Burnett likes that comment. He’s about to repeat it, but then decides not to and tucks it away for use back in Carmarthen, where it’s probably funnier.
‘I’m just saying,’ I just say.
‘Are you ever going to drink that?’ he asks. ‘Or can we bugger off?’
I try to focus on the Juice Issue. Try to figure out if I’d be happier if I drank the juice or happier if I didn’t. Then wonder if happiness is even the appropriate metric. I mean, maybe with drinks all that really matters is hydration.
Burnett stares. He wants a response.
I can’t make a good decision under that kind of pressure, so end up saying, ‘No.’
Then realise that’s not a clear answer, because his questions weren’t helpfully phrased, so I clarify. ‘I mean, no to the first question, yes to the second.’
We leave.
Hospitals normally weird me out, but Burnett’s presence grounds me and we get out without me doing anything embarrassing like walking into a glass wall or getting lost somewhere between Phlebotomy and Haematology.
Burnett, who’s good at walking without crashing into things, has been studying his phone. When we get to the car park, he waves it at me.
‘Churchyard search completed. Nothing obviously useful. A few bits of litter, wind-blown quite likely. Field search still on-going. But . . .’ He shakes his head.
Traffic noise from Eastern Avenue rolls over the warm car park. It’s the last day of October and unseasonably warm. A south wind ruffles our clothes. Pushes dead leaves up against the hospital walls, its doors and windows. A brown and yellow army, begging admittance.
‘I’ll chase Bridgend,’ I say.
Bridgend: the forensics lab which is trying to get any data from the dress.
‘Yes.’ Burnett squints into the wind, making his eyes almost disappear. ‘But no murder,’ he says again. ‘We’ve lost our murder.’
When he said that before, he was thinking like a detective. Implications for the investigation, lines of enquiry. That kind of thing. When he says it now, he’s thinking like a politician. Murder cases bring promotion. Deaths from natural causes don’t.
I say, ‘You haven’t had the write-up. From Pryce, I mean.’
‘So?’
‘So we don’t have to tell anyone about the heart failure. If you tell Bridgend that the dress belongs to someone who died from a heart attack, they’ll put it in a Jiffy bag and send it back.’
And Jackson will cut his support.
And I’ll be off the case.
‘How long before Pryce reports?’
I wrinkle my face. ‘He’s quick usually.’
Burnett’s hands flutter round his jacket pocket before falling back. An ex-smoker, I’d guess, not quite free of the habit.
‘We might get an ID,’ he says. ‘You never know, we might even get a MisPer call. It’s about time.’
I say, ‘Yes’ but think ‘No’. There are plenty of people – the old, the lonely, the homeless, the mad – who aren’t quickly missed, whose names arrive at the Missing Persons Bureau either slowly or not at all. But pretty Carlotta, with her Gore-Tex cheek implants? Those people are missed. Those people generate calls. And if Carlotta’s disappearance didn’t generate calls, there must have been a reason why.
And unless that reason is approaching some kind of expiration date, I think the weird silence is likely to continue.
I suspect Burnett thinks the same.
‘Get what you can on the dress,’ he says.
‘Yes, sir.’
He raises a hand. Gets into his car. Drives away.
I lean against my car. It’s odd the weather being so unseasonably warm. Like something in the machinery of the world has slipped and no one has yet noticed or figured out a fix.
The Mystery of the Unshaved Legs.
The Mystery of the Cotton Sundress.
The Mystery of the Unknown Body.
The Mystery of Why The Bloody Hell Anyone Wants to Dump Her in the Dead House of Ystradfflur.
A sweet little collection. A proper case, even if Burnett doesn’t have his murder.
I call Bridgend. Ask them to bag up the dress and have it couriered to the LGC laboratory in Culham, Oxfordshire.
The person I’m speaking to, a lab assistant, says tensely, ‘Do you mind holding a moment? My boss wants a – hold on a sec.’
There’s a muttered conversation which I can’t hear.
Then a male voice – strong, dominant, but also phoney – comes on the line. ‘This is Dr Jenkins. We’ve been looking after the dress and we’ve already commenced our review—’
‘Oh, yes, thank you. It’s just we really needed the results fast – I mean I know you guys are really tied up.’
‘We’re not “tied up”, no. There’s just a process.’
We go to and fro.
I’m nice, but persistent and I keep mentioning Culham, which is the UK’s largest private sector lab and, effectively, a death threat to any police-owned and operated lab.
Eventually Jenkins says, ‘Look, it’s fine. We’ll have most of the data ready for you tonight, and the rest of it Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.’
‘Well, that’s the thing you see. The inquiry is going to be active all the weekend and—’
By the time we finish speaking, Jenkins has promised me one data-dump tonight, a second tomorrow, and fast-track on all those things where the science just takes more time.
I thank him and hang up.
I’d never have got budget authority to go to Culham anyway.
The warm wind still blows. It’s not long after four, but light leaks from the hospital windows. On Eastern Avenue, the cars drive with sidelights.
I wait a while for no reason, then climb into my car and drive slowly round the corner to Roath Park.
The big lake. Lights over water. Geese honking close to the waterline.
And my father’s house, my mother’s clucking welcome.
7
My father’s house.
My beloved, complicated, dangerous father.
He’s at home tonight, which he isn’t always. He greets me as he always does. A crushing bear hug. Then standing me at arm’s length, so he can properly look at me. And all the while, a shouting download of whatever is on his mind. ‘Fi, love, brilliant to see you! Kath, sweetheart, Fi’s here, would you believe it? You’ve got brilliant timing and all, we’ve got Mal and his missus coming round in a bit. You remember Mal, don’t you, love? Ant! Where’s Ant? That girl never takes her nose out of her phone these days. Ant, your sister’s here. Staying for dinner, are you? It’s sausages. Those ones with the herbs in. Them with mashed potato – lovely!’
My father and I have, I think, a very good relationship, but it’s not always been straightforward. The first challenge came when I was ill in my teens. Dad was a roaring, anxious, supportive presence through that illness and its long aftershadow. He and I, always close, became even closer. Battle buddies. Resistance fighters. It became so that when I was actually ready for some independence – studying at Cambridge, entering my first relationships – I actually had to fight for the space in which to do it.
We handled all that well enough, I think, but then I chose to enter the police service. Given my father’s record – his multiple prosecutions, the various further crimes of which he was suspected but never charged – my desire to work in the CID appalled him. It felt traitorous. A betrayal.
Was it that? Maybe, but I’m not him. Don’t have his past, his allegiances, his friends. In any case, I joined the police and have never, not once, regretted my decision. I can’t imagine any other career, any other calling. My relationship with my father settled down after those first few bad months – or at least, it appears to have done. My father is a silky enough liar, as indeed I also am, that I wouldn’t necessarily know if he still harboured a grievance.
Anyway.
Mam fusses in and out of the kitchen, pleased to see me, but also anxious about whether
her mashed potato is lumpy. Mal Edwards and his wife do come round for a drink that, inevitably, morphs into dinner too. Mal was one of Dad’s tightest buddies from those early days. When I was five or six, Mal was one of those men who appeared most often at our dinner table, our parties, our family events. One of those smiling leather-jacketed men who would come knocking at our door, late in the evening, full of polite and solicitous friendliness towards my mother, but with eyes only for my father, and jingling a set of car keys that summoned my dad out to some important but unnameable night-time assignment.
That was then. This is now. Mal’s in his sixties. With the profits he earned from those old, discarded games, Mal built up a little chain of holiday rentals in Majorca. Lives out there eight or nine months of the year and comes back, baked the colour and texture of beef jerky, emanating that slightly superior air of puzzlement at our decision to live here in the winds and rain when we could be sharing his pool and sun-umbrella life in the south.
At one point, I corner Mal and his wife, Dorrie, on their own.
‘Mal, can I beg a favour?’
I explain that I’m putting together a photo album-cum-scrapbook to cover the early years of my parents’ marriage. That it’s going to be a big surprise Christmas present for them both. ‘Dad wasn’t big on cameras back then. Didn’t want things recorded. But that means they don’t really have much of a record of things until Kay was born, or even later. I know they’d love any photos you have of that time. Family stuff. Christenings. Whatever you have. I’ll get them copied.’
Mal and Dorrie are both enthusiastic at the idea. Keen to help. Invite me round to their place on the Bay. (‘Just a small place now, love. We think of Majorca as home, don’t we, Dorrie?’) They promise to say nothing to Dad till after Christmas.
Mal asks if I’m talking to any of the others in the old crew – he means Emrys Thomas, Gwion Cadwaladr, Howie Jones, a couple of others – and I say yes, all of them. Collecting up records of those weddings and picnics. Days at the racetrack or on boats out on the Bay. One by one, I’m going through their albums, finding pics of my ma and pa. Of me as a small girl. Of Kay as a newborn.
‘Brilliant idea, love,’ says Mal. ‘Brilliant.’
And he’s right. More right than he realises since – because this is me, because my stated motive is not always the same as my actual one, because my truth is formed in layers and the part which is most truthful lies most deeply buried – I have a secondary mission too.
Because my father is not my father. My mother not my mother.
In terms of love, yes, of course. In terms of loyalty, affection, history, shared relationships and much else – then yes, yes and yes.
But the biology speaks otherwise. It took me a long time to realise this, but my parents adopted me when I was small. They simply came out of chapel one day to find me – aged perhaps two-and-a-half – sitting in the back of my father’s open-top Jag. Mam and Dad had long wanted kids. Had failed to conceive any in the normal way of things. Were only too happy to accept this little penny dropped from heaven, and did all the things necessary to regularise my adoption.
As it turned out, Mam and Dad did go on to conceive two children – my sisters, Ant and Kay – but the mystery of my past remained deeply buried. Mam says she has no idea where I sprang from, and I believe her. Dad says the same, but I think he lies. His own past is too tangled, too murky for any deep truth to spring free and clear.
So I think my father knows more than he’s telling me.
More than that: I think those first two missing years of my life have something to teach me about the illness that afflicted me in my teens. Two horrific years in which I lost my sanity. In which I was in hospital at least as long as I was ever out of it. Two years in which I believed myself, in the most literal way possible, to be dead.
I’m in recovery now. Not exactly sane, but still a thousand times saner than I was.
And yet, I’m also aware that my present sort-of sanity is a fragile, precarious thing. A soap bubble dancing over rock. A butterfly trembling on the storm.
I don’t know whether learning the truth about my past will help my head heal itself. I don’t know how far my head will ever truly heal. But I do know that I have to find out. That I have to try.
The simplest course of action, obviously, would be simply to ask my father and the men who knew him best. The simplest and the stupidest. If my father knew I was investigating him, those faint traces I’m seeking, almost obliterated by time and memory, would vanish for ever.
So my investigation moves crabwise, silent, out of sight. Deals with traces and half-traces and mere sniffs of suggestion.
These photos are part of the search. I’m trying to knit together who knew who. What my father’s circle really was. Trying to gather enough material that I might yet find a diamond shining in the loam.
And yes, on Sunday, I do go down to the Bay to see Mal and Dorrie. They give me tea and cake and we sit in a litter of photos and other mementoes. I study them all, pick the ones I like, and they let me take them away to get them copied. No diamonds visible yet, but you don’t always know what you have until you look at it in the right way.
A good weekend. Productive. Rich and busy in other ways too – a trip to the gym, a cinema date with Bev, a lunch with Ed Saunders – yet I feel unsettled nevertheless.
I can’t get Carlotta out of my head. I check constantly for any data from Bridgend, any breakthrough from the MisPer people.
Nothing.
On Sunday lunchtime, I call Burnett on his mobile to see if he’s heard anything. He’s with his family. Half-puzzled at my call, half-irritated at being disturbed.
In any case, he has no news. Says we’ll talk first thing Monday. Tells me to come over to Carmarthen for a case review.
I want to drive up to Ystradfflur again, just so I can spend more time in the dead house, recover something of those happy hours with Carlotta. Would do it too, except that Burnett will still have his SOCOs scratching around, and I don’t want to share my private, night-time, wind-blown Carlotta with their big boots and stoic, official indifference.
Go to bed that evening. Restless, scratchy, wanting more.
And then, Monday – glory be – a crack.
A chink, a gap, a fissure, an opening.
I’m in Carmarthen with Burnett: in their ‘Major Incident Room’, a repurposed conference suite with a view south over the river. The room has some of the feel of an MIR. The whiteboards. The HOLMES terminal. The files, the papers, the felt-tipped List of Actions.
But already – and far too early – there are those signs of an inquiry in decay. The smiley faces on the whiteboard. The sidetable with coffee thermoses which already has more unwashed crockery than clean. No one manning the HOLMES terminal.
Those things betoken no lack of diligence. Rather they’re testament to a lack of leads and, worse, the lack of any clear crime. Pryce hasn’t yet submitted his written report, but he has confirmed, orally, that the presumed cause of death was simple heart failure. Neither Burnett nor I have felt compelled to communicate that news to Bridgend, but Burnett would have had to come clean with his boss, DCI Jim Pritchard. And, given that any significant crime in Dyfed-Powys means that resources have to be siphoned off from somewhere else, it’s pretty clear that Pritchard has promptly siphoned most of them back again.
I open the mail.
Nothing much, but one gem nevertheless. A padded envelope from Pryce. A short note and an evidence bag. Our smallest size, about two inches square.
The bag contains one single seed. A blunt oval. Seamed down the middle. Three or four millimetres long.
It takes me a second or two to realise what this is, then toss the bag at Burnett.
‘From Pryce,’ I tell him.
‘The faeces?’
I nod.
Burnett pokes the bag. ‘So. Not a squirrel then.’
I read the note. It doesn’t tell us much, but what it does communicate, I pass on.
‘It’s barley,’ I say. ‘Not wheat.’
‘Barley?’
‘Barley.’
We turn to Google.
Google and Wikipedia.
Research separately for a minute or two without speaking.
Then Burnett pushes back from his desk and, sighing, quotes from the screen in front of him.
‘“Barley is the second most widely grown arable crop in the UK with around 1.1 million hectares under cultivation. Each year the UK produces around 6.5 million tonnes of barley.” Blah, blah. “Although it is grown through most of the country, it is often the dominant arable crop in the north and west of Britain.”’
‘Because the weather’s rubbish,’ I say. ‘Wheat doesn’t like it too wet. Barley doesn’t care.’
‘Right. But that means we’re talking about one of the most common crops in Wales. Maybe even the most common in these parts.’
I shake my head. I think Burnett is missing the point.
‘Look, it’s barley. Who eats that? I mean, who eats that in the form of a whole seed? Most barley is turned into animal-feed, or turned into beer, or exported to wherever they feed animals or make beer.’
Burnett pokes at the seed more thoughtfully now. ‘There’s pearl barley,’ he says.
But pearl barley has had its hull and bran removed, and this seed is the whole damn thing. We click around online and get up a picture of bread made with barley. It’s almost flat. Unrisen. A heavy, chewy, rustic eat.
‘Some kind of health food place, maybe. A farmer’s market . . .’
That’s what Burnett says, but he hasn’t read Bridgend’s analysis of the dress in the same detail I have.
I call his attention to a section on the seventh page of their report: ‘Lower right inseam, 53 mm above hem. (Picture). Dried barley awn or spike. Length approx. 2.5 mm. Positioning consistent with natural deposition.’
The ‘natural deposition’ bit just means that if you wear dresses anywhere with long grasses, you’re quite likely to get an accumulation of seeds and grass spikes breaking off wherever the fabric is a little rougher, such as the inseam.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 5