This Thing of Darkness (19 page)

The hanging corpse and the fallen one. Both men went aerial in their own ways. But this case isn’t about the air, but about the sea. The murk of the Irish Sea, the dark Atlantic. That great salt boneyard.

I call Penry.

‘Brian,’ I say, ‘I’ve got another assignment for you, if you want it. Nothing illegal, just time-consuming.’

‘OK.’

‘Ports, basically. Bristol, Newport, Cardiff, Barry, Swansea, Milford Haven.’

‘OK . . .?’

I tell him what I want. What I’m looking for.

‘Will you recognise it?’

‘Me, no. But I know a man who will.’

There’s a pause. A long one.

Then: ‘Shouldn’t you leave this to, you know, the actual police?’

‘I
am
the actual police.’

‘No, you’re not. Not working like this.’

‘I’ve tried. I honestly have.’

‘And if we find a ship you’re interested in . . .?’

‘I present the evidence to my commanding officer,’ I say primly.

‘And then?’

‘We get search warrants. Intercepts. We send in the fucking SAS.’

‘Because a ship looks funny?’

‘Because we have evidence of a ship adapted for criminal purposes.’

‘Or adapted in some way that is totally innocent, only you wouldn’t know what it was because you don’t know the first thing about the shipping industry.’

‘That’s why we get a search warrant. We take a look and if we’re wrong, we say very sorry, have a nice day.’

‘Right. A magistrate is going to bloody love that argument.’

‘Livesey
was
murdered
and
tortured and there
was
a ten-million-pound scam.’

Penry considers that. He was a decent enough copper in his day and he can compute the odds as well as I can. The more serious the crime, the lower the evidential threshold needed to secure our authorisations.

In the end, though, he comes down against me.

‘No. Even then. You have to have
something
.’

He’s probably right, but until you look, you don’t know what you might find, so you have to look. The thing that worries me more is that Penry will be limited in what he can cover alone. And really, there are other ports to look at as well. Southampton, certainly. Maybe Falmouth. Dublin and Cork in Ireland. Maybe others. I’m not a shipping specialist. I don’t know how these things work.

Penry senses that I’m not happy and he asks why. I tell him.

He says, ‘I’ve got some mates in Dublin. I don’t mind going out there. Get someone to take a look.’

‘Would you? That would be brilliant.’

‘In terms of . . . I’m sorry to ask, Fi, but I’ll need petrol money. I’m near enough broke as it is.’

‘Petrol money? I’ll pay you. Time and expenses. Isn’t that what we agreed?’

‘This could take weeks.’

‘I’ve got the money, Brian. It’s not an issue.’

And it’s true: on an assignment last year, some gangsters gave me sixty thousand pounds. They were planning to kill me as well – it wasn’t all nicey-nicey – but they didn’t kill me and I kept the money. If my friends and colleagues on the force knew I’d taken the cash, I’d have had to give it back, but they didn’t and I haven’t.

I don’t say this, though, and Penry doesn’t push. I guess he assumes that I get money from my father, which indeed I also do.

‘Starting when, Fi? You’re going to say right now, aren’t you?’

‘Yes please. I don’t know their timetable.’

We chat another minute or two and I ring off.

I was standing in the hall while on the phone, so I could look at the blood marks on the wall.

Moon fallen. Livesey hanging.

And now Buzz, dear Buzz, attacked in my own home.

It occurs to me that if I can’t persuade Watkins to take the shipping angle seriously, I’ll end up doing something dangerous and stupid at the end of all this. That thought doesn’t bother me particularly. What’s dangerous for me isn’t quite the same as what’s dangerous for other people. Chicago, for example, all that data-entry work down in Ifor’s dungeon, that’s dangerous. It’s come close to threatening my sanity. My life even. Biros in the eyes and dark steps leading down.

A little bit of fire and brimstone at the end of a good case, on the other hand: that never feels scary, or not really, not in the same way. Even if I’m scared, it’s a knowledge that reminds me that I am alive, that I do have feelings, that I join together. Those things are golden. For me, they’re golden.

This case has a nice feel to it now, and I feel calm.

This has been a wonderful end to a wonderful day.

27

Gwynedd. North Wales. Not a different part of the same country but, for we native Taffs, a strange and different land altogether. Different accents. Different hills. Different words.

Language researchers put the boundary of North Walian and South Walian somewhere near Tre Taliesin on the road between Machynlleth and Aberystwyth. Gogs to the north. Hwntws to the south.

I tell Mike this, make him hear the difference between
dodrefn
and
celfi
,
llaeth
and
llefrith
.

He’s English, though, and doesn’t care. Says, ‘What’s that anyway?’

‘
Llaeth
? Milk.’

‘So call it “milk”.’

The road is twisty and wet with a splash of summer rain. I’m at the wheel, but since I’m a highly skilled police-trained driver, I can punch him on the arm without crashing. He says, ‘Ow!’ but he laughs and doesn’t look as guilty as he ought to, so I don’t think I hit him hard enough.

On the way down to Llanberis from Pen-y-Pass, Mike points to a bit of wet rock on the side of the valley. A broad open-book corner. Steep, like the angle of a castle wall.

‘That’s Dinas Cromlech,’ he tells me. ‘Forget all your crap about milk. If you want the beating heart of North Wales, it’s there. Cenotaph Corner, Cemetery Gates, Left Wall, Right Wall, Lord of the Flies.’ His finger jabs at climbing routes I can’t decipher.

I say, ‘It looks really . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Really . . . wet.’

He revenge-punches me and we head down to Llanberis.

We’re met by Nat Brown. Fifties, bearded, blue-eyed. Powerful, but in a way that’s more cuddly than scary. He looks at my car, a cute little Alfa Romeo, and says, ‘Best go in mine.’

His: a beat-up Land Rover. The old sort. Series III or something like that. The kind of car that rattles like seven devils when in motion, but which is still capable of crossing the Sahara, or fording a river in flood, or – as now – driving almost vertically up the side of a Welsh mountain on a track built of loose scree scattered over rhyolite, blasted through with potholes, then overlaid with swags of sodden grass.

When the track levels off, we encounter an old stone cottage, whitewashed, a handful of barns and outbuildings off to one side.

Brown takes us inside. His wife, Val, makes tea in a big brown pot and puts out the kind of fruitcake which could stop a bullet.

We talk.

Brown is the ‘Out and About’ columnist for one of Britain’s biggest climbing magazines. (‘Which isn’t saying much,’ he says.) Mike has already promised me that Brown is the best connected climber on the British scene. Been everywhere. Knows everyone. Heard everything. We offered Brown a consultancy arrangement on the same basis as Mike’s, but he refused. ‘No one else ever pays me for anything, so I don’t see why you should.’

I rehearse the facts of the cases which have brought us here. Not everything. I’m careful to keep the disclosure of non-public facts to a minimum. But still. A number of outrageous burglaries. Two deaths. One of the men tortured before he was killed.

Brown looks grim, but a good sort of grim. The sort that prefaces action.

He takes his tea, a wodge of cake and points at the door.

We go out.

Wind, rain and sunlight take turns to paint these mountains in their colours. One distant crag broods dark as coal, while another glitters with gold. Apart from a low stone wall around the cottage itself, the hill here is unfenced and sheep crop the mountain grass around our feet, hardly bothering to trot away as we approach.

We head for one of the larger outbuildings. Brown pushes at the door, then kicks it when it sticks.

Inside: a strange lamplit gloom. The entire interior has been cloaked in sheets of plywood, painted grey, then studded with holds. Not just the wall, but the ceiling too. There’s a man – loose trousers, old T-shirt, climbing boots – moving upside-down on the ceiling as we enter. He reaches out for a hold, finds it, adjusts grip, then shifts his body along to follow. The guy’s footwork is surprisingly delicate. Precise. Then a long reach for a bright orange hold that doesn’t seem like much of a hold to me. The guy shoots out an arm. A do-or-die sort of move.

On this occasion, it’s die. The guy reaches the hold, gets a grip of it, but his body is travelling too fast, too out of control, and he falls onto the blue matting that covers the entire floor.

On his back, looking up, the guy says, ‘Damn.’ Then, rolling over and groping for a water bottle, ‘You’re Fiona, right? The police person?’

I am, I say.

Brown introduces the guy on the floor. ‘This is Joe. Joe Allen.’

We shake hands. Sweat and chalk on his. I don’t know what on mine.

Mike has already told me about Allen. He’s one of the country’s top climbers, placed twenty-something in the world lead climbing rankings, but Mike also told me to ignore the rankings. ‘Not everyone wants to compete. The real stuff happens on rock.’

At the back of the building, a projecting wall is covered by an old sheet. Brown pulls it away.

‘This is it,’ he tells us.

It: an inch-perfect reconstruction of that Bristol balcony. The reconstruction was built by a local Llanberis carpenter, under the eye of our own forensic guys and using measurements taken by a team of climbers, led by Mike, at the apartment itself.

The climb looks desperate to me. If I hadn’t just seen a man crawling upside down on a ceiling, it wouldn’t even have occurred to me that anyone could climb out under that thing, then make the move up and out to the edge of the balcony itself.

Allen – our guinea pig – just shrugs.

Sits on the matting under the ‘balcony’. Chalks up.

Brown says, ‘OK, this is seven storeys up. You’ve just used a couple of camming devices to crack-climb up. Jumaring, effectively. Then this. It’s dark. You haven’t practised. No top-rope inspection, nothing like that.’

Allen says, ‘Sheez. OK.’

He positions himself under our mock-up and climbs out on the bits of timber that are standing in for those Bristol girders. His movements are light, limber. Unforced. I can see that, for him, this bit is easy.

Then he gets to the end of the girders. The part where Mike fell.

Allen says, ‘Sweet.’

Thinks about it. Adjusts body position, then swings out looking for the edge of the ‘balcony’. His first swing is for practice only, a sighting shot. But he keeps his body well in control, he’s not at risk of falling. ‘Big reach that,’ he says, but gathers his concentration again, swings out, and this time does it for real, gets the hold, swings a foot up to join his hand on the ledge, then just drops to the floor, because he’s done the hard part.

‘Seven storeys up, huh?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m saying V7, maybe the softer end of V7. Not too bad, anyway.’

Mike nods. That is, I think, what he said to us, though I don’t understand these climbing grades, no matter how often Mike explains them.

Somewhere else in this cave, I can’t tell where, there’s a reconstruction of the hardest bit of the lighthouse climb too. Mike went back to the lighthouse, with Rhod and a team of two other climbers, plus some of our forensic guys, who were able to take casts of the relevant holds and ripples in the stone. Mike has already told me that the lighthouse climb is fearsome. ‘There were sections there I couldn’t get close to, not even on top-rope. Rhod was OK, but even he came away twenty or thirty times before he got the sequence.’

Brown shifts us down to the far end of the building, till we’re standing under the biggest length of vertical wall in the room, about six metres at its highest. And now, I realise, I do see the reconstructed lighthouse, not because I recognise any of the holds, but because I recognise the colour of the casts made by our forensic lab. The casts are screwed to the wall, picking their way up in shades of white and grey. Again: an inch-perfect reconstruction of the real thing.

Allen chalks up. ‘Wow. Looks really thin.’

‘You’re about thirty feet up,’ says Mike. ‘No rope.’

‘Landing?’

‘Yeah, landing’s OK.’

‘And I’ve got mats?’

‘We assume so, as many as you want.’

I never really understand these climbing exchanges. Mike seems to think that falling forty or fifty feet onto a bouldering mat – a few inches of foam padding – is no big deal. Allen the same. In the car on the way up here, I tried arguing it out with Mike. He said, ‘Yes, OK, no one wants to fall forty feet onto a bouldering mat, even a big pile of them. But there’s a difference between a lethal fall and just a bad one. If you fall forty feet onto matting, you’ll break an ankle, maybe a leg, but there’s no way you should kill yourself.’

He told me about an activity called deep water soloing, where people climb sea cliffs without ropes. ‘The grading system basically rates danger from S0 to S3. S0 means you have a nice clear drop into deep water and as long as you can swim, you’ll be fine.’

‘And S3?’

‘Means the water beneath you is very shallow, so it’s basically as dangerous as soloing above a big pile of rocks, except that this way you have the possibility of drowning as well as just breaking your neck.’

‘And people do that?’

‘Yes,’ he says, and gives me one of those nutty, happy climber grins at the thought of it.

Allen blows the excess chalk off his hands, then starts to climb. Fairly slow. Moving with a considered, powerful grace. There’s one point a third of the way up when he starts to make a move, then reconsiders and pulls back. A tiny adjustment of foot position, then he’s in motion again. Climbs carefully up to the top, then slaps the very top of the wall and simply falls off, landing happily back on the mat.

‘Blimey.’

Mike says, ‘Rhod thought hard 7c, possibly 8a.’

Allen: ‘Yeah, solid 8a, I’d say. Not 7c. That was the crux?’

‘Yes. The rest was hard 7b, maybe 7c.’

I call for a translation. It’s Brown who provides it.

‘That route there. The lighthouse climb. To do that on-sight and without ropes – well, it’s doable, clearly. But you’re basically looking at an elite-level climber. Allen’s standard, or near enough.’

He looks grim. Allen too. I look between their faces, trying to understand their reaction.

Brown says, ‘There just aren’t that many people in the country like that.’ But there’s still something in the room here – a flavour, a scent, an emotional reaction – which I can’t understand and Brown gives me the answer to that too.

‘This guy. The one who’s killed your two people. I’ve probably climbed with him. Allen too.’

We go back to the main house. Sit around the farmhouse table. More tea, more cake, except that Mike and Allen go easy on the cake.

I get out my e-fits, hoping for but not expecting an easy win. Get nothing but blank stares. Then get my notebook out. Say, ‘OK, top-level climbers. Whatever you’ve got..’

Brown and Allen start to disgorge names. They’re not always immediately helpful. Allen, for example, names one climber as ‘Scottie Boy McHeadjob,’ and everyone laughs before Brown gives me the guy’s name in a more normal way. Allen, of course, would technically be a suspect, except that I checked him out when Brown first suggested getting him involved. Allen sustained a serious leg fracture ten days before the Livesey murder and has only recently restarted climbing. I’ve seen the hospital records and spoken to the doctor so, short of a ridiculously broad conspiracy, he’s clean.

We accumulate names, and with each name some further data too. Home town. Age. Whether in a relationship or not. Climbing style and preferences. Competition wins. Main areas climbed in.

Some of the facts I just don’t know how to use, or even make sense of. ‘Real limestone nut. Masses of sport climbing in France and Spain. Nothing to speak of on grit. Big pussy when it comes to hard trad.’ Then an argument over whether a particular route put up on Devon granite counted as hard or not.

I use my phone to record the whole conversation. Start off taking detailed notes, but my hand gets sore and I can’t keep up anyway, so I just leave the phone running. I’ll get somebody to transcribe everything later.

Two hours travel past us and through us and on to wherever discarded hours go to die.

More tea.

Val Brown comes in and asks if we’re staying.

I’m going to say no – I’ve booked hotel rooms for me and Mike on police expenses – but her husband just says, ‘Well,
I’m
not driving down,’ and Allen shrugs, and Mike does too, and I say, ‘That would be lovely, thank you,’ though I’m not quite sure what exactly I’m saying yes to.

So we sit and talk, as hours ghost past us into night.

As we talk, Val cooks up a huge meal of belly pork, potatoes and cabbage, and I help, because my phone is still recording – on permanent charger now – and I’m personally contributing very little to the discussion.

At seven o’clock, we eat and talk. Beers for the men. Val and I drink water that’s piped in from a spring on the hillside behind us.

It tastes of minerals and rock and moorgrass.

We’ve evolved, by now, a list of twenty-two names. Two women on the list, two German climbers who have spent a lot of time in the UK. Aside from that, our names are all British men aged between nineteen and their early thirties.

I want to turn to dates. We have a precise date for the Plas Du burglary and the Livesey killing, but only an approximate one for the lighthouse. I’m hoping that those things will help us whittle down names.

We overachieve. It so happens that Livesey died on the day of a big indoor climbing competition in Birmingham. At a stroke, twelve of the men on our list and both the women are struck off – they were competing and Brown himself was there as commentator. The event went on all afternoon and into the night so there was no plausible way one of them could have snuck off, zoomed down to Bristol for a spot of murder, then sped back for the grand finale.

Our other names start dropping quickly too. The climber called Scottie Boy McHeadjob was in the Karakoram, along with one of the two Germans from our list. Another guy was in Italy with a film crew watching him climb something heinous in the Dolomites. Two were in the Verdon in France. And so on.