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

by Harry Bingham

  Burnett collects me on his way over, then we drive on to Newbury. Not the town itself, but one of the glossy villages that sprout on the North Wessex Downs beyond.

  Bare hills and beech trees. Clear streams and, everywhere, the glint of chalk. Roadside banks and cuttings, field margins, the narrow tracks of sheep. Bone white beneath the green. A landscape you can crumble in your fingertips.

  Gerraghty’s home and place of business is a converted stableyard. Red brick and black timber. A fancy kind of clocktower built over the entrance arch. One part of the complex is clearly a family home – two storeys, windowboxes, curtains, a glimpse of kitchen – but the other two sides of the courtyard are all business. Plate glass. Two or three support staff types whispering into phones. A little conference room built so that the doors open straight onto some shaded decking and some Japanese-style fish pond.

  In the yard: a Range Rover, a Jag, a couple of smaller cars.

  Burnett parks his Mondeo and lets the engine die.

  He says, ‘There’s a packet of wet wipes in the glovebox.’

  That’s a declarative statement, but one I choose to interpret as a request or, just possibly, an order. Either way, I’m happy to comply.

  I give him the wipes.

  He pulls off a couple and scrubs at my ear. The ear itself and the skin just behind.

  He shows me the wipe.

  Mud.

  With another wipe, he scrubs away at my neck, the part of it he can reach. Tosses the used wipe onto my lap. It’s streaked with lines of pale taupe.

  I realise it is possible that my standards of cleanliness have declined somewhat through the course of the week. I think it is more than possible. It is a hypothesis firmly supported by the evidence.

  I use the wipes to scrub away at my other ear, my neck, anywhere I can reach.

  My mouth does a kind of sorry thing, though I don’t think any words come out.

  Burnett takes my hand and turns it over.

  Blisters. I also notice, for the first time, that some of my blisters have opened, got mud inside, and now look like little brown molehills of skin, the precursor of some medieval-type disease. I notice that the whites of my fingernails aren’t so exceptionally white any more.

  ‘Been digging?’ says Burnett.

  I nod.

  ‘Planting bulbs?’ he says, but his tone makes it clear he does not think I’ve been planting bulbs.

  ‘That pool. Up in Llanglydwen. I think you should see it.’

  ‘I have seen it. I was there, remember?’

  ‘Sorry, sir. I think you should see it now.’

  A short pause, then, ‘OK. OK, then.’

  We make a date. It’s Friday today and Burnett isn’t the work-all-weekend type, but we agree to meet tomorrow morning. I’m relieved actually: making my excavations official seems like a good thing.

  We get out of the car.

  I smooth myself down. Try to disentangle the professional police sergeant from the semi-feral ditch-digger. Last night, Roberts fed us fox, and I have the taste of it in my mouth still. The gamey density of venison, but with something doggier about it. Sharper. The choking scent of chicken going bad.

  I blink myself into the right frame of mind, or something close.

  Burnett inspects me a moment in the clear light. I don’t know what he concludes, or if he concludes anything, but his face moves in a certain way and he walks us both over to a doorway.

  Black painted. Glass either side. Brass plate saying, ‘Gerraghty Consulting.’

  Burnett is about to knock, but the door opens before he can reach it. A secretary says, ‘Inspector Burnett, is it? Please come on through.’

  She seats us in a conference room. Mildly pressures us into taking hot drinks. She asks, ‘All ready for Christmas, are we?’ and I can’t find a single thing that connects me to the ordinary world of Christmas. My head is full of a small, brown pool in the Brecon Beacons. A young woman in a white dress, laid out dead on a wild October night. And a small monastery in a nearby valley, where the doors are never locked and the prayering never ends.

  Gerraghty arrives.

  Handshakes. Business cards. Smiles.

  Gerraghty has the confidence of a successful man. Nothing showy. Nothing braggy. But that clear cold edge of steel all the same. He looks fit enough, but not Special Forces fit. If you were told that he was a successful IT entrepreneur, or a high-earning London lawyer, you’d believe it.

  Burnett starts us off. A quick case overview, concluding, ‘We only got the ID because this one – ’ jerking his thumb at me – ‘doesn’t know when to leave something alone.’

  Gerraghty looks at me.

  Blue eyes under sandy hair. A steady gaze.

  Burnett: ‘I understand from Mike Kennedy that you worked for the Mishchenkos.’

  Gerraghty: ‘Yes.’

  ‘You flew to Paris. They met you. Signed a consultancy contract.’

  ‘Yes. Look, before we go on. I have permission from my clients to speak to you, but on the understanding that nothing here is to be presented in an English court. Nothing will be shared with a foreign police force. Nothing that I tell you can be used in evidence against my clients should they be charged with any matter related to their daughter’s abduction.’

  He pushes a draft letter across the table. A letter for Burnett to sign that says the same things but in proper legal form.

  Burnett says, ‘I can’t sign that. I don’t have the authority and I highly doubt that—’

  Gerraghty nods and completes the sentence, ‘—that it would hold up in court anyway. Sure. You have to say that. Call Kennedy.’

  ‘Look, Mr Gerraghty, I understand that you—’

  ‘Call Kennedy.’

  Gerraghty pushes his own phone across the table. He’s got Kennedy’s number up on screen. His mobile, not his office landline.

  Burnett’s mouth moves a couple of times before any words come out, but he makes the call, via his phone not Gerraghty’s. Goes outside so he can speak to Kennedy in private. First Kennedy then, I expect, his own chain of command.

  Gerraghty brings a cardboard document box into the room. Leaves it on the side. Pours water.

  Looking at my hands, he says what Burnett said. ‘Been digging?’

  ‘Bulbs,’ I say. ‘I’ve been planting bulbs.’

  His face doesn’t say ‘Yes, I accept that as a highly plausible and socially satisfactory answer,’ but neither does it say, ‘No! I accuse you of an approach to police work so obsessive that it borders on mental illness.’ It’s just a face.

  We watch Burnett through the glass walls. Talking. Gesticulating as much as a heavily set Welshman of middle age ever does.

  I say, ‘That document. Would it even stand up in court?’

  Gerraghty laughs and shrugs. ‘Maybe. Don’t know. Never tried.’

  Burnett returns. He has some quarrels over some of the wording in the document. Minor stuff. He just has to fight something to avoid feeling pushed around.

  The two men agree a compromise. A secretary removes the document, then brings back a replacement with the wording corrected. She wears a grey skirt and a navy top. When she walks, she makes almost no sound.

  Her hands are not dotted with little brown molehills.

  Burnett signs. The secretary leaves.

  I have a notepad on the table. Burnett has a phone. Gerraghty removes notepad, and phone, and asks me for mine too. ‘No recording devices of any sort,’ he apologises without apologising.

  Then Gerraghty kicks out his legs. Says, ‘Good. OK. The whole story, right? From the top.’

  And he tells it.

  Alina Mishchenko stayed on in London after her failed yacht trip and the departure of her parents. Friends, parties, lunches, visits.

  On 10 October, she left a nightclub in Mayfair in the company of a couple of friends. ‘Old friends, perfectly trustworthy as far as we know.’ They hailed a taxi to go in one direction. She took a taxi to her parents’ home in Ch
elsea. ‘She never arrived. The house had CCTV mounted to sweep the entrance. It’s possible the audio captures the sound of her taxi arriving at about 1.30 a.m. – that would fit with the times we’ve been given – but in any case, she never made it as far as the front door. Never appeared on camera.’

  The next day, the eleventh, the Mishchenko parents were contacted in Kiev. They were told their daughter had been kidnapped. That she was unhurt. That she was being kept in good conditions. Told also that a ransom demand would be made. No mention at that stage of any price.

  Burnett: ‘So far, so standard, is it? I mean, for this type of high-end, professional kidnap.’

  Gerraghty nods. ‘Yes. The whole thing was clearly professional. No ears being sent in cardboard boxes, nothing like that. The first contact communications contained a link to a private page on YouTube that showed the victim speaking in English and Ukrainian. The girl was cable-tied to a chair. Black cloth backdrop. No clues to location. No abductors, not even in partial view. Her words were obviously pre-prepared. Basically, confirmation of abduction, a request for help. Victim was tearful, but not visibly hurt.’

  I say, ‘Communications? What – phone, email?’

  ‘Email and fax. Faxes give you a return receipt automatically. An email could easily end up in spam.’ He shrugs. ‘There were several unusual features of that early approach. One, the communications explicitly advised the Mishchenkos to hire a K&R consultant. Two, they provided a list of names. Four names, I was among them.’

  Burnett: ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t know in detail what contacts the Mishchenkos had with the other consultants – all known to me, all well known in our little industry – but they settled on me. We met up in Paris. I went over the terms of our normal consultancy arrangement. They hired me. Then, we did as instructed, and placed a comment on that private YouTube page. Basically, just confirming that I was involved. Asking for next steps.’

  Burnett: ‘That YouTube thing. That’s usual?’

  Gerraghty: ‘No. It’s slick. I mean, it’s all easy enough to arrange. You just have to make sure you don’t use any IP address that can be traced. But still. The whole thing was slick. Very well planned. And that’s a good thing. I told the clients as much. You’d much rather deal with pros, than people who don’t know what they’re doing. You’ll get squeezed harder financially, but you’re more likely to see the return of your loved one.’

  Gerraghty’s face changes. He’s plainly not a man who gets surprised all that easily, but there’s a wry acknowledgement in play as he says, ‘And one thing I hadn’t seen before. I get contacted too. Email and fax, same thing.’

  From the document box on the side, Gerraghty extracts a sheet of paper and floats it over to us.

  Dear Mr Gerraghty,

  Congratulations on your recent appointment as advisor to the Mishchenko family. For examples of our previous work, please contact one or more of the consultants below using the codeword jr5v7k.

  We look forward to a fast and satisfactory resolution of this matter.

  There was, of course, no name in the place you’d normally find a signature. The ‘sent from’ field is some made-up Gmail thing. And the place where the email implies we should find a list of names is as blank as the chalk downs themselves.

  Burnett puts his finger on the empty spot and raises his eyebrows.

  Gerraghty says, ‘Sorry. There were four listed consultants. They all spoke to me on condition of absolute secrecy.’ He shrugs a get-used-to-it type shrug, and continues, ‘The gist was they had all handled nearly identical cases. All abductions from London. All the same approximate family wealth: tens of millions, maybe just scraping into the hundred, two hundred million bracket, but no more. Foreign citizens. Three adult daughters taken, one teenage son. Two of those successfully returned. Two not. Presumed dead.

  ‘The purpose of getting me to talk to these guys was partly to confirm that we were dealing with experienced pros, but also to set some “house rules”. That’s the term the kidnappers used. Rule number one. No negotiation on price. The ransom amount was set at one seventh of the family’s publicly estimated wealth. So, in the case of the Mishchenkos, we received a demand for a little over nine million dollars. That same proportion had been applied in each of the other four cases too.

  ‘Two, no contact with any law enforcement body. The first consultant advised his client – as I would have done in his place – to talk to Mike Kennedy’s crowd. The client agreed. And that was that. There was no further communication from the kidnappers. Not even an updated ransom demand. No news of the victim. Missing, presumed dead.

  ‘Three. Kind of the same as two. No contact with any law enforcement body ever. No matter if the victim is returned alive or not. No matter what happens. We were told that any contact with any law enforcement body at any time would result in a further family member being abducted or killed. In theory, the Mishchenkos broke that deal by flying in to see you. They’re a brave couple, actually. And they loved their daughter.’

  Burnett’s throat rumbles. I think if the rumble could speak its name, it would call itself something like fuck-a-duck.

  I’m somewhat the same as him, except that I don’t rumble.

  Once he’s done, Burnett asks, ‘And the other one. The other missing presumed dead?’

  ‘The family was short of funds. They needed to negotiate on price, or claimed they did. Same thing. No further contact of any sort.’

  Burnett: ‘Jesus. So the kidnappers are basically using your K&R colleagues like professional references. Take a look at our previous work. Please notice that we mean what we say. We look forward to doing business.’

  ‘That’s about the long and short of it. I talked the case through with those four colleagues, the “professional references”. We agreed – the Mishchenkos and I – that we’d play it straight.

  ‘Volodymyr Mishchenko isn’t in fact worth what those public figures say. I mean, he may have been once, but the guy’s in a country whose eastern half is fighting a civil war. The western half is peaceful, but bankrupt. Commodity prices are shite. And Mr Sixty-five-million-dollar Mishchenko probably isn’t worth half that today.’

  I ask, ‘His house in Chelsea? That must be worth the ransom money on its own, or almost.’

  ‘Yes, except he’d remortgaged it. Put the cash back into his business. I’ve seen the paperwork. There was maybe a million pounds of equity in that house. Maybe one and a half, but Mishchenko was in a tough spot, no question. And, not that it matters in a way, but he loved his daughter. He’d have sold everything.’

  ‘So your role here . . .?’

  ‘Was to negotiate on timing, not price. We said, nine million dollars, OK. Explained about the mortgage. Sent bank statements and financial accounts from the Ukraine. Said we’d get the money but to give us time.’

  ‘You sent financial statements? Literally? You sent audited accounts?’

  ‘Not just that. We gave them the login details that would enable them to view the firm’s own management accounts. It would be easy enough to fabricate something on paper, but to reconstruct the firm’s entire financial management system? Impossible. We wanted to show that what we said about the money was true.’

  ‘And you think those accounts made sense to them?’

  ‘Oh, no question. They came back to us with questions on things like the way Volodymyr’s firm accounted for iron ore inventories. Things that made no sense to me. These guys were very financially sophisticated. Volodymyr commented he’d want them working for him.’

  I ask, ‘These professional references. What were the dates of the cases they handled?’

  The first case was 2008. The most recent case was 2012.

  Burnett goes back to Gerraghty’s role. ‘So, you negotiate. You ask for time to pay. They say yes, but you need to show us your financial circumstances. Did they ask for anything upfront?’

  ‘Two million. We paid it.’

  ‘Pounds or dollars?’
>
  ‘Dollars.’

  ‘Did you ask for proof of life?’

  ‘Yes, of course. The response was, we have the girl. You’ve checked our references. You know that we return our victims in good condition. You don’t need proof of life.’

  ‘And you accepted that?’

  ‘We had no choice.’

  We talk more, but Gerraghty has little more to give.

  Only one more question. As we get up to go, I ask the thing that’s missing.

  ‘Jack, you told us that these kidnappers promised to abduct or kill another member of the Mishchenko family, if they spoke to us. Yet they did come to Cardiff when we asked them to. They did authorise you to talk to us. They didn’t have to do those things.’

  My question why hangs in the air. A puzzle that clusters with all the others which ghost through this inquiry.

  Gerraghty doesn’t answer. Just passes across the document box, which isn’t as heavy as I’d like.

  ‘There’s not much here,’ he admits. ‘Any evidence we collected. Email exhanges, faxes. Anything we could get from the Mishchenkos’ own security systems. Anything we could do on IP addresses and that kind of thing.’

  He grimaces, telling us not to expect much.

  Burnett, ever the gent, takes the box and Gerraghty walks us both to the front door and outside. We stands together in the cool air. Damp brick exhales softly in the pale December sun.

  By the fish pond, a black ceramic jar sits on an iron stand. Gerraghty lifts a lid, takes a small handful of powder and scatters it on the water. Gold flashes beneath the black. A brief, splashing frenzy.

  We all watch the water as the ripples subside.

  Burnett says, ‘It’s a lovely place this. I’d love a fish pond.’

  Gerraghty ignores Burnett, answers me.

  ‘Why? Why did they do it?’ His faces changes, gets more serious. ‘We think of these Soviet Bloc oligarchs as terrible people. Thugs who cheat and bully their way to success. But it takes all sorts. The fact is, Volodymyr and Olexandra loved their daughter. They needed to see her body. Claim her. Mourn her. Take her home. Find out as much as possible about how her life ended.

  ‘And it was more than that. Volodymyr thought that pulling nine million bucks from the business now, of all times, might drive it over the edge. Into bankruptcy or forced sale. But he was prepared to do that. And, after it was too late, after you confirmed her death, he decided he didn’t want any other family to suffer. He wanted to do the right thing.’