Burnett nods. Long you’ve-made-a-good-point-there nods.
He stares down at her business card. ‘Miss . . . Tym Cwsyn,’ he says, neatly fitting her name into something Welsh, or Welsh enough.
She wonders whether to adjust his pronunciation, but decides against. A good call.
Burnett: ‘Absolutely. You’re quite right. Your clients are here of their own free will.’ He waves a big hand at the door. ‘If they wish to leave, they can do so at any time. In the meantime, if you don’t mind, we’ll collect the information which would have been very helpful had it been offered at a much earlier stage in our investigation.’
And on we go.
Names, places, phone numbers, dates.
On the other side of the glass, in the viewing room, the two constables will be starting to get those things checked. Seeking to verify facts or prove them false. Their half of this game is at least as important as the one we’re leading.
The story, as it emerges, is this. Alina stayed with a friend in London overnight, then drove down to Southampton, intending to cruise down to the French Mediterranean coast, from where she would, when she felt like it, fly back to Kiev.
It turned out, however, that the yacht had a problem with one of its engines and, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Alina chose to return to London instead, staying partly with friends, partly at her parents’ Chelsea house. The Mishchenkos didn’t keep close tabs on their daughter’s movements. As they say, Alina was twenty-three and perfectly able, in theory, to look after herself. Their last contact with her was 5 October. They say they didn’t start to be concerned until 9 October.
‘You had no specific reason to fear for her safety?’
‘No.’
‘None at all?’
‘No.’
‘Had she ever been out of contact for this long before?’
‘Maybe sometime yes,’ Olexandra tells us, ‘but there was big party on that Saturday – ’ she means the 11th – ‘and we are mother, daughter. We always talk.’
‘About . . .?’ Burnett tries to guess what Ukrainian millionairesses talk about together. ‘Dresses and that sort of thing.’
‘Yes. Dresses and this sort of thing.’
That’s Olexandra being snippy, I think, which is good. Her self-control is beginning to fail her.
Burnett thinks so too. He leans forward, pressing. ‘So. You’re concerned. You make some calls, yes?’
‘Of course.’
We take names and numbers of people called. The approximate dates. More grist for our fact-checking mill.
‘But you remain in Kiev? You don’t return to London?’
Olexandra shoots her husband a glance and runs her hand rapidly down the length of her face, stopping at her necklace. It’s an odd gesture. Hard to interpret, but maybe something that combines anxiety and a kind of good-luck gesture to herself.
She says, ‘No.’
Burnett picks up the gesture too. He pauses on it.
‘You did not return to London?’
‘Correct.’
Her mouth is drier than it was and she reaches for some water, eyes still flickering rightwards to her husband. Tymczyszyn is aware of the shift in atmosphere too, but she clearly doesn’t know what lies behind it. Her eyes are seeking out clues just the way ours are.
And the thing is, we know that they didn’t return to London. Not by scheduled aircraft anyway: we’ve already checked the passenger data. Private jets, the same thing. Either way, passports get scanned and the data gets entered.
Burnett says, ‘You stayed in the Ukraine this whole time?’
Olexandra says, ‘Yes.’ The first time, the word only just clambers out over her perfect teeth and dry lips, so she repeats it, more forcefully, ‘Yes.’
Volodymyr, during these last exchanges has been sunk back on his seat. Watchful. Deep in thought. When he hears his wife’s second ‘Yes,’ however, he rouses himself.
Leans forward. Says smoothly, ‘You are forgetting, darling. I have business trip to Paris. You also come. We stay at Hôtel Vendôme. Three night, starting fifteen October. Many phone call, of course. Most of them here. You can look.’ He pushes his phone across the table to us. ‘Then back to Kyiv. Air France both way. If you need flight number, we can find.’
Relieved, Olexandra rushes into the shelter of her husband’s slipstream. Corrects her story. Over-corrects it. It wasn’t really conceivable that she’d simply forgotten a trip to Paris – a recent trip, and one taken during a time of deep concern for her daughter’s welfare – but her anxiety to fit in with the new story makes her attempted lie even more palpable.
We probe around a bit more.
Collect more detail. More fact-check fodder.
We ask about the sons, but they’re both alive and well. One is a student in Paris, the other doing something with a German-based mining company. Both in regular contact. The Parisian one saw his parents every day during their Paris trip.
Burnett glances at me. Then picks Volodymyr’s phone up and says, ‘If you don’t mind, we will just check the call log.’
He leaves. Partly to get work done on the phone, but mostly to have a confab with the fact-checkers behind the glass.
I check over some of the data I already have, then say to Olexandra, ‘That’s a beautiful necklace. Black pearls, are they?’
‘Yes.’
She puts her hands to the back of her neck. First I think she’s intending to unclasp it, so I can see the thing up close. Then I realise, she assumes I’m asking for a bribe. That she’s about to hand the thing over. A rapid look and gesture from Tymczyszyn forestalls her and the black-pearl-shaped hole in my jewellery collection remains sadly unfilled.
The three Ukrainians speak to each other in low voices, as I go back over my notes, correcting the messiest bits.
Then Burnett returns. He’s brought some of the photos from the crime scene. Drops one of them on the table for the parents. Their daughter in partial close-up. Close enough that the candle-Bible-summer-dress arrangement is mostly hidden from view.
He keeps the rest of the stack face-down on our side of the table, but says, ‘That’s your daughter as we found her. She looked very peaceful.’
He makes a show of looking through all the other photos as though wondering how much more to disclose. Ends up revealing nothing more.
Olexandra, at this point, is quietly but profoundly sobbing. Tymczyszyn, after a moment’s hesitation, puts her hand on her client’s back. Keeps it there.
Volodymyr says, ‘Again, I say. We come very fast and very open. We ask you, please, to give us your informations, then we can go and grief in our own private.’
Burnett does the whole police shtick very well. Picks his stack of photos up. Beats it slowly, thoughtfully, on the table. Giving a good impression of a man who is considering the request with an open mind, rather than one who has carefully pre-planned his interview strategy and is now in the course of executing it.
He looks at Olexandra, as though only just now noticing her distress.
‘Mrs Mishchenko, do you need a tissue?’ Then, leaning back and talking straight into the mirrored glass, ‘Please, some tissues for Mrs Mishchenko.’
A uniform comes with a box of Kleenex. Olexandra cleans herself up, not because she really cares at this point, but because she wants Burnett to divulge all that he knows about her daughter and doesn’t want to give him any further excuse to prevaricate.
When she’s ready, Burnett says, ‘Good. OK. That’s fair. So let’s do this. I will give you my informations. All of them. Tomorrow morning, right here. Nine o’clock. In the interim, I’d really appreciate it, if you could search your memories for any other trips to Paris you might have forgotten. Any trips to anywhere at all. Also, by the way, I don’t believe your story. Sorry, but I don’t. So if you happen to remember anything overnight that might make me believe it, I’d really, really like to know. Is that clear? Yes? Is that very clear? Yes? OK. Tomorrow morning then. Ha
ve a very pleasant evening.’
20
The next morning. Nine o’clock. Same crappy interview room. Same horrible lighting.
We start, Burnett and I, bashing away at that business-trip-to-Paris story. It’s perfectly clear that we’d caught Olexandra out in a clumsy lie, one swiftly corrected by her more fluent husband. But now the new story is settled, we can’t dislodge it. The little chink we exposed yesterday is closed. The Mishchenkos have gathered confidently behind their new perimeter.
They’re right to feel confident. All our overnight fact-checking confirms that, give or take a few minor and excusable errors, the stuff we have now been told is largely accurate. Whatever it is that they’re hiding, it looks like it’s staying hidden.
So after bashing at them fruitlessly for thirty minutes or so, we relent. That’s partly because we don’t think we’ll get any further information. Partly too that we are all swayed by Olexandra’s increasing anger and distress, her husband’s pain, their lawyer’s increasing assertiveness. But also, we’re on thin ice here. Not legally, certainly not that, but in terms of possible public criticism. Coming down hard on people witholding evidence from a serious investigation: well, that’s us doing our job. But doing the same thing when the people in question are grieving parents: that’s a more delicate proposition. Truth is, if these parents had been more media-friendly – local people, not foreign millionaires – we’d have trodden more carefully still.
So we do as we promised. Hand over our information. The facts, all of them.
Mr and Mrs Mishchenko, we’re very sorry to tell you that we found your daughter dead. Lying in a churchyard in Ystradfflur. What’s that? You think our place names are hard to pronounce? Oh for fuck’s sake: you’ve got a lawyer called Tymczyszyn. Anyway. Your daughter wasn’t murdered. She had fibrotic lungs and a swollen heart. Those two things together: bad news, we’re sorry to say. A gasket waiting to blow. There’s good news too. No rape. No injury. No evidence of hostile action. No evidence that is, except that little DS Griffiths here would like to mention that your daughter’s legs had not been recently shaved and her fingernails could perhaps have been kept in better condition. Of course, there was the little matter of the candles and the Bible and the generally fairly freaky place we found her. Was she religious at all? Yes, sort of? The ‘sort of’ which means you go to church at Christmas and trace a silent cross when your plane hits a little turbulence? Right. So maybe not the sort of girl to go on silent retreats at remote Welsh monasteries. That surprises you, does it? What about her diet? Would it surprise you to learn she seemed to have an appetite for barley bread? The kind of thing that even pigs find hard to handle? Yes, we thought the same: more a champagne and caviar girl, we reckoned.
That – very approximately – is what we tell the parents. They’re frozen. Shocked. In grief. Emotions strong enough and big enough that it’s hard to tell what other thoughts or feelings might be moving beneath the ice.
We do ask a few little things. Get useful answers.
Would Alina ever go around with a substantial prickle of unshaved leg hair? No. Never. Under no circumstances.
And her nails? How did she normally wear them? Long, Olexandra tells us, and nicely looked after, holding up her own perfectly groomed mitts by way of demonstration. ‘Ah yes,’ I tell her, showing sisterly solidarity. ‘Like a Cardiff girl on a night out.’
We give them the details which will allow them to arrange for their daughter’s burial. Give them the ‘very sorry for your loss’ bullshit, which Volodymyr knows we barely mean, but which you still have to say, and go on saying, in case this interview transcript ever ends up in a courtroom.
Then we’re done. The Mishchenkos leave, Tymczyszyn with them.
Burnett, his constable and I regroup in a conference room with hot drinks and some food. The constable is called Aaron Hennessey and he has the air of a man always on the lookout for the con, an expectation of deceit.
Burnett glowers at a sandwich. ‘As long as it’s not fish paste. I hate fish paste.’
I take a bit of the fancy lettuce that the canteen now uses for garnish. I don’t eat it, but do wave it. I’m feeling buzzy and strange, but not particularly buzzier or stranger than I often feel.
I hold the lettuce up and it drips beads of cold, clear water onto my thigh.
I say, ‘They’re foreign nationals. That’s a high-risk group. They’re wealthy foreign nationals. That must make them super high-risk.’
Burnett looks at me, at the lettuce. Narrows his eyes.
Hennessey says, ‘High-risk for what?’
‘Kidnap. High-risk for kidnap. Did you know that more than half of all abductions in London involve foreign nationals? And that’s even with a lot of under-reporting, because immigrant communities don’t always trust the police.’
Burnett, who I think had already been thinking along these lines, objects. ‘Fiona, these aren’t a pair of penniless Somalis. It’s not as though the Mishchenkos don’t know how things work in the West.’
‘But that’s the point. They do know. I mean, they know how it works for them.’
That’s not very clear, so I make myself clearer. ‘Look, their experience is that the police are corrupt and untrustworthy. Mrs Mishchenko virtually tried to give me her necklace yesterday. That doesn’t mean she really thinks that’s how things work in South Wales. Probably it was only that she was frightened and not thinking straight. But the point is she’s never had to encounter our police service. Her whole life is designed to protect her from that kind of thing.
‘Only then she faces a new situation. A horrible one. Her daughter goes missing. She gets – she and her husband get – a ransom demand. A big one, probably. The kidnappers will be looking at the same rich lists as we found. So. You’re foreign. You’re rich. And someone has your daughter. What do you do?’
Burnett says, ‘You dial 999. Your daughter’s missing and you’re in the United Kingdom. You’re not in the Ukraine or Somalia or one of these places. You pick up the phone and call the police.’
I don’t agree. ‘Really? What do the Mishchenkos always do? In any situation, I mean. They get out their wallets. They look for the best of whatever the private sector has to offer. That’s their first instinct. The same one that supplies them with hotels and jets and cosmetic surgery and every other damn thing in their life. And when they find the right kind of consultant, they pay some giant retainer and say, “Let’s keep this between ourselves.” And those people are smart enough, or at least the husband is, that they held those crucial meetings in Paris. Outside our jurisdiction. Nice. Quiet. Tidy. Discreet.’
What I say has the ring of truth. I think we all see that. Were probably all thinking along broadly similar lines. But it falls to Burnett to point out the obvious flaw.
‘Right. Only our girl was praying quietly in a monastery, just a day or so before her death. No ropes. No chains. No thugs with guns.’
Me: ‘Was supposedly praying quietly.’
‘Not supposedly. The forensics boys have pinned her to that place.’
‘They haven’t pinned her to that time.’
‘No. But we have the testimony of half a dozen damn monks. I mean – ’ he laughs – ‘you could think of stronger witnesses, but not really. Six monks, for God’s sake.’
That’s not quite true, as it happens. As Burnett himself noted at the time, there was something just a bit flaky about the monks’ ability to make the identification, to define the exact time frame. But that’s not the part I take issue with.
I say, ‘Not that place even. What do we have? Really? We have a bit of tissue, some hairs, a cotton thread. The doors aren’t locked or monitored. And those hairs and things could have been planted there by anyone at any time. When we examined the shower waste, we found nothing. And there’s no way that our Alina wouldn’t have taken a shower in the two days she was there.’
‘The barley seed,’ says Burnett. ‘You’re saying someone forcefed her with barley t
o make us think she was in Llanglydwen? That’s not plausible. She must have been there.’
Hennessey looks at the pair of us sparring. I don’t think Burnett even disagrees with what I said about kidnap. He just wants to make sure we’ve tested out the logic. That we’re aware of the holes.
Into the silence, Hennessey says, ‘The private sector? What do you mean the private sector?’
Burnett stares, narrow-eyed, at his colleague. ‘The K&R consultancies,’ he says. ‘Kidnap and Ransom. Control Risks, people like that.’
I don’t know if I say or only breathe my own answer. But the answer in my head, the one that hisses down the pipes of my consciousness, the one that chatters in my blood, is ‘Yes. Exactly. Control Risks and people like that.’
And I think that my corpse – my beautiful, beautiful corpse – has finally found her crime.
21
Two days later. London. The NCA headquarters in Tinworth Street.
There’s nothing wrong with the building, really nothing, except it all feels too careful. Disabled ramps and anti-terrorist steel bollards and efficient heating and low-energy lighting.
The whole damn thing feels too safe, too cautious. I’d prefer a building that really went for it, in no matter what direction. Some granite-blocked, carved-lion, fuck-you assertion of state power. Or one of those government complexes that seem barely to have limped out of the Second World War, all crumbling grandeur and tin Nissen Huts. Or, sod it, we’re in South London: why not some crappy 1960s towerblock squatting over a retail arcade crammed with Poundstretcher shops and no-brand fried chicken outlets?
Burnett does something with security passes.
I’m feeling spacey, the sharpest attack I’ve had for some time. I can’t really feel my body. I try to act and sound normal. I do whatever Burnett tells me to do. He gives me a sign-in thing and a pen. I drop the pen. Bump my head on the desk when I try to pick it up.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 15
