The Funeral Owl (23 page)

He put a bottle of Barrowby rapeseed oil on the altar: an elegant, slim-necked bottle with an artisan black-and-white label showing a farmer.

‘So – two products, rapeseed oil and vodka. One bottling plant. This is what is referred to in
Dragon's Den
as a business plan.'

He let the laughter die away.

‘It wasn't their only business. This is unit four, access to which was via another internal door.'

The digital slides showed the interior of the next unit. It was crammed with scrap metal.

‘Just here,' said Friday, using a light ‘arrow' to indicate a pile of dull grey metal. ‘You can see roof lead. It's Victorian, and almost certainly came from above our very heads. We're confident the rest of the metal in the lock-up is stolen goods.'

Several reporters looked up, and the BBC swung a camera round to pan across the rafters.

‘Clearly we have a potential link between the explosion at Barrowby Airfield and the murder earlier this week of Sima Shuba, whose body was found here in the churchyard at Christ Church, following the overnight theft of lead from the roof. We have to consider the possibility that the explosion at Barrowby Airfield was not an accident and might be related to the illegal trade in stolen metal. Was the survivor, Will Brinks, involved? Before we can begin to answer these questions we need to complete and consider forensic evidence collected at both scenes, and autopsies on the dead. And we need to speak to Brinks when we get the all-clear from medical staff at Wisbech.'

Friday's reluctance to speculate further in public on gang warfare was admirable, thought Dryden. But in private Friday's views had been clear: this was an underworld spat between vicious ethnic gangs, or a civil war within one of them. Was this view based on the evidence, or a series of presumptions – even prejudices? It was certainly a neat solution. Dryden reminded himself that the truth might be less obvious. Perhaps the odd mix of ethnic backgrounds, Chinese, Polish and Irish traveller, hid a more subtle story.

A few hands went up amongst the pews.

‘I'm sorry. No questions today,' said Friday. ‘I'm sure we'll have plenty to say soon enough. For the record, we have also recovered from unit four several hundred yards of electrical cabling which we believe was taken from Coldham's Farm wind turbine facility, Brimstone Hill, and nearly two-hundred-and-eighty steel bolts lifted from the goods railway line here the night before last – the immediate cause, I believe, of a goods train derailment. The line is still closed. Industrious bunch, and reckless too, because these thefts put innocent lives at risk. In the case of the railway line, hundreds of innocent lives.'

A new shot showed various pieces of ornamental ironware taken from gardens and houses, and several items of graveyard sculpture, including a small angel with one foot raised, and a figure of death in a shroud, which hid the face.

‘This is now a major criminal inquiry involving three police authorities,' said Friday.

He put up pictures of the two Chinese men and the Pole.

‘We need to link these men into the wider criminal community. If anyone has information which could be of assistance to the police there are email addresses, telephone numbers and website addresses on the press release. We'd appreciate it if the media circulated this information. Also, the injured man owned a vehicle, a silver Ford Fiesta.' He flashed up the registration number on the screen. ‘We need to find this vehicle.'

There were no pictures of the survivor, said Friday. Will Brinks was a member of a travellers' community which was out on the road. There were no documents in his caravan at Third Drove – no passport, medical card or driving licence. The police were keen to track down the family. Brinks himself had suffered second-degree burns to his face, which was heavily bandaged. When he regained consciousness he would be interviewed.

The screen held the three pictures of the dead men. Why did they always look like this? thought Dryden. Haunted, hunted, desperate. The blank passport stare. These shots always seemed to suck any virtue out of a face, and leave it swollen with vice. Then he recalled the faces he'd seen on the incinerated corpses in the Barrowby Oilseed lock-up and thought that even this ugly, brutal flesh was better than those black ghosts.

Dryden walked out into the churchyard, leaving Friday to stonewall questions, and perched himself on a toppled tomb. Flipping open his laptop, he reread the splash, made a few changes, then hit the SEND button. It was pretty much the perfect story – but for one, annoying omission – a picture of the chief suspect, Will Brinks.

T
he story flew from Dryden's laptop with an audible
ping!
The moment was one of strange liberation. Unlike his former colleagues on Fleet Street, he didn't have to worry about tomorrow's story. His next paper was several days away. What he needed was to get ahead of the pack so that he had something to say in Tuesday's paper. Something to say, or something to show. Within hours CID would interview Will Brinks. An arrest might follow. What Dryden and CID knew – that a gun had been found at the scene and there was a bullet-hole in the lock-up door – put Brinks firmly in the frame as prime suspect. If Dryden could track down a picture of him, it would be a scoop in itself. Which was why he asked Humph to drive him to Rick's Tattoo Parlour.

Rick's stood at the heart of the village of Rings End – no apostrophe – two miles out of Brimstone Hill to the east. If you left Brimstone by any other direction you'd be heading for civilization: north, south or east. But west took you into the Great Soak, a silty fen wilderness which seemed to peter out into nothing. Once, a great mere had stretched over the land. Now, two hundred years after they'd drained the water, the roads still didn't bother to reach across it to where the far shore had once stood. The dwindling country droves reminded Dryden of trickles of water, wandering into a saltpan, drying out under the sun.

Rings End had a sign, but it wasn't twinned with anywhere, so there was nothing fancy, just the name. An apostrophe wasn't the only thing it lacked. Dryden had always sensed it had battled all its life to even be itself, to be a place at all. A road, a narrow carriageway of mind-numbing straights and sudden double-turns, cut through it, passing a single chapel, a row of farmers' cottages disfigured by double-glazing, and Rick's shabby lock-up.

Humph pulled off the road into a lay-by. An HGV crashed its gears and swept past, back towards Brimstone Hill. The road was so narrow that the big wagons seemed to lean over with the camber as they threaded the turn by the chapel, a building almost obscured by a billboard offering DISCOUNT CARPETS. It was a typical fen village, devoid of thatched charm, more like a deserted castaway fragment of the city than the country at all. Or all that was left of a city, perhaps, after civilization had left.

Humph slipped one of his language tapes into a CD player and clamped on his earphones.

Dryden checked his mobile; a text from Vee informed him that
The Crow
had gone to press.

Rick's door was always open but the view was obscured by a flyscreen made of beaded string. A customer lay back in the reclining dentist's chair: a woman, in trousers and a blouse, maybe thirteen stone, with a lot of pale skin showing at her neck and arms.

Jazz played on a CD player – Brubeck or Parker.

Rick looked up from under his green eyeshade. He was thirty, neat, an ex-jockey from Newmarket who'd run to fat after his teenage years. All that suppleness, and latent speed, seemed wasted in this box of a shop, with its single window. Dryden had done a feature on the tattoo parlour for
The Crow
five years ago. His own preconceptions of the ‘art' had not been positive. But his interview with Rick had at least tackled the issues, and there was little doubt it had brought him some new customers. Dryden often dropped by for a cup of tea and to pick up gossip. That was the real magic of the tattoo parlour: the chair. It seemed to be a modern-day equivalent of the confessional box. Once seated, the customers needed little encouragement to tell Rick secrets they'd die to keep hidden at home.

Rick took in Dryden with a sad smile. ‘Kettle's just boiled.' He'd been hoping, thought Dryden, for a paying customer. As he made tea Dryden thought, not for the first time, that he could never live a life like Rick's, always waiting for his livelihood to walk in the door.

The window of Rick's was full of painted designs, and through it Dryden saw a car pull up. A smart family hatchback with a taxi sign on top, it disgorged two kids in neat grey uniforms from one of Ely's private schools. That was where Rick's money went, on school fees, school trips, extra tuition. The kids came in, took chairs, and immediately began homework. The car drove off. Mrs Rick – she'd never been introduced by name – ran a cab based on the station rank. Humph called her Union Jack, which was her radio call sign.

Rick's tattoo gun whirled and Dryden told himself it was an illusion that he could smell burning flesh. The gun buzzed for two minutes with all the excruciating edge of a dentist's drill. In the sudden silence the customer asked if she could smoke and Rick said she could but she'd have to go outside. As she left, Dryden saw the blood on her neck, a thin dribble down her clavicle, as if her skin had split.

There were design books on a low counter and Dryden was flicking through.

‘You after a tattoo at last?' joked Rick. ‘If you can get Humph interested I do cheap rates for landscapes.'

‘I was looking for a flying swan, starts down here …' Dryden touched his hip. ‘But reaches up to the back of the neck.'

Rick found it instantly – £240 in black, white, yellow and that dash of red on the beak.

‘Handsome,' said Rick.

‘Handsome when you're twenty. Looks pretty weird when you're sixty,' said Dryden.

Rick looked at his kids then and something darker crossed his face, a sadness, maybe even a regret, that he couldn't give them what he thought was the best in life without them seeing where the money came from.

‘You heard about the explosion out at the airfield?' asked Dryden. ‘I found the bodies. Not a pretty sight.' He felt a lump in his throat. It didn't seem to matter how often he tried to treat his discovery of the victims as a coldly journalistic coup; the personal reality of the moment refused to fade. ‘The survivor's got one of these tattoos. Can I look at the wall?'

The customer came back in, alternately hauling her thighs, like coal sacks.

Rick said Dryden could go on through. At the back of the lock-up was a door and a corridor to a loo – spotless, clinical, because the council checked the place out, and controlled the licence. The corridor ran twenty feet and the whole of one side was pictures, snapshots of customers displaying tattoos.

Dryden sipped his tea and began, methodically, to work his way along. He didn't really have any hopes of finding Brinks but he thought he'd kick himself if he didn't check. There were a dozen tattoo joints within twenty miles of Brimstone Hill, but Rick's was the only one with a wall like this. It was like Facebook, in bricks and mortar. Or the
News of the World
. That had been the paper's slogan:
All Of Human Life Is Here
. And it was: a naked woman covered in a vine, grapes in bunches on her breasts. A man in a suit, white shirt, and tie, holding his tongue out to reveal a dragon in green; a teenager with his eyelids closed but blue eyes drawn on the lids. Each tattoo seemed to be designed to unsettle, distract, shock.

Even the humdrum made Dryden feel uneasy – the anchors on forearms, mythical birds on biceps, Union flags on shoulders, little miniature crowns and roses at the waistline. It wasn't as if he had some hang-up about skin being unblemished, forever young. He liked the process of ageing, as he liked old wood, because it showed the passage of time. Old age could have dignity. It wasn't the pictures that grew old, it was the canvas, and there was something unnatural about the contrast.

Under a snap of a woman with tattooed toes, he saw the edge of another picture, just a fan of white feathers. He edged it out, then pulled the pin that held it in place. It was Will Brinks, naked but for briefs, the eyes bright with something, maybe 120 per cent proof hooch. With his back to the camera, he tried to look over his own shoulder at the tattoo. He looked exultant, as if he'd been able to outsmart, for once, a world that probably seemed, for most of his life, too complicated to understand.

Back in the shop the customer was out for another smoke and the kids had moved on to their laptops.

‘That him?' asked Rick, looking at the snap Dryden had in his hand.

‘Yeah. That's him.'

‘Name?'

‘Will Brinks.'

Rick shrugged. ‘Tinker?'

Dryden looked at the picture again: bad teeth, slightly swollen face, jet-black hair worn long and cut at home, pale blue eyes. He did look like a traveller out of central casting. Rick would have had him in the confessional chair for an hour; maybe three.

‘Site's a mile from Brimstone Hill,' said Dryden.

Rick reached down behind the counter. ‘He dropped this off by way of thanks. He liked the work.'

It was a bottle of vodka, identical to the one the coroner had produced at the inquest.

The liquid inside was yellow. The label was the same as the others Dryden had seen, illustrated with the amber hay field.

Dryden put his hand on Rick's shoulder. ‘Just don't drink it, OK?'

Rick laughed. ‘Drink it? You crazy? I've been washing the needles in it; it's one-hundred-and-twenty per cent proof.'

‘One bottle?'

‘A crate.'

‘What do you reckon on Brinks? A bit simple?'

‘Sure.' He looked at his kids. ‘Damaged. I thought about saying no …'

Dryden held up a hand. He wasn't there to judge.