The Funeral Owl (29 page)

Brinks took a deep breath. He had a barrel chest, almost a deformity, as if his spine was curved. ‘He met Fangor in Wisbech. There was a crowd of them, mainly Poles. If they'd been middle-class kids you'd say they were friends; these kids, on the other hand, were a gang. He was out of his depth so he chucked them in, kept to his bird-watching. With being the caretaker at the site in the summer, it meant he was on his own a lot, but he liked that. That was his role, his position. It's important, and he took it seriously. When Fangor turned up on the old airfield he offered Will the job at Barrowby Oilseed. He couldn't afford to turn it down.'

Across the field of leeks Dryden could see the hide in the trees, but so well camouflaged it looked like a dense thicket of branches and dead wood. When they'd parked the Capri they'd all agreed they'd keep watch for an hour. Dryden's watch said fifty-seven minutes. He thought again about finding Brinks at Barrowby Airfield, the fifty-pound notes scattered on the grass around him. He was sure Brinks had been about to disappear. If so, he'd have packed a bag. And the car? Where was that? Parked in Ely or Wisbech perhaps, on a backstreet, with a full tank.

‘Where will he go?' asked Dryden.

‘It's going to be tough. He might be the son of travellers but he doesn't travel well. Maybe Ireland. He could find the village. But the coppers here'll have contacted the Garda. So perhaps he'll just watch and wait. That's the smart thing to do. He can sleep rough – he's done it before. If he does that we might lose him for good. That's Mary's nightmare, so it's my nightmare too.'

On his lap John Brinks had a cardboard box with a decorated top which said RAINBOW PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIOS. The police had taken it from the caravan to try and find a picture of his stepson, but had returned it now, having drawn a blank. Each snap had a caption in capitals on the back. Brinks had explained that Will was shy, almost manic in his desire to avoid being captured on film, but he'd always been keen to get behind the camera. He'd taken many of the pictures, but was shown in none.

Brinks took the top off the box now and shuffled through the snaps. He passed one over his shoulder to Dryden. A teenager, perhaps nineteen. Very dark hair, sallow skin, dark eyes, something cynical in the look to camera.

‘That's Dan Fangor,' said Brinks. ‘He had wheels.'

It was a Ford, blue. The rear window held a round sticker, white, with a black dragon, breathing red flames. The legend read: The Wavel Dragon. Krakow. Krakow, ancient capital of Poland.
A Black Dragon
.

Dryden saw the scene: the level crossing at Brimstone Hill. Muriel Calder locking eyes with one of her husband's killers. The brief communion, then the barriers rising, the klaxon sounding, and the Ford disappearing in a mirage of speed. Fangor at the wheel. The killer in the back. A white face, black hair, European features. Had it been Will Brinks? Was that why he was on the run now?

Humph woke at that moment and the sudden jolt of his limbs made them all look up, and out, across the field.

They saw a pheasant clattering up into the trees from the field, and then a figure running, breaking cover for a second on a bank top by the ditch, then down almost below the leeks, the head bobbing. John Brinks slipped out of the car and pulled the seat forward for Dryden. They knelt on a grass bank next to the car with some brush at their backs to blur their silhouettes.

They could see the figure now, moving against the background of the tree boles. The sprint had winded him so that he stopped, doubled over, shoulders heaving.

‘It's Will,' said Brinks. ‘He's in pain.'

And then they heard a dog bark.

‘That's Lolly,' said Brinks.

The sun had gone, so that the red light was diffused and soft. Will Brinks disappeared into the muddle of wood and branches which obscured the hide. When he came out they could see the shape of a rucksack on his back, and the lead stiff in his hand, the dog jumping up, overjoyed.

Brinks fought his way through the criss-cross mesh of trees and branches towards the western end of the copse, which was denser, but without trees, just hawthorn, and yellow-dotted whin. A car door creaked, then an engine came to life.

They were back in the Capri when they saw him pull out on the drove road behind them, creeping out from the edge of the wood on a track: a silver Ford Fiesta, Will Brinks at the wheel.

Humph waited till the car was almost out of sight, then followed, while John Brinks rang a number DI Friday had given him for emergencies. He gave someone details: a description of the vehicle and the direction and speed of travel: forty-five mph, east along Siberia Belt, a long drove road that led out into the zigzag maze of dead-end fields and farms towards the unbridgeable barrier of the New Bedford River: a wide fen waterway sunk in a trench. Beyond it stretched the fresh-water marshes of the Welney Bird Reserve.

The Capri stayed half a mile back but the long straights would have given Brinks time to spot the cab in the rear-view mirror. After the second right-hand turn they regained the straight to find Brinks nearly a mile distant, a cloud of dust rising from the rear wheels.

‘He's seen us,' said John Brinks. ‘Don't push him.'

Humph's foot was down on the accelerator but the Capri couldn't break sixty mph. Ahead, they'd lost him, the car turning away to the left, directly towards the New Bedford River.

Despite the tinder-dry fields Dryden could smell fresh water through the open windows of the cab. The idea of the river-filled ditch that lay ahead filled him with an immediate unease. He took in a lungful of the weedy, stagnant smell; trying to quell his anxiety by meeting it head on. But the scent of water was on his tongue now, and the fear almost fully formed: the fear of water that had haunted him since childhood.

Ahead, without warning, Brinks' car appeared again as they took a left turn. Humph had closed the gap to 200 yards but as they came in line they saw the Ford jump, a zigzag skid almost putting Brinks in the roadside ditch, as the car leapt forwards.

‘Steady, kid,' said Dryden.

‘Back off,' said Brinks. ‘Give him more room.'

Dryden wondered what shape Brinks was in. Had he, somehow, managed to avoid taking the sedatives and drugs the nursing staff would have given him in hospital? If he hadn't he was taking his life in his hands driving at more than ten mph, let alone seventy on back roads. At least now Dryden understood why he might take such a risk. If he was one of the burglars who had watched Ronald Calder bleed to death that day in 1999, pinioned with knives, he faced a life sentence if caught.

The horizon for which they were now heading was absolutely straight, and slightly elevated, and Dryden realized it was the distant bank of the New Bedford River, twenty feet above the level of the surrounding fields. At its western extremity, he saw a yellow school bus, double-decked, cracking eastwards at what looked like a steady fifty mph. Such buses were common in the Fens, where distances were large, population small, and schools distant. One of the slit windows on the upper deck was open and a blue and white Ipswich Town scarf flapped in the wind.

Brinks and the bus approached the distant T-junction on what looked like a collision course. At the last moment the Ford seemed to swerve, as if Brinks had only just seen the bus, but he couldn't brake in time to let it pass across the junction; instead he seemed to accelerate, trying to get ahead of it, swinging out, cutting sharply to the left. They heard the distant thunder of the bus horn, the tearing of rubber on tarmac of the skid.

Dryden had his head out of the Capri because the windscreen was smeared with dead insects. He thought Brinks had made it, but the swerve had started a lethal chain-reaction of adjustment and over-adjustment, so that although he was now travelling in front of the bus, the car was out of control.

It clipped one verge, then the opposite one, finally climbing the bank.

It flipped once as the wheels locked and then, for a single second, they saw it against the sky, free of the bank, spinning out over the unseen river. The sound of the car hitting the water beyond was unexpected: a collision of solids, like the slamming of a door.

Humph slowed the cab and swung it easily left at the T-junction to come to rest behind the bus, which had backed down the road. The driver was out, already up the bank, but he'd left the doors closed so that the kids were trapped, but they'd all crowded upstairs, their faces filling the windows, fingers thrust through the slits that opened for air.

Dryden ran to the top of the bank. The river, in its culvert, was as blue as the sky, carrying in its mirror-like surface the reflection of a single storm cloud. Concentric circles marked the spot where Brinks' car had punched a hole through the surface.

The bus driver joined him, keying numbers into a mobile phone.

Dryden was untying his own shoelaces, sitting on the bank, but he wasn't sure why.

John Brinks stood beside him. ‘I can't swim,' he said. ‘None of us can.'

Dryden unhitched his belt. In another dimension of time and space he was a child of ten, trapped beneath the ice on the river by his parents' farm. It had been the beginning of his fear, although he'd always suspected that he'd inherited it in part as well. He'd never seen his father swim, or paddle at the sea, or take to a boat. It was only after his death that he'd found out the truth: that he'd taken a group of boys to the Scottish mountains from the comprehensive where he taught in London, and one of them had died in an icy tarn. Jack Dryden, a poor swimmer, had been unable to stay afloat long enough to reach the body.

But Dryden's own fear had begun as a child that Christmas Day on Burnt Fen. He'd been trying out his best new present, skates. He hadn't seen the thin patch where the ducks had slept. Once he was in the water, looking up, he'd found a glassy ceiling of ice above his head. He could recall no panic, only a sense of loss, for the warm kitchen at home, his presents, a fire of bog oak. His life. A minute, or three, he lay beneath the surface. His father had found him and cracked the ice with his boot, hauling him back into the world, kicking, screaming, as if newborn. New born with this fear. His birthmark.

He stood up on the grass and began to throw off his jacket and trousers. He looked at the water and back at the top of the bus: the faces pressed to the glass, the fingers reaching for air. John Brinks was holding his clothes. Each of his feet seemed to be pinned to the grass. He was no better a swimmer than his father had ever been. But if he didn't move, if he didn't take a step, he'd be doomed to wait until they hauled the car out of the water, the limp body at the wheel.

For the first time in his life, looking at the surface of the water, he thought that his life might be a failure. He could feel his heartbeat in his skin. His brain felt disengaged, floating.

Beside him he was aware of John Brinks speaking: ‘It's OK. I'd wait, there's an ambulance on its way. What can you do?'

He jumped.

P
anic would have engulfed him once his head was below the surface but for the shock of the image before him: clear water, so that he could see the opposite bank, and the car on its roof in the silt of the river bed. His subconscious had been ready for a green, reedy slime; for white bubbles trailing slow-motion arms. But this was surreal: a kind of calm, green-tinted edition of the world above. Time had slowed down so he was able to wonder if he'd actually passed out when he'd jumped and missed the splash as he hit the water. He didn't appear to need air. His lungs didn't scream, there was no pain. In fact he didn't think he could remember what it felt like to draw in oxygen. One explanation, that he was dead, or dying, seemed frivolous, so he pushed it aside.

The only sound was of liquid mechanics: a kind of thudding watery heartbeat, the percussion of being
inside
the moving river. It told him that he was alive after all; that and the fact there
was
movement, even though it was glacial. The impact of the car on the riverbed had raised a circular wave of silt which was even now spreading upwards and outwards, as ponderous as a flower opening in a slow-motion film. Through the silt, beyond this silent explosion,
through
this explosion, he could see the car. Its headlights had come on, and he thought he could detect the dull pulse of an alarm as if it, too, had a heartbeat.

He floated, air trickling from his nose and mouth, the current gently creasing and uncreasing his boxers.

Despite endless childhood hours of trying, he always struggled to move forward with any speed in water. But down here, away from the surface, that didn't seem to matter. He realized now that for all those years his fear had not been so much of water at all, but of the
boundary
between water and air. Down here, in the green world, there was no ambiguity, no borderland. Fish-like, he wriggled his body, and was exhilarated by the sudden forward movement, the sense of power which came with the kick of his right leg, the onward momentum imparted by the matching push with his left. He slid through the water as if his body had been oiled, a part of the machine.

Kicking out he was within touching distance of the car in a few seconds. Will Brinks sat in the driver's seat. His head was up, his chin raised, snaking slightly on his neck with the current circling the interior of the car, his forehead marked by a jagged, bloodied wound. The dog floated in the water in the back of the car, its narrow back bent at an angle, its eyes open and lifeless, a trail of blood leaking from the mouth.

Dryden knew, despite the absence of any pain in his lungs, that he might die if he wasted a second in thought. Not because it would use up time, but because it might lead to other thoughts, to his fears, and to the reasons behind the fears. The sense of being outside this moment, as if watching himself, was so powerful that he felt he might just separate from his real body and float up to watch it from the surface above; which appeared as a shimmering white and blue plane, a mirrored ceiling, made of mercury.