The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series)

by Harry Bingham

  I put the face mask on to see if it makes a difference to the smell. I don’t think it does, but I’m not sure.

  Then another person, a uniform, Dyfed-Powys not one of ours, approaches.

  ‘South Wales CID? You’re the one who brought Inspector Morgan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Listen. We’ve had a crime reported. The country above Pen-y-cae. We’ve got no officers spare. Crime report came in on a mobile and—’ He shakes his head. When you get an emergency like this, every damn fool in the area gets on their mobile and the network collapses under the burden.

  He stares, wanting a response.

  The guy is older than me, bigger than me. I can’t tell if he’s senior or not, because his coat covers his rank insignia. Either way, he can’t really order me around. Out here, I’m a long way off my patch and I’m under no obligation to take orders from other forces.

  I’m about to be obstreperous, for no particular reason except that I like to exhibit consistency in all that I do, but then decide I don’t care anyway. A long mountain drive beneath this racing moon? What have I got that’s better than that?

  So I say yes. Meekly nod, take details. Suddenly wish I’d drunk the tea I’ve thrown away, but don’t make a fuss even about that.

  Climb back into my car and return to the hills. The wild country above Pen-y-cae.

  2

  I don’t, this time, drive like I have seven devils on my tail. Don’t drive like the lunatic I mostly am.

  I lack an excuse now, with no Major Emergency to bend the rules for me. But my mood’s changed too. The racing journey to Brecon was good, but I drive back over the mountains with almost legal quietness.

  Not to Pen-y-cae itself. The report came from one of the little valleys creasing the hills down into Cray and I make my way there, first to Cray and then into the winding lanes beyond.

  Hedges, of hawthorn and hazel, press close, their tops rising much higher than the car.

  Through the gaps, the gates and farm openings, I get scattered glimpses of fields, low barns, the slope of mountain.

  Deep Wales. Real Wales.

  This is the Wales that pre-existed the Romans, that will outlast our foolish time on earth, our crawl across the face of this dark planet.

  My attention is divided between the narrow road ahead of me and the blue glow of my phone sat-nav.

  The phone hasn’t travelled these parts before and the poor dear looks nervously uncertain. But she proves a trusty guide all the same.

  We fetch up at a small village. Two or three dozen houses. A stone church, a tiny pub.

  Ystradfflur. The valley of flowers.

  I park. Take cuffs, latex gloves and evidence bags from my glovebox. Get a torch out of the boot, but I’ve hardly flicked it on before a dark shape arrives beside me.

  ‘Police?’

  ‘Yes. Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths. I understand there’s a—’

  But the truth is, I understand nothing and my mostly invisible interlocutor seems to know that.

  ‘It’s up here. Brace yourself.’

  Into the churchyard. A black metal gate swinging unlatched. The moan of a yew tree sifting the wind. Torches whose beams probe the darkness in the far corner of the graveyard.

  The church itself is unlit, except for a dim lamp shining in a room to the side.

  We walk towards the torches. On a tarmac path at first, then step off. The brush of long grass wet around my ankles.

  An outbuilding of some sort. Two men – the ones holding the torches – outside it.

  They peel away from it and towards us. Words exchanged through the darkness.

  They’re words I don’t hear, or don’t respond to, because by now I’ve seen in through the little building’s doorway.

  Candles. Ten or twelve of them, sputtering but alight. Perhaps the same number again which have been blown out by the travelling wind.

  A wooden table. A table-top laid over trestles. Nothing fancy. The sort of thing you’d see at a village fete or agricultural show.

  And a young woman.

  Dead. I know she’s dead before I even step towards her.

  Know she’s dead from the stillness in her chest. The fall of her hands. The cast of her skin.

  Know it from the supreme peacefulness of this little mise en scène, the way the weather quiets itself in her presence.

  She’s dressed in white. Knee-length dress. Summery. Cottony pintucks and broderie anglaise.

  No shoes. No coat. No cardigan even, as this wild October howls outside.

  No sign of injury. No cut, no bruise, no stain of red.

  Her right hand has fallen off the table. A slim hand points to the floor as though begging for early burial.

  Her left hand is folded over her belly, but doesn’t touch it. A black book lies between her hand and her stomach. Leather cover, gold edging.

  The woman has long blonde hair that flows over the end of the table. She’s attractive. Tallish. Hard to tell her height exactly because she’s lying down, but a good few inches taller than me. Nice skin. Brown eyes. Pretty face.

  I spend a moment taking in the scene, its loveliness, its sweet perfection. Then – a good girl, a detective sergeant trying hard not to foul up everything she touches in the first ten minutes of getting involved – I snap into police mode.

  Pull my gloves on.

  Check the woman’s lips for the faintest ghost of breath. Check for a pulse, in her wrist but also her neck.

  She is glassily still, glassily cold.

  Blood has started to pool on the underside of her calves, her fallen arm.

  ‘Who is she? Do you have an ID?’

  ‘Never seen her before. She’s not from round by here.’

  All three men, the same answer. Shaking heads and looks of mystification.

  ‘OK, now I need everyone back. Onto the path, then out of the churchyard. Have any of you touched her? Has anything been moved? I’m going to need your names and contact details. On the path there, please stay on the tarmac. What’s your name, sorry? Huw? OK, Huw, I’m going to ask you to guard the gateway here. No one allowed in except emergency services. No exceptions, no excuses. Got that? And you, Gavin, what’s the other side of that little building there? A field, is it? OK, same thing for you if you don’t mind. Take the gate. No one in or out. If you see anyone where you think they shouldn’t be, you shout like hell. Now, Dafydd, tell me, is there by any chance a doctor in the village? No? Cray, anywhere local? No, OK. Have any of you called the police on a phone that actually works? Like a landline, you remember those?’

  And yes, they’d tried obviously. But the winds have brought down a phone line somewhere. And the mobile signal, never good, seems completely absent, either because of the overload or, more likely, because the local mast has lost power.

  And right now, there are two detective sergeants who stand here in this darkness that’s lanced through with our torchbeams.

  One detective sergeant is a good officer. She recognises that it makes sense to secure the scene as fast as possible, which means summoning resources from South Wales. Neath and Merthyr lie no more than half an hour away. It would take longer than that to assemble all the resources we truly need – the divisional surgeon, SOCOs, whoever the nearest duty officer is, and enough uniformed support to secure the crime scene and start securing statements – but all those things are going to arrive far quicker from our side of the Beacons than if we try to get them from the overburdened Dyfed-Powys force.

  The bad detective sergeant knows all that. Knows that every Dyfed-Powys officer within fifty miles will be fully occupied with the chaos down on the Brecon-Sennybridge road. And before the good detective sergeant has even cleared her throat, the bad one is issuing her instructions.

  ‘OK, Dafydd, I’m going to ask you to take a message through to Brecon. There’s been a bad accident on the A40, and you’ll find a makeshift command centre . . .’

  I give him the necessary details. Who to a
sk for, what to say. Scribble a note to minimise the possibility of error. The note says, ‘Dead white female 20s found Ystradfflur. No signs of violence. Onset of lividity. Scene secured. Forensic examination will need to cover churchyard & field. Request divisional surgeon, SOCOs, uniformed resources when available. Will remain on site until relieved.’

  Dafydd has a car, a Land Rover, parked no distance from mine. He roars off into the night with a backsplatter of mud and a sense of mission.

  ‘Drive slowly, Dafydd,’ I murmur.

  I check that Gavin and Huw both know what they’re doing. They do.

  I re-park my car, lights flashing, outside the entrance to the church. I’m blocking the entire lane, but that’s intentional. Whoever put the dead body in the little outbuilding either carried her from somewhere very close by – improbable, since none of the local men recognise her – or, more likely, brought her by car. If they brought her by car, they’d have parked as close to the church as possible, to make their journey shorter and easier. I’ve no idea whether there’ll be any forensically significant evidence present, but I don’t want the passage of some tractor to wreck anything that we do have. I tell Huw to stay in my car with the windows wound down, so that he can’t himself compromise anything further.

  I re-enter the churchyard.

  Hesitate. I want to return to the saintly beauty of my corpse, but I should do my job too.

  Head for the dimly lit room beside the church. The vestry, I assume.

  Try the door. It opens.

  Not much there. No corpses. No blood. No signs of struggle.

  A small table, a couple of chairs. A small brown teapot. Two mugs, a kettle.

  A forgotten scarf.

  A brown pottery bowl holding a wooden acorn and about thirty pence in small change.

  An old wooden cupboard, full-height, warped by age and damp. One door hanging a little open. Inside: no bodies, no obvious murder weapons. Just the kind of stuff that I assume most churches have. Spare hymn books. Candles. A couple of shrink-wrapped packs of communion wafers. Wine. Some clerical robes. Spare tea bags. An order of service that says, ‘The Church of St David at Ystradfflur’.

  A musty smell.

  I try the door into the church proper. It’s locked. No obvious keys.

  Try the church’s main door, the west door. Also locked.

  I stand outside in the wind. Feeling its pull at my coat, trousers, hair.

  I’m not thinking anything at all. I suddenly find myself not in space, not in time. There is nothing more of me than the momentary now: a flapping wind and a stone church rising into blackness. Nothing distinguishes me from them, or me from anything.

  I don’t know how long I’m there. With the flapping wind. The towered stone.

  Then it changes. Alters back to how it was: a small detective alone in a churchyard that holds one dead person too many.

  I return to the outhouse.

  Its occupant is, I know already, my best-ever corpse. Quite likely the best one I’ll ever have. Better even than the time I lifted Mary Langton’s head, black and dripping, from a bucket of oil.

  I have an urge, a very strong one, to get a joint from my car and perfect the moment, but I know that I’d never manage to keep the scene forensically clear of ash, not in this wind and this darkness. And in any case, this corpse is so good, she’s beyond improvement.

  I use my phone to take photos of the scene from every angle. Interior. Exterior. Close up. Wide view.

  That photography will be need to done again, and properly, as soon as the SOCOs arrive, but it’s still better to have a record from as early as possible.

  There’s not much more I can do but wait, and wait is what I long to do. To plunge into the moment. Without noisy interruption. Just me and my dead friend, alone in this stormy night.

  I smell her hair. It’s new washed. Pale blonde and well cared for. Thick, high- and low-lights, glossy. The smell is of shampoo, but there’s an aroma of something else as well. Middle eastern, exotic.

  Feel her fallen hand.

  Soft skin. Becoming translucent in death. Clean fingernails, no polish and kept short. Cut back, maybe, not filed, though I’m hardly an expert.

  No make-up. Neat eyebrows. A tiny prickle of leg hair. Not much, but more than most girls would allow to grow.

  ‘Who are you, love? And why are you here?’

  She doesn’t tell me, bless her, but she’s a bit too dead to speak. I decide that she needs a name, so I give her one: Carlotta.

  I don’t know why I choose that.

  I tell her, ‘Don’t worry, Carlotta, we’ll find out. We’ll make it all OK. We’ll make everything OK.’

  Everything, that is, except for making her not-dead: a legitimate enough quibble if she chose to raise it, but she keeps her silence.

  I spend time stroking her hair with my latex-covered hand. I want to trace the curves of her beautiful face, her lifeless body, but I’m painfully aware of the minute forensic exploration which will shortly follow and I limit myself as much as I can bear.

  Limit myself and listen out for the blast of sirens which will signal the end of this little paradise.

  No sound, no sirens, beyond the blowing wind.

  And my note, of course, was designed to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. ‘Onset of lividity’: something that happens only hours after death, thereby signalling that there’s no great need to rush a doctor up here, because the fact of death is already well-established. ‘No signs of violence’: which is true, but which implies that what we have here is a natural death, not a murder, though the entire set-up here strongly suggests some kind of foul play. ‘Scene secured’: so don’t rush. ‘Forensic examination will need to cover churchyard & field’: so even if you get here tonight, you’ll be unable to achieve anything useful until dawn.

  ‘Will remain on site until relieved’: don’t worry, folks, South Wales CID is here, you just take care of your road accident and we’ll sort things out in the morning.

  Time passes.

  The candles flicker, but stay alight. The yews in the churchyard try and fail to catch the wind.

  I stand for a while, stroking Carlotta’s hair, then go out to check that Gavin and Huw are doing their stuff.

  They are. I apologise for how long it’s taking to get people up here, ‘but there’s a hell of a mess in Brecon. It could take a bit of time.’

  Gavin and Huw are either farmers or farm-workers. They’re used to night-time lambing, milking cattle in the grey hours before dawn. Guarding this blowing churchyard is no great hardship. Gavin sits by the field gate as though part of it.

  I return to Carlotta. Stroke those dead lips, just once, then sit on the floor, holding her dead hand and listening to the wind.

  The candles burn. The wind blows. The night passes.

  At half-past two, my phone signal returns. A sadness, but I’ve already had longer here alone than I could have hoped.

  I call Brecon. Ask, with undisguised impatience, just how long it’s going to take them to get up here.

  Get a muzzily exhausted response. I think my little outpost has been all but forgotten in the mayhem.

  ‘Are you saying you need resources now?’ asks the operator.

  ‘I’m saying I have a corpse, a ton of suspicious circumstances, and I’ve been waiting God knows how long for any support whatsoever.’

  We snipe at each other a bit until the operator decides she doesn’t care. ‘We’ll get on to it,’ she says.

  I made the call from outside in the churchyard. Partly so I could do it in Gavin’s hearing. Partly because the signal was better in the open air.

  When I re-enter Carlotta’s little funeral chamber, I tell her we don’t have long left. ‘It’s going to get quite busy, I’m afraid.’

  She hears me out, but doesn’t answer.

  I feel her lips again.

  Because she is lying on her back, the blood has drained from the soft tissues of her face and is pooling at th
e back of her skull and neck. Lips normally get thinner under those circumstances, lose some of that youthful fullness, but Carlotta’s mouth looks quite pert still. She’s not plump, not by any stretch, but her body has a softness to it, an almost old-fashioned fullness.

  I don’t touch her dress, but I do smell it. It smells clean, looks clean. Some corpses excrete or urinate post-mortem, but Carlotta has kept things tidy. She’s that kind of girl.

  I smell the hair, the candles, the hair again.

  The vestry was musty. The hair smells different from that.

  Carlotta and I keep vigil together. She on her side of that dark line, me on mine. Our little ship riding the night.

  Then – too soon, too soon – I become aware of blue lights outside. Torch beams.

  I press Carlotta’s hand to my lips. Not a farewell, really, just a farewell to this phase.

  The introductions are over. The investigation is about to begin.

  3

  Dawn.

  Alun Burnett, a heavy-set DI from Carmarthen, sits in the vestry opposite me. The mugs, teapot, kettle, and some other bits have been removed in evidence bags, but Gavin-the-Gate’s wife has produced tea and bacon butties from her non-crime-scene-relevant kitchen, and Burnett and I are alone with our treasure.

  Burnett says, ‘Cardiff? CID?’

  I nod. ‘Major Crime. Under Dennis Jackson.’

  Burnett stares at me from eyes so deep he must spend his whole life walking through shadows.

  Burnett’s force is a tiny one. Just over a thousand officers, of whom a full nine hundred are lowly constables. That force is spread out over the largest police region in England and Wales. The largest and one of the safest. Burnett has, quite possibly, never encountered a murder or, if he has, he’s probably never encountered a good one, the sort that actually requires complex investigation.

  ‘I’m not just handing this over,’ he says.

  I shrug. I’m not asking him to and it wouldn’t be my decision anyway.

  ‘But I’m not saying we mightn’t need some assistance.’

  I take a bite of my bacon butty. It’s got butter and some of the fat from frying, and the bacon inside is still warm. It’s like the food-equivalent of a hot water bottle except, presumably, more fattening.