He’s joking, but also serious. Top London doctors aren’t going to mess up their businesses by refusing to co-operate with the police.
‘And if not London . . .?’
‘Oh, this is Hollywood grade, absolutely.’
‘You mean actual Hollywood?’
Aggarwal backtracks a bit. He tells me that London is one of the world’s leading centres for plastic surgery. Also, surprisingly, or suprisingly to me anyway, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Apart from that – ‘If you are looking for the best? If you don’t mind top-dollar price, and I do mean really top dollar? – Hollywood and New York, of course.’
Carlotta doesn’t quite look British but, despite the name I gave her, she doesn’t look Hispanic either. Her blonde roundness doesn’t suggest Spanish, Brazilian, Argentinian blood.
Aggarwal thinks the same.
He rubs his face. His tiredness surfacing as mine does.
‘Look, I’ll get you names. Doctors in New York and LA, the top ones. Don’t forget to pass on my congratulations.’
Driving home, the motorway is long and empty and extends infinitely into night.
15
On Wednesday there’s a cake-and-fizz thing, a farewell to Operation April. Everyone is careful to say this isn’t the end, but it looks pretty fucking ended to me.
This is meant to be a party, but it feels like a wake.
I leave early, intending to drive home and smoke myself stupid in the garden, but as I drive angrily up Pen-y-Lan Road, trying to avoid the traffic on Eastern Avenue, stupidly pissed off by the fact that other people have cars and are allowed to drive them, I think, Fuck it, I do have one live inquiry, don’t I? A live inquiry with some actual, proper investigative work still to be done.
I’ve turned the car round before I know it. Drive up, away from the coast, into the hills. The hills around Llanglydwen.
Roberts’s house.
This time, I arrive in the light. A fading late November day, yes, and the mountains to the east roll upwards into heavy cloud, but still: no need for torches. And in daylight I see something I hadn’t noticed last time. A wooden board nailed to a gatepost. Crude red letters that say, ‘house for sale’ then a mobile number. The number was painted too big to start with, so the last few digits are squashed and hard to read. I try what I think is the number, but get an unobtainable signal.
The cottage is as I saw it before. No car. No light. No heat. No human presence.
I stand in the doorway, looking out. Quiet pastures steepening to a little fringe of wood, the bare hills above. I don’t know what a physicist would say, but time doesn’t flow in these valleys the way it moves elsewhere. There’s something so changeless here, something so little altered since the retreat of the glaciers, that I feel myself in a kind of permanent present. One that knits the modern, the medieval, the Roman, the pre-Roman.
The tremble of those many pasts is with me here. A faint turbulence that plucks at my skin, the hem of my coat.
From where I stand, I can see the hillside where Neil Williams has his farmhouse. Down the valley, I can just about see the monastery’s squat tower, the scatter of houses that forms Llanglydwen. Aside from that, nothing. Green fields, gluey with mud around the gates and feeding places. Sheep. Hedges, mostly bare now, but holding a few last flares of field maple, the dark bronze of haw berries.
And a shack. A thing of old timber and tattered corrugated iron. A farm shed you’d say. A place to store straw or shelter animals. Except that those things don’t need fire and this place has a thin plume of ascending smoke.
I change my shoes for the heavy walking boots I keep in the back of my car. Walk through a couple of fields towards the smoke. Sheep cluster around, hoping for food.
Black muzzles, white coats. Those disconcerting alien eyes.
‘Hello?’ I call as I approach. ‘Hello?’
No answer.
The shack has a door. Corrugated iron over a clumsy wooden frame. There’s a latch of bailing twine, but the door rests on the ground anyway. I rap on the metal, say ‘Hello’ again and enter.
A strange darkness within.
The orange glow of a wood fire. An earth-scented dampness. The place in shadow mostly – no light, no electric light – but cut about with scraps of illumination from outside wherever the iron is rusting away or a join was poorly made.
By the stove, there’s a man, doing something with a knife. He looks at me. Says nothing, but I can see the flash of his eyes, a movement of the mouth beneath a tangled beard.
Moving slowly, I walk towards him.
‘Mr Roberts? Len Roberts, is it? I’m Fiona. Fiona Griffiths. From the police.’
Say that last bit with a glance backwards towards the door, my way out. I’m not sure what Roberts’s feelings are about me and my kind, but if this encounter gets confrontational, I’d sooner that any rough stuff takes place outside.
He doesn’t say anything, but I think his face twitches welcome. His hand too.
He’s gutting some kind of animal, I realise. A badger, I think. There’s a mess of blood and fur and a loose drool of guts.
‘Badger, is it?’
‘I took him in the wood there,’ he says, gesturing through the wall. ‘Proper big ’un, though he’s got mange, here look.’
He holds up some scrofulous bit of fur, though what’s mange and what’s blood and what’s just standard-issue badger, I find hard to tell in this dimness.
‘You’re not in the cottage, then?’
‘No, no. No, that’s on the . . . on the market now.’
He struggles to find the word ‘market’. Roberts, I suspect, is a man who would always have been happier with badgers than property transactions.
‘I saw the sign.’
‘Aye.’
‘Is it with an estate agent as well, maybe?’
‘Ah, well, those people . . .’
I take that as a no. Roberts’s hands go back to the butchery. He’s deft with it. That knife, this carcass, here in the smoky dark.
There’s a chair or stool of some kind. I grope for it, checking it’s clear. The thing has some padded, velvety surface, like an old piano stool. I sit down.
‘You’ve come about Bethan, I suppose.’
‘Sort of. We found a body – not Bethan’s – but some other young woman over in Ystradfflur. We haven’t been able to identify her as yet.’
‘Ystradfflur?’
‘In the churchyard there. We found a body.’
Roberts’s face moves darkly, but his face is deep in the shadows here and everything is dark.
He finishes his gutting. Stands up, finds a metal bowl from a crude wooden shelf off to the side – planks laid over a couple of old oil drums. Slithers the guts into the bowl.
‘For Judy,’ he says. ‘For later.’
I stare at him, bemused. Then I get it. ‘Judy. Your dog.’
‘Little Jack Russell bitch. Her mother was a good ’un too. Eager, you know.’
‘The woman we found. She wasn’t murdered. Just died. Heart attack. She looked completely healthy, but she had a lung condition she may not even have known about. Her heart struggled – and bam! That was it. But somebody laid her out in the bier house in Ystradfflur. Candles, Bible, white dress. No sign of violence.’
Roberts is grinning now. White teeth, white eyes.
‘Well, that weren’t me. You can’t pin that one on me.’
‘No, I don’t think we can. We’re not even going to try.’
‘All laid out with candles, you say?’
‘Yes. I’ve got pictures if you want to see.’
He does. My iPad is in the car, so I go to get it. Walking back through these November fields. Bare hedges the colour of mink and woodsmoke. The sheep watch me closely, but are giving up on me as a source of food.
I get the iPad and return to find Roberts in a little allotment behind his shack. Leeks, parsnips, cabbage, kale, carrots. He’s digging up a couple of swedes when I find him. Shakes o
ff the loose soil, wipes the rest on his trousers. Holds up the muddy globes against the fading sky and says, ‘I didn’t know . . . Were you wanting to stay?’
I wasn’t expecting the invitation and my reaction is a little slow to arrive. But arrive it does, and it’s the right one.
‘I can’t stay the night, Mr Roberts, but I’d love something to eat.’
Roberts cuts a leek, loosens the earth around his carrots and pulls up a couple of big ones. He’s a good gardener. The soil round here is mostly clay, but Roberts has his carrots on a slight bank, loosened with sand for better drainage.
He sees me looking. ‘They don’t like it heavy. They like it soft. These boys – ’ he means the swedes – ‘they want it wet and don’t mind it heavy.’
He washes his vegetables in a barrel that collects rainwater from the roof. They’re not clean, not remotely, but they are, I accept, much cleaner than they were.
We go in.
I’m not sure where the rest of the badger is now, but its two hind legs are in a big metal cooking pot. I show Roberts pictures of Carlotta. Her face. Her corpse. The crime scene photos. Roberts doesn’t know how to swipe the screen to flip through the images, so I do it for him. Once, he tries doing it himself, but his fingers are so hardened by this life of his, the thickened skin and accumulated grime, that the screen doesn’t recognise there’s even a finger there. He might as well be poking with a stick.
‘She wasn’t hurt?’
‘No.’
‘No . . . no silly business? Nothing horrible?’
He means rape, I assume. ‘No. Not that we can find.’
He nods, relaxes. ‘Well. And you don’t know who she is, you say?’
‘No.’
‘Imagine, eh? You being her mother or father. Having a little girl. Looking after her. All the way from a little babi.’ He uses the Welsh word, not the English. The first syllable rhyming with Ma and Pa, not say or hay. ‘All that and you don’t even call you people when she gets taken.’
‘And why would anyone do that, Mr Roberts? Keep their silence, I mean.’
He shakes his head. He doesn’t have an answer. Starts cutting thick moon slices of swede into the bowl. The carrot, almost purplish in this interior twilight, follows. Then the leek.
I feel like I stumbled there. Asked the wrong question. But since I don’t know the right one, I say, ‘I know you were close to Bethan. Her father says you were a real friend.’
‘Yes. We were . . . Bethan and I . . .’
He seems on the verge of saying something further, but doesn’t. Adds a slop of water to the pan. Salt. Settles the pan on the stove, which is no more than a large, roughly cubic, metal container kept off the ground by a few breeze-blocks. The metal was painted once, but is so time-worn now that only a few flakes of dull white paint remain visible. A bendy metal flue pipe takes most of the smoke up and out of the room. Roberts feeds the fire, poking logs into its red and glowing heart. He adjusts things till he’s happy, then steps back.
‘He’ll do.’
‘Mr Roberts, I know we gave you a rough time back then. When Bethan was lost, I mean.’
‘You were doing a job. I know it looked funny.’
‘That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard on you.’
Roberts’s eyes flicker, unreadable. I’m very aware that I’m alone with this man. He’s bigger than me, of course, and far stronger. Also knows this shack, these fields, this valley. Is a dab hand with a knife.
I change the subject. ‘The estate agents, let me guess. You asked them to list the house, but they wouldn’t do it.’
‘It’s been listed for two years. Don’t think any bugger’s come to view it though.’
‘And you’d stay here if it sold? I mean, that’s the plan?’
Roberts nods, with a kind of muddled approval. As he sees it, I think, he can sell the house, stay living here in this shack, and have enough money for those things – salt, saw blades, nails, winter coats – that he can’t make or kill or grow himself. And perhaps, yes, it’s true that the estate agents are reluctant to help a local villain, but their task is hardly an easy one: selling a remote and collapsing cottage, whose nearest neighbour is a known badger-killer and suspected child-killer.
‘You might want to heat the cottage. It feels a bit sorry for itself at the moment.’
‘Yes, she does that.’
‘It would look nicer tidy.’
‘Aye.’
As we speak, a black, white and brown arrow hurtles into the room. Leaps onto Roberts’s lap and vigorously licks the man’s face. When the hello is over, another leggy jump takes her up to the shelf with her bowl on it. She slurps up her evening meal then, sitting beside Roberts, starts licking herself.
‘Eager,’ I say. ‘She’s certainly eager.’
‘Aye.’
Roberts’s eyes have a melty quality as he and the dog find their rhythm.
The dog, Judy, must have a good life, I reckon. Everything shared with her master. Same food, same bed, same fire.
Fresh guts for dinner and a whole world to run in.
Man and dog cuddle a bit, until Roberts decides our meal is done.
It’s dark outside now and the room inside is almost pitch black. Roberts – for my sake more than his own, I think – fiddles around with an old Petzl headtorch, the kind of thing that climbers use, and plays with some wires down in the corner. To my surprise, a chain of fairy lights comes on overhead, the power coming from an old car battery.
‘Get him topped up at the garage. They don’t charge me none.’
Roberts hands me a spoon and divides the stew between two bowls, at least one of which, I can’t help feeling, was last used by Judy. The meat is gamey and strong, but not unpleasant. Roberts asks, anxiously, if it’s OK.
‘Mr Roberts, I’ve never had a better bit of badger in my life.’
He laughs, in relief mostly. Tells me that badger is good, whereas fox, ‘You have to lay him in the stream really. He can be a bit ripe if you take him green.’
We eat. We talk. We tickle Judy.
I get up to go. The fairy lights give enough illumination that I can see the shack interior properly for the first time. There’s a bed loaded high with blankets and covers. For all that the stove provides warmth, the shack must be icy in winter, unthinkable in any wind.
Also a piano, an object even more incongruous than the fairy lights.
‘Bethan,’ I say. ‘Bethan liked to play the piano. The Williamses didn’t have one. You did. It was in your cottage back then, I suppose.’
‘I don’t play myself, but this was my grandmother’s and then my mother’s.’
‘And you still keep it?’ I think of the effort of bringing it down here, from the cottage to its new – and probably final – resting place.
‘Oh, aye. Well, it’s silly really. But I just think . . . if she ever comes back, I’d like her to know I’d been thinking about her.’
‘And you think she could come back? That she’s not dead?’
‘She was never found, was she?’
I’m uncertain whether that’s intended as a rhetorical question. After all, Roberts is isolated enough that he might well not know the answer. ‘No, she’s never been found.’
His teeth gleam in the light.
‘Well, then. She could walk through that door just the way you did.’
‘Len, did you sleep with her? Were you and she more than just friends?’
He hesitates at that. Hesitates, but says, ‘A couple of times. She gave herself to me. I showed her the way. But we weren’t like – a couple. Not that. I knew I was a bit too old for her. Bit wild. A countryman, you know? She wanted something different for herself.’
I thank him. Leave. Walk back through these fields, where a light frost begins to nip the grass.
If he’s speaking the truth now, he lied to the inquiry at the time. Despite repeated interrogations, he swore that he and Bethan had only ever been friends. I should really make a wri
tten statement, right now, of Roberts’s new story. Have him pulled in for another round of questions. But will that bring Bethan back? Explain the riddle of Carlotta’s corpse?
I ask the sheep, and they tell me no.
Ask the moon, and it counsels silence.
16
Despite the eye-prickingly intense darkness of Roberts’s shack, it’s not actually late.
I get into my Alfa Romeo, whack the heating up and wonder what next.
Drive the short distance into Llanglydwen.
The village, such as it is, huddles just below the union of two streams. Waters joining and hurrying under the low, grey hump-backed bridge. Houses, mostly whitewashed. Some newer things in brick. The little village church, St Cledwyn’s, and, opposite, one of those tiny pubs. The sort of thing you get in Wales, and maybe in Ireland or the highland parts of Scotland, but nowhere else. The kind of boozer that serves a dozen locals. Where everyone knows each other by their first name. That doubles as a post office and that sells bread and milk and stamps.
I drive the few hundred yards on to the monastery.
Grey stones under silver light. They’ll be ringing the bell for compline soon, but I think I’ll pass. I’d like to see the pigs again, scratch their piggy bellies, but I’ll leave that for another day.
I drive on home.
Or rather: intend to drive home. Intend to drive home, have a bath, read a book, go to bed. To do all the regular things that a regular girl does without anxiety or complication. Only, as I draw close to Cardiff, Carlotta murmurs to me through dead lips and we find ourselves heading into the office instead.
Go into the Operation April suite. Check my emails.
I have an email from Aggarwal. The names of thirty-three international clinics, ones that he places at the very top of the rhinoplastic tree. To those names I add another hundred and twelve names from a Vogue feature on plastic surgery, and start pumping out emails. Copy and paste. ‘Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths from the South Wales Police . . . seeking to identify a young woman found dead under circumstances that remain unexplained . . . have reason to believe that the deceased may have been a patient at your clinic.’
Blah, blah. My email isn’t exactly truthful, but isn’t quite false either.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 12
