We go over to our car. The crappy green Mondeo that seems even crappier here, in these surroundings.
Gerraghty says, ‘Andriy, the son who was studying in Paris, has terminated his studies. He’s now living in Kiev under a twenty-four-hour armed guard. Roman, the other boy, is still in Berlin, still working for the same mining company, but he too is under twenty-four-hour protection. Volodymyr and Olexandra, the same. They have a bullet-proof car. Armed guards on duty all the time. It’s a fucked-up way to live and it’s fucked for ever.’
He tails off, but he isn’t done.
Blue eyes, steady gaze.
‘Unless you get the bastards. You want to know why they came to Cardiff? Why they let me speak to you? So you can do your job and get the bastards.’
28
Get the bastards: if I had a motto, it would be something like that, only in Latin of course. Posh but violent: I’d like that.
For now, though, our efforts at getting the bastards are focused on a muddy bit of hill above Llanglydwen. The next day, Saturday, I arrive before Burnett.
Get a torch and a joint from the car. Climb up through the sheep-chopped field, the wire fence, the overhanging tree, the wood which thins out as it rises.
When I arrive at my pond, its unwinking brown eye has changed. Somebody has been here. My excavations have been cleaned, tidied, deepened. The little bank that retains the pool is still there, just, but a neat V-shaped channel is ready to spill the waters downhill. The mattock and spade aren’t where I last left them – muddy-handled, lying on the ground – but leaning up against a tree, their handles shining in the half-sun.
It’s Roberts, of course, and I can’t help looking around to see if I can see his chuckling smile, his wild beard. I see nothing, though that doesn’t mean he’s not here somewhere.
I climb down the hill far enough that I can get a view of the road below. Sit there smoking and watching, just happy to be here.
It’s beautiful. On days like today, you notice that nothing is ever only brown. You can see where bare branches are budding purple or green at the tips. The bronze of bracken, the blue light in the shadows of stone walls.
A kestrel floats into the wind, riding the rolling level. Sandy feathers tipped with black.
Down below me, a Mondeo arrives. Parks up. I flip my joint – only three-quarters smoked – away. Wave at Burnett as he steps out, finds his bearings.
He trudges up the field towards me and I take him over the fence by the ash tree. Up to the pond.
He surveys the excavations.
‘Bloody hell. You have been busy.’
I wave a hand at the tools. ‘Do you want to do the honours?’
Burnett says yes, which is just as well because my hands have the dull red fire that, I now know, comes from having too many mud-filled blisters.
He starts to hack away at the last little wall of earth.
There’s not much to do now. The job’s already mostly done. A few good blows with the mattock and the water starts to spill. The pond, for the first time since I’ve seen it, drains a few inches.
Burnett keeps going. He doesn’t avoid the mud any more than I did and it’s worse now because there’s more water around.
Burnett hacks. The pool drains.
But even as it drains, the water keeps coming. The pond refills from somewhere we can’t yet see.
Eight inches down.
Half the surface area of the pond is now exposed, or almost. Soft mud open to the unfamiliar sun. Tiny worms wriggling away from the air.
Burnett keeps going.
Eighteen inches down and only the deepest part of the pool is still closed to us.
Burnett doesn’t talk now. Partly the effort, but also that he’s in the grip of this same thing. I badly want to go and find the joint that I flipped away, but don’t do it. Once I think I do see Roberts peering at us from the undergrowth to our east but, if so, he vanishes again when he sees me stare.
And, finally, we do it.
Drain the damn pond.
A stream tumbles away from us down the slope. Not a huge one, but a steady one. A stream that comes from beneath the little cliff itself. With the water gone, you can see the thing. There’s a little black-shadowed overhang right at the bottom. A litter of loose rock in its mouth. Water burbles out from around the rocks. A trickle that never stops.
Burnett says, ‘If that stream keeps flowing now, why wasn’t it flowing before?’
I say, ‘It was. But it was flowing somewhere else. Underground. It just found some other exit.’
‘Do you know where?’
I shake my head.
Burnett digs until the pond no longer exists. Aside from a few little puddles of water, the original pool has disappeared. Burnett gets down on his hands and knees in the mud and drags the loose rock away from beneath the little overhang.
It doesn’t take much dragging.
Burnett peers into the opening he’s created and says, ‘Fuck.’
I pass him my torch. He shines it into the opening, repeats the swear word, then says, ‘Take a look.’
I step down into the mud. Hands and knees. Peer along the line of the torch beam.
A low, black tunnel retreating into the bowels of the hill.
You couldn’t see the tunnel before, because it was blocked by a mouthful of water and rock, the way water fills the U-bend under an ordinary domestic sink. Now that we’ve drained the water and cleared the rock, we see the whole length of tunnel shining clear.
There are no bones. No corpse-of-Bethan-Williams. Just wet rock, shining like whale flanks in the torchlight. I can’t even tell how far the passage extends. At the limit of the torch beam, the rock seems to turn. Into a dead-end, perhaps. Or possibly not.
There’s only one way to find out, but it’s not a way that appeals to us right now. Not without preparation. Not without equipment.
Burnett looks at me.
He says, ‘The passage was flooded.’
I say, ‘Yes, they’d have had to get wet. They’d have had to go underwater.’
‘Right. But what then?’
I pull away from the mouth of the hole. Pull well away and say, ‘You’re closer.’
‘You’re smaller.’
‘You’re the senior officer. This is your investigation.’
He says, ‘Right. I’m senior. Exactly. So look, just . . . just bloody do it.’
I just bloody do it.
Squelch down into the soft mud. I’m lying on my belly, eye-level with that darkly dripping opening. I squirm through. It’s tight, but not ridiculous.
From a dark slot at the back of the tunnel, a bubbling spring produces a little stream that rolls out to the clear air. I’m not quite sure where those waters drained before we cut the hillside open, but there are any number of cracks and fissures which could have provided drainage.
From outside, Burnett’s voice asks, ‘Well? Can you stand?’
He wants to know if the passage was flooded to the roof – in which case, it’s inconceivable that Bethan Williams ever voluntarily made this dive. But the line of the water is clearly marked on the walls. A light-brown silt mark rippling along the rock. And though I can’t stand, I can kneel upright with my head only half-bent under the low roof, well above the level of that now-drained water. The rest of the passage varies in height, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but was never wholly submerged.
If Bethan Williams did make the dive that dark night, she only had to duck down under this one canopy of rock – the dip of the U-bend – before emerging again. Beyond that point, she’d have been able to squat or crawl or kneel, her head in the air, able to breathe normally.
I tell Burnett what I’ve found.
My voice echoes in here like a sound chamber, a pebble rolled in a stone bucket. Burnett’s voice, by contrast, comes from another world. A world where the light hovers blue and green and dusty gold.
From that far-off planet, the voice says, ‘And the tunnel? Does it
go further?’
‘I thought I was only checking head heights, sir. Did I mention that you’re the SIO?’
‘Fiona . . .’
That’s his just bloody do it voice, so I just bloody do it.
The passage has an inch or two of cold water burbling through it, but I crawl on through.
My stupid, crappy LED torch in my right hand. Silver-blue light on black rock. Jonah crawling in the belly of the whale.
Those Aberfan schoolchildren, buried under rock.
I get to the end of that first straight run. The tunnel does a dog-leg, but continues. Behind me somewhere, twelve yards and a million miles way, Burnett’s head looms at the little opening, blocking the light. I feel a sudden rush of terror, as though someone were stopping the passage.
I jerk instinctively in alarm and hit my head sharply against a shark’s fin of projecting rock. Get that temporary white-black flash which accompanies head pain. Disorientation. Drop my torch, rub my head, feel what I think is a red wetness of blood, though since I’m wet enough already, it’s hard to tell.
I crouch there, swearing as my pulse rate calms.
A cool air moves against my face. Burnett is saying something, but I can’t tell what.
After a bit, I call to him. ‘Yes, the tunnel goes on, and no, I’m not going further.’
He says something else, but I can’t tell what.
I move to come out, but realise that the passage is tight enough, I can’t simply turn. I can’t raise my head above a kind of high-crawl position and the passage is narrow enough that I can’t twist round that way.
I feel a tide of panic. That quick, dark surge.
Take control, woman. Get a grip.
I get a grip.
Crawl backwards a yard or two, until I’m in a place where I can rise into a low crouch, twist round and head back for the light.
Squeeze out into the golden world, this blue-green planet spinning on its own in the darkness. Get far enough out into the opening, that Burnett can get a big hand under my arm and haul me out and upwards.
He says, ‘Are you OK? Did you bang yourself?’
I don’t answer. Just clamber back out of the dank pond-bottom. Sit on a pile of grey scree looking down into the hole. My whole front is wet. Muddy and wet.
I wish, I really wish, I had that joint with me now. Without the calming, collecting weed, my thoughts feel scattered. A field of sheep, disturbed by foxes.
Burnett looks at me closely. Says, ‘Go on. Talk to me.’
I say, ‘Um.’
That, and possibly, ‘Uh.’
Burnett looks at me like he wants more and, eventually, when my brain sort-of catches up with my body, when it re-orients itself in this world, I say, ‘Look, Bethan Williams didn’t leave the valley by road. She didn’t leave it over the hills. This whole damn place was surrounded by the best damn surveillance team you could ask for and she just vanished.
‘So, OK, so Roberts could have killed and buried her – but buried her where? He didn’t have much time and you guys put massive resources into finding any grave, any place of deep water or disturbed earth. And how often does a body actually vanish under those circumstances? I’m going to say, just about never.’
I continue. Set out the various thoughts that led me here.
Tell him that Len Roberts still keeps a Petzl headtorch. That’s the leading lighting brand for extreme sports. The brand used by any serious caver.
The neoprene too. Wetsuit material. Cavers always keep spare, so they can mend any snags and tears in their suits.
And this pond itself. Why did Roberts take Bethan Williams to this particular section of hillside? It’s not especially close to his cottage. The rocks and the hills and the woods extend along the valley for a mile or more. If he just wanted a patch of woodland, this section here had nothing much to recommend it.
I say, ‘When I came here to drain it, I assumed the water would just empty out. That I’d get a chance to take a proper look. But when it didn’t drain, that proved to me there was a lot more happening here than we could see. Something like that, for example,’ I add, pointing at the tunnel. ‘And you know, your officer, Ceri someone-or-other, the one who told us about the monks. He reminded us that Llanglydwen is only a few miles away from Pen-y-cae, the caving place.’
Burnett swears gently to himself. I know the feeling: when a clue thumps you in the nose and you don’t even notice because you don’t know how to recognise it for what it is.
He says, ‘Pen-y-bloody-Cae. The caving place.’
‘The main cave there is called Dan-yr-Ogof. And I’ve been doing some research on these places, these last few days. You want to guess how far Dan-yr-Ogof extends underground?’
‘I expect you’re about to tell me.’
‘Seventeen kilometres. Eleven miles. One of the main explorers of that system reckons the whole thing will run ninety miles once it’s fully mapped.’
‘You’re saying this . . . this . . . tunnel here connects with Dan-yr-Ogof?’
I shake my head. ‘Maybe, I’ve no idea. But this whole area is hollow with caves. Ogof Draenen measures seventy underground kilometres. Ogof Ffynnon Ddu runs to almost sixty. Agen Allwedd runs to over thirty. And there are dozens more as well, a whole sweep of them. The whole southern edge of the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains. The chain runs all the way to Abergavenny. Fifty or sixty caves easily and that’s only the ones we know about.’
Burnett joins me on the scree. Says, ‘Fuck.’
Says, ‘Times like this, I’d kill for a cigarette.’
I tell him he doesn’t have to kill anyone. Also – and this is really Murder Planning 1.01 – he shouldn’t announce his intentions beforehand, particularly to a detective sergeant whose specialism is in major crime.
I go to my car. Make a roll-up for Burnett. Make a roll-up for me, and sprinkle just the wee ittiest bit of resin over my tobacco. Take my booty uphill.
We sit on rocks and light up. Once we have our favourite addictive substances floating in our bloodstream, Burnett says, ‘So. Your theory?’
I shrug. Don’t have one, not really. But I do say, ‘Bethan Williams didn’t walk up this hill unwillingly. She didn’t think she was walking to her rape and murder.’
‘Plenty of victims don’t.’
Which is true. But how many rapists get their victims to crawl through an underwater opening as a prelude to their crime?
We both feel the pressure of the dark tunnel which snakes into the hillside behind us. Our duty will require us to crawl that route. Not this morning. Not today even. But sometime soon.
Burnett shudders. Asks, ‘How are you with enclosed spaces?’
‘Fine.’
‘Really? The thought of that thing doesn’t creep you out?’
‘I’m fine with enclosed spaces, so long as they’re lit, heated and in possession of doors, windows and, ideally, tea-making facilities. That thing creeps me out like all seven shades of fuck.’
Burnett laughs.
Flips his ciggy away into the damp leaves curling up against the tumble of scree below us.
‘How did Roberts even know it was there? I mean, you dug for a week to find it.’
‘The water level. If that pool is effectively just part of a stream that drains away somewhere else inside the hill, then its water level would never change. If there was a drought, the water level wouldn’t fall because the stream would replenish it. If it rained all month, the water level wouldn’t rise, because the stream would go on draining the excess in the normal way. Most people wouldn’t notice those things and wouldn’t be able to make sense of them if they did. But Len Roberts and his brother knew this valley, every inch.’
‘That’s still theory. You don’t actually know that Roberts knows anything about caving.’
‘Which Roberts?’
‘Len Roberts.’ Burnett shoots me a look. ‘What do you mean which one?’
‘Len always stayed here in this valley. Never moved. But
his brother went on to Swansea University. Became a regular member of the South Wales Caving Club. They tell me he was among their most active members. Geraint died a couple of years back in a cave diving accident in Austria. No funny circumstances, as far as I know, just a dangerous sport claiming its victims.’
‘Fuck.’
For a while, we just sit there. Enjoying the free air, the empty air, the gold, the blue, the green.
Burnett says, ‘They’re connected, aren’t they? The Bethan Williams case and this Mishchenko one.’
I nod. Take away the Roberts-as-rapist theory, and what do you have left?
He grimaces. Gropes as though looking for another ciggy, then moves his hands in an oh-sod-it sort of way.
He says, ‘So, eight years ago, when Bethan Williams vanished, we thought we had a simple little case. We assumed we were looking for a child-rapist-murderer type, and we just went about that investigation in the normal way. But now we know about the kidnap, and we know from Gerraghty that these kidnaps have been going on for years, so that obliges us to consider an alternative hypothesis. A hypothesis such as, for example, Bethan Williams stumbled on some information regarding the Welsh end of this kidnap operation and was either silenced or forced to run.’
I nod.
Yes. I always like the moment when senior officers come round to my way of thinking. I should find some way to mark the moment. Ring a silver bell or strike a small commemorative medal.
Burnett sighs and continues. ‘And your idea is that if you’d been running the London end of this kidnap operation, you’d have some natural concern about Bethan Williams. You’d want to know whether she had any incriminating information. You might even want to try finding her before the police caught up with her.’
‘Exactly. In any case, I’d be pretty damn sure to come up here and check things out.’
‘And you wouldn’t especially be worried about being seen by local police, because we were all so busy looking at what we took to be a child abduction case we wouldn’t have any interest in any Londoners dropping by for a visit.’
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 20
