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

by Harry Bingham

  Williams has come back into the room at some point during this. Is looking at it with my eyes.

  Says, ‘It wasn’t like this. Not then.’

  ‘I know.’

  And I do. Back in 2006, Neil Williams was married. Wife’s name was Joanne. When their only child vanished and their lives descended into the crapper, there were any number of police inquiries, Social Services reports and the rest. Neil’s farm isn’t much – two hundred acres of upland grass that would be marginal at best – but he has, or had, a side-business as a straw and hay merchant that earned the family decent-enough money. No doubt this farmhouse always had an earthy agricultural quality, but no more so than plenty of the houses in the surrounding valley. Certainly none of those intrusive inquiries found anything remiss with the basic quality of love, care and hygiene surrounding the young Bethan.

  ‘Joanne’s gone?’ I ask.

  ‘After Bethan . . .’ he begins, then starts again. ‘Well, I suppose we were arguing a bit even before she went. Nothing so big. Not really. Just that Bethan wasn’t sure about life up here on the farm and Joanne had started to take her side. So, I don’t know, we were snappy and Bethan in the middle of all that. It was a bad few months, maybe, but you know, all families have their spats.’

  He looks at me, wanting me to tell him that, yes, all families have their rough patches, and I duly give him the assurance he needs.

  I ask, ‘Your arguments. Did you ever get violent? Did you ever raise your hand in anger?’

  He says no and I believe him, but there’s enough in what he does and doesn’t tell me to hint that those arguments were bad, even without overt violence.

  ‘And after Bethan went, that was it really. Me and Joanne were both upset. Different ways of expressing our grief, if you catch my meaning. Hers was – well, she spent more and more time with her sister in Brixham. Torbay area, you know. England. And when she was here, it wasn’t the same. We were always at each other. Stupid things. And, in time, she stopped coming.’

  ‘You divorced?’

  ‘No. It’s still odd though. Getting letters to Mr and Mrs Williams. I throw ’em away, often enough.’

  He waves the papers at me that he’d left the room to collect.

  The stack is cold and damp: the temperature and humidity of the house beyond this kitchen.

  Photos. School reports. Postcards. Letters. Drawings and paintings.

  Bethan’s life pre-abduction. There’s not much there. Not in terms of evidence, for sure, and these things would have been carefully evaluated by police at the time. But there’s not physically that much either. Just not much documentary record of a vanished life.

  I turn pages. Look at Bethan’s four-year-old depiction of her home and family. A fat dad with a big red body, stick arms and legs, a smiley blue face on top. The mum the same, except smaller, and there’s some vague effort at a green dress. Little Bethan, with an orange body and holding a bright-yellow balloon, stands between the two.

  ‘I loved that,’ says her father. ‘That happiness. But music was more her thing. Singing. Piano. I often think, if we hadn’t lived here but, I don’t know, Brecon, Carmarthen, St David, everything could have been different. A place like this? Well, it’s paradise for a little girl. For a teenager, like Bethan . . .’ He shakes his head.

  The kettle’s boiled now and Williams make tea. Builders’ sludge for him. Peppermint from my own stash for me. While he’s doing it, I run some searches on my phone: ‘cleaning companies Carmarthen’. Tap through to any firms that look worthwhile.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘What’s your guess, this many years on?’

  ‘You’re her age, aren’t you? Sorry, I know I’m not meant to ask.’

  ‘I turned thirty this year. I know I look younger.’

  ‘Oh.’ Williams has some of the mannerisms of a much older man, though he is, I know, only fifty-four. He looks at me trying to fit his mis-appraisal of my age into whatever set of thoughts he had about Bethan. Then gives up. Says, ‘Well, you’ll know from the police reports, love. There’s this . . . man. Len Roberts. Used to do some contracting work. Driving combines. Getting the silage in. That kind of thing. Very seasonal. Work like a devil for four months of the year, sit on your arse the rest.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he got close to Bethan. Or Bethan close to him. I don’t know. I didn’t like it. Neither did Joanne. But that’s how it was. She used to go over to his cottage, that old place of his. They used to talk, I don’t know what. It was like that maybe two months. Bethan swore the two of them weren’t, you know, weren’t . . .’

  ‘They were just friends. They weren’t sleeping together.’

  ‘Exactly. And we believed her. She was a sensible girl. Head screwed on. Not giddy. Then . . .’

  ‘Your girl vanishes. Everyone fingers this guy, Len Roberts, as the villain. His place is turned over. There’s any amount of evidence that Bethan had been there, including on his bed, but no trace of violence, no trace of sexual assault, and no trace of Bethan.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Beyond our windows, the air thickens. A low mist is beginning to form, water droplets swirling the other side of the glass. It darkens too. It’s mid-November now, and the night gathers early, even more so up here, among these purpling hills. There are no curtains on the windows. No streetlamps lighting the yard beyond. Somewhere, in the darkness, a fox screams. Twice, maybe three times repeated. Not a mating cry, I don’t think, but one of those warning shrieks that’s almost like a groan of disappointment. The noise has an almost asthmatic quality, but also something darker, wilder, vulpine. We wait until the noise has gone.

  I say, ‘You should get this place tidied. Tidied and cleaned. It’s not good for you living like this.’

  He says the kind of things I expect him to say. That I’m right. That he ought to. That he makes the effort now and again, but . . .

  I interrupt. ‘I’ve got some numbers.’ Wave my phone at him. ‘They’ll come out. Bring all their own equipment. Three or four cleaners. One solid morning’s work.’

  He stares at me.

  I say, ‘It’ll be a couple of hundred quid. Do you have that? Is that OK?’

  He nods. ‘Yes. I suppose.’

  He looks perplexed. Perhaps he didn’t know that the South Wales Police, unlike their Dyfed-Powys cousins, arranged house cleans for crime-stricken men of a certain age.

  I’m not sure my bosses know that either, but I make the necessary calls all the same.

  I walk into the part of the house I’ve not yet seen.

  Heaps of stuff. Way too much. Not quite hoarder levels, but definitely not-quite-coping levels.

  ‘I’m going to get a skip too. I’m going to tell the cleaning people to throw away anything you don’t definitely need. Nothing to do with Bethan. That stuff is sacred. But other things.’

  I point to a stack of dead newspapers where the paper on top is dated 2012. A plastic crate full of dead oil filters and old cam belts. A cardboard box, full of something, I can’t see what, but its sides are soft and outward sloping in the damp.

  The collie’s on my side now and wags his slow approval.

  Williams nods.

  I make the calls. It’ll be more like five hundred quid when it’s all said and done, but five hundred quid well spent.

  ‘Then get someone in here. Once a week. Once a fortnight. OK?’

  He nods.

  ‘Say, “Yes, officer, I promise to do that.” And I’m going to check on you, mind.’

  He doesn’t say what I told him to say, but what he does say is close enough.

  ‘A promise is a promise, Mr Williams,’ I tell him sternly. ‘And if one day, I do find my biological father, I wouldn’t want to walk through the door and find him living in a pig-sty. I’d want to see a family home, ready and waiting for my return.’

  Something has collapsed in his face now. His right hand is down with his collie. Massaging its neck, its ears. Getting those swift, long d
og-licks in return. And Williams’s eyes are more than just misty now. They’re watery. Ready to overflow.

  Some collapses are good, I think. Collapses that precede change.

  He takes me to the door. Wants to hug me, I think, except he can’t find a way to do it and I probably don’t help him much.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, ‘thank you.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question. About what you think happened.’

  He’s resting a shoulder on the door frame, leaning forwards into the night. An outdoors man, happier out than in.

  ‘I used to hate that man. Used to think about driving down the hill and killing him.’ A glance indoors into the kitchen catches the old pine dresser in its sweep. Where he keeps his shotgun, I’d guess. ‘Two, three years, I used to think about that every day. Kept me going in a funny way.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now? I don’t know. If Roberts did hurt my Bethan, I would kill him. I would do it, not that I should say so to you. But if he didn’t, and he always said he didn’t . . .’

  I finish for him.

  ‘Then he’s suffered as much as you. Another life fucked up.’

  ‘Yes. Something like that. He’s local. Lived here all his life. A wild one, yes, him and Geraint, his brother. But if he didn’t do no harm to my Bethan, I don’t wish him harm in return.’

  ‘Have you ever spoken to him? Since then, I mean.’

  ‘No.’ His voice says he wouldn’t do it either. One of those rural feuds which will dissipate around the time that glaciers return to these hills.

  I step out into the night.

  I parked my car in daylight two dozen yards from the house, but the darkness here is so complete that I only find my way by pressing my blipper and waiting for the car to light up. When it does so, I see the mist has been thickening invisibly all this time. There’s twenty yards of visibility, no more. The car’s amber lights are haloed and softened, beckoning me across the mud and granite chippings of the farmyard.

  At the car, I call back, ‘Thank you, Mr Williams. Good night.’

  He says the same, more than once. Then the door closes. I can see him moving around in his kitchen. Watch for a while. The blue light of that interior world. The soft grey vapour of mine. The side of my car is cold and wet against my hand.

  I would wait awhile longer but, behind me, that fox barks again and a sudden streak of animal, black and white, races past me so close I can feel the spatter from its moving legs, the hotness of its moving body.

  Williams’s collie out to combat the fox. Or find prey. Or otherwise navigate the dark paths of this nocturnal animal world.

  A world without police.

  I’m suddenly, inexplicably, reminded of my father. All those years he spent building his criminal empire. His night-time prowls. Those invisible pursuits.

  The risk of capture and the hot, feral scent of success.

  I’m doing what I can to understand those times, of course. Trying to uncover his past and mine. So far, I’ve got nothing useful from all the photos I’ve collected, from Mal, from Emrys Thomas, Gwion Cadwaladr, and the others, but I also know that sometimes you can have a clue in your hands and not recognise the message it flashes up at you.

  More work is the answer. It always is.

  I get into my car, let in the clutch and glide downhill.

  Drive on to the place where my records and my sat-nav tell me Len Roberts has his cottage.

  I find the place all right. Sign on the drive. Letters carved on slate. The cottage too, in the shine of my headlamps, looks much as it did in the photos put together back in 2006. A holly tree is grown bigger now. There’s more moss on the roof. Clumps of grass digging themselves into the cracks between the house walls and the front terrace. A gutter drips.

  It’s the same place all right, but no lights. No car.

  I get out. Fetch a torch from my boot.

  Approach the front door. Knock.

  Nothing. No answer and even the sound of the knock fails too quickly in this muffled air.

  I try the latch and the door sticks a bit, but opens.

  I’m not surprised, not really. Out in these parts, where the nearest neighbour is usually half a hillside away or more, locks aren’t all that useful. Burglaries are rare, because most houses have little to offer thieves and, in any case, if someone really wants to gain entry, they’ll just walk round the back and break a window.

  I grope for a light switch. Find it, but there’s no power. My torchbeam finds a dark kitchen. Flagstone floor. An old scrubbed wooden table that doesn’t rest quite flat. A couple of rush-bottomed chairs. Not a lot else. A few pots and pans, some mugs, but not the clutter there was in Williams’s kitchen. A fridge, yes, but not powered up and the only things left in there have long passed the interesting-coloured mould stage and are squishing down into a rubbery black and brown namelessness.

  I look further. Find a boot room: a few old shoes, men’s sizes. A yard or two of black neoprene, or something like that. A plastic box with some electrical junk, rat-traps, hacksaw blades, rawl plugs. Some wire traps. Also a downstairs loo. Overhead cistern, old-fashioned pullchain. The water level in the bowl is well down from its correct level, and when I pull the chain, no water descends from above.

  The walls, the floor, the cistern, everything has a kind of dampness. Water droplets gleaming in the torchlight. Houses, even Welsh cottages, don’t accumulate this kind of chilly damp from a few nights left unattended. There’s a density to the cold here which tells me this house hasn’t been heated or dried for weeks at least, maybe longer.

  The living room: a carpet, a sofa, a couple of chairs. Some photos. Not much.

  I don’t go upstairs.

  When Neil Williams spoke of Roberts’s place, he said, ‘his cottage, that old place of his.’ I’d understood that as meaning the cottage itself was old, but I think now I got that wrong. Think he meant ‘the place he used to have’.

  But if Roberts had sold up, this place would be occupied, surely? And if Roberts is still living here in this valley, somewhere down the hill from Williams, then why isn’t he living here, in the house he owns?

  I don’t know. Don’t have an answer, but am happy to get outside, to this freely moving air, this animal-tunnelled night.

  I poke my torch around aimlessly, as though expecting it to find Len Roberts, Bethan Williams, the secret of my poor, dead Carlotta, but find nothing but mist.

  I get in my car and drive slowly home.

  12

  Time evaporates.

  It vanishes and passes in ghost-showers of rain, in morning mists that hang low over these city streets, clinging to the damp trunks of Bute Park and straying over the Taff’s black waters like something undecided. When we have sunshine, and we do, I can’t quite understand it. I’m puzzled the way I would be if I found camels grazing on the Hayes, or monkeys screaming in Alexandra Gardens. It’s not a bad thing, just strange.

  Essylt, under my supervision, and with the support of Aaron Howells, contacts every plastic surgeon in the country. Every one.

  Do you know this woman? Is that rhinoplasty yours? Did your hands fix those Gore-Tex shields to her cheekbones? Did your hands cut through her cheek, from the inside, from the back of the mouth, to slip those carefully sculpted implants into place?

  No, no, no and no. In different versions, the answers we’ve had three hundred and some times over.

  Do you forget a patient? Would you ever simply start to forget the long chain of women – pretty, unpretty, medium-pretty – who came to you seeking help?

  I don’t think so. Apart from anything else, these surgeons have assistants, they have records, they have their before and after pics. And then too, they are specialists in the human face. Professional students of our female contours.

  So we do our work, and compile our responses. Letters, statements, emails, denials. The whole stack of them amounting to a big round zero.

  Watkins, brusquely, redirects Essylt t
o some other assignment. Gives me enough work, including that boringboringboring Twyn-yr-odyn assault, that my own Carlotta time is severely reduced.

  I feel the vibration of Watkins’s disapproval. Her half-sense that I pulled a fast one.

  There hasn’t yet been any formal decision about what to do with Operation April – that will only come when we hear back from the BKA – but the vibe is bad, and everyone knows it. Leads aren’t followed. Reports go uncompleted. The project is dying.

  One morning, I come in early, four a.m. early, and throw away all the coloured balls, the toys, the stupid smiley-faced distractions that accumulate in any well-lived in office. I leave anything that is directly work-related, or anything which is immediately personal – framed photos, tubes of hand cream – but everything else goes into a black bin-liner which ends up stashed in the waste collection area down in the loading bay.

  The work stuff, I smarten up. File documents. Order files. Put loose paperwork onto the appropriate person’s desk, on top of their keyboard, so they have to deal with it. Two of the DCs have solitaire-type programs on their desktops, which they open when Watkins is away and things are quiet. I turn on the computers and delete the programs.

  By about ten to eight, I’m all done and I blip myself out before anyone enters it. I spend forty minutes in the canteen pretending to eat breakfast, then re-enter the suite once it’s semi-populated and share the general bemusement and outrage at the pixies who have been busy overnight.

  Watkins, I think, has guessed the identity of the pixie in question, but she says nothing. Secretly, I suspect, I think she approves.

  Meantime, work.

  Some boringboringboring paperwork on stupidboringstupid Twyn-yr-odyn.

  Some tidying-up bits and pieces on Operation April. A police-bureaucracy version of last rites.

  But in whatever little gaps and peeps of time are left over, Burnett lets me pursue my enquiries amongst the British plastic surgery community. I’m not on his payroll, so he doesn’t much care how I spend my time and evinces no great interest in what I have to say about my results. But I’m, at least in part, allowed to do as I want. And praise be for that.