This Thing of Darkness (24 page)

I tell Watkins about the Voice’s concern with possible surveillance activity. With this matter of motive. Why anyone would want to steal data when there was no conceivable buyer.

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I lied. I told them we had no idea.’

‘We
don’t
have any idea.’

‘Except we do. You know what I think. You know I think we need to investigate the shipping. I thought that before, and I think it doubly now. They thought we might have surveillance teams already operating. That means there is
something
we need to be surveilling.’

I also tell her about the Voice. That my interrogation proceeded electronically. That the data exists somewhere, if we can find it.

‘Fiona, when they abducted you, what else did they do?’

I can’t answer that. My face shows I can’t.

Watkins doesn’t push at the question but she puts her hand to my top. Lifts it. Looks at my belly. The brown dots. She wants to look elsewhere, but my face won’t let her. She drops her hand.

Says, ‘We need to get you into the office. Do this properly.’

‘I can’t do that. Sorry. I can’t. Can’t talk about it. Can’t think about it. Definitely can’t get all official about it. I’m sorry, Rhiannon, but this is between you and me. It was hard even coming here.’

‘OK.’

‘And I’m going to need time off work. I don’t even know how much.’

‘OK.’

‘And please, no official anything. No crime report, nothing like that. I couldn’t manage it.’

‘Can I talk to Dennis?’

‘Yes. Him, yes. But the same basis. A private thing between you and him.’

‘OK. Take as much time as you want.’

I nod. Should say thank you, I suppose, except that when you’re covered in the marks of torture, you sort of expect a modern boss to ease up on all that sick-note malarkey.

‘The Stonemonkey,’ I say. ‘We can find him. I wrote you a memo. Nat Brown will be helpful. Mike Haston too. Use them.’

She nods.

‘And the shipping. If we can.’

She says, carefully, ‘We need to proceed on the basis of evidence. At the moment, we have nothing.’

I whisper, ‘Hardly nothing.’

I mean the question they kept pushing at me. That question, and these injuries. These brown dots that cluster like starlings.

Watkins says, ‘I’ll do what I can. I’ll speak to Dennis.’

I smile. A sort of smile. Lopsided and underpowered. I feel more than hear Cal peeping in from the kitchen, then closing the door again when she sees us still at it.

Watkins whispers, ‘At least they let you go. At least they did that.’

I want to say, ‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ but the words just stay jammed somewhere between my larynx and my tonsils. Lodged sideways, like a seatbelt buckle embedded in cartilage. Like a steel clasp buried in a mash of blood vessels and major airways.

I say, ‘I need to go.’

‘OK.’ Her face moves in the lamplit dimness. She had feelings for me once. A stupid, impulsive infatuation which I stupidly helped provoke. She’s happy with Cal now. Those feelings for me lie safely in the past, but that doesn’t mean that their mark doesn’t still remain. She has something like tears in her eyes, I think.

I say, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong. None of us. We did nothing wrong.’

Watkins’s eyes say thanks. But she’ll be tough on herself. Reanalyse her decisions, and do it with the same pitilessness that makes her such a demanding officer to work under. But still. I spoke the truth. I don’t think anyone could have predicted this – and even if she had, what could she have done? She, or any of us? If bad guys want to snatch junior coppers from remote country roads, nothing we do will stop them doing just that.

‘Look after yourself, Fiona.’

‘I will.’

40

Will – and do.

Return to Edgbaston. Live in a stew of dope and microwave food and romcoms. Have baths that last for two hours. Use every scented thing I can find.

Throw all my clothes away. The new ones, that I bought in Rhayader. Buy myself new-new stuff from chain shops in the Bullring shopping centre. Mango, Gap, Oasis, Zara. I buy things that are practical and things that really aren’t. Buy nothing, though, that is short-sleeved or cropped or that might ride up to show an inch of thigh. I wear long-sleeved pyjamas in bed and avoid myself in the mirror.

My brown dots start to fade.

The first day or two, Lev is there all the time. Then he starts to disappear for ever longer stretches. I don’t think there’s anything he has to do particularly. He lives on nothing. His martial arts teaching is sporadic at best. I think he just prefers his squat to this palace and needs to spend time there.

The dope, though, I keep that up. That and the romcoms.

Although I’ve smoked cannabis for as long as I’ve been in recovery from Cotard’s, I’ve never been one for bingeing. Don’t like the fog, the excess. Yet the more I smoke, the more that barn recedes. When I try to find it in my mind – something I don’t even attempt for the first few days – I discover that I can hardly find it. It’s not even that I’ve lost my recall. It’s more that I recollect all those things – the van, the chair, the questions, the pain – like something from a story, half-forgotten. And there are so many other stories in my head now. Women in white skirts and golden meadows. Bridesmaids searching for dresses. A girl taking a boy to a Celine Dion concert when it was meant to be something to do with sport.

And in the end, everything fuses. Like some weird movie where the heroine is tortured in a barn, then escapes to a world of taffeta dresses and silver lakes and implausibly handsome men. A movie so long and tangled that you get to the end barely able to remember what happened at the start.

Before too long, I feel that old investigative itch starting up again. It’s not that I’m ready to abandon the cannabis – I’m not – or that I’ve given up on the romcoms (I haven’t). Just that, in between times, I’m ready for something else. So I fire up a computer. Find out what’s been happening.

Penry has been taking loads of photos of ships. He’s covering everything from Bristol to Milford Haven. As good as his word, he has a mate of his taking pictures of the shipping in Dublin, and also Cork.

Thousands of pictures of hundreds of boats.

Iron and rust and machinery and waves. A world I don’t understand.

I fiddle around on Dropbox and find a way to send the pictures to Stuart Lowe without burning out the internet. Get a note back from Lowe saying he’ll take a look. The note is terse, but the promise seems genuine.

Good enough.

On the Stonemonkey, Watkins has been at her Watkinsian best. She’s put together a decent team on the research. Headed by the sleeky blonde Jane Alexander, a capable, if not always imaginative DS. Three full-time team members: Jon Breakell, Essylt Jones, a new recruit, and Pete Pritchard, a uniformed constable over from Bristol and a reasonably keen amateur climber.

Jane’s group – with support from a specialist web team in London – have identified around 150 climbing blogs, plus a whole heap of e-zines, magazines, climbing clubs and forums. They’re starting to scour those things for anything suggestive of the guy we’re looking for.

I think of Brown’s comment, ‘You can’t hide the good ’uns. You know ’em when you see ’em.’ If he’s right, then Jane’s accumulating pile of data holds our answers. A rubble heap, containing jewels.

That’s good. Rigorous police work, properly conducted. But I also remember what I kept repeating to the Voice. My feeble summary of our inquiry’s next steps.
Don’t know. Find Stonemonkey. Ask him. Evidence
.

If we find the Stonemonkey and he tells us nothing, what then? We have the hands that murdered Livesey, but nothing else. Evans in prison, but on a trivial charge. The Voice untouched, unknown, out of reach.

An outcome I could not accept.

Time passes.

Lev checks in most days. Checks I’m maintaining my dope-and-romcom diet. He sometimes stays long enough for a joint and some microwave yukkery, but my present comforts don’t suit his spartan tastes. He never, now, stays for long. He doesn’t say much directly, but I sense he thinks I’m doing OK. Healing up.

Good enough.

On my sixth day in the house, I feel strong enough to attempt a search I’ve been putting off for too long.

Eilmer. My favourite flying monk.

When I accessed the data on Gareth Glyn’s witness protection programme, I got virtually nothing.
Security clearance not sufficient
. Except that the case had an odd codename: Eilmer. Odd enough that I checked it out on Wikipedia and found only one possible reference: to Eilmer of Malmesbury, the monk who flew.

Now just maybe whoever came up with that codename was a keen student of medieval aviators and wanted to tag all his projects with suitable monikers. But more likely not. More likely, the only people who know about Eilmer are those who have reason to think about Malmesbury when coming up with codenames. And since the codename itself is only visible to fairly senior police and intelligence officers, no one would have thought it necessary to avoid any glimmer of connection to the target. Which all goes to suggest that the little bird I’m seeking perches somewhere close to Malmesbury’s stony walls.

Then there’s the question of what cover Glyn now uses.

The answer: I don’t know, but I doubt that people ever really reinvent themselves, that they inevitably migrate back to whatever they truly were in the first place. And if Gareth Glyn – a somewhat obsessive planning officer of only medium ability, intelligence and ambition – were forcibly transplanted to some other clime, would he not head back to the only thing he actually knew and was competent at? The answer, I think, is yes.

So: I search for planning officers on Malmesbury town council. Nix, nothing.

Then planning consultants and town planners. Get nowhere.

Run similar searches on towns and villages within thirty miles of Malmesbury.

Nothing.

Extend the range to fifty miles, but without confidence.

Nothing.

I think laterally. Extend my search. Not planning exactly, but closely related. And before too long – bingo! – I light on a Gareth Pollitt, a Malmesbury resident, with a small business in architectural drawings. Mr Pollitt has almost no online record. No Facebook page, no home blog, no professional memberships. I only come across him because he took out a paid ad in one of those little local advertiser booklets, that happened to release an online version.

I can’t find a photo. No biographical detail. No entry on the electoral roll.

Those omissions are good. Very good.

I make a call. Reach ‘Pollitt’. He speaks in an accent which is Cardiff born and bred. A native Taff.

I’m so pleased, I want to blow kisses down the phone.

I don’t, of course. Instead I tell Pollitt that I’m building an extension and need drawings. Could he help?

He says yes, but starts to ask questions that I hadn’t properly prepared for. What floor area? What kind of glazing? Any change in levels between the main house and the extension? I’m awkward to begin with, but then find my stride and start to build myself an extension. Give myself underfloor heating, and a roof lantern, and French windows with an arch above and a new terrace beyond, in York stone and herringbone brick.

‘There’s a Japanese maple, though. We’ll need to build around that,’ I caution him.

Pollitt, who sounds sour, says, ‘I suppose we’d better meet.’

I say yes, but don’t make a date.

Not yet. The barn still feels too close. I want more padding before I re-enter the world I had before.

Spend two more days in a fury of dope and movies. Then, on Tuesday, just eleven days from when I was taken, I borrow some sports things from the woman whose house this is and go out for a run. I’m rubbish, of course. My stew of cannabis and junk food hasn’t helped my never-remarkable fitness. I run a mile, then jog another half-mile, then get a stitch and walk back.

But I’m done, I realise. This chicken is cooked.

I text Lev,
GOING BACK TO CARDIFF NOW
. THANKS.
VISIT ANY TIME. FXX
.

Clean the house. Wash anything that needs washing. Think about replacing the bathroom toiletries, but decide to leave them be.

I’m OK, I think. Injured but OK. When I undress now, my brown dots are barely visible. I have to search to find anything.

That evening, I ring Watkins. Tell her I’m coming back.

This coming Sunday, it will be the end of June. The Atlantic Cables line testing starts on Monday. And my
do-this-police-style
plan is looking calamitously far short of coming to fruition.

41

Wednesday.

Morning run. Shower. Breakfast.

My run is crap, but I’m two per cent less useless than I was before. I think,
I should really get fitter
, something I’ve thought often enough in the past, but this time the thought might actually preface action.

It’s strange being home again – blood stains still a-glimmer on my hall wallpaper – but not a bad strange. It’s nice being back.

Go into the office. Check in with Watkins.

She grips me fiercely, but in a way that is meant to be nice, then drags me straight through to Jackson’s office. He gives me one of his shaggy-browed stares. Goes to the door and kicks it shut.

‘Fiona.’

That’s not even a statement, it’s a name, and the rules say you don’t have to yap every time someone correctly identifies you.

I say nothing.

‘Welcome back. If you
are
back.’

‘Um, I think so.’

‘Anything you’d like to tell me? On the record, I mean. As a police officer.’

I shake my head slowly at that. No, no, I don’t feel ready for all that. Maybe never will.

Jackson waits till his stare vanishes into pointlessness. ‘OK, and off the record?’

I tell him what I told Watkins. That I was abducted. Pressed for information. Divulged everything, except my particular suspicions about the attacker’s motives.

Jackson says, ‘Rhiannon told me that she saw . . . some marks. I won’t ask you about those. You tell me
what
you want,
when
you want, and
if
you want. But two things. One, we have as much support as you could possibly need. If you want someone to talk to, a psychologist or whatever, any of that, you just tell me. There’s a guy in London who’s worked with . . . these sort of issues. He might be good, he might be crap, but if you want to see him, you just say. All right?’

Nod.

‘And two, we were pretty bloody focused on this inquiry before, but we’re ten times as focused now. I’ve spoken to the chief’ – he means the chief constable – ‘and told him that I want there to be no limits to the resources I can chuck at this thing. Not that there
have
been limits so far, but just in case. I’ve given no reason for my request.’

I nod thanks. Can’t speak. Not really. It’s frightening being here, but OK.

Jackson does some more silent staring. Shows off his versatility in the field.

Then pulls out a file and passes it over.

‘This came to us from Dyfed-Powys. There’s a DNA correlation and we always exchange information when we have that sort of thing.’

I flip the pages. It’s a police report from the force that covers mid-Wales.

A report that deals with an incident logged in a mountainside barn outside Abbeycwmhir. In the hills above Rhayader.

A burned-out van. A dead man inside. The man’s body was badly burned but enough remained for a pathologist to determine that the probable cause of death was a succession of blows to the back of the head. His DNA matched one of the bloodstains left in my hall.

I try to speak.

Nothing comes out.

Try again.

Say, ‘Those head injuries. That wasn’t me.’

Jackson: ‘Fiona, I wouldn’t give a flying fuck if you had battered the man to death, then brought Jesus Christ and a retinue of his fucking angels down from heaven to bring him back to life, so you could kill him all over again. And I will, happily, put those sentiments on the record any time the situation requires.’

Me, huskily: ‘Thank you.’

A pause while I wonder where my voice has gone to.

Then me again: ‘I
did
disable him. Hurt him quite badly. Maybe it was a punishment thing.’

Jackson: ‘You said to Rhiannon there were two men, correct? You think the other guy saw his buddy had messed up? This was his way of cleaning up?’

I shrug. Or maybe nod. Those blows to the back of the head mean I must have left the man alive. I hadn’t been sure before. As to what came later, I guess Jackson’s suggestion is approximately correct.

Leaning over me, Jackson flips through the file to the boring stuff at the back.

Telecommunications and Data Analysis. The sort of thing I normally chomp through, but not this time. It just looks like a lot of words.

Jackson: ‘More crap. Basically, we can track a heavy use of mobile broadband – very unusual in that area – to the local mast. Some, not all, of that traffic was automatically captured and stored. But it was very heavily encrypted and – don’t ask me how this stuff works – things were routed abroad through a billion different servers so we don’t have a bloody clue who was on the other end of that line.’

I nod.

Disappointing, but as expected.

‘Dyfed-Powys have asked the folks at GCHQ to do what they can. But if you encrypt things right, you beat the code-breakers every time. We’ll just need to see.’

Nod.

I’d bet every marijuana plant I own that these guys know how to encrypt things right.

When I next become aware of anything, I see that the room is silent and Jackson and Watkins are both looking at me.

Jackson: ‘Fiona, I need to ask. Are Dyfed-Powys likely to find your DNA on the scene? If the answer’s yes, that’s no problem, but it would help to know.’

It’s a good question. My DNA would have been all over that van – blood, sweat, piss, you name it – but apart from that there was just the chair with the tarpaulin beneath. Take those two things away. Wipe down the door, maybe the walls, and you’d have a perfectly clean crime scene. No evidence I was ever there. That’s why they burned the van: the one item they’d never have been able to clean.

Me: ‘Don’t think so.’

I get the words out, but that place has come closer again. That barn. That chair. That long first evening, where I sat alone, watching my face on screen, waiting for what was to come.

Gusts of something wash around and through me.

It was to avoid all this that I spent all that time in stoned-out luxury in that Edgbaston palace. I don’t want to answer Jackson’s questions. Don’t want to step any closer to the things that happened in that place.

Jackson stares at me. Watkins too, but Jackson is doing the heavy lifting.

He says, ‘Constable, I’m not sure you’re fit for duty.’

‘I think I need to work. Part time even. It might help.’

I give him my I’ll-be-good face. It’s one he’s seen often enough before, usually just after he’s ripped my head off for some offence or other.

To Watkins, Jackson says, ‘Rhiannon, can you use this one? It’s OK to say no.’

‘Yes. Jane Alexander’s got a group researching this climber. Fiona could help with that.’

‘OK. But if you see her cracking up, you send her straight home.’

Watkins says yes, and Jackson looks at me to see if we’ve got a deal.

We have. I do my submissive nod. The one that promises good behaviour.

Jackson says, ‘Anything else?’

My mouth moves. I’m not sure if words come out, but I think they both know what I’m trying to ask.

Watkins says, ‘We’ve placed a watch on Cardiff Docks. Also Swansea, Barry, everywhere in our area.’

That means not Newport. Not Milford Haven. Not Bristol. Nowhere else in the south-west.

It’s a start, I suppose, just not a very good one.

Watkins says, ‘If we get any additional evidence – anything we can use to justify the request – we’ll get other forces involved. At the moment . . .’

She trails off. Her meaning, I think, is roughly: ‘We’ve put a watch on the ports in our own jurisdiction because you’ve been tortured in the line of duty and for some reason you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about all this, so we want to make you feel happy. As for actually taking you seriously, that’ll have to wait for – you know –
evidence
.’

I don’t say anything.

Jackson uses the silence to give me a bunch of stapled sheets. The title page says:

TORTURE SURVIVORS’ HANDBOOK.

Information on Support and Resources for Torture Survivors in the UK.

‘This thing is mostly aimed at people coming here from abroad. But you should read it. And use it.’

I hold the book in my hands.

I say, ‘They got the apostrophe in the right place. That’s good.’

‘Yes.’

I sit there holding the book, not looking at it.

Jackson says, ‘Chicago. We were recruiting for a new exhibits officer anyway. But because we weren’t sure exactly when you might be returning, we pushed that process forward a bit. Got a new guy. Somebody Nadin.’

‘Trefor,’ says Watkins. ‘Trefor Nadin. Did the job over in Gwent. Knows his stuff.’

‘So I’m . . . I’m done?’

I can’t believe it. Feel almost shaky with gratitude. If I’d known all along that being tortured was all it took . . .

Jackson says, ‘Yes, you’re done. And you did a decent job, when we needed you to do it. Thank you.’

I shrug, as though I’m the sort of officer who regularly receives those compliments. I do wonder, vaguely, if Nadin is likely to find the ash from my joints in his drying machine, but I think I’ll be OK.

‘Sir?’

‘Yes?’

‘Chicago.’

‘Yes?’

‘I believe I’m right in thinking that the case has no useful leads. Lots of good work, but no actual leads?’

Jackson nods.

‘It’s just that during the course of my work, I noticed a couple of coincidences.’

Jackson nods telling me to go on. He doesn’t know what I’m about to say.

‘Well, my understanding is that perhaps the only tangible lead we have is that the victim, Kirsty Emmett, thinks she was deposited by a white van. A good-sized white van. She lost consciousness during her ordeal, so we can’t be sure that she didn’t switch vehicles at some point, but we’re pretty sure she started in a van, and ended in a van. Just not necessarily the same one.’

‘Go on.’ That bass rumble, which is vibration as much as sound.

‘And we’ve checked more than a hundred such vans, without result. No DNA match. No fibre match. No van that looks suspiciously clean. We’ve still got some results to come back from the lab. There are a number of vehicles we’re still chasing. But no one is feeling particularly hopeful. The inquiry team has also failed to identify any vehicles that were both in Gabalfa and in Tremorfa at approximately the right dates.’

Jackson nods. His eyes are shaded, but glittering.

‘Now, I don’t have anything like proof, but I do have some questions.’

‘For example?’

‘Well, for example, DI Dunwoody knows perfectly well that his nephew is an instructor at the university sports centre, just outside Gabalfa. Knows perfectly well that the centre runs a fleet of vans. And of course the nephew in question, Kyle Bransby, works here as a SOCO. Works with Ifor Dawes a lot of the time.

‘Now I’d presume that Bransby knew that Ifor was going down to Splott a lot of the time. I mean, a SOCO and an exhibits officer work together all the time. But Ifor’s journey down to Splott would take him so close to Tremorfa that it would be totally unremarkable if we saw Ifor’s van cropping up on Rover Way at the kind of time indicated by Emmett. What’s more, Bransby had presumably observed Ifor’s recent forgetfulness. Although Ifor may not have been driving his van in a particular place at a particular time, he wouldn’t necessarily remember one way or the other.’

Jackson: ‘And
was
Ifor’s van present at the relevant time?’

‘Yes. Yes, it was. But of course, we can’t meaningfully forensicate the van, because any traces of Emmett’s DNA could have found their way there via a spilled evidence bag, for example. And any traces of Kyle Bransby’s DNA would be accounted for by his presence as a SOCO. In effect, the evidence could be hidden in plain view. Left in the only place where it would have no value in a court of law.’

Jackson – slowly, cautiously: ‘And that’s your hypothesis?’

‘Not a hypothesis really, sir. A possibility.’

‘The possibility being that Bransby used a college van to abduct a victim local to him there, in Gabalfa? He rapes her. Transfers her to a different van – Ifor’s – and dumps her. He gets access to Ifor’s van – well, we don’t know how exactly . . .’

‘And Ifor was,’ I say, ‘visibly forgetful about car keys and the like.’

‘OK. Then Bransby dumps Emmett. Returns the van. Makes sure he’s on the crime scene team, so his DNA is, legitimately, all over the place. I mean, yes, he’d have been suited up, but if we’d found his DNA, we’d have put that down to sloppiness, nothing else.’

I nod. ‘Yes.’

Jackson stares at me. ‘And you didn’t say any of this before now, no matter that you hate it down there, because . . .?’

‘Well, the inquiry
was
doing some necessary and useful work. Work which could have found a bad guy who wasn’t Bransby. Two, if Bransby
was
our perpetrator, then any court case would be stronger for having successfully ruled out so many other possibilities.’

‘And three?’

I hadn’t said anything about three, but maybe my face is suggesting something, or maybe Jackson is already thinking along the same lines as me.

‘And three, because there may be two crimes here, not one.’

‘Yes. Yes, indeed there may.’

He stares at me.

Over the years, Jackson has yelled at me plenty. Probably more at me than any other member of his team. Proper, old-fashioned, Welsh bollockings. Lungs trained on the hilltops and rugby fields. Language born of the pithead and the parade ground. An eisteddfod of rebuke. And I’ve always assumed – anyone would – that this was Jackson properly angry. That the shouting was how he showed it.

I now think I got that wrong. I mean, yes, when he’s yelling at me, he’s probably not secretly humming ‘Mr Blue Sky’ in his head. But I think how he is now – silent, glittering, emphatic, compressed – is how he is when he’s really angry. When his jumping up and down on someone’s head thing might actually happen.