The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (2 page)

I call Jon Breakell in the office. He’s the other poor sod who’s been lumbered with this case. I ask him to contact social services, find out what the deal is with Adele Gibson. He says OK and asks if I’m coming back for lunch.

I’m not. The furniture company’s other phantom lives up in Blaengwynfi, in the country above Aberkenfig. Jon says he’ll call me when he gets something.

I’m in a bad mood as I start the drive, but the miles and the mountains start to soften my ill temper. There’s something about these mining towns – the cramped valleys and injured mountains – which feels truthful to me, more truthful than anything you can find in Cardiff.

Bracken on the hills. Water flashing white and silver in the streams.

Buzzards.

The cottage in Blaengwynfi stands above the main village, up on the hill. An asphalt road runs as far as a small line of four new brick houses, then gives up. A cattle grid marks the boundary to the open hill and an dirt driveway runs the remaining two hundred yards to the cottage. Crushed rock for the tire tracks, grass growing freely in between. Sheep wander across the road.

I drive up to the cottage.

It’s small. Probably just two bedrooms. Green painted front door. A modest effort at a garden. Low stone wall keeping the sheep off. No lights.

A red Toyota Corolla sits outside a wooden garage next to the house. Water barrel. Wood shed.

There’s no bell so I knock at the door. Wait long enough that I’m within my rights to peer through all the windows, but I don’t see anything much. Net curtains in what I think must be the kitchen. There’s a smell, like that of a manure heap, only not as sweet, not as grassy.

Drive back to the little group of four houses lower down the hill. Knock on a couple of doors until I find a neighbor. Ask about Hayley Morgan. The woman I ask looks blank, until I point up at the cottage, then says what people say when they don’t know the people they live next to. ‘Oh, Mrs. Morgan, keeps herself to herself really. Doesn’t cause any trouble.’

I can feel her curiosity tugging at me, like a kite on a string.

I don’t give her what she wants. Knock on the two other doors. Get another don’t-know-don’t-care from a mother who has a ciggy in her mouth and a TV on loud in the front room.

I’m just heading back into the valley when my phone bleeps with a text. I was probably out of signal higher up. Jon Breakell.
BIT WEIRD. CALL ME
.

I call him.

‘Oh hey, Fi. Look, I just got off the phone with social services. There’s been some problem with Adele Gibson’s bank account. Money’s been going into it from the furniture place but it’s gone straight out again. That’s been going on for a while apparently, some sort of bank cock-up, but just recently, the last eight weeks,
all
the money has gone out. Social security money. Disability living allowance. Whatever. Anything that’s been paid into the account has gone straight out again.’

‘Gone where?’

‘Don’t know. The payments are made out to a T.M. Baron. I’m trying to trace him now.’

Jon starts telling me what he’s doing with social services and how he’s going to trace T.M. Baron, but I cut him off. ‘Later.’

Drive back up the hill. Fast, springs protesting at the potholes.

I’m a city girl but I’ve spent enough time on my Aunt Gwyn’s farm to know the smell of manure, and that wasn’t manure. At the cottage I knock again for form’s sake but I’m already looking for a rock. Try to slide one out from the garden wall. I don’t manage but I do find one erupting, like an oversized molar, from the muddy verge beyond.

Wrench it out. Heave it through the living room window. Reach through the broken glass for the catch. Open the window, sweep the worst of the glass off the shelf and slide myself inside, taking a pair of latex gloves from the car before I do.

The smell is stronger here. Definite. It’s like the smell you get from chicken left too long in the fridge. A smell that combines the damp meatiness of mushrooms, the gamey quality of hung fowl, the choking quality of ammonia. All that, only intensified. Compacted.

The living room has two armchairs – blue, velvet covered, old – and some thin cotton curtains. Some books. A TV. Fireplace.

The standby lamp on the TV is not illuminated. Gloves on, I flick a light switch. Nothing happens. An old-fashioned phone on a side table, but no dialing tone when I lift the receiver.

Go through to the kitchen, passing a tiny hall, flagstones on the floor, wooden stairs leading up. Mail, too much of it, by the door.

The whole house is cold.

Hayley Morgan lies in her kitchen.

She looks tiny, frail. Like a thing flung, not a person fallen.

She’s dressed – grey skirt, blue top, cardigan, fur-lined boots – and wears some make-up. Mid-fifties, at a guess.

She’s been dead a while: body flaccid, no lividity. But the smell is the strongest indicator. This kitchen feels no more than ten or twelve degrees now, and it’s the middle of the day. Decomposition doesn’t happen fast at these low temperatures, but it’s already extensive. The smell isn’t even just a smell. It has a more physical presence that that. A scent that climbs into your nostrils, occupies your sinuses. It’s like a ball of cotton wool, dense and damp, that makes breathing difficult.

I push a window open, though crime-scene procedure would have me touch nothing.

Morgan is terribly thin. There’s a sharpness about the way her bones poke from her skin that’s somehow agonizing. Like an African famine repainted in Welsh colors.

Some sign of a head injury. Nothing much. I guess she fell, hurt herself, and never got up again.

I start to explore the kitchen.

Look inside the fridge, swing the cupboards open, look in every drawer. The kitchen sink doesn’t have cupboards beneath it, just a red gingham curtain on a piece of clothes line.

Cutlery, crockery, pots and pans.

Cling film, sandwich bags, old boiler manuals, oven racks.

Kitchen cleaner, rat poison, dustpan and brush.

But no food. None. Not anywhere.

Not a spillage of breakfast cereal. No tin of fish, no box of cat food, no place where some dried fruit has spilled and never been cleared up. In the dustbin, I find a packet of sugar that has been torn open. Usually with sugar, when you shake an empty packet, it rustles with the glassy tinkle of sugar crystals caught in the folds at the bottom. When you think about it, in fact, it’s rare for any packaging to be completely empty. There’s always a little ketchup left in the bottle, a little sauce left in the can.

Not here. The sugar packet looks as if it’s been sucked or licked clean. The paper’s smooth texture has become fibrous and uneven. Something similar is true of any other food waste I can find.

I shake the packet of rat poison.

It doesn’t rattle. It’s completely empty.

I leave the house, putting the front door on the latch, and drive down the hill until I get a signal. Call Dunwoody.

‘Keeping out of trouble, are you?’ he asks.

I don’t know what the answer to that is. I’m standing by my car, just below the cattle grid, watching a buzzard test its weight on the winds blowing up from Aberkenfig. Its armaments seem tactless somehow. Excessive.

The bird hovers overhead as Dunwoody repeats his question.

I still don’t know how to answer, so I just say ‘Yes.’

3.

The next thirty minutes are spent with the logistics of death. Get a duty officer up from Neath, the divisional surgeon from Cardiff, a SOCO – scene of the crime officer – up from Swansea. It’s Dunwoody’s job to do those things really, but I find myself doing most of it. I keep him in the loop, more or less. He promises to come over ‘soon as I can’. I ask him to get a full set of phone records from the phone provider. Also bank records. Also any medical and social services records. I’d do it myself except those things are easier to do from the office.

I also speak to Jon Breakell, who says T.M. Baron has been traced to an address in Leicester.

‘And you’re going to tell me that Dunwoody has got some uniforms kicking down the doors.’

‘Not exactly, but this kind of changes things, I guess.’

‘Just a bit.’

I hang up.

I’m parked just below the cattle grid, but within sight of the open moorland. From where I am, I can count six sheep, but there will be dozens more, roaming the hill, cropping the grass, disturbing the grouse and the pipits, the skylarks and the plovers. There are enough sheep on this hill to feed a family for years. Hayley Morgan died as next season’s roast dinner grazed the verge beyond her kitchen window.

There’s only one road up to the cottage and when a clean blue Passat noses its way up the road, I travel with it. The Passat discharges one SOCO, Gavin Jones, and a plump Detective Sergeant, who turns out to be Bob Shelton, the duty officer from Neath. Jones has a porn star moustache, sprinkled with grey.

I say, ‘You’re it? This is the team?’

Jones the SOCO, who clearly knows his colleague socially not just professionally, says, ‘Yes, love, this isn’t
CSI
.’

I’m thrilled to be called ‘love’ by anyone with a porn star moustache, but can’t help pointing out that the woman inside died via a combination of starvation and poisoning. That we believe her to have been the unwitting accomplice of a complex fraud. And that, actually, crime scene investigation is precisely what this is.

The two men roll their eyes at each other over my head. I’m too prettily feminine to be offended. Just say, ‘She’s in the kitchen. You can view her from that window.’

Jones looks through the window. Clocks the sight, the smell. And, when it comes to the point, seems reasonably professional. Suits up properly. Gloves and mask. Steps into the house. Doesn’t go in far, just enough to view the corpse.

I ask him if he has a spare suit in his car. He does. It’s ridiculously large – a man’s size, XL – but I put it on anyway. By the time I’m ready to re-enter the house, the fat DS is sitting on the garden wall about to light up.

I say, ‘If you’re going to have a cigarette, you are not having it there. You haven’t secured the back of the house. You haven’t checked the garage and parking area. Given that any third party would have arrived by car, those areas form part of the crime scene. DI Dunwoody is on his way over here now and he will expect me to report to him when he gets here.’

I tie off my charm-package with a neat little smile and head on into the house. Jones hasn’t moved far. The little front hall commands the living room on the left, the kitchen on the right. He’s checking both rooms with a high power ALS lamp, swapping filters to check for biological traces.

‘No blood that I can see. Plenty of fingerprints, of course. No drugs showing up. Let’s try bright white.’

He removes the filter and swipes the torch around the floors. The cottage isn’t the cleanest, and the living room has an open fire which looks like it provided the only heating for that part of the house. Under the torch’s glare, every footprint shows up precisely in the dust. The scatter of glass crystals gleams like diamonds.

‘That’s you?’ says Jones, pointing at the footprints which lead from the living room window to the kitchen.

‘Yes.’

There are other prints, but small ones, belonging either to a woman or a child. Hayley Morgan, whom we haven’t yet approached, was no bigger than me. Jones assesses the dead woman’s feet from a distance and looks at the pattern of marks on the living room floor.

‘I don’t see anything,’ he says, meaning male footprints.

‘Me neither.’

We both assume any fraudster is a man, though we have no particular reason to think so.

In the corner by the TV, there’s a bundle of papers, down with the firelighters and matches. Most of the paper looks like it’s there to start a fire with, but there are a couple of soft cardboard document wallets.

‘I’d like those, when you can.’

Jones nods and asks me to pass him his camera. He photographs the scene, wide-angle and close up. Photographs the floor. Moves over to the document wallets. Checks them, close up, for biological traces, and nods to indicate that they’re clear, as far as he can see.

He gives them to me.

As all that is happening, I’m looking into the kitchen. The smell is still intense, though there’s air moving through the house now and I’m standing in the hall by an open door. The more light and air there is in this house, the smaller Morgan seems. A minor detail. A styling accessory.

I take the document wallets, but say, ‘What’s that?’

The kitchen has a rough, textured plaster. On the wall above an electric night storage heater, someone has scratched away at the plaster, wearing a hole right through to the old-fashioned breeze blocks beneath. There are grooves left in the soft plaster. Jones focuses his torch beam on the area. It’s hard to be sure, but the grooves look like tooth marks.

Jones doesn’t say anything direct, just, ‘We’ll know when we examine her mouth.’

‘Yes.’

‘Those things.’ He nods at the exposed block wall. ‘They’re made of compacted coal ash. Waste materials from a blast furnace. God knows what kind of chemicals in there.’

‘Yes.’

He shines the lamp on Morgan’s face. Her personality somehow shrinks away under the illumination. Simplifying, reducing. There is dust on her face. The dust might be a combination of plaster and coal ash or it might not. He moves his lamp away and there is something reverential in the way he does it.

I have my documents. He has his camera.

‘I’ll get on then,’ he says.

I don’t know how to answer that either, so I just say ‘Yes.’

4.

Later that evening. We’re in an evil little pub near Blaengwynfi. A red carpet, darkly patterned to compete with the beer stains and the ground-in food. Stone benches beneath the windows and a smell of damp. There are four drinkers here apart from us, all men. They attack their pints the way infantrymen march: slowly, knowing that the road ahead is long.

I’m here with Dunwoody, Jon Breakell and Buzz. Buzz – Detective Sergeant David Brydon, as far as my colleagues are concerned – isn’t on the inquiry team, but when he was done for the day he cadged a lift out here with a scientific officer from Cathays. He’ll drive back into town with me later.