The Funeral Owl (30 page)

Locking a hand on a door handle, bringing the other round, to mesh with the first, he pulled. The door came free with a deep, visceral clunk which he felt as well as heard: and then the lights shorted out and the alarm stopped ringing in its faraway place. The door had come open so easily because Brinks had been driving with the windows open and the car had flooded, although Dryden could see a single bubble of air, trapped in the back, up against the window.

Brinks had been able to spring his seat belt before passing out, so that now Dryden had the door open, he seemed to simply
flow
out of the car, rising slightly, so that his head brushed the roof-edge as he came out into the green light. Buoyant, his lungs still holding some air, Brinks rose quickly, his arms coming away from his body in an awkward arc, his legs trailing like sand bags from the basket of some strange, aquatic balloon.

Dryden feared that if he touched him he'd weigh him down. So he rose with him, the two of them like underwater dancers, corkscrewing slightly, but not touching at all.

The surface above threatened a return to thrashing arms, to panic, to the fear that Dryden would find himself again on the edge of life. So six feet below the surface he reached out and took Brinks' forearm, reeling him in, so that he could hold him round the chest, taking him towards the bank through the green water. The liquid world seemed thicker here at the edges, as if it might just suddenly solidify, and they'd be trapped, like insects in green jade.

The spell broke when Dryden's head came up out of the water.

He would have panicked then but the bus driver was half in, half out of the river, and he reached out to grab his arm. Humph was in the water too, just his head clear, one hand holding a clump of reed on the bank with bone-white knuckles. They took him under both arms, then grabbed at Brinks' sodden shirt, hauling them both on to the steep grass bank.

The sounds around him made Dryden realize he was back in the real world: the hiss of wind, the call of birds, the rumble of the bus engine; and from Humph, words without a meaning. And a strange, unidentified noise like the wings of birds flapping. Dryden was on his knees, looking up the bank away from the water, so that he could see the top deck of the bus. The children had their hands out of the slit windows, clapping.

T
he shivering, at first continuous, slowed after midnight but sleep was impossible. He'd been five hours in A&E. They'd given him drugs and told him to go home and sleep. If only. He lay in the narrow bunk of the
Lunigiana
and thought how bizarre it was, in retrospect, that he'd chosen this place to lie each night, separated from his greatest fear, the river water, by the thin steel hull of the boat. He splayed his hand against the cool metal and tried to feel the water beyond. This sudden awareness came without fear or anxiety; it was simply that, an awareness – a bolt of self-knowledge, the idea that each night he'd put himself this close to his fear. Dragging Will Brinks out of the New Bedford River had been a genuine victory. He could see the world more clearly now.

But he still couldn't sleep. Lying awake, he'd had time to consider the old photograph Brinks' stepfather had shown him of Daniel Fangor, and the blue Ford with the distinctive window sticker of a black dragon belching red flame. If it was the car Muriel Calder had seen at the level crossing in Brimstone Hill, then the man she'd recognized in the back seat could well be Will Brinks. The description fitted, and Brinks was the only European – other than Fangor – working out at Barrowby Oilseed. All of which would explain Brinks' sudden decision to leave home, and keep running.

Laura sensed Dryden was awake so she got up and made coffee in the small galley in the
Lunigiana
. She suggested they drink it up on deck. A sense of peace enveloped Dryden as he climbed aloft because he knew that when he went back to his bunk he would sleep. He just needed to see the dawn. A glimpse of sunlight and he'd give up on the day.

A satellite sped across the sky above. He watched it orbit, sitting, head back, scanning the stars. Laura went back to bed. Dawn spread, a light electric blue bleeding across the darkness. He checked his mobile and rang Vee Hilgay's number, leaving a message that he'd be out of action for a day on doctor's orders. He'd filed a story on Will Brinks' escape and capture – minus his own heroics. When Eden cried he brought the boy up to see the sky. He made one more call. The duty officer at West Cambs Police HQ confirmed that Will Brinks' current condition was ‘improving' in intensive care at Wisbech General Hospital. Dryden hoped that this time they'd put two coppers by the bed.

A sunbeam swept the fen. He rang Humph. The cabbie picked up quickly, no trace of sleep in his voice. Dryden imagined the Capri in a lay-by somewhere.

‘Usual?' asked Humph.

‘No. I need to sleep. Six tonight, if you can make it. Sharp. Bring me a paper.'

‘Right.'

The cabbie hung up, displaying, again, an almost autistic ability to use conversation solely to transmit information.

Then Dryden went below, put a sleeping Eden in his cot, and crawled into the bunk and experienced that rare pleasure of falling asleep limb, by limb, by limb, so that by the time his mind slipped away it represented his entire disembodied consciousness.

Sleep was a dark tunnel in which a black dragon slept.

W
hen he saw the light next it was the evening sun, bouncing off the water outside the porthole window of the
Lunigiana.
Humph was parked on the riverbank. Despite the change of time, the cabbie had seen no reason to alter any other detail of his daily routine. He'd brought two double espressos from the shop at the station and a round of bacon sandwiches.

Just under twenty minutes later the cabbie swung the Capri over the gravel in front of Muriel Calder's house.

Dryden kicked open the cab door, so that the rusted hinges squealed. He felt a bone creak in his foot, and a pain ran down his spine into his thigh. His whole body ached, as if it had been shaken until the tendons and ligaments had snapped and frayed. It was astonishing to him that his entire time beneath the water had passed in a painless trance. Since waking his pain levels had risen progressively, as if he was feeling the effects in reverse. From his pocket he took a bottle of pills he'd been given in A&E and popped three.

‘I don't know why there's pain at all,' he'd told a nurse, who'd relayed the question to the doctor, who'd come by with an answer, putting an unnaturally clean hand on Dryden's knee as he sat in a wheelchair. According to an eyewitness – the bus driver, also admitted for shock – he'd been below the water for nearly three minutes.

‘That puts an enormous pressure on your whole body, like you're a submarine, forced down to the ocean bed. It's as if your rivets are creaking. They didn't fail, and that hurts. But it's a good pain.'

Dryden walked stiffly towards Muriel Calder's front door. His iPhone chimed to indicate an incoming message from Vee: Will Brinks was now ‘comfortable' and in a private room under police surveillance. The official statement on Brinks' escape and recapture had been, in part, agreed with Dryden: Brinks had been apprehended after a brief chase on Euximoor Fen near his home on Third Drove. No mention of the river rescue. Dryden loved words, but of the few he hated, ‘hero' was top of the list.

The electric light in the porch of the house was still on. The Georgian facade, defaced by the scars of ivy hacked back from the ashlar stone, gave him a blank stare.

He knocked, stood back. The snapshot of the blue Ford, and the black dragon, had given birth overnight to an idea, a suspicion, which seemed so outlandish he'd not allowed it to form in his mind, even in the shape of those shadow words that are just thoughts. He hoped with a genuine passion that DI George Friday was right and that the Barrowby Airfield deaths were down to a vicious gang war. But there were other options.

The door opened. Muriel Calder stood, blinking.

In her eyes he thought he could see something that made him think he was right. There was a pulse of fear, like a dash of electric light, but then it was gone. She saw the single bulb burning and reached to the side to turn it off, then, noticing, perhaps, the approaching sunset, she left it on. ‘Is the story in the paper?' she asked, pointing at the rolled-up copy of the
Ely Express
he had in his jacket pocket.

It took a moment for him to realize she was talking about the story they'd planned: the hunt for the Ford with the dragon sticker. ‘Oh. No – no. I was planning to use it in
The Crow
, Friday's paper.'

She was in jeans and a burgundy corduroy shirt, but the trousers were stylishly drawn in at her waist with a rainbow belt, and the shirt matched two stud earrings which showed beneath the neat, short hair. ‘Come through,' she said, too well mannered to ask why he'd called.

At the bottom of the mahogany steps he looked up at the rifle box under the military portrait. It was empty, the wooden-stocked rifle gone. He thought then that this wasn't a game, and given what had happened in the kitchen ten years ago, the house held deadly possibilities.

He made himself climb the stairs to the gun cabinet. There was a brass plate in the green velvet under the empty gun case:

Peter Davenport

Lee Enfield Rifle No. 1 Mk 6.

The Appleton Cup

Catterick Cadet Camp

1952.

First Prize
.

Did a ‘Lee Enfield Rifle No. 1 Mk 6' count as a ‘classy military' weapon? That was how DI Friday had described the ballistic experts' description of the gun that had fired the fatal bullet at the lock-up on the airfield.

Muriel Calder had gone, and he could hear the sound of water running in the kitchen. He had an urge to run then, so strong it made one of his legs twitch. But he walked down the stairs, as slowly as he could, and pushed the kitchen door open. The back door was hooked back so he could look out over the fen, and that seemed to dissipate the fear he felt.

The first time he'd been in this room the sunlight had been veiled by the aftermath of the dust storm. Now the sunset lit it vividly, and he could see the knifepoint holes where the burglars had pinned her husband's hands to the wood.

He threw the paper on to the table, splash headline showing. ‘Seen that?' he asked.

‘I heard the radio news. The survivor from the airfield tried to get away. How is he?'

‘As well as you'd expect. He'll live.'

She poured boiling water into the pot, sluiced it, tipped it out, then refilled, adding loose tea from a caddy. She set a cosy on the top and put the pot in the middle of the table. ‘Is there something wrong?'

The clock ticked and he suddenly had a vivid insight into what her life had been like since the day she'd opened the front door and seen the man with the shotgun, his face obscenely streamlined by the stocking. Every time there was a knock at the door, did she relive that moment? Did she think, perhaps, that one day she'd open the door and somehow time would loop backwards, and she'd bring her innocent caller in here, to the kitchen, and her husband would be sitting at an unblemished table?

‘His name was Will Brinks, did you know that?' he said, trying to load his voice with authority.

For the first time he thought that the years alone in this house had taken her mind, because her face just seemed to freeze. ‘Who?'

‘The man you saw in this kitchen on the day your husband died. And the man you saw at the level crossing in the blue Ford. Will Brinks, almost certainly. The Black Dragon is the symbol of Krakow, the owner of the car is a Pole called Fangor. There's a castle with a cave under it, and in the cave there lives a dragon. Fangor was probably here in this kitchen that day as well. In this room.' He smiled, looking at the teapot.

‘Does this man Brinks live close?' she asked.

It was an odd thing to ask and it made Dryden question his suspicions for the first time.

‘He lived – lives – at Third Drove, on Euximoor Fen. A mile away, maybe a little bit more. He worked out at Barrowby Airfield, in one of the units. I don't think you knew that when you saw him that first time, by the level crossing, but I think you saw him again.'

Dryden flipped over the newspaper. There was the picture of Brinks. Calder licked her lips. She reached out for the paper, her fingers shaking, but then she pulled back, clutching both hands together at her heart.

‘He survived the explosion at Barrowby,' said Dryden. ‘Fangor, the Pole, didn't. I saw the body. He was …' He searched for the right word because he did want to give her that satisfaction, a clear picture of his death. ‘Burnt-up. A cinder.'

Her lips set in a thin horizontal line. ‘Good. But the other one – this Brinks – is going to live, you said. This one?' She pointed at the picture.

‘The explosion was caused by a gunshot,' said Dryden. ‘It produced a spark which ignited fumes in the lock-up from the still. I think that whoever pulled the trigger wanted to kill Brinks. Easy, if you're a good shot. And you're better than a good shot, at least that's what Jock Donovan tells me.'

She looked him in the face, her eyes very cold, even hurt.

‘Was it you?' he asked. ‘Did you try to kill Will Brinks?'

‘How could I?'

‘The rifle. Peter's rifle. Did you go out to the airfield and wait for your moment? A rifle like that, with a telescopic sight, it can't be difficult if you know how to handle the weapon. And you do know how to handle it – don't you? Where's the rifle now?'

‘I think you should leave.' She touched the table as if it was a talisman.

Dryden stood up. ‘You'll tell the police?' she asked.

He walked out into the hallway, in no hurry to answer the question. ‘Of course. They'll want you to identify Brinks, at the very least.'