This Thing of Darkness (25 page)

Jackson, dangerously controlled: ‘Do you know whether DI Dunwoody has made any effort to check those university vehicles?’

‘No.’ Jackson’s eyes push a question at me, and I correct my answer. ‘I mean, yes, I do know, and no, he hasn’t.’

Jackson, in a whisper: ‘And in any case, Bransby is a crime scene specialist. If he can’t clean a van, then no one can.’

‘True. But then there’s a bizarrely well-cleaned vehicle to deal with. You might even expect that Bransby – if he were the perpetrator – might let a few weeks go by then seek to persuade the college authorities that the vehicle is faulty and needs to be sold or scrapped. Anything to remove it from possible investigation.’

Jackson, so quiet now I can hardly hear him: ‘And has the college been selling off any such vehicles, Fiona?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know where those vehicles are now? Who the new owners are?’

‘Vehi
cle
, sir. It was just the one. As for the new owner, you’re looking at her.’

Jackson falls silent, but his eyes retain that dangerous intensity. I can feel Watkins’s gaze, blowtorch-like, on my neck.

Jackson: ‘Fiona, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d ask you to give Rhiannon here access to that van. Rhiannon, if you would arrange the necessary analysis, I’d be most grateful. There will be no need to mention anything of this to Mr Bransby or Inspector Dunwoody.’

We nod. Make the necessary arrangements.

Watkins says, with some kindness in her voice, ‘Is there anything else?’

‘Not really. Just – well, Kirsty Emmett was blindfolded. She could see very little. But I presume she could smell. You might want to ask her if she remembers the smell of aniseed. Bransby favours a particular type of chewing gum.’

‘That’s a question we’d normally ask at first interview. Are you sure—’

‘I’ve read the transcripts. The question was not asked.’

‘And it was DI Dunwoody who led that interview?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you.’

And that’s it.

We’re done.

I’m assigned part-time to Jane Alexander’s research effort. Jane says she wants me to review the work her team has already done. That’s good policing – a way to avoid groupthink – but it’s also an indication that she’s not finding what she’s looking for.

I accept a mountain of data from her and promise to start work.

She doesn’t ask where I’ve been. Nor does anyone else. Partly, that’s because I’m not the wheel at the centre of anyone’s universe. Mostly, it’s that Chicago has kept me well concealed from ordinary office life, so no one’s really noticed anything different.

I sit at my desk, feeling strange.

An unthreatening sunlight falls across a peaceable carpet.

People who know me walk past, say hi, mean well.

No one is taping me to a chair.

No one is using me as a poor-quality electrical conductor.

Constable, I’m not sure you’re fit for duty
. Him and me, both.

I phone Penry. Tell him he doesn’t need to bother with the Cardiff docks, or anything else in our area. Ask him to keep going with everything else.

He tells me to come over one evening. ‘I’ll cook,’ he says. I say yes, OK.

See my friend Bev, who talks to me about a new diet and fitness thing she’s just starting.

I tell her I’m starting one too. Have just started, in fact.

‘You, Fiona? Dieting?’

I persuade her that I’m for real, and she tells me that she’s trying to swim regularly down at the International Pool on the Bay. We agree to go swimming together that evening. I phone Ed Saunders, who lives in Penarth just a few minutes on from the pool. Invite myself round to dinner. He sounds keen, welcoming.

The world is strange.

No one is throwing me in a van.

I’m not ripping at wet plywood with ragged hands.

Lev isn’t here, jabbing his fork at the telly.

I make peppermint tea and eat lunch at my desk. I wonder what Jackson will do to Dunwoody. I think that if he does go properly apeshit – if he does actually jump on Dunwoody’s head – then I should get to watch. I mean, if not me, then who?

I dispose of my mozzarella and rocket sandwich. Turn my attention to Jane Alexander’s documents.

Ninety-five names have been harvested so far. Of those, twenty-eight have been discarded as Not of Interest. Thirteen are deemed to be of Possible Interest. There are no names of Definite Interest.

I follow my sandwich with a plastic pot of chunked fruit that I eat with my fingers. If colleagues stop to chat, I find I’m able to conduct a vaguely normal conversation.

I feel OK. I feel OK.

I’ve survived and I feel OK.

I think:
If this police-style thing doesn’t work out, maybe I don’t have to do anything about it. Maybe I work hard, within police rules, and if we catch the criminals we do, and if we don’t we don’t
.

That is a possible course of action. Theoretically, I mean, that is possible.

42

Swimming with Bev is surprisingly brilliant.

We swim up and down and encourage each other lots. Afterwards, we sit in a chirpily colourful cafe and drink vegetable smoothies and Bev talks about her diet and whether her arms and thighs have got any thinner.

I listen to her with intensity, discuss her questions with earnestness, then agree with whatever she said in the first place.

Look at
my
thighs. Wonder if they’ve got thinner.

We agree to make our swimming trip a regular thing, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Then Penarth. Ed’s house.

I arrive with a bunch of flowers, nice ones not garage ones. Give him a friend-kiss, warm but not intimate. He has something lovely on the stove. A bottle of red wine open, and half a glass already poured. We chat a bit. This and that, nothing much.

I don’t talk about the barn at all. Just skirt around any topic that comes close to that subject. I tell Ed about my swimming trip with Bev. We talk about work.

My corpses, his nutcases.

Ed normally sees through me when I’m not being authentic – a favourite word of his – but his attention isn’t fully with me. He chops herbs and wields oil, but he’s too slick in the kitchen for those things to be the cause of his distraction.

I don’t care. We can be distracted and fake together, that’s fine with me. Then, when he’s done with his herbs and his chopping, he tops up his glass and says, with just the faintest rose-blush of embarrassment, ‘Look, could I ask you a favour?’

The favour is that Ed, good old Ed, is about to launch out into internet dating. He wants me to look over his draft profile, help choose pictures.

Whatever felt crooked in the atmosphere before, that little bit askew, feels straightened out by his request. For all my inadequacies, I’m one of Ed’s closest friends and probably his closest female friend. I respond at once. Busy myself with the duties and responsibilities of my new role. Help choose pictures. Comb out the text of his pitch. He’s got four different websites in mind, and wants me to help choose one of them. We study the sites. Laugh at some of the pitches on offer. Pick out guys and girls that we think look hot. When we get hungry, Ed brings his stew – some rich, tomatoey, Italian thing – over to the computer desk and we eat and work at the same time.

I’m struck, actually, by how buff Ed looks in his pictures. He does some windsurfing from time to time, and there’s one of him, ankle deep in water, wetsuited up, looking to his left and laughing, with wind and salt spray ruffling his hair. He looks attractive. More than attractive, in fact. He looks hot.

I say, ‘That one’s a keeper, definitely. You look like a hottie.’

When I say that, I feel his eyes shift back from the screen to me. I feel the odd interrogation of his gaze. Its ambiguity.

I remain as steady, unruffled as I was that night with Buzz, the night he told me that he’d started dating again. It’s not even that I’ve thought these issues through. Would I, a somewhat nutty late-twenties woman, do well to seek some kind of a relationship with a (surprisingly buff) mid-thirties guy who, for reasons that I don’t understand and can’t explain, quite likes me, certainly as a friend but just possibly (or have I got this totally wrong?) as a romantic partner?

I’ve just no idea how I’d answer that, or answer any of the multiple questions locked away in its interstices. But in a way, that uncertainty
is
my answer. I’m still too messed up to make sensible choices. Buzz was a wonderful choice. My landing permit for Planet Normal. But, now that I have my feet temporarily set on this difficult planet, I need to choose carefully. Make a forever choice for my forever future.

I can’t do that until my head is more settled and my head, at the moment, is a-crawl with beetles and thoughts I can’t bear to touch.

So, for now, I just blink forward, study the screen and keep my voice blandly normal. If there’s any question in Ed’s glance, I bat it away with peaceable indifference.

Ed pours himself more wine. Drinks it with a little edge of anger or aggression.

The thing – whatever it was – passes.

We pick two websites, ditch the others. Select photos. Write text. Pick out some possible women for Ed to ‘like’.

It feels good. Ed needs a proper relationship, I can see that. He’s been available before, but not determined. Not strategic. This venture of his feels like he’s at last taking the dating game seriously again. He got into his first marriage way too early – he had his first child when he was only twenty-two – and this feels like a mature attempt to refashion a life for himself.

I think of him and Buzz, two thirty-something men pushing down the slipway into the estuary that, with only a breath of good fortune, will open out into the placid seas of Forever Married Life.

I wish them both well.

We go on working. Laugh quite a lot. Ed drinks too much. He looks a bit like a younger, more suit-and-tie version of Matthew McConaughey and I slip in a photo of the actor to the group that we upload. Ed calls me an idiot when he notices, but he likes the compliment.

A good evening.

Good for Ed, good for me.

When we hug goodbye, I don’t feel that ambiguity any more, and think perhaps it was never there in the first place.

Ed closes the door, leaving him enclosed in the golden lamplight of his little hall. Me outside in the sea breeze and the blowing trees.

I walk to my car. Blip it open. Get in. Do nothing.

When I close my eyes, I see all those website women. An endless sun-swept parade of them. Blond-haired and brown. Long hair and laughing eyes. Bare shouldered on a foreign shore.

And Ed with them. The multiple Eds of those photos. In close-up. In a wetsuit. As Matthew McConaughey. Ed clean-shaven, Ed with some windsurfer’s stubble.

I feel something. An emotion that wriggles out of reach.

I try holding up words to the shape.

Lonely. Jealous. Confused. Happy
.
Horny
.

The words and the shape don’t match. I think there aren’t enough words.

Emotions flicker out of sight. Silver mackerel in a dark grey sea, uncatchable.

And when I check my emails last thing before bed, I have one from Stuart Lowe.

He’s been looking at Penry’s photos.

Most of them he’s dismissed, but there’s one of a ship in Milford Haven that he’s singled out. A stern trawler. The
Isobel Baker
. The ship docked in Milford Haven yesterday. Unloaded a regular catch, caught after a couple of successful spells in the Irish sea.

Lowe’s email says,

Gantry appears to have been adapted for non-standard load. Trawl winches look unusual for a ship this size – but certainly suitable for a load-bearing umbilical system. Can you get better photos? Superstructure if poss. Also close-ups of stern, especially gantry A-frame and any new cabling/control equipment. Also ramp and any on-deck fixings, particularly if recent, please. Thanks, Stuart.

I stare at Penry’s photos. They look completely unremarkable to me. But then that’s why I recruited Lowe, because he knows what to look for.

I shoot him a thank you note. Say we’ll get more photos.

Call Penry. ‘Brian, I think we’ve got it.’ Tell him which boat, which port. He says he’ll get onto it tomorrow. We ring off.

Silence swelling in a dark house.

Streetlights on outside, but nothing but the greenly glowing oven clock inside.

Silence and darkness and bloodstains in the hall.

I call Penry back.

‘Brian?’

‘Fi.’

‘Be careful.’

‘I will.’

‘No. You don’t understand. Be incredibly careful. More careful than you’ve been in your life. You
cannot
be seen. I can’t tell you everything, but you have to believe that these people are extremely dangerous. They kill. They torture. And they are very, very close to making a lot of money.’

‘OK.’

‘You don’t have to do this. You owe me nothing. You do not owe me this.’

‘OK.’

I don’t know what else to say. I think I should tell him not to head back to that port. But I think if I did that, he’d go there anyway.

He reads my mind, or close enough.

He says, ‘If I don’t go, if I don’t take these photos, you’d go anyway, wouldn’t you? You’d do it yourself.’

I hadn’t quite got as far as thinking about that, but I know he’s right and say so.

‘Well then.’

‘It’s not the same. This is personal. For me, this is personal.’

Penry doesn’t say anything straight away. For some reason, nothing I can explain, I’m suddenly sure that he’s standing like me in a dark house. Silent inside and lit only by streetlights filtering in from the night.

Two people. Standing in darkness. Holding phones until the silence creaks with the waiting.

Then Penry says, ‘I used to be a copper. And I fucked up. And I went to jail. And now I want to do something that makes me feel like the first part of my life, the policing one, wasn’t a waste of time. That it wasn’t just some kind of act. You’re not the only one who gets to do stupid things because they’re personal.’

I smile at that.

Smiling on the phone: not a brilliant telecommunication technique, but it works for me. A smile glimmering through the darkness.

We tell each other goodnight.

Hang up.

Listen to silence, as blood stains glimmer in the half-light.

Sleep.