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

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The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 18

by Harry Bingham


  I don’t say anything, just let Burnett pin me with his gaze while his hand seeks and finds a Danish pastry. In my opinion, it’s not OK for senior officers to give you a bollocking while their bloodstream is being replenished by baked goods of your own providing, but that’s my personal opinion only. I don’t know how things work in Dyfed-Powys.

  ‘Fiona, does the water-level in a random pool above Llanglydwen have anything to do with a possible – and I’m stressing that word, “possible” – kidnap inquiry in relation to Alina Mishchenko?’

  Since I don’t instantly answer – which is a pity, since the word ‘yes’ would have been a good, clear, and simple response – Burnett fills the silence by saying, ‘At the moment, we have one corpse. One. The victim, a certain Alina Mishchenko, died from natural causes, but under circumstances that might suggest professional kidnap. We have asked the country’s most senior kidnap specialist to investigate that hypothesis using his own extensive contacts in the London K&R community. We will await any further developments with interest but, in the meantime, can I remind you that we don’t actually have a case. You know, an actual case with an actual crime that we can actually prosecute.’

  I don’t really know what people like me are meant to say to people like Burnett after speeches like that. I mean, the gist of anything I say is clearly meant to be, ‘You are right, O Mighty One. Before your wisdom, I abase myself. Before your authority, I tremble.’ So that part, I get. But how do you say that sort of thing in the kind of English that people actually use? I don’t know. I’ve no idea. On the other hand, since, even if I did know, I’d be most unlikely to say anything of the kind, my ignorance is of that humdrum don’t-know-don’t-care sort, like ‘Why are there glaciers on Pluto?’ or ‘Why are small boys always dripping with snot?’

  Burnett waits around to see if he gets some version of the ‘Mighty One’ speech.

  I try to remember if there actually are glaciers on Pluto, or if that’s something I’ve just made up.

  Then everyone gets bored with the moodily silent waiting, so I say, ‘I’m very good at boring jobs. The ones with lots of lists and paperwork.’

  Burnett nods, but in a way that fails to suggest enthusiasm.

  I say, ‘I thought maybe it might be useful if I had a look at car number plates. The ones you collected a few years back.’

  ‘You want to look at lists of vehicle registration numbers?’

  I don’t say anything. I’m pretty sure I don’t even nod. But my face probably does something to signify that Burnett has correctly heard and interpreted what was, after all, a fairly simple English sentence.

  He says, ‘The Bethan Williams ones?’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  ‘Fiona, there are thousands of them. We didn’t just track vehicles in and out of Llanglydwen, we had cameras on the A4067 too.’

  My face still doesn’t say anything, but if it has a look, the look probably says something like, ‘Well then. That’s good.’

  Burnett continues to stare.

  ‘You want to look at a box full of ten-year-old number plates when we don’t actually have a live inquiry of any sort and your boss in Cardiff, Dennis Jackson, now, he’s happy for you to do that, is he?’

  It’s eight years not ten years. And Dennis Jackson doesn’t know about my number plates or my very interesting Llanglydwen pool, but my face probably looks more yes than no. At any rate, Burnett shakes his head, hollers at someone out in the corridor, and that someone takes me downstairs to an under-lit basement that smells of damp and – just guessing – rats, corpses and mouldering bones. We find a document box containing the registrations collected during that old Bethan Williams inquiry. Burnett has made it pretty clear that if I want to waste my time, he’d prefer me to waste it at Cathays, rather than here in Carmarthen. He also doesn’t want me physically removing originals, so I stand over a photocopier for forty minutes shoving bits of paper into its maw.

  Then stash the box of originals back in the basement with the mouldering Carmarthen bones and take my box of copies back with me to Cathays, there to spend a happy day truffling.

  Maw. Muzzle. Mouth.

  Gob. Gullet. Craw.

  25

  A happy day truffling. That’s the plan, anyway.

  But back home in Cardiff, Watkins keeps trying to get me to help with what she calls the ‘mothballing’ of Operation April. That’s work I detest and keep trying to escape from, turning my phone off and sitting in random corners of the office. The strategy is only partially successful, but even when I do get an hour or two alone with my number plates, they grip me less than they ought to.

  Just for the hell of it, I do a basic PNC search, looking for daughters of wealthy expatriate Londoners who have been found dead in suspicious circumstances. I find a couple of boring things – motorbike accident, drug overdose – but also come across one instance, in 2005, of a wealthy Swedish-Latvian family whose daughter was found dead in some woods in Suffolk. Cause of death was thought to be suffocation, but the corpse was far from fresh and the indications usually used to make the diagnosis – bloodshot eyes, blood high in carbon monooxide – were of little value so long after death.

  I look at pictures of the body. An eighteen-year-old, Linnea Gorkšs. Father a property guy, who’d made a fortune in Latvia’s transition to democracy. Mother a Swedish financier who’d become part of the team in more ways than one.

  Does Linnea somehow mark the start of our story? It’s hard to tell. There was a major police investigation at the time, but one that withered for lack of leads.

  I follow the story until I’m sure there’s nothing tangible here for me, then just go back to the photos. Linnea made a nice corpse. Pretty. She was found in a shallow grave in a wooded area. Already starting to decompose, but you can still make out that white-blonde Baltic hair, those pale, pale Nordic eyes.

  Even those eyes don’t hold me for as long as normal, though.

  Work is normally a haven for me, a place of calm, but in my current mood nothing holds me for long. I’m a pest and a pain, even to myself. A prickle of misdirected energy.

  I email links to the Gorkšs case through to Burnett. Write,

  ‘Another Alina Mishchenko? What do you think? F.’

  Ten minutes later, I get a short email back.

  ‘Could be. Very old case, though, and speculative. Leave aside. Alun.’

  I search around a bit in the Bethan Williams file. Len Roberts had a brother, Geraint, who left Llanglydwen to go to Swansea University some eleven years back.

  I make some calls.

  Learn some things.

  Start an email to Burnett.

  Delete without sending.

  I itch around the office. I achieve nothing of value, other than interrupting people, impeding their work, and causing minor disruptions and annoyances wherever I go. I then remind myself that I am now a detective sergeant, trusted by my force with all matters relating to the prevention, investigation and prosecution of crime. It behoves me therefore to repay that trust by dismissing myself from duty before I can do further harm.

  I execute my own instruction with alacrity.

  I pest, pain and prickle my way downstairs. Drive out of town. Am actually passing Aberfan before I realise that I don’t live out here. I had this weird feeling that I was going home, and here am I – the loom of the Brecon Beacons rising before me – only now realising that I live in a bland little rabbit hutch in Pentwyn and every mile I drive is a mile further from home.

  I don’t stop driving, though I do slow down.

  Darkness starts to seep from the rocks and trees. Leaks from the mountains. Thickens in the fields, the woods, the barns and hedges. It’s not dark yet, but everyone knows where it’s headed.

  I arrive at the mouth of the Llanglydwen valley.

  The road up is single lane only. The Welsh version. Hedges rising so close they almost touch the car on either side. About a third of the way down, I park up at a little junction wh
ere a muddy track fords a little stream, brown waters over brown rock.

  Dress warm, dress sensible.

  Coat, scarf, hat, gloves, boots. Torch.

  Walk on down the road to Roberts’s place. Find his spade and mattock. The mattock is heavy, but not ridiculously so. I lug them up the road, then up through the field and wood to my little pond.

  My pond. Roberts’s pond. Bethan’s pond.

  It’s full on dark now, and darker somehow beneath these trees, this little cliff. In the light, during the weekend just gone, the water here was the chestnut colour of black tea, but now I can see nothing except the occasional glimpse of silver where a ripple catches a slice of moon.

  I start to dig.

  I’m small, weedy and unpractised in the use of a spade. A dunderhead in matters mattocky.

  But still. If ‘dig’ is a slightly flattering way of describing my efforts, I do at least start hacking out little spits and clods of earth. Scraping away the surface clutter of leaves and sticks and little splinters of rock that have fallen from above.

  My aim is to dig out a V-shaped groove that will pierce the lip of the pool and allow the whole damn thing to drain downhill. My channel will need to be two or three feet deep to achieve what I want, but there’s no rush. Bethan Williams has been gone eight years and more. She won’t begrudge the odd extra day.

  I get stuck in.

  Turns out Len Roberts was right about that damn mattock. When I try to stab the spade into the ground, it dings off stone almost instantly. Not that the ground is solid rock, just that the whole bank is a mass of earth, stones, tree roots and larger rocks. The earth and stones, I can work with. The larger rocks, maybe, I’ll be able to prise away with the blade of my mattock. The tree roots, I have no idea.

  I work for about two hours, propping my torch on a little hillock of new-turned earth. Make use of whatever scattered bits of moonlight find their way down here.

  I try to stay clear of the water. My plan is to dig my channel in the dry and breach the restraining dam at the last possible moment. The plan is a sound one, but I still manage to stumble into the pond, getting cold water over the top of my boot. And the earth is wet enough that my boots are soon clodded with heavy clay. My trousers are spattered with mud right up to the waist.

  After two hours, I’ve made a decent start. My arms are aching and, I realise, I’ve got blisters on both hands.

  I didn’t know you could get blisters from digging.

  I drop my tools, and slip and slide my way downhill.

  Roberts’s cottage.

  No electricity. No running water.

  A bathtub, yes, but one so lined with green and brown that it looks like one of those photos you see of foreign torture chambers.

  By torchlight, I find some firewood. Make a fire. In the kitchen, there’s a drawer with candles, and I light a couple to release me from my torch’s blue light.

  I have mud on my hands, my coat, my hair, my face. When I lick my lips, I encounter the gritty mineral taste of clay. I fill a bowl of water from the butt outside and do a very basic job of cleaning up. I can still feel where my hair is glued into rat-tails of mud and I slightly doubt that my face is the same colour as it was this morning. But the light is poor and there’s no mirror to prove me wrong, so I imagine myself a princess in a crystal palace. A cool light plays on marble fountains and peacocks strut through the gardens beyond.

  Food.

  It would have been a good idea to bring some but – I confess it – this plan of mine was not well thought through.

  I’m not fool enough to open the fridge door, but do rustle around in drawers and cupboards till I find a packet of dried soup. Rice. The soup is more than a year after its sell-by date, but I don’t see how anything can kill you if you boil it enough. So I fetch water. Add soup and rice, and settle the saucepan on my fire. Stir with a long stick.

  A smell of things scorching and steaming and drying out.

  At one point, I have a feeling that Len Roberts is looking in at me from these uncurtained windows. I’d rather he didn’t do that, but this is his cottage and I don’t much mind.

  My riced-up soup boils and burns.

  I eat it. Nest up my cushions, my dubious blankets. And stare into the firelight as, outside, peacocks go clucking to their roosts and this cooling marble sheds the heat of day.

  26

  Morning.

  Wake stiff and stupid in the pre-dawn light.

  Somewhere down the valley, the first canticles of the day will be sidling upwards. The first few dozen kyrie eleisons.

  No canticles for me. My eleisons go unkyried.

  This aching sinner scrapes a little cold soup from the pan for her breakfast. A little cold rice. Stumbles around, finding gloves and hats. Dresses under the blanket because of the cold.

  Walk, fast, back to my car. The temperature’s hovering around freezing and the fields are sheeted in white. Hedges stiffened in a white cast that sparkles in the rising light.

  Reach the muddy junction where I’m parked. Have to yank at the door handle, because the damn thing wants to freeze itself shut. The windscreen is iced and I don’t have any de-icer and my hands, even if I ask them nicely, tell me that they don’t want to scrape away at the ice. So I just turn the engine on and the heating up and listen to a farming spot on BBC Wales till the screen clears, or clears enough.

  I drive to Cardiff.

  My own house – no peacocks, but plenty of mirrors – reveals just how dirty I still am. I wash properly, rinsing my hair until I can no longer feel the fine grit of Llanglydwen mud at the roots. Work at my fingernails till they turn from black, to brown, to almost white.

  Get dressed. Office clothes. Smarter than usual. White shirt and a charcoal suit.

  My dirty clothes go in a plastic rubbish sack in the back of my car. I drive to the office. Not late, but actually early.

  Talk to Burnett. Has he heard from Mike Kennedy?

  He has not.

  Watkins comes by my desk and tells me things to do with Operation April. Nothing interesting, just things.

  I say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ until she goes.

  Essylt Jones comes by my desk.

  She says things. I say things back again. She goes.

  My hands are blistered and my arms achey.

  I ring Alun Burnett.

  ‘Have you heard from Mike Kennedy?’ I ask.

  ‘You already asked me that. About one hour ago. I said no. I also said I would call you when I heard anything.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I haven’t heard anything.’

  ‘Oh.’

  We ring off.

  Hours kindle and burn. Transform into papery black flakes that float off to wherever those things go when they’re done.

  I wait until Watkins is out of the office, then slip out. Drive out of town. Up to the little junction outside Llanglydwen, where a muddy track burbles over brown rocks. Change out of my office clothes for the ones I wore yesterday. Crackly with mud, dried-white and cakey. My boots are still wet but, phooey, they’re only going to get wet anyway.

  Up the hill to my pond.

  A brown eye that stares at me. Not angry. Not malevolent. Not anything at all. An unblinking spaniel eye that communicates nothing, that can wait forever.

  An eye, a spade, a mattock.

  A maw. A muzzle. A mouth.

  I dig.

  I’m more effective today than I was yesterday, not least because I’m starting in the light. Wear gloves to protect my blisters. Figure out how to let the mattock’s own weight do the work for me.

  My channel widens and deepens. The light sinks. The moon rises.

  And as it does, as I get the first glimpse of that huge orange moon, a great cheese hung implausibly over the north-eastern horizon, I find I have a spectator. Len Roberts’s tangled, grinning face.

  I tell him good evening.

  He asks how it’s going.

  I point to my labours and say, ‘Hard work.�
��

  He nods and laughs and nods again. Two rabbits hang from his belt. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘I will be.’

  This morning, I drove to Cardiff thinking, ‘Must remember to buy food, soap and bottled water.’ And, typically, remembered everything except for the last three items on that list.

  Roberts tells me to come by later, but he doesn’t leave, not straight away. Just watches me work, a chortling laughter dancing in his eyes.

  Once he asks about Carlotta. He doesn’t use her name, as I never gave him that, but he wants to know.

  I say, primly, ‘The investigation is still ongoing, Mr Roberts.’

  ‘That means you buggers haven’t got anywhere.’

  ‘It means we found a barley seed in her digestive tract. A barley seed that came from the monks down there.’

  I point down the valley, where lights are beginning to twinkle. Where vespers are starting to murmur upwards.

  ‘A barley seed.’

  ‘And we know she was there. For a day or two at least.’

  Roberts chuckles. ‘Oh, a day or two. Yes. A day or two.’

  He puts his hands together in prayer, looking up at heaven, then darting quick glances at me to see if I appreciate his humour.

  I start digging again.

  27

  And so it goes. The whole week the same. My days in Cardiff, doing shreds and scraps of work, but mostly just trying to live with my own prickly energy.

  I don’t mostly last through till five o’clock. Mostly, by mid-afternoon, I find myself in my car again, heading north. Dig every evening. Eat in Roberts’s shack at night. Sleep in his cottage. Then get up early, go home, wash, change, pretend to do some work.

  Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. The whole week the same, except that on Friday, Alun Burnett says when I call him for the second time that morning, ‘Yes. Fiona, yes. I’ve just heard back from Kennedy. He’s got someone for us. A guy called Jack Gerraghty over in Newbury. He’s worked for the Mishchenkos and he’s willing to meet us.’

 

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