This Thing of Darkness (28 page)

‘Dad gives an allowance to me and Ollie. Ollie takes it. I don’t. I’m fine with Ollie taking it. I mean, the money is just money, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Cesca takes the photo off me and looks at it. Kisses her finger and touches it to the dead girl’s face. Pins the picture back where it came from.

‘I don’t think I’ve helped you, have I?’

‘We can’t prosecute the crime, no. Not without Jazz. Not without a whole heap more evidence.’

Cesca looks at me. The first time she’s done so properly, the mistress of her own apartment. Her assessment of me is confident, adult.

‘Why did you come here?’

‘Cesca, I think your dad is a criminal on a grand scale. One who will kill, if need be. I think he works in collaboration with others. Those others probably don’t look like criminals. They probably look like legitimate businessmen. Probably
are
legitimate businessmen, except that that’s not all they are.’

‘I don’t know about any of that. I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just I don’t know.’

‘That’s fine. Look, do you know what I mean if I distinguish between evidence and intelligence?’

Her answer: sort of, not really.

‘OK. Evidence is anything we’ve acquired according to specific rules, which we can produce in court, which will make a material difference to the verdict. Intelligence is much looser than that. It’s for our benefit, not the court’s. It might be hearsay in a pub. Or an accusation left anonymously on a Crimestoppers line. Or something that a daughter says, strictly off the record, about her father.

‘We can’t mention those things in court. But we also don’t have to reveal them to the defence team. Don’t have to prove they’re true. But most of our cases, most of our bigger ones anyway, start off with scraps of intelligence. The intelligence shows us what kind of evidence we need to gather. We build the case from there.’

‘OK.’

Cesca has her bracelet off and she’s fiddling with it. Long fingers, dark nails. She’s barefoot too now, like me, except that her shoes are neatly placed at the end of the bed and she hasn’t trodden holes into the soles of her tights.

‘You know your father. You know who he sees and what his relationships are. You have insights that we don’t have and can’t gather. We can’t even intercept his communications because we don’t have enough evidence to secure permission.’

‘You want me to – to grass on him?’

Her voice puts inverted commas round the word. This isn’t a world she normally lives in. Not a world she ever wanted to be part of.

‘I do, yes. But that’s me. What
I
want. You have to do what
you
want. What feels right.’

‘I don’t
know
anything.’

‘Except maybe you do. Things that might seem irrelevant to you might seem very significant to us.’

Her face is naturally mobile, expressive, but it’s got a stillness to it now.

‘And if you’re right . . .?’

‘If your intelligence helps us direct our inquiries in the right direction, we’ll be investigating your father on a charge of murder. If we can make that stick, he’ll get a life sentence and most likely die in jail. You might not want that. Even if you’re no longer in touch with him, even if you don’t approve of him, you might not want that. And no one says you should. You
are
his daughter. It
is
your decision.’

Cesca’s face flicks from me, the corkboard, and some place out in the hallway, a pool of dark shadows where her father stares back at her.

I realise I’m doing a Gareth Glyn. Telling a girl I’ve never met that I suspect her father of being a murderer. And the worst sort of murderer at that: one who kills for greed.

I couldn’t handle it when Glyn told me that, no matter that I hardly believed my father to be any kind of saint. Cesca, I think, is handling the revelation better. But then, in her mind, her father was already some kind of killer. The man who wrecked young Jacinta’s life, who drove it onto the rocks of suicide.

Plus, of course, Cesca handles
everything
better than me. I’m a fuck-up. She isn’t.

‘Will he know? Will you need to name me?’

‘No. Never.’

‘I can’t believe it. That you burgled this place. But you did, you really did. When you wanted to smoke, you went straight to that drawer.’

‘I did, yes. The person I used was a former police officer. Totally discreet. And, as I say, you’d be well within your rights to have me fired and prosecuted. If you want to do that, I’ll tell you who to call and what to say.’

‘That’s all right.’ That look again. An examination which concludes with, ‘You are really odd, though. Like
really
.’

We laugh. She’s right. We both know it.

‘It’s your call,’ I say. ‘It’s whatever you want.’

She stares into space. The darkness in the hall, the picture on the corkboard.

I think of Nellie Bentley. The silk gown and the children’s heads. That repetitive movement, to and fro.

The picture wins.

Cesca says, ‘OK.’ Just that. Whispered.

She throws her bracelet on the bed. Unties her hair, combs it out with her fingers, then re-clips it, loosely.

‘OK.’

I turn her computer on.

I say, ‘I’ll show you some pictures and some names. You tell me anything you know. Anything you sense or suspect or wonder about. Intelligence, not evidence. I won’t record anything. I won’t take notes. It’s just you and me, talking. What happens after that is up to me and my colleagues. I will never involve you in any way.’

She laughs. A laugh that takes in her hippy-dippy ganja box, my holey tights, my burglarous tendencies. She says, ‘You couldn’t really, could you? Involve me, I mean.’

‘It might be a wee bit difficult.’

The computer lights up.

Blue and open. The light of twenty thousand feet above ground.

Four corpses in the room, plus Jazz MacClure. Five. And one of them a raggedy little puppet who keeps falling off her chair and who isn’t really dead.

I’m still feeling strange, but it’s a good strange now.
My
strange.

I call up some photos and we start to work.

47

Work long, work hard.

Mostly, we just go through my long-standing list of names. My targets.

Ivor Harris. MP and slimeball.

Trevor Yergin. Technology and finance.

Brendan Rattigan. A dead man, but still a bastard.

Idris Prothero. A man who once tried to kill me and who I once, unsuccessfully, sought to jail.

Huw Allsop. A man about whom I still know little. Who may, in fact, be a perfectly nice guy.

Ben Rossiter. Close friends with Prothero and Rattigan.

David Marr-Phillips. A man I met once, glancingly, and don’t trust.

Joe Johnson.

Owain Owen.

A dozen more.

I gathered those names following my first big case. One that delved into the peculiarly nasty crimes of the late and unlamented Brendan Rattigan. I put together a list of the people he seemed closest to, both socially and in business terms. I had reason to believe that many of those people either knew about Rattigan’s habits or indulged in the same thing themselves. Either way, I felt they needed to be brought to justice.

Since then, my campaign has morphed a little. Become uncertain of its centre.

Prothero, I know, dealt in illegal weapons and consorted with professional contract killers. Almost certainly, tried to have me killed. David Marr-Philips is a business associate of Prothero’s and presumably knew about the arms dealing, if not necessarily the itsy-bitsy murders that ran alongside. Cesca’s father, Galton Evans, was on my original list of guys-not-to-like and has now promoted himself to suspect-in-chief for the Livesey and Moon murders. And then there’s the Voice too, whoever he is. Also a man I saw only once, a dark shape on a distant hill. A man who had recently ordered my death and who was the mastermind of a criminal enterprise that would end up netting him personally some thirty-four million quid.

I don’t know if the Voice and that dark shape are already on my list, or if they’re people I haven’t yet identified, or what.

I don’t know how real the connections between these people are.

But one by one I summon the photos of the men I’m interested in. Hear what she has to say about them.

Many of them she doesn’t recognise at all. Some she does, but has little to say about them. A small handful of others – Harris, Rattigan, Prothero, Rossiter – she saw with her father on a fair number of occasions. Family things. Business things. She tells me what she knows, but doesn’t know much.

I’m not really surprised. Cesca is now twenty. She stopped seeing her father when she was seventeen and had issues with him for several years before that. And, in any case, how much does the average disenchanted teen know about their father’s business activities? How much did
I
know about my father’s illegitimate activity? How much do I know now, even?

But – one of my slogans – not all harvests look the same or ripen quickly. You don’t always know what you’ve gained.

And among the litter, a jewel.

A pearl, a ruby, a sapphire, a diamond.

Without much hope, I show her a photo of Ned Davison. Start to ask if she knows anything about him.

She interrupts.

‘Creep. Horrible little guy.’

Her voice says ‘creep’. Her face says, ‘fucker’.

I raise my eyebrows.

She says, ‘Standard issue pervert. Fondled me when I was about fifteen. One of those accidental-deliberate things when he ended up with his hand on my breast. Yeugh.’

So far, so
meh
. I don’t like older guys who fondle teenagers – I once burst the testicle of a man who fondled
me
– but I’m on the hunt for bigger prey.

Cesca says, ‘I’ve got a photo somewhere. He was with us in France.’

She fishes around on the cloud, her Instagram account.

It’s not there, I want to tell her. I’ve already looked.

I make tea. Peppermint for me, vanilla chai for her.

I taste her chai. It’s nice.

Bring the mugs back to the room. Look at Cesca from behind.

She’s pretty, maybe beautiful. When I was at Cambridge and didn’t really know the first thing about myself, I confused thinking-someone-was-pretty with being-attracted-to-them. I had a brief lesbian phase, which didn’t work out too well, because however much I liked a girl, she always lacked the one piece of kit I really needed her to have.

But now, seeing Cesca, I think I understand that old confusion. I’m such a mess myself that when I see an attractive, intelligent woman who has her life vaguely together, I think,
I want that quality. I want to be that person
. From that thought to kissing someone – well, it doesn’t sound logical, but it made a kind of sense at the time.

I don’t share these thoughts with Cesca. Don’t risk a cheeky kiss.

Just sit back next to her, give her her tea. Do that, in time to hear a quiet
aha!
of triumph.

‘Not my account,’ she says. ‘My mum’s.’

She flips through her mother’s account. Brings up the picture she’s thinking of.

A table in the south of France, or somewhere like that. A shaded terrace. Vineyards in the background, blue hills beyond. Marianna Lockwood, Ollie, Cesca, her father. Plus five other men.

Prothero.

Marr-Philips.

Owen.

Rattigan.

Davison.

‘I was about sixteen,’ she says. ‘Our last family holiday. I mean, mostly, it was just the normal crap. Mum and Dad sniping at each other. Me and Ollie trying to avoid them. Both of them using their money to get us on their side.’

She grimaces. The experience of every child in a collapsing marriage.

‘But Dad could
never
let business drop. Not for Mum. Not for us. And this holiday was a classic. He was on the phone for a couple of hours every day. The computer too. And then, people would just
arrive
. Like this thing. I mean, having friends over for lunch, OK. But this was a takeover. There was a maid at this villa, Marie I think, whose job was to cook and clean, but then all these guys arrive, and me, Mum and Marie are running around to get things ready. Serve up. No thank yous, or not really. Stupid conversation, with these freaks like Davison and Rattigan making everything feel seedy. My dad too, of course. He was the worst, even. Then we finish pudding, and Mum and I are waiting for these guys to go away, so we can have our house back, and we’re basically pushed out. “Look, Marianna, why don’t you and the children go shopping?” Like I was ten years old and still went shopping with my mum. Like that’s what Ollie wanted to do. But Dad made us go. “We’ve got a meeting.” Called it something stupid. The Cardiff Rotarians, I don’t know. But that’s what it was: a business meeting. All these guys – who live in South Wales, for God’s sake – have to fly to France to invade our holiday. And this guy Davison taking notes and acting like some creepy super-secretary guy. Like he’s the linchpin that everything else depends on. And I just thought, have your frigging meetings in Cardiff and leave us to our crappy miserable holiday.’

She finishes.

I leave a little moat of silence round her words. Jazz and the others press a little closer in.

I am sitting in the gap between my various worlds.

A shady terrace in Provence.

A student flat off the Seven Sisters Road.

An empty barn in the hills above Rhayader.

I try to pull myself into the world I know to be real. Real now, real here. Put my hand out to the hanging aubergine dress. Feel the fabric.

I hear myself saying, ‘Yes, but the British police can intercept communications in Cardiff. Place bugs. Get video. Arrange any kind of surveillance. We can do what we want, assuming we have the permissions.’

Cesca stares at me.

I continue. ‘So you have your meetings abroad. Invade a holiday. The British police can’t and the French police won’t try to bug you. Even if they try, you’re not using the phone and you’re sitting outside, where conversations are harder to record. The principals – your dad, Prothero, the others – they can sort out the big stuff face to face. Then, when details need to be managed and you don’t want to jump on another plane, you turn to your fixer, your creepy Davison character. He’s an accountant and a consultant, so he’s got every reason to buzz about between guys like these. He’s never been on our radar, not really, so we’d have a hard time justifying any active surveillance. And bingo, you have a conspiracy. Or not a conspiracy, even. Just a network of businessmen, where it so happens that the business concerned is totally illegal.’

Cesca doesn’t answer immediately.

Jazz and the others sit tight, sit quiet.

I find myself holding the hem of the dress to my right. Like the fabric is the only thing that anchors me here, in this room, this reality.

Cesca says, ‘It’s just one photo. It’s hardly proof of anything, is it?’

‘It proves nothing. Intelligence, not evidence. But it
is
odd, isn’t it? Why meet in France, when you all live in Wales? Why make sure that you and Ollie and your mother were out of the house? Why push you out, if they had nothing to hide?’

I don’t mention it, but I’m also certain that Evans, Prothero, Marr-Philips, Owen and Rattigan had no legitimate business interests in common. There are lines joining one or two of them – Marr-Philips has a minority stake in Prothero’s engineering company, Evans and Rattigan sat on a couple of boards together – but nothing that joins all five.

I ask to see other photos from the holiday, anything she has.

She’s happy to let me see them, but there’s nothing much.

Just one shot intrigues me. A shot from an upstairs window. One that was, I think, meant to capture her brother diving into the swimming pool, but which inadvertently grazed the edge of a gravelled parking area. And in that parking area, a pale blue car, a BMW, I guess. And beside it: a man, hand raised – in greeting? against the sun? because he’s glimpsed the camera? The man is tallish. Lean. Youngish, perhaps about the age I am now. Tanned. Thinning hair and – or am I making this up? – blue, intelligent eyes.

‘Do you have other shots of this guy?’ I ask.

Cesca looks, but without much enthusiasm – she’s tired now – and in any event she’s got nothing.

‘Do you remember him at all? Did you spend any time with him?’

Kind of. Not really. Just a guy who arrived as part of the invading army. Didn’t stay for lunch. Didn’t hang around. Not creepy, the way Davison was.

I call up a photo of my own.

One that shows a man. Mid-thirties. Lean. Tanned. Thinning hair and intelligent eyes, with two colours of blue in them. Rain-cloud grey and cobalt blue.

‘Is this him?’ I ask.

My voice is a husk. An empty shell.

Cesca looks at the man. Vic Henderson. A man I kissed with passion once. A man who would have liked to take me away on holiday, his very own brown-legged Caribbean boat-girl. I said no to that idea and – long story – he tried to kill me instead. That plan didn’t work out so well and Henderson is now shuffling round a prison hospital, relearning how to walk, speak, feed and pee.

Cesca doesn’t know that story and I’m not about to tell her. She just looks at the photo. Says, ‘Don’t know. Maybe. I don’t really remember. Sorry.’

I want to push her, but don’t. The harder you push at an unreliable memory, the less reliable it becomes.

I tell her fine. Tell her we’re done.

Say thanks, and mean it.

I expect Cesca to push back from the computer with relief, but she doesn’t, or not immediately.

Instead she puts a long forefinger to the screen and says, ‘It’s what you came for, isn’t it? These pictures. This conspiracy idea.’

‘I didn’t know exactly. I just knew that you had better access than I did. But yes, I suppose, it was this.’

‘Do you want them?’ She means the photos.

I nod. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. But it’s your call. If you give them to me, I’ll share them with my boss and with someone I know at SOCA, the organised crime agency. None of us are going to go shouting about any intelligence we’ve collected. But it’s your call. It’s totally your call.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Cesca looks at me. Yawns. Laughs.

She picks up my ankle. Looks at the mess I’ve made of my tights, my dirty foot.

‘Let me guess, you don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight.’

I admit it.

She drags a bedroll from under the bed. ‘For when people stay over. Or when boyfriends start kicking in their sleep.’

We clean up, pee, go to bed.

Evans, Rattigan, Owen, Prothero, Marr-Philips, Davison.

All in one place at one time, and wanting to talk about things so secret that Evans’s own family was banished from the house.

Fruit from the golden tree. Fruit I’ve been seeking for years now.

But in that happy knowledge, a brown worm turns. Marr-Philips made his money from property, much of it during the decade of upheaval that rebuilt Cardiff from the late-eighties onwards. Gareth Glyn accused my dad of killing the people who stood in the way of that redevelopment. If there’s a conspiracy here, I’ve no reason to think my father isn’t a part of it.

For all I know, I’m not investigating Evans and the rest of them. I’m investigating my father. I’m investigating
me
.

People never really reinvent themselves. They migrate back to whatever they truly were
.

And what was my father, if not the go-to man for violence in South Wales? That’s the thought I can’t handle. More than anything that happened in that barn near Rhayader, it’s the thing that is making me lose my mind and scatter my shoes.

In the bed above me, Cesca murmurs, ‘Fiona? Fi?’

‘Yes?’

‘Never fucking burgle me again, OK?’

I tell her OK. Tell her goodnight.

Tell her those things and try to sleep.

My father: provider of muscle.

And Gina Jewell dead.