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

by Harry Bingham

  That’s nice, I think. More compassion than hellfire. I say as much.

  Cyril nods, like I’ve just passed a test. ‘Mother Julian of Norwich,’ he says. He shows me a small leather-bound volume and adds, ‘Her little book, Revelations of Divine Love, is the first book in English known to have been written by a woman. And it is one of the greatest. You should read it.’

  ‘Maybe sometime.’

  ‘That sounds like “probably never”.’ He laughs at me but it’s a generous laugh.

  Across the yard, the solitary bell starts to toll. Cyril glances over and apologises.

  ‘I will have to go in a moment. You didn’t come to learn about Mother Julian.’

  ‘I want to know about Alina Mishchenko. The girl you gave shelter to. She didn’t stay in that room. The room where we found the genetic material.’

  Cyril, shortly: ‘I don’t know which room she was in.’

  ‘She wasn’t in any of them.’

  Cyril is irritated with me now. It’s one of the holy things about him, this lack of concealment. Like he doesn’t have to play games of pretence, he can just be himself and trust that the result will be a good one.

  ‘I’m not a forensic expert. All I can tell you is that she stayed with us for a few days. Then moved on. Why you did or didn’t find anything, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘A few days? Before, when we first interviewed you, you said two days. You and your colleagues.’

  ‘Two days, then. What I said then would have been right. It was nearer the time.’

  The bell’s tone has changed now. A long, slow beat through the twilight. Cyril stands.

  ‘I’m sorry. I need to go.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I need a truthful answer.’

  Cyril laughs. There is something intensely seeing in his eyes. And compassionate. And as patronising as fuck. And I don’t like being patronised.

  On an impulse, he gives me the Revelations book. A gift.

  ‘If it’s truth you seek . . .’

  He leaves. Starts to walk downstairs.

  ‘Father, you must answer my questions. I’m going to have to insist.’

  He reaches the turn of the stair. Broad oak treads. That deep patina that only old wood can achieve.

  ‘I “must”? You “insist”?’ That damn smile again. Then, ‘There is compulsion in religion too, in the sound of that bell. And its summons weighs a little greater.’

  He goes on down.

  Over the banister, I shout, ‘There’s more compulsion in a pair of fucking handcuffs, Father.’

  My voice sounds sweary, and stupid, and aggressive, and thin, and pointless. The abbot just raises a hand and disappears. I hear the front door open and close.

  The low bell sounds another twenty or thirty seconds, then silence. Cyril will just about have made it in time.

  I go back to his study. Poke around in his things for no particular reason except I’m feeling pissed off and there’s no one here to stop me poking. I find nothing of interest. The study is just what it looks like.

  Go out into the courtyard.

  Dusk. A violet light, speckled with stars.

  A free air moves.

  I move with it, over to the pigsty. Lean over the wall and grunt at the pigs until I get a hoggy sound of happiness back.

  They’re happy pigs, these. Peaceful. More peaceful than me.

  I feel like – no, I am – the least peaceful human here and, to my own surprise, find myself pushing at the church door, joining the evening service.

  I sit at the back. The Carlotta position. I’m wearing an ordinary woollen scarf, but adjust that over my hair so that my scalp won’t afright the gaze of the Lord. There are a few others there. Spiritual seekers getting a dose of the hard stuff. Just pre-Christmas: boom time for the God industry.

  Cryil clocks my entrance – the monks all do, probably – but he and his brothers carry on their chants without pause.

  I join in, or do mostly. When the monks whack out their kyrie eleisons, I come right back at them with my christe eleisons. No one’s going to out-eleison me and no one does. We get to forty each, at which point the kyrie camp folds its tents and moves on.

  A psalm. A reading. A canticle.

  Prayers.

  Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

  A good prayer that.

  I think of Len Roberts hurrying a terrified Bethan Williams up a hill at night-time. Saving her from something, but condemning her parents. A failed marriage, a lifetime of regret.

  I think of Burnett and me in that damn cave. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord. We could have used a little holy fire in that place.

  And Carlotta. Those first hours we spent together in Ystradfflur. All perils and dangers of this night. And what a night it was.

  I’m intent enough on these thoughts that I hardly notice when the service ends. Hardly notice when the monks do their business with the icons.

  The church empties till only Father Cyril and I remain.

  He lays his hands on my head and murmurs, ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,’ and my lips answer, ‘In the name of Christ, Amen.’ He doesn’t move his hands straightaway and I don’t move my head.

  We stay there for I don’t know how long before something shifts and I stand and we walk outside together into the night.

  He invites me across to the farmhouse for dinner, but I shake my head. I still want answers to my damn questions, but those will have to wait. Right now, I’m tired. I want to go home and say as much.

  I say, ‘Sorry.’

  He waves my sorry away. Not needed, not wanted.

  I hold up the Revelations book. ‘And thank you. I’ll read this. Actually read, not pretend-read.’

  He whops me one of his courtly smiles. ‘Peace be with you.’

  He goes his way and I go mine.

  40

  Monday morning, Carmarthen.

  No Burnett, of course. His boss, a DCI Jimmy Pritchard, is running things for now. He’s old school. Ramrod straight. Grey moustache. Doesn’t like me. Somehow wants to blame me for injuring Burnett, for making this case complicated, maybe even for finding Carlotta on his patch in the first place. It’s as though finding a London kidnap ring operating in the heart of Dyfed-Powys is all my fault. Me, my force, my big-city ways.

  But I’m a good girl. Arrive on time. Say, ‘Sir’ when I’m meant to. Break nothing. Don’t swear. Shoot no one.

  And I protect the case. Against Pritchard’s dislike. His depredations.

  ‘What’s all this business with the Bethan Williams number plates?’ he asks tetchily. ‘That data’s eight years old.’

  I say, carefully, ‘Yes, sir. Inspector Burnett saw a possible link with the Mishchenko case.’

  I explain our thinking, making it sound entirely like Burnett’s ideas.

  Pritchard rubs his moustache with the back of his hand and says, ‘Long shot.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What else did Inspector Burnett have you working on?’

  I tell him. Our other leads.

  Thanks to Gerraghty, we now have a very full picture of Alina’s movements prior to her disappearance and, because of the kind of girl she was and the kinds of place she frequented, most of those movements would have been covered, at some point, by private security cameras. We started soliciting the relevant data in that week before our caving adventure. Material is coming in now and we need to start sorting through it. In particular, we’d strongly expect the Mishchenkos’ own house to have been surveyed, and carefully surveyed, by the kidnappers in the week or so before Alina’s abduction. We have some possible shortcomings in the CCTV set-up – the system was optimised for the view of the stairs up to the front door itself and offers only a partial view of the street – but these things are never perfect.

  We also have those IP ad
dresses, the ones used for the kidnappers’ email correspondence. That line of attack remains unpromising, but we have the NCA’s tech unit doing what they can.

  Then we have that tantalising bit of audio of a London taxi arriving at the Mishchenkos’ house at 1.30 of the day Alina was snatched. Not all taxis carry CCTV or systems that monitor locations in real time, but plenty do. We’ve asked our colleagues in the Met to ask the major taxi firms for help. They’ve told us fine, no problem. For them, that kind of enquiry is routine.

  I talk everything through with Pritchard, including the early forensics work on the cave tunnel.

  The entrance tunnel has become unsafe after just a few dozen yards and the forensics boys have been unable to collect any blast residue. They can’t use robots to push further in, because they lose radio contact almost immediately.

  Pritchard says, ‘Where was the blast exactly? How far in?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t measure it, sir, but two or three hundred yards, I’d guess. And the tunnel walls were very tight in places. And very twisty.’

  Plus the explosive was placed in an area of geological instability anyway. My guess is that the device was fairly small. Just large enough to set off a collapse that would have happened at some stage, no matter what. If it weren’t for the direct evidence of Burnett and myself, no one would ever guess that an explosive had been involved. Just an ordinary rockfall in a cave that should never have been meddled with.

  Pritchard glowers at my answer, like it’s all my fault the blast wasn’t bigger, louder, bangier.

  I say, ‘But whoever placed the bomb didn’t have much time, sir.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ and proceed to offer the fruits of my Wikipedia research yesterday. ‘Look, if you want to throw a bomb together quickly, and if you don’t have the materials already to hand, you’re probably going to choose an ordinary ANFO explosive. That’s a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, both of which are easy enough to come by. That’s the low-tech explosive of choice in all those improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and the rest.’

  Pritchard latches on to that.

  ‘OK, so let’s go with that idea. Let’s assume that’s right.’

  I nod. ‘The timing is this. Somebody in this kidnap ring saw Burnett talking to the media last Tuesday. That’s also the moment they spotted a police patrol car guarding something up on the hillside outside the village. Someone went up to investigate and found the cave. So between Tuesday lunchtime and our entrance into the cave first thing on Friday morning, someone bought or made some ANFO, presumably secured some kind of detonation device as well, placed the cave under some kind of surveillance, and had the materials and personnel in place ready to take action as soon as they saw the three of us enter. That’s fast, that is. Too fast. I just don’t think you can act that fast and cover your trail effectively.’

  Pritchard says, ‘No, no. When the mines were active, laying your hands on some explosive would have been possible enough. Maybe not easy to get hold of, even then, but now . . .’

  Now all the mines are shut and the ex-miners are either coughing black stuff into their old men’s handkerchiefs or they’ve retrained as plasterers or motor mechanics or forklift operators. Either way, none of them are chucking explosives around with the merry abandon of old.

  I say, ‘Yes, sir. I’m sure you’re right.’

  Pritchard’s face tries out a few different possible looks. Settles on a ‘Well, OK then, keep going’ one. A face that seeks to convey, ‘It sounds like you and Inspector Burnett have been handling things very much as I’d have done in your place.’

  I say, ‘Yes, sir. Of course. Thank you,’ but I can’t help remembering Mervyn Rogers’s comment back when he stood back to let me into all of this. He said he hated these country crimes: ‘You just tramp around in mud, knocking on doors till you find whichever lonely nutter chose this particular moment to go round the twist.’ As it turned out, he was wrong about that, very wrong, but I can see that Pritchard is used to one type of inquiry, has spent his whole professional life figuring out how to work those inquiries as efficiently and effectively as possible – and now his DI is blown half to bits and is recovering in a Cardiff hospital, he has fifteen officers, mostly constables, absorbed in work which is mostly to do with data analysis and hardcore computer stuff, and he’s having to deal with a load of other forces and agencies – us in South Wales, the Tech people at the NCA, the chemical reporting crew at the Metropolitan Police, a heap of other specialities too. That’s not what he ever asked for, ever wanted. But it’s what he’s got.

  And as it happens, we’re doing OK, not least because Burnett, though now at home, is on the phone every hour, issuing instructions, receiving reports, and generally marshalling the whole op.

  I have a new respect for him, actually. Case management of this sort is a skill all of its own. Burnett has it. I don’t and never will. A police force needs people like him a whole lot more than it needs people like me.

  And as we do our work, in this stub-end of a week, this sawn-off Christmas week, the first little nuggets tumble into our lap.

  Yes: the Metropolitan Police have located the taxi driver who arrived outside the Mishchenkos’ house that night. An interview is being arranged.

  Yes: we’ve made good progress on those old Bethan Williams number plates. During the time that movements in and out of the Llanglydwen valley were being monitored, there were only eight number plates that could be traced to a London owner. Research on those eight owners has given us probable negatives on five of them: four had friends or relatives in the area. A further one was travelling to a holiday cottage rental. That gives us three names where we can’t locate an innocent reason for travel. We haven’t yet pulled anyone in for questioning, but we don’t want to go in hot and heavy until our evidence base is stronger.

  On the explosives front, then, no, we haven’t yet been able to source any unusual movements of high-explosive or detonation devices, but we have found an agricultural merchant in Brecon who reports a possibly suspicious sale of ammonium nitrate fertiliser. The purchase was on the Wednesday before we entered the cave. It involved just a single sack and was a cash purchase by an unknown customer. Obviously ordinary householders might well use those agricultural merchants, if they need a new spade, say, or some fencing materials, but sackfuls of agro-industrial chemicals are generally only bought by farmers, and those guys are all repeat customers, known to the vendor, typically buying in bulk – and during the growing season at that. Who needs fertiliser in December?

  No in-store CCTV, but the till log gives us a precise time for the transaction and there were exterior cameras surveying the car park and timber store. We have yet to acquire and process the data, but the pieces are there.

  Monday, Tuesday, we work hard. On the Wednesday morning, Christmas Eve, Burnett comes by. He’s in a wheelchair and his bloodstream is still groggily high with heavy-duty painkillers. But he’s OK. Pleased to see me. Pleased to be on the ship’s bridge again, of this inquiry which now looks like a proper inquiry.

  He says, ‘When Bethan Williams ran, presumably the kidnappers knew why. Wouldn’t they have been worried about Roberts too? Wouldn’t they have wanted to kill him?’

  ‘Mmm. Maybe. But who actually knew about the Bethan/Roberts relationship? I mean, not even her mum or dad really understood that.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And let’s say the kidnappers didn’t know about Roberts until you guys started trying to pin a sex-killing onto him. At that point, the kidnappers have to think, maybe we got lucky. Maybe this girl we were worried about got killed, totally at random, by somebody else. Or if not that, then – somehow, we don’t know how – she ran away. But since she obviously hasn’t told the police anything and since this guy Roberts obviously hasn’t told the police anything, even under very strong pressure to do so, maybe we’re OK? And if we suddenly decided to kill Roberts anyway – a better-safe-than-sorry thing – t
hen the police would all of a sudden have to think about totally other hypotheses for the two deaths and we’d be at risk of making ourselves more visible not less. I mean, I don’t know how these things worked, but it seems to me that the fact that Bethan had gone and there were no police officers battering any doors down must have seemed like a sign that everything was OK.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose. Fair enough.’ He grimaces. ‘It drives you mad, lying in hospital, thinking about these damn things and not actually able to do anything.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I’ve been in hospital more than once myself following incidents in the line of duty. It didn’t drive me mad, but I know what he means. When a big case is heading for its endgame, you don’t want to be anywhere but in the thick of it.

  Burnett, thinking something similar, says, ‘This is shaping up, isn’t it? This is shaping up.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We might actually have a case here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jimmy Pritchard didn’t manage to bollock the whole thing up, then?’

  ‘DCI Pritchard was very helpful, sir.’

  ‘Bet he was.’

  It’s Pritchard’s job that Burnett wants.

  He stares at me.

  I don’t know what he wants, what he expects.

  I don’t say anything. I don’t think my face does anything in particular. His gaze blows over me like wind over barley. Ripples on a midnight lake.

  ‘Fiona, go home. It’s Christmas Eve. Take the rest of the day off. You work too bloody hard and, a few days ago, you were almost killed. Take a break.’

  I open my mouth to protest. To argue back. But he pre-empts me.

  ‘Go home. That’s an order. Fuck off right now, or I call your Dennis Jackson and tell him that you grow and smoke your own cannabis. And I will bloody do it.’

  He moves towards a phone.

  OK, OK. I wave meek surrender.

  I get my bag but, before I go, I check that he knows where we are with the explosives stuff.

  He does.

  Check that he knows who to call at the Met on the taxi things.

  He doesn’t but, he points out, his indexer, Ffion Harries, certainly does.