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

by Harry Bingham

  So I lie in his arms and wait, shivering, for morning. And when morning comes – the luminous tick of Burnett’s stupid watch creeping round to seven o’clock – I know what I’m doing.

  We wake.

  Talk ourselves through another meal, this one a huge cooked breakfast with side-orders of everything. Coffee for Burnett, tea for me, but the real sort of tea, caffeinated and everything.

  ‘Go crazy, why not?’ says Burnett, approving of my recklessness as he eats another farmhouse sausage with his fingers.

  ‘You’ve got bacon fat on your chin,’ I tell him.

  ‘I haven’t finished eating yet. Food tastes better from your fingers.’

  Then – serious face – he wishes me good luck. Tells me with a tone that has already given up. Is already preparing for death.

  I say, ‘Good luck yourself, mate.’ I can’t stop myself from grinning.

  ‘You’re cheerful.’

  ‘Don’t know about you, but I’m planning to fuck off out of here.’

  I have another joint. I’ve not smoked as much as this in a long old while, but I’ve not lost the knack, it seems.

  Burnett wants to know why I’m in a good mood. I show him his watch. ‘It’s morning. A bright new day.’

  When I stand up, I stumble. Light-headed from cold, from lousy sleep, from lack of food, from too much ganja. Burnett watches my stumble. He says nothing, but recalculates his odds. Revises them down from puny to nothing at all. His face saddens but stays brave.

  ‘When you get out,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Forget the Christmas turkey and all that. You can order me a plate of roast lamb. Spuds. Veggies. Bottle of wine. One of those old-fashioned puddings to follow.’

  ‘Treacle sponge?’ I say, ‘That kind of thing? Spotted dick, rhubarb crumble, bread and butter pudding?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes to all that. And cream and custard and ice cream and coffee, please. You can bung the lot on expenses.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me mentioning it, sir, your arteries won’t thank you for that. Maybe lighten up on the dairy products?’

  ‘Bugger my arteries, sergeant.’

  ‘Bugger your arteries. Yes, sir. They’re your blood vessels after all.’

  We say goodbye. One of those adventure movie, stumble-out-into-the-night goodbyes, the sort of thing that makes my father cry every single time.

  I walk off down the cavern.

  Burnett thinks he’ll never see me again.

  36

  But it’s not hard. If Burnett hadn’t been preoccupied with his own demise – or his own demise plus lots of puddings – he’d have seen it too.

  I get to April, her forking little chamber. Blow its guardian angel a kiss. A fond smile. Then take the smaller passage, the left-hand fork of the Y, the part I explored yesterday evening.

  Yesterday. December the nineteenth. Near enough the shortest day of the year. And I was here in the hours of night.

  I head for Carlotta. Her grand chamber. Her rippling, silent sepulchre.

  Stand there on the edge of the black water.

  It’s ten o’clock, or almost.

  Broad daylight outside, wherever outside may happen to be. Birds cheeping. Trees waving. Sheep baa-ing.

  Outside.

  Murmuring a little prayer of hopefulness, I close my eyes. Turn my torch off. Keep my eyes closed long enough for them to become accustomed to the absolute dark.

  In my explorations yesterday, I explored every damn yard of this whole damned cave system. Perhaps something, some minor little tubule, evaded my attentions, but I don’t think so. I truly don’t think so.

  And how do you hide an exit? The same way you hide an entrance.

  And how, from the inside, do you figure out what’s entrance and what’s exit? Well, sometimes the best answers are the simplest and I’m about to try the simplest method of all.

  I count one minute. Then two minutes.

  I want my eyes to have the absolute maximum sensitivity to light.

  And when I reopen my eyes, I see – something.

  Not an absolute blackness, but, for the first time, a shimmer of something like silver in the dark.

  Walk towards it.

  Ankle-deep. Calf-deep. Thigh-deep.

  I struggle out of my blue-and-black nylon outer. Leave it floating on the water. A shadow corpse, the ghost of me.

  When I start swimming, I barely even notice or care about the water’s cold embrace.

  The silver thickens. Brightens.

  As I approach the end of the chamber, Carlotta watching in silence above me, I see a split in the roof. The split was there last night, but its interior, its further end, stood invisible in the darkness.

  It’s not invisible any more. Through that rift – high, narrow and inaccessible – comes a glitter. I can’t see the sky directly, but through that narrow opening comes the reflection of the reflection of the reflection of daylight.

  Roberts came to this chamber and he saw that glitter too.

  Knew that this chamber was butting up close to the flank of the mountain. Knew that if he could find an exit from this chamber large enough to take a human, that exit would quite likely emerge into the open air.

  How do you hide an exit? The same way you hide an entrance.

  I reach the end wall on its leftmost flank. My torch back on now, I swim cautiously round the rim searching downwards all the time.

  And see it. By the light of my torch, I see it.

  An orange rope.

  Underwater.

  Four feet down.

  I take a deep breath. Ask Carlotta to guard me. And dive.

  37

  Dive down, grab the rope.

  My light fails the moment my head goes underwater, but I don’t need light now. If I’m right, I’m about to get as much light as I can handle.

  I grab the rope. Let my body settle into a roughly horizontal line. Then gently pull.

  The rope is anchored to something. To what, I can’t see. But I pull gently, sliding myself along. From above, the line looked like it was running straight into the wall of the chamber but, though my helmet scrapes scarily on a low ceiling, my forward movement is unimpeded.

  I move, slowly, hand over hand through the cold water.

  After – what? – four yards, five?, my head raps against stone.

  Panic, instant and complete engulfs me. I yank hard on the rope. I tug at it, thrashing around to see if I can evade the rock that’s now obstructing me.

  I can’t. The rope is fixed to some underwater block of stone and there’s no way round, or none that I can find.

  The panic lasts only a moment.

  I laugh at myself, or would do if that wouldn’t mean swallowing a few pints of cold, Welsh hill water.

  Instead I ease myself up. Let go of the rope. Allow myself to float upwards.

  Once my helmet hits rock, nudging me sideways. There’s a momentary ding of alarm, but not the panic there was before. Carlotta can’t follow me here, but she’s laughing. Gently sad to see me go, but pleased for me as well.

  I open my eyes. There’s still water above me, but it’s not black, not the colour of water rising into rock.

  A thin plate of grey, glazed with silver.

  I swim up and burst through.

  Into air. Into light.

  I’m in a little pool encased by a low cave tunnel. The pool is small – a few yards across, nothing more – and I swim and stumble to the little shore.

  Lie down, panting. Thank fuck. That kind of panting. I can’t yet see the outside world, but its light fills this little place. Grey and silver and with shades of green and gold and every good colour that exists in this world above ground.

  I feel Carlotta now only as a faint regret. A lingering sadness.

  When I’m done panting, I crawl slowly to the exit. Stand when I can.

  Stand in the mouth of this short and stubby cave – this cave which looks like a dead-end, closed off by this flat,
unimportant bit of water – and look out at an ordinary Welsh scene. Winter fields, their grasses bleached by time and frost. The brown studs of molehills, prickled with silver. Winter trees, leafless, but beautiful. And God’s own sky, arched and blue and puffy white and everywhere.

  Downhill from me, there are some men planting a hedge. Ripping out some old, dead stumps. Planting saplings that will live another fifty years. They have a Land Rover and a wood-chipper and what looks hellishly like a flask of hot tea.

  38

  It takes four hours to assemble a rescue team. That’s slow-going in one way, but it’s the weekend before Christmas and the resources needed are fairly specialist.

  Two cavers up from Swansea. Both seriously skilled. Each with a ton of experience in cave-diving and cave rescue. Both of them friends or, at any rate, good acquaintances of Rhydwyn Lloyd. Speaking of him with the solemn respect that only the newly dead enjoy.

  Also, a paramedic with expedition experience. Karakoram. Himalayas.

  A collapsible stretcher. Sub-aqua gear. Pain medication. Some kind of full-torso strapping, heavily padded. A 1000-lumen halogen lamp, in addition to top-end Petzl head-torches and extra thermal clothing for Burnett who’ll be very cold by now.

  And food. Because I didn’t have much to do for those four hours, I spent the first one getting warm. The hedging guys, having heard some fraction of my story, made me sit in their Land Rover under a blanket that smelled strongly of dog, but with the heating switched to max, and hot tea in my hand, and eating the sandwiches that they’d brought for lunch.

  My first phone calls, made with a borrowed phone, were to Jackson. Protocol probably required me to speak to Carmarthen but, sod that, I don’t know anyone there, not properly, and if I wanted anyone to arrange a complex rescue operation at short notice, and on the weekend before Christmas at that, it would be Dennis Jackson.

  Thereafter, and with Jackson’s growly, commanding energy on the case, I knew I could take it easy.

  So – bandying Jackson’s name around as needed – I got two uniformed constables from Neath to take me to an M&S store. There, I bought a packet of slow-roast lamb shanks with honey-glazed root vegetables and a red wine jus that presumably just means the same as juice. And a portion of ready-made mashed potato, with a cheddar cheese crust. And a bottle of Aussie plonk that’s on special offer. And a chocolate fudge pudding that serves three to four. And a bread-and-butter pudding with cinnamon and nutmeg and sultanas and candied orange peel. And an apple crumble, because they didn’t have rhubarb. And a pint of double cream. And a pot of fresh custard. But no ice cream because, in all sober truth, ice cream seemed like a quite impractical request on Burnett’s part and I don’t think he’ll be cross with me if I substitute with custard. And I sent one of the constables to buy some proper metal cutlery from a kitchen shop down the road, because the stupid plastic things that M&S offer me are no use to man or beast, as I told the perfectly nice headscarfed woman who serves me. Get the same copper to buy a flask and have it filled with coffee at one of those chain coffee shops, with plenty of milk and sugar and cream, as I don’t want the boss to get snarky with me just because I have a natural and – just my view – appropriate concern for his arteries. One of the coppers drops by at a friend’s house and comes away with a little camping stove and some basic cooking equipment, which means Burnett will be able to eat his goodies sort-of hot instead of cave-interior cold.

  I put my booty in a bag, along with the various receipts, so Burnett can start my expenses claim promptly.

  When I meet the rescue team up at the exit chamber, I make them stuff the whole lot into their tackle bags and tell them to serve it properly, and to mind he gets the paperwork.

  The rescue party wants to know where it’s going of course, and I sketch the cave out for them. The whole system. Every chamber, every turn, every forking twist.

  I don’t think my map is to scale, but it has every notable feature marked and I can see one of the cave-divers is looking at me quizzically.

  ‘You’ve been in this cave once?’ he asks.

  I ignore the question. I want to tell him to go gently at April’s little junction. She’s only six, now and for ever, and she needs gentleness, but I don’t know how to say that in a way these guys would understand.

  The first diver – properly wet-suited, no furry undersuits for him – drops into my little hole, finds the rope and disappears. A minute later, he’s back again, confirming that what I’d said about the underwater tunnel was all correct. Then the two divers negotiate the stretcher and various tackle bags through the tunnel. Come back and escort the paramedic.

  I wave them off.

  The two uniformed constables from Neath are in a car on the lane sixty yards below me. They thought they should stay with me, as though I were some precious vase with complicated insurance. But I want the solitude, not the insurance.

  The solitude, the silence, and a final joint.

  Lean against the little cliff and smoke.

  Sheep, fields and hedges stretched out under this chilly northern sun.

  When you have things, are used to always having them, you forget to value them. Greens and golds and blues and the faint violet buds on these bare December branches. Those things and this freely moving air. These scents of freedom.

  I’m still in my stupid furry suit and nylon belt, but I now have a thick police jacket over the top and my legs have dried out and a nice female police officer from Neath lent me a bobble hat that is red and white and has a Christmas tree stitched in green.

  I think about our case.

  The thing about making a big move, the way our kidnappers did when they blew up the tunnel, is that you have to get it right. Get it right and the kidnappers would have wiped out the two lead investigators. The whole cave thing would have looked like a distraction: the system clearly too dangerous to allow safe passage. Bethan Williams: she too would have looked like a red herring. The kidnap ring itself, well, presumably, for safety’s sake, they’d uproot the Welsh end of the operation and replant it elsewhere in Britain. Everything else would go on as before.

  But screw things up, as these guys did, and the situation looks very different.

  With only a little luck, we’ll be able to identify the explosive used. Try to track a supplier. Attempt forensics at the mouth of the cave. See if we can pick up traces of someone other than myself, Burnett and the poor, dead Rhydwyn Lloyd.

  Those things, plus there are now two police forces who will be super-committed to deploying every possible resource to catching these bastards.

  And Bethan Williams. It’s pretty much certain now that she made it out of Llanglydwen alive. Unless something strange happened thereafter, she’s more than likely alive now. Getting on with her new life, under a new name, that old past already fading into something a little like barely plausible myth.

  Will we find her? Get her to tell us what she knows?

  I don’t know. Eight years is a long time, but I’m more optimistic than not.

  In the lane below, a car stops.

  A police Range Rover. One driver. Not in uniform.

  It’s DCI Jackson. He’s about to ask the two uniforms for help, but peers up the hill first and I wave at him. He waves back.

  Reluctantly, reluctantly, I take a last drag on my joint and flick it away from me. Get out my boring tobacco roll-ups.

  Jackson doesn’t smoke normally, but he makes an exception when it comes to corpses and we’re near enough corpses here, I reckon.

  He stumps up the hill, looking his age.

  ‘Afternoon,’ he says, when he comes into range.

  ‘It’s a nice one,’ I agree.

  ‘You in one piece?’

  I nod. Give him a ciggy. We light up. Backs against Welsh rock looking out over a world full of good Welsh light.

  For a while, a good while, we don’t speak.

  ‘Christmas shopping today. That’s what the missus had planned. You got me out of that one.�
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  I give him a proud to serve sort of gesture, but don’t really put my back into it.

  Christmas shopping: what I should have been doing too. And I should have been with my parents last night. My mam will have been upset with me.

  Oh, well.

  ‘Your man, Burnett. He’ll be OK, will he?’

  I say, ‘Yes, I think so.’

  His rib injuries looked horrendous, but in the context a few painfully broken bones hardly signify. And I’m fairly sure that if he had a punctured lung, we’d have known all about it by this morning.

  ‘Cold?’ asks Jackson.

  ‘Yes, he’ll be cold. But – ’ I shrug in that way you have to do if you’re saying something a bit delicate about someone’s weight – ‘he carries more padding than I do, and I survived.’

  Jackson asks a bit more, then dismisses the issue. Nothing to be done but wait.

  He bums another roll-up.

  Lights up, inhales, exhales.

  ‘He’s worked with you, but lived to tell the tale, eh? That’s not bad going, considering.’

  We talk about Rhydwyn Lloyd, who suffered worse than one shattered ribcage. It won’t, thank goodness, be either of our jobs to break the news of his death to his family. Not us who’ll be knocking on a well-garlanded door to smash every peace-and-goodwill sentiment within.

  ‘Poor sod,’ says Jackson, but there’s a grimness around his jaw which says that his thoughts are running on more polician lines. Get the bastards lines.

  I say, ‘We should probably get the bastards, sir. You know. Arrest them. Prosecute them. Convict them. That sort of thing.’

  ‘That’d be good. You should look into that.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Will do.’

  ‘Got any leads?’

  I talk to him about getting Forensics on the cave entrance. The one we entered by.