Burnett reads the section a couple of times, and says, ‘OK, so barley again. But the report lists about twenty other deposits. None of them uncommon.’
‘Yes, but not farmers’ market-y either. And look, it’s almost certain that Carlotta wasn’t wearing this dress when she died. Somebody changed her into it.’
Burnett’s with me now, following my logic.
He nods slowly. ‘OK. Here’s your hypothesis. In the day or so before she died, our victim, “Carlotta”, eats some barley bread, or something like that. Something quite heavy and rustic anyway. Rustic enough that eating whole seeds of barley is part of the experience.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then she dies. Her heart just blows a gasket. Quite likely she was going to drop down dead, no matter where she was, no matter what she was doing.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then someone, or more likely two or more people, decide to change the woman into a white summer dress that’s totally unsuitable for the season.’
‘Yes.’
‘That dress had been in a field of barley. These depositions here might have survived one wash in a washing machine, but probably not more, and maybe not even that, so quite likely, someone wore or handled that dress in a rural, barley-growing location, then folded it up, put it on a shelf, and didn’t take it out again until it was used to re-clothe the victim.’
‘You don’t fold dresses. You hang them. But yes, exactly.’
‘But the fact that the dress had been in barley fields and there were barley seeds in the stomach suggest another possibility. I mean, a possibility apart from the farmers’ market idea.’
I say, ‘Yes. We’ve got both ends of the barley-bread production process involved here. What about some artisanal bakery that uses its own grain in its products? Or a farm-shop?’
Burnett and I turn to the computer to seek out farm-shops in the very rough area of Ystradfflur. We find a couple, plus a bakery which makes a lot of its food purity. (‘All our grains from local growers. Working with nature.’) We widen our radius, start to find more targets.
And as we’re doing this – good coppers, working the case as we’re trained to do – a uniformed constable, Ceri Somebody, I think, comes to stand behind us. He breathes heavily through a gingery moustache.
‘There’s those monks,’ he says. ‘The ones with a brewing licence. They’re up in the Beacons somewhere. Up the valley from that caving place.’
The caving place: Pen-y-cae.
The same broad area in which Carlotta was found.
We fool around on Google.
Ceri Somebody is right.
The St David Monastery in Llanglydwen. Only eight miles by road from Ystradfflur. Less than that as the crow flies, as the buzzard glides.
Burnett and I look at each other. He’s thinking what I’m thinking.
The bible under Carlotta’s hand.
The churchyard and the candles.
All that, plus monks who brew beer.
Beer, made from malt. Malt, made from barley.
Two minutes later, we’re out of Carmarthen, heading east.
8
The Monastery of St David at Llanglydwen occupies three sides of a cobbled courtyard.
The main building looks like any other farmhouse of the area. Grey stone, slate roof. A little paved forecourt with neat black railings and some terracotta pots which might, at other times of the year, hold flowers.
To our left, a row of stone barns with wooden doors, painted black. At the end, the low wall and earthy smell of pig-sties. To our right, a modern block. Oak boards, weathered grey. An external staircase and a wooden balcony that runs the length of the upper floor. Ten windows. Ten doors. And the balcony means that every door can be accessed directly from outside.
And at the end of the modern block, backing up to it, is a little church. Only the stubby little tower, the little belfry with its iron bell, and an arched east window, gives any clue that the building has an ecclesiastical purpose. Mostly it, like the surrounding buildings, simply merges into the landscape beyond. Grey stones. Grey clouds. The creep of moss.
There’s no one here.
Burnett and I get out of his car, a pale-green Mondeo. No sign to indicate where we should go. None of the buildings appear to be lit. So, for a moment or two, we just stand there blinking in the wide, silvery light.
Then, from one of the barns, a man emerges. Brown robe. Black leather sandals, worn with socks. A well-used yard-brush in his hand.
He sees us, leans the brush against the wall and comes over to us, smiling.
‘Good morning, sir,’ says Burnett. I’m Detective Inspector Alun Burnett and this is my colleague, DS Fiona Griffiths.’
He puts out a hand.
The monk, smiling again, exposes his hands to our view. They’re the hands of a farm-worker. Mud. Muck. Dirt in the creases of his palms, the rim of his nails.
Apologising for the non-handshake, the monk offers a tiny bow instead, which Burnett – sort of – replicates.
The monk raises a hand to his lips indicating, I think, that he’s of a silent order, or at least currently non-speaking, but he waves us towards the main farmhouse and escorts us there.
He swings open the front door for us – it’s not locked – and takes us through an internal door into a handsome living room. A good-sized fireplace, not currently in use. Two big sofas. A grandfather clock. Panelled walls. Some religious pictures that don’t mean much to me.
The monk hovers at an oak sideboard. Indicates a decanter of water. Glasses. And a wooden board containing some apples and, under a muslin cloth, bread and cheese.
The monk opens his hands over the food. Points to the clock.
It’s just a couple of minutes before twelve. The bell in the little belfry is tolling. The monk smiles again. Bows. Rushes off. There’s a sound of water running, then we see the monk running, wet-handed, to the little chapel. Other monks are arriving too.
‘Matins,’ I say. ‘Lauds, terce, sext, then I’m not sure. None, I think. Vespers. Compline.’
Burnett stares at me, as though he too has been bitten by the silence-fly.
I say, ‘The monastic offices. It’s something like that. I know there are seven of them. I think this one is sext, or maybe terce. No, actually, it must be sext, mustn’t it? Six hours after dawn.’
‘Seven church services a day?’ says Burnett. ‘Bloody hell. I used to think Sunday morning chapel was bad enough.’
We inspect the bread. It’s rustic enough to satisfy any belly, but it looks wheaty and though there are seeds on top, they’re not the little ovoid bullets of barley.
Burnett eats a bit of cheese. ‘Oh, now that’s good. That’s really good.’ He hands me a bit on the tip of the knife, but I don’t take it.
I sit in the window and watch the yard.
Burnett tries to talk to me, but I don’t make it easy. Then he tries to check phone messages, but the signal in these parts doesn’t make that easy. Burnett kicks around the room, as though looking for a pile of old magazines to read, much as he would if this were an upmarket doctor’s surgery.
I say, ‘We could look for the kitchen.’
‘OK. Yes.’
It’s not hidden. We find it at the back of the house, down a stone-flagged hall. A biggish room originally, but extended to make it even larger. On a stove, quietly bubbling, is a big pan of soup. Bowls, under a cloth, warming beside it.
In the extension area, we find more ovens. Catering-sized, these ones. Bread trays. Sacks of flour. And seeds. Barley. Wheat. Flaked oats. Poppy seeds. Stored in big glass jars, ten-kilo things.
Burnett holds our little evidence bag up against the jar of barley.
The seed in our bag and the seeds in the big jar look pretty much the same, except that our seed has a certain polish coming, I assume, from having passed clean through the digestive system of a fibrotic young woman who died before the seed’s journey was done.
We bustle back through to our
living room.
At twelve thirty-five, the church door opens and half a dozen monks exit. Four of them head for our farmhouse, two others for the barns.
The party coming towards us is headed by a tall man. Grey hair, closely cut. Must be in his fifties, but a brisk walker. When he sees us looking from the windows, he raises a hand and breaks into a semi-trot.
We meet him by the front door.
‘Detective Inspector,’ he says. ‘I do apologise for your wait. Brother Gregory looked after you.’
He makes the last sentence somewhere between a statement and a question and looks at me as though challenging me to deny it.
I say, ‘Fiona Griffiths. I’m a detective sergeant.’
He smiles. ‘And you’re here on business, I take it? Something I can help with? I’m Father Cyril, the head of our little house.’
Burnett is good. It’s easy to play things loose with people who are accommodating and who aren’t in any sense suspects. But tight is almost always better and Burnett stays tight as a drum.
He says, ‘In the course of an important investigation, we found a barley seed. It’s possible that seed originated here. If it did, that’s fine. We just need to know.’
He holds up our little evidence bag. The ovoid bullet. The burnished seed.
But he doesn’t let Cyril look at it, not really. Producing the bag, then not letting someone see it: another good move. Classic police. Those tiny little signals of control. Of threat.
‘You want to know if we grow barley? We do.’
‘And where does it go, once you’ve harvested it?’
If Burnett is good at his game, Cyril is good at his. He says, eyes creasing in smile, ‘“Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine.” Not so much wine in Wales, but our barley gives us bread and beer and feed for our animals. It sustains us.’
‘Do you sell any of those products outside the monastery?’
‘Yes. We sell almost all our beer. We brew around ten thousand barrels a year and consume only thirty or forty ourselves. That beer provides most of our income. Pays for all those things we can’t make or grow ourselves.’
‘And the bread?’
‘Yes, we sell our surplus. The village shop. The markets in Sennybridge and Brecon. But not much. Maybe five hundred loaves a week in total.’
‘And would any of those loaves have had barley seeds on top?’
Cyril laughs. ‘Brother Nicholas is the great artist of our bakery. You’d need to talk to him about his exact recipes, but yes: Brother Nicholas does like his barley seed.’
Weirdly, we’re all still standing. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. People stand only if there’s no available seating or if there’s something provisional about the gathering.
And that’s only part of it. Burnett does the police thing well. Heavily present. Feet set apart. Mouth and eyes and face not doing those little dances of mutual social pleasing which we normally do with newly met strangers. He’s not directly threatening, not in the slightest, but there’s a lack of giving which causes most people to feel an edge of alarm. To over-cooperate.
But Cyril seems immune. He’s taller than Burnett, lighter on his feet, and his blue eyes are almost constantly a-smile, as though laughing at some secret joke. A mirth that moves behind us, above us, out of sight.
Burnett asks to see – the loaves or the bakery, I’m not sure which – and Cyril says yes. Leads us back to the kitchen, from which the soup has gone, the soup and the bowls. From a room next door, there is the sound of spoons moving on crockery. The sound of a man’s voice talking. I try to hear what he’s saying, but can’t make it out.
Cyril takes us back to the bakery area. Shows us the catering-sized ovens, the bread trays, the kneading machine, the proving area. He talks the way a father might talk about his daughter’s ballet things. Just about knowing what’s what and where to find it, but the edge of unapologised-for ignorance is never far away.
We see some bread too. The bread made with ordinary wheat flour rises high and soft. The barley-only bread is low and heavy.
I say, ‘May I?’ but I’ve cracked the loaf open before Cyril gives permission. There are seeds baked into the bread too, not only on top, and the bread smells dense and malty and brown. I break a wheat loaf open too. It’s not seeded. Not inside, not on top.
‘These are clues?’ asks Cyril.
Burnett ignores the question. Says, ‘Do people ever come here to buy bread? Do you have any passing trade?’
‘Ever? Ever is a long time. Perhaps very occasionally, I wouldn’t necessarily know. But no, not really. Anyone local can get these loaves from the village shop.’
Burnett considers his next move. His hand moves a stainless steel bread tray around the countertop as he ponders.
The baking area is lit by cool white fluorescent lamps. Long cylinders of light that nudge blues into something bluer, that pushes clear whites into something shot through with duck-egg. Burnett produces a photo of Carlotta, a photo that doesn’t quite tell you how dead she is. A photo that feels a tiny bit off, maybe, but in a way that would be hard to identify unless you knew.
I feel a sudden pang. Want to take the photo from Burnett, angry that other eyes should be looking at the corpse I knew. Jealous of the intimacy we shared.
‘Do you know this woman? Have you seen her before?’
I’m expecting – Burnett is too – that Cyril will say ‘No,’ but he doesn’t. He says, ‘Um.’
He says, ‘Could be. Maybe. You’ll have to excuse me, I don’t always know . . .’
Burnett catches my eye, but all I have to offer him is a ‘Me too, boss,’ look of surprise.
Burnett: ‘You think you might know her?’
‘Yes, well, we are a small community, but welcoming. We offer a place of refuge. Sanctuary.’
Burnett: ‘You’ll have to excuse me—’ Burnett stops where the word ‘Father’ would logically be, as though he can’t quite bear to hear himself talking churchy. He reverses a yard or two and goes at the sentence again with a bit more vroom. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, this talk of refuge? In plain English, you take – what? – immigrants? Asylum-seekers?’
Cryil laughs. A pealing laugh, this one. Nothing secret.
‘Immigrants? Yes. Exactly. We take refugees from the world. Those seeking sanctuary. If you, Inspector, felt yourself to be in some kind of trouble – spiritual trouble, I mean, an affliction of the soul – you might want to come and spend time with us.’
‘And you do what? You offer therapy?’
‘We offer prayer. We offer silence. The chance to participate in our community. Maybe only for a day or two. Maybe for the rest of your life.’
Burnett tries to get his head round that. ‘So – what? – people just up sticks and come?’
‘Yes.’ Cyril hesitates, wondering whether to continue, I think. But he decides in favour. ‘There are people who might look happy and successful to you. Perhaps, I don’t know, they have money, jobs, boy- or girlfriends, whatever they want. But they have lost their connection to God. And without that, what are they? Souls in trouble. People who need our help. Sometimes they know that. Sometimes they half-know it. Sometimes they have to learn it, or re-learn it. We are here for them all.’
Cyril smiles and darts a glance at his watch. ‘Do you mind?’ he asks, waving us back to the reception room where we waited earlier.
There are three bowls of soup there now. Bread. Butter. Water. Salt.
‘It’s one of the things about the monastic life. We’re so regular in our timings that when we reach the midday dismissal, our bellies start to rumble.’
We eat the soup. It’s good, I think, but I don’t know. I don’t really taste it. I keep thinking of the photo of Carlotta that Burnett carries in his pocket. I don’t want him to have it. I want to take it off him.
Cyril tells us that the monastery gets a trickle of spiritual solace-seekers throughout
the year. ‘In summer, yes, especially, because the life here is a little easier. Some of our visitors are very regular. Some people might, for example, spend two weeks with us every year. The same two weeks very often. And others? Well, we don’t judge. We don’t ask.’
I say, ‘So someone might pitch up, I don’t know, for a day or two, a single night only? There would be nothing to prevent that?’
‘No. We wouldn’t wish to prevent it.’
‘Do you have to book? Is there a booking system?’
The monk smiles. ‘We ask people to let us know if they’re planning a visit. It makes things easier. But sometimes, the people who need us most don’t know in advance that they need help. We take no payment. We demand no notice. Our doors have no locks.’
I exchange a look with Burnett. This is a new world to both of us. Give us some sex-workers in Cardiff or, I don’t know, a shotgun-wielding drunk in Tregaron, and we’d know what to do, how to proceed. But here, we’re like a blind man at a busy intersection. Tip-tip-tapping with our white stick. Trying to figure out what’s pavement and what’s on-rushing truck.
Burnett: ‘So, theoretically, our girl here,’ he brandishes the photo, ‘she might be, for example, a Londoner. She might encounter some kind of crisis in her life. She decides she needs to get away. She could just hop in a car, come down here. Then what? She checks in with someone? Signs in at all?’
‘Ideally, yes, she’d let us know she was here. But she wouldn’t have to. Those rooms are all open.’ The abbot indicates the little modern block outside our windows. ‘There is clean linen. Water. Food is always available in the kitchen. We expect people will come here wishing to share our life. Our services, our work, our meals. And, to be frank with you, those are the visitors we most welcome, most take to our hearts. But other people have other needs. If people want a space for quiet contemplation on their own, apart from our little community, then we are happy to give them that space.’
If Carlotta had attended church services and the rest, presumably her face would be familiar to the abbot and his fellows?
‘Maybe, yes, mostly. But women are asked to cover their heads while in church. At mealtimes, we do not talk. We don’t socialise with our guests the way you might expect. And then, we’re not a silent order. Except during the weeks of Lent, speech is permitted. But we place a high value on silence, an inner retreat. I myself have just finished four weeks in which I spoke not a word. During that time, my attention was inward. I’m afraid elephants might have walked through that courtyard without me noticing.’
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 6