This Thing of Darkness (8 page)

‘Oh?’

I shrug. Gather my things. ‘I mean, Critterling would have been too obvious. And Crack and Slab would have been just plain weird.’

His hatred follows me as I leave. On the way out, I ask the secretary her name. Bronwen, she says. Bronwen Woodward. Nice to meet you, Bronwen, I tell her.

10

My pact with Jackson holds up.

I work like crazy on Chicago. The inquiry has so far collected over three thousand four hundred exhibits, all of which need to be bagged, labelled, referenced and catalogued. It’s the sort of job for which Ifor would normally have assistance, but Laura Moffatt is flat out on a job of her own, and sickness, budget pressures and staff turnover means that there’s less back-up available than there normally would be.

The truth is, I don’t think Ifor could ever have handled the volume of work on Chicago as efficiently as me, and both Jackson and Laura Moffatt think the same. Plus, though it’s not strictly part of my remit, I read every interview transcript, stay closely in touch with the investigation itself. For once, my ever-precarious CID account is in credit.

But I’ve other fish to fry and they’re browning nicely.

The Saturday following our visit to Galton Evans, Mike Haston, the climber, went out to Critterling with ropes and three mates. Not Rhod but other, more pliable, climbers. I was there too, with a technician from the forensic lab to check our procedures. We roped off a thirty foot wide chunk of cliff, the chunk down which Moon fell. And Mike, with his friends, traced every inch of that sweep of rock. Took moulds of every projection, every place where Moon could have hit his head. The climbers did essentially the same job that the original SOCO attempted, except that these guys didn’t regard a hundred-odd feet of vertical or overhanging rock as ‘difficult access’. They thought of it as a playground. Working on fixed ropes, but moving like dancers.

After four hours’ work, we had a complete collection of moulds. The cliff remade in negative. And none of them had that right-angled cross section. Or anything close. It was obvious, more or less, from that first day I was there with Buzz. Once the guard had fallen over the overhang – a fall through empty space – he would have struck the smoothly rising slab. And that slab is a thing of delicate beauty. It’s rippled in places. There are little crystals poking out now and again. Two cracks of not much more than a finger’s width. Mike tells me there are a couple of fossils visible, ammonites. But the thing is basically just one smooth sweep of limestone. No deep fissures. No blocks. No sharp protrusions. And once Moon hit, rolled and bounced down the slab, he’d have been ejected into space again, as the slope of the cliff moved away from him. The final impact site lies almost fifteen feet from the base of the cliff.

My forensic guy, Bryn, stashed his accumulating moulds in an old fruit crate stacked on the rocks below the high tide mark. The moulds smelled of warm plastic, but had the colour of old flesh. An alien autopsy.

And as those moulds accumulated, the facts looked increasingly beyond dispute. Derek Moon was struck by an object with a roughly right-angled cross section. No such object exists on the cliff, so the injury must have occurred before or after the fall.

After is ruled out – he came to rest on his back, the side of his head untouched by that final drop. So that only leaves before.

Which means murder.

The bureaucracy takes time, of course. Getting casts made. Getting a damn report from Bryn, who normally has the honour of being harried and hounded by detective inspectors at the very least and isn’t thrilled at being harried and hounded by a mere detective constable, and a wee, female, exhibits-managing one at that. But I get there. Assemble what I need. And – exactly one month from my first visit to Moon’s death-place – I’m ready. Arrange a meeting with Jackson and Watkins, my appointed babysitter. Present my treasure.

A written report, by me. Bryn’s, over-cautious, forensic summary. The key documents from the original case files. And my collection of plaster shapes: lumps from the cliff, that crucial dent in Moon’s head.

Jackson’s desk is a-scatter with my booty.

I talk it through. Neat, swift, professional, precise.

Finish into silence and Jackson’s stare.

Eventually: ‘It’s a stretch, Fiona.’ His terse conclusion.

‘No,
that’s
a stretch,’ I say, pointing to the two lumps of plaster of Paris that Jackson has in his hand. One, an image of Derek Moon’s skull wound. Two, a cast of the ‘best fit’ piece of rock we could find from the collection we assembled. The piece of rock that most fits the lethal injury. The two things don’t match at all. ‘What you mean is, we don’t have a motive. And that’s true. We don’t. Not yet.’

‘Any quarrels? Personal grievances?’ Watkins’s question.

‘No. None uncovered. I’ve checked the original inquiry files and transcripts. Everything seems to have been done right. No obvious holes.’

‘Theft?’

Watkins’s question and one that arrives dripping in disbelief. You do get people killed for trivialities – a pocketful of cash, a fancy phone – but only by accident, only where alcohol is involved, and never, ever on a lonely clifftop path a couple of miles from the nearest village.

I don’t answer her directly. Just shake my head. ‘One aspect of the case which wasn’t explored at the time was his work life. He was working nights at a telecoms installation down towards Oxwich Bay. I’ve not pushed things too far yet’ – a glance at Jackson, letting him know that his ‘no flying solo’ pennant still flies from my masthead – ‘but I understand that there’s some pretty fancy technology there. Worth millions, not thousands.’

‘Fancy technology? In Oxwich Bay? You’re joking.’

‘No, sir. It’s a major launching point for undersea cables. Telecoms between Britain and Ireland, Britain and North America. And I guess when the cables come ashore, they need equipment to sort out which data goes where.’

‘Anything missing that you know of?’

‘Nothing reported, no.’

I put a little emphasis on the word ‘reported’. Meaning that without authority, I wouldn’t even dream of investigating further.

Jackson half conceals a smile.

Watkins says, ‘OK, Fiona. Then take a look. Keep me in the loop.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Jackson says, ‘And Peter Pan. Plas Du. Where are we with that?’

I look at Watkins. ‘That interview with Galton Evans, ma’am. Did you believe a word he said?’

‘I don’t think he
lied
. But no. He knows a hell of a lot more than he bothered to share.’

Jackson stares at us, looking for clarification.

Watkins says, ‘Evans – or his soon-to-be ex-wife – has some stuff nicked. Evans’s company has insured it. The thief contacts Evans’s guys and offers to cut a deal. Evans figures it’s cheaper to buy it back and does whatever he needs to do. Maybe he knows the identity of the thief or maybe not, but he certainly isn’t telling us all he knows. I suppose, if we really pushed, we might be able to make a handling case out of this.’

Handling stolen goods is a reasonably serious offence. If the property involved is worth more than a hundred grand and, in the words of the sentencing guidelines, if the offence ‘bears the hallmarks of a professional commercial operation’, any sentence is likely to exceed four years and could be as long as fourteen. That’s a case well worth going after, except that Evans wasn’t really a handler. He was a guy trying to get some stolen goods back, and on behalf of somebody else at that. No court is going to bang him up for that, and Watkins doesn’t want to waste her time with slap-on-the-wrist offences.

Nor does Jackson. In an ordinary world, he’d end things there, but he’s still conscious of our conversation about my need for something beyond Chicago’s stony walls.

He says, ‘Fiona . . .?’

‘Yes. No point in trying to manufacture a case when there isn’t really one there.’

‘Good. So we’re agreed—’

‘But I did wonder if it might be worth looking around to see if this case connects to anything else. I mean, a guy capable of entering totally inaccessible second-floor windows is probably going to do something similar again. Why wouldn’t he? Burglar alarms won’t stop him, because people don’t bother to protect against the impossible.’

Jackson looks at Watkins, who nods.

I look at my hands, and mumble, ‘I mean, Chicago, obviously. That comes first. But I expect I could fit in a little extra.’

The grown-ups laugh at me, and tell me OK.

‘I might need access to the PND.’

PND: the police national database. Almost unbelievably, it’s only very recently that one regional police force has been able to access the data held by another, without physically faxing a request through. Since there are forty-three regional forces, since data requests are often difficult to frame, and – not least – since everyone hates faxes, that old system was atrocious, a gift to criminals. These days, everything is much more twenty-first century and slick but,
oy vey
, the audit trails. The smart card authorisations, the accreditations, the picky little ‘proper purpose’ rules. It’s enough to make a woman turn to crime.

Watkins says, ‘Tell me what you need. Don’t go crazy.’

I don’t go crazy, but I do, fortunately, have a prepared authorisation form with me, carefully phrased so it looks suitably narrow but, with a little generosity of interpretation, has enough breadth to let me do anything that I want.

Watkins reads through it, adjusts a couple of phrases with a bristle of impatience, then signs it. Hands it back.

I accept her gift with a ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ and a glow of satisfaction. Whether she knows it or not, I have in my hands the keys to the vault.

The keys to the vault and a licence to hunt.

11

A licence to hunt, yet for ten days I find nothing. No targets. No leads. No new directions.

A chilly April tips into May. The weather stays cold. A winter refusing to accept the logic of our spinning globe.

I can’t even, for a change, complain of my working conditions. One of the unexpected pleasures of my EO work is that almost nobody knows what I’m actually working on. Yes, when I’m bagging things up and ferrying stuff to the Bridgend lab and chasing SOCOs to reference their location photos properly, the work I do is public and visible. But all that takes no more than half my theoretical working hours and when my door is closed and locked and my HOLMES terminal is on and I’m sitting either there or nested amongst my cushions, laptops and energy bars, I find that I have far more time for my own researches than I ever used to have. And if I sometimes work late, all through the night at times, kipping for a couple of hours in my nest, then waking up for yet more peppermint-tea-fuelled work, I realise that nobody even notices. I’ve taken to keeping a few changes of clothes in my lair. Wet wipes, toothpaste and soap keep me roughly hygienic. I’ve not yet found a way to wash my hair without a shower, but it survives.

Yet for all that, I find nothing.

Thefts of high-end telecoms equipment: nothing.

Crimes associated with telecoms firms: nothing, or nothing of interest.

Patterns of suspicious behaviour involving anything telecoms related: nothing.

Open police intelligence campaigns with a telecoms link: nothing.

Even when I skip out of the police system and start to investigate public sources – telecom industry committees on fraud prevention, that sort of thing – I find nothing.

Plas Du: the same thing. I look for high-value thefts where goods have been returned. I find one or two things, but nothing that appears to connect. I search for any thefts reported by friends of Galton Evans. I check out his business and personal connections – investment partners, present and former colleagues, people he’s holidayed with. I even check, name by name, fellow members of his golf club, his yachting club. The odd racehorse syndicate.

Nothing. The odd reported crime, of course. Contacts with the police. Names mentioned in the course of other investigations. But nothing that draws these stray ends together. Nothing where the dim lamps of inquiry glow hot and bright.

I check out Idris Gawr LP, of course.

Idris Gawr isn’t a particularly unusual choice of name for a Welsh venture. Idris Gawr – Idris the Giant – was a king of Meirionnydd. According to legend, Idris was so large that he used the mountain of Cadair Idris in North Wales as an armchair from which to study the stars. In historical reality, he lived and reigned a long time. Fought the Irish and the English. Defeated by Oswald of Northumbria in 632 CE. Died by strangulation.

He’s not our best-known king, nor is he the most obscure. If naming your investment vehicles after murdered medieval kings was your thing, then Idris Gawr would be as good as any, better than most.

I check for any public information on the company, but get almost nothing. The Cayman General Registry Office supplies me the names of three directors, all of whom are local lawyers. Brass plates and nothing else. Those plates might conceal Lady Innocence herself, a barefoot girl in a field of buttercups. Or they might conceal a river of blood, a chatter of corpses.

I think the latter, but can prove nothing.

Common sense would say give up. No regular police investigation would pursue these cold trails for anything like as long as I’ve already spent. On the other hand, there
was
a dent in Moon’s skull, a dent not made by the cliff down which he fell. And what I said to DCI Jackson about Plas Du remains true. A thief capable of wafting his way up a sheer wall and in through a second-storey window is hardly likely to play that game just the once.

And then, too, there’s something strange about Picassos that vanish and reappear. About a reputable insurance company that ignores its own procedures even when the case involves £400,000 worth of the boss’s wife’s art collection.

These things murmur of hidden depths. Indeed, the only reason why no one but me is excited by these things is that without a plausible motive for Moon’s murder, it’s hard for a police force to treat the death as suspicious – and as for Plas Du, it’s hard for a senior officer to get excited about stolen goods that have unstolen themselves.

But I’m not a senior officer. I have neither their budgetary constraints nor their conviction targets, and however little I find on the police database, I can’t shake the feeling that there are big things – dark and violent – playing out in the shadows beyond our view.

More hard work, done the regular way, would find those things, but my patience isn’t unlimited. So, when police resources fail me, I rely on my own.

The first step is the easiest.

I call Penry. Ask how he’s getting on with his job hunting.

‘Got bugger all. Middle-aged ex-con.
I
wouldn’t give me a job.’

‘
I
might though. What are your rates?’

‘Don’t know. Is it legal?’

‘Brian, if it was legal, I’d do it myself.’

He dithers around, not giving me a proper answer. Thinks he can’t charge me, because he has this idea that he owes me something, even though it was me who put him behind bars. I tell him he’s useless. And to come to dinner tonight, with a scale of fees in his pocket.

He says yes, to the first part anyway.

I don’t want to get in a muddle over cooking, so I prepare sensibly, not ambitiously. Leave work early. Get plenty of beers. Do a one-pot chicken and lentil thing which is so simple that even I can’t cock it up. I can’t tell if it tastes nice, but I’m ninety per cent sure it doesn’t taste terrible.

I’m ready by six thirty and Penry isn’t due till eight.

I check some used-car websites, looking for a van. Find nothing suitable. Sign up to an email alert thing which will tell me if what I want comes up.

Six forty-two.

That still gives me time for the next thing, so I tootle off to do that too.

Bronwen Woodward, Evans’s secretary.

She lives, the electoral roll tells me, in one of the streets off Sedgemoor Road, the other side of Eastern Avenue. It’s a frosty evening. Stained glass in the door. Sea-mist wandering through the streetlights.

It’s not Bronwen who answers the door, but an overweight forty-something woman. Blond hair, perm, carmine nails, a wheezing cough. I say, ‘Is Bronwen in, by any chance?’ She doesn’t answer directly. Just appraises me, coughs, and shouts up behind her. ‘Bronsferyoo.’ Then nothing happens. She doesn’t let me in. Stays leaning across the hallway, the sound of a TV and its blue light falling from the living room door. Heavy floral wallpaper. One of those thick red carpets that seems to trap time.

I have one of those weird out-of-body sensations, where it’s hard to tell whether this moment has lasted a second or a century, where I wonder if there’s some
open sesame
spell, some hidden spring, which has to be touched to unlock things, to let time flow again.

I don’t find out. Bronwen comes to the turn of the stair, sees me, and her face changes two or three times before settling on something bland and cautious. The older woman, her mother I assume, vanishes back to the land of the blue TV.

Bronwen comes downstairs. She’s still dressed in her work clothes. A dark woollen skirt and formal jumper. No shoes, just stockinged feet.

‘Bronwen, hi. I’m Fiona, remember? From the—’

‘Yes. Is it OK?’

‘It’s all fine, totally. Just, could I have a private word for a minute?’

I can. We go upstairs. There are boxes in the hall and on the stair landing. Not the sort of boxes that say ‘All packed and ready to ship’, but the sort which say, ‘Random crap accumulates in this house and never gets tidied or sorted.’ A plus-size lace camisole hangs on the frame of a bedroom door. A giant teddy sits on top of a box from whose torn corner there is a spillage of DVD cases, a hoover part, a canvas strap, and some kind of kitchen gadget not removed from its plastic packet.

Bronwen makes a silent face which says, I think, ‘I know what you’re thinking and I agree.’

Her room is the opposite of the house. Ordered and neat. The window slightly open and a smell of air freshener.

I sit on the bed, Bronwen on the only chair.

I say, ‘Is it OK coming here? If it was easier, I could come and see you at work.’

‘No, no, it’s OK. Here’s probably better.’

‘Mr Evans. A difficult boss, I imagine.’

She makes a curious gesture before she answers. A sideways bat of her hand, accompanied by a movement of the head. She says, ‘He’s a character, that’s true.’

‘Sexual harassment is an offence. You don’t have to report it, that’s your choice, but if you want to, you can call me. I’ll give you my direct line.’

‘Thank you. It’s OK. I’ve done four months. I just want to build my CV, then . . .’ She wants to dismiss the subject, but I do write out my direct line – the one leading in to Ifor’s dungeon – and my mobile number as well. Tear those out of my notebook and pass them over. ‘It
is
an offence. The law
does
protect you.’

Her lips say ‘thank you’, though her voice says nothing.

We sit without talking. Then, simultaneously, we speak.

She says, ‘Can I get you anything?’

I say, ‘And look, there’s something else.’