A name without a description.
Kripke’s logic is so good, he should have been a detective.
I do another round of shopping.
Downton Abbey boxset for Mam. Pestle and mortar for Ed Saunders, because his current one is chipped.
Last forty-three minutes then run outside.
Sit under a tree.
Read Saul Kripke telling me things I already know.
Also look at my iPad.
My Carlotta photos, my Bethan Williams photos – and a video that Burnett sent me. The SAS one. It’s two and a half minutes long. Len Roberts and a girl, Bethan, walking up a field to some woods.
Roberts is in the lead, impatient. Urging the girl forwards. But there’s no compulsion. He doesn’t touch her, not once, except a time when she half-slips and he catches her arm.
The video is shot at night, and from distance, but Len Roberts is clear enough. I have no problems recognising his figure, black and green in the image-intensifier. He’s carrying a bag. Equipment of some sort, but it’s totally unclear what. Bethan Williams, I personally can’t identify one way or the other, but the images will have been analysed to death and probably shown, confidentially, to family members or school teachers, or others capable of making the identification. In any case, Burnett tells me there was no practical doubt.
The two figures reach the treeline and vanish.
Image intensifiers aren’t thermal things. They don’t track infra-red. They just take whatever illumination is available and intensify it. When the two figures reached the treeline, what little light there was proved insufficient and the image was lost. The SAS guy in question kept his equipment trained on the area for – Burnett tells me – a further two hours, but saw nothing. No Roberts. No Bethan. No nothing.
I haven’t completed my list of shopping targets, but before I know what I’m doing, I’m in my car, heading out of town.
Pontypridd. Merthyr. Glynneath.
Llanglydwen.
Not Llanglydwen proper, but the top end of the valley, higher even than the Williams’s farmhouse.
I find the approximate place where that that video was shot. A muddy gate. A sloping field. A fringe of wood, hunkered down against the grey hills rising above.
Park the car. Fleece. Boots.
There’s more wind than there was in Cardiff, and it’s colder up here, but it’s all fine. At least there aren’t any Christmas trees. No Now Only £24.99.
I walk up through the field. No sheep here now but the weak December grass has been cut and chopped by a hundred sharply cloven hooves. By the time I reach the top of the field, my boots are claggy with dark mud.
A wire fence divides off the wood from the field. There’s a stile, but so collapsed, I just climb the wire, using an overhanging ash tree for support.
The wood itself sits in a fold of land just below the main rise of the hill. It’s perhaps only fifty or a hundred yards from field to bare hillside, but the trees extend in both directions. More than a mile up to my right. Not as far to my left, but still extensive. Roberts could have entered at any point along the width of the valley. The spot where he was filmed isn’t particularly close to his cottage. Isn’t particularly close to anything.
I decide to plough more or less vertically through the wood, heading for the hill.
The going gets a bit rough. The parts that aren’t thicketed with trees and brambles are a tumble of loose scree and grey rock.
At the upper edge of the wood, I’m stopped by a wall of rock.
The wall is hardly impenetrable. There are places where the rocks rise only a foot or two higher than me, and plenty of places where muddy chimneys sneak up between the little buttresses.
Beyond the rock, a few last trees, hawthorn mostly, slanted and flattened by the wind. No place to hide there and enough starlight to have given those SAS guys a good enough view.
But it’s not the hawthorns or the gleam of hill that hold my attention, but a brown pool, stagnant beneath the cliff. The pool is not especially impressive, extending only a few feet out from the rock itself, filling the little dip of land where the ground has pulled away from the stone. The width isn’t much greater – twelve feet, maybe fifteen – the sort of feature which might easily be obliterated through the course of a single dry summer.
And yet – it holds my gaze.
The curve of the pool below, the rock above conspire to produce something like a large brown eye. Unblinking. Disconcerting.
We stare at each other for a bit, then I move on. Traversing the upper line of the wood for a few hundred yards in each direction. The little rocky band comes and goes, in some places quite distinct, in others hardly there at all. No other pools. The odd dark band on the rock, where seeping water blackens it, but otherwise nothing.
Why did Len Roberts bring Bethan Williams here? Of all places, why here?
I go back to the pool. The unblinking eye.
The turbid brown is ruffled a little, but only a little, by the tetchily fitful wind.
I prod the pool with a stick. At maximum depth, the water’s three feet, no more. But it’s not mostly that deep. Mostly, you can see through the coffee-coloured water to the rocks and silt beneath.
The Dyfed-Powys team would certainly have checked the pool for the presence of a corpse. You wouldn’t have to drag it, even. Just get your most junior constable to get in there and fish around. It would only take a moment or two to ascertain if Bethan Williams was lying there or not.
So clearly not.
Yet Roberts came here with Bethan and the girl was never seen again.
I poke at the water with my stick. No corpses bob to the surface. Just some bubbles that stink of methane.
I call Burnett. Tell him where I am.
‘Why?’ he says.
‘Look, did you guys drain the pool, or what?’
‘Drain it? It’s about two feet deep.’ He asks me again why I’m there.
I tell him the truth: that I couldn’t hack the Christmas shopping. Ask if there’s a garden centre anywhere near here. Ystradgynlais maybe.
He says yes. Tells me where. Hangs up.
I drive to the garden centre. Buy hosepipe and secateurs.
Drag both things back to my stupid pool, which looks smaller and more boring than when I first encountered it. The weather has worsened too. A frown of cloud. Quick, sharp scatters of rain, striking my face like flung hail.
I know the theory of siphoning things, or think I do, but the actual practice takes me more time than I expect. Cut my first bit of hose too short. Cut the second bit too long.
But I’m persistent – a pain in the arse, Jackson says – and I get there in the end. My hands are so cold I can’t really feel them any more, and I end up getting water over the top of my boots too. But still. I get a bit of hosepipe drawing water up out of the pond and trickling it down the hill instead. Weight my hose with flat plates of rock so it can’t move around. Then think, since I don’t have long till it gets dark, I might as well get the rest of the hose working for me too. Cut more lengths of hose. Five sections. All properly in place. All drawing water out of the pond.
Six pipes pouring water down the hill.
I start looking for signs that the water level is dropping. Watch to see the soft mud and clammy rocks of the pool bottom rising up out of the murk.
Nothing.
I place twigs and leaves to mark the boundary of the pond. Walk down to my car. Get a joint. Walk back.
The water still pours from my hosepipes, but the water still laps at my boundary markers, just as it did before.
No change.
I smoke my joint. Tuck my hands under my arms in a vain attempt to warm them up.
How long does it take to empty a pond? If the pond is fifteen feet long, by three or four feet wide, by an average depth of no more than eighteen inches or two feet, how long before my hoses drain it completely? Or forget draining it completely: how long before the damn thing drops the two inches that will
prove to me the damn thing is emptying at all?
As night starts to thicken around the hills, as the temperature starts to fall further, I see a farmer out on a tractor. Delivering hay, or feed, or something to his sheep. Headlamps in the gathering dark
I go to my car. Get another joint, a torch, a blanket.
I can’t see Roberts’s cottage from here, but I can see Williams’s farmhouse. Lights on, a dog barking.
A rural evening. A Welsh December.
No feed for me. No hay. No tractor.
Climb back up the hill. Smoke my weed. Wish my blanket was thicker.
And still the water drains. And still the pool remains unemptied.
23
I don’t go home that night. Can’t.
Can’t face the drive back. Can’t face my house. Can’t face all the things which go with that place, that life.
All the same, I can’t stay here. By nine o’clock, I’m bone cold. By ten o’clock, I’m even colder yet it’s still only a sudden burst of rain, backed by a growl of thunder, that drives me from my spot. Down through the bigger oak and ash trees to the tangle of haw and blackthorn by the fence. Stab myself on the wire as I climb over, then lose my footing and slide several muddy feet downhill on my bum.
By the time I make it back to my car, I’m wet through and stupid-cold.
Engine on. Heating up. Brain off.
When the stony cold in my chest and belly starts to shrink back a little, I start the car, let in the clutch, start to drift down the hill.
I wonder vaguely if I’ll head for the monastery. Free bed, free food, and if anyone’s pissed off that I’m using the place as a hotel, I’ll canticle my way through matins till they’re happy.
But that’s not there where my wheels stop.
They stop at the bottom of Len Roberts’s drive. I don’t turn off the engine – I still need that precious heat – but I do bump off the road onto a verge shaggy with long grass and fallen willowherb.
Stay there.
I still don’t know if we have one case here or two. Don’t know if the Carlotta case links to the Bethan Williams one or not. If had to bet, I’d say yes, but criminal investigation is about evidence, not betting. If the two cases are connected though, I’d say they’re beginning to knit together very nicely.
These profound thoughts are interrupted by a tap at the window.
A brown finger, horn-nailed in the faint light from my car.
Len Roberts.
I wind my window down.
‘Good evening, Mr Roberts.’
‘Evening.’
I say nothing. He says nothing.
It’s still raining. Not hard any more, but with a gentle constancy. Now I’m slightly less cold, I don’t mind it. Just let the clean rain wash in through the opening.
‘Rain,’ he says.
I nod and agree.
He says, ‘Maybe that’s why she ain’t draining.’
‘Maybe.’
He knows and I know that it’s been dry most of the day. I don’t know how Roberts knew I was up by the pond, but if he can move quietly enough to catch badger and fox, he can move quietly enough that I won’t see or hear him. It strikes me he could move furtively enough that he’d have been aware of any SAS presence all those years back.
‘They looked there,’ he tells me. ‘Four police in them fluorescent jackets.’
‘I don’t think Bethan Williams is in that pool,’ I say.
‘That’s what they wanted. They wanted it simple.’
‘It’s how policework operates, Mr Roberts. Most of the time, things are simple.’
He grins at that. White teeth flashing through his beard.
‘Things are simple,’ he repeats. ‘Everything is if you looks at it right.’
Silence.
Silence and darkness and the gently insistent rain.
I shouldn’t be here, not really. Not having this conversation.
If a police officer has a conversation one-on-one with a material witness, with no recording, no lawyer, no nothing, that conversation is inadmissable in court. Worse still, its very existence risks destroying the usability of any evidence you may collect under proper conditions at a later stage.
When I saw Roberts before, he wasn’t a material witness to anything. The Bethan Williams inquiry had long since folded its tents. The Carlotta-Alina enquiry had no especial reason to worry about him. But now? With that undraining pool and his flashing smile?
The good DS Fiona Griffiths would say, ‘Good night, Mr Roberts,’ and drive home to her safe, bland new-build in Pentwyn. Would report her guesses in full to Alun Burnett. Would allow her superior officers to make key operational decisions about the investigation in hand.
Unfortunately, however, the bad DS Griffiths has noticed that her superiors don’t always make decisions which accord with the way she wants to do things, and so it’s not altogether a surprise that the words, ‘Good night, Mr Roberts,’ fail to exit my mouth.
Instead, I say, ‘Listen, is there any chance I could stay in your cottage tonight?’
I can. He says I can.
The place is as cold and as damp as it was, but Roberts shows me where I can find firewood and matches. Leaves me to make heat, while he goes down to his shack to fetch food. I’m not sure what it is that he brings me – he claims chicken – but it tastes fine. Both bowl and spoon seem reasonably clean. I brought some chocolate out of my car and we sit there in the orange light of the fire, eating it. Judy joins us too, sitting with Roberts but friendly enough.
I don’t want to sleep in either of the bedrooms upstairs, but Roberts fetches me some blankets and I pull some sofa cushions down in front of the fire. Apart from the smell of damp things steaming, and mould spores refreshing themselves in the unnaccustomed warmth, it’s an OK place to be. Companionable.
Staring into the fire, I ask, ‘What was it like? All that time the police were bashing away at you, trying to get a confession. What was it really like?’
He shrugs. He isn’t, I think, very introspective. Things happen – rain, wind, sex, police raids – then things change. The sun shines, turnips grow. Badgers either walk into his traps or they don’t.
He says, ‘I know what I’ve done and what I haven’t.’
That’s what everyone thinks of course, what they want to be true. But it isn’t. People confabulate. Reshape memories. Take difficult episodes and reconstruct them as narrative. We are liars even to ourselves.
I say, ‘Do you have a spade? And, I don’t know, a pick-axe?’
‘Mattock.’
‘Mattock?’
‘He’s like a pick, only with an adze. You’ll want him for lifting stones.’
‘And you have one?’
He tells me yes and tells me where I can find it. That grinning intensity is there. Excitement peeping out like a root that’s been uncovered, a buried rock.
We talk. We watch the fire. I yawn. Roberts leaves.
The next morning, the weather still looks dour. Trembling on the brink of more rain, more thunder. I do walk back up the hill to my pond. The hoses are still there, still draining. The water level hasn’t changed at all.
The two cases. Bethan Williams and Alina-Carlotta. Connected or not connected? Two cases or one?
I still don’t know but those hoses say one. The unemptying pond says the same. That unblinking, peaty eye.
I pull the hoses out. Throw them away. Walk down the hill and drive home. Bath-time.
24
Police headquarters, Carmarthen. Monday morning.
I’m there early, as before. A bag of artery-destroying pastries, as before.
This time, though, Burnett half-expects the ambush. Sweeps the carpark with a suspicious gaze and locates me before I’ve even clambered out of my car.
‘Morning,’ he says, an observation so obvious you’d think that a professional detective – a detective inspector, no less – would refrain from making it.
‘And a very fine and beau
tiful one, may I say, sir? Carmarthenshire at her loveliest.’
Burnett gazes at a horizon heavy with oncoming rain. A press of cloud, grey-bottomed and laden with threat.
We stomp our way into the building. Upstairs.
‘This will be about . . .?’
‘Our inquiry, sir. Our happily re-invigorated inquiry.’
On entering his office, Burnett apprehends the bag of pastries and starts to interrogate its contents, with his eyes first, then his teeth.
‘This weekend. In Llanglydwen. What the bloody hell were you up to?’
‘Taking a look at that pond. I did tell you.’
‘Fiona, that pond is about yea long and yea deep. It was fully investigated at the time.’
‘I know. Four officers in hi-vis jackets.’
‘Well . . .’ Burnett is exasperated with me, but hasn’t yet detonated. I don’t have long, though. I’m like James Bond fiddling with the warhead as the digits count down to zero.
I say, ‘If you drain water out of something, and the thing never gets any emptier, what does that tell you?’
‘You drained the pool?’
‘No. I tried, but I couldn’t.’ I tell him what I did and what I found.
‘Well, I don’t know, but it rained, didn’t it? The damn thing probably just refilled.’
I shake my head at that. My impatience grappling with his. I don’t mention the long hours I sat watching the undraining waters – I try to avoid revealing the depths of my obsessiveness – but I do say, ‘Look, maybe that pool is enormous. Like it extends a long way under the hill. Maybe my hoses weren’t draining it, because the thing was far bigger than it looks.’
‘A giant underground lake? That’s your theory?’
‘Or it was refilling all the time. Suppose you took a stream and hid it under a mountain of stone. Hid it so effectively, that all you could see is one little backwater. No matter how much you tried to drain that little backwater, it would never get any smaller, not unless you start sucking up the whole damn stream.’
Burnett stares at me. ‘I believe you were seconded to the Ystradfflur investigation. The one that has led us to Alina Mishchenko and a possible kidnap case, correct?’
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 17