This Thing of Darkness (6 page)

I nod. My submissive nod. The one that actually means I actually mean it.

‘And no flying solo. No more interviewing people under caution when you haven’t even bloody told me you wanted to visit the site.’

I do my nod again, but maybe not quite so submissive as the one before.

Jackson doesn’t let that go. He says, sharply, ‘Fiona?’

‘Yes, sir. No flying solo.’

‘OK.’ And then he smiles and maybe I do too and then everything changes and there is light in the room again and I can stand up without wobbling and no longer feel the need to point upwards at my head.

‘Your OSPRE exam. Did it go OK?’

‘Made random guesses all the way through, sir.’

‘Excellent.’

He wants to know when I hear the results. I’m not sure, but I think it’s six weeks, something like that.

Then Jackson wants me gone. He’d quite like to do some real work, I think. But I have one last call on his patience.

‘Lichens, sir. Do you have any interest in lichens at all?’

8

Lichens. Neglected but remarkable.

For one thing, they’re not one organism, but two. All lichens are joint ventures that combine a fungus and an alga. The fungus does the rooty, mushroomy stuff. The algae do the photosynthesis part. A neat trick.

And they’re tough little critters. A few years back, a Spanish scientist, don’t ask me why, put some lichens on a spaceship and bounced them around in open space for a fortnight. Cosmic rays. Heat and cold. Total vacuum. Not great for the health, you’d imagine, but when they came back to Earth, they were just fine. All tickety-boo and ready to carry on lichening around.

There are drawbacks to this way of life, however. Most pertinently, lichens grow slowly. So slowly, indeed, they can be used to date the exposed surfaces of rocks. And if some remarkably adept burglar chose to go skyhooking his way across a narrow cornice near Llantwit in order to gain entry to a corridor full of minor Picassos, then the lichens will bear the imprint of that skyhookery for years, and perhaps even decades, afterwards.

My researcher from the University of Kent does indeed come to Plas Du. And finds that, sure enough, if you ignore the most recent growth – the stuff that has happened in the years since 2009 – the older lichens reveal a line of pointy metal hook marks running all the way from the corner to the window. The marks are so clear, we think we can even identify the brand of skyhooks.

The process takes two weeks. In academic-forensic terms, two weeks is blisteringly fast, but to me, down in the dungeons, the moment can’t come soon enough. I chase Pam, the researcher, every day at least once, sometimes twice. But we get there. She gives me the confirmation I need. By phone and email, letter to follow.

‘
Fab
,’ I tell her. Tell her that she’s my favourite ever lichenologist.

Go skipping into Jackson’s office to tell him what I want to do next.

He laughs at me, but tells me to go ahead. ‘You’re to work with a grown-up, this time. Rhiannon, now. You and she get on all right, don’t you? I’ll get her to babysit.’ He makes the call that makes it official. ‘Tomorrow morning. She’ll come and get you.’

I nod. ‘Thank you.’

I don’t go back to work though. I’ve booked today as a holiday. Only came in now to get the Plas Du thing moving forwards.

I’ve taken the day off to meet a friend. One I haven’t seen, or not properly, for some time. I’m not sure exactly what gifts to bring, but decide on some beer, a packet of cigarettes, a cup of coffee in a stay-warm plastic mug and a bacon sandwich which I try to keep vaguely warm by leaving my coat on top of it.

Park at HM Prison Cardiff. The spaces are reserved for prison staff only, but I’m police, so I almost count. Check with the front desk for scheduled release time. Eleven o’clock, they say, but say it in a way that evades the question of whether anything will actually happen on schedule.

I say, ‘Can you tell him to come and find me? I’m in the car park. A few routine questions.’

I’m parked up under the wall. The other cars in my row all have their noses pointing outwards, snouts toward Fitzalan Road and a glimpse of trees. My car faces in. Nothing to see but blocks of rough-hewn stone. Grey and brown and rust-red and a black so deep it shimmers blue in the shadow.

Play Classic FM until it annoys me. Radio 2 lasts no longer. Radio 4 is worse. A stupid drama about a stupid woman whose stupid life problems could, in my opinion, be solved by a good, hard slap.

Not that, as a police officer, I’m technically pro-slapping.

So I wait in silence, which is better. The zen of the prison yard.

Time does whatever it does near prisons. Flows fast on the street outside, thickens as it approaches these darkly rising walls. Minutes pass like flies struggling in syrup.

Penry appears at about twelve thirty. He moves slowly, like an old man blinded by sunlight.

I could help him, of course. Step out of my car. Toot my horn.

I do neither. Just stay at the wheel, watching him peer through the glare of windscreens.

He stops when he recognises me. Mouth wordless in the breeze. Shifts his face around till he finds something right for the occasion. Tough, male, but nevertheless a tough male face that balances on top of a sea of other feelings.

I lean across the passenger seat and flip the door open.

He stands in the opening. ‘Jesus, Fi.’

I move my coat off the bacon sarnie and say, ‘The coffee’s cold. So is the sandwich.’ Give him his gifts anyway.

He sits there on the seat, facing the wall, holding the beer, the coffee, the sandwich, the ciggies. His eyes are swimming.

After a bit, he says, ‘Can I?’ meaning the cigarettes.

I nod yes and we both light up. We wind the windows down, but the car fills with smoke anyway.

He says, ‘I think that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.’ Looks straight ahead as he says it, because I don’t think he’d trust his eyes if he looked at me, and Penry has this compulsively macho thing going, like he thinks his penis might fall off if he ever let up.

I say, ‘Home?’

He nods.

I drive him home.

Penry: a former copper. A good one. Decorated for bravery. But took early retirement after an injury sustained in the course of duty. Felt his life go to pieces. Did some stupid things. Went to prison for them, not least because I did a lot to ensure he did. But we’ve become friends nevertheless. I’ve visited irregularly throughout his jail term and he once helped out on an inquiry of mine from the inside.

I park outside his house. It’s been rented out for his stay inside, but has been empty the last six weeks.

I let Penry find his keys, get used to the idea of standing on the right side of a lock.

He opens up. Moves through the space, as alien to him now as the first explorer on Mars.

‘It’s cleaner than I thought,’ he says. ‘I thought the tenants would have trashed the place. Always assumed they would.’

He rests his hand on a radiator, which is somewhat warm. In the kitchen, he swings open the fridge door. There’s milk there. Fresh milk. And butter, cheese, bacon, some orange juice. In the cupboard, fresh boxes of cereal, bread, tinned beans, a few bits and pieces. Beers.

His face turns to me, looking more pained than happy.

‘I’ve been in when I can,’ I say. ‘Cleaning up and stuff.’

‘You didn’t have a . . .’ he says, then remembers that I once burgled the place anyway, that I don’t always need keys.

And then he just slumps down on a kitchen stool, face in hands. He cries silently, but his shoulders heave through his faded purple sweatshirt. I wonder if I’m meant to put my hands to him. Rest a hand on his neck, knead his shoulder muscles, something like that.

I don’t. Just find a bottle opener, open a beer, push it his way. Go out to the car, get a joint from the boot.

When I come back in, he’s stopped crying. He’s halfway down his first bottle. He holds a second out to me.

‘I don’t drink,’ I tell him. Show him my joint.

He laughs. I light up.

And then we sit there, in the cloister of his kitchen, him drinking, me smoking, and neither of us talking much.

I ask him what he’ll do now.

‘Security work of some kind, I suppose. Don’t know if anyone will want to hire me, but being on the inside does give you a perspective. It does teach you stuff.’

‘Ask Watkins for a reference,’ I say. ‘She might give you one.’

‘Really?’

The inquiry where Penry helped me from the inside was one of Watkins’s. She’s got fierce views about bent coppers, but this particular bent copper showed a fair bit of heroism in helping us out that time.

‘Worth a try.’

We chat. Him about prison, me about my cases. Plas Du and Dunthinking’s damn Chicago.

He drinks another beer, then goes up to shower. Comes down in a different pair of jeans, a different top.

I’ve finished my joint and I’m getting bored.

I say, ‘Brian, let’s just say you were a copper again. Say you’d never been to prison, that none of that stuff had ever happened.’

‘OK.’

‘And let’s say you were on a case. A serious one. Murder, rape, something like that. If you started to believe that the investigation, although properly conducted, would never result in a successful prosecution, would you do anything about it? I don’t mean anything awful particularly, just – I don’t know – entering premises without a warrant, tracking a car, stuff like that.’

‘That stuff used to happen a lot. Half the time, it wasn’t even all that clever. First time I worked on a big case, they had this suspect in custody, bastard was definitely guilty but saying nothing. When I came in the next morning, the guy had a fractured cheekbone and we had a full confession in writing.’

‘Yes, but now. If it were you. And I’m not talking about hitting people.’

‘Now? But look, I
have
been to prison. That stuff changes you.’

I leave it there.

Don’t stay much longer. Drive out to Gower. To the churchyard where the security guard, Derek Moon, lies buried. A stone church with a low tower. Gravestones sloped against the wind. Grass shaggy in the spaces between.

Moon’s grave is a good one. Simple carving. Welsh sandstone. Moss and lichens already claiming it. A deep fingernail’s worth of growth already in the cleft of that M, the curl of the Os. Someone has left a clutch of daffodils here at the graveside. Out of water and with an elastic band pinching the stems.

I get a knife from my car – an ordinary kitchen knife, nothing special – and cut away the elastic band, take a couple of inches off the stems. Near the entrance to the churchyard, there’s a little set of open shelves, holding a few plastic vases, some basic gardening bits and pieces. I take a vase, fill it from a water butt under the vestry roof. Settle the flowers properly back.

Take a photo. I’ve never seen Moon’s actual corpse and that bothers me somehow, like a missing tooth.

As I’m doing this, I realise that I’m being watched from the other side of the graveyard wall by a girl in a red coat. Big eyes, serious mouth.

I say, ‘Those flowers. Did you leave them?’

She doesn’t nod exactly, but her face is more yes than no.

‘They looked very nice, but they last a bit better in water. You can get vases from over there,’ I tell her.

She nods.

‘So they’ll look nice for him,’ I add and, as I do so, have this vision of Moon. Bearded beneath the soil. The blood on his scalp crusted over. Black as tar in the deeper-lying wounds. The dead man himself looking upwards, through the soil and the worms and the stones and the grass. Looking at the yellow daffodils and a silent girl in a scarlet coat.

When I get home, I find two missed calls. Penry’s number, no message. I don’t call back.

What I do do, however, is address a niggle that’s been bothering me. Lockwood’s divorce from Evans was clearly amicable enough, as amicable as these things ever are. Yet Francesca chose to change her name rather than stick with the one she was born with. And Ollie’s first answer about his sister’s presence in the house on the night of the burglary was a strange one.
She’s in London now. Art student
. And there was something gap-toothed about Lockwood’s photo collection, the one that contained no pictures of the daughter, Francesca, with her father.

The daughter has a car registered to her name. A Fiat Punto hatchback, forty thousand miles on the clock. I use the national number-plate recognition system to try and track times when Francesca Lockwood was in the same place as her father. Can’t do it. That doesn’t mean they never have been in the same place – there are trains and taxis and buses and friends’ cars and a million other possibilities for interaction that I can’t trace. But still. He has a car. So does she. Yet the two things have never been in the same place at the same time, not even around Christmas.

Another item for my to-do list, I fancy.

As I’m getting to bed later that evening, the phone goes again. I answer it.

‘Brian,’ I say.

‘Fi.’ His voice is slurred. Beery.

I imagine him standing upright, but leaning up against a wall. He has prison skin, too pale for the world.

I didn’t call him, he called me, so I don’t see any need to make conversation. Just sit on my bed listening to the crackle on the line until he gets to what he wants to say.

He says, ‘Your question. About what to do if you thought an investigation was going nowhere.’

‘Yes?’

‘I didn’t give you an answer. Not really.’

‘So . . .?’

‘Look, I think coppers need to obey rules, I really do. The rules aren’t stupid, not most of them. But then, why become a copper at all? Why become a copper unless you want to deliver justice? And the rules don’t always help. Usually, yes, but not always.’

That’s still not an answer, I think, but I don’t say so. Just sit listening to that crackle and thinking of Moon’s churchyard at night.

Clay against the dead man’s lips. Daffodils yellow against the wheeling stars.

Then Penry speaks again.

‘This investigation of yours. The security guard. You think that investigation is going nowhere?’

‘Maybe. Yes. Maybe.’

‘And you want to do something about it? Take action outside the rules?’

‘Maybe. Possibly. I’m not sure.’

A pause, a short one. Penry winding himself up to an actual answer.

‘Fi, I think the justice comes first. It has to.’

‘Yes. Thank you. I think so too.’

‘But don’t fuck up. You’re still a police officer.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you don’t want to end up like me. A copper
and
a convict.’

I say yes. Tell him thanks.

He says the same to me.

We don’t hang up straight away. Just stay there, listening to the crackle. Then one of us says goodnight. Then the other one does too. And then we are alone, as alone as Derek Moon, but without the clay, the worms, the stars, the daffodils.

I think police rules matter and I’ll try to abide by them. But the dead matter more. Their rules are sacred and they last for ever.