CRIME: Burglary
VICTIM: Diocese of Bangor
ADDRESS: Bangor Cathedral
DATE: 7 March 2016
PROPERTY STOLEN: Old papers, various.
For a moment, I can’t figure out why I haven’t seen this before. I might, in my tiredness, have missed something lower down the list, but I wouldn’t, surely, have missed the topmost result.
Then I realise the North Wales Police have only just uploaded the data. And why not? On the polician Richter Scale, the theft of ‘old papers, various’ hardly rates a tremor.
But the date. That’s what really catches my eye. The burglary took place just a week or so before Gaynor Charteris’s head was made so bloodily separate from Gaynor Charteris’s body. I feel the tingle of the discovery. A wash of cold that dances in my cheeks and fingertips.
I call the officer who logged the crime.
He’s not interested. He says, ‘The papers? I don’t know. Just junk, I think. The cathedral people were pissed off because someone broke a lock. They had to report the incident to claim on their insurance.’
Junk.
But the thefts from Dinas Powys were junk too and I get my not-very-interested Gwynedd copper to give me a number for the cathedral librarian, Aled Owen.
Call him.
Owen is probably a good human being and one more likely to be summoned before the Holy Throne than I am, but, Lord help me, the man is boring. Just talking to him makes me want to push plastic forks into my eyes.
‘The papers that were stolen. Do you have a detailed catalogue of what was taken?’
A long answer. One that tells me about trying to get funding to computerise an old card-index system.
‘Sorry. I don’t care about your funding issues. I asked if you have a detailed catalogue of what was taken.’
‘Well, no, as I was telling you, we were hoping to get the funding so we could start to build a proper record-keeping system. Because the project wasn’t completed, we have only the card-index system that was here before.’
I had one of those fruit salad boxes for breakfast and the black plastic fork is still there, a dark little devil-trident that winks evil at me.
I pick the thing up and start pressing it into my left hand.
‘That card-index,’ I say, as the tines of the fork bend whitishly back. ‘It listed each one of the documents that was taken, yes? And you have the index cards themselves, yes?’
‘Yes, the index cards were filed away. You know, the old-fashioned little wooden drawers. They’re nice to use, actually, if you’re present in the building. But so much research now takes place online—’
‘Do you have the cards, yes or no?’
‘Yes, we do, but—’
‘OK, and do the cards record every single one of the documents that had been present before the theft? That’s another yes-or-no question, by the way.’
‘Well, it’s not quite like that. It’s partly yes, partly no. It’s the diocesan system, you see. The way documents were originally collected.’
‘Mr Owen, I’m investigating a murder. A woman down here had her head cut off by someone wielding a reproduction broadsword. The victim also had three Iron Age spears plunged into her chest and her head was left sitting on top of a table in her living room. The murderer is still at large. OK? Now I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to answer it with a “yes” or a “no”. No other words allowed. Do you understand?’
‘Look, I don’t think you have to be like that. I’m only—’
‘You mean, “Yes.” The answer to my question was “yes”.’
It takes a little longer, and I have to go on pronging my hand until I get my answers, but the upshot is that the cathedral library had a complete catalogue of all its own materials, new and old. But there’d been a recent programme of retrieving older documents from the various parishes in the diocese, so that everything could be held and accessed centrally. Those parish documents had, in most cases, never been indexed in any way. Many of them were still sitting in the same stacks that they’d arrived in. And it was the parish documents, some of them, which had been stolen. The cathedral documents – the more obviously interesting targets – had been left untouched.
‘Good. That’s helpful,’ I say, gingerly removing the fork and looking at the three dark-purple blood spots that it’s left behind. ‘And do you know which parishes had their documents stolen? That’s another “yes” or “no”.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. And are you able, please, to supply me a list of those parishes?’
‘Yes.’
Owen has been so good for so long that he lets himself off the leash again and starts promising to get a letter to me as soon as possible.
I tell him to fuck off with the letter. Tell him to use email like everyone else.
I don’t use the phrase ‘fuck off’ but I do get close.
I say that ‘as soon as possible’ has to mean he starts work right now this minute and means he doesn’t finish until he actually sends me the email.
He tells me about some bit of diocesan business which is going to occupy him for most of this afternoon. I start telling him, in detail, about the way our pathologist thinks Gaynor Charteris’s neck was first cut with a sharp-bladed knife, then hacked off with a sword. Tell him how many litres of blood we estimate are still gluing up the pile of Charteris’s hand-knotted Persian carpet. Ask him if his stupid meeting is more important than finding the killer.
‘No.’
‘No? Your meeting is less important?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. So you will tell your colleagues that your assistance is required in the course of a murder investigation and you will not be able to help them, not in one single detail, until we have what we need. Is that agreed?’
It is. Hosanna and hallelujah, it is. He promises to work on my list and get it to me as soon as possible.
Promises and delivers.
A list of parishes, in north and mid Wales. In most cases, very little data on what documents were stolen but – helpfully – names and contact info for the relevant local rectors, who presumably know a little more.
I’m about to start hitting the phone, when another thought comes to me. I turn to Wikipedia, the source of all fine detective work, and start looking up individual parishes.
And when Katie phones, at four that afternoon, with news of what her geologists have found, I say, ‘Let me guess.’
‘What?’
‘I’m going to take a wild guess and say your cross comes from Llanymawddwy. That village, or somewhere close by.’
‘How do you spell that?’
Katie’s English ear takes a moment to process my impatient answer, and I can hear her typing the place name into her computer.
Then she chuckles softly down the phone. Says, ‘The upper Dyfi valley. That’s where my geologist buddies place this stone. This Llanywhateveryousaid is slap bang in the area they were talking about.’
There’s a shocked pause. A pause lit by the dull amber glow of a dead trail turning live.
Katie: ‘How did you know?’
I tell her. About the cathedral theft. ‘Nine different parishes saw their records vanish, but some of those were Victorian churches in urban parishes, or rural churches that go back further but not that much further. But the church at Llanymawddwy is old, old, old.’ I click around until I get the Wikimedia entry on the church, double-checking what it says. ‘Saint Tydecho established the church in 525 AD,’ I say. ‘That’s just a century after the Romans left. That’s pretty much the same time as your Dark Age nobleman was sitting in Dinas Powys worrying about hairy-arsed barbarians.’
I don’t know what the hell is going on, but the Dark Ages are alive again. Alive and killing.
6
I ask Katie if she’s happy to accompany me up to Bangor. She says yes.
We’re to leave first thing in the morning and Logic, that noble angel, says that I should finish up m
y ordinary office tasks, get myself home and washed and packed and ready.
And I love Logic, her and Sweet Reason. Those two good angels once helped me out of a deep, dark trough of illness. Held my hand through three difficult years at Cambridge. Have walked with me throughout my career in CID. I owe them love and fealty, and I honour them both.
But, poor dears, they can be simpletons.
Logic says ‘Go home, get ready,’ and Sweet Reason, nodding, agrees. But they’ve forgotten who I am, what I need. And, before I even really know it myself, I’m zooming up North Road. To the hospital. To the mortuary.
Arrive just before the place starts to close for the night. Flash my warrant card around. Sound all grim and policey. ‘Sorry, some further investigations are needed,’ I say. ‘Yes, I know it’s last minute,’ I say. And, ‘Yes, of course, this has been sanctioned by the SIO,’ I say.
People want to go home and I tell them, ‘Go home.’ I’ll lock up, no problem. Watch as a mortuary attendant, treating me like an idiot, shows me not once but twice how to turn the main lights off, how to operate the door-exit button.
Someone lays Gaynor Charteris out on a gurney. Both parts of her. The head and the body. Like a brutally explicit demonstration of Cartesian dualism.
Other people clatter with keys and lights and coats and desk drawers and procedures. Someone, a new person this time, comes again to check that I know what to do on exit.
I do. Yes. I do, I do, I do. I do.
Please go away, or better still – sorry, and all that – just fuck off.
Eventually, blessedly, everyone fucks off.
Logic and Sweet Reason depart sadly, their bare feet pattering away down the hospital corridor, wings bright beneath the halogens.
I’m alone with Gaynor Charteris.
I’m not here to examine her. To ask tedious questions of her remains. I just want to be with her.
Silent, together, and alone.
I get a wheelie chair. Adjust the height till I can sit up close to Gaynor’s chill arm, her bloodless chest.
Swivel her head so it’s looking at me. Tilt it back and wedge it with a wad of paper towels so she’s looking up into my eyes. Hold her hand. Feel that bloody stump of neck. Stare into her glassy, unseeing eyes.
Feel the peace of it. This infinite peace.
That, and the infinite strangeness.
Was there a moment? I always wonder that. Is there ever an exact moment of death? One microsecond you’re there, the next you’re definitely not? People, even doctors, always talk as though that partition exists, but personally I doubt it. I suspect that death creeps over us more gradually than that: an ever-dimming sunset, not a sudden rush into night.
When I die – die properly, I mean – I’d want to feel the whole process. I’d want my ordinary seconds to expand, suddenly, to hours, so that I could watch, one by one, as my cells figured out that things weren’t working any more. As, one by one, they drew the curtains, flipped the lights, slipped quietly away into the dark. It seems wrong, somehow, that you wait your whole life for this one unimaginable lightshow, this never-to-be-repeated magic trick – and then, biff, bam, boom! – the show’s over, leaving nothing but the night that has no morning.
I sit and think these thoughts.
Don’t always think, even. Just sit.
Me and Gaynor Charteris, her head and her stump. Watching a violet evening fade to indigo. Wait till no light enters except a vague starlight, the glow of neon.
Charteris and I merge a little. Become one and the same.
Dead nobodies in this palace of corpses.
I feel something of Gaynor herself, of course. I always do. Less sadness than I normally get. More a brisk tsk of annoyance. An impatience at being kept rudely away from her precious dig. Someone has cleaned up her hair, unfortunately, but we don’t mind too much.
We share a sense of bustle. Love of the past and the open skies.
But that’s not the biggest thing, the most insistent. The feeling that keeps on intruding is an odd one: a sense of fakery. Of fraud.
That swift, sharp slitting of Gaynor’s throat was done with some modern implement. A very sharp kitchen knife, even. That was the stroke which killed her.
The pathologist confirmed as much in his report, but I saw it for myself when I first encountered the corpse. See it clearly now, even in this neon-tinted dark. The clean, effective slit. The brutally repeated butchery that followed.
The sword, the spears, the severed head: that set-up had a superficial grandeur to it, but the closer you look, the cheaper it seems.
A designer dress remade as a high-street cheapie.
Costume jewellery in place of diamonds.
Increasingly, I realise, I feel angry and disappointed on Charteris’s behalf. If you’re going to do a job, then do it properly. The spears, we both like very much. (Except: why the broom handles? Why old spears on such tactlessly modern shafts?) And the sword itself: well, perhaps we can forgive a reproduction. But a kitchen knife? A kitchen knife?
No, we can’t allow that. Don’t accept it at all.
I’m troubled enough by that damn knife that I can’t settle. Can’t tumble into that dreamless union with the dead which has been central to most of my cases.
By ten o’clock, I simply feel angry and unsettled. I give Charteris a parting kiss on her stony forehead, then tuck her up again in her body bag. Shove her back in her stainless steel fridge.
A little row of green lights tells me that everything’s fine. This meat won’t spoil.
I think briefly about meeting some of the other corpses here. Getting to know them. I did that before once, when I was young and foolish, but I’m wiser than that now.
Or, if not wiser, then hungrier.
When did I last eat? Did I actually have lunch today? Or breakfast?
It is possible that I forgot.
I close up and let myself out.
Don’t get lost. Don’t walk into any walls or mistake broom cupboards for exits.
Find my car surrounded by empty asphalt and a skitter of night.
Switch on. Heating up. Mortuaries are cold and I never remember that before I enter.
Turn my phone on. A shower of texts. Missed calls. Voicemails. Most are boring. Some aren’t.
Chief among the non-boring ones: a succession of texts and calls from my friend, Ed Saunders. We were meant to be having dinner tonight. He’d cooked for me. Waited in for me.
I am a terrible person.
I am a useless, stupid, forgetful idiot who favours a slightly unsatisfactory communion with the dead over what would have been a highly satisfactory communion with the living.
I call Ed. Tell him I’m an idiot. (He knows.) Tell him I’m a terrible human. (He knows.) Tell him I’m very sorry and if it would put anything right, I’ll come over right now and let him tell me how terrible I am to my face.
‘It never makes any difference, Fi, no matter how much I tell you. But sure, why not come over for a swift drink?’
Twenty-five minutes says my sat-nav. A mere eighteen says I and, sure enough, eighteen minutes later, I arrive in Penarth, Alfa Romeo friskily panting, to be greeted by a slice of homemade stilton and broccoli quiche with a fresh-tossed salad and some buttery new potatoes.
I say sorry again.
Ed says, ‘You told me you had a case.’ He means a murder case. ‘And I know what that means.’ It means I become more than usually terrible.
It’s good having friends. Good, in particular, to have friends who don’t desert you just because (a) you were once their former lover and (b) they’ve hooked up with a perfectly nice, if annoyingly glossy, woman called Jill who is looking increasingly settled and like The One.
Ed and Jill and I socialise together reasonably often and Jill’s mostly got past her early territory-marking prickliness, presumably because she’s sniffed me over, tossed me between her paws, scrutinised her mate through slitted, lethal, emerald eyes, and determined that I’m no threat t
o her glossy loveliness. But, though Jill has mostly accepted me, our new trio – things aren’t the same as, or as good as, our old Ed-’n’-Fi evenings and it’s nice to have a scrap of the old times back.
I scrunch my eyes up, trying to remember why Jill isn’t here tonight.
‘Business trip?’ I say, voice rising into uncertainty.
‘Spot on, Fi.’
He does a look at me which, I think, is asking me to remember anything else about what he told me two days ago when we set this evening up.
‘Um, New York? She’s . . . meeting someone?’
It’s stupid, but when I was sitting with Gaynor Charteris, I had problems connecting with her properly, because the pair of us were too annoyed about that damn kitchen knife. Now here I am with my oldest, bestest friend, and I’m having trouble connecting properly with him because I keep missing Charteris, her physical presence. That way that children sit with a teddy bear on their lap or pulled into their tummy: I want the same, except with Gaynor’s head. Want to feel that stony chill against my skin.
I find myself looking from side to side, checking vaguely to see if that head is somewhere in the room. As though in my absent-mindedness I might just have brought it along with me, leaking slightly through an old plastic shopping bag.
I don’t know if Ed notices, but if he does, he doesn’t mind.
‘Yes, New York. She’s looking to set up an office over there. Exciting stuff.’
Is it?
I spend my time sitting with corpses and chasing murderers. That’s exciting.
Ed, a clinical psychologist of insight and compassion, spends his life helping child and teenage crazies. I don’t know if his job is exciting exactly, but rewarding, certainly.
And Jill, a psychologist herself, quit her clinical work to set up a business that – and I never quite understand the details – uses psychometric data to help big companies understand what sort of workers to hire, which ones to reward and (I guess) which ones to fire. She lives in Bath, has an office in London, travels a lot and is now, obviously, trying to replicate her success in the United States.
The Deepest Grave: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series Book 6 (Fiona Griffiths 6) Page 5
