The Funeral Owl (32 page)

‘You're not going to dump me, are you? After all these years? Think of the kids.'

‘Just shut up and listen. I've got the Regional Crime Squad en route. The Met's got an organized crime branch and they want reports on the hour. I've been asked at least three times by people above my pay grade to explain why I was looking for Powell in the company of a local journalist.'

Dryden went to protest. They were looking for Powell because they were on the trail of the gun. They were on the trail of the gun because Dryden had found a link between Barrowby Airfield and the Calder killing. Questioning Dryden's presence in Christ Church was a bit rich.

‘I know,' said Friday, anticipating Dryden's response. ‘I know. But I need to play this by the book. You're an eyewitness. I'm the investigating officer. I need to establish a bit of professional distance. OK?'

‘I was there. What'd you want me to do, forget I found him?'

‘No. Although it would be a smart move not to print too many details. I'm sure you know that for us this is family. Plus, he
has
a family.'

‘Really? He never mentioned one. What kind of family?'

‘Ex-wife, two kids. She's a PC too, so don't even go there.'

Dryden recalled Powell's penchant for bling, the gold watch, the low-slung sports car. None of that matched up to paying maintenance on two kids on a constable's salary.

‘They know, do they?'

‘Sure. They're being looked after.'

Dryden found the surge of emotion which gripped the police, or any of the emergency services, on hearing the words ‘officer down' mildly irritating. It was as if they felt the need to re-enact a not very well-written episode of
Hill Street Blues.
The tribalism didn't do them any favours; it felt primitive, and knee-jerk. And for him it always begged the question: why don't they go into overdrive when the victim is just a member of the public?

‘How did Powell die?'

‘What information I have will be given at the forthcoming press conference, Dryden. I'd recommend you come and listen to what I have to say. Some of it will be news to you.'

‘Sir.' A uniformed PC stood at Friday's shoulder. ‘The TV people are on their toes. They say they need to get something now …'

Friday straightened his tie and turned on his heels.

The press conference was businesslike. Friday said that PC Powell's death was almost certainly linked to the outbreak of gang warfare in the Fens which had been sparked by the murder of Sima Shuba. He revealed that Powell had transferred to Brimstone Hill specifically to track triad trade in both scrap metal and alcohol. He had begun his career with the Thames River Police. The force's serious crime squad believed large quantities of scrap metal were being moved out of the area by barge. Alcohol was being sold to intermediaries – shopkeepers, car boot sale traders, pubs. Powell's investigation was strictly undercover and would have culminated in a raid on the gang once its storage and production site had been identified. Events – in the form of the Barrowby Airfield explosion – had overtaken the inquiry. The results of a preliminary autopsy would be known within twenty-four hours.

Friday walked away without taking questions. The press dispersed to cars and vans, eager to get the details on to late evening broadcasts and into morning papers.

Dryden followed the detective back towards Christ Church. ‘One question, because you do owe me,' said Dryden. ‘Just before I found Powell's body you called out, like you'd found something. What was it?'

Friday straightened his back, then dropped his head back, holding the arc until there was a plastic click from his spine. ‘There's a rear door, in the apse. Little wooden Victorian door, painted white. There was a handprint on it, in colour. Lots of colours. Vicar says it's workmen and it was there yesterday. The place reeks of paint. No big deal. We've taken pictures, we'll look for a match. But it's a sideshow.'

‘Colours?'

‘Forget it.' But Dryden couldn't forget it, because the workmen had used only white paint to build the vicar's partitions in the apse. So whose hand had made the print?

D
I Friday was halfway to the cypress tree and the pool of halogen-white lights when he stopped, wheeled round and walked back. Up close Dryden realized he had a brown envelope in his hand.

‘I forgot. We did a quick check through Powell's paperwork at the station. He kept a punctilious diary. But he was behind on a lot of routine stuff, because of the CID work. He was due to make a call on Meg Humphries, out on Euximoor Fen. Some business from Ely. A delivery. It's for your mate.'

‘Humph.'

‘The fat bloke.'

‘That might be him.'

‘Sorry. We had to read it, standard procedure. Give it to him, will you?'

It was an envelope with a long history. There was no stamp but a watermark in the top right corner which read: Ely Coroner's Court Office. And a crest of the Royal Arms.

The first address was a suburban street in Witchford, Grace's home. That had been scratched out and replaced with Humph's name and address. Then that had been crossed out and replaced with Humph's name again, but his mother's address on Euximoor Drove. Various scrawled signatures marked the front of the letter.

‘Good job it's not urgent,' said Dryden, out loud, but Friday had gone.

Dryden walked to the wall of Christ Church so that he could stand in the splash of red and blue light coming out through the narrow stained-glass window. A white card, with the letterhead of the coroner, was attached to a page of A4.

Dear Mr Humphries,

I attach an email message left on the computer of a seventeen-year-old boy at Ely's Cromwell School. The young man, Julian Amhurst, died in the river at Ely this weekend. A tragic case. He took his own life. It was clear that he was largely motivated by stress over exams and trying to win a place at Cambridge University. Emotional problems had also begun to emerge. He left a whole series of messages for friends and family, but they were never sent, one of the details which persuaded me to record an open verdict, rather than one of suicide. This message is for your daughter, Grace. I know that anyone left behind after the death of a young person in these circumstances feels a certain amount of guilt. This is only natural. In this case it seemed it might be helpful to Grace if she was able to read the message. I thought I would, however, leave the final decision to you.

I enclose a printout of the message.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Digby Ryder

Her Majesty's Coroner

Dryden had no right to read on. He had the printout in his hand but he deliberately made his eyes focus on a point short of the paper so that he couldn't read the words.

A set of TV lights thudded on, then off, and caught his attention. When he looked back at the words they were in focus and he couldn't stop himself seeing the first sentence, which was like taking the bait on the hook, because it led to the second sentence, and so onwards to the end.

Grace,

Just a note. I'm sorry that other people will read this. I just didn't want you to think that what you'd said had upset me. I know it did, you saw that, but I would have just asked again, probably. It was just a trip to the cinema and I don't even like 3D films. It was Chris's idea. He said you'd like it. And he said it was what normal people did. So I needed help. That's one thing they'll say about me – that he did his homework.

I like you. I'm sorry you didn't like me, but it was cool that you said it straight. It is weird I got it wrong because I'm supposed to be good at chemistry. I really got upset because I'm not coping with the work, and the exams coming. I sit and look at pages in text books and I blink and then an hour's gone on the little clock in the top right of the computer screen and I don't remember anything. I can't link thoughts together any more, not like in a series. They're circular, and so they don't go anywhere, like they're trapped. Chemical symbols are a bit like that sometimes, but equations balance out. But this doesn't feel like that. It doesn't feel right. I should see someone, a doctor maybe, but the effort puts me off. Either way you might get this. It's just to say not to worry, that it's nobody's fault, and certainly not yours.

Jx

Dryden had an insight into the boy's mind. He saw him sitting in front of a computer screen, the letter finished, then adding that final
x
.

When did Grace know he was missing? That evening she fled from home, perhaps. Maybe she did blame herself, maybe that explained everything. Humph said she'd been listening to the local radio so she'd know he was dead by now, but that was hardly a surprise, given he'd been missing for days. But the fact of it might be devastating.

Dryden wanted to go quickly and take the letter to her, but he needed to avoid the lights and his colleagues in the press. So he set out around Christ Church, going anti-clockwise. There was a splash of light beyond the apse, not from the pencil-thin stained-glass windows, but from the coffin-like apse door DI Friday had mentioned. A forensic officer in a white suit emerged with a camera and tripod and walked away towards a parked police van.

The door stood open, the light flooding out.

Dryden got within ten feet before a scene-of-crime tape stopped him in his tracks. He could see the handprint on the white paintwork, blue little finger, blue for the next and for the middle finger, but smudged with red, then the index finger – sharpest of all – in a kind of brown-black. It wasn't an ordinary hand that had left this mark. Either the index finger was shorter than the rest, an abnormality in itself, or the fingertip was missing.

G
race's bedroom was at the back of the double bay-windowed bungalow. Humph's mother was watching TV as they came through the front door. Football, Europa League, although she had to admit she had no idea who was playing, but she liked men in shorts. There was a pot of tea beside her armchair and she was holding a catering-sized pack of cheese and onion crisps.

‘Grace is in bed,' she said. ‘Something's upset her. She was reading your paper, Philip. The
Ely Express
. Then we had more tears. But she wouldn't say why.'

She looked out the front door where the helicopter still held its position low over Christ Church.

‘The radio said … The neighbours called, too. A policeman? Did they really kill a policeman?'

Humph walked straight past her towards the bedroom door.

‘Don't, Humph love, she's asleep. Leave her.'

Humph stood for a heartbeat on the threshold and knew it was too late, but he knocked once anyway, then threw the door back. They saw the window open, the net curtain turning in the breeze. The bed was empty but the sheets were swirled into a nest. A copy of the
Ely Express
lay half-under the pillow.

Humph went to check which coat Grace was wearing.

‘Don't worry,' said Dryden, helping Meg take a seat on the sofa. ‘We know what's wrong now – we just have to find her. Ring the police …' He took the woman's hands. Like Humph's they were surprisingly small and nimble. ‘Tell them she might harm herself. That we know why, that she might do this tonight. Then ring the neighbours, all of them. Tell them to put lights on everywhere and check outbuildings, and unlocked cars, and the nearest bus stops. We'll get out on the road.'

Dryden offered to drive but Humph took the wheel of the Capri. ‘Where?' he asked, as if Dryden had an answer.

Dryden did have a picture in his head of the roads of Brimstone Hill. Grace had been ‘asleep' an hour, so she could have got no further than five miles without a lift. There were no buses, and the road back into the township was blocked by the police. They drove first to the roadblock on the Ely Road and explained to the officers on duty that they were looking for a missing girl. Fifteen, fair, round face, in a red coat. They took a note but Dryden could see that they were still mesmerised by the emotional punch of those two words: officer down.

In an hour they were back at Euximoor Drove at the house. Across the fen neighbours had lit up everything they could. The darkness pulsated with electric light.

Humph stood outside with a mug of tea, staring into those lights, as if one of them would give up his daughter, as if she'd emerge from the black velvet night carrying a star.

Dryden stood in Grace's bedroom. He felt that if he immersed himself in the room, in its random items, he'd somehow
see
her, and know where she was. But all he could recall was that last time he'd set eyes on her, in Dacey's auction room, moving between the stalls, in a trance. He ran the memory like a YouTube clip, back and forth, until a new set of images appeared on the end. He'd forgotten that last glimpse of her, walking to one of the fine art stalls, studying a lithograph on the wall, a view of Denver Sluice, the croquet-hoop superstructure against an evening sky, the high lock gates closed, holding back the water. She'd seemed to fall under some kind of spell as she studied the image.

‘The car,' he said, making the decision to trust in intuition, and walking out the front door. ‘I've got an idea.'

Denver was six miles north, then four south on the far side of the Bedford Levels. They drove at a steady thirty mph, the windows down, checking the fields under the moonlight, the bus shelters, the pumping stations. Meg rang to say there was no news and Dryden could see Humph struggling with his anger, and with the guilt, trying not to blame anyone but himself.

The sluice was a complex of floodgates spanning both the Ouse, and several of the artificial rivers built in the seventeenth century to drain the Fens. Beyond it, downstream, the river magically became two, each channel running the last twenty miles to the sea side-by-side. But on the upriver side the landscape was criss-crossed with ditches, drains, meres and rivers. The sluice was the landscape's watery heart, regulating the flow of water off the land, and keeping back tidal seawater coming up from the coast.