This Thing of Darkness (9 page)
Penry arrives punctually at eight. He gives me a bunch of flowers. Roses, stock, gerbera, carnations. They look nice, and I say so.
He looks smart too, or smartish. Clean, ironed shirt. Jacket. I’ve a momentary worry that he thinks this is a date, even though there’s a good twenty years between us. I never know how these signalling things are meant to work. Whether I’ve been sending funny signals or not reading the ones he’s been sending me. But then he rescues me by mentioning a party he’s going to on Friday night. ‘Maybe get back in the game,’ he says, meaning, I think, that I’m not the game.
Which is good.
I give him beer and my ninety-per-cent not-awful chicken.
To start with we eat in the kitchen, but that feels strange, so I say we should go and eat in the living room, plates on our laps.
That’s better, but still not right. I try turning most of the lights off. Then sitting on the floor. Then playing music. Then not playing music.
Then realise that it’s the fakery which is bothering me, and I go and get my stash of photos for Penry to look at. Shots of Moon’s injuries mostly. But also that one of the daffodils on his grave. Some of Plas Du, and the impossible burglary.
Only when those things are strewn all over the floor do I feel relaxed.
I tell him about my crimes. The burglary at Plas Du. The security guard with a broken skull.
I want to talk about Moon’s long leap over the cliff top. About the sticklebacked rock that split his head open. But I don’t do that.
I want to tell him about the girl in the red coat, about the grave and the daffodils, but I don’t do that either.
Penry looks at the photos, longer than most people do, but he looks at me too. A long, discerning, Penry-ish stare.
‘You
do
have a burglary. You
don’t
necessarily have a killer.’
‘That’s true.’
‘And the artwork came back, right? There’s nothing missing?’
‘Which makes it stranger. That wants more investigation, not less.’
‘Found any thefts like it?’
‘No. But again: that’s strange. Why we need to investigate.’
‘Who’s in charge?’
‘Watkins.’
‘Jackson supervising?’
‘Yes.’
‘Strong team.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’re not happy.’
‘Not unhappy. I’m OK, actually. OK for me.’
‘But something.’
Penry stares at me again. He has one of the skull injury photos on his lap. Not one of the best ones, but still fairly explicit, fairly graphic. I have one of those moments where I’m hanging between two worlds. Can’t quite tell whether I’m in the land of the living looking at pictures of the dead, or in the land of the dead wondering how it feels to be alive.
I don’t know what I do or say, or if I do or say anything.
Then Penry says, ‘So why does anyone return four hundred thousand pounds’ worth of artwork?’
I say, ‘Exactly. Who does that?’
Penry’s thoughts change tack. He picks up one of the Plas Du pictures. Holds it up beside the Mofatt skull injury one.
‘You’re saying these are connected?’
‘I can’t be sure.’
‘But . . .?’
‘OK, let’s assume for now that Moon
was
murdered. I know we’re not a hundred per cent on that, but just assume it.’
‘All right.’
‘Our hypothesis is that someone met Moon on that path. Demanded something, threatened, had a fight – whatever. In any case, the attacker hits Moon with a crowbar, causing that skull injury. Moon is now either dead or badly disabled.’
‘Right.’
‘But it can’t look like the guy’s just been hit. It has to look accidental. For that to work, we need two things. Two things minimum. One, the path has to come close to the edge. Two, the cliff needs to be high enough and steep enough that everyone will just
assume
that the fall killed him. It’s got to be the kind of fall that simply eliminates any questions.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘And most of the coast isn’t like that. Yes, it’s high, steep and rocky. But sometimes the path is just twenty or thirty feet above the waves. Other times, it’s high enough, but the cliffs aren’t properly steep. They’re not sheer. You’d have to start questioning whether a fall would be enough to kill a healthy, well-put-together guy. And as soon as you raised those questions, you’d start to look at the skull injury in more detail, which would mean the entire plot could start to unravel.’
‘Go on.’
‘Look, I’ve walked that path. Jackson hasn’t. Watkins hasn’t. And you can see the land up to the edge. You can see the sea. You can’t actually see the cliffs. Not when you’re standing on top of them. No one can see the cliffs, so how do you know where Moon has to “fall”? There’s only one type of person who has an easy answer to that.’
‘A climber,’ says Penry in a whisper. ‘The sort of person who knew how to break in at Plas Du.’
‘Correct. Those guys aren’t just familiar with these cliffs. They go there for a good day out.’
I have my left hand on a photo of Moon. Right hand on the daffodil photo. My stockinged feet in the litter of all the other pictures on the floor.
And I feel OK. I think there aren’t really two different worlds, that that whole idea is just a fraud perpetrated by the living. I think we have just one world, a continuum, one populated by living and dead alike. I’m most at ease when I feel no barrier between the two. An easy movement to and fro.
Penry says, ‘And the one real solid lead we have is that your boy Evans bullshitted you when you went to see him.’
‘Bullshitted to a detective inspector, on a live inquiry, in a signed statement. Yes. That’s a lot of hiding.’
‘Yes.’
‘And his investment company seems to be named after a climb at the place where Moon fell and died. I mean, maybe a coincidence, yes, but a funny one, if so.’
‘Yes.’
Penry was a good copper once. He can be an idiot, of course. A posturing, macho idiot. But those things don’t bother me much and, anyway, I think we’re through most of that by now. In any case, I can tell Penry feels what I do. That there’s a withholding here, a mystery to be pierced.
He finishes his beer. Brains. That’s the brand. A brewery founded by Samuel Arthur Brain in 1882 and a gift to punning publicans ever since.
I say, ‘There’s more in the kitchen,’ and Penry goes to get another bottle. When he comes back he stays standing, surveying me, my mess of photos.
He says, ‘So . . .?’
I tell him about Francesca Ottilie Lockwood.
Ollie’s brother, Marianna’s daughter, Galton Evans’s lost girl.
The girl who hasn’t seen her father for years now. Who shed her father’s name. Whose brother says of their father that ‘he’s OK, but he
is
a bit of a dick.’
Penry looks disconcerted. Says, ‘What would you be hoping to find?’
‘Anything. I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I just know we ought to look.’
‘When?’
‘Saturday?’ It’s Thursday today.
He stays standing. Drinking beer. Staring down at me and my room. He says, ‘I think you’re a very bad person.’
A compliment.
He finds a bit of paper in his jeans back pocket, and tosses it at me. His scale of fees, I presume.
But I don’t care about that now. Just go to a drawer. Get out my set of pick locks. Ask if he knows how to use them. He says no.
I give him the picks and a few locks that I keep loose, for my own practice. I show him what to do. He starts out useless, but soon begins to get the hang of it. We go to my own front door and pick that. Go to my back door and pick that too.
I put everything – the picks, the spare locks – in a plastic bag.
Then ask if he knows anything about computers.
We do it.
Go to London. Penry goes up to Seven Sisters, the not-particularly-nice part of London where Cesca Lockwood has her flat. I head for King’s Cross. Central Saint Martins, where she studies.
It’s the first Saturday in May. Lockwood’s Facebook account has already pinned her to this place and this date. She doesn’t normally work Saturdays, but the school is running a fashion weekend event and the place is heaving.
Lockwood has a class in the morning, followed by an afternoon of ‘projects/workshopping’, and not enough time between the two for her to go home.
I’ve dressed vaguely younger than I am. A bit studenty. Black jeans, striped top, one of my sister Kay’s discarded jackets. Earrings.
But I don’t care, or not really. I’m not undercover exactly, just don’t want to attract attention.
I hang around in the café to start with, hoping to spot Francesca but no joy. Then drift along to the lecture theatre – Marek Adam, ‘On Drawing’ – and take a seat at the side. No one challenges me, or particularly looks at me. The tutor, with an accent that drifts between Paris and Central Europe, says, ‘In the battle of style and realism, we always have to be on the side of style.’ He pronounces ‘style’
stil
, and ‘realism’
réalisme
.
He shows us drawings of women with waists as thin as a bobbin of cotton, but with belts that are to die for.
Cesca comes in a minute or two late. Long, dark hair. Complicated silver jewellery and a black wrap top. She has a whiff of the dancer about her. Simultaneously gifted and vulnerable. Breakable.
She sits next to a girl who I had already provisionally identified as her flatmate – say what you like about Facebook, but we burglars love it. The two girls exchange a few words, then turn their full attention to the lecture. Take notes on tablets, faces slightly illuminated by their screens.
I text Penry:
OK TO GO. I’LL LET YOU KNOW IF ANYTHING CHANGES
. Three minutes later, get one back.
I’M IN
.
Then – nothing. We listen to Adam talking about
stil
. Pure imagination. How the true
stil
must move and change. How it is ‘hard, hard’ to find the true
stil
.
Pictures of women come and go.
The lecture breaks up.
I position behind myself behind Lockwood and her flatmate. They, and most others, drift down to the café I was in earlier.
I get a tray. A salad. A smoothie. Also some yogurt-granola thing, which tastes like upmarket gravel.
I eat until I don’t want any more. Sit too close to Lockwood. Stare a bit too much.
There’s a vibration there. The sort of vibration I normally get off dead people. Simultaneously peaceful, and alluring, and dark, and for ever. One of those things that I find hard to get out of my head once it’s there.
I’m not doing this well. My old undercover trainers would rate my current observation tactics at about zero out of ten. Too close, too obvious, too prolonged.
Target will burn the surveillance
.
I think I’m burned.
It doesn’t matter though. I’m just scraping out the last of my finely gravelled yogurt, when I get a text from Penry.
ALL DONE. SEE YOU SOON
.
I clear my tray, walk away from Lockwood’s following look, go to meet Penry at a coffee shop just round from where I’ve parked my car.
He arrives on a whoop of adrenalin.
‘Getting in, easy as anything. No one saw me. No CCTV. Neighbouring flat either empty or very quiet.’
‘Good.’
‘OK. Now.
Interesting
. Look at this.’
We download his pictures to my laptop.
Bank statements.
Penry directs me to an image, and I zoom in enough that the text clarifies. On 5th April, Lockwood’s account received a payment of £4,000 direct from her father. On 9th April, the same amount of money left her account, paid over to an outfit calling itself the London Women’s Health Network.
‘They help women with rape, domestic abuse, stuff like that,’ Penry tells me. ‘I didn’t photograph everything, but the same money came in and went out every month.’
The bank statements don’t portray a woman with a vast income. Certainly more than the average student – her mother owns millions of pounds’ worth of artwork, after all – but she doesn’t appear to be someone for whom £4,000 is immaterial.
‘What’s the flat like?’
‘Cruddy. I mean,
I’ve
lived in worse places, but then I didn’t have four grand coming into my account every few weeks.’
‘Did you get into her computer?’
‘Yes. Loaded up your stuff, no problem.’
My stuff: some Trojan horse software which allows me to operate a computer remotely. The software wouldn’t evade an expert audit, but how many people get their computers manually checked for stuff like that? The software was a present to me from a reasonably classy criminal, so I know it’s good.
‘Anything else?’
‘Not really. She was drying clothes on the radiator, which I don’t think you’re meant to do. Some dope in a desk drawer. Little hippy-dippy Indian box. The sort of box which says, “Hello, I’m where students keep their ganja.” But not a lot of it. She’s not dealing.’
Our gazes, both of them, go back to the screen. Four grand coming in and going out, every month.
‘Blood money,’ says Penry. ‘Blood money that she won’t accept.’
I nod.
That’s what it looks like, all right.
But whose blood? And why the money?
Penry looks at me. I look at him. Big questions. No answers.
And the stink around Galton Evans has just got stronger.
North London and cluttered streets.
Railway bridges in dark Victorian brick. A canal, oily and secretive. Plane trees behind iron railings and buddleia growing where it shouldn’t. It’s May but still feels like March. Wet pavements and evening on the prowl long before the afternoon is done.
Penry has already gone home, his job complete. My day isn’t yet finished, but I’m through with burglary. My contact, Eliot Whillans, stirs his coffee with a wooden stirrer. Blue and white striped shirt, grey tweed jacket, mid-forties. There’s something sad in his expression, I think, but his eyes have an activity which I like.
‘How much do you know?’ he asks.
‘Absolutely nothing. Nada, zip, zilch.’
He laughs. ‘OK, from the start then. Submarine cables, all you need to know.’
He tells me that there’s nothing new about laying cables beneath the sea. The first successful cable was laid in 1851. The world was already wired up by the outbreak of the First World War. Two things shook the industry up from the late-eighties onwards. First, the invention of fibre optic. Second, the internet.
‘These days,’ Whillans tells me, ‘an ordinary cable can shift tens of terabits a second. Ten million million bits of data. People think that when they call the US, or order something from a US-based website, they’re going via satellite. That’s not right, or almost never. Ninety-nine point something per cent of all traffic goes undersea. It’s faster and more reliable.’
‘And those cables are owned by?’
‘Well, in the old days, consortiums of different telecoms companies. Splitting the cost, sharing the traffic. These days, you get completely independent operators too. So you might get an indie operator laying a marine cable then selling capacity to anyone who wants superfast connectivity.’
‘So it’s a speed thing? That’s important, is it?’
‘Very.’ Whillans – a lecturer in telecommunications technology at Middlesex University – looks at me to check I want the details. I do, but only because I’m not sure what matters here and what doesn’t.
‘OK, you’re up against general relativity here. Signals can’t move faster than the speed of light and the Earth is round. Assuming that you’re not about to dig a tunnel from London to New York, that means you have to find the shortest undersea route, then shift the data as efficiently as possible. In the past, you’d have been happy with eighty or ninety milliseconds. These days, the best cables manage sixty-five millisecs, and there are new operators aiming to cut that to the high-fifties, or even mid-fifties. Even in theory, it’s not possible to do it faster than about forty milliseconds, so we’re getting ever closer to the limit.’
I make a face. At least, I assume I do, because Whillans responds to what I’m thinking.
‘Who cares, right?’
‘Yes. Who the hell cares?’
All inquiries have their moments like these. That sense that an important truth is here, lurking somewhere in this coffee-scented steam, this pinboard wall flapping with student posters. A truth that might just jump up and settle if only I knew what to ask – and how to recognise it when it arrived.
‘The finance industry, basically. Let’s say you’re trading foreign exchange and the price in London moves, then there’ll be some tiny difference between the London price and the New York price for the exact same thing. So if your London office can get information to your New York office quicker than the next guy, you can snatch an advantage. Buy or sell before the price in New York has reacted. It’s not even humans doing this any more. We’re way too slow. Obsolete technology. It’s computer versus computer now.’
Whillans tells me that a one millisecond speed advantage is reckoned to be worth as much as a hundred million dollars a year to a good-sized hedge fund. He tells me that a human trader looking at a screen is like an astronomer looking at the light from a distant star. ‘The data might as well be fifty thousand years old. You’re doing archaeology, basically.’
He talks more. He’s helpful, but I feel lost all the same. A stranger in my own world. A relic.
Impulsively, and contrary to procedure, I pull up some pictures on my laptop. Derek Moon, the dead security guard. I don’t show my picture of his skull injury – my favourite – or any of the photos of him alive. Instead, I show the pictures taken when he was found. Before his body was moved.
A man with his skull split open. Brains leaking. The sky reflected in his open eyes and fish nibbling at his feet.
No fibre optics here. No hedge funds. Just the oldest story in the world.
Salt, rock and a dead man’s eyes.
‘Derek Moon,’ I say. ‘Somebody killed him. Smashed his skull in then pushed him off a cliff. He worked as a security guard. The landing station at Oxwich Bay.’
Whillans’s eyes are with the man.
‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Jesus.’
His reaction confuses me for a moment. I think he’s reacting to some clue that he can see but I can’t. I lean forward eagerly, before realising that his comment is one of shock. That what I see as beautiful, he sees as something else.
I fold the laptop.
The table is dark wood. Its varnish treacled with the spillings of a million cups of coffee, a thousand crumbled muffins.
I say, ‘It wasn’t one of those ordinary murders. Money. Sex. Argument with an ex. Nothing like that.’
Whillans exhales. ‘Oxwich Bay? That’s an older site, mostly. A big Anglo-Irish cable. I think there was a plan to lay one of the new high-speed transatlantic cables from there, but they changed plans. It’s coming in at Brean, Highbridge, somewhere like that. Somerset, anyway.’
‘If you wanted to steal stuff? Presumably there’s some fancy kit around.’
‘Yes, but . . .’
He explains his ‘but’, and his ‘but’ is a hell of a lot bigger than his ‘yes’.
The kit at Oxwich Bay is now at least ten years old, a century or so in telecoms terms.
The stuff may be expensive, but it’s not off-the-shelf. The higher end bits of kit are built to order, designed for the specific purpose in hand. ‘If you stole a switch from Oxwich Bay and tried to plug it in on a different site, a different network architecture, you’d have nothing at all. It wouldn’t work.’
And then too, the only plausible buyers for any stolen bits of kit are the telecoms giants themselves. ‘No one else has a use for these things. And, look, I’m hardly a fan of British Telecom, but even I don’t think they’re into bumping off security guards for a bit of junky old switching equipment . . .’
His eyes are kind. They say sorry. Sorry for trashing your dipshit theory. Sorry that you are a museum piece adrift in a world you no longer understand.
We do our goodbyes somehow. I’m not sure how. I’m feeling spacey and uncertain. A group of students has entered behind us, and I feel myself getting tangled up in their presence, as though I could easily step out of my life and into theirs, all long hair, padded coats and muttered intimacies. One of the girls is wearing a purple jumper and because I own a jumper quite like it, I have this idea that she must be me, some simpler, easier version of me, and I quite like that thought, except that it leaves me – me, the unjumpered one – without anchorage. No port in the storm.
That night I take the train back to Cardiff. An obsolete technology transporting obsolete humans to an obsolete city in a country that isn’t really a country at all.
But the train does have an internet connection. It’s not secure and I shouldn’t use it to access the Police National Database, but sod that. Live fast, die young. I connect anyway and spend some time investigating the records of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary.
Telecom related crime – nothing, or nothing of interest.
Crimes whose description contains the term ‘telecom’ or ‘undersea’ or ‘cable’. Nothing.
Ditto, except that I search on descriptions of victims instead of the crime itself. Nothing.
Frustrating.
Frustrating, but not altogether surprising. Although I haven’t, until now, focused on Avon and Somerset specifically, I have, over the past couple of weeks done similar national searches that have revealed nothing. I can’t help feeling that the information I need is here, it’s just that I’m not asking in the right way.
As I thump my keyboard softly for inspiration, an email tinkles in.
From Bronwen Woodward. Her home account, not her work one.
Her email lists all outgoing and incoming calls made or received by Galton Evans at his office, from the day I took Lockwood into Cathays to two days after the visit from me and Watkins. Easy, as she told me it would be: she handled all his calls anyway. The call log on her phone gave her everything she needed.
Her list of numbers means nothing to me yet, but I’m good with lists. If Galton Evans knows more about that Plas Du theft than he’s told us – and he does, I’m certain – he’ll have got on the phone to someone to compare notes. The low-key nature of our inquiry will even have helped. Marianna Lockwood has already, in effect, been cleared. Even our visit to Evans had the air of a tidy-up meeting. No cautions handed out. A lowly DC left on her own to record the statement. If we’d come in more heavy-handed, Evans might have felt impelled to disguise his tracks. As it is, I’m hoping that he’ll have proved over-confident. That his calls will betray him.
I think they will.
I’m tempted to start right away, but a train is not the best place for that kind of research.
I stare back at my screen.
What are you hiding, Avon and Somerset Constabulary database? I wish I knew.
And then, and only because I’ve a memory that Whillans once spoke about marine cables, instead of undersea cables, I search for crimes or victims with the word ‘marine’ in their description.
A lot more comes up on that search – unsurprisingly, because Avon and Somerset has a long stretch of shoreline, including the whole Port of Bristol – but in amongst the crap – the dockside thefts, the industrial accidents – there’s a gem.
A man, Ian Livesey, found dead in a Bristol apartment block. Two months ago. Hanged. Swinging from an internal balcony on a length of bedsheet. Livesey was an American, only recently arrived in the UK. His occupation was reported as
consultant marine engineer
.
The facts don’t look helpful. Hanging is a common enough method of suicide but it’s almost unknown as a method of murder, at any rate in Britain where there’s no history of lynching. And then too, nothing was missing from the apartment, the door was locked from the inside, and there was no evidence of forced entry.
And yet, and yet, two curious facts pokes out of the pile.
First, Carolyn Sharma, the dead man’s fiancée, was apparently the last person to speak to him. They had a normal type of conversation but it was ended, she claimed, by him saying, ‘Hey, babe, that’s weird. I’m sure I locked the door.’ A pause. Then, ‘Call you back.’
He never did.
And then also this.
All suicides in England and Wales are examined post-mortem by a pathologist. That examination is normally conducted fast, so the family can arrange burial, but in this case the family chose to invoke their right for a re-examination of the corpse, stating their strongly held view that suicide, in Livesey’s case, was inconceivable. From what I can see from the available records, the family is in the course of repatriating the corpse to the United States for re-examination by a pathologist there.
Now it’s true that grieving families do strange things. Denial, anger, depression, acceptance.
But the oddness of the family’s request – the insistence of their refusal to believe in Livesey’s suicide – impels me to truffle further.
LinkedIn, Google, Facebook. Specialist marine journals.
Truffle further, strike gold.
Livesey was an engineer, who started his career in the US Marine Corps, and who came to develop a speciality in sub-sea surveys. He worked for a big undersea firm for a while, then set up on his own. At the time of his death, he was retained by an independent cable company currently in the process of laying cable from Highbridge in Somerset to Long Island in New York. The very same cable that had been going to emerge from the waters of Oxwich Bay.
One cable, two deaths. And my dipshit theory is suddenly alive again.
Alive, strange and darker than ever.
The Avon and Somerset records contain contact information for the fiancée, Carolyn Sharma.
My fingers hesitate. The train is a lit tube passing dark embankments.
No flying solo, Fiona
.
Keep me in the loop, Fiona
.
Outside, the fields are still English, but the train will soon enter the Severn Tunnel.
Twnnel Hafren
. When they were building it, in the late 1870s, they hit an underground water source, the ‘Great Spring’, which caused the tunnel to flood. The work was all but complete by that point and the whole thing, all four miles of it, the longest undersea tunnel in the world, was underwater. Doomed, you would think, a failed project, except that a diver descended that flooded shaft, traversed more than three hundred yards, and closed off a watertight door that would enable pumping works to begin.
I always think of that when I’m beneath the estuary. Think of the diver, Alexander Lambert. Swimming down into that place of total darkness and total submersion. Wearing a newly invented form of breathing equipment, which might work or might not.
The loneliest place in the world.
As we enter the tunnel, I write an email to Sharma. Send it as soon as we recover signal. The email is brief, formal, professional, but it explains who I am and indicates an interest in talking to her.
The train is barely leaving Newport, before my phone rings. An international call.
Total darkness and total submersion.