Read Online The Funeral Owl by Jim Kelly - Free Book Online Page A

– just voices.’ He pressed his hands to his ears as if he could hear them now. ‘I can’t believe someone is dead. Murdered. It’s such a peaceful place.’
    Dryden tried out a few of his own theories as to what had happened, hoping they’d share theirs, but they said they had none.
    â€˜I better get to work,’ said Dryden eventually. He put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘Good to meet you, Mr Haig. Hope this all quietens down. Gives you some peace.’
    The grandson walked him to the edge of the Clock Holt.
    â€˜And Temple-Wright knows he’s blind?’ asked Dryden before they parted. ‘I could do a story if your grandfather wants me to. Can you ask him? Not now. He’s tired. But let me know.’
    They swapped cards. Haig’s said he was a picture restorer and framer. Dryden looked at his hands again, seeing this time that they were long, even elegant, with dry paint under the nails.
    â€˜I’ll ask him. You know what I think? I think the vicar doesn’t care about Grandad because he loves the place, the church, and because he was the guardian, the keeper. She hates that, hates the idea that we might love this place.
I know
.’
    Something in the way Vincent Haig said it implied a darker knowledge.
    â€˜I’ll talk to her if your grandad wants me to,’ said Dryden. He felt a thrill for the power of his trade. If she backed down he could run a story anyway, saying the church had shown mercy. But something told him Temple-Wright didn’t do backing down.
    The ambulance into which they put the victim’s body still stood on the road, the light flashing. Dryden thought they’d leave with the forensic unit when the job was done. It was sad, poignant even, that they felt no need to hurry away with the body.
    â€˜You know the legend, about the Devil and Brimstone Hill?’ asked Haig. He had a way of sharing information which Dryden found deeply annoying. First the question, then his own, pre-prepared and calibrated answer.
    â€˜Sure. He was chased here by the vicar and went up in a puff of smoke to hell.’
    â€˜Perhaps the Devil’s back,’ said Haig.

EIGHT
Tuesday
    T he Jolly Farmers had been closed for thirteen months, but it might as well have been thirteen years. It stood at a T-junction two miles from Christ Church, out on the fen. The smell of winter damp ran through it like the spreading fingers of dry rot. A single lavatory had been sluiced down with Domestos, adding an astringent note to the fetid air which had been trapped behind boarded windows and bricked up doorways. There was nothing quite as dispiriting, thought Dryden, as a dead pub. It was like an empty theatre; all the more desolate for the fact that it had once been so alive.
    The atmosphere suited the occasion. The Ely coroner, Dr Digby Ryder, had decided to hold his court in the old pub – as was his right under the law – because the case he wanted to deal with was local, involving the deaths of two tramps earlier that year, whose bodies had been discovered in a flooded ditch. A local case, of local interest, so Dryden had put it in the diary a week earlier. But now the pub was crammed with journalists because Ryder was also due to formally open the inquest into the death of the man found in the churchyard at Christ Church. Given that the police had issued such a short statement the day before, and Dryden’s eyewitness account had yet to hit the streets, the rest of the media were keen to cover the coroner’s court, even if proceedings were limited to a few formalities.
    The coroner’s officer, DS Stan Cherry, had removed the boards over some of the windows so that indirect sunlight filled the old public bar. Dust didn’t hang in the air – it clogged it, like cigarette smoke. Three darts stuck out of the dartboard, a handwritten Xmas Draw board hung on the wall beside a Pirelli calendar featuring Miss April 2010,