I scowl my opinion, but hurry to the room.
Watkins, my direct boss.
Dennis Jackson, her boss and my über-boss.
Adrian Brattenbury from the National Crime Agency, dark-blue herringbone suit, white shirt, and that look of quietly unfussy fitness. Physical fitness, yes, but mental alertness too.
Also, two men I’ve not met before. Grey suits. Close-cropped blond hair. That precisely defined German accent which somehow reproves the rest of us for speaking messily.
I blunder in, trying to remember if I’m late, if I was even told about this meeting, or if I’d been invited, if I was.
Jackson, introducing me because I don’t, says, ‘Fiona Griffiths, one of our detective sergeants.’
Everyone else has papers in front of them. A look of busy competence. I get a pen out of my pocket. Wonder if I’ve got any business cards on me. Don’t. Smile brightly instead.
The German guys do have business cards. Markus Hauke and Moritz Windfeder. Both from the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA, the equivalent, roughly, of the American FBI.
Jackson says, ‘Fiona, we’re discussing Lake Geneva and all that.’
Lake Geneva: one of our targets, Owain Owen, recently paid €2,200 for a weekend conference at some luxury hotel on Lake Geneva, and he never turned up. We sent a guy out there ourselves – a big deal on our police budgets – and he spent the whole weekend looking for Owen, asking other delegates if they’d seen him.
Nada. Nothing. Nix.
Three of our other targets – Ben Rossiter, David Marr-Philips, and Nick Davison – were also travelling that weekend. Rossiter and Davison were on ‘business’ in Copenhagen. Marr-Philips on a long weekend in Amsterdam.
Jackson says, ‘We know Rossiter and Davison were in Copenhagen. They were on the flight. They paid for their hotel room. Their mobile phones were there. But the phones apparently never left. Our Danish friends and colleagues have let us take a look at exactly which cell, which mobile phone mast, those phones were connected to. And basically, give or take the trip to the airport, the phones were in the same place the whole time.’
Windfeder says, ‘Right. In a hotel bedroom.’
‘Exactly.’
Windfeder: ‘So they come in to Denmark. Everything is correct, everything is above the line. Then they leave their phones here in this hotel bedroom, they’re paying cash for everything, use taxis or public transport. And – pfft – verschwunden.’
His colleague, Hauke, says, ‘Disappeared. Gone.’
Jackson: ‘Marr-Philips, the same thing, more or less.’ He tosses some papers across to the German pair who scan them briefly. ‘And it’s not the first time. This is the third occasion that we’ve been able to track. Three times in a single year.’
Windfeder, the senior of the two, turns his pale eyes back to Jackson and Brattenbury. Those two, equally.
Brattenbury, who deals with the BKA far more frequently than we provincial coppers, says, ‘We’re looking for an interception warrant. Basically, we think these men, perhaps others too, are involved in a wide-ranging, dangerous and entrepreneurial conspiracy, or set of conspiracies even. We think they fly to locations around Germany, in order to convene somewhere within your borders. They do that, because they need to meet face to face at certain times and they think the risk of interception here in the United Kingdom is too high—’
Windfeder shrugs and says, ‘And also because we are German.’
Brattenbury nods. A quiet, regretful nod. ‘Yes. And also because you are German.’
What Windfeder means is that Germany possesses what are probably the world’s strictest privacy laws. The national experience, not only of die Hitlerzeit but of the all-intrusive East German Stasi, means that the legal bar for interception has been set very high indeed.
Windfeder trims the papers in front of him into a neat pile, square-edged.
He says, ‘Listen. From what you have told me, I agree. I understand your reasons. I would share also your beliefs about this maybe-conspiracy. I would want to listen to what these people are saying to each other. So. So.’ The German pronunciation of that word, more definite sounding than ours. ‘We present this material to our legal department. If there is the basis for a warrant, we will be happy – really happy – to do the rest.’
Jackson says, ‘We’re aware some of this material – ’ he means all of it – ‘is circumstantial, but we think it’s very strong.’
Windfeder says, ‘We will read with an open mind.’ He does a gesture, a kind of windscreen-wiper movement in front of his face, to show us just how open his guys will be.
Hauke, encouraging: ‘This material? Ja, it has certainly the smell of Verschwörung, conspiracy.’
Politely, positively, the meeting breaks up. The grown-ups are going out somewhere, then off to Bridgend for a pow-wow with the Chief Constable.
No such things for the likes of me. No pow. No wow.
On my desk: a fat report from a team of forensic accountants who’ve been looking at Owain Owen’s finances. Sample excerpt: ‘While there is certainly no “smoking gun”, we note a succession of balance transfers, in amounts and on dates that might well support the theory that . . .’
Fuckery.
Expensive, necessary, well-directed fuckery.
I think, if Owain Owen was in this room now, he’d laugh. Far from being frightened by our meticulousness, he’d be comforted to see that our entire year of effort has so far produced nothing more injurious than that ‘might well support the theory . . .’
I think we’re not even close with the BKA. I think we’re not going to get that warrant.
I kill the face on the whiteboard. Check that the DCs are busy on their appointed tasks.
And I have my tasks too. My List of Actions, agreed with Watkins and Brattenbury, actions which are still tardily incomplete because of the time I’ve been spending with Burnett in the wilds of Powys and Carmarthenshire.
I look at my List of Actions.
It stares back at me.
I make a little papery nest and lay my List of Actions inside it, to see if the list will mysteriously complete itself.
I’m guessing not.
Call up a photo of Carlotta’s face, her beautifully dead face, on the system.
Phone down to the print room. Ask for a colour copy.
Tomasz Kowalczyk, king of the print room and all things papery, tells me ‘Dzien´ dobry,’ and asks if I want the normal size. ‘Six times four, yes?’
I say yes, then amend my answer. ‘No actually, Tomasz. I want a fuck-off big print. What’s the biggest you can do?’
It turns out that ‘fuck-off big’ isn’t a standard paper-size, but Tomasz tells me he can do full-colour in A2, or monochrome in A1. I take the colour option. Two copies.
‘Tak, Fiona. Forty minute.’
Barley seeds and flakes of skin.
I stand there, doing nothing, seeing nothing, for I don’t know how long. Then something changes and I look up. See Esyllt, one of the DCs.
‘Esyllt?’
She comes over and I show her Carlotta’s face on screen. A few different views. ‘That’s six or seven thousand pounds’ worth of nose,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe about the same for the cheeks. But they’re nice, aren’t they? I mean, that’s a nice nose, isn’t it?’
‘Fiona, that person. Is she dead?’
I tell her what I want. All the plastic surgeons in the country. Not just emails, but phone calls.
‘Starting with London. Then London outskirts. Then everywhere else.’
Esyllt looks at me. ‘Fi, this is on the Action List, is it? It’s just—’
She tells me something to do with other people having told her to do other things. I don’t hear, really. It’s just words.
I wait till her mouth has stopped moving and say, ‘Yes, definitely. This takes priority. Keep me in touch with progress.’
Then Essylt says yes, or words to that effect, and goes.
Time gurgles and pas
ses.
Tomasz emails: ‘Ready.’
I fetch my photos. Big ones. Ones that feel substantial in the hand. One for the office, one for home.
Beyond our windows, in Bute Park, a cherry tree burns with late autumnal fire. Yellow leaves flaring against wet black branches. The leaves win all the attention, but you already know how this particular story ends.
I pin one of my Carlotta photos so her dead face fills my little cubicle. The view settles me and I click around till I get to the PNC database.
A blinking cursor asks: Location?
I tell it Llanglydwen.
Radius of search?
Twenty miles.
Crimes/Incidents (select from list).
Violent Offences (all). Violent Deaths (all). Missing Persons.
Search from date.
I hesitate. I’ve run this search before. So has Burnett. But we were looking for anything recent. Any pattern of crime that could make sense of our nice fresh corpse. But what if the pattern had lain buried for years? What if we were looking at only the most recent manifestation of something far older?
The PNC lets me search from as far back as the early eighties, though the further you go back, the ropier the data becomes.
I enter the earliest date offered.
The machine blinks and considers.
Violent incidents: two. In 1992, in a village twelve miles from Llanglydwen, a local farmer got drunk and walked half a mile to threaten a local haulier with a shotgun following a dispute over money. In 1998, the same farmer hanged himself from a tie-beam in his barn.
Missing Persons: one. Date: 2006. On a farm just three windy miles from Llanglydwen, a teenager, Bethan Williams, went missing. No personal difficulties reported, beyond the normal teenage-girl stuff. No body was ever found, but investigators at the time concluded that she had most likely been abducted, raped, then killed. A local man was suspected – arrested and intensively questioned – but no meaningful evidence was ever found and no charges were ever brought.
In the summer of 2006, a crime without a corpse.
In the late autumn of 2014, a corpse without a crime.
And a case which was already strange dips its hands into the peat-brown waters of the past and comes out stranger still.
10
Watkins isn’t happy with me.
‘This thing with Essylt. You can’t just reassign people. She had a set of specific, time-critical tasks to complete.’
‘I know. Sorry, ma’am. I don’t always . . .’
I trail off.
‘Don’t always what?’
‘Think. I mean, I do, obviously. Too much. But when I’m on a train of thought, I . . .’
Watkins isn’t fake pissed off with me. She’s only a hair-trigger pull away from firing lasers from her eyes, spitting nails from her mouth. But, on a sudden, her mood changes. Swivels. ‘Well, perhaps it doesn’t matter.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Operation April. There are . . . developments.’
‘Ma’am?’
She talks. I hardly hear her. Or rather do – hear words, see strings of sentences, watch those softly pacifying euphemisms floating out into space.
The gist: Hauke and Windfeder continue to be helpful, positive, encouraging. But they’ve made it clear that they believe our warrant application has no plausible chance of success. They are only facilitating the whole process as a way to introduce the case into their system, to acquaint some of the decision-makers with the material. For them, this is a first step, not a final one.
I say, ‘Well, we didn’t think . . . we never thought we’d get there on our very first approach.’
‘I know. But, Fiona, there are realities—’
‘Realities?’
‘Our budgets are shrinking. If we invest a lot of resource, we’re expected to produce something. We’ve been on this a year.’
‘Produce something?’
I’m aware that my conversational range appears unnaturally limited just at the moment, but fuck’s sake. We’ve built, piece by piece, an astonishingly detailed, if, yes, circumstantial case against our targets. We’ve started to uncover what might just be the most sophisticated and ambitious criminal gang in British history. And some fucking senior policeman, whose copper’s brain has been surgically exchanged for an accountant’s pea-sized cerebellum, has decided to give up at the very first setback.
Watkins says, ‘We’re not closing the operation. This isn’t over.’
Watkins is trying to gentle the blow, but I’m not gentled.
Our targets haven’t crumbled in a full year of the most urgent surveillance we can muster. Their defences will hardly fail if we withdraw most of our troops.
And it’s defences, plural. Always multiple safeguards, layer upon layer. Like one of those megalomaniac Indian castles, where intruders faced one moat that was swimming with crocodiles, then a dry moat patrolled by elephants, then a third one aswarm with tigers. Then walls, and more walls, and higher walls, and more archers, until you realise the purpose wasn’t to create something unconquerable – that point had long since been passed – but to create a statement of Ozymandian magnificence. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Watkins says more things.
I don’t hear her, not really. Don’t respond. Just think, we’re giving up. After one year of effort. One solitary year and we’re giving up.
Watkins says something, something that might have had a question in it.
I don’t hear her. Don’t hear the question.
Say nothing. Do nothing.
She sighs.
‘Look, I think maybe it would be good for you to be attached to a more . . .’ She hesitates, looking for the right word. ‘A more traditional inquiry.’
Lord help me, I think, she’s being diplomatic. Trying to spare my feelings. And when has Watkins ever done that? I can only nod.
She’s aware that my little adventure in Dyfed-Powys appears to be petering out. She starts telling me about an assault with intent in Twyn-yr-odyn. Says, ‘We have the perpetrator but it’s one of those where we need an experienced pair of hands packaging the case for the CPS.’
She says some other things too, but I’m not listening.
Fuck Twyn-yr-odyn.
Fuck senior policemen with accountants’ brains.
I interrupt. Say, ‘I’m not finished in Carmarthen, ma’am.’ I tell her about my search on the PNC. Tell her about Bethan Williams, the missing teenager.
That pauses her. Rocks her back on her springs.
‘And your corpse?’ she asks. ‘The one you found?’
‘That’s not Williams, no.’
I give Watkins two slim files, one on each of the two women.
Photos. Dental records. Heights and weights.
Unless Bethan Williams grew four inches, changed her eye colour, and found a way to replace an amalgam-filled rear molar with a new and flawless tooth, the two girls are different.
Watkins looks at me. Says, ‘OK, so there’s something here.’
Yes! She thinks so too. I say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Worth investigating.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And anything you do will be under DI Burnett’s supervision, of course . . .’
She continues. I scatter yes ma’ams whenever there’s a gap. She says (tersely, uncomfortably) that Essylt can continue to work through the plastic surgery stuff I gave her, but I’m not to issue any further instructions without her, Watkins’s, express consent. (‘Yes, m’am. Thank you.’)
And then, the best bit of all, the only good part, in truth. Watkins says, ‘The plastic surgery, OK. That’s covered. What else?’
What else: my favourite question.
11
Neil Williams sits at table under the light.
The room smells of dog and cat and mud and maybe sheep. An oil-fired range cooker. Lino that’s unsticking itself from the floor beneath. Boots drying on a few sheets of newspaper. A flat
cap, tweed, shiny with wear. A collie that barked twice at me when I entered, then jumped back onto the collapsing springs of an old armchair, where it’s been quietly licking itself ever since.
‘Bethan? I still think she might come back one day,’ Williams says. ‘I mean, I know that’s not what . . . I know that. But you know, it could happen. She was sixteen when she went, so she’d be coming up twenty-five now. Her whole life still ahead of her.’
The right answer to that – the right police-ish answer – would combine sympathy with firmness. A little splash of, ‘If you say so, sir,’ with a good, thick spread of, ‘Unfortunately, in these cases, the data tells us . . .’
I don’t take that option. Say, to my own surprise and certainly to his, ‘I vanished once. I mean, I was tiny. Only two. I remember nothing about it. But . . .’ And I tell him the story. The true story of my murky appearance in this world, when I simply appeared – from nowhere, unannounced and unspeaking – in the back of my father’s Jag. ‘My adoptive father, that is. I’ve never met my biological parents.’
Williams stares at me in surprise.
I say, ‘So yes, it can happen. I’m trying to track down my original parents now. Maybe somewhere there’s a father, like you, wanting to know what happened to his little girl. Believing that that little girl might yet walk through the door. And of course it’s unlikely. These things are. But could it happen? Yes. Yes, I hope so.’
Williams – weathered face, brown hands, misting blue eyes – wants to reach out, to pat my hand, I think, or arm. He pulls back from that gesture, but taps a pile of papers on the table instead. Bills. A seed catalogue. Something to do with farm machinery.
‘Just a minute, love,’ he tells me.
Leaves the room.
The collie watches him go, but doesn’t move.
I offer the dog my hand and he, somewhat grudgingly, licks it.
I get up. Open the fridge, which is mostly empty. A paper bag with tomatoes. A loaf of bread. A half-eaten tin of beans. A smeary packet of butter. Milk, within its sell-by date. Bacon.
I find the kettle, put it on. The handle is sticky with something, I don’t know what. The counter too.
There’s a plant on the window sill which has dried up completely. Is now only sticks and barren compost. I find a bin and throw it away. By the bin, a little curl of dead leaves, chestnut and sycamore, from the trees outside. Tramped in here or wind blown. I throw those away too.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 8