Copy. Paste. Adjust. Send. Repeat.
Forty-two emails sent. Another hundred-odd to go.
I don’t have the main lights on. I didn’t want their oppressive overhead brightness. So I work by the light of my desk lamp alone. A quiet pool in this dark room.
And, as I work, I’m suddenly aware that I’m not alone.
Watkins is standing in the light of the open door, a flat cardboard packet in her hand.
‘You still here?’ she asks.
I wave my hands. Stupid question.
She comes over, looks at my emails.
‘It seems like a long shot,’ she says, but there’s a clear uncertainty in her voice.
‘Is it? Someone did the surgery. In the end, we just have to knock on enough doors . . .’
Something in Watkins’s face softens. It’s stupid, but she had an affection for me once, an infatuation even, and I have this idea that she wants to bend down and stroke my nose.
‘Aggarwal told me that my nasolabial angle was textbook.’ I show Watkins my face in profile so she can admire it properly. ‘That bit there is called the columella,’ I add, pointing.
‘Well, you’re right. It’s probably worth a little more research,’ says Watkins, struggling to ignore the perfection of my columella.
And as she struggles, my computer bleeps to announce incoming messages.
Twelve unread messages. Eleven automated responses. ‘Thank you for your message, our office is now closed.’ That kind of thing.
But one that’s not like that. From a human, not a robot. From a doctor, not a mere mortal. And from a Hollywood clinic, a proper one. A place that caters to movie stars and the mega-rich.
Dear Sergeant Griffiths
Many thanks for reaching out to us – and I’m only regretful that the occasion is such a tragic one. I can indeed confirm the identity of the deceased as Alina Mishchenko, who was a patient with us just two years ago. She was a beautiful person and touched all of us with her confidence and poise. I’m sure she will be sorely missed. I’ve attached Ms Mishchenko’s contact details to this email and I hope that this assists you in locating her family and breaking the very sad tidings to them.
In the meantime, all of us at the clinic here stand ready to assist in any way that we can – and, of course, we send her family all of our prayers and sympathy in their time of need.
With our deepest sympathies,
Dr. Grant Peterson
Alina. Not quite as good as Carlotta, somehow, but I suppose I should allow her the right to her own name. My own, dear, private Carlotta gives way to the slightly frostier, more public Alina.
Mishchenko. A Ukrainian name. The address which Alina gave the clinic was in Kiev. Pechersk Raion: according to Google, one of the city’s more prestigious neighbourhoods. Google Earth shows me a street of large villas, compounds almost. High walls and security gates.
High walls, security gates and a Hollywood surgery that caters to the super-rich.
With Watkins breathing over my shoulder, I browse further, every inch the modern detective. Google finds me a list of Ukraine’s richest people. At place twenty-eight on the list, there is a male Mishchenko in his late fifties. If I understand Google’s machine-translation well enough, the guy has two sons and a daughter. Except that, I’m guessing, he now has only sons.
Eleven-thirty.
Lights dim in the corridor outside. Lights dim in the slumbering offices below. In Bute Park, inky and silent, night animals prowl.
Fox. Owl. Mink. Bat. Stoat.
And we have our kill too, our first scent of carcass.
Watkins says, ‘If this checks out . . .’
She doesn’t finish her sentence.
I nod, but say nothing.
If this checks out then, on top of our various other mysteries, we now have one more: The Mystery of Why a Ukrainian Oligarch’s Daughter Should Choose to Die in Remote Mid-Wales.
Watkins clicks around on my computer, trying to find a picture of Alina Mishchenko, but the relevant websites are in Ukrainian and we can’t even read the script.
She pushes back from the screen, with a sound that is half tiredness, half that snorty senior officer annoyance.
‘Work this through with Burnett,’ she tells me. ‘It can wait till Monday,’ she adds, knowing that waiting is never my strong point.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And look, I came in to give you this. I was going to leave it on your desk.’
Watkins hands me the cardboard packet she came in with.
I open it up.
Photos. Fourteen of them. Full colour, ten by sixes. Our Operation April targets, the full set of them, A-list and B-list.
‘Target practice,’ says Watkins, as close as she ever gets to an actual joke.
I say thank you. That and goodnight. Wave to Watkins as she leaves.
At the door, she turns and says, ‘Fiona, this . . .’ Then stops. Even in the dimness of this room, in the feeble light of the corridor outside, I can see calculation in her eyes. For a moment, I think she’s going on to say something further, but then her look changes and she just says, ‘This was good work, well done.’
I nod. That wasn’t what she’d been going to say, but I think I know what she’d been going to say anyway.
Watkins leaves.
In Bute Park, foxes kill things. Owls devour field mice in a single gulp.
And I’m alone in a dim and silent office, with the corpse of a dead girl, and a conspiracy of photos.
Stay there until something shifts, then drive home quietly, the speedometer needle sometimes within the zone of legal for as much as a minute or two at a time.
Prepare for bed, or try to, but my attention keeps on being tugged sideways by Alina-Carlotta, who seems closer to me now than ever.
I feel her presence so strongly that when I brush my teeth I can’t remember whose face I’m looking at in the mirror. Don’t know if I’m me looking at Carlotta, or Carlotta looking at me. I know that only one of us is dead, but for a few troubled minutes can’t remember which one of us got lucky.
17
Monday.
I’m in Carmarthen shortly before eight. Burnett doesn’t arrive until nearer nine. I watch him getting out of his car. There’s a heaviness to him sometimes, more strongly present when he’s unobserved. When he’s with me, or when I see him with other people, he shakes himself into a brighter, lighter, higher-energy self.
I observe him briefly, then bound out of my car to start improving his day.
‘Good morning, sir,’ I tell him. ‘I brought you caffeine, sugar and hydrogenated fats.’
I wave a paper bag at him, full of the kind of baked goods that his doctor probably warns against. A cup of coffee that might still have been warm if Burnett had arrived at a more diligent hour.
‘Good morning, Fiona,’ he says, capably hiding his excitement at having his day improved. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘Our case, sir. Our corpse. The beautiful corpse of Ystradfflur.’
We go into the building. Up a flight of stairs.
Pausing on the landing he tells me, ‘We don’t have a case. We don’t have a crime. We don’t have an investigation. We don’t even have any grieving relatives. Not ones who can be bothered to pick up a phone, at any rate.’
‘That’s harsh, sir. Maybe they’re grieving a lot and picking up the phone a lot too. Maybe they’re out of their heads with worry.’
We stomp along a corridor to his office. He doesn’t invite me to sit, but that’s because we’re such close colleagues already, he feels able to dispense with the niceties.
I sit. Get horrible baked things out of their paper wrappers and arrange them beneath the glare of his desk lamp. The flaking icing sugar looks like peelings of skin, scabrous and fragile under the light.
‘I shouldn’t,’ he says, but does.
‘We’ve got an ID.’
He stares at me, wondering how come I’ve got the information bef
ore him.
‘Missing Persons?’
‘Nope. Rhinoplasty.’
I push a bunch of paper at him. The email from Grant Peterson. Bits printed off the Internet. A couple of pages put together over the weekend by some analysts at the NCA.
Not much, but it’s a start.
There’s a profile of Volodymyr Mishchenko, the man I presume to be Alina’s father, taken from a Ukrainian business newspaper and translated by someone at the NCA.
The guy made his money in ‘extractive industries’, which seems to mean mostly iron ore and a bit of manganese. Estimated wealth: $65 million, but with the comment, ‘This figure should be taken as a very approximate guide only. The fact is that there is very little financial transparency in the Ukraine and Mishchenko’s real wealth might be a multiple of this figure.’ In 2006, the guy bought a house in Chelsea for £6 million.
Pictures too. Of Volodymyr, who just looks ordinary. One of those solid-looking faces. Not chubby exactly, nothing like that, but there’s a sort of Welsh stockiness in the bone structure. The sense that you wouldn’t have to scratch far back into the guy’s ancestry before you found a brood of peasant farmers. Men trudging behind the plough. Headscarfed women bending over the turnip harvest.
The mother – no surprise – is younger. A glamour puss doing her best to keep time at bay. The photo we have of her shows her in a golden dress at some kind of charity event. Not a trophy wife exactly, but certainly one who knows what’s expected of her and who does her best to fill the role.
And the daughter. Alina. The NCA doesn’t have, or doesn’t yet have, a great photo. But from the same charity event, they truffled up a shot of Alina in a little black dress, glass of champagne, laughing at something off-camera. Burnett studies it closely, then says, ‘What do you think?’
I say, ‘Yes. Not absolutely definitely, but I think yes, that’s her.’ The girl I spent one beautiful night with.
There’s a whole computer thing you can do, forensic facial mapping, which takes a whole host of facial measurements and determines, in theory, whether a given photo is or is not of a given subject. The trouble is that those things only work if you have a half-decent photo to work from, and this one of Alina probably isn’t good enough.
Burnett thinks the same.
He turns to a sheet at the back of the NCA package, marked ‘Known Travel Movements’.
The whole family entered the UK, travelling first class on British Airways, on 22 August of this year. Father, mother, Alina, the two sons. The father returned briefly to the Ukraine a fortnight later, and the two sons took the train to Paris, but then the two parents spent most of September in London, before flying back on the 29th.
Alina isn’t recorded as having left the UK.
I found Carlotta’s corpse on 28 October.
‘So. Interesting.’
I nod.
Burnett turns back to the top sheet of the package. Grant Peterson’s emails with Alina’s contact data.
Data that includes a phone number.
Burnett gives a little half-shrug, fills his hand with more pastry, and calls the number, phone on speaker.
A few rings rattle our silence, then a voice answers.
Burnett tells it, ‘This is Detective Inspector Alun Burnett of the Dyfed-Powys Police. Is that Mrs Mishchenko?’
It isn’t, of course. It’s a flunkey. A flunkey who says something to us in Ukrainian, then passes us on to someone else, a higher-up flunkey, one with reasonable English.
Burnett makes his request again. No pleases. No making nice.
‘May I ask what matter this may be regarding?’ says the flunkey.
‘No.’
The flunkey isn’t sure how to react. Has to go off somewhere to consult.
For a full five minutes, we listen to silence. The little gather of electrical crackle which is all that tells us of the fifteen hundred miles, underground and undersea, that separates us.
Then a man’s voice, strong and confident.
‘This is Volodymyr Mishchenko.’
Burnett re-introduces himself. Says, ‘We have information regarding your daughter.’
‘Yes?’
Burnett pauses. That little, police-ish squeeze of control, a reminder of where the power lies. Then: ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Mishchenko. I’m very sorry indeed. But I have to inform you that we have found a dead body, which we believe to be that of your daughter. In plain English, I believe your daughter is dead.’
There’s an ah from the other end of the phone. A short, sharp expression of something inescapable. An expression whose pain travels those fifteen hundred underground miles without losing even a sniff of its energy.
Burnett lets that energy dissipate a moment, then says, ‘Your daughter is missing, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Has been missing for some time?’
‘Yes. Yes, she has.’
Here, in our Carmarthen office, we exchange glances. Until this phone call, it had remained quite possible that our Californian nose doctor had simply misidentified Carlotta. Perfectly possible, indeed, that I’d driven this whole inquiry down a muddy dead-end track, simply because I was too fixed, too obsessive to let a good corpse escape my grasp.
But Mishchenko’s reactions more or less kill that hypothesis. It’s clear that he had almost been expecting – almost wanting? – this call.
But, though Burnett is good, Mishchenko is hardly a pushover.
He asks for more information, asks to know the details.
Burnett says, ‘Mr Mishchenko, I’m very sorry, but we don’t yet know that you’re the father. I’m afraid we will need you and your wife to give us a formal ID.’
A tiny pause, then Mishchenko: ‘Good, OK, I understand. You can send through photo and my wife and I—’
‘Mr Mishchenko, we can’t release the body for burial without a positive ID. That means – I’m sorry, sir – you’ll need to be here in person. Our coroner will insist.’
That’s not true, in fact, but it’s close enough to serve. And Mishchenko gives way, almost without further resistance. There’s a brief pause, one where the silence creaks with his thinking, but when he speaks, he simply says, ‘OK. OK, we come.’
Burnett signs off, then looks up at me with a look of triumph. He wasn’t, I can see, expecting this outcome.
Nor was I. As well as triumph, there’s a brief dart of something else in Burnett’s face. A savage pleasure. I think of Len Roberts as he skinned and gutted his badger. That wild look, that quickly moving blade.
He had his kill and we, for the first time, have the scent of ours.
18
The Mishchenkos come, and come fast. Fly out the next day, Tuesday. Make an appointment to see us on Wednesday.
See us, that is, in Cardiff not Carmarthen, to Burnett’s grumbly annoyance. It’s ultimately his call, of course, but Carlotta’s corpse is still here in the Cardiff mortuary and it makes sense to interview the parents while they’re still in the shock of that contact. Not just that, but we have more resources of every sort than does Carmarthen, including – sort of – a Ukrainian speaker, so Burnett arranges things for Cardiff, then grumbles at having done it.
I don’t care. He can grumble.
I take the parents to see their daughter’s corpse. The parents, Volodymyr and Olexandra Mishchenko, plus a lawyer they’ve brought with them from London. A British citizen of Ukrainian origin, Anna Tymczyszyn.
The father looks like he did in his photo, the way he sounded on the phone. Confident, alpha-male-ish. Late fifties, but exuding enough authority to make up for any loss of energy.
The mother, Olexandra, is more interesting. She’s nervous. Unsettled and unhappy. Plainly dislikes the mortuary’s grimly clinical surroundings. The strangely polished, unsettlingly lit rooms where our British corpses come to rest.
For all her grief, she remains self-possessed. She’s older than she looked in that NCA folder – our information has her age at forty-eight – but she�
��s ridden the waves of time the way she’d have wanted to. Good skin, good hair. No doubt plenty of surgical support as well. The same blonde roundness as her daughter, though dried out a little by years and sun and diets. She’s wearing a dark-grey dress and matching jacket. A black pearl necklace, half obscured.
A mortuary assistant prepares the corpse on a gurney. Unveils her.
That jabbing ah again. Volodymyr, and Olexandra too. The mother’s shock is almost instantly replaced by a dissolution of tears. An undoing.
I feel a stupid ache of jealousy. This may be their daughter, but she is my corpse. It wasn’t them who kept vigil through that first windswept night of Carlotta’s death. Not them who tracked this woman by the rhinoplasty scar beneath her almost-perfect nose.
I want to ask the parents to step back. Want to take my rightful place by the dead woman’s hair. Feel its fall again. The icy smoothness of her folded hands.
But I don’t. I’m good. Every inch the calm professional.
The parents give us a formal identification, then Tymczyszyn and I stand back. Clones of each other, almost. Pencil skirts, matching jackets, dark court shoes, unfussy white shirts. Tymczyszyn’s suit is midnight black, mine only charcoal grey, but we look like what we are. Professional escorts at this grim rite. Sombre, respectful, paid.
The parents take twenty minutes – longer than most, much longer – then pull away. Volodymyr wants to come straight to Cathays, get our interview over and done with, but Olexandra needs time. A fancy lunch somewhere, so she can cry into folded linen, re-do her make-up away from these mortuary smells, the silent dead.
I don’t want to pause, but there’s no force I can apply so, out in the car park, I negotiate a new interview time with Tymczyszyn, then watch the three Ukrainians vanish in the lawyer’s Audi.
I get back to an angrily impatient Burnett.
He stares out through the internal glass wall of our little conference room, the semi-opened blind. We’re on the second floor here, my normal working space, not the upper floor where Operation April once happened.
‘Thing is, it’s this sort of thing that tends to piss us off in Dyfed-Powys. We get a case. We work it properly. Then all of a sudden the key interviews are happening in Cardiff. The times get changed. I’m kept waiting around. And, in the end, whose case is this?’
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 13
