The Funeral Owl (5 page)

‘Tanooo,' echoed Eden, enjoying the sound of one of his favourite words.

Tano was the car, named for her father, Gaetano. It was covered in a silty film.

‘I could write your name in the dust,' she said. ‘I brought coffee.' She had a flask in the pocket of the papoose. She patted the other pocket. ‘Sandwiches.'

The Brimstone Hill Café's menu was circa 1950s, and the only coffee you could get was instant, or a whipped-up confection from a vending machine that was meant to be espresso but was actually powder and hot water. They called it
fenspresso
.

Dryden lifted Eden out of the papoose and led the way into Christ Church. He'd visited before and the door was always open in daylight. Laura slipped into a pew and unscrewed the top of the thermos so that the delicious aroma escaped and seemed to overpower the usual scents of a lonely church – polish and candles. It smelt like a shrine to coffee. She had never been inside Christ Church. The chapels of her homeland, the Lunigiana, were baroque, gilded, crowded with statues and candles. Her local chapel in her home village was full of cherubs circling angels, looking down on the saints. The simplicity of this brick vessel took her breath away.

‘So,' she said, nodding. ‘Beautiful. You didn't tell me. You kept it secret so you could show it off now.'

Dryden set the child down on the narrow carpet in the aisle. Eden lay on his back, kicking. They were acutely aware that many of the children they knew from post-natal classes were walking already. Eden hadn't even shown an interest in crawling. He seemed to enjoy watching the world. A born observer, an outsider looking in. That there might be something wrong with his development was an anxiety which they had yet to share with each other.

Laura sat with her head back, looking at the roof. It was decorated with simple arts-and-craft designs in bright colours. Childlike, and beautifully executed. In the apse beyond the altar the decoration extended down over the brickwork, a riot of colour. A two-decked pulpit in stone and a brass lectern were gifts from benefactors and looked out of place. Dryden knew that the local congregation had been disappointed by Temple-Wright's refusal to preach from the lofty pulpit. She stood at the altar rail, on their level.

They were not alone in Christ Church. Workmen were constructing a wooden screen, to the vicar's orders, across the nave in front of the altar, creating a separate space beyond in the apse. A church within a church – somewhere cosy for the winter congregation. In many churches they'd have screened off a transept, but Christ Church had none. Its simplicity was like the living quarters on Noah's Ark. The builders had a radio playing, tuned to one of the local commercial stations, but the volume died away as soon as the banging door marked their entry.

‘So what's the plan with Grace – back to her mother's?' asked Laura, handing Dryden a thermos cap full of coffee and a bottle of fizzy water. The words of the question were slightly slurred. Laura had been in a coma for nearly a year after their car accident. The neurological damage had affected her speech so that the consonants were slightly dulled. It had been the one side effect of the coma which had got worse with time, and had put an end to her hopes of returning to acting.

Dryden was studying the hole in the roof directly above their heads where the thieves had taken the lead. Gaps showed between painted rafters.

‘Philip,' Laura prompted. ‘About Grace, what will they do?'

Dryden shook his head as if coming out of a trance. ‘She doesn't want to go home. She's angry about something. I reckon two or three days out on Euximoor Drove will remind her of the comforts of home. Humph needs to make it clear to her that in a year she can do what she likes. Less, ten months. She can have a room at his house if she wants, right in town. He's hardly ever there. She wants to go to the local college for A-levels, which makes sense. She can see her mum. She can avoid her stepfather. It's her choice. She just has to put up with the way things are for a bit longer.'

‘She must be unhappy, very unhappy, to actually do it. Run away like that.' Laura brushed her hair back from her forehead and pinned it back with a clasp. Her face was exceptionally animated when she spoke, a mannerism which seemed to have deepened as the clarity of her speech had declined. She was like a heroine in a silent movie, each twist of emotion clearly broadcast for dramatic effect.

Dryden told her what Grace had said, about her ever-expanding fen family.

‘So it's the Fens that are to blame,' said Laura, her eyes widening in mock horror.

‘Maybe. I got the impression there was something else, something she wasn't telling her father, or her grandmother.'

‘You think she's hiding a teenage secret?' Laura knelt down next to the baby and adjusted his jumper. Eden's eyes were focused on the dust they'd disturbed from the pews which was rising and catching the sunlight that raked across the nave.

Free, briefly, of the responsibility of the child, Laura let her gaze turn to a large painting which dominated the nave. ‘That could be in a church at home,' she said.

A heavy, dark wood gilded frame surrounded a medieval Italian landscape which showed Golgotha in the foreground and the three crosses, with Christ crucified in the central role. The canvas itself was damaged: there was a diagonal scratch, two tears in the sky, and an old damp patch above Christ's head.

Dryden stood and went to the painting. ‘I read about this on the village website. That's why it's called Christ Church, for this painting. Well, there were two originally – another one opposite. They were gifts from a local family of landowners.'

‘What happened to the other one?'

‘Destroyed by the damp and the cold. This one's not that much better.'

‘That's unfair. It's beautiful still. Don't be so hard on old age.'

Dryden told her what he could remember from the website: that the works were nineteenth century, Italian, copies of two lost medieval masterpieces. In the manner of the time, the landscape was faithfully Italian, precisely of that between Rome and the sea, complete with ruins, rural scenes, villages and campanile. The background was inhabited by tiny figures acting out miniature dramas: a shepherd chasing his hat in the wind, a peasant chopping wood, children running after a horse.

Laura stood beside him, looking into the picture intently as if her own childhood was pictured there. She laughed, extending a finger towards the hatless running shepherd. ‘I know him; he lived in our village.'

‘Everyman,' said Dryden.

She shook her head, missing the reference. ‘Stefano.' Laura studied the painting. ‘So if it's a copy, who painted the original?'

‘Masaccio.'

Laura whistled, recognizing the name. ‘Yes, one of the masters. I think there's something in Parma in the cathedral – a vast nativity, with the magi on camels.'

‘Shame this isn't the real thing,' said Dryden. ‘Our delightful vicar could have her internet church and still have enough left over to cover that roof with gold leaf instead of lead.' He turned on his heels. ‘Mind you, that really would get the thieves excited.'

As they left, Laura stole a glance back at Stefano and his flying hat.

D
ryden loved graveyards: there was something about their settled sadness, the sense in which they represented eternal rest, which in turn appealed to his own desire to step outside the day-to-day world of deadlines, appointments and rush. Laura had driven Eden away in Tano to the crèche, leaving him to eat his lunch. The headstones at the back of the church were older than those at the front – Victorian slabs of stone, etched with euphemism:
Asleep
, or
Gone Before.

Laura had left him the coffee thermos so he sat on a box tomb and poured himself a shot of acrid espresso. He was surrounded by the graves of the rich, entwined by granite ivy and laurel, and adorned with carved wrens, robins, swords, urns and the occasional skull. It reminded him of one of his favourite cartoons, by the humourist James Thurber, depicting a street full of determined men and women striding to their next appointments, against a background of a cemetery. The caption read simply:
Destinations
.

The churchyard ran to a fence, and then a ditch, beyond which was meadow and pasture, dotted with sheep – a recent innovation in fen farming, which had been largely devoid of livestock for a century, thanks to the cash value of salad crops and grain on the vast, rich, open fields. Right at the edge of the church land, up against the fence, was a striking memorial: a soldier carved in grey-green stone, in a boot-length cape. There was a plinth, in marble, with lead letters which read:

IN MEMORY OF THOSE

WHO FELL IN THE

KOREAN WAR

1933–1953

Peter Davenport

Paul Davenport

Brothers in Arms

It was the stone statue of the figure that dominated the memorial. Despite being a forgotten war, Korea did have this one potent symbol – the caped soldier. Dryden recalled pictures of the conflict in books, snippets of newsreel on the History Channel documentaries. A war of bloody attrition, with the Americans, Canadians and Australians dug in along a lonely front line with the South Koreans, facing the Russians, the Chinese and the North Koreans. Incessant, almost tropical rain had brought misery to thousands of troops in bitterly cold trenches. As a war it seemed to occupy a no-man's-land in Dryden's world-view of the twentieth century – lost between the bombed ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the tensions of the Cold War of the 1960s. Little had survived in the public memory other than this icon, the soldier in battlefield green, the cape big enough to cover his pack and rifle, and almost reaching down to the ground. The only part of the body to be revealed was usually the head in the helmet, and that was invariably held down, the chin on the chest, the face sheltered against the endless rain. Dryden ate his sandwich and wondered about the Davenport brothers. Twins, perhaps, given the identical dates, who had lived and died together. Perhaps both had been lost on the same day.

A clock chimed somewhere in Brimstone Hill. Glancing back at the church, he saw the small door that the metal thieves had ripped open to get to the staircase which corkscrewed up to the roof. The door was wooden, lancet-shaped, and hung out on its shattered iron hinges. A limp stretch of scene-of-crime tape hung across the opening. Dryden could just see the worn stone steps twisting upwards.

He walked over to investigate, carrying his coffee cup. The staircase was damp and smelt of leaves and dead birds. The thought of climbing up and looking down on the graveyard made his heartbeat pick up with a combination of fear and excitement. It was so rare to be able to look down on anything in the Fens. He looked up the spiral stairwell, trying to judge if he had the courage to face his fear of heights. The steps were splashed with guano. The thought of climbing them made his legs go weak. He decided to stop himself doing anything stupid by closing the door. He put down his coffee and lifted the door up on its hinges, then brought it round and pushed it into place.

Which is when he saw what had been nailed to the outside.

The door kept falling open so he had to hold it back with one hand. He reached out his other hand to touch a small wooden sign carved to mimic the shape of a piece of paper or parchment, with curling gilded edges. His mouth ran dry, not from fear, but from an overwhelming memory. He'd been brought up a Catholic, and the iconography was still potent. Crucifixes in his childhood had always been replete with the broken figure of Christ, the bleeding stigmata, the crown of thorns, and above the head the sign that Pontius Pilate had dictated to the scribes to be written in Latin, Hebrew and Greek:
I
ē
sus Nazar
ē
nus, R
ē
x I
ū
dae
ō
rum
– shortened to INRI.

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

And here was that sign. Nailed roughly to the door, so that the nail had split the wood. Had Temple-Wright seen this? He doubted it. Because it begged several questions: was this the work of the metal thieves, and if so, from which crucifix had it been ripped? Judging by the size of the plaque, about two feet by one foot, it was from a crucifix of some size. It was painted in gold, red and blue, and all the colours were weathered. There was something sacrilegious about the act of nailing it to the door. But the police had made no mention of it; or had they simply disregarded it as a mindless piece of vandalism? Or had the door just been discovered open, and no one had bothered to look?

Christ Church was named for the two Italian pictures of the crucifixion which had hung in the nave. Dryden had read on the local history website that this dedication had been further cemented with the erection of a crucifix in a stand of trees to the edge of the graveyard, a kind of miniature fenland Golgotha. A wood carver from Cambridge had won the commission for the figure of Christ. Dryden had always assumed that the crucifix had failed to survive the intervening century and a half of winters. It was certainly not visible in the churchyard.

He walked back to the box tomb he'd been sitting on by the Korean War Memorial and jumped lightly on top. He could see clearly over the headstones and memorials. There
was
a stand of trees in the north-east corner of the graveyard, a thick clutch of pines, set in a circle. He picked his way through the graveyard towards it, and saw immediately that a rough path led into the trees at an oblique angle. He stepped into the copse, from open sunlight to deep shadow in one stride, so that his eyes failed to make the transition. He had to stop, blinking. He heard an animal in the undergrowth scurrying for cover. Vision came to him slowly, revealing that the path wound onwards around a very low mound, the borders of the way forward once marked with whitewashed stones. Now some were missing, and those that remained were weathered and grey. The path itself was made of pavings set neatly in a slow curve, overgrown with weeds, cracked and uneven.