This Thing of Darkness (10 page)

15

Ten days later.

I’m in a car with Watkins. I’ve worked hard. Hard enough on Chicago. Logging data. Checking data. Ferrying exhibits. Sitting in meetings with Dunthinking’s pinky beard and trying not to scream.

The inquiry has got nowhere with the tracking-vehicles-observed-in-both-locations strategy and is now focusing only on white, or whitish, vans that were spotted on Rover Way in Tremorfa at roughly the right time. Dunthinking’s plan is simply to locate and investigate every such vehicle looking either for ones that have been suspiciously well cleaned or for ones still bearing poor Kirsty Emmett’s DNA.

It’s not a ridiculous strategy, but it is vastly time-consuming. Rover Way isn’t the main route into town, but if Eastern Avenue and Newport Road are congested, plenty of traffic will simply sidle southwards in the effort to escape the crush. We have, at present, 122 vehicles to check, and that’s excluding over a dozen emergency services vehicles which theoretically fit the description. Now, combing through 122 vehicles to find a dangerous and violent rapist seems like a good investment of time and money, but each one of those vehicles will yield a whole heap more samples for me to file and deal with. We’ll likely still be dealing with the deluge a full year away. A thought I find terrifying. A thought I almost literally cannot endure.

At one point, during one of Dunthinking’s eternal briefing sessions, I said, ‘Or, you know what, we could think about the other end. Gabalfa. We could actually look at vans local to
that
area.’

In public, Dunthinking said something terse and negative, cutting me off. In private, thereafter, he said, ‘You will do
as
I ask,
when
I ask, and
how
I ask. You will
not
tell me how to run my inquiry. And you will also remember that I will be reporting, in writing, to DCI Jackson my impressions of your overall performance here. Do you understand, Constable?’

I did my humble-acquiescent stuff. Chockfull of yes-sirs, no-sirs and penitent gazes at the floor. But he wasn’t fooled and stared after me with hatred even as I gathered my things to go back downstairs.

Go back downstairs and – me being me – redouble the work I’m doing elsewhere.

I make use of any crevice of time I can find. I’ve made a couple of field trips. Once by myself, a second time with Mike Haston. But not mostly that. Mostly, I’ve pulled data from the PND. Spoken to Carolyn Sharma by phone. Found out more about the undersea cable which yanked one man to his death on a Gower sea shore, hanged another by his neck in a Bristol apartment.

I’ve gone slower than I like, but I know that I’ll have to be rigorous if I’m to persuade my bosses that there’s anything here to investigate. And since this damn investigation is the only air-tube connecting me to the world beyond Chicago’s gloomy depths, I can’t afford to have it snipped.

I sleep in the office most nights. Work till my eyes are green and sore.

I think:
This investigation can get me out of here
.
A couple of honest-to-God murder victims will spring me from this jail
.

No one has yet said anything to suggest that, but my extra-curricular work has produced enough of substance that Watkins, sceptical as she is, has agreed to accompany me down to Bristol to inspect the scene of the hanging, to talk again to the officers who investigated at the time.

On her lap, she has two files. The original inquiry data. My own additional researches. She’s on the first of those now.

‘Nothing missing. Nothing stolen,’ she says.

‘We don’t know that.’

Watkins doesn’t answer directly. Just holds up a letter from Customs & Excise. She doesn’t hold it so that I can read it, but she knows that I’ll know what it refers to. Because it so happens that the dead man, Livesey, had been pulled aside for a random luggage check when he entered the UK. Those things are always recorded so that any subsequent allegation of theft or malpractice can be settled by video evidence. Investigators at the time of the suicide checked the videotape of the luggage search against the items found in the apartment. There was nothing missing. The apartment itself was a corporate rental, and its fixtures and fittings tallied precisely with the contents. The letter from Customs and Excise is just some boring blah about how to access the video.

Watkins doesn’t pursue the argument, just says, ‘Access. The apartment was on the eighth floor. Locked from the inside. No sign of forced entry.’

I say, ‘How hard do you think Avon and Somerset would have investigated? How hard would we have done? Or
you
even? Hanged man. Locked door. Nothing missing. That’s a suicide. You throw a couple of DCs at it, get a report written up for the coroner. Move on.

‘But then you find out that the guy’s fiancée and his entire family says they’ve never seen the guy so positive about life. That she, the fiancée, spoke to him for half an hour the evening of his putative suicide. She said he grumbled about his flight over. Was trying to figure out his apartment’s wi-fi connection. How are those the concerns of a man about to take his own life? And then, too, that weird ending. Like the guy’s become aware of an intruder where no intruder could possibly be.

‘Now you’re going to say – and I agree – that fiancées can get this kind of thing wrong. They get it wrong because they have to. Emotionally, they can’t accept the facts. Only, then you find out that the dead man was working on some engineering project where a second man has also died under strange circumstances.

‘Two deaths. Both strange. Neither properly investigated. Same project.’

Truth is, we’re rehashing old ground. If Watkins didn’t accept the need for a second look at this, we wouldn’t even now be heading for the Severn Bridge, heading for England.

The car thrums.

Uniformed driver.

The spires of the bridge rising as we approach.

Watkins makes a noise in her throat and says, ‘Are you around a week on Sunday? Cal and I are having some friends over in the afternoon. If you . . . if you wanted to . . .’

She doesn’t know what to do with her facial muscles at this point, tries a smile, feels uncomfortable and glowers fiercely instead.

One of the reasons I like Watkins: her social skills are even worse than mine, so I feel agile and accomplished in her company.

‘That would be lovely, Rhiannon. I’d love that.’

I pluck a smile from my rose-garden of happiness and pass it over.

Watkins smiles – glares – shifts position. Gives me, rather abruptly, data on time and place, as if she were arranging a dawn raid on a property where armed resistance was to be expected.

Down at seat level, where the driver can’t see, I squeeze her wrist till I feel her relax. I say, ‘Plas Du. Peter Pan. I’ve made some progress there too. Do you want to look?’

I have a pile of paperwork with me. Three files and a four-page summary document. I typed up the summary last night and my eyes are still stinging with sleeplessness.

The first file is the investigation into Plas Du. The other two files are ones copied from other police force records, one from the Metropolitan Police, one from the Sussex Police.

Watkins takes the pile with curiosity, reads my summary with increasing interest, stares at me without saying anything, then turns to the files.

The car is silent. We enter England.

And my attention drifts from Plas Du and from dead engineers. It drifts to the place where it most truly belongs: to myself, my embattled head, my mysterious past.

When I was a teenage nutcase, not actually sure if I was alive or dead, one of the things that baffled me was the strangeness of my affliction. Cotard’s Syndrome is almost always associated with early childhood trauma, but I had, I was certain, enjoyed the safest of all childhoods. Happy, safe, settled, secure.

And so I did, from the age of two or two and a half. But it turns out that my life before that point is a mystery. Not only to me, but to my mother and father, the parents who adopted me one sunny Sunday, when they came out of chapel to find me, little me, alone in their Jag, a camera round my neck and no earthly explanation as to who might have put me there. Who, and why. I know nothing about where I was in the first two years of my life, or who I was with, or what happened to me. I am, however, certain that those two years hold the clue to the whole, precarious mystery of my head.

I’ve sought to investigate that mystery, but with scant reward. Yet I do have a clue. A hopeless one, perhaps, but it’s what I’ve got.

Back in the mid-1980s, a man called Gareth Glyn, a town planner type, made some allegations about corruption in the city planning process. Those allegations were investigated without result. He lost his job – one of those quit-before-you’re-fired things – and continued to work as a freelance planning consultant thereafter. In 2002, Glyn simply vanished from view. Walked out on his wife. No warning, no preamble, just here one day and gone the next.

So far, so blah. But, point one, a thoughtful ex-detective who worked in the Cardiff CID of the right era says that Glyn’s claims probably had merit. That there probably was corruption and, if there was, then my father almost certainly had a hand in it.

Point two, the whole period in question – Glyn’s allegations, the investigations, his departure – coincided almost precisely with my own strange arrival into the world. Six months after he left the council, I arrived, a little girl dropped from heaven, in the back of my father’s Jag.

Point three, a few months before Glyn’s disappearance, one of the national intelligence services – presumably MI5 – searched police sources for any data they had on Glyn. Those sources had nothing much, but the request itself was significant. Why the hell were they interested? And why so many years later?

And finally, point four, towards the end of last year, I placed some dodgy software on a superintendent’s computer. Software that allowed me to inspect his data. To use his computer as though it were mine. Now, I know – naughty me, bad girl, mustn’t go sabotaging the computers of senior officers – but I did use my access to see if Glyn was in witness protection.

Checked, and discovered this:

Witness name (original):
Glyn, Gareth Huw

Codename:
Eilmer

Status:
Witness protection

Date from:
9 May, 2002

Date ending:
Indefinite

Security status:
No alerts

Current location:
Not available (security clearance not sufficient)

Current identity:
Not available (security clearance not sufficient)

Supervising force:
Not available (security clearance not sufficient
)

Supervising officer:
Not available (security clearance not sufficient)

Like so much in this little investigation of mine, the answer was frustratingly elusive.

Elusive, but not barren. Because perhaps I’ve been told what I need to know. Perhaps those dead ends contain an opening wide enough for me to wriggle through.

But not now, not yet. Those things lie in my future. Bristol lies in my present.

One man hanged, another man fallen, and an undersea cable that leaves corpses wherever it touches shore.

16

The apartment looks just like the photos. They don’t always, but this one does.

Bland. Hotelly. Tasteful in a beige sofa and chrome lamp sort of way.

Also empty. The corporate rental began the day of Livesey’s arrival and had been due to run two months. Given that the coroner has yet to report and that police interest in the property only recently ended, no new tenant has yet moved in.

A straw-haired DC, about my age, is waiting for us outside.

‘Luke Creamer,’ he says, shaking hands with an enthusiasm that indicates he knows nothing of Watkins’s reputation. He was one of the original investigators and nothing in his manner suggests that he’s at all doubtful about the verdict he came to back in February.

We go up in a lift. Creamer ushers us along a corridor to a door. A modern composite thing. Cream painted. Solid lock. Solid door frame.

Watkins: ‘The frame hasn’t been touched?’

‘No.’

‘Not replaced, repainted?’

‘No, only the lock.’

‘The lock is new?’

‘Yes. When we were called, the lock was locked from the inside. We had to drill it out – destroy it, basically. Then, I don’t know, I guess the lettings agent got the thing replaced.’

‘OK.’

Watkins inspects briefly then makes a gesture of angry impatience. Her way of saying, ‘I say, Constable, would you be so good as to let us in?’

He does so.

Watkins glares at me. Says to Creamer, ‘Other routes in?’

‘None.’

‘Fire exits?’

‘This door, then emergency stairs.’

‘Access from the roof?’

‘Nothing. Not without cutting a hole.’

Watkins starts stomping round, checking the facts.

I make a call. The person I want was due here already, but he’s been a bit held up. He’ll be here in a couple of minutes.

The apartment is top floor, arranged over two levels. The living room is double height, with a gallery leading to the two bedrooms and bathrooms. Livesey was found hanged from the gallery, his feet only a foot or so from the floor. A side table kicked away – or pulled away – a couple of feet distant. A pair of large French doors open onto a balcony with a view over the city and the brown ocean beyond.

I ask, ‘Has the apartment been cleaned?’

Creamer says, ‘I don’t think so. Do you want me to find out?’

I don’t answer. I’m on my hands and knees on the floor beneath the gallery. Beneath the swing of the corpse.

Inspecting the carpet for stains. Find nothing much. A little bleaching where Livesey urinated, post-mortem. But I moisten my finger, touch the carpet around the crucial area, though avoiding the bleaching. Taste my finger. Nothing. Repeat the process a few times. Still nothing.

Then spot a blond wood and metal chair that’s been shifted slightly from the kitchen area.

‘That chair,’ I ask. ‘Has it been moved?’

Creamer is being called over to the balcony by Watkins and doesn’t answer, but I don’t care.

Go over to the chair. Feel around with my wet finger on the carpet. Find something crystalline. Taste it.

It’s salt.

‘Salt,’ I say. ‘I’ve got salt on the carpet.’

Watkins comes in from outside. She’s saying something about access. I don’t know what, because I’m not listening, but in any case I already know what she’s going to tell me. The apartment sits over the top two floors of the block, and its balcony juts like a smoothly curving prow over everything below. There are no balconies to either side, nor any balcony directly below.

I’m examining the chair now. The metal arms. I ask, ‘This chair? Did anyone check it over?’

Watkins is saying something else now. My attention isn’t with her, but there’s a ferocity in her look which is eloquent enough. She’s pissed off, I think, because she’s concluded, wrongly, that this is an obvious suicide and is angry with me at bringing her here. Doubly angry perhaps that a junior member of a neighbouring force should have to witness us blundering through the obvious.

A knock at the apartment door relieves me of the need to answer Watkins.

Creamer opens the door.

Mike is there. Loose brown shorts. Tatty shoes. T-shirt and fleece. Hair tied back with a not-very-clean green hair tie. A backpack worn on one shoulder only.

He says, ‘Hi.’

I say, ‘Ma’am, this is Mike Haston. An access consultant.’

Watkins’s face flickers through various different shades of glower, trying to find the right one for the situation. ‘You’ve retained a consultant?’ is what she says.

‘Working gratis,’ I say brightly. ‘A citizen volunteer.’

I give Mike my happy face to make up for the thunderbolts he’s getting from Watkins.

He doesn’t care much either way. Just unslings his backpack. Pulls out a couple of ropes.

The gallery is supported at its centre point by a steel pillar. Mike tests it briefly, then loops a rope round the pillar. Pulls the ends out to the balcony.

Watkins snaps, ‘This is a crime scene.’

Meaning: ask permission before touching anything.

But also, I note, acknowledging that we need to treat the apartment as a place of possible murder, not just one of unfortunate suicide.

Mike stops doing what he’s doing. Waiting for someone to explain to him exactly what he should be doing.

I say, ‘Mike, it’s fine. Just don’t touch anything too much without checking first.’

To Watkins, I say, ‘Ma’am, I’ve been out here with Mike already. To the foot of the building, not up here. And according to Mike, any competent climber could make the ascent. We’re not sure about the balcony, because we’ve not had a chance to inspect it. But the first seven storeys of this building aren’t impregnable. They’re a walk in the park.’

Mike digs around in his pack. Gets out a small, flexible wire with a couple of spring-loaded cams on the end, and a simple release mechanism. I’d never seen one before Mike showed me. Watkins is equally baffled.

Mike tosses the device from hand to hand. Says, ‘OK, this building is clad in preformed concrete panels. Those things are made in a factory somewhere, then just clipped into place. On this particular building, there’s a gap about so big between the panels.’ He holds his finger and thumb about a quarter of an inch apart. ‘That’s not enough to get a real grip, but plenty to get one of these boys inside. You slide it in like this.’ He pulls the release mechanism and the cams fold up. ‘Then pop it in and let go.’ He lets go and the cams snap back. ‘Any half-decent climber could go all the way using a couple of these.’

Watkins: ‘These gadgets. They’re legal?’

Mike: ‘Every climbing shop in the country. They’re for climbing, not burglary.’

Watkins: ‘Even so. No. The time it would take to do all that. You’d be seen from below.’

Mike: ‘It’s after dark. You wait for an empty street. Allow maybe twenty seconds to get above the level of the streetlamps. Easy.’

And, though Mike doesn’t say it, no one looks up. Why would they?

Watkins goes through the same calculation. Tries to find a face to accommodate the situation. She has difficulty settling on one, but the mood has shifted. We all watch in near silence as Mike sets up his ropes.

He ties off the one looped round the pillar. Snaps a karabiner onto the loop. The karabiner is level with the very lip of the balcony. Wind and traffic noise. The blue light of high places.

Mike starts to put on harness, chalk bag, rock boots. Says to Creamer, ‘You might want to check the flat below. They might get a surprise otherwise.’

Creamer does a short double-take, then nods. Disappears.

Mike takes his other rope, clips it into the karabiner, and throws both ends over the balcony, where they vanish into space. He makes some adjustments till he’s happy with his set-up. Creamer re-emerges. Tells us there’s no one below us. That he’s left a Police Action notice on their door, just in case.

The balcony floor is weathered timber. The balcony edge is glass and brushed steel. The air around us is sea air. Air from the Bristol Channel, the Irish Sea, the dark Atlantic. Up here, solid ground seems no more than a memory.

Mike looks at me.

I look at Watkins.

We’re all as though hypnotised by the light, the situation. All of us, except Mike, for whom these things are ordinary.

Watkins nods. ‘OK.’ Adds, ‘Thank you.’ A Watkinsian first, I do believe.

Mike clips into his descent rope. Swings matter-of-factly over the balcony. Winks. And vanishes.

There’s a moment where nothing at all happens. Time, freed by the wind and the height, does what it likes. Stretches out, curls up, takes new shapes, new dimensions. The three of us left on the balcony stand back from the edge, stare at the karabiner, the tensely swinging rope.

Watkins is the first to find her voice.

She says, ‘Salt?’

I explain what I’m thinking. I conclude, ‘You said in the car that nothing was missing, but we don’t know that. We only know that nothing
physical
was taken. But Livesey was an engineer. Seabed surveys, that was his thing. If this was a murder and if it was motivated by theft, he only had one thing worth murdering for. And that was his data. His passwords. His access.’

Watkins takes this in. The karabiner on the balcony wall creaks against steel. There are sounds below us, but they filter only dimly upwards. Mike, a few feet away, is already in another world.

Watkins says to Creamer, ‘That chair. Has it been forensicated?’

Creamer says, ‘I’m not sure,’ then changes tack and adds, ‘But I don’t think so. We wouldn’t have . . .’

‘Get onto it now.’ To me: ‘This second post-mortem. Where does that stand?’

‘It’s due to take place imminently. I asked Sharma, the fiancée, to hold off while we took a look back here. So we can instruct the pathologist, if need be. I don’t know if they’ll be able to find anything, but we can at least tell him what he needs to look for.’

Watkins nods.

The karabiner creaks.

Creamer is making a call from inside. Watkins and I are left in this blue silence. Listening to the karabiner, watching the ever-shifting rope.

Creamer rejoins us. ‘SOCO on the way.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘Should I get a DI over?’

Watkins
is
a detective inspector, of course, but not from the local force. And if this is a crime scene, it’s theirs, not ours.

Watkins says, ‘Let’s wait for . . .’ She doesn’t complete her sentence, but doesn’t have to.

The karabiner, the rope, the light.

More time passes, perhaps only moments.

Then a hand, Mike’s hand. A lunge upwards from below. Seeking the lip of the balcony, the little gap between the timber floor, the glass retaining wall.

The lunge misses. A pause. A second lunge, closer this time. Then a third. This time, Mike gets the grip he wants. He gets two hands on the lip, swings a toe up to the platform, levering it between wood and glass. Then his grinning face. Then he pulls himself in one fluid movement to the barrier itself. Steps over it, smiling, shaking the acid out of his arms, wiping chalk off on his shorts.

He’s breathing hard, but happy.

Pulls his rock boots off. Bare feet. Sweatmarks on the wood.

Watkins stares. Creamer too. I probably do the same.

He laughs at us.

‘OK. It’s interesting. Really interesting.’

He explains. The balcony is supported by steel girders sticking straight out of the main frame of the building. In construction terms, there’s no great weight in the balcony, so the girders are quite slim. ‘Standard I-frame cross-section,’ says Mike, ‘so quite easy. Nice juggy handholds, and enough room to get a heel hook as well.’

A heel hook: a type of foothold.

Watkins: ‘So it’s possible to climb out on them?’

‘I
did
climb out on them. I mean, yes, it’s exposed. I’m roped up and a fall wasn’t going to be a big deal. Doing it without ropes, though, that would be pretty bold.’

But if you’re here to murder someone, then a certain recklessness is already baked in, I reckon. Say something to that effect.

‘Yes, but hear me out. Someone
has
been out along there. There are five girders beneath the balcony. I checked them all. Four of them were untouched. The third one, the middle one, that has fingermarks all the way along it. I climbed the next one along, this one,’ he says, tapping on the floor with his bare foot. Then, moving along the balcony to the centre and tapping again, ‘This one here, that’s the one your fingerprint guys will want to look at. That’s your intruder right there.’

His words break some sort of tension. Creamer looks at Watkins, who nods.

Creamer goes into the apartment. Makes a call. He’ll be alerting a duty officer. A suicide is being upgraded to murder. Their Major Crimes team will need to get working on this, just two months too late.

To Watkins and me, Mike says, ‘But there’s something else. Something troubling. Yes, the route up to the balcony is OK. Yes, the route out on the girders is OK. Not trivial, it’s not something I’d personally want to attempt without protection, but there are plenty of climbers who solo that kind of thing for fun.’

The wind blows. The ropes still tap restlessly against the balcony.

I say, ‘But . . .?’

‘But then you’ve got that final move. From the girder up and out to the lip of the balcony itself. It’s insane. Like this wild, off-balance slap for a hold you can’t see.’

Watkins: ‘But you did it. We just saw you.’

‘Yes. On my fifth attempt. The first two times, I was a mile away. Then I took a long rest on the rope, I sorted out my start position and tried again. Missed twice, then got it. But doing that move? Unroped and at night? You just watched me die four times over.’

Watkins and I exchange glances. It’s a strange experience this. Tiptoeing round the body of someone else’s expertise. Not knowing what to ask. Where the right questions lie.

I make an attempt. ‘Mike, in layman’s terms, how good are you? How good would a climber have to be?’

Mike pulls the elastic out of his hair. Lets it blow free. He tries to explain. As I understand his explanation, Mike himself is pretty good, a talented and committed hobbyist, but he’s not remotely an elite-level climber. I ask about Rhod, say, ‘Would he have made that move? Assume that he’s got some strong motivation to do so.’