Newton Abbot to Marldon.
On round Torbay to Brixham.
‘Joanne. She’s not still living with Sandra, is she?’ asks Williams with a hint of gloom. ‘She and I never really . . . We never really . . .’
Sandra: that’s Joanne’s sister, Neil Williams’s sister-in-law. The person who gave Joanne refuge when her marriage collapsed.
‘No. Joanne’s got a place of her own now. It’s her we’re going to see, not Sandra.’
Joanne: my excuse for this little venture.
I told Williams that now that Parry and the monks were all in custody, it would be safe for Bethan to return. Runaways, especially girls, more often contact mothers than fathers and I told Williams that he needed to repair his relationship with Joanne. Not that I was pushing them back together. Just that the two of them should be able to have a civilised, communicative friendship once again, just in case his little runaway should ever come chirruping at Joanne’s door.
He accepted that logic. Never once questioned it.
But it’s not Joanne’s house where we finally stop.
I pull up at a small terraced house on a hill, with views that peep out to a grey ocean. Houses built of stone below, whitewash and stucco above. Big windows that gather the light. We’re parked so we can see directly into a good-sized kitchen. A cluttered, homely mess. No one present. No one visible.
We wait about twenty minutes, then see, walking up the road towards the house, a woman about Neil Williams’s age. Short brown hair. A little middle-aged dumpiness. A dark coat and, beneath it, a blue shirt with big white polka dots.
Joanne.
Williams, somehow disappointed, says, ‘Oh. I thought she’d look more . . .’
He doesn’t say more what.
I don’t ask.
Williams is about to get out of the car and approach her, but I restrain him, one hand on his arm. He looks a question at me with his eyes. I say nothing. Just point him back at the house.
Joanne herself lives a few miles round the bay in Paignton, where she works as a hotel receptionist. She was interviewed, just after Christmas, by two of Burnett’s burly officers, both male, both in uniform.
I don’t know exactly how that interview went, but I do know those two officers returned empty-handed. Back in the second week of January, I went down to see her myself. Unannounced. Not in uniform. Not, strictly speaking, on police business at all.
She didn’t tell me anything, not with her words. But she was frightened of me. Agitated. Wanting me to go.
She wanted me to go and I went, but only as far as my car and my binoculars.
I found nothing that first day and had to go back to work, a Monday, the day following. But I came back when I could and, when I couldn’t, paid a friend of mine, Brian Penry, to do the watching for me.
A daughter losing all contact with her father – well, that happens. But a daughter and her mother? That’s different. Assuming that the mother had always been loving, loyal and supportive, even the angriest teenage runaways tend to get back in touch – and Bethan had never really been angry, only frightened.
So I watched and Penry watched. Long hours in stationary cars. Nonsense playing on the radio. A sea breeze wandering in through the window, itching away at the fast-food wrappers blowing in the foot well.
It took time, yes, but time and waiting have been the theme songs of this case.
Four stone cells and a lifetime of prayer.
Up at the house, Joanne rings a doorbell. Today is a Saturday, Joanne’s day off. She didn’t come here the first week or two that Penry and I were watching – I think because my visit unsettled her routine – but she seems to have settled back nicely.
Neil Williams watches hypnotically.
The door is answered. We see an interior movement, but nothing further. Joanne enters. The door closes.
Williams, silently, pushes a question at me, but my finger points him back to the window. That big, wide-open kitchen window.
We see nothing at first, then Joanne Williams polka-dotting around by the sink and kettle. She leans up against the sink, bum on the ceramic, talking to someone in the room.
I hear myself say, ‘Bethan ran because she was scared and because she didn’t want that old Llanglydwen life. That wasn’t her. Didn’t fit the woman she was becoming. But that didn’t mean that her old connections didn’t matter. They did and they do. So she came home, sort of. Only halfway so far. She just needs a little encouragement.’
I point again at the window, but I don’t need to.
Neil Williams is staring in with an extraordinary, shining intensity. I don’t even know if he heard what I just told him.
We watch together, then Joanne Williams pushes away from the sink and, briefly, we see the other person in the room. The back of a head only. Long dark-blonde hair in a pony-tail. Something in the swish of that hair, the movement of the body beneath, says that it’s a young person. My age, or a little less.
Neil Williams says, ‘Oh!’
The oh of a man in the presence of all that is holy, or might be. He stares through the window and grips the Toyota’s plasticky dashboard so hard that I hear it creak.
I slip off my seat-belt. Ease my door open. Just releasing the catch, not yet opening it wide.
The girl doesn’t turn, then does. A half-profile, glimpsed briefly, then lost again.
‘Oh!’
I take the car key and drop it into Williams’s pocket.
‘Go gently, Mr Williams. It’s been a long time.’
He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t respond.
But he doesn’t have to. This silence – simultaneously sacred and fearful – is his response. He’ll do this well, I think. I only hope that Bethan has the wisdom to respond in equal measure. But from what I’ve seen of her already, I think she will. I think they’ll all do fine.
I step out of the car and walk down the hill towards the ocean.
My car is a hundred and seventy miles away in a farmyard in Llanglydwen. I’ve not given any thought as to how I’m going to get from here to there, but I expect I’ll figure something out.
I usually do.
Epilogue
May 2015
And that sounds like an ending, does it not?
I started with two things: a corpse without a crime, and a crime without a corpse.
Poor Carlotta, my crimeless corpse, found a crime that almost perfectly suited our first dark and windy encounter in Ystradfflur. A crime whose investigation finally released four other victims back into the lives they once enjoyed.
And Bethan, it turned out, was no corpse and had suffered no crime. I don’t, even now, know what paths led her back from being a teenage runaway in, most likely, London, to an ordinary life spent close to her mother down in Brixham. But I don’t need to know. Reunions matter. History doesn’t.
But I am not a good person. I am not.
In my defence, I will say this: that I try to be. Most of the time, I do try to be. And when I consider the Seven Deadly Sins, that list of evils which, one by one, I renounced on my night of white-veiled prostration, I think I am not wholly fallen.
Luxuria. I am not generally guilty of lust.
Gula. Gluttony. I am not a glutton. When it comes to the good leaves of the plant Cannabis indica – well, perhaps, but then Jesus once turned water into wine. I think he’d forgive a little harmless spliffing.
Avaritia, avarice.
Acedia, sloth.
Invidia, envy. I am not free of them, but few people are. I’m hardly the worst.
It’s the two remaining vices that give me pause.
Ira, wrath. Superbia, pride.
The two sins whose names that night filled my mouth with an awful silence.
Am I a proud and wrathful person? Was it my pride that led me down that footpath alone? Was it the boiling heat of my wrath that enabled me to do to Anselm what few people ever do to another in their lifetime?
And it is not the first time
. I own it. These things fall in patterns and I deny neither the pattern nor its dark consequences. My preference for working alone. The bloodshed which so often results.
Anger and pride.
Also, I want to say: untruthfulness.
I am not a truthful person. I lie and I conceal and I dissemble. I lie to my bosses and to my friends. I make myself appear what I am not. I do those things with aforethought and cunning. Without shame or repentance.
I am not to be trusted.
So here, for the ears of no listening person, I make confession. I have scattered this story with endings, ends which are also beginnings, but I have not told this.
In the third week of January, Aurelia – Miss Ekaterina Zhamanakova – rang me up. Invited me to meet her family. I said yes, yes happily, and we gathered at a country house hotel outside London. Old stone and sweeping terraces. Grey columns and billiard-smooth lawns. A place where kings and duchesses once danced.
There, in that grand drawing room, Aurelia introduced me to her amply bosomed and not underperfumed mother. Smiled as she watched me crushed in turn by her pinstriped father, her broad-shouldered brothers.
They gave me lunch. A gold watch. A bunch of flowers so big, I near-enough needed a flat-bed truck to get them home.
And thanks. They gave me the thanks that, for all their swank and money, they meant as humbly and sincerely as any family could. I was moved and felt honoured, and I said so, and I meant it.
In the afternoon that followed, Aurelia – I cannot think of her as Ekaterina – walked with me in the gardens. Those wind-blown lawns. Those ancient cedars.
We spoke of many things, but the part I most remember is this.
I asked, ‘Do you still pray?’
‘On my knee? No.’
‘And in your head?’
‘All the time, Fiona. Maybe literal every minute.’
She looked sad and troubled as she said it and I had no comfort for her.
But I have still not said the thing. Have not made confession.
Because as I left the hotel that evening, ready for the drive home, Aurelia’s father, Yuri, came with me. Leaned against my car. Against the driver’s door, blocking admittance.
I already knew that the Zhamanakovs had been prepared to pay the ransom, every jot and tittle of it. Knew that they were one of those who lost their daughter because they chose to make contact with the police. Lost their daughter because we, the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, failed to preserve that contact with the sacred secrecy it required.
Despite all that, Yuri said to me, ‘I have that money still. The ransom money. I kept it, ready to transfer in one second, because I hoped one day those kidnappers ring up and say, “We still have your daughter. Do you still have the money?” That never happen, but when you find Ekaterina, the money was still there. All of it. Still waiting.’
I said nothing. My face didn’t move. The wind was silent and the cedars held quiet.
‘I want you to have it. You save my daughter. Money is yours.’
I told him what every police officer should say. That I was doing my duty. That I was glad to be of service. That police officers are permitted neither to solicit nor receive gifts.
‘You don’t have to stay in police.’
‘But I do.’
‘It is a lot of money.’
‘Which means it’s all the more important I say no.’
‘The money is in Switzerland. Very safe. Very private. Very, very private.’
I say nothing.
‘Eleven-million dollar.’
He looks at my face and the light changes and the cedars still don’t move and he gives a slight shrug and says, ‘I send you the details.’
Only then do I move.
I shake my head and say, ‘Mr Zhamanakov, I cannot take your money and my “no” really does mean no. But there are some criminals behind this whole thing—’ I wave my hand at the big house, the house where Aurelia is a prisoner of nothing more than her own head, her own past. ‘Perhaps we will catch those men in conventional ways. In the ways of police officers. Ordinary regular law enforcement. And I hope that’s what happens. But sometimes . . . sometimes, we fail. Or rather . . .’
I taper off and Zhamanakov murmurs, ‘You might need a little help.’
I echo his phrase. ‘Exactly. We might need a little help.’
Yuri gazes at me with those steady eyes and gives, again, that half-shrug. ‘OK. Then when you are ready, you give me call.’
We leave it there. The whole thing arranged as simply as calling a cab, booking a table.
We say goodbye, Yuri and I. A kiss, a hug, a handshake. A deal concluded.
I drive home to Wales with my car stuffed so full with flowers that I look like a mobile florist.
What I’ve just done – what I’ve just asked for, what I’ve just agreed to – would have me flung out of the police so fast and hard that I’d end up in some far distant orbit, able to study the glaciers on Pluto up close and at leisure.
And I confess this.
I am a woman of pride and wrath, and my soul is troubled.
I have asked for peace and peace has not come.
I have sworn at an abbot and rubbed caustic lime in the eyes of a man I almost liked.
I have done these things and I am that woman: prideful, wrathful and without truth.
I am that woman. And I repent of nothing.
Author’s note
Caves, kidnap and anchorites.
Caves first. It’s true that a broad arc of South Wales is hollow with caves, some of them very extensive indeed. I’ve been down a few of them including Ogof Daren Cilau, which is best known for having the longest entrance crawl of any British cave: six hundred metres on your belly before you reach a cavern that allows you to stand. The various features that Fiona encounters underground, including the lake in the exit chamber, are all perfectly consistent with what you can discover for yourself if you care to don a wetsuit and crawl into one of those places.
My own years of adventuring underground now lie behind me, but my memory of that time did much to inform the book. Fiona’s dodgy light, for one thing. I was first introduced to caving by a schoolteacher whose first passion (like mine) was rock-climbing, but who regarded caves as an acceptable foul-weather alternative. The school didn’t own any quality caving kit, so we used to nick stuff rejected by a local ‘sub-aqua’ club: basically, wetsuits that were falling apart. We drove off to our caves, either in South Wales or the Mendips, equipped with scissors and a fast-drying neoprene cement. We used the scissors to cut the worst bits out of the wetsuits on our laps – the failing seams, the collapsing knees – then fixed new bits of neoprene into the holes we’d made. The smell of drying glue giddily convinced us that, this time, the seams would hold good under stress. They never did, of course, and the wetsuits always commenced their slide into total failure within minutes of our entering the cave.
That part, though, I never really had a problem with. Getting a bit wet and cold was all part of the experience. But for reasons I never understood, I always ended up with the very worst of the quite bad torches we possessed. My torch was secured to the battery pack I wore on my waist by a pair of crocodile clips. Mostly those things worked, but whenever we reached an actual tight spot – a squeeze, a boulder choke, a flooded sump – the crocodile clips would go pinging off, my world would go dark and I’d be left yelling for some so-and-so with a torch to show me where in hell’s name the passage was. There’s no darkness quite as dark as the blackness underground, especially when you have water within an inch or two of your mouth. That’s black, that is. Fiona learned exactly what it feels like.
So much for caves. On kidnap, I’ve stayed as close to the truth as the scanty facts permit. London is indeed the world capital of the super-rich. It is also the global centre of the kidnap and ransom industry. Because immigrant groups, including the very wealthy, are hesitant about reporting crime to the police,
no one actually knows how common domestic kidnap in the UK truly is. That story about the Lithuanian gang who kidnapped a fellow countryman for a ransom demand of just two hundred pounds is perfectly true; you can look it up for yourself. Stories about the very top end of kidnapping, however, are much harder to come by. No one talks about them, and the British law-enforcement agencies may never even hear of them. So I don’t really know if there are gangs sweeping the likes of Alina Mishchenko and Ekaterina Zhamanakova off the street – but if not, you sort of feel there ought to be. A sweet little business opportunity, or so you’d think.
And, finally, anchorites.
A friend of mine, a clergyman, referred to this book as my ‘anticlerical novel’. It’s not that, or at least I hope it’s not. It isn’t even, I think, against the whole principle of anchorism (if that’s a word). Back in the Middle Ages, it’s not as though there was a whole fistful of opportunities for religiously inclined, but otherwise ordinary, women. If those women – and the vast majority of anchorites were female – chose to have themselves walled into a church, then good for them. It wouldn’t have been my choice, but if a girl wants canticles, give the girl canticles. Whatever makes her happy.
Two other observations. First, if my reading is correct, the church authorities do seem to have made a genuine attempt to ensure that any putative anchorites had thought long and hard about their vocation. Certainly, once you’d made your vows, the church was strict about seeing that you adhered to them, but the process of getting to the point of commitment was a considered one. A text of the era warned would-be anchorites that the journey got harder, not easier, as time went by. You’d think that the first year of confinement would be the toughest. Not so, apparently; it was the easiest.
Second, those anchorites were seen as holy, important people, central to the communities that supported them. People came to consult them, bringing their questions, seeking their wisdom via the anchorite’s little window to the world. Although my fictional description of the anchorite set-up is perfectly accurate in some ways, it’s crucially different in that Fiona, Aurelia and the others were to be shorn of all social contact. By depriving their victims of choice, and by isolating them from the world and from human community, my fictional monks weren’t acting as holy men, but as torturers.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 39