The Devil's Cliff Killings

by Simon McCleave

  They walked out of the church and into the sunlight, moving to a quieter part of the church yard. Ruth knew this wasn’t the place for a conversation. Some of her colleagues knew about her and Sian. Others had their suspicions. But a full-blown domestic was highly unprofessional.

  ‘We can talk. But it’s not going to change things. There’s always going to be a third person in this relationship. I don’t blame you,’ Sian said in a virtual whisper as a tear rose in her eye and she blinked it away.

  Ruth ushered her around the side of the church and out of everyone’s view.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like that. I can move on,’ Ruth said, feeling overwhelmed.

  ‘You can’t. How could anyone move on? It’s my fault. I thought that I wouldn’t care about it, but I do.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ Ruth asked as she gave way to the pain inside her. She didn’t want Sian to answer the question. She didn’t want it to be over. Sian was best thing that had happened to her in years.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t see how it’s going to change. And I don’t want you to lie about how you’re feeling. No one knows what happened to Sarah, and I can’t imagine how that feels. But I don’t want whatever’s left over.’

  Ruth looked at her for a moment. ‘Please. I promise it will be different,’ she said, knowing that she sounded desperate. She didn’t care.

  ‘I’m sorry. I do love you but it’s not about that,’ Sian took a breath and gave her a hug for second. Ruth put her arms around Sian’s back and pulled her closer to her. She could feel Sian resist and move away.

  ‘I’ll put in a transfer request,’ Sian said, wiping a tear away with the palm of her hand.

  ‘No, you don’t need to do that.’

  Sian took a decisive deep breath to compose herself. ‘Right, I need to go.’

  Watching her walk down the church path, Ruth felt detached, as though it was too much for her bear. And then the anger and self-pity arrived. How had she let this happen? She was so stupid.

  Sarah’s disappearance had destroyed her. And there was no coming back from that.

  CHAPTER 25

  Six days, one hour

  Ruth had already finished a bottle of white wine and checked the BBC News app three times by the time Dan rang the doorbell. She had also taken strong painkillers, so the codeine and alcohol had numbed her of any feeling. Ella had rung to say that she was running late and wouldn’t be back for over an hour.

  ‘Hi, Ruth. Is Ella here?’ Dan asked. After their drunken kiss from the other night, Dan was clearly feeling embarrassed.

  ‘Come in,’ Ruth said. She should have felt awkward, but she was drunk and her head was all over the place. ‘She’s going to be late, so you’re stuck with me.’

  In fact, if she was honest, she was glad of any company that would distract her. And Dan was always good company.

  ‘You don’t mind me waiting here?’ Dan asked as he walked into the living room.

  ‘As long as you don’t try to kiss me again,’ Ruth grinned at him. ‘Drink? Beer?’

  She could tell she was in that kind of mood. A bit drunk and childishly reckless.

  Dan looked at her and frowned. ‘Erm ... okay ... I would love a beer.’

  ‘Great. I’ve only got Amstel,’ Ruth called as she went to the fridge. The booze was giving her a buzz and it was a relief not to feel anxious and despondent. It was a relief to not feel at all.

  ‘For the record, you kissed me,’ Dan said as she walked in and handed him the beer.

  ‘You stuck your tongue in my mouth, Dan,’ Ruth chuckled.

  ‘After you kissed me,’ Dan said defensively. He swigged his beer and looked at her. ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘No,’ Ruth said and then smiled. ‘A bit.’

  ‘Nobody drinks anymore. Have you noticed that? Ella’s generation. Bloody Snowflakes. They have a drink or two and that’s it. Remember what we were like?’

  ‘That’s the problem, I can’t remember,’ Ruth laughed.

  ‘The nineties. I went out in 1991 and came back just in time for the Millennium,’ Dan quipped.

  Ruth laughed. That’s what she had loved about Dan. His funny, sharp wit.

  ‘Oh, while I remember, Ella found my watch from when I stayed over. She said it’s on her bedside table,’ Dan said, gesturing upstairs.

  ‘I’ll show you where that is,’ Ruth said, going to the stairs. ‘Come on.’

  Why are you going upstairs with him?

  ‘Are you inviting me upstairs with you?’ Dan said with a grin.

  ‘Fuck off, Dan. I think I can resist you,’ Ruth laughed as she turned. ‘I’m just making sure you don’t steal anything.’

  Dan laughed. As Ruth walked up the stairs, she realised that she was now drunk to the point where the light of the day looks different. Where the pattern of time seems to change. One part of her brain told her to be careful. The other part told that part to fuck off.

  Having retrieved the watch from Ella’s room, Ruth watched as Dan came out onto the landing. He looked at the open door to Ruth’s bedroom and beyond that, the beautiful view across the Welsh countryside.

  ‘Wow. Now that’s a view,’ Dan said as he walked into the bedroom and stood in front of the large window.

  Ruth followed him in, slightly annoyed at his lack of manners.

  ‘Help yourself, Dan,’ Ruth mumbled as she followed him in.

  Now they were in the bedroom together, Ruth could feel the tension rising. What were they doing? Was it just the drink making her brain misfire? For fuck’s sake, Dan was happily married and she was gay. Get a grip.

  Dan looked at the curtain and straightened it.

  ‘Sorry. Force of habit.’

  ‘You know for a straight man, you were always strangely neat and tidy.’

  ‘You mean metrosexual?’

  ‘Or camp and mincing?’ Ruth said, and they laughed.

  Dan gave her the finger with a grin. ‘Aren’t you a lesbian?’

  ‘Am I?’ Ruth said, smiling and raising an eyebrow back at him. Oh my God, she was flirting with him.

  They looked at each other. The tension mounted and Ruth felt herself begin to fizz inside. And then she reached for the corner of the duvet, pulled it back and looked at him.

  ‘Really?’ Dan said uncertainly.

  ‘We can go downstairs and sit on the patio instead?’

  ‘Yeah, that does sound boring,’ Dan said.

  A moment later, they lay on the bed together. Ruth reached for him, putting her hand on the back of his warm neck. She pushed her lips to his. They kissed, first lightly, then more urgently, her tongue in his mouth. She moved so that her hips tilted against his. She felt her breasts against his chest. She felt his weight and strength as he pulled her closer. He nuzzled against her. His lips on her neck as he worked his way up to her earlobe. Arching her back, she closed her eyes.

  It was such a relief to let go and allow herself to be taken. That blissful loss of control. Not to care about anything for a few reckless moments.

  IT WAS NEARLY DARK as Nick gazed over the River Dee, which snaked its way past the pub garden where he sat. Over on the other side, the riverbank was wooded and steep. He could hear the twitter of evening birdsong and the mechanical whirr of someone cutting their lawn nearby.

  Sitting at the far end of the garden, Nick looked around and saw that it had now emptied out. It must be getting late. Or at least too late for children to run and shout as they played on the swing and slide as they had done earlier.

  Reaching down into a Co-op plastic bag, Nick pulled out a litre-bottle of vodka and a litre of Coke. Glancing around to make sure that no one was watching, Nick poured a good four inches of vodka into the pint glass and topped the rest up with Coke, which fizzed momentarily over the top and dripped down onto the grey wooden table. He couldn’t bloody wait. He felt like shit. His face, his lungs, his back were all agony. The only thing that was going to help was alcohol.

  He put the glass to his mout
h, tipped it and opened his throat. With four large gulps, the pint had gone. The warmth began in his stomach as he waited for the booze to do its magic trick.

  Suddenly, there was movement from a table over by the doors that led from the garden into the pub. Someone was sitting smoking. They were looking over at him. In fact, they were staring at him with a fixed gaze.

  It was his dad.

  Jolting awake, Nick opened his eyes and looked at the bedside table full of fear and anxiety. The only drink he could see was a glass of water. Thank God. His mind raced for a few seconds until he knew for certain that he hadn’t picked up.

  Fucking drinking dreams, he thought to himself as he rolled onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. He could hear Amanda’s slow breathing as she slept beside him. His heart was still pounding in his chest as he took some deep breaths.

  Drinking dreams were common for those early in sobriety, and even though it was a relief to wake up sober, they scared the crap out of him.

  Rolling onto his side again, he watched Amanda sleeping as she faced him. The skin on the back of his hand was still red and tender from where it had been burnt in the fire. He didn’t care. He could have stayed like this for ever.

  CHAPTER 26

  Six days, eleven hours

  It was now seven o’clock and the SOCO team had been working overnight to secure what Ruth suspected was a crime scene. A large white forensic tent had been erected over the grass that led from the tarmacked observation point to the actual cliff edge. They needed to keep the rain and wind off until they had completed a fingertip search.

  Having managed to stave off yet another hangover, Ruth sank the remnants of her strong coffee before putting on the white forensic suit, purple rubber gloves and boots. She couldn’t even work out if she needed to feel guilty, and she was too tired to process it. In her head, Sian had made it clear that she didn’t want to be with her. If Dan wanted to cheat on his wife, that was his business. What she had needed last night was drunken sex with someone she felt comfortable with. So anyone that judged her could go and fuck themselves. Of course, there was a large part of her moral conscience telling her otherwise, but she was happy to live in self-deception for a while.

  She glanced over as Nick parked his car next to hers, got out and gave her a nod of hello. She had told him to come in late or even take the day off, given the events in Bangor the day before. However, she knew that he would get restless and bored, so it wasn’t a surprise to see him this early.

  A male uniformed officer, twenties, tanned and handsome, was standing beside the scene of crime tape. He was running the scene log.

  Ruth showed him her warrant card so he could sign her in. ‘DI Hunter, Llancastell CID.’

  ‘Morning, ma’am,’ the constable said.

  ‘Morning. Has DCI Drake been here yet?’ Ruth asked. Drake had messaged her to say that he was going to be there at the crack of dawn.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ the constable replied, looking down at the timings of the log. ‘He arrived at five thirty and left half an hour ago.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said as she turned to wait for Nick to reach her. ‘Nick, you’re supposed to be taking the morning off.’

  ‘And do what, boss?’

  ‘I don’t know. Aren’t you meant to be painting a bedroom for the baby or building a cot?’ she asked.

  Nick grinned. ‘Yeah, I’ve been told to go away as I make the house look untidy.’

  ‘Where’s Hayley Collard?’

  ‘We had to release her on bail.’

  ‘Does she know where Rosie Wright is?’

  ‘I don’t know, boss. She said some stuff to imply that she did. She said that Rosie was “a long, long way away” and we’d never find her,’ Nick explained.

  ‘And what did you think?’

  ‘I thought she was bullshitting. Her scumbag, sex-trafficking boyfriend had just been flambeed ...’

  ‘Flambeed? Wow,’ Ruth teased him. The hangover was showing signs of going.

  ‘I’m not the Neanderthal Welshman that you think I am,’ Nick replied with a smile. ‘Hayley’s raging with us because we found out where Vasilescu was keeping the girls. He tried to burn the house down with them in it and destroy any evidence. Except he died in the fire.’

  ‘You think she made comments about Rosie to get at you and waste our time?’

  ‘That’s my instinct. Rosie Wright might have been taken to Dublin, but my money is on her disappearance being linked to Blake.’

  ‘Your money is always on Blake, Nick,’ Ruth said.

  ‘His misery is my life’s goal. Anything that sees him locked away for the rest of his natural is good in my book.’

  ‘Glad to see you working a programme of serenity and tolerance,’ Ruth said sardonically.

  Ruth and Nick ducked under the tape as chief forensic officer Alexander Travis strode over to greet her. He pulled down his mask and gestured to where they were.

  ‘Glorious morning and a view to die for,’ he said.

  ‘Was that meant as a tactless joke, Alex?’ Ruth snapped. Travis’s jolly mood and clinical attitude to forensics got up her nose at the best of times. This morning she had one shredded nerve left and he was already getting on it.

  ‘Oh no, sorry.’

  ‘Have you found anything?’ Ruth asked. She wanted to get down to business and feared that Travis would try to side-track her with irrelevant prattling.

  ‘Yes, have a look,’ he said as he replaced his mask and they wandered in the direction of the small wall that separated the parking area from the grass and the clifftops.

  Crouching down by the white-painted wall, Travis pointed to a dark spot of something on the paintwork.

  ‘Blood?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘Yes. We’ve tested it here already. We’ll get it back to the lab for a DNA match,’ Travis explained, ‘but it’s only been here for a matter of days.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Ruth asked hopefully.

  ‘Over here,’ Travis said as Ruth and Nick followed him to the cliff edge where the grass stopped and the ground became rocky and dry.

  Crouching again, Travis pointed to some marks in the earth only six inches away from the edge.

  Feeling her anxiety rise, Ruth knew this wasn’t the morning to be looking down the Devil’s Cliff – a seven-hundred-foot sheer drop to razor-edged rocks and a swirling black sea. She drew a breath and crouched down to see what Travis was looking at.

  ‘You see these,’ he indicated to another set of indentations in the earth that were about three inches wide.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ruth said.

  ‘They look like drag marks to me. Maybe from the heels of two shoes,’ he said.

  Nick looked at them. ‘If you were dragging a body to the edge of these cliffs to throw it over, would you expect to see drag marks like these?’

  ‘Yes, quite possibly. I can’t think of any other explanation of why they’re here.’

  ‘Can you tell how long they’ve been here for?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘There was heavy rainfall ten days ago, which would have washed this dry earth away, so they were made in the last ten days,’ Travis explained. ‘And over here, we have two partial footprints in the soil.’

  ‘Anything we can use?’ Nick asked.

  ‘This one is small. Maybe an adult’s size-five shoe. This one is larger. A size ten. We’ll make casts of them here and then get back to the lab,’ Travis said.

  This was music to Ruth’s ears. She knew how important an imprint of a shoe could be. Forensics could look at the pattern, size, wear and damage features of a shoe tread and match those to an individual suspect. It wasn’t just that they were wearing Adidas Gazelles, size ten. It was the way they wore it, the way they walked that gave the soles a pattern of wear that was completely individual to that particular shoe and wearer. Using powder and special lighting, they could spot microscopic details that were second only to a fingerprint in identifying a suspect.

  ‘So, a woman and man?’ N
ick said.

  ‘Kathy and Gareth Wright,’ Ruth said.

  IT WAS UNUSUAL TO HAVE a briefing halfway through the day, but the developments in the search for Rosie Wright were coming thick and fast. Ruth didn’t want any officers wasting their time on irrelevant lines of enquiry.

  The air was hot inside the incident room. Having over a dozen CID officers working flat out in one area didn’t help.

  Sipping at her water, Ruth watched Sian coming in, reading documents and going to her desk. She didn’t know if Sian was actually reading or just avoiding eye contact. Now that the hangover had all but gone, Ruth was left floundering as she tried to process what had happened yesterday. Sian had all but said that she no longer wanted to be with her. In a drunken, needy state, Ruth had slept with her ex-husband. All she could conclude was that it was a bloody mess.

  Swigging at her bottle of water, she could still taste the cigarette she had smoked ten minutes earlier. That was one bonus, she thought. No one nagging her about her smoking. She still hadn’t told Ella what had happened between her and Sian. She was going to be gutted.

  And on top of all that, the BBC News app still had no developments in the Edinburgh rape case. Trying to push her chaotic personal life out of her head, Ruth looked up to see that Drake had come into the room and was resting casually on a table at the back. He nodded her an acknowledgement.

  ‘Okay, everyone. A quick update on where we are with everything, please,’ Ruth said as she waited for the room to quieten while walking over to the scene boards that were now cluttered with documents, photos and maps. ‘The black box from Gareth Wright’s VW Golf shows that last Monday at eight o’clock Gareth drove up to this point here on the Gogarth cliffs. This is an observation point over the Devil’s Cliff. As most of you know, these are the highest cliffs in Wales. Forensics and SOCOs have been at this area since the early hours of this morning. We found a trainer eyelet out there last night that belongs to a pink Converse All Star, the type of trainer that Rosie was wearing when she went missing. A trace of blood was found at the car park, which is being DNA matched as we speak. There were also drag marks and footprints close to the edge of the clifftops. One footprint belongs to a size ten, probably male. The other, a size five, is likely to belong to a female. Our hypothesis is that Rosie Wright discovered that her mother and brother were smuggling drugs into HMP Rhoswen and confronted them about it.’