This Thing of Darkness (20 page)

I want to know whether any of these notional alibis can be proved. So, if Climber X is thought to be climbing in the Verdon Gorge, is there any actual evidence that he was indeed present on the days in question? I assume that our search will proceed pretty much as any police search like this proceeds: test every alibi until one cracks under the pressure.

But this is a new world to me. Mike explains that all the climbers on the list are professional or semi-professional. I ask what that means. Who pays climbers to do what they do? The answer, it turns out, is equipment manufacturers who compete to get the top names sporting their brands. The money is piffling by the standards of other elite sportsmen – Allen, arguably the best climber in the UK, reckons he earns about sixty grand a year – but the climbers we’re looking at are the superstars of their own exclusive world. Bloggers write about them, equipment makers chase them for photos, magazines want interviews. And of course they all need other climbers to hold ropes, clean routes, and all the rest of it. They just don’t live in a world where they could pretend to be in one place for the week and really be off torturing marine surveyors in Bristol.

The task is far bigger than we can hope to accomplish in an evening – there are a huge number of checks for us still to make – but I’m not feeling hopeful. Nor is Brown. Val has already gone off to have a bath. Mike and Allen go back to the bouldering cave for a late-night work out. They’re making plans to go climbing together the next day.

I think Mike is a bit starstruck hanging out with Allen like this. He’s like I would be if I got to work next to a real-life Sherlock Holmes. Puppyish and sappy.

The kitchen seems suddenly quiet. Brown sticks the kettle on for more tea. ‘I’m terrible,’ he says, ‘Drink the stuff non-stop.’

He asks me more about the cases and I answer him in pictures. Moon with his skull split. Livesey dangling from his bedsheet.

Bring up the picture of Livesey’s thigh, too. ‘That brown spot there? You can hardly see it, but it’s the mark of an electric burn. Very high voltage, very low current. It doesn’t leave much of a mark, but . . .’

Brown says, ‘Christ.’

I’ve noticed that people blaspheme when I show them my pictures, blaspheme rather than swear. I don’t know why.

He says, ‘This is your job, this sort of thing?’

‘Yes. I love what I do.’

We go through more names. Dig around in Brown’s notes. Climbing websites, blogs and forums.

One guy is looking suspicious. No climbing on the crucial dates. No injuries. We’re just trying to sort out a possible sighting of him at a bouldering venue in the Austrian Alps, when Brown interrupts.

‘Oh bollocks!’

‘Bollocks?’

‘He was getting married that weekend. I was in the bloody congregation.’

Another one bites the dust.

Neither of us have the heart to continue.

Brown leads me upstairs. Says, ‘You’re with Mike, are you?’

‘Friends, that’s all,’ I say, not sure if we’re even that. I mean: would we still see each other if I didn’t have a case that needed him? I don’t know.

Brown doesn’t care. ‘OK, he can have the bunkroom with Joe. You’ll be in here.’

Here: a tiny room, with a wooden bed, a chest of drawers, a view out over a flank of mountain and nothing else. The place looks a bit like one of those old-fashioned youth hostels. The kind of friendliness you get from old wood and warm tea.

‘Thank you. This is lovely.’

‘We get a lot of people coming through here. Sometimes people ask. Sometimes they don’t. Most of the buggers on that list have been here at least once.’

My stuff is still in the car in the valley, but Brown finds me a toothbrush and a clean towel. When he asks if I have everything I need, I tell him, ‘Yes.’

28

To bed, but not to sleep.

Lie awake looking at the ceiling. The window open a crack, and only moon and mountain beyond.

Sheep champ. Hours pass.

Watkins thought we wouldn’t be able to find our bad guy because we had no CCTV, no witness statements, but I never thought we’d get him from all that police stuff. To me, all along, the clue was in the crimes themselves. These climbs of his weren’t just hard, they were exceptional. Finding the exception should have been easy.

Should have
.

Stupid words, stupid thinking.

Back in Cardiff, Zorro is going exactly nowhere. Watkins is doing almost everything right. Reanalysis of all the cold-case stuff. Combing through the Atlantic Cables material. Some clever computer stuff aimed at seeing if we can locate the IP address of any machine that accessed Livesey’s files in the hours following his death.

And, following the attack on Buzz, security has been stepped up too. The operation has been elevated to Top Secret. The only computers which can access the Zorro files are located in Cathays itself, or Portishead in Bristol. Those machines are secured by double passwords. Somebody from the IT department enters one password. An officer named on the Zorro operation list has to enter another. Even then, all movements in and out of the operation room are logged. All data movements are tracked. No data greater than ten kilobytes, or something like that, can be transferred anywhere, even to another police computer, without Watkins expressly authorising the movement.

They extracted DNA from the blood on my walls, but found no match on the system.

Buzz’s e-fit pictures have been distributed, but the men concerned have not been identified.

Activity, yes. Product, no.

I swing my legs out of bed. I’m in T-shirt and knickers only. There’s no heating on and the window is open.

Starlight and moonlight.

Grey cliffs and black hills.

Two dozen names and two dozen alibis.

An inaccessible room. An invisible murder.

A puzzle that looks impossible, except that we have two corpses and they’re real enough.

Since I can’t see myself sleeping, I pull on some trousers and go barefoot downstairs.

In the kitchen, a lamp burns. I put the kettle on to boil. Root around in a cupboard for herbal tea. Find an elderly packet of camomile, which I don’t really like, but which will have to do.

The Brown’s kitchen has a huge old range cooker with a flue that whiffles, a big beast snoring. I lean up against it, liking its warmth.

Livesey and Moon.

Moon and Livesey.

I assume that Livesey has been buried. Some Virginia churchyard, perhaps. White clapboard in the sunshine and a solitary bell. But that doesn’t feel right, not for him, not for Livesey. If I could arrange his burial – and I’d have really liked to – I’d have done it out at sea. A wooden deck. A canvas sack. A heavy stone or iron weight. A few words offered to an absent God. Mourners bare-headed beneath the sun. Then a swift heave over the side. A splash, a spew of bubbles, then that long, unhurried, unimaginable descent.

That’s how I’d have done it, and no stone to mark the place.

The kettle boils. I make tea.

Then the stairs creak and, from the door, Brown says, ‘Couldn’t sleep?’

He’s in tartan pyjama trousers, no top. He has a chestful of hair, turning grey, but there’s still plenty of power in those arms, those pecs.

I tell him no, I couldn’t sleep. Ask if he wants tea.

‘Yes – or no, actually, sod that, fancy a hot chocolate?’

I do, and say so.

He puts on a pan of milk to warm. Finds a carton of chocolate. Roots around in a hall drawer, muttering softly, then comes away with an old tin of rolling tobacco. ‘Thought I had some somewhere.’

He makes the hot chocolate and I roll the ciggies.

We sit outside on the front step and drink and smoke. Brown has put a coat on over his bare chest. He’s given me one of Val’s coats and a pair of wellies.

The silver moonlight lends the pale upland grass a sheen which is almost like frost. The very highest hills have curls of old snow still gleaming from the hollows.

On the mountain facing us, a distant cliff gleams. A black diamond beneath the stars.

Brown jabs his cigarette towards it. ‘That’s Cloggy. Clogwyn d’ur Arddu. Three decades back, a young man, a kid really, wanders up to the cliff and decides he’s going to climb the hardest line on it. Practises for three days. The fourth day he just goes for it. There’s no protection to speak of. At about a hundred feet, there’s a little bolt but only an eighth of an inch, and it’s tied off with two millimetre rope – a bit of string, basically. After that, there’s nothing at all. Nothing until you hit the top at a hundred and fifty feet.’

He doesn’t finish. I nudge. ‘And?’

‘He either climbs it or he dies. But he didn’t die, didn’t fall. The result was Indian Face, maybe the hardest route in the world at the time. Even now, with standards a million times higher, it’s only been climbed three times.’

I think of that, the boy under the cliff. That swaggering belief. But also the other thing. That thing, whatever it was, that impelled him to that place of risk and skill and extreme danger.

I say, ‘That’s him, isn’t it? Our boy. We’ve been doing this all wrong.’

That’s hardly me at my clearest, but Brown is nodding.

‘Yes.’

I say, ‘Some hyper-talented kid. New to the scene. Newish. Enough that he hasn’t got onto your lists, your “Out and About”s. Most kids like that, they want to achieve their Indian Face. They want to do the climb that etches their name in history. But what if this one is messed up? Angry, fucked up, who knows what? He doesn’t choose Indian Face, he chooses Nellie Bentley’s lighthouse. He chooses the wall of Plas Du. Pockets ten million quid. The kind of money which dwarfs anything that a Joe Allen can earn, even with a whole career at the top of his sport.’

Brown has finished his cigarette, reaches vaguely to see if there’s another, but there isn’t and his hot chocolate has gone cold.

He throws the remains of his drink on the ground in front of him. A milky spill.

He says, ‘Yes.’

That sounds like an ending, but we’re both thinking the same thing. That the story can’t end there. Can’t either begin or end in that place.

That kid, that unknown boy, didn’t get to that level of skill in isolation. He had some kind of prehistory. Climbs and experience that took him to the necessary level of skill. He climbed Plas Du, Bentley’s lighthouse and those other insurance-related climbs in 2009. If it took him a year to plan that campaign, there must still have been a record from 2008 and before. Some place where he left his mark: a too-talented kid, angry at the world, and with an extraordinary appetite for risk.

And even post-2009, the story doesn’t stop. Back in September 2011, he was, quite likely, involved in the murder of Derek Moon on a Welsh clifftop. Then, in February of this year, he breaks in to a Bristol apartment via a climb which, if not as extraordinary as the one up Bentley’s lighthouse, still required a highly capable climber in peak condition.

I remind Brown of the dates, the timings.

He nods. Gestures back into the house.

‘He’s there,’ he says, meaning the archive. The mass of notes and emails from which Brown compiles his column. ‘And if he’s not in my stuff, then
somebody
has run across him. You can’t hide the good ’uns. You know ’em when you see ’em.’

A thread of cloud, a long thin streamer, obscures the lower face of the moon. The world darkens. A couple of sheep graze up against the wall of Brown’s bouldering room. Another, annoyed by their presence, moves away with a sudden trot of hooves.

Starlight and moonlight.

Grey cliffs and black hills.

We go inside and work until dawn.

29

Friday morning. Late.

Granary toast and scrambled eggs. Val Brown drinking coffee. Nat and I are on tea. No sign of Allen or Mike, who are both out on the crags somewhere. The end of the table is heaped with papers. My notes and Brown’s.

No breakthroughs, but we realise two things. First, that the process will take time. Second, that it’ll succeed. It’ll get its man.

I’ll need to talk it through with Watkins, but I think she’ll agree. We need more resources. More manpower.

Brown offers to drive me down to the valley, so I can pick up my car for the drive back. I wonder vaguely if I should wait around for Mike since, theoretically, I’m his wheels home.

‘Those buggers won’t be back before dark,’ says Brown. ‘And if the weather stays good, your boy won’t be leaving tonight anyway.’

So I accept his offer. Drive down off the mountain. Set off for Cardiff. From the heart of North Wales to the heart of the south. Not far as the crow flies. A hundred and twenty miles, if that. But the road lies through mountains all the way. Small roads, twisty roads. Towns and villages, clustering grey beneath the hills. The journey up took five hours, and it’ll be no quicker back.

So I take my time. Go slow, because there’s no other way.

At Beddgelert I stop at a café with free wi-fi and send a long email to Watkins. Updating her, but also suggesting that we’ll need more manpower. I say,
Can we talk about this on Monday? I doubt if I’ll be in Cardiff this side of 5.30.
Get an email back almost straight away.
I’m out Mon & Tues. Prepare a draft plan. We’ll discuss Weds.

Prepare a draft plan
. The sort of chore which might usually be given to a trusted detective sergeant. I go back to my car feeling all grown up. The glow of pride lasts about twenty minutes, during which time I don’t break the speed limit even though there’s nothing ahead of me and no speed cameras in sight.

Trawsfynydd, Dolgellau.

Llanbrynmair, Llanidloes.

Low hills, green valleys.

Grey farmhouses and sheep-studded fields.

Bridges.

Rivers flowing fast under alders. Trout-coloured water breaking over rocks.

Near Llanwrthwl, I stop for fuel.

As I pull away, I hear a knocking sound under my car, as though a fallen branch has got trapped. Behind me, a white van flashes. Someone inside is pointing down at the back of my car.

There’s a layby just ahead and I pull over. The van follows. Half overlaps me, and I’m expecting a patronising male explanation of a problem which will, presumably, become completely clear as soon as I take a look beneath my car.

I get out. Bend down. Try to see under my car.

I don’t get patronised. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the van’s rear door opens up.

That, as I turn, a blanket descends over my head.

That someone grabs me from behind. Both arms round me, encircling my chest. Pinioning me.

I kick, of course. Thrash, kick, bite, struggle.

But all I get is mouthfuls of blanket. Some low grunts when one of my kicks hit target. But soon my legs are captured. Taped together. My arms too. The blanket is tied loosely round my neck. I’m tipped sideways into the van. Not thrown particularly hard or particularly gently. The doors close.

We move off.

I can’t see anything at all and go skidding round the back of the van whenever it climbs a hill or turns a corner.

I am completely fucked and I didn’t see it coming.

I am completely fucked and no one knows where I am.