This Thing of Darkness (11 page)

Mike says, ‘In terms of grade, I’d place the move at about a bouldering V6 or V7. Don’t even ask what that means, it’s just a way of gauging the difficulty of a climb. I climb that kind of thing at the wall in Cardiff. Fall a few times, then figure it out, climb it clean. Rhod’s better than me. His best bouldering grade is V9, maybe even V10. If he’s on form, I guess he’d climb V6 on-sight ninety-something per cent of the time. Climb it clean, without a fall, that is. V7, I don’t know, but it’s well within his ability. And, of course, you can train for things. If you know you’re going to be making a particular type of move, you can practise it. Train specifically for it. But still. Fuck.’

He laughs. Not a happy laugh. A release of tension one.

Watkins and I still have the tension, not the release.

Mike looks at us and says, ‘If you’ve got someone who’s capable of camming his way up to the eighth floor, then climbing out along those girders, then who still has the fitness and confidence to make a Do-Not-Fall type of V7 move at the end of it, then that’s one hell of a dangerous man.’

He points in at the apartment.

A penthouse flat. A hundred feet up. The front door locked from the inside. No skylight. No other means of entry. Impenetrable.

‘If that place wasn’t safe, then nowhere is. Nowhere.’

Weathered timber, glass and brushed steel.

A wind blowing straight from the Bristol Channel, the Irish Sea, the black Atlantic.

And a climber who can enter any building, anywhere. A climber who kills and an undersea cable whose touch is murder.

17

We do what we have to do.

The very next day, I fly out to Virginia. Long haul to Washington, then a rinky-dink regional jet to Norfolk, so small and cute I feel like I could gobble it up. The flight has just one stewardess, who has a huge American smile and calls me ma’am. When I struggle to get my bag in the overhead locker, she thrusts it up there for me with a competence that suggests she could probably bundle me up there as well if she had to.

I meet Carolyn Sharma, Livesey’s fiancée. We meet in the lobby of my hotel, drink coffee – decaf, in my case. The hotel is nice. Cheap, of course – police budgets aren’t designed to support long-haul travel – but nice. The lobby is black and white and a soft coffee-tinted cream. Fake colonial mouldings and potted palms. Sharma wears khaki shorts, boat shoes, and a blue linen shirt, the colour of the sky.

She says, ‘Officer Griffiths, I want to say thanks so much for coming out here. We all appreciate it.’

I stare. Her face offers one thing, her words something different.

She wasn’t like this on the phone, but then maybe no one ever has the same phone-self and real-self.

I say, ‘Fiona. Or Fi.’

‘Oh, OK, sure. Fiona. That’s a lovely name.’

I think I’m a disappointment to Sharma. I think she wanted someone older, or more senior, or at least more capable of growing a moustache and twirling a nightstick.

‘I think you’re right. I don’t believe that Mr Livesey – that Ian – took his own life.’

‘Oh, honey. Oh, hon.’

This time her words and face find synchrony. She’s not young. Livesey wasn’t. He was fifty-two, she’s late-forties, and this was to have been a second marriage for them both.

But love lives in older faces too. Love and grief.

I address those things the only way I know how.

‘Carolyn, I’m not able to speak for my police service. As a body, we haven’t drawn any firm conclusions and won’t do so until our investigation is complete. But if you want to know where I personally stand, I do not believe that Ian committed suicide. I believe he was murdered. And although it won’t really lessen your hurt, it’s my intention to find the person who killed him. Find him, arrest him, prosecute him, jail him. I have a good record. And I will make it happen.’

Sharma wants to produce another ‘hon’, or something, but her face, her brave face, has dissolved completely now. She’s crying, silently but with tears that fall ceaselessly, abundantly, like grain at harvest, like mackerel in swarm.

Her hand keeps groping for her bag, but she’s too much of a mess to find the catch. I take her bag from her, open it, find the tissues I imagine she’s seeking, and pass them over.

She wipes at her face, catching the tears as they fall, but she might as well try to catch a river. A waiter comes over to see if he can help but, unless he has the power of resurrection, there’s no job for him here. I put my hand on Sharma’s bare knee and she covers my hand with hers, and we sit together that way, the still centre of a noisy world.

After a bit, her tears turn to juddering sobs broken only by a handful of
oh, hon
s, which rise like boulders above the swirling current.

When she gets her voice back, or something like it, she says words to the effect that Livesey was a lovely man, that he had only friends, no enemies, that no one could possibly have had a reason to kill him. I think she thinks that he was killed in one of those random ways. A failed burglary, someone looking to score enough cash to buy the next hit of drugs, that sort of thing. I tell her gently that that’s not our thinking.

I get out the statement that she made for the Avon and Somerset Police, a statement which dwells only on the matter of Livesey’s mental state. I don’t tell her this, but it reads like any number of similar statements we take at the time of a loved one’s suicide. The general gist: Yes, So-and-so has his/her issues, we all do, but I can’t believe he/she would do something like this, it’s just not possible. The evidential value of those statements is close to zero, but if the bereaved need us to take them, we do.

I ask her if she’s OK to do this next bit, and she says yes. In a funny way, I think the process of an official interrogation and statement-taking is helpful to her. Like the way you sit up straighter in tailored clothes.

‘Carolyn, are you happy for me to call you by your first name? I can call you Ms Sharma or ma’am, if you prefer.’

‘Oh no, gosh, Carolyn’s fine.’

‘Carolyn, I’d like to record our interview, if I have your permission to do so.’

‘Sure. Of course.’

I do the preliminaries. Confirm her identity, her relationship with the deceased, have her confirm that her previous statement is full and accurate.

She gives me what I need, at first leaning forward to talk, rather formally, into the recorder, then adjusting position and speaking more naturally, more fluently.

I ask about Livesey’s work. If she was aware of the detail.

‘No. It was complicated stuff. I knew he was doing this big project but, you know, as for the details . . .’ She tails off into a shrug.

‘You were not aware of the detailed progress of his work?’

‘No.’

‘The results of his work were stored electronically. On his laptop and on a data server. Did you have access to those things? Did you share passwords, for example?’

‘Gosh, hon, I never thought . . . No.’

I probe away. Had Livesey ever been threatened? Suffered from identity theft, or a phishing attack, lost a laptop, anything like that?

No, no and no.

Had any of his colleagues or collaborators been threatened or suffered thefts, especially of electronics?

Longer, more complex, answers, but still, in essence, no.

Had Livesey ever referred to the possibility of violence in relation to his work?

‘No. No, never.’

Sharma’s face looks anxious, as though she thinks there are answers that I want, that she ought to be able to give, that she can’t supply. She looks upset, as if she’s failing.

I say, ‘Carolyn, you’re doing fine. These answers are helpful, actually. Sometimes a “no” is more useful than a “yes”.’

Because the voice recorder can’t see it, I rub her knee again, then her arm. She cries again, briefly, then wipes her eyes. We’ve pretty much run through her tissues and the non-resurrecting waiter brings a wodge of paper towels with a hushed ‘You’re welcome.’

I round out the interview. Compile it into a statement. Get her to sign it. It’s a big fat negative on all fronts, but what I said is true: sometimes negatives are helpful. Truth is, if the lethal actors in this investigation are based in America, our chances of catching them are slim to zero. The more negatives Sharma can give me, the better I like it.

The next day – a smiling blue morning, their May like the best of our July – we meet at the morgue. The pathologist, Vincent DiGiulian, works for the US Navy mostly, hardly a surprise in this town which is half sea and all port, home to the US Navy’s Atlantic fleet and one of NATO’s two strategic commands. But DiGiulian also runs a small private practice and he welcomes us to his facility, the Bellavista, which, though much smaller than those I’ve been used to, is well-equipped and immaculately kept.

He produces coffee for Sharma, water for me, and we sit at his office window, watching traffic move sedately on a six-lane boulevard. The tarmac is already warm and big trees shadow the central reservation, the broad verges on either side of the road.

I feel a long way from Cardiff.

DiGiulian tries to dissuade Sharma from being present at what follows, but she’s paid for all this – the corpse repatriation, the re-examination – and she insists on seeing it through. A rite of passage. And perhaps the grimness is what she needs. A walk through the valley of the shadow of death. A last farewell.

She sips the last of her coffee, looks as pale as her well-tanned skin can manage, and says, ‘I want to do this. Sorry, but I do.’

We change into scrubs, masks, boots. DiGiulian, already dressed, takes us through to the examination room itself. Livesey is there, covered with a pale cloth, almost phosphorescent under the lamps.

DiGiulian says, ‘OK, I’m going to do this like it was the first time. No preconceptions about cause, or anything like that. I deliberately haven’t read your report’ – he nods at me, referring to the report put together by the Avon and Somerset pathologist – ‘because I don’t want to fill my head with anyone else’s dumb ideas. I want to get dumb ideas all of my own, right?’

He goes on to explain that it can’t truly be like the first time. Avon and Somerset were reasonably careful with their crime scene procedures – careful, that is, considering that suicide was the presumption right from the start. But they did, for example, take residue and fingernail samples from Livesey’s hands. The data from those samples proved negative for anything interesting, but the very process of analysis means that Livesey’s hands can no longer be regarded as forensically intact.

His hands, or indeed anything else.

Livesey was a strong, fit man in his youth and was still clearly so in middle age. But he’d be less strong and fit now, with a Y-shaped incision running from both shoulders to his sternum, then down to his crotch. A second vivid tear running ear-to-ear across the forehead. The English pathologist removed organs, including the brain, for weighing, tissue analysis and all the rest of it, then returned the organs to the corpse after he was done, sewing up his original incision.

But these things are done to mortuary standards, not surgical ones. A surgeon’s tiny, careful stitches, the sort designed to minimise scarring, have no place here. Livesey is sewn up with coarse thread and big stitches. Half man, half crafting project.

Before opening the corpse, DiGiulian runs through the standard surface examination. Checking skin for hair samples, gunshot residues, any foreign objects. He finds little enough.

I say, ‘Traces of salt found at the scene on the floor. Also, on his trouser leg. Right leg, upper thigh.’

Traces which weren’t found until we re-examined the clothing. Avon and Somerset hadn’t been sloppy exactly. Just that a full no-holds-barred examination is expensive. It’s not done for every violent or unexpected death. It wasn’t done here.

DiGiulian stares at me. He has big, sad, clever eyes. He says nothing. Just turns to the right thigh. Checks the skin under a variety of UV lights. Checks it under close magnification. Swabs the right thigh and puts the swab in a sterile beaker.

Because the whole exam is being recorded, he says out loud, to the recorder, ‘White crystals found on upper right thigh, inside the leg, five, six inches below the genitals. Crystals appear consistent with ordinary household salt. Swab removed for further examination.’

None of us say anything.

Sharma is very still, her face almost frozen. To start with, DiGiulian was making great efforts to keep Livesey covered in every area bar the one he was working in, but the effort meant a constant twitching and tweaking of the sheet. As he gets ready to start on the internal exam, Sharma says – the first time she’s spoken – ‘Just remove the damned sheet.’ DiGiulian shoots her a glance, but does as she asks.

Livesey’s naked body with its vivid Y-shaped laceration suddenly seems like the biggest thing in the world. The biggest and the quietest.

DiGiulian slides a scalpel down the stitches so softly it seems like he’s miming the action, not performing it for real, but the body falls open at his touch. Falls open more abruptly, more completely, than seems quite plausible. Partly because of a body brick placed under the corpse’s chest. Mostly, though, because this is a dead body, where cut surfaces don’t heal, where the insides are just a jumble of discarded organs.

Ian Livesey, the man who was to have been Carolyn Sharma’s husband, is now a thing of grey-yellow flaps of skin. His fat and muscle is exposed like a side of meat in a pork butchery, half a bucketful of brown-purple slops held within.

I’ve seen this before and I love it every time. My version of a winter sunset, a bowl of flowers.

Sharma hasn’t and presumably doesn’t. She swallows, her breathing accelerates. Her hands wander through space, looking for anchor. I catch one of them and settle it on my knee. She resists at first, then relaxes.

The internal exam is long and without adventure. I’m not expecting anything much from it and all the work has already been done. But it’s part of the rite, and DiGiulian does it all, speaking to his recorder as he goes. Sharma doesn’t get comfortable with it all exactly, but the tedium itself has a kind of anaesthetising quality and after a while she squeezes my hand, and pulls away.

Even when DiGiulian peels Livesey’s face down – literally rolling it down from the forehead, in order to get better access to the skull and the brain inside – Sharma is OK. I hear her gasp a little, but she remains upright, keeps her hands to herself.

To have your face rolled down over your eyes and not even to notice your blindness. That’s dead, I think, as dead as it’s possible to be.

Livesey’s skull isn’t empty. His brain was removed for weighing by the Avon pathologist, but was returned afterwards. DiGiulian repeats the extraction, weighing, and observation process now. Takes a little sample for laboratory analysis.

To have your brain removed not once but twice. And to move no muscle, to experience no flicker of thought or feeling as it happens. That’s dead, that’s very, very dead.

Three hours in and the exam draws to a close.

DiGiulian looks at me. I know what he’s asking.

I say to Sharma, ‘Carolyn, Dr DiGiulian and I want to examine that inner thigh area. The examination might be upsetting for you.’

I suggest she might want to leave it there. Reassure her she’ll get all the information we uncover. I use my most professional police constable manner. Like I’m interviewing for a role in Family Liaison. But Sharma shakes her head with conviction. ‘No. No. I want to see the whole thing.’

She’s right. It’s what she’s here for. To discover the horror she will have to live with.