This Thing of Darkness (2 page)

I call the forensics guy again. ‘Just checking, the window was single-glazed. Ordinary four millimetre glass? Nothing out of the ordinary.’

He checks things and, sighing theatrically, says, ‘No. Nothing out of the ordinary.’

Views of the building show no overhanging trees, no obvious ways for Peter Pan to cheat.

There
is
a grand-looking porch in the middle of the house. I can just about see that you could get on top of the porch with a ladder, then pull the ladder up to gain access to the roof, then – maybe, somehow – pad up the roof to the ridge, and along the ridge to the gable end in which my precious window is housed.

But what then? Glide down on gossamer wings? Hammer a spike into the wall and abseil? Then hope that the spike is plucked away by a passing bird before it’s noticed?

Nothing out of the ordinary
, except that four hundred thousand pounds’ worth of art somehow contrived to vanish.

Plas Du is a few miles in from the coast, near Llantwit.

Fifty miles. An hour and something, where the something varies with the density of traffic and the frequency of speed cameras.

I’m there in an hour and ten.

The house is as good as I’d hoped. Better.

The original detectives were perfectly correct: the window is impossible to reach. Set twenty-five foot up in a delightfully sheer wall. The masonry is dressed stone with only tiny gaps between each block. If someone had hammered a spike in anywhere, the scar would still be evident today. And there’s no scar.

I take photos.

Call London. Reach a guy called Adrian Brattenbury, a senior officer at SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Beg a favour.

Because Brattenbury and I have been working together on Operation Tinker and because he still harbours a vague sense of guilt towards me – something to do with having let me be abducted by a bunch of homicidal gangsters – he’s happy to help out. He promises quick results, and SOCA’s quick is quicker than ours.

The rain is clearing from the mountains as I ascend towards Gwyn’s farm. Light shines on floodwater. Pewter and tin.

Beyond Crickhowell, a rainbow stutters.

When I’m back, there’s a new car in the yard. A silver-grey Audi A3. Not the newest, but clean. A city car, not rural.

In Gwyn’s kitchen: Detective Sergeant Jane Alexander. Navy-blue suit. Cute shoes. Unfeasibly blond hair. She holds a china teacup and a grim expression.

‘Fiona,’ she says, standing. ‘Study leave over. I’m sorry.’

2

‘Fiona, you have detained an individual who is asking for an interpreter to help with a phone call. Under what circumstances can that request be refused and by whom?’

I don’t answer.

Jackson leaves the silence long enough to allow my non-response to register, then tries again.

‘A man is being prosecuted for arson, with insurance fraud as the suspected motive. His wife is believed to have knowledge of the alleged crime. No persons were present on the property at the time of the fire. Fiona, is the wife here a compellable witness?’

I’m pretty sure Jackson knows the answer to his question, so I stay shtum.

Rhiannon Watkins is sitting next to Jackson and has the peaceful demeanour of a barbarian army at the gates of Rome. She says, ‘If an officer’s behaviour has been deemed unsatisfactory, and has not been remedied by a first-stage disciplinary meeting, a second-stage disciplinary meeting will be held. What four things will the second-stage line manager do at that meeting?’

I’ve never yet had a second-stage meeting, though I’ve had plenty of first-stagers.

I say, ‘Look, I know you want me to pass this exam.’

Jackson says, ‘Yes, and we gave you study leave so you could revise for it. But it turns out your books never left your desk.’

He taps the pile of Blackstone’s manuals in front of him. My manuals.

‘I
have
read them,’ I say. ‘More than once.’

More than once
is a good expression. What I mean is ‘twice’, except that I skipped through the boring bits and smoked quite a lot of cannabis and ignored anything that I thought I already knew. But for all Jackson knows, I’ve read the books a million times.

‘Have you done the mock exam?’

I want to say yes, but I’m struggling to remember whether the damn thing came in a sealed wrapper or not. Because I can’t remember, I stay mute and Jackson waves the exam at me. It
is
in a wrapper, the seal unbroken.

I wave my hands helplessly. He keeps asking questions whose answers he already knows.

Jackson resumes. ‘The questions we just asked you are more straightforward than those you will face in the exam. You will have to answer 150 questions in the space of three hours. That’s seventy-two seconds per question. The subject areas are incredibly broad-ranging. If it’s in the books, it can feature in the exam. Do you understand?’

I don’t nod exactly, but I do twitch.

‘Most officers sitting the exam fail it. Not just in our force, but across the country. The pass mark is fifty-five per cent, but I know perfectly well you have the capacity to score better than that, and neither Rhiannon nor I will find it acceptable if you merely scrape a pass. We’re looking for an outstanding score, and if you don’t achieve one, I will ask you, in writing, why not. I am also going to place a note of this conversation on your record.’

It’s not like Jackson to get all formal about these things. Normally, he just yells, looks like he’s going to rip my head off, then somehow my head stays on and everything carries on much the same as before. I say ‘yes sir,’ but roll my eyes at the same time, which maybe diminishes the overall effect.

Watkins leans forward. Does her friendly voice at me.

‘Fiona, we want you to become a sergeant because you have obvious aptitudes and we want to promote the best. But also, we need you to mature. As a police officer and as a person. And the standards we expect from a sergeant will be higher than those we’ve tolerated up till now.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

A phone call interrupts us. Jackson takes it. Watkins and I stare at the carpet. Jackson says things, but I don’t listen, not really.

When he hangs up, he stares at me. ‘Chicago. Ifor Dawes is getting overwhelmed by the volume of material coming in.’

Chicago: the codename given to a current rape inquiry. A woman, Kirsty Emmett, was abducted in Gabalfa. Blindfolded. Knocked around, fairly badly. She was raped, then deposited by the river down by the Tremorfa steelworks.

Ifor Dawes: a DC who’s become a specialist exhibits officer, responsible for managing the collection, processing and storage of physical evidence gathered in the course of an investigation. In some inquiries, the number of individual bits of evidence – fibres, hairs, bodily fluid samples, pieces of rubbish – can run into the thousands. If Ifor says he’s being overwhelmed, he’s probably not inventing it.

That said, although I’ve done bits and pieces for both Ifor and his colleague, Laura Moffatt, I find the work so grimly tedious as to be life-threatening. And this particular rape inquiry is being headed by DI Owen Dunwoody who, in my unhumble opinion, is the stupidest officer of his rank in South Wales.

Jackson says what he says looking straight at me. But it wasn’t a question, so I don’t give him an answer.

Watkins, beside me, says, ‘Fiona, a good officer might feel this was an opportunity to help.’

I say, ‘I’ve got a whole stack of cases you asked me to look into. And an ongoing involvement with Tinker.’

Jackson says, ‘A stack of
cold
cases. And Tinker will scrape along without you.’

I wave my hands again. What do they want from me? Either Jackson or Watkins, or the numpty Dunwoody, have the power to order me to help Ifor, if that’s what they want. I can’t see why I need to pretend to be keen to help out in my least-favourite role for my least-favourite DI.

Jackson and Watkins exchange a look.

A pause.

Sunlight gilds the carpet. Creeps slowly towards the wall.

Jackson: ‘You’ll help Ifor. You can report to him downstairs right now. Get further instructions from DI Dunwoody. When Owen decides he doesn’t need you any more, he’ll release you to your other duties. At that point, I’ll ask Owen and Ifor to let me know in writing how, in their view, you have performed.’

Still not a question. I say nothing.

‘Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’ I don’t say anything more and nor does anyone else, so I stand up. ‘And I will pass the exam. I said I would.’

‘With a score of seventy per cent or more please, Fiona,’ says Jackson. ‘We don’t want good. We expect outstanding.’ His voice is grimmer than usual. Unyielding.

‘Yes, sir.’

I grapple with the door, trying to leave. Jackson says, ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

I look back. My books are still on his desk. I say, ‘Oh,’ retrieve them, then get the door open again. Stand there with my foot preventing the self-closing mechanism from doing its stuff.

‘That burglary at Plas Du. The glass scatter. I had it analysed at SOCA. They were able to match the estimated surface area of the broken fragments against the size of the hole in the window.’

Jackson says nothing: his way of asking me to continue.

‘Basically, the glass was all on the
inside
of the building and formed what their analyst called a “natural pattern”. That is: it had fallen there, not been arranged.’

‘So the blow was struck from outside?’

‘Exactly. Yes, sir.’

Jackson stares at me. I stare at him. I don’t know what Rhiannon Watkins is doing, but when she does a full-on stare, she usually burns holes in things.

It’s Jackson who breaks the silence. ‘Good. Then when you make sergeant, you can go and arrest Peter Pan.’

I give him one of my peachiest smiles. Him and Watkins, both. I think that’s the first sensible thing either of them has said today.

‘Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you very much.’

3

Saturday. High winds, gusty and unstable.

I meet Brydon in a greasy spoon café near his parents’ house in Pontypool: our first proper meeting since The Break Up. A trial day, an attempt to normalise.

Brydon is there before me. He’s ordered a pot of tea for him, a cup of peppermint tea for me. A waitress in a black T-shirt takes our orders.

‘The full breakfast,’ Buzz says, closing the menu without really looking at it. Printed sheets encased in a padded leatherette wallet.

I hold the menu in front of me, staring at it but not really reading it.

‘Why do they pad the menus? I mean, books aren’t padded, are they?’

I think of other readable items which don’t come with leatherette padding and start listing them. Marketing brochures. Theatre programmes. Phone directories. Clothing catalogues.

‘Have you eaten?’

‘No.’

This does feel weird. For me, certainly, but also I think for Buzz.

‘How about sausage, egg and chips?’ he suggests.

One of his roles in our relationship: trying to get me to eat normal, regular meals like a normal, regular human being.

‘OK. Yes, that. I’ll have that.’

‘Sausage, egg and chips?’ The waitress looks for my confirmation.

‘Yes, but can I have it with bacon? And beans? And those things that come in triangles.’

I show her the shape of a triangle.

‘Hash browns?’

‘Yes. For the beans, I mean. I probably don’t need the chips though,’ I concede.

‘You might as well have the full breakfast then.’

She goes through the contents of the full breakfast, which sounds quite like the thing I just said I wanted, but I already can’t remember what I said and certainly can’t imagine eating it, so add, ‘Maybe you should bring chips as well, just in case,’ which is logical to me, because chips are the one thing I can pretty much always eat some of, but I can see that my food-ordering technique isn’t coming across as all that credible.

The waitress looks at Buzz checking, I think, that he’ll underwrite this order. He commands her obedience with a nod, and she goes.

‘Sorry. I’m still the same.’

‘So I see.’

When I broke up with Buzz, I told him, in effect, that a man as sane as him needed a woman a good bit more sane than me. But I also tried to explain that the break-up was for my sake too. Buzz helped me first touch the soil of Planet Normal. Helped me breathe its atmosphere, understand its customs. Those were precious gifts, the most precious possible, yet I also came to see that, in Buzz’s company, I could only ever be a resident alien. Travelling on faked papers. At constant risk of deportation.

If I am to become well – stably, reliably, confidently well – I had to take the risk of leaving Buzz’s kind, protective custody. Had to take the risk of living alone on this planet. Treading its soil without support.

One day, I hope I’ll be well enough to contemplate a relationship again. Perhaps even marriage. But I need to do that without feeling giddily convinced that the whole enterprise is a sham that could be stripped from me at any time.

I need to become a sort-of-sane woman before I can become anyone’s now-and-for-ever wife.

The breakfasts come, plus my side order of chips.

Buzz tucks in with gusto. I bite the end off a chip.

I say, ‘How is your Using Computers To Destroy Policing As We Know It project coming along?’

Buzz had worked alongside me in Major Crime. Since he had done nothing wrong, not one thing, since the start of our relationship, and since I was the breaker not the breakee, it should by rights have been me who switched jobs to give him space. But since we both knew that I wouldn’t cope anywhere other than Major Crime, he applied for, and secured, a transfer. He’s now doing something with a boring acronym which involves using data-driven intelligence to target police resources.

Buzz starts to answer. I half listen, but there’s something depressing about the relentless trend of the crime statistics and the way modern policing responds. I try to say the right things, but my heart’s not in it.

‘How about you?’ asks Buzz.

I find a chip, a long one, and steal some of Buzz’s ketchup.

‘Boring, stupid crimes. Boring, stupid paperwork. Boring, stupid prosecutions.’

‘That bad?’

‘Worse.’ I tell him about Ifor Dawes and Chicago and Owen Dunwoody.

Buzz laughs. ‘You’re going to be an exhibits officer? Bet you just love that.’

My mouth moves, but nothing comes out. I don’t have the words to express how much I loathe the role. It’s not even that I’m bad at it. I’m not. Truth is, if Ifor needed a temporary sidekick, they probably couldn’t have found a more suitable helper. I’m fast and accurate at anything paperworky. My memory is excellent. I don’t know a lot about forensic technicalities, but I know enough that I’m unlikely to cock anything up.

But,
Gott im Himmel
, the boredom!

‘I’d honestly sooner spend time in prison,’ I say with feeling.

Nor did it help matters that I was complaining loudly about Dunwoody in the canteen. Called him Owen Dunthinking and shared my thoughts about the extent to which he deserved his current position. I assumed I was in the clear because we’d just had news that protective coverings placed down at the crime scene might have failed, thereby compromising further forensic investigation. Any competent DI would have been down there like a shot, getting the problem sorted. Alas, Dunthinking decided it was more important to spoon a plateful of pie and mash into his face first and, as he was returning his tray, he managed to hear my full assessment of his abilities. He said nothing, but went pink with anger – pinker than usual – and his eyes were little raisins of hatred in the surrounding pudge.

I say something of this to Buzz, who says, ‘Ah, yes, I did hear about that.’

I grimace. Not apologetically, just not very thrilled to know how widely my outburst has circulated. Dunthinking’s nephew, Kyle Bransby – a part-time SOCO, a part-time instructor at the university sports centre, and in my never-humble view a full-time dickhead – told me with relish that Dunthinking ‘is going to make this the biggest exhibits operation in force history. Months, it’ll take. Months.’ He leered at me, a wash of stained teeth and aniseed breath. That vision – and that threat – haunts me still.

I try to continue chatting with Buzz the way we normally would. But this isn’t normal. Anything but. I break off and say, ‘It
is
weird this, isn’t it? It’s not just me.’

‘No, it’s not just you.’

His smile tilts down to his plate, and I see that for all his Buzzishness, this is a man in pain.

Pain that I caused.

I’m tempted to say sorry – again – but instead say, ‘I think it’s the same for me. I think it hurts the same way.’

I think
: with my crazy head, I can’t always feel my feelings. They just get cotton-woolled away. But it all connects up. This long, dark winter. My restlessness. My gloom.

The awareness settles me. It’s like I’ve been living with my own baffled version of this Buzzian pain, and now for the first time have a glimpse of it. A painful thing, yes, but also a true thing. A real one. It’s like I’ve been carrying around a steel weight all winter without knowing it’s there. Then someone shows me a glimpse of it – a metal edge, a dull sheen, the heft of something folded in cloth – and I feel a sense of relief. This pain, that weight: it all connects up.

‘Oh, Buzzling,’ I whisper.

He grimaces.

Sergeant Brydon isn’t what you would call an emotionally complex man, but his methods for dealing with moments like these used to achieve consistently successful results. Those methods, however, would constitute a criminal act if carried out in a public place and we’re trying to move on from all that anyway. So he sighs, and stands, and says, ‘Let’s make a move.’

I nod.

We go. I’ve eaten almost nothing.

One of our first dates was a day out at the seaside, and we’ve decided to reprise that, except that the weather then was all sunshine and white parasols. The weather now carries straight from the North Atlantic. Salt, grey, edged with spite.

We head for Gower, take one of the cliff paths. Grey rock, grey waves. When there’s a break in the cloud cover, the volume of light feels overwhelming.

Mary Langton, one of my favourite corpses, had her ashes scattered over this bay. Brendan Rattigan, one of my least favourite, has his bones rattling somewhere in the tides beneath us.

‘How drunk would you have to be to fall off?’ I ask.

‘What, here? Very drunk.’

‘At night. Dark, but moderate visibility.’

‘This is one of your cases?’

It is, I admit it. The accidental death.

Buzz is hurt, I think, that I can’t let our first day since the break-up stand on its own, but I’m not entirely sorry about that. He always had this picture of me as someone capable of changing into the sort of woman he ought to marry. It’s helpful for him to remember the cranky obsessive I actually am. It might make it easier to let me go.

‘Who? What? Where?’ he asks.

I give him the facts. We walk on five hundred yards to where the security guard fell.

The cliff stands at the eastern edge of a small, rocky bay. There are climbers – orange jackets, ropes, helmets – starting to work their way up the crags opposite. Standing where we are, we can see nothing of the cliff beneath our feet. There’s just a short, tussocky slope, the soil bleaching into limestone. Then nothing. No middle distance. Just a long leap to a far horizon and the sound of waves breaking over rock.

A metal spike, corroded but still sound, stands a few yards below the path, just before the slope starts to tilt irreversibly into void. The path mostly doesn’t come this close to the edge.

‘Was it wet?’

‘Yes, but not very. And he knew this path. He did night shifts at some telecoms construction site further on down the coast.’ I point. ‘He used to walk out sometimes, if his wife needed the car.’

‘Any motive?’

‘No.’

‘Alcohol?’

‘Two pints, drunk an hour or two before death.’

Buzz shrugs. ‘Anyone can slip, I suppose. And once you start to fall . . .’

His sentence drops away, like the ground. We sit down, looking at the horizon, the waves that carry an edge of white at their crests.

I don’t know what Buzz is thinking. I’m thinking of the man who died and that feeling I half understood in the café: that metal gleam, that weight of pain.

A couple of climbers walk past us on the path. Stuff jingling from their harnesses.

The first climber says, ‘OK? Nice day.’

Buzz says whatever men say to each other.

I say, ‘Is there rock climbing here? Underneath us?’

The climbers say yes, and start to argue about names.

‘The cliffs have names?’

They show me a guidebook. Not only the cliffs, but each individual route up the cliff. The crag underneath us now has four routes – Critterling, Little Arrete, Idris Gawr, Crack and Slab. The climbers tell me the routes range from ‘pretty simple’ to ‘well, if you fancy a challenge’.

Then they laugh.

Then they leave.

‘Your boy was a climber, was he?’

For a moment, the tense confuses me. I don’t know why Buzz is using the past tense, when the dead man’s presence is so strong all around us. It feels like ignoring someone who’s sitting right next to you.

So I sit there blinking, trying to feel the fence that separates dead from living, until I find the answer to Buzz’s question. ‘No, no. I don’t think so anyway.’

‘Does he have a name?’

‘Derek Moon. Aged thirty-eight. Wife. One little girl.’

The man’s presence still seems strong and I hang there between two worlds, until Buzz nudges me back towards his one, the land of the simply living.

We spend more time together. Walking. Pub lunch. Talking in a way that becomes less weird, as the day goes on.

But it’s hard work and by three, we’re both ready to finish. A success, more than not.

Buzz drives back into Cardiff. A sane man getting on with his life.

And me, what do I do? I’ve never really had a good answer to that question, but my legs take me, as I knew they would, back to that cliff, that fall.

A few hundred yards from the actual site, the slope eases enough that there’s a way down to the sea, steep but manageable. I scramble down to the shoreline – waves foaming over rock – and traverse across to the cliff. The water is ankle-deep mostly, thigh-deep at worst. The exact depth, however, soon becomes immaterial, as I fall sideways and soak myself.

As I get closer to the cliff itself, the beach rises until it’s clear of the foaming water. Rocks and sand, mixed. I stare upwards at the sweep of limestone. White, grey and ochre. Stippled with lichens.

Emptiness and the glitter of sea air. A long blue fall, that ends here, where I’m standing.

Boulders the size of bullocks.

Rocks the colour of tea.

I stare upwards trying to trace the line of descent. I don’t know how you calculate these things other than by throwing crash dummies off the cliff. Except that if crash dummies bounce differently from humans, you wouldn’t achieve much and there are rules – tedious, tedious rules – about throwing actual live humans off cliffs for the purposes of practical forensic study.

All the same, the big picture is clear. Once the guard had started his fall, he’d have encountered perhaps twenty or twenty-five feet of empty space, as he passed a long scooped-out overhang, then he’d have struck a fairly clean-looking slab as it rose to the overhang. A bit of rolling or bouncing on the slab, then he’d have been ejected by another change in slope and angle. He landed where I stand now, his skull impaled on a rock that angles sharply out of the sand like some sticklebacked Himalayan ridge.

Accidental death?

Maybe. Beer plus night plus cliffs equals an easy verdict.

But two pints in a fourteen stone man is hardly drunk. And he knew this path, knew its risks. The simplest conclusions aren’t always the right ones.