The Funeral Owl (37 page)

There were flowers on Jock Donovan's grave. There had been every day since the funeral. The police found his body on the flat roof of Brimstone House. He'd shot himself with a US handgun, very neatly, in the left temple. Vincent Haig had paid for the burial, and his grandfather changed the flowers each day with blooms from the cottage garden.

Dryden felt that Donovan's suicide had been a release the old man deserved. Not so much self-destruction as a preventative execution. No court could have contrived a punishment to match the one he'd faced: to remember, finally, and daily, that single night of incessant fear in 1953 at the Battle of the Hook; to be haunted by the very feeling itself, of standing in the blood of his brothers-in-arms.

Grace sounded the horn on the Capri.

Dryden climbed in and regained his seat in the back. He knew something had happened. Grace was crying, holding her father's hand.

She looked at Dryden in the rear-view mirror. ‘Dad says – if it's OK with Mum – I can have Boudicca.'