Free The Funeral Owl by Jim Kelly

you.’
    Most of the journalists made a bolt for the door.
    Dryden sat tight, opened his laptop, and wrote a fifty-word paragraph to email to the office so that they could add it to the story he’d already written for the
Ely Express
. It changed little of what they knew of the case.
    The press pack had now been reduced to the usual suspects: two or three of the local dailies, and the weeklies. Dryden’s instinct was to leave and follow up his own leads on the big story, the murder in Christ Church graveyard. But he had three clear days before the next front-page deadline. His immediate priority was the coroner’s second case.
    Sgt Cherry called for order and Ryder launched directly into a summary of the known facts concerning the sudden and unnatural deaths of Anthony James Russell and Archibald Donald McLeish.
    A fen blow, nearly as bad, according to the coroner, as the one that had hit the area the day before, had struck Brimstone Hill one Sunday evening that spring. The next day, 8 April, the rain had fallen. A cloudburst had thundered down for two hours between 6.30 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. When the air cleared, the village’s main drain, the Brim, was clogged, water lapping over and into the road beyond Christ Church. The problem was presumed to be a blocked culvert where the brook ran under the railway. The Fen Waterways Board turned up next day to dig out the silt. They expected to find something in the hole besides silt: a tree stump, a supermarket trolley, a dead badger. Instead they found the bodies of two men.
    Identification was nearly instantaneous. The men were, in that telling phrase, ‘well known to the police’. One was a thirty-two-year-old former land worker who had been born in the village. He’d been known, since school, as Spider Russell. He was six foot two inches tall.
    â€˜Spider for his long legs and arms, I think?’ Ryder smiled at thin air.
    Several heads in the front row nodded in agreement.
    Russell began drinking at fourteen, said Ryder, starting with cider, usually in plastic bottles, consumed in private down by the railway line. By sixteen he was barred from both The Brook, the pub in the centre of Brimstone Hill, and The Jolly Farmers.
    Ryder spread his hands out wide. ‘The Jolly Farmers,’ he repeated, as if they’d missed the reference.
    He took up his story again.
    Spider Russell didn’t let being barred stop him drinking. He’d walk the six miles into Friday Bridge on a Friday night with his agricultural wages and blow it all in the pubs there.
    Two women in the front row began to discuss this fact and Ryder paused until they were embarrassed by the silence into which they were talking.
    â€˜Drink eventually cost young Russell his job,’ said Ryder. ‘Although it appears he’d tell anyone who listened that he’d been pushed out of the labour market by migrant workers who’d do the work for half the money.’
    After becoming unemployed, Russell’s life took a predictable route, continued Ryder. His mother moved to the East Midlands when he was nineteen to start a new life. There was no other family locally. Russell had a room above the mini-market in Brimstone Hill, paid for by his mother, using a banker’s standing order. He smelt so badly they wouldn’t let him in the shop, but they would sell him cans at the back door. He lived off benefit which he collected from Peterborough on a Monday.
    â€˜But for the most part he seems to have lived the life of an affable beggar,’ concluded Ryder. He reached down under the table and ruffled the fur of one of the dogs.
    Spider Russell’s friend, whose body was found alongside his in the ditch, was called Archie McLeish. Ryder said Russell met him in Wisbech on market day and brought him back to Brimstone Hill. He was from Ayr, Scotland. McLeish was nineteen, a former heroin addict, who’d switched back to alcohol. Russell let McLeish sleep on his