Then, one evening, one of my swimming pool Thursdays with Bev, I get a text. Cesca Evans. Asking me if I’m around over the weekend. ‘Maybe meet up? Cxx’.
Cesca Evans is the daughter of a rich guy – a rich, bad, murdering guy – who I helped to put away for a beautifully well-deserved life sentence. You’d think that the man’s daughter wouldn’t become a friend of mine, but she has, or sort of has, I can’t quite tell.
In any case, some time after we first met, she invited me to an exhibition where she had some silkscreen prints on display. The email was a round-robin thing, it wasn’t personalised in any way, but I still thought that she probably wouldn’t have included me on the guest list unless she actually wanted to see me. So I went. Put on a dark dress and silver jewellery, the sort of thing I thought I was meant to wear, and turned up.
The gallery was in Clerkenwell, London. Achingly hip. An old brick warehouse made over to look twenty-first century stylish. Lots of people. Young, metropolitan, confident, cool.
I got the clothes thing wrong. I was way too formal. Too by-the-book. The guys were in dark jeans and linen jackets. One man was there in a long-sleeved black T-shirt with a violently frayed collar, a hobo-type woollen scarf and an oversized felt fedora with a floppy brim.
The women were either carefully dressed-down, exquisitely selected street-grunge, or boldly dressed in the kind of clothes no high street store ever sells. Things that looked newly collected, hand-stitched, from some new local twenty-something designer. The sort of jewellery you’d talk about by starting your sentences, ‘Oh, this piece?’
Not long after I entered, Cesca saw me and waved, but looked nervous. Didn’t approach. Then, forty minutes later, when I stepped outside for a joint, she joined me, leaning over an iron guardrail and puffing smoke into the night.
We spoke stiltedly for a few minutes – she thanked me for coming, I told her I thought her prints were great – then, abruptly, she invited me to some kind of after-party.
I went. Didn’t do much, but didn’t disgrace myself. Left at two in the morning, got a hug and a kiss as I went.
Since then we’ve met up twice more. Once in London, once in Cardiff. I think I’m not a friend exactly, but somebody she’s collected. A person stored up for possible future use, or perhaps just as a curiosity she likes to get out and examine now and again. In any case, she calls me her ‘Strange Detective’ or ‘Strange Police Person’ and begins her texts to me, ‘Hi Strange, . . .’ or, more often now, just ‘Hi S, . . .’
Anyway. I say yes to meeting up. Don’t hear back, but I suspect I was only ever just one option on a menu of choices.
The next day, however, I get a slightly peremptory text asking for my address. ‘See you 5ish. Cxx’.
Leave work a bit early. Pick some food up on the way home. I’m not sure what people like Cesca eat, so buy some upmarket nibbles – Italian salamis, grilled artichokes, ciabatta – in case they’re needed. Feel like I’m making the same mistake: the dark dress and silver jewellery one. But since I don’t know what the right foodstuff-provisioning methodology is, I stick with the one I’ve got.
Cesca arrives forty minutes late in a new silver BMW 1-series. Dark, patterned trousers worn below a black jumper, silvery-grey cardigan. Nice shoes.
She picks at my salami with long fingers. Wants to explore my house and does. She’s disappointed, I think, at how normal it is. Stupid patch of grass at the back. Boring kitchen, bland living room. Nothing much upstairs.
On the back of the door, a child’s dress. Pink with a white bow. Suitable for an age two to three, something like that.
Cesca fingers it.
She doesn’t ask the obvious question, but her curiosity is obvious, so I tell her, briefly, the story of my strange arrival in the world.
‘They just found you in the back of a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘How old were you?’
I point to the dress. ‘That age. Maybe two or three, something like that.’
‘Didn’t they ask where you’d come from?’
‘Of course they did. I didn’t say anything. Didn’t talk at all for eighteen months. And then, by the time I did, I’d presumably forgotten everything that went before.’
‘Bloody hell, Ess.’
I nod.
‘Do you think . . . I mean, do you ever think . . .?’
Cesca knows I’m not totally right in the head. The first time I met her, I kept losing my shoes, admitted that I’d burgled her flat, then made myself a joint from her own stash.
I know what her question is and say, ‘Do I ever think there’s a connection? Between my craziness and those missing years? Yes. I do. There has to be.’
She stares at me. There’s something unusually blunt in her gaze at times. Not rude exactly – you sense she’d be equally OK if you were the one asking the questions – but on the outer edge of blunt.
I don’t know if her gaze is expecting a response, but it doesn’t get one. I say nothing and she appears to dismiss the conversation. Loses interest. Goes into my bedroom. Opens cupboards so she can see my wardrobe. Picks around in it, the way I pick at people’s bookshelves.
She’s getting bored. Wondering if she made a bad choice coming here.
I don’t know what I’m meant to be or do to keep hold of her. Don’t know that I really want to keep hold of her. For what reason? She gave me something I prized – the piece of evidence that launched Operation April – but what does she have to offer now? Perhaps this whole friendship thing was a mistake from the start.
Back downstairs, we stand in my kitchen and eat my nibbles. Not properly eat, not even. Pick salami straight from the packet. Tear off bits of bread without warming it. The whole thing feels provisional. Temporary. When Cesca gets a text, she reads and answers it without apology.
When she looks up, she says absently, ‘So, what are you working on?’
I don’t answer her. Not straightaway. I just stand staring. The two of us alone in my kitchen, silent, staring, open-mouthed.
It’s one of those moments which seems vibratory somehow. One of those moments where a right turn, for once, means something decisively different from left.
I say, ‘Do you want to see?’
‘See?’
‘This case I’m working on.’
She has a pause of her own then. A decision to make. Something in her face twitches, but she says, ‘Yes, OK.’
‘Do you have a bag with you? Overnight stuff?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
I go upstairs. Pack a few basics for myself. Nothing much. Within four or five minutes we’re out of the house. She slings a bag from her BMW into my Alfa Romeo, and we’re off. Out of Cardiff, heading north and west.
Pontypridd. Treharris. Aberfan.
Cesca is a Welsh girl, in theory. Her father is born and bred Welsh, and her mother, though English, still keeps a large country house here. But Cesca’s mental geography is different from mine. To me, there’s Cardiff, there are the coastal towns to either side, the valleys above us, the sea below, and a whole wide world which spreads outwards from there.
For Cesca, I think, the globe is mostly dark. Its various bright points – London, New York, Paris, Gstaad – are connected by rushing trains and speeding aircraft. Though Welsh-blooded, she sees the darkling world beyond my car windows the way a tourist might.
When we drive through Aberfan, she says, ‘Aberfan, isn’t that where—?’
‘Yes.’
In October 1966, a colliery spoil tip became unstable. Laid on weak sandstone riven by numerous underground springs, a vast agglomeration of rock and shale started to move. A hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of sodden debris moving so fast that the mass started to liquify. A literal wave of rock.
That wave demolished a farm. Overran a line of terraced homes. Killed some adults, a couple of dozen.
Crushed, buried, suffocated, drowned.
And that wasn’t the worst of it, not ne
arly. Because the kids at Pantglas Junior School had just returned to their classrooms and those classrooms stood directly in the path of the deluge.
They heard the rock coming. Some thought it was a jet, diving to crash. One teacher ordered his children to hide beneath their desks.
Acts of bravery. Defiance of the coming dark.
The rock struck the school. Buried it. Left a silence so profound that not a bird, not a child could be heard. Just the low tinkle of settling rock. A hundred and sixteen children died that day.
A hundred and sixteen.
It later emerged that the National Coal Board had been warned, and warned repeatedly, about their spoil storage, the obvious dangers. Did nothing.
When the coroner began the sad business of recording deaths, he read out the name of one child, reporting the cause of death as asphyxia and multiple injuries. The father interrupted and said, ‘No, sir, buried alive by the National Coal Board.’ The coroner, gently, kindly, suggested the man might not be thinking straight, but the father repeated, his voice faltering only a little, ‘I want it recorded – “Buried alive by the National Coal Board”. That is what I want to see on the record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate.’
I tell Cesca these things and she stares out of the window, trying to read the savagery in these dark hills, the lines of heartbreak.
She says, ‘You seem angry.’
‘Not angry, no.’
‘You are, though.’
Am I? I don’t always know my own feelings well. Have more problems finding them than Cesca does reading tragedy from the landscape.
We drive on.
At Merthyr, we cross the Heads of the Valleys road. Leave the mining towns behind us, drive onwards into the Beacons. I feel the relief I usually feel when I make this trip. Leaving the neon behind. Entering the high hills and the indigo darkness.
I drive a few more miles. Say, ‘Sorry.’
Cesca doesn’t say, ‘For what?’ and I don’t know that I’d have had an answer if she did.
Instead, she says, ‘This case of yours. What is it?’
‘We found a corpse. A girl a bit older than you, a bit younger than me. No rape. No violence.’
I tell her the rest too. Public information only, for the most part. Say where I found her. How I spent that first night. How she was dressed. Her heart condition.
‘So she wasn’t killed?’
‘No. I mean, something was wrong, but not that.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
I don’t answer. Her fingers play with the radio, looking for something. She doesn’t find it, whatever it might have been.
We come off the main road. Start slowing down as we get close. Hazel hedges and moonlight. A thin, unconfident mist.
Once, we encounter sheep in the road and I have to slow right down, nose them ahead of me until a mud track allows them scamper away into the night. We get to the little hump-backed bridge above the village. A stone arch, a glimpse of rushing water beneath. Then the village itself.
‘Where are we going?’
‘The place she was last seen. In here.’
A few hundred yards outside the main part of the village, I make the turn into the monastery. Park not in the courtyard this time, but the gravelled area behind the guest house. We park next to the monastery’s tatty blue van, the one it uses to sell its bread. As far as I’ve seen, it’s the only vehicle the monks have.
I get my bag. Cesca, seeing me, gets hers.
‘This is a hotel?’ Spoken with that High Rising Terminal.
‘A monastery.’
Cesca’s face changes quickly, fluidly. Settles on some expression I can’t quite read under the dim glow of the only external light here. At first I can’t read her, then think maybe I can. Cesca was disappointed by her Strange Police Person’s house, but this – this whole excursion, the crime at its root – is exactly what she wanted from me. A tourist attraction that finally delivers.
As we come round the corner of the guest block, a lone bell starts to toll. Compline. The last service of the day.
I suddenly remember: I haven’t brought a hat. Tell Cesca the thing about women having their hair covered. From the back of my car, I get a hat, a cable-knit thing that keeps my ears warm and no doubt protects my modesty too.
Get back to Cesca, who is adjusting a pashmina round her head and neck. Some dark jewel-coloured thing that somehow completes what had already seemed a perfectly nice-looking outfit. We leave our bags at the foot of the stairs and go over to the chapel door.
Cyril intercepts us. Starts talking – welcoming us, in that graceful, but just too impersonal way of his – when he recognises me.
‘Ah, detective! You’re not here on business again, I hope? No? A short retreat for you both. Please. You will be most welcome.’
He tells us, briefly, about the rules. ‘Between the end of compline and the start of matins, we keep the Great Silence. No word is spoken and please, not even between the two of you, not even in private. No food either. Water may be taken, but that’s all.’
He pauses, smiling, but wants to hear that, yes, we’ve got it.
The man is polite, attentive, but I notice that Cesca gets full-beam monkishness. I just get the overspill. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the guy knows I’m not the spiritual-retreat type. Perhaps he thinks I’ve already heard his shtick.
In any case, Cesca, I see, responds. Speaks in a low, reverential voice, and keeps plucking at the folds of her pashmina to make sure it’s balanced right.
To either side of us, monks sidle past with little more than a ‘good evening’ or ‘welcome’, but the tolling bell slows to one beat on, one beat off, indicating the service is about to begin.
We go into the chapel. There’s one other civilian there, a pale-faced, beardy guy about ten years older than me. Grey tweed jacket. Intense-looking. We exchange nods.
Cesca doesn’t take the back pew, the way Carlotta was said to have done. She goes up to the front. Not into the monks’ stalls, but the first pew back. Genuflects. Crosses herself. Steps into the pew and kneels in prayer.
I can’t quite handle genuflecting, but I can sit down and shut up, so I do that instead.
The service is longer than I’d expected. Three psalms, spoken not sung. The Gloria. The Nicene Creed. A canticle of some sort, then a chanted hymn to Mary. We tell her that she is ‘more honourable than the cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim’, though since I’ve never met her, nor seen those beasts besides which she is more honourable and glorious, I feel my statements lack a certain dependability. Then a couple of chanted prayers. Then a kyrie eleison which is short enough, Lord help us, except that we repeat it forty times. Then another prayer. Then another one. Then another one. And then we’re cooked. One of the monks is blessing us and we’re all forgiving each other.
Cesca has been surprisingly intent all this time, making her chants and responses with absorbed conviction. And now, as the service ends, it’s as though she bobs up from whatever place she’s been, looking around her, re-gathering her bearings.
Before we file out, though, one last rite.
The monks gather by the icon nearest the altar and murmur a prayer in Greek, I think, crossing themselves when they’re finished. Then the same with the next icon. And so on down the length of the south wall. Four icons in total.
Intense Guy in Tweed hangs back in silent prayer. Cesca and I drift bamboozled, so we just follow the monkish herd and say amen whenever it seems like a good idea.
We troop outside.
The air is chilling down to frost. The courtyard cobbles carry an extra glitter. Above us, a few dozen stars exchange private confidences, while those monks who hadn’t already greeted us before the service do so now, in silence. Folded hands and smiling eyes.
Beyond us, one of the pigs becomes suddenly excited, moving around its pen, scratching its bulk against the low wooden door. Then we he
ar it grunt in piggy satisfaction as it lies back down.
We smile and go our separate ways. I take Carlotta’s old room, of course. Cesca is next to me. Intense Tweed Guy goes off towards the village somewhere, a local man. He reminds me, just a little, of a man I once arrested for a firearms possession offence. The same intensity of demeanour. The same darkly flashing eyes.
In my room, I dig a toothbrush from my bag and brush my teeth.
Sit on my bed.
Why am I here? Don’t know.
Why did I bring Cesca? Don’t know.
I hadn’t really expected her to get all holy, but then I had no great expectations either way. After all, I barely know the woman.
The walls here are nothing much. Paper thin, in the serviceable old cliché. I hear Cesca moving around next door. Running the shower, getting ready for bed.
I’m not tired.
Didn’t bring anything to read.
There’s a Bible by the bed, but I’m all bibled up for now.
I wish I had a gun with me. Not to fire, especially. Not for protection even. Just to have. I used to like sleeping with it. The gun just a hand-snatch distant from my pillow and my dreams all cushiony soft for its presence.
I open the door and sit on the bed, just to see what that feels like.
Much the same, it turns out, but colder.
I leave the door open.
Moonlight and frost talk together in hushed whispers. Their own Great Silence.
Aberfan: when the queen visited the village the autumn after the disaster – paying her respects, honouring the dead – a three-year-old girl presented her with a posy. The attached card read, ‘From the remaining children of Aberfan’, and the queen almost broke down in tears.
I try to feel Carlotta’s presence in this room of mine, but can’t. Which doesn’t mean much. I’m not psychic.
At some stage, well after midnight, I sleep. My version of sleep, that is.
Jumpy. Alert. Undergunned.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 10