This Thing of Darkness (56 page)

20

Linton Hill. Sussex.

A chalk down, a sloping field, a kind of nose or headland poking out into the surrounding sea. Bentley’s lighthouse commands views of the sea on either flank, captain of all it surveys.

The day is blustery, but more sunshine than cloud. The sea almost jaunty. White sailing ships nearer shore. Big ships on the horizon. Brute, industrial shapes rendered flat by distance.

Mike – a fully paid-up consultant now, £250 a day plus expenses – seems slow to get started. He walks slowly round the tower, feeling the masonry. The walls aren’t vertical – they slope inwards as they rise – but they’re steep enough to feel effectively sheer. A fifty-foot leap of stone, painted in broad candy stripes of red and white.

Mike completes a couple of circuits then walks back to get a better view of its upper parts, at one point getting a pair of binoculars from his car. I just sit with my back to the building, feeling the sun on my face.

Chicago has become even worse than I’d first realised. Most of the work that Ifor did early on has turned out to be wrong or incomplete or otherwise problematic. If Dunthinking had been doing his job properly, he’d have been onto those things hard and early, but as it was he handled it his own way: Dunthinkingly. I have to clean up the mess, but cleaning up the mess weeks after the event is a much more serious proposition than doing the same thing when everyone’s memory is fresh and irregularities can be sorted out with a single phone call. A morning’s work takes a week. A week’s work takes longer than I can bear to think.

So I don’t.

Don’t think about Chicago, or about Zorro even. Just sit in the sunlight, feeling the breeze.

Mike’s done inspecting.

Or rather: he’s done inspecting the walls. He’s now inspecting me.

‘Why did you tell me to say I was busy during the week?’

‘Because I’m going crazy at work. I wanted an excuse to get out. I knew I’d be the only one to volunteer for anything on Sunday.’

Mike considers that.

‘You don’t seem like a policewoman, you know.’

‘What do I seem like?’

‘Don’t know. Just not police.’

Mike gets ready to climb and I help him lug some of his mats into place. The mats are for bouldering, Mike tells me: fierce, short problems, usually no more than twenty feet high. The lighthouse is much higher than that, and the upper portion of the climb would effectively have been unprotected, no matter how many mats an intruder cared to strew beneath.

Mike boots up, chalks his hands.

The masonry here is fairly coarse, the pointing corroded. All the same, actual holds or edges are few and far between, and look desperately thin into the bargain. Mike makes a couple of false starts, then tries again. This time he rises five, maybe six, feet from the ground before his foot pings from a toehold and he slides to the ground, grazing his palms and swearing softly.

‘My bad. That was doable.’

He ascends again. Gets to the point he was at before. Positions his foot a little differently. Reaches up for a positive edge. Makes the move that beat him before. He climbs a further ten or twelve feet, moving with painful slowness. Each move, I think, looks tentative. Precarious. I’m expecting that sudden downward slide at any point. I keep worrying that the mats aren’t positioned right. Keep nudging them tight against the wall with my foot.

Then Mike decides against further ascent. He’s looking down, figuring out where his holds are, but some change in his body position shifts his balance in the wrong way and there’s that sudden abrupt slippage. Skin rushing against stone. Mike hits the mats all right, but his limbs are flung out and the slope bounces him out and off the mats onto hard earth.

‘Are you OK?’

Mike rolls upright, rubs an elbow, says, ‘Fine. I’m fine.’

He gathers his breath. I stay leaning against the sunny wall.

A stolen teddy bear. Value one hundred pounds. The only item reported lost not to have been returned.

‘OK,’ Mike says, ‘it’s hard. Really hard. Crimpy and strenuous and some really thin holds. A tough route.’

‘But possible? I mean, someone
could
do it?’

‘Oh sure.
Has
done it. Definitely.’

I stare. Most forensic evidence – prints, residues, traces – are easily destroyed by exposure to the elements. I can’t see how Mike can have found anything which could have survived, visible to the naked eye, for two years.

Mike laughs at my face. Pulls off a climbing boot and smears the toe into the white-painted stone. The boot is soft rubber and leaves a small black trace behind.

‘There are boot marks all the way up. You don’t always get them. It’ll depend on things like foot placement and the exact type of move you’re trying to make. But, well, you can see for yourself.’

He’s right. Little dabs of black. Hard to see unless you’re looking for them, and impossible to interpret unless you already know what to expect. The boot marks rise higher than Mike just climbed.

I take photos.

I say, ‘Sorry, but I’m going to need to keep your boots. Our forensic boys will need them to distinguish your marks from the other ones.’

He says, ‘Really?’ and I say, ‘Really,’ and tell him to get a new pair on expenses. Put his shoes in an evidence bag. We’ll need to resurvey the Bristol apartment for traces of boot rubber.

I suddenly remember Watkins’s get-together. That was today. Sunday. I wonder if I upset her by volunteering for this trip? I’m thinking maybe yes. I send her a nice text. So sorry I can’t be there, that kind of thing.

I wish I was a better human.

I wish we had food for the hungry and harmony between nations.

We drive to London.

A block of flats outside the Barbican. Thirteen floors above us: the apartment where the Redheads live.

This time, Mike hardly bothers to get out of the car. He just shrugs. Says, ‘Easy.’ It’s a modern building. So consciously styled it might as well drench itself in hair mousse and wear aviator shades. The upper storeys boast some angled, louvred window screens which form what is, to Mike and his kind, essentially a ladder. The first couple of storeys lack that gimmick, but a couple of service shafts have been enclosed to form what look like a pair of pillars or buttresses standing a few feet apart from each other. Mike makes a star-shape with his body, one hand and one foot on each pillar, and shimmies his way up the first few feet to show me how easy it is. He doesn’t even need his climbing boots, just his ordinary shoes.

He drops back to the ground, looks at his watch.

Six thirty. A long day.

I say, ‘I’ll call Watkins.’

Get her at home. Hear Cal’s voice in the background, a clatter of pans. I tell Watkins what we’ve found. That the London building is easy. That the climb up the lighthouse looked desperate, but someone had, for certain, done it.

‘You’re sure, Fiona?’

‘Yes.’

She pauses. Doesn’t accept my ‘yes’ straight away. I text her my photos of the boot marks on the tower, but they’re the kind of things that don’t photograph well. What looked unmistakable in the light of day, looks murky and ambiguous on screen.

She continues to hesitate.

I say, ‘They
are
withholding from us. There
are
two murders here.’

She says, ‘I’ll have to run this by Dennis. And Findlay.’

‘Of course.’ I wait to see if she has anything else to say, but there’s nothing on the phone but the faint sounds of Cal cleaning up. I ask, ‘How was your party? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it.’

She says, ‘It was fine.’ Then more gently, ‘It was really nice. I hope you can make it next time.’

I say whatever I’m meant to say, then, ‘Where do you want me now? I’m in London at the moment.’

I hear her exhale. She knows what I want. Suspects me, rightly, of having engineered this timing.

‘You’re up to date on Chicago?’ she asks.

‘Yes. You can check with Laura, if you want.’

Again, that out-breath. That pause.

‘OK. Stay where you are. Let’s see this through.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

‘OK.’

Then she says nothing, and I say nothing, and I say, ‘Is that all, ma’am?’ and she says yes, and we hang up.

Mike raises his eyebrows at me. ‘What’s next? I’m hungry.’

We get food. A nearby pizza place. Mike eats like a girl. Gets a pizza, yes, but no dough balls, no garlic butter, no dressing on his salad. Diet Coke, no pudding. I try teasing him, but he shrugs. ‘Secret of climbing. Train hard. Rest plenty. Don’t eat.’

He asks again what’s next. I shouldn’t really tell him but I do. ‘We kick down some doors and make people cry.’

Mike says, ‘Cool.’ Pauses. Then, ‘Tonight, were you thinking we would sleep together?’

21

We don’t sleep together, no. Just take neighbouring rooms in a nearby Premier Inn. Say a prim goodnight to each other as we separate.

Sleep comes to me in snatches only. Rags of cloud over a tattered moon. Then, at two o’clock, my mobile rings, the screen luminous and urgent in the sudden dark.

I answer it.

‘Fiona?’

It’s Carolyn Sharma.

I say yes. Tell her hi.

She tells me she can’t stop thinking about the way Livesey died. ‘I just wanted to talk to someone, hon. I hope it’s OK.’

‘Yes. More than OK. It’s good.’

‘Everyone here, they’re real nice. Kind people, you know. But they keep wanting to take me out of myself. Take me somewhere nice, get me to laugh. All those things.’

‘And you think that’s all well and good, but you want to be allowed to grieve. That sometimes you might want something that isn’t just sunshine.’

‘Yes. Exactly that. Exactly,’ she says, and pauses. Then, ‘It’s like I had all this great time with him, these memories. We were friends long before we started to date. Then he dies, and all I can think of is those burn marks on his thigh.’

I want to tell her that she’s got that wrong. That the actual dying is only a passage, something you have to squeeze through. That when you come out, it’s not like that any more. That actually being dead is wide and dark and silent and without end. In that place without walls, a few scorched genitals hardly figure.

I don’t say that though. Instead, I say, ‘Carolyn, tell me about when you first met. What you were wearing. What he was. What he smelled like. Everything.’

She does.

They met at a garden party. ‘I was with my first husband, then. He was kind of an asshole, but I hadn’t figured that out yet. But Ian? Oh, he was different. Real courteous. An officer and a gentleman, in that old-fashioned navy way. I was wearing this blue dress and . . .’

She goes on. I only partly listen. There’s a teeny tiny kettle in my room and some tea bags. I pad across the room and make peppermint tea, even as she continues to recount her story, low-voiced in the darkness.

She seems nice, I guess. Livesey too. But my attention isn’t really with her, or Livesey when alive. All I can think of is the dead man. The hanged man. The half man, half crafting project with his Y-shaped cut and a face folded over his eyes.

At one point, Sharma says, ‘Oh, hon, what time is it with you? I wasn’t thinking.’

I say, ‘It’s the middle of the night, but I like talking. Go on.’

She does, but not for long. Cries once, but not really.

I say, ‘Carolyn, will you make me a promise? I want you to tell me the full story of your relationship. Start to finish. The bad things and sad things, as well as the good things. And I want you to call me whenever you feel like it. If that’s stupid o’clock my time, I really don’t care. I just want you to call me. I want you to say that you’ll do that, but then I also want you to actually do it. And to go on doing it until you really, truly don’t need to any more.’

‘Oh, hon, you’re sweet, you really don’t have to.’

That makes me snappish. ‘I
know
I don’t have to. Of course I don’t have to. So when I ask you to do it, I must really mean it.’

‘Oh, OK, sure. All right. I’ll call. I mean, if you’re really . . . But yes. I’ll call. Thank you, hon. I’d like that.’ She also tells me that ‘you English police must sure have a different way of working than ours do over here.’

There are a lot of possible answers to that, but all I say is, ‘Welsh. I’m Welsh, not English.’

Before she hangs up, I say, ‘And Carolyn? Can I ask a favour?’ I ask her how well she knows Stuart Lowe.

Her answer: not brilliantly well, but well enough.

I say what I want and ask her to ask him. ‘I just think it would be better coming from you. I can email stuff over and he can say yes, no or maybe.’

She sounds puzzled, but not in a bad way. ‘Sure, hon, sure.’

We say good night.

It’s three o’clock and my alarm is set for four fifteen. No point in trying to sleep again. So I arrange my pillows in a nest and use the time to think.

Think about Carolyn Sharma and the fact that she called through the night to talk to me.

Think about Livesey and Moon and that undersea cable.

About myself too. The secrets of my past, and a man with the codename Eilmer.

At four ten, I climb out of my nest. Have a shower and dress for action. Ready to kick down doors and make people cry.

22

A car collects us at quarter to five.

Metropolitan Police, BMW 3-series. A DI Dunne is in it, next to a driver who isn’t introduced except as Jimmy. Dunne is a chubby soul, but powerful. He doesn’t seem to think much of me or Mike, but maybe that’s just part of the Met’s standard issue arrogance. He eats a warm sausage roll from a paper bag and balances a styrofoam coffee cup between his thighs. Golden flakes of pastry shower down, a high-cholesterol snowfall.

The car glides through empty streets. The radio crackles.

Notting Hill. Holland Park.

Stucco houses. Something glossy about the whole area. A morning light, tipped with rose.

We gather on a road that encircles a church. A Gothic revival spire above us. Plane trees coming into leaf. And four cars, fluorescent orange and yellow against white, beneath. A knot of uniformed police officers, black-jacketed, smoking a pre-raid ciggy, the sweetest of the day.

Radios. Batons. Handcuffs.

A few early commuters stare.

Dunne fidgets, till he gets the confirmations he’s been waiting for. ‘Let’s do it.’

Our little troop shakes itself back into its vehicles. The house we want is close by. A tall house at the head of a T-junction just off Ladbroke Grove. Our vehicles enter each bar of the T. Stop in the middle of the road, lights lazily circling, blocking exits. The men in the fourth car will be entering the large communal gardens at the back of the house, securing exits from the rear.

When we’re all in place – less than two minutes from leaving the church – Dunne raises a thumb and our three cars put their sirens on at the same time. Not for long, just a few whoops of policeishness released into the late-dawn morning. Just enough to rouse people from their beds. Just enough to get these lawyers and bankers, these prosperous one-percenters, aghast at the black-white-and-fluorescent intrusion into their comfortable pre-breakfast lives.

Dunne and a couple of beefy coppers hammer at the front door. A fourth guy has a megaphone at the ready. Mike and I are out of the car, stretching our legs, watching the show.

We’re on delicate ground here, not that we show it. English law is fiercely against excessive use of police force. And the truth is, had we made a far more discreet appearance – two plain-clothes detectives in an unmarked car – we’d probably have achieved all we needed. But as any copper knows, the single most effective weapon in an interrogation is fear, especially fear shot through with tiredness. An arrival like ours generates both things in a way that a quieter arrival never could.

A man – pyjama bottoms, T-shirt, rumpled hair – comes to the door. A brief dialogue. Then he stands back, granting admittance.

I say to Mike, ‘I’m up.’

Trot up to the house. A female PC, built like an oarswoman, comes with me. The person who answered the front door is Nellie Bentley’s husband. He escorts me, Dunne and the PC upstairs. The house is four storeys, but has generous ceiling heights so it seems higher.

Family photos on the wall. Some artwork.

The husband says, ‘Look, if you can just tell us what this is about . . .’

Dunne says, ‘If we can just go upstairs please, sir.’

We get to the top floor.

Nellie Bentley is there. In her bedroom. Blue nightdress and a dressing gown. One of those sexy Agent Provocateur-y numbers that probably seems like a sensible fashion choice when you and your husband share the run of the top floor and a lot less sensible when there are three police officers in the room with you, two of them in uniform, the radio always crackling, and the sight of those batons and handcuffs the biggest things in your current universe.

Two children – six and eight, maybe, a boy and a girl – shelter terrified behind their mother. She keeps tweaking at the join of her silk gown, then reaches behind her to find her children’s heads. The silk, the children’s heads. Repetitively, to and fro.

Dunne says, ‘Are you Eleanor Bentley, known as Nell or Nellie?’

‘Yes.’

‘We are here in connection with a murder investigation and we’d ask you to accompany us to the station for questioning.’

‘Murder? I don’t know—’

‘Mrs Bentley, please don’t say anything now as we will need to record your answers. You don’t have to say anything, but be aware that it may harm your defence . . .’

He ripples on with the caution, one that he’ll repeat when he’s in front of a video recorder at the station. I like these moments. These incantations. Our Nicene Creed, our little liturgy.

Bentley cries, as she should. As the moment requires.

She wants to be with the kids. Comforts herself by comforting them.

Dunne says, ‘I’m sure your husband can take care of the children. These officers will stay with you as you dress.’

The oarswoman PC and myself stay with Bentley. She flusters over clothes. Part of her thinks she’ll be going straight on to work after all the nonsense is sorted out and her hand hovers over trim little suits and dark dresses. Another part decides to play it safe, and she goes for comfortable trousers, a warm jumper.

When Bentley goes to the bathroom, we stand outside with the door half open and I turn up the knob of the oarswoman’s radio, so its mutter can be heard in the bathroom.

The funny thing – funny if you’re us, not if you’re Nellie Bentley – is that we aren’t actually arresting her. Our requests, our politely phrased
pleases
, are meant completely literally. If she said, ‘No, sorry, it’s five thirty in the morning,’ we’d have to decide whether to arrest her and, if so, for what. In practice, we’d most likely just arrange for her to come in for interview at a mutually convenient time, much as if she were making a dentist’s appointment. But though we know that, she doesn’t and she lives in a world where the coercive power of the state is alive, well and creaking the floorboards outside her bathroom door.

On the drive into Charing Cross, Bentley says, in a small white voice, ‘What am I being charged with?’

Dunne: ‘We haven’t charged you with anything yet.’

‘I get a lawyer, don’t I? When do I get a lawyer?’

Dunne pauses for a few seconds. No reason for the pause, except to establish dominance. Remind her that he can do what he wants, when he wants. His gaze flicks out of the window, watching traffic, the movement of taxis. Then he tells her, briefly, she can call from the station.

She’s silent a moment or two.

The car slides past Hyde Park Corner. Up the side of Buckingham Palace, then down the Mall. Flagpoles lining the street. Geese honking in the park.

Looking down at her hands, Bentley says, ‘I’ll tell you everything, you know. There’s really nothing. Really.’