The Funeral Owl (36 page)

‘Thursday morning I came here to visit the memorial. The first time since the murder in the graveyard. I found this – that they'd torn the letters out – and I couldn't walk away, could I? It was personal, as if I'd been singled out. I told myself I hadn't. That they were just thieves. But I couldn't find the peace I always get here. It broke the spell. The magic of the place.'

He leaned forward and touched the stone.

‘They never knew what they'd done,' he said. ‘What they'd unleashed. I told you it was the explosion which unlocked the memory of that night in the trench in Korea. But it was this. Just a few metal letters in stone.' He heaved some air into old lungs. ‘It's always been important to me, this place, because it meant I didn't have to remember. Didn't have to feel anything. All I had to do was touch the stone. Bear witness. Keep the rest of it inside here …'

Donovan put both hands to his head.

‘When I saw this, it was over,' he said, swaying slightly. A sudden gust of wind cracked like a sheet. The pine trees began to sizzle. ‘I saw everything again. And I can't stop seeing it.'

‘We should get in the church, Jock. There's a dust storm brewing. Then rain. You could sit down. You need to sit down.'

‘Everything was unlocked. The fear came out, and the guilt, and the loss – and then, what came out last but overshadowed everything, was the anger. I had to do something with the anger. I had to hit back. I nearly died of the tension, the bottled-up feeling that I had to hurt someone else. And then I knew. I knew who to blame. The people I'd never blamed. The enemy. All those years I hadn't hated. But that morning, standing here, it crowded around me, like these dust storms, blocking out the light.'

Dryden could taste dust on the wind now, on his lips.

Donovan stepped back. ‘I'm not mad. I was for a while in the years after I got back. But I've been better. And I thought I could keep the good feeling …' He shrugged, struggling to put what he felt into words. ‘Keep the
absence
of the bad feeling. I just wanted to feel nothing, as I've always felt nothing. I thought if I punished them I could have that back, my old life. Punished them the way that Peter and Paul would have done. So I took the rifle and went up on the roof. I saw someone in the telescopic sight but he had his back to me. He had that dark, black hair. Glossy. I thought, I'll kill one. One shot. Then the others will come out. And maybe, if I still feel the anger, I'll kill them as they come out, one by one. I pulled the trigger and in the same moment he bent down, touched his shoes. I'd have probably missed him anyway. My arms shake now I'm old.'

He rubbed a hand over his rough skin and stubble and Dryden saw he was crying.

‘Life's a comedy sometimes.'

He stepped away from the edge of the memorial.

‘The blast terrified me. I thought, it's God. It's His judgement.' Donovan raised his voice. ‘When I got myself up on my feet there was this silence, and even if I screamed there was still silence. I just went outside and tried to find a noise, any noise. I saw you go by in the cab. Then I heard a siren. And that bell.' He twisted at the waist, looking back at Christ Church. ‘It rang out of time.'

The old soldier stood to attention. ‘I'm sorry now for what I did. I just wish they hadn't taken the letters. Because then I'd have died never having remembered, and that would have been a mercy. Now I've got to live with what I've done – I've killed three men. But most of all I've got to live with what I didn't do that night in 1953. I didn't die with my friends. Did I? I didn't even fight alongside them.'

H
e took Donovan's arm, a bone in a sleeve, as if his muscles had dissolved, and tried to lead him away from the memorial.

The churchyard around them was suddenly churning with leaves. Looking across the Clock Holt, Dryden could see the edge of the dust storm blotting out a line of poplars. Daylight was bleeding out of the sky.

And then he saw a ball rolling along one of the churchyard paths, blown by the wind. It was Donovan's present to Eden: small, multi-coloured, with the Korean script blurred as it spun.

And then he saw Eden, walking, with strange, staggering steps, in pursuit of the ball.

‘Eden! Philip!' Laura's voice was clear above the sound of the wind. She came into sight around the apse of Christ Church, calling for her child.

‘He's here!' Dryden ran towards the child. Eden was looking at the ball, not at his feet, which were set at odd angles with each step. The wind and the dust and the
whirl
of things made the child scream with joy. He stamped his feet as the ball rolled away.

Dryden made himself stop a few feet short of his son, holding out his arms. Laura arrived, doubled over. ‘I left him playing with the ball on the blanket,' she said. ‘I just looked away and he was gone.' She was half laughing, half crying.

Eden walked into Dryden's arms. He picked up the child and turned him round so that he could see the ball, which was being blown towards the church porch.

The coming storm reached the pine trees round the vicarage and somewhere a door banged, wood splintering. A single car alarm began to pulse a warning.

‘Inside,' said Dryden. Donovan had caught them up, so he shepherded the old man down the path towards shelter.

The door to the church was open so they went in, pulling it shut behind them. The light here was redder, darker. The dust storm hissed at the windows. Donovan took a seat in the back pew and looked around him. Dryden saw him differently then, as a figure from his own childhood in North London: a Catholic church, the confessional box, and the forgiven sitting quietly, mumbling their penance.

‘I'm going to have to ring the police,' said Dryden. He felt he had to keep saying it in case he took the easy way out and just let the truth be a punishment in itself.

‘After the storm,' said Donovan.

Laura rolled the ball down the nave and watched Eden follow.

The door of the vestry where they'd found Stokely Powell's body swung open and Rev. Temple-Wright came out. Her head was down, her eyes on her feet, and Dryden guessed that she never looked up at the painted roof.

She met them halfway down the nave opposite the Masaccio, and smiled at the child. ‘Take a last look,' she said, pointing at the painting. ‘It's going away tomorrow. At last. They've got someone coming from Florence to see it in London, did I say? An expert. Everyone's excited.'

‘You'll sell?' asked Dryden.

She laughed as if the question was outlandish. Then she noticed Donovan in the back pew and her neck straightened, as if she were drawing herself up.

‘Of course. If it is Masaccio then I'm told we could be talking in excess of a quarter of a million. It probably won't be, but they'll sell a copy, too. It'll pay for a few tea mornings if nothing else.'

Dryden stepped a foot closer. ‘There's been some vandalism in the churchyard. They've taken all the lead letters out of the memorial to the soldiers who fought in the Korean War.'

‘Yes, I know. They were very methodical. Still, wars are best forgotten,' she said.

‘What wars do you remember?' He struggled to keep the aggression out of his voice.

‘I'm talking about the wars of men. The wars I'm interested in are more difficult to win. The war on ignorance, the war on greed …'

Dryden held up a hand to silence her and was deeply satisfied that the gesture worked, even here, in her own church. But then it wasn't really her church at all.

She forced a smile for the child, reminding Dryden to make sure the door was locked when they left. Then she pulled a scarf up across her mouth and fled.

Laura was standing in front of the Masaccio. Eden was sitting on the carpet now, the ball in his hands, but captivated instead by the light, which shimmered as the dust storm passed, sudden beams of sunlight breaking through, cutting across the nave like strings of silver.

‘I don't understand,' she said, as Dryden stood beside her. ‘Look …'

He stood two feet from the canvas, studying the familiar landscape between Rome and the sea. Superimposed, in the foreground, the grassy Golgotha, with its three crosses. All the details suggested Italy: the Roman ruins, the Arcadian scenes, the villages and campanile. The tiny figures engaged in everyday life – the innkeeper on his doorstep, a washerwoman under white sheets, a beggar with one arm beside the road. And the peasant chopping wood. The peasant he'd called ‘Everyman' but Laura had christened Stefano after a man she'd known in her own village. And Stefano was turning from the woodpile because the wind had blown his hat off.

But there was no hat.

‘That's impossible,' he said. He stood back, scanning the background.

Laura held both hands over her mouth. ‘Tell me I'm not going mad,' she said.

And then Dryden knew. ‘You're not going mad.' That one missing detail told the whole story.

Temple-Wright had said the other painting, this one's twin, had been destroyed by damp but they had sold the frame. Had Vincent Haig been the middle man, or offered an expert opinion? Or did he know someone who'd spotted that the frame
was
original, even if the picture was lost forever, and that therefore it was time to take a closer look at its twin? Then, perhaps, he'd looked at the work itself: the paint, the pigments, the frame. Had he seen the hallmarks of its master? And when Temple-Wright announced the painting was to go to London to be valued, had he taken his chance? Dryden saw again the multi-coloured handprint by the door to the apse, the intermittent lights at night in Christ Church. Did the heady smell of paints in Sexton Cottage mask a secret masterpiece, Vincent Haig's copy of Masaccio's Crucifixion? A copy to hang here, while the original was passed on for sale in the shadowy world of the European art market.

Dryden glimpsed the future: the Florentine expert smiling a sad smile. A copy after all. And Albe Haig, living out his last years in the security of Sexton Cottage. And then, after a decent passage of time, the original turning up on the market. Or perhaps it would never surface, hanging instead on an art lover's wall, a source of private delight.

He thought then that Brimstone Hill had seen many crimes since the day of its first miracle, the casting out of the Devil. This one, he felt, should remain a secret he would share only with Laura.

‘What's happened?' she asked, her brown eyes wide.

‘A miracle,' said Dryden. ‘The second miracle of Brimstone Hill.'

The door closed with a bang and they realized Jock Donovan had fled. Then they heard the rain on the roof like a blessing.

B
arrowby Airfield was deserted. Laura lay on a picnic blanket in a white dress, her natural tan enhanced by ten days of unbroken clear skies since that one night of rain. Eden wore a sun hat and was covered in cream, although he'd inherited Italian skin – olive, dark already. Boudicca lay on the edge of the blanket, panting.

Dryden sat in the back of the Capri. A red letter L was attached to the rear bumper, another in front. Dryden didn't know why he'd volunteered to sit in on the driving lesson but it seemed like an act of solidarity, of support. He was frankly regretting it now, not because he didn't trust Grace, but because he suspected Humph's pedagogic powers were limited.

‘OK,' said the cabbie, squirming slightly in the passenger seat. ‘Let's start the engine.'

Grace glanced in the rear-view mirror and gave Dryden a look of infinite long-sufferance.

The Capri's engine coughed twice then caught.

‘OK. Clutch down and into first gear.'

‘What?'

Humph removed the sausage roll from his mouth and repeated the sentence. They edged forward over the wide expanse of grass. A few curious rabbits fled. Eden was up on his feet in pursuit, Laura ten feet behind, shepherding.

Dryden's mobile lit up on the back seat beside him.

Vee Hilgay was in the Magistrate's Court, Ely. The text was not a surprise. Muriel Calder had made her third appearance on a charge of manslaughter. She was remanded in custody for further psychiatric reports. DI Friday was uncertain if they would ever get the case into the Crown Court. Dryden was perfectly sure Calder was sane. But the calm premeditation of her killing seemed to defy some unwritten law of murder. It marked her out as a demon. Another devil of Brimstone Hill. The more she demanded her public trial – in her mind, the trial of Will Brinks for the murder of her husband – the more the experts wanted to study her mind. In the end, Dryden hoped, she'd get her day in court. Then the years that followed in gaol would at least offer some satisfaction.

The case that most definitely would come to the Crown Court involved the civil war which had broken out between the Erebus Street triad gang – 14K – and its breakaway rival – Sun Yee On. DI Friday had charged three men from 14K with the murder of Sima Shuba. Their case would be held in tandem with that of two men – related to the victims of the Barrowby Airfield explosion and members of Sun Yee On – charged with the murder of the
master
of 14K in the burnt-out house on Erebus Street.

The Capri circled the airfield in first gear, then second, then third, then back down through the gears to one, and an orderly halt. Grace swapped seats with her father and they headed for the gates.

Dryden called through the open window to Laura: ‘Ten minutes.'

They took the Ely Road to The
Jolly Farmers and then turned down to Brimstone Hill. The cab notched up forty-five mph and slipped into third gear, then slipped back to thirty mph as they reached the lampposts in the town. They came to a stop outside Christ Church.

Grace got out to let Dryden free, then got back in to hear the latest lecture on the relationship between speed and gear selection. Grace was booked in for her test on her seventeenth birthday. She would have to sit through a lot of lectures about driving. It was her father's special subject. But if she passed, her life would be transformed. Humph had promised her a car for her birthday. She could drive to Humph's house, go and see her grandma, organize her own complicated life. It was just fourteen months away.