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

by Harry Bingham

  That place is easy too. The last big case I worked on featured a guy called Derek Moon, who was struck on the head, then pushed off a cliff. His battered body, half stoved in, lay on the rocky beach below, head staring up at the blue and glassy sky. Burnett doesn’t have the same wide view, but his little muddy beach, his stoved-in ribs are the same.

  So I give that first big cavern to Moon’s staring corpse. Allow him to merge with the cavern. With Burnett’s figure patiently waiting in the darkness.

  I move on down the cave in my mind. Reach that first crucial fork. The larger tunnel continuing on, and the smaller streamway emerging from above.

  That’s a mother-daughter arrangement, I think, and with a pang of feeling, give the smaller streamway to little six-year-old April Mancini, my first ever proper corpse and still one of my all-time favourites. I hesitate about giving the larger tunnel to Janet, April’s mother, but Janet had lovely coppery hair and I can’t quite fit her with that other tunnel, so I leave her be. I’ll find something better for her in due course.

  And so it goes. The most significant landmarks, of course, I want to reserve for my best corpses, the ones I’ve encountered through my work in CID. But a career in policing gives you enough traffic accidents, enough stabbings and GBHs, that I’m able to endow even minor features of this midnight world with a victim. A chattering crowd to map out this catacomb.

  And so I smoke my joint, map my cave, and feel the spirits of the dead cluster round.

  Carlotta is here too, of course.

  She’s my most recent corpse and, perhaps, my most importunate, the most demanding. She doesn’t want to be left out of my map, but at the same time I can’t think it’s right to give her any old junction, any bit of dried-out streambed or muddy rockslide. So with her, I hold off. With a little luck, I’ll find something really good for her. Her own echoing chamber. Something grand. Something special. I look forward to finding it.

  And when I’m done – joint smoked, map made – I crawl on. Not frightened any more, but excited. Keen to populate my new world.

  Reach a place of complex, fractured passages, a kind of meeting point of three or four lanes, one of them emerging almost from the roof and accessible only by a mountainous, lumpen stalagmite. The floor of that meeting point has a litter of smooth black stone, evidence of some old streambed, and I almost yelp in excitement when I remember that Mary Langton’s severed head had just such a black pebble clacking in her mouth.

  Mary too joins our throng.

  I work for two hours. Probing these passages. Peopling them.

  I eat a sandwich. Drink water from a pool underfoot. My light, I think, is dimming, but it’s good enough to work with. I’m just getting used to smaller and smaller amounts of light.

  Two more hours. More food. A cheeky little top-up joint, which I know I haven’t quite deserved.

  My light is now fading to a silvery-blue nothing. It’s strange. The torch still beams. There’s an impression of illumination, but nothing is actually lit enough for me to properly make it out. It’s like a slow blindness, the last glimmer from a dying star.

  I’ve got Burnett’s replacement batteries with me, but I don’t know how long they’ll last and I can’t afford not to squeeze the very maximum from the ones I have.

  A slow blindness.

  A gathering chill.

  It’s nine in the evening, a full twelve hours after we first entered the cave, when I come across Carlotta’s cavern.

  It’s a really good one. Huge. So long that my limping torch can’t even find the end, perhaps not even the middle. The cavern is wide too, broad enough to swallow a church. Up at my end, the cavern floor is rocky, but further on there’s the glimmer of water.

  Carlotta and her family lived life on a big scale. A cut above ordinary folk. Kiev, Paris, London, New York, Hollywood. That kind of girl, that kind of life. And as soon as I find the cavern, start to understand its true size, I feel Carlotta sauntering down to take possession. I’m thrilled, actually thrilled, to be able to hand it over. My gift to her in exchange for that lovely first night she gave me.

  I think, Silly, whoever it was who laid her out. Silly to have placed her in a modest little churchyard. Carlotta always wanted something grander. A cathedral perhaps. A saint’s resting place. But here, in my torchlit underworld, I’ve found her the perfect crypt, a place to rest forever. I’m pleased about that. Contented.

  I eat the last of my food – half a banana and the last of the chocolate. Think about smoking, but decide against. Then stumble forward to explore my find.

  35

  High stone arches.

  The plop of water falling somewhere out of sight.

  The stone, where I can see it, is mostly black, or very dark grey, plentifully intermixed with shades of iron and calcite. Further ahead, water shimmers on the tunnel floor. The blue-white of my torch strikes a temporary silver from the ripples.

  I walk on into the cavern, echoey and vast. Walk on until I reach the water.

  At that shivering brink, I hesitate. I’m cold and tired. I really, really don’t want to enter this water alone. Perhaps I could rest? Stop for the night. Sleep. Start again, revived, in the morning.

  I don’t quite make a decision, for or against. Prevaricate by deciding to reconnoitre further. I continue into the water.

  Ankle-deep, calf-deep, thigh-deep.

  There’s been plenty of water on my journey already, but nothing at all on this scale.

  A giant underground lake? That’s your theory?

  Yes, inspector. It turns out we have a fair few of them in South Wales. If my researches on the Internet were anything to go by, this particular cavern is large, but would be dwarfed by the much bigger chambers at Ogof Ffynnon Ddu and some others around here. The quantity of water is also unremarkable. Water, after all, is what makes these things in the first place.

  I go on until the water level reaches my mid-thigh, then stop. This cavern is too big to explore with the light I have. I can hardly see the side walls properly, and the chamber’s end is still in darkness.

  I start to track back, so I can replace my batteries on dry land, when my light goes out. It’s not just the loose connection playing up again, because when I jiggle frantically at the back of my helmet, nothing happens. Nothing at all.

  The darkness is extraordinary. So total, so sudden, that it’s like being transported at once to the bottom of the ocean floor, flung to orbits beyond the solar system.

  Something flutters in my chest, my freezing hands.

  A quick, elusive flutter of feeling, like a small animal scurrying for its burrow. A quick movement of grey-brown, then nothing.

  That movement is a feeling, I know that. One I should capture and figure out.

  First, I think it’s excitement. To be here, in Carlotta’a cavern, standing in this lake, inky and cold, beneath the mountain. To be in a place like this and to know that your footsteps are the first, or among the first, to have trodden here? Well, it’s a rare and special thing. A privilege.

  But even as I think those thoughts, I feel that quick dart of feeling again, more strongly this time, and realise, This feeling. I know it. It’s fear. Yes, maybe an explorer’s excitement too, but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is fear. The growing hunger. The gathering cold. The knowledge that this clock is ticking and the endgame is already here.

  But that insight also tells me something further. To explore this cavern in all its chill enormity or not? The answer is that I have no choice. By this time tomorrow, I’ll be too weak to crawl, too cold to swim.

  I also know that I can’t change my batteries here, in the middle of this lake. My hands have long lost all sensation. I can’t see what I’m doing. And if I drop Burnett’s batteries, the good ones, then I’d never be able to retrieve them.

  Here, in this dark place, light is life. Those batteries more precious than gold.

  I start to go back the way I came, but that’s far harder than it sounds. W
ithin a few paces, all sense of direction vanishes. The lake’s uneven bottom means that I’m constantly stumbling and, when I right myself, I’m uncertain about which direction I’m now facing. For perhaps ten minutes, I try simply to walk back to the start of the cavern. Then trip on some underwater hazard and only just manage to stay upright. By the time I’ve regained my balance, I’m thigh-high in water again and I realise that, for all I know, I’m back standing exactly where I started.

  Not good.

  The fear isn’t fear now, it’s terror. To die here, in this place? With Burnett dying slowly of pain and cold all that way back in that first big cavern? Not good. Not good at all.

  An unthinkable place to die.

  I mutter a swear word. ‘Fuck it.’ The cavern walls bounce it back at me, in multiple fading copies.

  Think, Griffiths, think. It’s the only thing you’re really good at.

  Think. Use your brain.

  So I do. I stop to think and it occurs to me that if I’m as blind as a bat, I may as well try to navigate like one.

  I whisper, ‘Carlotta,’ and the sound, too quiet, barely travels over these gently rippled waters.

  I try again.

  ‘Carlotta!’

  Louder this time, and an echo bounces back. Compacted, close, almost claustrophobic.

  Turn my head through ninety degrees.

  ‘Carlotta!’

  Another echo, but this time tubular and distant. Remote. I realise that I’m now facing down the length of the cavern, hearing the echo return from a far-distant end wall.

  Turning the other way, I try again. A long echo – another end wall – but I think the echo here is less remote than the one before.

  I don’t think I’d explored more than a third of this cavern before losing the light. I want an end wall, yes, but the nearer one, not the further one.

  And so I do it. Navigate my way back by echo. Checking every two or three yards. Keeping the compact echoes of the side walls to my left and right. Checking the sounds to front and rear.

  Gradually, the water drops down to knee height. Mid-calf. Ankle.

  Then nothing at all.

  I’m on dry land, and my panted ‘Carlotta, Carlotta, Carlotta’, is now no more than a prayer of relief to the dark deity of this cavern.

  I change the batteries. My numb fingers do drop them, several times, in the process, but find them again almost instantly. And with new batteries, my lamp comes back on. Full brightness, the way I started this morning. The length of the torch beam is almost shocking. Unreal. Searchlight-bright.

  And this cavern is a true monster. My lamp can’t pick out the far end. The light just dissolves into a kind of misty blackness.

  I’m shivery with cold and I really, really don’t want to go swimming in this. On the other hand, I’m not going to be in better shape tomorrow, so I do what I have to do. Walk back to where I was and only when the water is again thigh-high, do I see the far end of the chamber dimly visible in my beam. Dark walls, rising from water.

  For a while I just stand, beaming my torchlight at the cavern ahead, looking for exits, but torchlight is a fickle companion. Any outward projection of rock casts a huge shadow which could conceal any number of tunnels leading out. The simple truth is that if I want to check this cavern properly, there’s only one way to do it, and that’s by exploring its full length.

  I try moving closer to the side of the chamber, to see if the water gets shallower. The water does get a little shallower, but then I catch my foot on a submerged rock and fall over.

  Ah well.

  Since I’m now soaked anyway, I just swim in slow strokes the length of the chamber. Black waters, blue light.

  From above, Carlotta looks down with grim satisfaction. Relishes this pilgrim prostrate in her dark crypt.

  Swim on. Reach the end of the chamber. The water is bitterly cold. The walls rise in a smooth slab overhead. When I test the shadows with my torch, I find nothing. Some broken rocks and fissures, yes, but nothing that a human could walk or crawl along. Nowhere for Bethan Williams to have exited this place.

  Nowhere for us to exit. Burnett and me.

  I’ve reached a dead end.

  The blindest of blind alleys.

  Bumping up against the wall, looking for a resting place in this smoothly curved rock, I feel almost furious with frustration. It wasn’t meant to be like this. If we’d just come in here with four uniformed policemen guarding the entrance, we’d have had no problems at all. Or Len fucking Roberts could just have told me what he did. He knew I’d found his damn cave. Knew that his secret was out. He could just have told me, instead of bringing me bloody badger stew.

  Angry, scared and cold, I swim, stumble and walk my way back to the head of the chamber.

  I sit on a stone, while water pours out of my outerwear like someone emptying a wellington boot.

  Cold shivers inside me. Cold and fear.

  I need to finish this. Bring this little adventure to an end.

  I call to mind my map of the cave. The system is a tangle of passages, caverns, crawls and ducks. A system I can make sense of only with my population of corpses, each one lighting up its own little area, its own little catacomb. As far as I can tell, the system is roughly Y-shaped. That long entrance crawl formed the lower tail of the Y. The fork in the system guarded by April Mancini is the crux of the Y. This blind cavern forms the end of the left arm. The right arm is made up of a long series of passages and caverns with countless side-arms and twists and loops and dead-ends, each of which now has its own guardian corpse to identify it.

  But if I’m right, I’ve explored the entire cave system. Looked for the exit and failed to find it.

  I go back to my earlier logic, the logic I gave Burnett. Test it. Think it through.

  And it’s not wrong, I’m certain. Quite apart from anything else, I haven’t come across the corpse of Bethan Williams and that says, as strongly as anything could, that she entered the cave and left it again. Since she didn’t leave it, only to re-enter Llanglydwen and the world she’d left behind, that says I’ve missed something.

  Something, somewhere.

  I look again at my watch.

  The cold is intense and I’m not drying out, not really. Long shivers run through me, ones that are systemic now, that I can’t shake off.

  I hesitate a moment, then make the walk, crawl and stumble back to that first chamber where Burnett still lies. The journey takes two and a half hours, and I’m numb with cold, the creep of exhaustion.

  But I arrive.

  When I do, Burnett doesn’t instantly move, his body crunched and somehow wrong-looking.

  As I draw closer, though, he moves – a bit, not much – and greets me. Asks if I’ve got anything.

  Nothing, I tell him. Say I’ll start again tomorrow.

  He’s positive, encouraging. Tells me to come in beside him and get warm. But I can tell: he thinks we’re dead. Him and me. Trapped down here for ever.

  He could be right. I think we’ll manage one night down here all right, but not two. In twenty-four or thirty-six hours, we won’t be dead or anything like it, but I’ll be too weak to move and Burnett isn’t healing any time soon.

  There’s no food, so we just talk ourselves through dinner. A huge pile of roast chicken for Burnett. My mam’s cottage pie and lots and lots of chocolate cake for me.

  I tell Burnett that I’m meant to be home for dinner with my family tonight.

  ‘They won’t raise an alarm, will they?’ asks Burnett with a flicker of hope.

  ‘Nope. Just think I’m a useless, forgetful idiot, like normal.’

  ‘Oh, well. Pass the gravy, would you mind? I shouldn’t really, but these roast potatoes are just too good.’

  I pass the non-existent gravy. He eats his non-existent potatoes. We talk rubbish and think our own thoughts.

  Burnett manages a belch. Says, ‘I can’t eat another thing.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘I fancy vegging o
ut in front of a movie now. Coffee?’

  I say no to coffee and we bicker about what movie to watch. Settle for an old Connery-era Bond movie, I forget which one.

  I offer Burnett a ciggy. He takes a joint and smokes it. I smoke two.

  He says, ‘Connery is still the best, isn’t he?’

  I don’t really have an opinion on that, but we snuggle together. I lie on Burnett’s right side, the one that doesn’t make him yelp with pain if it’s touched.

  His lungs are OK, I assume. If there was a meaningful puncture there, he’d have been dead by now. He’s stiffening up, though, the pain getting worse now that the shock has dissipated. I’m pleased that I’m not him.

  And that’s how we spend the night.

  Burnett’s big paws around me. Like an embrace of lovers, except that our bodies are too cold and our minds too distant for anything at all like that. I borrow usefully from his warmth, spooned up inside his curl. He won’t get as much from me, but I’m still better than nothing. Even so, and doing everything we can to conserve the heat, we feel, all night long, the cold ground beneath us, draining our heat.

  A few times in the night, I feel Burnett shiver. Or maybe I start shivering and the act is contagious. But I feel him try to suppress the shakes. He’s awake, but trying to let me sleep. A little act of courage.

  I don’t sleep, not really, but sleep and me are not always close friends, even at the best of times. So, instead, I just think myself a cheeky midnight snack – one of those lovely gooey chocolate puddings that you can microwave and eat with cream – and think through my long day’s journey underground. Walk those dark tunnels again in my head. Corpse after corpse, chamber after chamber. Checking my map in my head. My memory.

  I think it through, test it, check it – and feel increasingly certain of my conclusions. I want to wake Burnett and tell him not to worry. Want to tell him how I’ve peopled these caves with corpses. How I can travel it from place to place in my mind. That I’ve got it all figured out.

  But I don’t do that. Partly because I am half-asleep and don’t want to wake enough to tell anyone why everything’s going to be OK. But also: courage is a virtue. Something to keep hold of. Dying well is an achievement, a thing to be proud of, and so far Burnett has handled himself impeccably. It would somehow be letting things down, giving away his treasure, to tell him that he doesn’t have to worry, that it’ll all be OK.