violent as a volcano's pyroclastic wind, charged with energy, an eruption of the earth into the sky.

‘They're much worse this year,' said Meg Humphries. ‘It's so dry, so …' She covered her mouth again. ‘So violent. My God …'

Dryden knew that she was thinking about Grace, that she might be out there, alone.

‘It'll be gone in a moment,' he said.

They watched as the forward wall of the cloud engulfed a pair of tied cottages a mile away, then a line of poplars, and a car parked on the drove. One second the trees stood in the grey polluted air ahead of the cloud, the next they were gone. The forward wall of the storm began to throw out debris – fence posts, pieces of roofing, uprooted plants, farmyard litter.

Humph checked his mobile; the signal had gone.

They moved into the hall, away from the glass. The light faded; it was almost dark. The sun was eclipsed and there was an instant silence. Meg kept chickens and their constant clucking soundtrack died. Even the wind itself seemed silent. Boudicca lay by the fireplace as if she had been shot.

The front door had an art deco fanlight. The rainbow of colours faded away. Above them they heard the roof creak with the effort of staying on the house. The storm front hit with a muffled thud. They heard a tile fall, then others, and all the windows rattled. Then the noise of the wind returned, but they were inside it now, so the sound was circular, accelerating around them. From the backyard they heard splintering glass. Something hard hit the bay window and the glass cracked but held. In the chimney they heard the dust churning, a clatter as a dead bird fell into the fireplace, and finally a brick.

Then it was gone, as suddenly as it had come. Sunlight burst into the house.

Dryden hoped it was a parable; just like the storm, their fears for Grace would pass.

He ran to the back door and threw it open. Outside the world was grey – covered in a thin snow of soil the colour of school socks.

He heard a shout from the front room.

They were all looking out of the bay window. The air was still misty with dust but they could clearly see, lying on the path, the body of a girl, her head partly hidden by a holdall, her legs bare and white in the dust.

G
race was unconscious, caked in white dust, like the victim of some exotic earthquake, carried out of the ruins of a Mexican suburb, lit by TV floodlights. The silt had settled over her body and formed a crust, and there were no cracks in this carapace. Dryden got to her first and lifted her head. Her eyes were closed, her lips dusty and slightly parted to reveal her teeth. The thought that she might be injured, or even dead, made Dryden hold her very still so that he could look for signs of life. He searched her face and felt a second pass in slow motion.

She coughed, expelling a small cloud of dust.

‘Thank God,' said Humph, kneeling down beside her. He wriggled an arm under her knees and they lifted her together.

They carried her into the front room and laid her on the sofa. Her limbs fell awkwardly, as if she was still unconscious. Opening her eyes, she tried to sit up, which sparked a bout of coughs. Meg arrived with water but the teenager pushed the glass aside. ‘Don't fuss, Gran.'

Humph shook his head. ‘You've given us a scare, Gracie. I'll ring your mum. She's in a state.'

‘The holdall,' said Grace. Her voice was furred up. They gave her the bag and she put her hand in and fished out a can of Pepsi. She drank it all, coughed, then closed her eyes. Dryden thought that she had pressed them closed, to shut them all out.

‘Thank God,' said Meg, her face wet with tears.

Instead of ringing Grace's mum, Humph pulled open the holdall. He found a few clothes, an iPod Touch, a hockey stick in its own carry-case, a copy of
The
Catcher in the Rye
, a framed picture of a dog – a mongrel that had been run over the year before, a bath-bag the size of a football, a cuddly toy Humph recognized and a purse crammed with membership cards. And a portable draughts set in a little inlaid wooden box Humph had given her just before the divorce as a present. They played when they met because it meant they could spend time together without talking.

‘What were you thinking?' asked Humph, sitting down opposite, as if he was preparing to interview his own daughter. The role of father inquisitor didn't suit him, overshadowed as it was by his real role as absentee father.

Meg told him to go and make eggs on toast and tea.

‘I don't want tea,' said Grace. She brushed dust from her face and hands.

‘Come on, you.' Meg took her granddaughter by the arm and led her into the bathroom. There was a shower only, a stand-up thing with a cord to pull, but she'd have to make do. And she had to pull the curtain on the bathroom window, because even though they were half a mile from the nearest neighbour, people had sharp eyes on Euximoor Fen.

‘She's grown up,' said Meg when they could hear the buzz of the shower.

‘You saw her a few weeks ago,' said Humph, worrying the eggs in the pan with a spatula. He'd driven Grace out to his mother's house on the Bank Holiday for a barbecue. Her little sister, too. The girls had made salad while he'd tended to a long line of sausages.

‘A fortnight's a lifetime when you're fifteen,' said Meg. ‘Leave her here for now, Humph. When she's eating, you go. I'll talk to her when she's ready to talk. Her mother can call.'

Always ‘her mother'. Meg couldn't stand the sound of her name. She'd blamed her for the break-up of the family, although she had a pretty comprehensive grasp of her son's shortcomings.