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

by Harry Bingham

  I give him all the yes, sir, no, sirs he needs to keep him happy, then get up and start to leave. I’m wondering what I can say to Rogers to persuade him to pass this up, but Jackson knows me too well.

  As I start wrestling with the door, whose self-closing mechanism always seems determined to trap me in its maw, Jackson says, ‘And don’t start messing around with Rogers. You don’t so much as talk to him till I do. If he tells me you’ve spoken to him, you’re off the damn case no matter what.’

  A thick finger jabs the air for emphasis. Dark hairs line the finger in question. Jackson is bigger, older, heavier, more senior, growlier than I think I can ever be. The solidity of his presence sometimes makes me feel that, next to him, I’m no more than a dandelion seed tiptoeing on the air.

  I nod. Say, ‘Yes, sir.’ An almost proper one that time.

  Then tiptoe out of the door and float away down the corridor.

  6

  Rogers, bless the man, stands back. Why he does it, I can’t imagine, unless it’s an act of kindness to me, in which case I owe him big time. He claims it’s because he doesn’t like ‘these bloody country things. You just tramp around in mud, knocking on doors till you find whichever lonely nutter chose this particular moment to go round the twist’. But the office chatter is all of headcount reductions and budget restrictions and no serious DS would pass up a proper murder inquiry just because they didn’t like a bit of Breconshire mud.

  I’ll settle with Rogers when I can – a gift of beer? a bottle of whisky? – but for now, I’m on a roll.

  Carlotta’s sweetly beautiful corpse is delivered to the mortuary. Burnett and I watch together as the pathologist, Dr Pryce, swabs and bags, slices and dices.

  It’s a process I love, that I love every time. The dark rituals of our profession. The rites that precede burial.

  Pryce is always meticulous, which is another way of saying slow. The surface examinations alone take ninety minutes. But then the bone saw comes out. The quick red flick of blood, darkened with a smell of burning.

  The chest cavity opens. Is wrenched open with a cracking of bone, kept that way with a body brick. And before too long, Pryce’s deftly moving scalpel reaches the heart.

  Pryce extracts the organ. Places it on a set of scales so he can record the weight. Then exhales, irritated, through his cotton mask. To the hanging mike, he says, ‘Marked hypertrophy of the right ventricle.’

  He palpates the heart. I resent that on Carlotta’s behalf. It’s one thing to be dead. It’s quite another to have some pissy little pathologist poking at your most sacred organ and puffing with annoyance as he does so.

  He sees what he needs and says, half to us and half to the microphone, ‘Yes, really quite marked. The pulmonary blood vessels?’

  He bends to examine them. When he opens his mouth he does so with a slight tap of the tongue against his upper palate, and when he changes his position he tends to breathe out heavily through his nose, so that even when he’s not actually saying anything he seems to give off a series of tuts and puffs of annoyance.

  This is my fourth proper PM with the good doctor Pryce and I like him less each time I meet him. But he’s skilled at what he does. He checks his blood vessels and says, ‘Yes. Fibrosis. Quite advanced. More than sufficient to account for the hypertrophy. Cause of death, impossible to be certain as yet, but the chances are we’re talking about right ventricular failure.’

  Burnett glances at me for help, but I’m not a medical dictionary and I keep my mouth shut.

  He gives up on me and says to Pryce, ‘You mean she died of a heart attack?’

  ‘“Heart attack” isn’t a medical term, Inspector. If you mean acute myocardial infarction, then no. She did not die of an infarction but, most likely, of a failure of the right ventricle. And, most likely, that failure arose because of strain placed on the heart by the build up of fibrosis in the pulmonary blood vessels.’

  Pryce only smiles when he’s been really annoying, but I bet he’s got a big one hidden under that cotton mask of his.

  I wonder how many of Pryce’s teeth Burnett could break with a single blow of his fist. I’m guessing plenty.

  Burnett says, ‘And the fibrosis, in your view, arose as a natural organic process? An illness, basically?’

  ‘Organic? No, not necessarily.’ Pryce runs through some of the causes of pulmonary fibrosis. ‘Inhalation of tobacco smoke would create or exacerbate the condition. Certain diseases of the connective tissue can produce fibrosis as a by-product. A variety of medications can aggravate an existing condition. And there are a number of trades and occupations notably prone to the condition,’ and he starts telling us about coal miners and sand blasters and shipworkers and structural steel workers. ‘Idiopathic fibrosis is also commonplace, that is a fibrosis arising where no cause can be identified. In those cases, I think you could say the problem was likely to be “organic” as you put it.’

  Burnett throws me another glance, one that I interpret as meaning roughly, ‘Is this guy always like this?’

  I come right back at him with a look that says, ‘You’re on your own here, buddy.’

  Burnett wonders whether to continue our game of glance-tennis, but concedes the match by saying to Pryce, ‘OK, I think the deceased probably wasn’t into heavy welding and I doubt if she spent much time down the mines or handling sand-blasting equipment. But you’re saying that she could simply have had this problem with her tubing for no known reason at all – maybe something genetic, maybe something else, we don’t know – and anyway, her heart starts to suffer. Everything gets a little bit worse. Then one day, this young woman just keels over dead. That would be consistent with what you’ve seen so far?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And would she have known she had the problem? I mean, presumably she wasn’t completely symptom-free, then – bang – heart failure. Presumably there would have been something to indicate a problem beforehand?’

  ‘Probably, yes, but not definitely. She’d almost certainly have suffered from shortness of breath, but she might or might not have thought to see a doctor. And diagnosis of the condition is complex. Ideally, a physician would order a lung biopsy, which would likely require a general anaesthetic. Because the procedure is invasive, some physicians tend to avoid it in favour of various spirometric procedures, even though those procedures are known to deliver some quite unreliable results.’

  Pryce continues, but the picture is growing clearer for all his obfuscations.

  Burnett interrupts. ‘So. I recognise you have more work to do, and that you can’t be one hundred per cent sure even when you’ve done it, but one plausible theory – one highly plausible theory – would be that she had a few symptoms. Shortage of breath, that kind of thing. Maybe she seeks medical help, maybe she doesn’t. Either way, she doesn’t end up getting the one diagnostic test that would definitely have revealed the issue. And one day, her right heart ventricle simply fails and she dies. All that could have happened without any external intervention. That is, we’re looking at an ordinary, but natural, human tragedy. No murder, no manslaughter, nothing like that.’

  Pryce says, with that slightly camp edge to his irritation, ‘I haven’t completed my work and you are asking me to speculate, but yes, what you are saying is highly consistent with the evidence I have so far located.’

  ‘OK, good.’

  Burnett throws me another glance and this one is easy to read. It says, ‘Let’s fuck off out of here.’ My return lob says simply, ‘You bet.’

  We reconvene in the hospital café.

  White ceiling tiles. Low-energy bulbs in cylindrical down-lighters. Walls and chairs in Hospital Yellow. A colour so blatantly designed to soothe those in medical distress that it makes me want to bubble blood from the corners of my mouth, just to show it who’s boss.

  ‘I hate hospitals,’ says Burnett, coming to the table with his coffee and my juice.

  ‘I hate them more.’

  ‘That guy, Pryce. Jesus
.’

  ‘You had him on a good day. That was him trying to help.’

  ‘But no murder.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just something very weird.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Burnett looks at me with those heavily shadowed eyes. ‘I mean, maybe in South Wales you like to drag corpses into ecclesiastical buildings, surround them with candles and Bibles, then bugger off again, but in Dyfed-Powys we don’t go in for that so much.’

  I shake my head. Same here. It’s not a big thing in Glamorgan either.

  And the MisPer register has come up blank. A couple of possible matches based on visual ID only, but it only took us a couple of calls to rule those out.

  We haven’t yet been able to check DNA against the national database – it’ll be a day or two before we get the results back – but DNA matching only works when we have the individual, or close family members, on file already. Carlotta doesn’t seem like that sort of girl to me, though she could yet prove me wrong.

  We might yet get something interesting from Pryce’s various scrapings and swabbings – blood or skin caught under a fingernail, any indication of sexual assault – but his monotone comment to the waiting microphone was only, ‘Fingernails, right hand. Very clean appearance. No visible foreign matter . . . Fingernails, left hand. Also very clean . . . Vagina. No visual evidence of assault. No foreign matter visible. No visual evidence of recent intercourse.’

  Burnett’s team has already reached most households in Ystradfflur and the surrounding valley, seeking an identification. No joy. No hint of joy even.

  Pryce did find some evidence of cosmetic surgery. He wasn’t, in fact, certain about the lips, but agreed it was worth researching. (‘Sample removed for microscopy. Query possible presence of hyaluronic acid of non-human origin.’) On the other hand, because we asked him to look for any history of past cosmetic surgery, he did detect, under magnification, a possible rhinoplasty scar under the tip of the nose. Also – an easy win – cheek implants on both cheekbones. (‘Malar implants of expanded polytetrafluoroethylene located over both zygomatic bones.’)

  The human in me was disappointed. Carlotta was lovely enough already not to need surgical help. The implants weren’t even all that large, in Pryce’s opinion, suggesting that Carlotta was trying to perfect the already-good, not correct something problematically wrong. In my old-fashioned view of things, that smacks of vanity and I can’t help feeling cross with her. It’s my first quibble with Carlotta. Our first minor tiff.

  The detective, on the other hand, was pleased. Because Pryce was plainly out of his depth in assessing the rhinoplasty, Burnett asked him to reserve final examination of the nose, lips and cheeks for a time when one of the hospital’s consultant plastic surgeons was on hand to advise. It may be a few days before we get full details.

  Burnett is thinking along the same lines as me.

  ‘How many plastic surgeons are there in the country? There can’t be that many.’

  ‘About three hundred,’ I say. ‘I’ve already checked.’

  Burnett does the same maths as me. Three hundred surgeons means it wouldn’t be beyond our resources to approach each one.

  ‘Helpful. That’s helpful.’

  ‘Assuming she had the surgery in the UK.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  Burnett shrugs, meaning that most Brits don’t go abroad for their surgery. Which is, presumably, true, except that most surgically enhanced Brits also don’t wind up on a tabletop in the Dead House of Yrstradfflur surrounded by candles and the mountain wind. Which means that we’re dealing with a somewhat specialist subset of such people. Which in turn means that we can’t be sure Carlotta’s own surgical habits follow the rules applicable to everyone else.

  Also, of course, we don’t know that Carlotta is British.

  I wonder a bit why I chose to call her Carlotta. It’s a Spanish name, I suppose, but that blonde hair doesn’t exactly shout Spanish.

  Burnett’s thoughts are running on similar lines. He says, ‘She doesn’t look Welsh, does she?’

  ‘Not really,’ I say, which is true – but then what’s Welsh? Not everyone looks like what they are.

  Burnett sighs. Drains his coffee. Wonders about getting another.

  ‘I’m not even sure we’ve got a crime here,’ he says.

  ‘No.’

  There are various offences connected with disposal of a corpse, but the most obvious one, though rarely prosecuted, is prevention of a lawful and decent burial. Say what you like about the way we found Carlotta, there was nothing indecent about it, nor was there anything to prevent a lawful burial taking place in due course. If her heart failure took place under circumstances where medical help could and should have been sought, then someone might possibly have been guilty of manslaughter, though it would be very hard to make the charge stick.

  Burnett thinks the same. ‘We don’t have to decide, though,’ he says. ‘We package it all up. Give it to a coroner. Let him decide.’

  ‘Or her,’ I say, just because I hate hospitals and I’m feeling pissy.

  ‘Or her,’ he says.

  He’s staring at my juice, which I’ve barely touched. He wears that male expression which tosses a light veil of politeness over a strong underlying message of get-a-bloody-move-on-woman.

  I say, ‘Her legs. Why didn’t she shave her legs?’

  Burnett doesn’t quite roll his eyes at me, but gets close.

  I say, ‘Look, her hair was nice. Highlights, lowlights. Well looked after. She cares enough about these things to go out and get a nose job. Get cheek implants. Maybe lip-fillers. That kind of girl doesn’t just stop shaving her legs for no reason.’

  Burnett takes the opposite position, not necessarily because it’s his, but because it’s a good way to test out the hypothesis.

  ‘She’s feeling poorly. Short of breath. Bit under the weather. She just thinks, what the hell, I’ll leave it a few days.’

  I say, ‘OK. She’s feeling ill. Not rush-to-hospital ill. Maybe not even see-a-doctor ill. But let’s say she’s feeling ill enough that she wants a few days kicking around the house, wearing a dressing gown, eating yogurt and watching daytime TV.’

  ‘OK, yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s when you shave your legs. I mean, that’s when I’d shave my legs and I’m hardly the get-a-nose-job type.’

  ‘No.’ He stares at my nose, then looks sharply away when he sees me noticing. ‘No, quite. So, we present our coroner with the Mystery of the Unshaved Legs.’

  ‘And the Mystery of the Cotton Sundress,’ I add.

  The dress came from Monsoon. It’s a 2014 style, and was selling for £59 during the summer, but was knocked down to as little as £22.50 in the autumn sales. The firm tells us that they shifted a few thousand of the dresses over the course of the year. They have stores in Hereford, Bristol, Cardiff and Bridgend, but also a mail order service that could send the dress just about anywhere.

  We have no idea why an October corpse was dressed in a July-only dress.

  ‘And the Mystery of the Unknown Body,’ says Burnett, ticking off our puzzles. ‘And the Mystery of Why The Bloody Hell Anyone Wants to Dump Her in the Dead House of Ystradfflur.’

  He’s right about that. Let’s just say that you had Carlotta with you for some reason – a reason you wouldn’t want to share with the wider world. Carlotta complains a bit about being short of breath, but she doesn’t think it’s a huge deal and nor do you. Unfortunately for you both, however, her right ventricle is about to collapse and promptly does so, leaving you with the annoying problem of where to leave her.

  You presumably don’t want to leave her wherever you happen to be at the time: too great a risk that whatever it is you’ve been up to gets exposed to police scrutiny. So you pop your sadly deceased girl into the back of a van or car, drive around till you find somewhere reasonably far from wherever you started and remote enough that the corpse won’t instantly be detected. Ystradfflur clearly ticks the re
moteness box, all right.

  But that’s where the puzzles really start. If you’ve been up to something wicked, wouldn’t you simply tip your girl over a bridge somewhere? Tie a couple of bricks round her and topple her into the glass-blue bowels of a deep Welsh lake?

  And instead, she appeared to have been cleaned and given a clean dress to wear. No injury. No sign of rough handling. No graze of an arm against a wall, no scraped skin where her hand dragged.

  And then the setting itself. Reverential, you have to say. A gesture of respect to the departed . . . but a respect that showed only in death. In life, anyone wanting to be nice to Carlotta would surely have given her access to a razor. I mean, yes, I know that Denial of Cosmetic Materials is not yet an offence. Isn’t even a particularly big deal. But most people are nicer to living people than to dead ones. Carlotta, even if just in a small way, seemed to have had things the other way round.

  I don’t mention it again now, but Pryce did confirm that Carlotta’s nails had been cut with scissors, not trimmed by file.

  I take a sip of juice. I’ve drunk down about an inch. There are three and a half inches still to go.

  Burnett looks at me, my juice, then casts a flickering glance down at his watch.

  I say, ‘Faeces.’

  ‘Faeces?’

  ‘We won’t get anything from stomach contents, because the corpse was dead too long. Everything’s been digested basically.’

  Burnett nods. He knows that. It’s the sort of thing which I know anyway, but Pryce said so explicitly during the PM.

  ‘But you often get only partially digested food matter coming through in the faeces. Bits of sweetcorn. Tomato skins. I don’t know, nuts.’

  ‘You want to identify the corpse from nuts? She’s not a bloody squirrel.’