The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series)
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Praise for the Fiona Griffiths
Crime Thriller Series
‘Exceptional . . . Absorbing . . . Fiona’s narrative sears the pages’ Kirkus Reviews
‘Bingham has gotten inside the mind of his clever, neurotic heroine so well as to make her seem entirely credible... An interesting, unusual and in some ways even moving crime novel.’ Literary Review
‘Bingham’s novels always contain something unexpected. This fast-moving novel contains some of the most ingenious murder methods in modern crime fiction’ Sunday Times
‘With Detective Constable Fiona ‘Fi’ Griffiths, Harry Bingham . . . finds a sweet spot in crime fiction . . . think Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander . . . Denise Mina’s ‘Paddy’ Mehan [or] Lee Child’s Jack Reacher . . . The writing is terrific’ Boston Globe
‘Gritty, compelling . . . a [police] procedural unlike any other you are likely to read this year’ USA Today
‘A stunner with precision plotting, an unusual setting, and a deeply complex protagonist . . . We have the welcome promise of more books to come’ Seattle Times
‘A dark delight, and I look forward to Fiona’s future struggles with criminals, her demons and the mysteries of her past’ Washington Post
‘Compelling . . . a new crime talent to treasure’ Daily Mail
THE DEAD HOUSE
FIONA GRIFFITHS BOOK 5
HARRY BINGHAM
Contents
Praise for the Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Epilogue
Author’s note
Stay in Touch
Dedication
Copyright
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1
October 2014
‘Well?’
Bev runs her hands down her hips and gives me a wiggle.
‘Well?’
I say, ‘Great. Really nice.’ I’m not sure what to say.
‘My jeans. They’re new.’
‘Oh.’
Now I know where my attention’s meant to be, I know how to focus. The jeans are a kind of washed-out indigo. Skinny-cut. Low-waisted, but not ridiculous. Slim dark leather belt, discreet scarlet buckle. The jeans are close-fitting enough that Bev’s phone makes a hard, flat shape in her back pocket. When I did a spell in Traffic, during my first two years in the police, and I was just a regular uniformed copper like everyone else, I remember an accident victim with very tight jeans, who suffered multiple fractures to both femurs. We had to cut her out of those jeans to get at the wounds. One of the paramedics did it with a scalpel, handling the blade delicately enough that it made only the finest pink graze down the girl’s thighs. Two parallel tracks pricked out in dots of blood.
‘New jeans,’ I say. ‘They look great! Where did you get them?’
‘It’s not about where I got them,’ she chides me mildly. ‘I’ve dropped a whole size. These are a ten.’
She gyrates again, and now I know what to say, I say it with enough enthusiasm and repetition that Bev is satisfied. We finish getting changed and troop through to the chirpily upbeat café, where we get fruit smoothies and pasta salads.
‘I mean these are Gap,’ she tells me, ‘And Gap does a fat size ten. My last ones were Next and they do a really thin size twelve, so in a way I haven’t gone down as much as you think, except that the Next ones were my target jeans – I bought them before I could really get into them – so I think I have actually. Gone down a size, I mean.’
We go round again. The same little tour of girly chat.
Bev and I have been swimming together now for more than a year. Once a week, pretty much without fail. She’s got thinner: her main ambition in all this. Me, I don’t think I’ve particularly changed shape, though Bev swears I have, but I’ve been running and doing weights too, and I’m now fitter and stronger than I’ve ever been, which isn’t saying a lot, but it’s still nice. I don’t even hate exercise the way I always assumed I would. I like it, actually.
We finish our salads. Bev asks me if I’ll ‘help’ her with a low-fat granola. I say yes and she goes to get one.
As she returns, two men heave themselves over towards our table. Their gait has that post-gym male slowness. A slowness designed to exhibit how much they’ve knackered their muscles, how buff they must be underneath their clothes.
I set my face into its default mode for these encounters: mostly blank, but garnished with random, pre-emptive hostility.
The men get close. One of the two – T-shirt tight over his pecs and biceps, gelled hair, a prowling smile – says, ‘Well? And how are the two prettiest girls in CID?’
I say nothing.
Bev – surprised, pleased, flustered – gives some kind of answer. Stays standing, I think because she wants to show off her newly resized legs. She introduces the men to me: Ellis Morgan and Hemi Godfrey. Both coppers. Both uniforms. Morgan in Traffic. Godfrey in some other division, I don’t know what.
Everyone sits.
I try, vaguely, to make nice, because I think Bev wants me to, but I’m already wondering how fast I can leave. Very fast, my normal answer.
But then Godfrey says, ‘You want to go somewhere we can get a proper drink?’
I’m thinking, ‘No, absolutely, definitely not,’ but Bev is saying, ‘Yes, that would be lovely, wouldn’t it, Fi?’ and throws me her female-solidarity look hard enough that it’s probably sticking out between my shoulder-blades.
I say something. Not sure what, but more yes than no.
There’s a discussion about arrangements. I don’t participate, but it’s agreed, I don’t know why, that we head for The Grape and Grain, a wine bar north of here which has some weird associations for me.
We drive there in separate cars. Bev rides with me.
‘That’s Hemi God-frey,’ she says. ‘You remember,’ and starts telling me things that I mostly don’t remember. But it’s clear enough that Bev is excited by the prospect of this not-quite-date date. Clear too that she wants me as her chaperone. The figleaf which allows us all to pretend that this isn’t a full-on mating dance.
We drive over the estuary, where the Taff flows into
Cardiff Bay. The last light of evening, a troubled orangey-grey, is dying behind us. Bev uses the vanity mirror in the passenger sun visor to reapply her make-up and scolds me mildly to drive smoothly.
I drive as smooth as a gusting wind permits. Her lips darken and the light dies and car headlamps thread a shining necklace over the turbulent grey.
We get to the bar.
Go inside.
The first time I came here, I was wet through. Boots with holes in and a second-hand coat that wasn’t man enough for the weather. I arrived dripping, in the entrance, half-expecting one of the waiters to clear me away, the way you’d remove a drowned mouse or a dead pigeon.
I think I’m standing like that now. Remembering.
‘Fi, are you OK?’
The words are nice, but there’s a steel in Bev’s voice which isn’t normally present. The steel is there to remind me that this is payback time. That Bev’s patient acceptance of my various faults – my forgetfulness, my ill-temper, my general weirdness – isn’t unconditional. My support of her whole diet-’n’-fitness thing has certainly ticked one box, but there are other conditions too and one of those, in the handsome shape of Hemi Godfrey, is even now coming over from the bar to greet us.
I polish up one of my better smiles and give it to Bev. ‘I’m fine. I’m really fine. This’ll be fun.’
We greet each other with kisses this time, which we hadn’t done earlier, as though the movement from gym to bar has nudged us over some invisible but important social boundary.
Godfrey waves a twenty-pound note at the bar. ‘What can I get you?’
He wants to go large. Get a bottle of fizz, something like that. But I don’t drink, Bev’s hardly a boozer, and even Morgan doesn’t want much, so we each go our own way. A glass of red for Morgan. White wine spritzer for Bev. Orange juice for me. Beer for Godfrey, which seems more natural to him than champagne would have done. As he guides us to our table, bleached wood under a swag of dried hops, he tries out his ‘two prettiest girls in CID’ line again, but it doesn’t work so well this time. Perhaps because we’re not the prettiest: Jane Alexander is definitely better looking than either of us, though she is, admittedly, a few years older. Or maybe because the paucity of real competition means that the compliment was always walking with a limp.
A moment of doubt flickers round the table. The sudden tick of anxiety.
I jump in. Do my bit. Be the friend that Bev wants me to be.
‘Ellis, be a love, and get us some crisps or something. I’m starving. Hemi, you look like you’ve had a proper workout. Weights, was it? We mostly stick to swimming, me and Bev.’
Morgan jumps up to get snacks. Godfrey jumps on the male-friendly conversational leads I’ve tossed him. Bev dives in after. Morgan comes back with a bowl of nuts and a plate of vaguely Italian-looking nibbles.
I tear up a piece of salami and ask Morgan to tell me what’s new in the world of Traffic.
He laughs. Glances sideways at the others. Leans forward and, in a confidential whisper, says, ‘How long before those two actually start snogging? And do you think we have to stay until they do?’
I laugh.
Conversation flows. It is mostly the Bev and Hemi show, but Morgan and I do enough that the necessary figleaf remains in place, no matter that it has a tattered, end-of-season curl to it.
I hated my time in Traffic. Hated it, even though I love corpses and love driving, and Traffic supplied both things with far greater frequency than my current berth in Major Crimes ever does.
But Morgan, it turns out, is not an idiot. Nor does he, any longer, spend his time scraping cars and corpses from these city streets. Instead, he’s attached to a small liaison unit that works with the University Hospital, the city’s highways department, the ambulance service and – inevitably – some computer types working on strategies to drive down the frequency and severity of accidents. Morgan doesn’t boast about it, but it sounds like he’s in charge of things and that his team is doing good, intelligent, valuable work.
At one point, he asks, ‘Sorry, I didn’t get your name properly. It’s Fiona . . .?’
‘Griffiths. Fiona or just Fi, whichever.’
He nods, as though docketing the information in a file already partially filled. He doesn’t tell me what’s already in the file.
Bev is now playing with her necklace and laughing at almost everything Godfrey is saying. Godfrey’s face is shining and pink. His energy is up, a cocker spaniel scenting pheasant.
I’m thinking I’ve done enough, it’s OK to leave now, and I guess Morgan is thinking the same. Then his phone goes.
A work call. He goes outside to take it.
I play with an olive and pretend to be interested in whatever Bev and Godfrey are talking about now.
Morgan returns, but doesn’t sit. He’s got that important-work-thing face that people get.
Godfrey says, ‘Are you OK, mate?’
‘Yes. Big bloody problem outside Brecon, though. Chemical tanker overturned. Spilled its load. The car behind smacked into it. Whole damn thing ignited.’
‘Brecon? But that wouldn’t be in Cardiff, now, would it?’
Godfrey glances at Bev, hoping to get another harvest of necklace-twisting laughter, but Morgan’s face is too serious for that.
He looks at me.
‘My car’s in Penarth. I can get a squad car, or . . .’
I roll my eyes.
‘You haven’t had a drink, have you?’ he adds.
‘No.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No.’
He looks at Bev and Godfrey, his mind already elsewhere. He tells them to have a good evening, but I already have my coat on and in less than a minute we’re in my car and heading north.
Morgan’s on the phone again. Talking to the officers on the scene. Then making other calls, commandeering resources from Cardiff and Bridgend.
As we cross the M4, and between calls, he says to me, ‘Wind’s pushing the smoke over Brecon. They’re starting to evacuate.’
He doesn’t add, because he doesn’t need to, that Dyfed-Powys’s tiny rural force will be overwhelmed by the sudden demand on resources. We’re not the only ones now flying north to help.
I say, because Morgan is an inspector and senior to me, ‘Permission to speed?’
He says yes, and I start driving the way I always want to. Racing over the black tarmac. Swerving past the cars ahead, when the road permits. Pushing the car up to ninety-five on the straights, braking hard just before we hit the bends.
Nantgarw.
Pontypridd.
Cilfynydd.
On a roundabout outside Abercynon, I misjudge my speeds a bit and we skid a few yards before my little Alfa-Romeo collects her nerve and agrees to head for the road ahead of us, not the thickly wooded bank rising to the side.
Morgan smiles. Says, ‘Steady.’ But I keep my speed up and my foot down.
Merthyr.
Aberfan.
Pentrebach.
Morgan says, ‘I’ll find someone to run me back later. No need to stay.’
I nod. But my face is with the road and the road is heading up into the mountains. We pass the Llwyn-on Reservoir doing more than seventy. The wind here is both strong and gusty and I drive by feel as much as sight.
Morgan says, ‘You’re the Fiona who’s Roy Williams’s friend, right?’
Roy Williams: a former colleague of mine. I’m not his friend, not really. But I once helped extricate him from a situation that was blackly menacing to us both, and he’s remained a steadfastly loyal ally ever since.
‘Roy? Yes.’
Morgan nods, satisfied. ‘He told me you were mental.’
Cantref.
The high pass over the Beacons. Pen-y-fan inkily dark against a purple horizon.
Then the swoop down towards Brecon and the A40. An empty landscape.
Sheep, trees, wind, grass.
The distance ahead of us burns with light. Not the tanker fire an
y longer – that will have long since been extinguished – but the bright white of emergency incident lighting, shot through with the flash of blue lights, the sombre amber of recovery vehicles.
Morgan gets on the phone again. Confirms our location. Tells me where he wants to be set down.
We drive on in silence.
The windows are closed but the air coming in through the vents has an acrid, burned metal scent to it.
I say, ‘Do they know what spilled?’
‘Isocyanates.’
I don’t know what to say to that, so say nothing. It doesn’t sound good, though.
As we get close to the makeshift evacuation HQ – a couple of vans and a white tent thrown up on the A40 on the Sennybridge side of Brecon – Morgan says, ‘Thanks for the ride. And for not quite killing me.’
He meets up with whoever’s commanding the Dyfed-Powys operation. Disappears into the tent. Disappears, I expect, from my life, unless by some appalling mischance the gods of policing ever send me to work in his Traffic Incident Harm Reduction Unit.
Someone from Dyfed-Powys approaches me, offering a cotton facemask and a mug of tea.
How you know you’re in Britain: at the scene of every major emergency, someone’s thought to bring along a tea urn.
I don’t normally drink caffeinated tea, but I don’t particularly want to head home just yet, so I take both gifts, the face mask and the tea. Don’t wear the former or drink the latter. Lean against the flank of my gently panting car, feeling the coltish mountain air compete with the burned-brown scent that returns whenever the wind drops.
People – some in hazchem suits, mostly just in anoraks and woolly hats – pass me by with little more than a look. A yellow generator powers two banks of floodlights. The grass at the tent entrance is already being trodden into mud. Vehicles come and go.
I drink some tea.
Someone asks me where he can find Jim Jones. I point at the tent, not because I know if there’s a Jim Jones there but because it’s easier than saying something.
Drink a bit more tea. Pour the rest away.
A scrap of moonlight plates our little world with silver.