The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series)

by Harry Bingham

  But at least we’ve got something to work with now.

  Burnett says, ‘How many of you are there?’

  Six monks, including Cyril.

  ‘And you’re not aware of any recent deaths in this area? Sudden, unexplained?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have regular members of the congregation? Locals, I mean. People who might come here rather than the ordinary village church?’

  ‘No, not really. St Cledwyn’s is better for weddings and funerals and the regular Sunday morning services. But, of course, we offer something a little different. There are a few people who like what we offer. Perhaps they come to some services or a moment’s prayer. And our annual carol service is standing room only.’

  Burnett asks to interview each of the monks, one by one. While that’s organised, I go, with the abbot’s permission, to see the guest accommodation block.

  It’s as he said. Each room spotlessly clean. Very bare: a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, a hook for any hanging clothes. A Bible. A wooden cross. A small en-suite shower room.

  Each room the same.

  On each door, a laminated Guide to Visitors. The guide is consistent with what the abbot’s already said. Visitors are encouraged to come to services and meals, but there are instructions about where to find food if someone doesn’t want to attend the communal dining. There’s a list of times: services and mealtimes. Some comments on how to deal with muddy work-boots or clothes wet from the fields.

  There’s no blood. No corpses. No pretty white summer dresses from Monsoon.

  No forgotten suitcases or abandoned clothes.

  No crucial heart-medication left behind to lethal effect.

  I go back to Burnett. Tell him what I’ve seen and what I haven’t.

  He’s just done with his second monk, about to start on number three. Tells me, ‘They think yes, she was here. Just a day or two. Didn’t come to meals. Didn’t help with the farmwork. Just sat in the back at most services. Then left.’

  ‘They think?’

  He laughs. ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it? You get a pretty girl coming here. OK, so she keeps herself to herself. Maybe dresses modestly and all that. But even so . . .’ He shakes his head, ridding himself of an image. ‘I did a spell in the Navy when I was just out of school. I mean, if a woman like that had come on board our ship, every guy there would have been—’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, not particularly needing Burnett to complete that beautiful thought.

  Suddenly awkward, we scuttle back to safer territory.

  Burnett: ‘I suppose we should do the forensics. It doesn’t have to be every last inch.’

  I nod. Walk outside into the courtyard where my phone signal is better. Call Carmarthen. Ask for a couple of SOCOs.

  It shouldn’t be a hard job. Carlotta’s hair was nicely washed, well looked after. And long. Long enough that breaks are almost inevitable. You can clean a room very carefully – carefully enough that it looks spotless to the ordinary eye – but still leave easily enough material for a forensics team to find. Broken hairs. Flakes of skin. The little clumps of skin cells that gather at the root.

  The call doesn’t take long. I glance inside. See Burnett interviewing Brother Gregory, who seems to have shed his silence for the time being.

  I ought to go in and help, really. Partly that’s just the role of any junior officer: take the notes, fetch the tea, say, ‘Yes, sir,’ on demand. But also, these monks might theoretically be witnesses. Might, very theoretically, one day stand in a courtroom. In which case, I should be there co-interviewing with Burnett, in order to preserve the evidential integrity of what’s being said.

  But I don’t.

  A grey pigeon flies with heavy wing beats across the yard. It sits on the low wall bounding the pig-sties and tries to remember what it came for.

  I glance inside the farmhouse. Burnett is still interviewing and I bet he’s doing just fine.

  Wander over to the chapel. Go in.

  It’s a small room. Seating for maybe fifty or sixty people, tops. Up by the altar, two rows of wooden seats facing each other. Where the monks sit, I assume.

  The remaining pews, arranged the normal way, take up most of the remaining space.

  There are candles by the altar and the monks’ seating. Some natural light from the windows that line one wall. But I can see that if you’re a prayerful monk looking out at a row of similarly prayerful monks opposite you, you would actually have to strain round to see anyone seated at the back, and even then that person’s head and face would be mostly in shadow. Add a hat or headscarf and any woman would be more than half-concealed, whether or not she was actively trying to hide.

  Because I don’t want to get back to Burnett too soon, I continue to tootle round the little church trying to think what this life must be like. Seven services a day. Forty-nine in a week. Two and a half thousand in a year. Fifty thousand in a generation. A whole heap of prayers, readings, chants, psalms, hymns. Heaped up, and for what? For who?

  I don’t know.

  Down one wall of the church, the one where there aren’t windows, there’s a series of icons. Little gold-framed paintings of saints. There’s a symbolism there – baskets, tombs, doves – which I don’t know how to interpret. Under each painting, a little piece of darkened glass and a candle – lit – set into the wall.

  Shrines, I think, shrines.

  That word isn’t one we encounter often in the police service and, when we do, it crops up in sentences like, ‘Friends of the murder victim/accident victim/missing person are already bringing flowers to create a roadside shrine in her/his memory.’

  Flowers. Football scarves. Cuddly toys.

  Greetings cards inked with sincerely meant condolences.

  Those are shrines that last a couple of hard rain-showers. Last just long enough to acquire a dark sprinkle of car exhaust, before they’re discreetly tidied away by the municipal cleaning teams, working in the half-light of early dawn.

  These shrines aren’t like that. The meanings of these stretch back so far into the past that I can feel the medieval starting to crumble into the ancient.

  St Anthony. The only icon that has a name underneath it. An old guy with a beard, and a halo, and a domed head, and those delicately posed fingers that are maybe intended to convey some specific religious meaning, but could equally well be signalling the prelude to some ordinary human action, like scratching an itch or picking a nose.

  I stare at Anthony, who stares right back. He’s a tough bugger, I think. Like one of those seen-it-all, done-it-all DIs that you get in Cardiff, or London, or any of the big cities.

  The main difference: a DI wouldn’t get away with that beard. Or that halo.

  The two of us look at each other a while, but say nothing.

  ‘So long, Tony,’ I tell him, then walk back outside.

  Away from the prayers and into the light.

  9

  We do the forensics and, yes, in one of the guest bedrooms, the middle room on the upper floor, the forensics team found six blonde hairs trapped in the gap between the mattress and the wall. A scrap of tissue stuck to the sink’s porcelain upstand. A white cotton thread caught under a leg of the bed.

  The hairs looked a good visual match for Carlotta’s and analysis proved them identical. DNA was captured from both the tissue and the thread. The DNA matched Carlotta’s.

  So she was there: in the monastery, sheltering from the world. I pushed, of course, for a more thorough examination of her room. Pushed hard enough that I dragged an ill-tempered forensics guy from Carmarthen to pull apart the U-bend beneath the shower, looking for more traces of hair and any flakes of skin. No results back yet, though as Burnett said with some irritation, ‘If she was in the room, she was in the room. We don’t have to track every last flake of skin.’

  For the same reason, we didn’t examine the chapel, though we presume that Carlotta had indeed been there, sitting at the back, hair covered from the sight of the Lord, her f
ace in shadow, as Anthony feasted his saintly eye on her Gore-Tex cheekbones.

  As for Burnett’s monkish interviews, they turned out to be frustratingly uncertain. Though the monks couldn’t quite agree amongst themselves, it seems that Carlotta was present in the monastery for just two or three days, leaving either late on the Sunday night or early on the Monday morning, perhaps thirty hours or so before her death. The monks were, however, unanimous in saying that she didn’t join them for mealtimes. They were unsure about how she arrived and left, though two of them mentioned that they thought they had seen a small blue car in the parking area at the back of the guest block.

  Burnett didn’t think the lack of clarity was suspicious in any way. ‘Truth is, most people don’t remember that well, especially if whatever we’re asking about didn’t particularly matter to them at the time. This girl breezes in for a weekend. Attends some services, but otherwise doesn’t integrate much. The monks are just so used to those kind of visitors, they’ve stopped noticing them. They basically just didn’t care.’

  The monks. My bosses. And Burnett’s too.

  Pryce has now confirmed in writing his hypothesis of death from natural causes.

  We have no Missing Person to match against our corpse.

  So we have no crime. No crime, no grieving family, no confected outrage in the press.

  We have nothing of criminal interest except the world’s most perfectly presented corpse and that, alas, is not enough in our fallen world to justify continuing investigation. So we’re told to finish, to wrap up, move on.

  I have a kind of farewell lunch with Burnett in Carmarthen. A greasy spoon café just up behind the police station. The sort of place where the laminated menus stick slightly to the tables. Where lasagne represents the most adventurous meal choice.

  Burnett opts for the roast chicken lunch. Me, for beans on toast.

  ‘Pity,’ he says. ‘The case started out so promising.’

  Pryce’s chicken is an unhealthy-looking grey, the way my sister looked when she had glandular fever. He examines it gloomily.

  ‘We’ll get the coroner to give us an open verdict,’ he says. ‘At some point, someone will have to report our girl missing, then we can pick up from where we left off.’

  I say, ‘Yes’, but mean, ‘No’.

  No, I don’t think anyone will report this girl missing.

  I eat some beans.

  Do that, and say, ‘She didn’t leave on Sunday night.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Pryce didn’t find any kind of gut problem. Let’s say she left at six p.m. on Sunday, died sometime Tuesday afternoon. That’s getting on for forty-eight hours. Normal gut transit time is less than twenty-four.’

  ‘Or she took some bread for the road.’

  ‘She had cheek implants. And lip-fillers.’

  ‘What? So she can’t take some bread?’

  ‘Not that bread. That barley loaf is the kind of thing you eat if you’re, I don’t know, some kind of hippy, vegan, cycle-to-work eco-person.’

  ‘Or if you want to eat healthy.’

  ‘I eat healthily,’ I say, somewhat primly, given the rather more hit-and-miss truth of my dietary habits. ‘But I wouldn’t eat that. I mean, yes, if you put it on my plate. But no, given an ordinary nice-looking wheat loaf or that barley thing, I’d take the first not the second.’

  Burnett shrugs. ‘It takes all sorts.’

  The kind of remark that annoys me. Yes, it takes all sorts. There’s the sort that wants to rack up fifty thousand services of prayer in the company of the good Saint Anthony. And there’s the sort that want to pump animal collagen into their already perfectly adequate lips. But if the latter type of folk suddenly starts eating barley loaves just for the fun of it, something odd is going on.

  I don’t say that.

  Don’t say anything much.

  We say our goodbyes in a windy car park by a grassy bank. Positioned up here, on a little mound overlooking the River Towy, the police building has the feel of a hill fort. A garrison outpost in hostile territory. Civilisation’s furthest frontier and the first line of her defence.

  Back to Cardiff.

  The whole thing, soup to nuts, has taken less than the two weeks Jackson first granted me, and I’ve not even been on it full time. For once in my life, I’ve completed something without getting Jackson pissed off at me. Rather the reverse. He’s pleased to have me back.

  I tootle around my regular desk for a bit. Chat with Bev until my time-wasting starts to annoy her. Find Mervyn Rogers. Let him know that his generosity in letting me keep the Carlotta case hasn’t, in fact, cost him much. That the inquiry is fading out to nothing.

  He says, ‘These country things. They never amount to much. Anyway, I don’t care, I’ve got a GBH to get stuck into.’

  ‘A GBH?’ I say, with just a touch of longing. ‘A section 20 or . . .?’

  ‘Nope. Section 18, with intent. Nice bloody great stomach wound too. Witnesses. Forensics. All coming in lovely.’

  Rogers grins at me. He’s trying to make me feel bad, and I try to look like he’s succeeding, but I’d still rather have a corpse without a crime than a crime without a corpse.

  I get some peppermint tea and tootle upstairs.

  Top floor. Conference suite on the Bute Park side.

  Outside the door I want, a couple of paint-splattered buckets, a stepladder, and an old dustsheet. Lights not working in the ceiling. Some carpet tiles pulled up and not replaced. No wi-fi signal.

  The idea is to make this part of the building look derelict. Unused. But there are some clues which say otherwise. Clues such as a biometric entrance security system, that requires both a fingerprint and a six-digit code that changes each week. Clues such as a digital CCTV camera which photographs everyone on entry and exit.

  Even the absence of any wi-fi signal is telling. Inside the room, data is kept so secure that it’s virtually in lockdown. There’s no wireless signal: all devices have to be physically wired to the server, to ensure that no data can be intercepted by a receiver placed outside the room. Password systems are onerous and double-action.

  There’s no sign on the door.

  No entry in the annual budget.

  The name of our inquiry – Operation April – is never mentioned on any list of current operations.

  Yet for all that it’s the biggest damn deal in this building. Indeed, give or take the occasional investigation into terrorist activity, it’s quite likely the biggest damn criminal investigation in the country.

  We have four crimes, four actual known-about, well-investigated crimes to work with. Those four are: (1) A nasty people-trafficking ring, as nasty and brutish as they come. (2) A weapons export game which our beloved Westminster politicians decided to define as a non-crime, though it was a non-crime that claimed the life of at least one person and really more like two or three. (3) A payroll fraud, which sounds dull but which killed people just the same. And (4) A wire-fraud, a description which makes it sound really old-fashioned, all trilby hats and Burberry macs, but which was lethal, ambitious and, by only the narrowest of margins, a failure.

  The progenitor of the first of those crimes is dead.

  The progenitor of the second is known to us – Idris Prothero, of Marine Parade, Penarth – but we can’t touch him, because his weapons export suddenly became legal and we were never able to connect him to the various people who kept dying around him.

  Crimes three and four: good news and bad.

  The good news: we got one of the principals behind the wire-fraud. Galton Evans: arrested, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced. He’s doing a life sentence now, minimum tariff of forty years and the poor bastard is fifty-six now.

  The bad news is that we failed to get the major criminal behind the payroll fraud and I don’t actually believe that Galton Evans was even the senior operator behind the wire-fraud. Indeed, we now believe – me, Jackson, DI Rhiannon Watkins and Adrian Brattenbury of the National Crime Agency – that all
four crimes are the product of a loose network of local rich guys. Men who have made some real money in straightforward, legitimate ways, but whose real interest is in originating and investing in criminal enterprises – enterprises which, in at least two cases, stood to make profits of well over a hundred million pounds a year.

  We can’t yet be certain that any conspiracy even exists. We have nothing approaching proof. But we do have a mounting scatter of data – pebbles rolling in the stream, straws tumbled on the breeze – that suggests we’re more right than not.

  I blip myself into the suite.

  Enter unannounced. See it with fresh eyes. The way it really is.

  A fucking smiley face on the whiteboard. Coffee things in a mess. Two DCs, not knowing I was coming, fooling around at the window, throwing a ball at the glass and catching it on the return. A coloured ball, a child’s toy.

  I’m furious, yes, and the ball vanishes as soon as the DCs turn and see me. The coffee things are tidied soon after. And, to be fair, this isn’t how the room normally looks. If I’m there, or Watkins, or Adrian Brattenbury, the whole place has a polished, quiet functionality to it. A murmur of data gathered, work done.

  But maybe this is the reality. Maybe that stupid coloured ball reveals the truth that Watkins’s rigorous management normally obscures.

  That this inquiry is failing. Going nowhere. Driving so far into the sand that our turning tyres only plough themselves deeper into the dust.

  I ask where Watkins is. One of the DCs – Essylt Jones – points to the big conference room at the end of the suite. ‘In there, with everybody. There are a couple of German guys.’

  That last bit said with that High Rising Terminal. There are guys? And they’re German? And they’re in our conference room? That kind of inflection.