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

by Harry Bingham

  Stand up without the pen.

  Burnett retrieves it and hands it to me. I stand there holding it, wondering why he’s just given me a pen, and he has to remind me about the whole sign-in thing. Shows me again where I’m meant to sign.

  I sign.

  Burnett takes the pen and sign-in pad out of my hands. Says, ‘You’ve put your name as “Carlotta”. You’ve just signed in as a corpse.’

  I shrug. Like I give a fuck. Like anyone gives a fuck.

  Burnett, it turns out, doesn’t give a fuck either. He just stares at me a moment longer, then clatters the pad back to the receptionist.

  I count my breaths in and out. Try to feel my body.

  Meantime, a man – grey suit, calm, sensible eyes – arrives. Shakes hands.

  In-two-three-four-five.

  He tells me his name. Michael Kennedy.

  I tell him mine. The Fiona one, not the Carlotta one.

  Out-two-three-four-five.

  My Little Miss Normal act is obviously going a bit wrong somewhere, because Burnett says, ‘Fiona? Are you all right?’

  I say, ‘The Lubyanka. The old KGB headquarters. Russians used to joke that the place was the tallest building in Russia. Had to be, because you could see Siberia from the basement.’

  I laugh.

  Too much, for too long, then notice the two men aren’t laughing, so I shut up.

  Those male glances pass over my head. The one that asks is-she-always-like-this and the one that says don’t-ask-me-mate-I-hardly-know-her.

  I don’t care. The glances zoom over the top of my head and do no injury as they pass.

  I think: the Lubyanka. A place of imprisonment.

  That’s why I’m feeling weird.

  Carlotta was imprisoned. Somewhere, somehow. All the care which had been taken of her in death had not been shown to her in life. I know I’ve got some data to support that conclusion – those unshaved legs, those scissor-trimmed nails, that uncertainty about the forensics from the monastery – but my conviction runs far ahead of our still-scanty information.

  My feeling of spaciness, of outright dissociation, increases. It’s one of those times when I feel the dead person almost physically present with me. Her presence more emphatic, more blatantly real, than anything else around me.

  I find myself pecking my left arm with the bunched-up fingers of my right hand. It’s an old gesture. One I used to use to see if I could locate any inner sensation.

  Right now, I think I can feel something, but I’m not sure.

  The men stare at me. Their lips move. They’re probably saying things.

  I think they want me to go upstairs, to some bland conference room, a place of whiteboards and melamine.

  I start to follow them but walk straight into a glass turnstile instead.

  I don’t really feel the thump, but I do feel the glass cold and solid beneath my hands.

  ‘Actually, can we go out somewhere? Get some fresh air? I’m feeling headachey.’

  We go out somewhere.

  Tinworth Street. The Albert Embankment. A place that does coffees.

  The men order grown-up drinks. Coffees. Americanos. The big sizes.

  I’m still aiming for normal but, because my compass is spinning, my journey there is more dizzy than direct.

  I order coffee, because that’s what the men just did and I know it’s a normal, everyday thing to do. Only then I remember that I don’t like coffee, so I amend my order.

  ‘Only can I have that without coffee, please?’ I say, and the man says, ‘Caffeine? You mean without caffeine? You want decaf?’ and I say, ‘Yes, yes, decaf, exactly.’

  We step outside.

  Red plastic chairs under red umbrellas. Women walking past in padded coats.

  Plane trees and traffic and those scuffed-up urban lawns.

  Carlotta, grimly, rattles chains at me. Is annoyed with me for having anything to do with this workaday world of the real.

  Kidnapped. Imprisoned. What else, Carlotta, what else?

  Burnett and the other guy head for a table in the far corner of nowhere, not wanting our incredibly insightful and thrillingly secret conversation to be overheard.

  Everyone exchanges business cards, even me. I usually forget to bring them.

  Burnett starts talking about Carlotta. He uses that other name, Alina, but at least the gap between what’s in my head and what’s here in the outside world begins to narrow.

  I say, ‘Sorry,’ but no one listens.

  Burnett lays out the facts of our investigation with swift, professional ease.

  Kennedy nods. When I manage to listen, he’s telling us about a case, ‘a few years back. A bunch of Lithuanians snatch another Lithuanian from a bar. They beat him very badly. No particular ransom plan in mind, so they just go to his phone contacts. Put out a ransom demand for two hundred pounds. I’m not kidding. Two hundred quid. By the time we manage to catch up with the victim, the guy’s hurt so badly he spends several weeks on life support.’

  Burnett says something, I don’t hear what.

  I sneak a look at my iPad under the table. Get pictures of Carlotta up on screen. The ones I took. They’re still probably my favourites. The way the shadows and the pooling blood gather into great clots of darkness under Carlotta’s pale skin, her tumbling hair.

  Above my head, the red umbrella snaps in this December wind.

  I can feel my legs, or think I can. I want to peck my arm again, but think I shouldn’t.

  Soon enough, Kennedy starts talking about what we came for. An overview of ‘high-end’ kidnap in the UK.

  ‘OK. The top end of the kidnap scene. That means London, basically. This place has more billionaires than any other city in the world. Way more. Near enough double the number in New York or Moscow, plus loads of super-rich types who aren’t quite in the billionaire bracket. These guys are typically foreign-born. They’re here part time, most likely, and they’re here for safety, for fun, and for business. A mixture of those three.

  ‘The very top end, the billionaire class, they’re basically not at risk. They just have too much security. One or two levels down – the Mishchenkos, those kind of people – it’s a different story. Yes they have security, but there are limits. And those limits mean there are weaknesses.

  ‘So let’s say you decide to target a family like that. You certainly don’t take the dad, because he’s the decision-maker. He’s the one who knows where the money is. You don’t take the mother, because for all you know dad is shagging someone else. You don’t know if you’d be snatching the love of his life or just solving a problem.

  ‘Result: you take a child, preferably a daughter. Your girl Alina would be a classic choice of target. A party-loving twenty-something. She won’t want any heavy-duty man-marking. She doesn’t believe London is unsafe. So, one evening, she leaves a party. She hails a taxi and, ta-daa, it’s not a taxi.’

  A crime so easy, you almost wonder why it doesn’t happen more.

  I sip my coffee, doing my best impression of Ordinary Girl on Planet Normal.

  The coffee tastes a bit like my cooking, like my one-pot tomato-lentil thing when I don’t remember to stir the mixture or turn the heat down. The same rubbery burnedness, the same hint of poisoned exhaust fluids.

  Burnett asks about perpetrators, their likely profile.

  ‘Two basic options,’ Kennedy says. ‘One, this is an intra-Ukrainian thing. Some dispute over money or resources or power that just happens to be playing itself out on the streets of London. And if that’s what’s going on, then good luck. The perpetrators will be abroad. Negotiations will happen abroad. Any settlement will take place abroad.’

  I say, ‘That’s not our thing. I mean, that isn’t what we’ve got.’

  The men look at me, so I explain. The Mishchenkos were very quick to come to Cardiff. They were plainly anxious for information. And the fact that they flew to Paris very close to the time of the presumed snatch strongly suggests that the locus of their inter
est was somewhere in Western Europe, almost certainly the UK.

  Kennedy agrees with the logic, adding, ‘And the body was OK when you found it. If what we’re seeing is the fallout from some power dispute between Ukrainian gangsters, you either wouldn’t find the body at all, or it would be a mess when you did.’ He shrugs. ‘If you’re sending a message, you might as well send the damn message.’

  Burnett: ‘OK, so this isn’t an all-Ukrainian affair. Option two?’

  ‘Professional kidnap. That’s what this looks like. A well-planned, well-executed snatch for money. Those type of kidnappers generally treat the victim well enough. No rape. No unnecessary violence. Food, drink, housing – all of that stuff usually OK.’

  I say, ‘Leg hair.’

  Kennedy looks at me.

  Burnett says, ‘Her legs hadn’t been shaved for a few days. Sergeant Griffiths here took that as a sign that some kind of coercion had been involved. Coercion up to and including imprisonment.’

  The man stares at me, as though seeking to figure out whether I’m a stickler for beautiful legs. Maybe he’s wondering whether, beneath my grey woollen trousers, I have the slimmest of slim calves and skin like honey silk charmeuse.

  I don’t enlighten him. Just do my dating face. The one that’s mostly blank, but garnished with random hostility.

  I say, ‘She’d had cosmetic surgery. She wouldn’t leave her legs unshaved.’

  ‘Fair enough. Reasonable deduction.’

  Kennedy’s calm agreement settles me further. My two worlds sliding into one.

  Burnett asks more about the normal practice in professional kidnap, ‘if there’s any such thing as normal, that is.’

  ‘Oh definitely, yes,’ Kennedy says. ‘Best practice would be, you take your victim. You get well away from the scene. Get her to a safe house. Check and double-check against pursuit and surveillance. When you’re happy, but as soon as you can, you contact the family. Basic message is, “We’ve got your daughter, don’t talk to the cops, start counting your money.” If that’s what happened here, then the top-end families, the Mishchenko types will go straight to one of the K&R consultancies right here in London. With these high-end incidents, it’s very rare for us to be involved before the K&R types get in there.’

  Burnett seems surprised at that. I can’t tell if I am or not, but I don’t think my face has his we’re-not-in-Carmarthen-any-more startlement.

  Kennedy continues, ‘Look, London is probably the world centre for the K&R business. It’s got everything. International outlook. Big insurance industry. Lots of money. And any number of ex-spies, ex-Special Forces, ex-law enforcement types keen to increase their income.’

  He waves his hand outward, beyond the plane trees and the red umbrellas, over the street.

  At first I don’t know what he means, but then I do.

  Our view is blocked by an old warehouse, but beyond its walls a grey Thames rolls east. Only a few miles now and those cold waters will merge with a chilly ocean. Flat estuary sands and the call of gulls. But on this same river, only a few yards upstream from where we sit, the MI6 ziggurat commands the waves. On the far bank, and only a little way downstream, MI5 has its own glossy offices.

  A cluster of spies, a murmur of agents.

  Billionaires, spies and secrets.

  I say, ‘Those K&R guys. Let’s say the Mishchenkos hire one of them. Let’s assume they have the wit to pick a quality operator. What happens then? Does the K&R guy say, “We have to get the police involved,” or does the whole thing happen in the shadows?’

  Kennedy laughs. ‘Half and half. Look, the K&R people are pulled in two directions. On the one hand, they know us. They work with us all the time. They know we’re not stupid. They know we share their objective, which is always, always, always the safe recovery of the victim. Plus they know we have resources that they can’t access.’

  He waves his hand again in the direction of the river.

  Resources: one of the world’s three or four best intelligence services. One of its two or three best eavesdropping and decryption services. Access to Special Forces with long experience of hostage rescue.

  Resources that would be quite nice to have, you’d think.

  I say, ‘So the K&R guys mostly want to bring you in . . .’

  ‘Right, but their clients might or might not agree. They don’t always trust police forces, even ours—’

  ‘And let’s just say that the clients in question flew to Paris to meet their K&R guy, specifically in order to stay out of British jurisdiction, then lied about the trip when being interrogated in a police interview room in Cardiff—’

  ‘Then I’d have to guess that those clients wanted to keep the whole affair nice and quiet and well away from any nasty British coppers.’

  And that’s it, I think. Our case in a nutshell.

  Alina Mishchenko was meant to be on a yacht, but a random engine failure takes her back to London. No parents. No supervision. Any previous security plans thrown into disarray.

  And one night, she takes one tiny risk that she shouldn’t and learns that, yes, she should have listened more closely to Daddy.

  Duct tape over her mouth. Ditto with her hands and feet. Change of vehicle. Then, hell with it: you take her anywhere. Not out of the country most likely. Borders, especially sea borders, attract too much attention. But an industrial unit in East London? A Scottish croft. A Birmingham lock-up. Or – why not? – a little farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons.

  Shortly afterwards, Alina’s parents receive a message. We’ve got your girl. The parents get on the phone. Find a K&R guy they like. An instinct of caution, some ex-Soviet distrust of spies and policemen, makes them hold the meetings in secret, out of earshot, in Paris.

  And then – what? Alina’s fibrotic lungs aren’t enjoying the terror, the change of scene. She’s scared, she’s breathless, her heart’s under pressure. She’s all set for total ventricular collapse and a sweet little ransom deal is taken abruptly off the table.

  That’s a good story, credible in every way, except what kind of kidnappers feed a victim barley-bread still warm from a monastic bakery? Or let her out to pray for a couple of days before dying? There’s more to this story than the one we’ve sketched so far, and much of what we have sketched is pure supposition. But still: there’s that sense of threads beginning to tie together.

  My coffee’s cold, but still mostly undrunk. I sip a bit more, but it still tastes like exhaust fluid.

  Burnett says, ‘Somewhere in town, there’s a K&R man who knows a fuck of a lot more than we do.’

  Kennedy nods. ‘Yes. And given the way this incident turned out, you’d have to say that client confidentiality doesn’t have quite the importance it did.’

  I suddenly realise that Kennedy has an authority I wasn’t expecting. I was expecting some spotty analyst type, and Kennedy has neither the spots nor the lowly demeanour. I sneak another look at his card, my brain clearer than it was the first time.

  Michael Kennedy. Head of the NCA’s Anti-Kidnap and Extortion Unit.

  A unit which is involved in every single case of domestic kidnap.

  Which is involved whenever British citizens are taken hostage overseas.

  Iraq. Palestine. Mexico. Nigeria. Pakistan. Hundreds of cases a year. Roughly one a day.

  One hell of a job.

  I tap the card. An Ordinary Girl on Planet Normal. Like that. I tap it the way that girl would.

  Say, ‘Mike, I’ve a feeling that Alun and I would quite like a chat with that K&R guy. I think we’d very much like to meet him.’

  Kennedy – calm guy, calm face, and as experienced as hell – nods.

  ‘I’ll make some calls.’

  22

  Christmas. I love it. All of it. The lights, the shopping, the whole thing.

  I love it the way I love having someone press their face close up to mine and tell me to have a good time, a really good time. Like that, only with yellow teeth and garlic breath and a damp, too-long
squeeze of my upper arm.

  The next day, the day after London, I start my Christmas shopping. Do what I have to do. Make a list of people I have to buy presents for. Think of presents. Buy them.

  The actual gift-giving, I like. Thinking of things that my mother would like, or my sisters, or Buzz, or Bev, or Ed Saunders: that part’s OK, it’s actually nice. It’s the process of buying them I don’t handle well. Shops always turn me slightly crazy, but then you throw in the glittery Christmas trees, the red-and-green promotional stickers, and the way everything seems to be pawing at me and saying, buymebuymebuyme, as though humans were only ever £24.99 away from knowing true happiness – I don’t survive that stuff for long.

  I shop in forty-minute blocks. When I’ve reached my forty minutes, even if I have an item in my hand and am next in the queue at the till, I walk outside. Sit under a tree somewhere. Read a book.

  The thing I’m reading at the moment – Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity – put a bullet in the head of old, descriptivist theories of naming. So, back in the day, people thought that a name was basically a description. Aristotle? He was an ancient Greek guy, big long beard, top-top philosopher dude, taught Alexander the Great. That was Aristotle. That’s what the name meant.

  Saul Kripke pointed out that this idea was nonsense. What if Aristotle had died in early infancy? All those descriptions would curl up and die, yet it would be daft to say that it wouldn’t have been Aristotle who’d have died. We needed, he told us, a different way of thinking about names. A kind of causal harpoon that joined a name to the thing itself. A harpoon whose barb would still bite no matter how things had turned out.

  I’ve read Naming and Necessity about a million times and it’s still one of my favourite ever philosophy texts.

  When I’m not shopping or reading Kripke, I look at my Carlotta photos. Her face, dead. Her body, dead. Photos of her, and of Bethan Williams. Photos taken when she was alive and happy and who is now – what?

  ‘Girl raped and murdered by a wild man of the hills?’ Or ‘Girl who vanished for no known reason and is now living in London/working as a shopgirl/living under an assumed identity in Albuquerque’? We don’t know.