The Funeral Owl (3 page)

‘I'm all right,' Grace said, emerging in a dressing gown Humph recognized as one he had bought Meg twenty years ago.

‘You passed out,' said Humph, by way of putting her right. ‘You're not all right.' He led the way into the front room where he'd put a plate on the table. Two fried eggs, both yolks broken, the toast burnt. The dog came and sat under her chair.

Grace took her father's hand. ‘I thought I'd never be able to breathe again. I panicked. Sorry.' She looked out of the window at the grey world, the air clearing now, as if after a snowstorm. ‘I've not been in one like that. It's weird.'

‘It's the dry summer. Global warming. Stuff,' offered Dryden.

She coughed. ‘I'm not going back.' She attacked the eggs with apparent enthusiasm.

A tall girl, perhaps five foot seven, with narrow shoulders and an oval face, she reminded Humph of her mother. She prompted divergent emotions in the cabbie: he wanted to stand next to her and let his cheek touch hers, but just as urgently he wanted to leave the room, drive away, in case he was called on, suddenly, to protect her.

‘I'm never going back,' she said. ‘I want to live here with Nan.'

Meg said they'd talk about it, catching Humph's eye, glancing at the door. She didn't think now was the time for a cross-examination. If Grace wanted to tell them why she'd run away from home she'd do it in her own time.

‘Last night,' said Humph, persisting. ‘Mum said you hadn't slept in your bed.'

She gave her father a one-shoulder shrug. ‘There's a bench at the bus station in Ely. By the Indian. I was fine.' She didn't look at her father, or her grandmother, but chased a fried egg round the plate instead. ‘I just wanted some space, OK?'

Humph covered his eyes with one small hand over the bridge of his nose. ‘You've got my mobile number. Why didn't you ring?'

She took out her mobile and put it on the table, then pushed it away. The movement left a mark in the thin veneer of dust which had somehow settled on the interior of the house. ‘Battery's flat. It's useless.'

His mother was right, thought Humph, Grace had grown up. On some extra mental plane he tried to work out when it was
he'd
last seen her. A week ago, maybe more. They talked every day, several times a day, on the mobile, by text, but he realized now that she could hide things from him if they didn't see each other, that if they relied on messages she could construct a version of her life that pleased him, and that he could do the same for her. It was a side effect of the modern world, he thought, that people could be who they wanted to be until you met them.

‘Can I stay here?' She looked at her grandmother. ‘Please.'

‘I'll talk to your mum,' said Humph, indulging in a huge sigh. ‘It's her call.' The cabbie looked at his mobile and headed for the front door. ‘I need a better signal.'

Outside it was very quiet, as if the landscape was in shock.

Humph had a personal space slightly smaller than Norfolk, so Dryden said he'd find a better signal too, and wandered off down a path beside a field of leeks. Each of the plants had gathered soil in its leaves, grey and claggy, like the waste from a vacuum cleaner. If he took in a full lungful of air something in his throat would catch, making him cough.

Dryden had work to do. He was the editor – newly appointed – of
The Crow
newspaper, based in the small cathedral city of Ely, just ten miles east across the Fens.
The Crow
came out on Friday. Its sister paper, the free-sheet
Ely Express
, came out on Tuesday
.
One of the reasons Dryden had been made editor of
The Crow
was because he'd proposed increasing the paper's readership by launching new editions; the first of which was to be here, in the West Fens. He'd rented a new office for the paper in the fen township of Brimstone Hill, just a few miles from Euximoor Drove, and assigned himself to the new edition, at least for the first three months. He'd left his other two reporters to run head office in Ely.

News was scarce out on the Fens. So the dust storm was a gift from heaven – almost literally. The story was perfect for
The Crow
's rural readership, and a strong West Fen story for the new edition. For the town-based
Ely Express
he'd stick to a picture. He'd got plenty of shots, and from the digital read-out on his phone they were decent ones. Each storm was bad news for local farmers because the wind picked up the topsoil and moved it miles. Some farms lost crops, ruined and uprooted, while others saw seedlings and salad crops buried. Worst of all, some of the soil was lost forever, blown high enough to carry out to sea, or dumped in rivers and estuaries. And this had been a bad storm, much more violent than average, part of an emerging pattern of more extreme weather. There'd be plenty of damage out on the windswept land.

He rang the local rep for the National Farmers' Union and told him what had happened and said he wanted an update from his members. Also – a good trick he'd played before – he wanted an estimate of the damage on one, unnamed, farm in terms of insurance claims. Once he had that figure he'd multiply it by the number of holdings on the affected fens and get himself a nice big fat headline figure for
The Crow
: ‘£1m DUST STORM HITS WEST FENS'.

He called the local police station in Brimstone Hill. The township had a resident community constable and his house had a blue light and a front counter open every Monday, Tuesday and Friday between ten and two. Dryden tried his mobile and got the busy tone. Bad fen blows caused havoc on the roads, so he guessed the policeman was out somewhere at a traffic accident. Then he rang the head of the primary school, a woman called Jan Riddle.

She answered her mobile: ‘Dryden?'

‘Sorry – just wanted to see if you're all OK. Did the dust get that far?'

‘You're like the angel of death,' she said.

‘Thanks a lot.' Dryden liked Riddle and had earmarked her as a key contact on an earlier visit. She was in her mid-forties, playful, one of those rare teachers who don't have to discipline the kids. Dryden had sneaked a story into the paper about her five-year-olds running a marathon by doing a hundred yards around the playground every day. So she was on his side.

‘But yes, we're all fine, no one's dead, but we've had tears. They were out for break and I didn't see it coming. Those that aren't crying are too excited to sit down. The TA got them into the bike shed, so most of them only got a mouthful and their noses blocked. We dished out the milk early, so thank God for school milk.'

Dryden memorized the quote, thinking it would make a great top line for a sidebar on the main story:

‘SCHOOL MILK

SAVES KIDS

AFTER DUST

STORM HITS

PLAYTIME'.

‘Gagging, were they?'

‘Have you tasted it? It's like a mouthful of cinders.'

He promised he'd pop in later, then ended the call. His mobile rang immediately.

It was Vee Hilgay, his chief reporter, calling in from head office in Ely. Dryden had recruited Vee in his first executive move as editor. Old money, a spinster, she'd spent nearly twenty years running a charity which looked after the elderly in the fen winters. She wore a donkey jacket, CND lapel badge and Doc Martens. At the age of seventy-four, she was the coolest OAP in town.

‘We've had a fen blow out here, a bad one,' said Dryden. ‘I'll do you a hundred-word caption and send you some pics for the
Express.
What you got?' he asked, walking to the end of the path and catching sight of Humph, still standing by the Capri, his mobile to his ear. He could hear his high, tuneful voice, but the tone was odd, as if he was talking to a call centre in Bombay.

He heard Vee turning her notebook pages. Dryden operated without paper due to his indecipherable shorthand and the fact that people – especially in the Fens – always stopped talking if you started taking notes. He had an excellent short-term memory. He just needed to remember to make a note before the slate was wiped clean by a good night's sleep.

‘One thing,' she said. He heard Vee sip tea. She lived on tannin, carting a thermos round with her the size of one of the shell cases from the Somme. ‘Metal thieves struck again, out on your patch, Christ Church at Brimstone Hill. Last night, apparently, about thirty foot of lead off the roof and the odd lead angel from the graveyard. The vicar said she'd be on site at noon.'

‘I'll get Humph to run me down to the church. If I can get a picture I will,' said Dryden.

‘What about Humph's daughter?' asked Vee.

‘She's here.'

‘Thank God. Poor girl. It must be a nightmare being a fen teenager.'

‘Why?'

‘
Why!
She lives out in some godforsaken village where most people's idea of a good time is a smoke on the swings.'

‘It's five miles from Ely.'

‘The city that never wakes up,' said Vee. ‘And five miles, Dryden. You know what the public transport system's like in the Fens. It doesn't exist. She might as well live in Timbuktu. Her Mum's on her case twenty-four-seven. Adolescence is horrible wherever you live. Imagine what it's like for her.'

‘OK. I only asked.'

‘And then there's her dad. If he's not actually working he's asleep in the cab in a lay-by. He might as well be in the Navy.'

Humph was Dryden's chauffeur during most daylight hours. Since the reporter's accident more than a decade earlier he'd needed someone with wheels. For nearly a year Dryden's wife had been in a coma so he'd had to live a strange, lonely life. He'd shared it, in part, with Humph, who in his turn was grieving for the loss of his marriage and children. Dryden gave him all his travel expenses by way of payment, which didn't amount to much, but that didn't bother Humph. The cabbie's core business was late-night trips from the Cambridge and Newmarket clubs, plus the Ely school run. In between times he was available to ferry Dryden around. The last thing Humph wanted was to go home, as home didn't really exist any more. So it suited the cabbie just fine, and he slept when he could – feet up in a lay-by.

Vee ran through everything she had on her diary for the
Ely Express
. Then they went through what they thought they'd have for
The Crow
later in the week, earmarking the planning decision on a new southern bypass as the paper's potential lead story. The Ely edition could take a picture of the dust storm on its front page too, while the new West Fen edition could lead with the story and picture. Events might upset their news decisions – it was still a long time until the final deadline – but it was always good to have a plan.

Dryden was gratified that his hunch that Vee would make an excellent reporter had been vindicated. She was curious, organized and bloody-minded. He'd leave her to work up the by-pass story. He cut the line and walked back towards the Capri.

Humph was propped up against the side of the cab, finishing a call on his mobile. When he stood the suspension gave out a twang
.

Back in the bungalow, Grace was swaddled in a huge duvet, still lying on the sofa. Her grandmother was reading snippets out loud from last week's paper. The girl's eyes looked heavy and she was still bloodless, with skin the colour of lard.

Humph waved the mobile at his daughter. ‘Mum's on her way. She says you can stay here if you want, maybe till Sunday. So that's a week off school. Then it's back home. It's the best I could do. She wants to know why you left home. Just so you know. So even if you won't tell me or Gran I'd recommend you tell her.'

Humph sat down and the kitchen chair he'd chosen disappeared entirely from sight.

‘She said there'd been a fight, with Barrie's boys?' he asked.

Barrie was her stepfather. He had two teenage sons who lived at home.

‘They went in my room,' said Grace. ‘They didn't ask. He said I should forget it.'

‘Barrie?'

‘Yeah. Him.' She almost spat it out but Dryden felt she had faked the disgust in her voice, that she was play-acting, falling back on a cliché to portray her relationship with her stepfather.

She shivered and her grandmother tucked in the duvet under her feet. ‘I bet she didn't tell you what happened, did she?' said Grace. ‘Not all of it.'

Dryden noticed that she had a lazy left eye, which seemed to follow the right after a one-second delay.

‘We had a barbie – we're always having barbies. There isn't even a real fire – it's gas. So this woman turns up by car, because that's the only way you can turn up at our house, and Barrie says – like out loud – that he'd lived with her after he left his first wife. This is out at Isleham. Wherever that is …'

Places like Isleham were mythical to Grace. Deep-Fen. Places where inbreeding led to webbed feet and IQs so low as to excite academic interest.

‘“My common-law wife”, that's actually what he called her, like he was proud of it, and it hurt Mum. I could see that because she started laughing about it. And then this woman starts telling him how the kids are.
His
kids.
Other
kids. Kids he had with this woman. And they were coming too. Mum said later that she knew they were invited, but I don't believe her.

‘And then they were there too, in a souped-up Vauxhall. A car again – it's like car city out at our house. And the boy's just like Barrie, only I don't think he's so cruel. And the girl didn't want to be there so she just sat on the step with a bottle of lager. She smoked too, one after the other, like Barrie.

‘So suddenly we're a fen joke. There's me, there's Barrie's two boys, there's an extra boy and an extra girl who came with the common-law wife. Everyone's related to everyone else but it takes you twenty minutes to work out how.'