‘If we can find what sort of explosive they used, we might be able to trace any recent purchases. And of course it’s hard enough getting in and out of those damn tunnels as it is. Doing so in a way that avoids leaving any trace forensically must be just about impossible.’
‘Whoever did it would have worn gloves, presumably . . .’ says Jackson, uncertainly.
‘Yes, but . . .’
I don’t answer, or not properly, but latex gloves would have torn to shreds within seconds. And, in any case, DNA-testing is sensitive enough these days that any drop of sweat can be tested for skin cells. A single broken hair. There’s just no way a person could kick and thrutch through those tunnels without leaving a trace. And, with its cool, constant temperature and absence of sunlight, that cave isn’t far from being an ideal place to keep those traces in a perfect state of preservation. Whether our guys can find those traces, and whether the resultant information will be any use to us if they do – those are open questions, of course.
Jackson says, ‘I’ll get Carmarthen on to all that. Offer our resources if they need support.’
I nod. Good.
‘This’ll stay in Carmarthen, of course.’
He means the inquiry. Means that, even minus Burnett, and even given what’s looking like an increasingly onerous workload, the inquiry will remain a Dyfed-Powys-led operation.
I mutter something vaguely polite. I don’t really care who runs the damn inquiry. Don’t care, as long as the person in charge isn’t terminally stupid and as long as I’m left with a little freedom of action.
‘Rhiannon said to pop in later. If you can. If you want to.’
I nod. I will if I can.
‘And well done, I suppose. I can’t think of any other officer of mine who’d have got themselves into that situation. But I can’t think of anyone who’d have got out of it either.’
Is that a compliment? A Jacksonian compliment? It’s not quite clear, but I say, ‘Thank you,’ anyway.
Jackson stands. I stand. We walk together down the hill.
39
Saturday, what’s left of it, is a day for home and hot baths and speaking to my sister on the phone and padding around in bare feet with the room thermostat turned up so high that even though I’m in knickers and a dressing gown, nothing else, I still feel too hot.
Call my mam. She’s out, but I leave a message apologising for my no-show last night. Tell her I’m looking forward to Christmas Eve, the start of our family Christmas.
Go to sleep early that night. Sleep well.
Sunday starts out slow. I sleep in, pad downstairs for some peppermint tea, then go back to bed and spend two or three hours on the Internet. Wikipedia: the source of all good policing.
When I’m done, and still in my dressing gown, I go down to the kitchen to make myself a huge breakfast – huge by my standards, that is: tea and toast and bacon and a three-egg omelette which I make by trying to fry three eggs in the same pan, making a mess of it, then stirring it all together and wondering how come the bottom starts to char before the top part has managed to cook.
I think I should eat it all, that I must still be hungry, but I’m really not. I eat most of the middle layer of egg – the bit that’s neither burned nor raw – but the truth is that the itch of impatience is on me now, and I leave my toast and most of my bacon. I don’t even want the egg I do eat.
Hat, coat, scarf. Car keys. Phone. Bag.
Gun.
I’m actually standing in my hallway, checking my bag, having that know-I’ve-forgotten-something feeling, when I realise that the thing I think I’ve forgotten is a handgun. Except that British police officers don’t ordinarily carry guns. I’m not a firearms-trained officer and my supervising officers would refuse point-blank ever to authorise me to carry a weapon.
Also: most people don’t need guns when making an ordinary set of house calls.
Not for the first time, I wonder why I have a thing with guns. Why I sometimes grope for a gun which isn’t there. Why – at one time during my life – I slept with a gun by my bed and why I slept like a baby as long as it was there.
Don’t know.
Don’t know, don’t care. Glaciers on Pluto and small boys with snot.
Gunless, I jump in my car and see where it wants to take me. To hospital, is the answer. Not Carmarthen’s Glangwili General. Burnett’s injuries necessitate the kind of complex surgery that only the University Hospital here can offer. So we pootle up Eastern Avenue, my Alfa Romeo and I. Park. Locate Burnett: the prize exhibit of the orthopaedics ward.
He’s looking fine, basically. Cheerful.
Of his ribs, he says, ‘Smashed to buggery, but everything basically fixable.’ He shrugs a bit, with his right shoulder only, and gives me all those surgical details that are so involving if you’re the patient and somehow just gibberish if you’re not. But ribs are quite easy, surgically speaking, and he somehow managed to avoid lasting internal injury.
‘I’m a fat bugger, see,’ he tells me, contentedly. ‘Carry my own anti-blast padding.’
I say the things I think I’m meant to say, then his face goes flat and shiny and he says, ‘Thanks for getting us out of there. I won’t forget what you’ve done for me.’
I tell him, OK. No worries.
He thanks me for the food.
I tell him de nada. Ask if he’s processed my expenses yet.
He starts thanking me for something else. I don’t really hear what.
I change the subject.
We talk a bit more until Burnett’s earnestness and his smashed ribs and these hospital smells – these careful nurses and squeaky vinyl floors – send me running again.
Running for the hills.
Neil Williams first.
He’s in his farmyard, tinkering with his tractor. Flat cap. Tweed jacket so grimy it looks like it’s grown over him, woody and mossy and smelling of green.
He straightens when he seems me. Mostly pleased, part anxious. Asks me if I want to come in.
I do.
He lets me in and stands back, a marine recruit readying for the sergeant’s inspection. And I play my part. Do actually inspect every room of the house. For clutter. For damp. For cold. For grime.
It’s about a hundred times better than it was. Maybe a thousand. There are still a few little drifts and piles of clutter, which I point out sternly. Williams promises to shift them.
The first time he makes the promise, it sounds like one of those things that people say and don’t mean. Like me telling the glossily slingbacked Jill how I couldn’t wait for her to come round to mine. So I don’t leave it there. Make him actually assemble all the crap on the kitchen floor, and tell him I want it all properly sorted by the next time I come.
He nods and promises and this time he means it.
Good.
The house remains colder and damper than any city-dweller would keep their home. The kitchen still has a smell of sheep and mud that perhaps is endemic to any farm of this size and type. The living room has walls painted a pale bathroom blue. The sofa is old and its threadbare flowered weave is covered by a blue throw, which is itself balding and puckering with age.
I stand in the doorway between kitchen and living room. Revolving between the two. Trying to figure things out.
Say, ‘Mr Williams. If Bethan returned now, if she walked through that front door today – or not today, but in two weeks’ time, four weeks, or I don’t know, some time soon – what would she think? What do you think she would think?’
He’s unsure. He’s not a particularly verbal man and has trouble articulating his thoughts, but we get there. She’d find it a bit ‘country’, a bit wild. ‘She liked things, not all pink and frilly exactly. But she liked things right. Done proper.’
I try to figure out what that means, but I think I know. I think Bethan would like a more contemporary version of anything my mother likes. Cream walls. Sofas from John Lewis. Side lamps with silk shades. Prints or photos on the wall.
‘Mr Williams, I think we need to get at least one room properly ready. This room. The living room. New paint. New carpet. New furniture. Everything done right, top to bottom.’
He nods. Can’t speak. His eyes are bright and overfull.
‘I’ll arrange for someone to come here and sort things out. But you’ll have to pay. Do you have the money?’
He nods. Pawing at his eyes. Not knowing what to do.
‘It’ll be thousands. And I’m not promising that she’ll ever come back. You do understand that?’
He nods. Says it’s fine. His voice is choked but I pretend not to notice.
I make him show me photos of Bethan. All the ones he has. Her, and Joanne, and him too. Their shattered family.
He’s got quite a good collection, in fact. Wedding photos. Baby photos. First day at school photos. We make a pile of the best ones and I tell him he needs to get them professionally framed.
He blots his eyes and promises me yes. He says, ‘Before. Those other police. They weren’t like this. I’m not saying they didn’t try their best, like, but . . .’
He stares with puzzlement into the ashes of his life. How the man in that wedding picture, the proud father of that little baby girl, became this man alone on a lonely hillside.
I tell him, ‘That lot before were Dyfed-Powys. I’m South Wales. Part of the Life Reassembly and Home Decoration Team. And I want you back on track. If your Bethan ever does walk back through that front door, I want her to think this is a place she’d like to come and stay in. The kind of home she might create for herself. And I don’t want her to think of you as the angry father she left behind, but as a loving one waiting to welcome her back.’
He promises me, again, that he’ll do everything I say and I leave him there, in his living room, looking at photos of Bethan.
Leave the house. Drive down the hill.
Roberts.
Len bloody Roberts.
March into his damn shack. Kick off the well-meant assaults from Judy. Stare at the old villain with blazing, angry eyes.
‘Well?’ I say. ‘Well?’
At first he says nothing.
Then he says, ‘Look.’
Then he says, ‘I’d of come to get you. I wouldn’t of left you in there. I didn’t even know about the collapse till the day after.’
That puzzles me a moment. How come people didn’t hear the bang? Say something to that effect.
Roberts replies, ‘There weren’t no bang. I mean, up close, if there’d been anyone there, then maybe. But what I’d have done – and it weren’t me who did it – would be set off a charge, only a little one, in that boulder choke.’
I interrupt. ‘There were two charges, not one. Two detonations.’
‘OK, so two small charges, both ends of the choke. Just enough to bring him all down. Anyone looking wouldn’t even think about a bomb. They’d just see a tunnel collapse. Prob’ly blame you for entering where it weren’t safe.’
I nod. That makes sense.
Too much sense. A plan almost perfect in its conception. Almost perfect in its execution.
Roberts continues, justifying himself. ‘I knew you’d gone in there. Was expecting you to come bouncing round as normal after. Had stew ready, and all. Then when you didn’t . . .’
He goes on to tell me that the next day he tried entering the tunnel the normal way, found it blocked, realised what must have happened and went over the hill to the cave exit on the other side.
‘I’d of got you out,’ he says, ‘but I saw the ambulances and all that and realised you must of found the dive already. Good going that,’ he adds. ‘Took my brother and me more ’n’ a year to find him.’
‘You could just have told me about the cave in the first place. You could have told the police all those years back.’
He shakes his shaggy head. Mutters something that doesn’t get further than the thick furze of his beard.
I say, ‘That cave almost killed Inspector Burnett. It did kill Rhydwyn Lloyd. I don’t know if you knew Lloyd, but he’d have known your brother.’
Roberts nods, admitting the acquaintaince, but says, ‘It wasn’t the cave who done it.’
‘I know. And I know it wasn’t you who blew the tunnel.’
He says nothing, so I push.
‘Len. The cave. You took Bethan Williams out that way because you knew the valley was being watched? You knew there were men on the hills?’
‘SAS, them boys were. They’re the only ones as could hide like that.’
‘They were SAS, yes. And they were there to protect Bethan. To find her. To take her back to her family.’
‘That’s not protecting her.’
‘Oh really? How did it work out then, your plan? How many corpses so far, Len?’
He scowls. His look is blazing and dark, but also furtive. Temporary. A look that grazes my face only briefly, then hides back in its own shadows.
‘I hope you get them bastards,’ he says.
‘I will get them bastards, but you could just have told us. You could just have told the damn police at the time. Like, when someone said to you, “What the fuck did you do with Bethan Williams?”, you could have given them the fucking answer.’
‘I couldn’t. I promised.’
‘Promised who? Bethan?’
He nods.
The stupid sod is still in love with her, I realise. The one true relationship of this man’s life is still alight in him. Preventing him from engaging in any further adventures in the world of the ordinary, the loving, the human, the connected.
‘Mr Roberts, I want you to come to a police station with me now. I will interview you on the record. And you will tell me every damn thing that happened. You will not face charges. But you will tell me every fucking thing that happened and every fucking thing you know.’
Roberts’s face changes. Becomes mobile. Flickers sideways. And, for a moment, I think I have him. Think I’ve got the stubborn bastard to relent, to allow change.
But if he relents now, what have the last eight years been for anyway? This stupid, impossible love of his, this pointless sacrifice – what do they become if he just leans forward into a police microphone and tells us everything?
So he says no. Says sorry. Apologises and means it. Wishes me luck. Offers me tea and a ladleful of God-knows-what from the black pot of sin on his stupid homemade stove.
I turn down the food, the drink and the apologies. ‘Promises are for helping people. If they don’t help people, they’re pretty fucking stupid.’ I tell him if he ever grows up enough to change his mind, I’ll drive him over to Carmarthen and we’ll do things right.
He watches me go with Judy in his arms, that tangled beard, those flashing, unreadable eyes.
The stupid sod. That thwarted, idiot heroism.
I’ll talk to Burnett about all this. We could just send a squad car to pick Roberts up. We can’t, as it happens, arrest him, as we suspect him of no crime, but we could try intimidating him into giving us a proper interview. Personally, I don’t think that option has a hope of working, but it’ll be Burnett’s call, not mine.
I think he’ll agree with me.
I get back into my car and drive – freewheel almost – down the hill into Llanglydwen and the further few hundred yards that lead on to the monastery.
Those quiet walls, that peaceful courtyard.
Matins. Lauds. Terce, sext, none.
Then vespers, compline.
I’ve missed none and it’s not yet vespers. I search out Father Cyril, the tall, blue-eyed, smiling abbot with that more-than-human grace.
Find him talking to Brother Gregory in the tool shed. Ask for a few moments in privacy.
He takes me not to the farmhouse’s main reception room where Burnett and I first interviewed him, but upstairs to his study. Small. Not much by way of creature comforts. A lot of theological work. Bibles and prayer books. Plus an accumulation of the sort of paperwork that this life, this monastery entails.
&n
bsp; Bills for oil, electric, water. Diocesan correspondence. Ministry of Agriculture grant application forms for certain works connected with one of the barns. Veterinary certification for the animals. Most of the paperwork is filed in lever-arch files with their contents marked in felt-tip on their sides. Some of it spills over the desk. The detritus of a lived life.
Above the abbot’s desk, two little prints. Icons, I suppose he would call them. A male figure and a female one. The male one is standing on a green hill and has a white dove perched on his shoulder.
He sees me looking.
‘You’ll recognise our patron, of course?’
It takes me a second, but I realise he’s talking about St David, a Welsh bishop of the sixth century and the patron saint of Wales.
‘David,’ I say. ‘A local boy.’
‘Local enough. He was preaching at the Synod of Brefi to a large crowd. Because those at the back couldn’t hear him, a small hill rose up beneath him. The dove here settled on his shoulder.’
‘That’s his big miracle?’ I ask. ‘Making a hill? In Wales?’
It’s hard to think of a more superfluous achievement. Making ice for the Inuit or sand for the Bedouin might just about top it.
Cyril laughs. Indicates the other icon. The image shows a woman in bed – sick, or dying, or maybe just asleep – and all manner of heavenly wonderfulness breaking out in the room above her. Cyril’s long finger keeps pointing and he has his eyebrows raised.
Wants to know if I recognise the image.
‘No idea,’ I tell him. I’m not really au fait with medieval saints. Just know that most of the women ended up being broken on wheels, or purged by fire, or dying from exceptionally holy self-imposed starvation.
Cyril says, softly quoting, ‘“And He showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the creator and protector and the lover. For until I am substantially united to Him, I can never have perfect rest or true happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to Him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.”’
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 27