I start to talk through the cave forensics, but he says, ‘Fuck off. Right now. If I don’t see you in that car park in one minute, I call your boss. Starting now.’
I fuck off.
Get to the car park in less than a minute.
See Burnett’s wheelchaired form in the incident room window. He has a phone. Is waving it. Threatening the call.
I do meek surrender hands.
Get into my car.
Sit. Door open. A brisk wind blowing up the River Towy. A chill wind, a chattering wind. A wind born of the wild Atlantic, now blowing over this garrison outpost.
Civilisation’s furthest frontier and the first line of her defence.
I do nothing.
Feel the wind. Feel myself.
Have I been overworking? Maybe. Quite likely yes.
The wind blows. The Towy flows. I count breaths.
In-two-three-four-five. Out-two-three-four-five.
Part of me agitates to get back into that incident room. To stay on top of that flow of data. To check that neither Burnett nor Pritchard makes a move that I wouldn’t.
But Burnett is a competent guy and also, sad but true, he’s told me to fuck off.
And off, reluctantly, I fuck.
On the way, I call Ed Saunders. Ask, timidly, if he has the day off work and if, by chance, he’d care to spend a couple of hours Christmas shopping with me.
‘Leaving it till the last minute, Fi? Sure you don’t want to wait till last thing this afternoon?’
‘Not completely the last minute. I got you your present early, only then I saw you’d got yourself it already.’ I explain about the pestle and mortar.
He tells me, gently, that the new pestle and mortar had come ‘from Jill, actually’, but it would have been a wonderful idea. Says he’d love to meet up. We agree to meet at one o’clock on the Hayes.
I call Bev. Ask if she’s at home later. She is.
I say I’ll pop round.
Call my mam. Talk about Christmas arrangements. Say I’m looking forward to seeing her later.
Meet up with Ed.
He helps me get the last few bits I need. Going round the shops is easier with him there. I have less need to run out screaming.
I tick off all the last people left to do, except Ed.
I don’t know what to get him, except then I do. Waterstones doesn’t have what I want, but then I remember a Christian bookshop on Wyndham Arcade and I drag a surprised Ed in there. I find a copy of Revelations of Divine Love. Buy it. Write ‘To Ed, Happy Christmas 2014, Fi xxx’ inside it and hand it over.
He takes it, looks pleased but also puzzled.
‘Not your usual reading matter.’
‘No. But an abbot gave me a copy and then I swore at him and then we just kyried ourselves into a holy coma.’
I tell him that thing about it being the first book in English known to have been written by a woman. I don’t tell him that I read the entire thing, cover to cover, last night. Don’t tell him I started reading from page one again when I woke this morning. That I have it in my bag right now. The book has a short biography of Mother Julian in the front of it, a few pages of historical context. Those things disturb me more than a little, but the text itself is solid gold.
Ed gives me a chaste kiss on the cheek and says thanks.
We go to a café. Orange juice and a salad box for me, juice and a toasted panini for him. The panini when it comes is way better than my salad, so I keep begging nibbles from him and, because he’s nice, he lets me have them.
He gives me my present. A pair of gloves in soft brown leather.
‘You’re always complaining you have cold hands. From now on, I’m not going to listen.’
He’s right, of course. I do complain. But that’s not because I don’t have gloves, it’s that I almost always forget to wear them or carry them with me in places I might want them. But I don’t have any gloves as lovely as these and I put them on and wiggle my fingers and tell Ed that I love them, which – in so far as it makes sense to love a pair of gloves – I do.
‘How is it going with Jill? She seems really nice.’
‘It’s going great. Really well.’
‘Is she The One?’ I ask. A question which is permitted me by virtue of being Old Friend and Former Lover.
He nods. Not a ‘yes for sure’ nod, but a ‘definitely possible’ one.
‘You won’t stop being friends with me? You’re not going to be one of those awful, terrible, wicked people who ditches all their existing friends just because they’ve found someone they’re going to be with for the rest of their lives?’
He shakes his head and reassures me, but some women just don’t handle the presence of former lovers in their partner’s life. In the end, Ed’s loyalty to Jill will be – should be – greater than his to me.
Not a thought that hugely cheers me.
I also realise that though I’ve given Ed books for Christmas before, I’ve never dated them like that. With the year as well as the season. I think it’s because I know that things between us are more fragile now than perhaps they’ve ever been before. Under threat.
I sigh. A big let-it-all-out sigh.
I remember Father Cyril’s hands on my head, and the way I leaned into those hands, and the way that time and the world vanished as I did.
Ed says, ‘You’ve got mozzarella on your cheek.’
I remove it. The café is heaving because it’s Christmas Eve and people with trays but no tables are circling us the way, I imagine, hyenas circle a limping wildebeest.
I wiggle my gloves and point at the hyenas.
‘Let’s get out before they eat us.’
We do. Say goodbye and Happy Christmas.
Ed goes back to Ed-land. I drive across town to see Bev.
Give her her present: a DVD of Water for Elephants, which looks terrible to me, but stars an actor called Robert Pattinson on whom Bev has a major crush. She gives me a little tower of books, the Fifty Shades trilogy, and explains, ‘You love reading and, I don’t know, I just thought this would be really you.’
I don’t entirely know how to respond to that, but we end up laughing a lot anyway.
‘Bev, I know I’ve been a bit useless these last few weeks. Sorry about that. It will get back to normal.’
She looks stern for a moment. ‘Not a bit useless, Fi. Completely useless.’
I mutely agree and she looks stern another second or two before relenting. ‘Anyway, you’re always like this when you’re on a case. You always come back, though, so I do forgive you.’
I ask about Hemi Godfrey and she scrunches her face up and says, ‘Well, he is nice, but . . .’
I listen to her mount the case for the prosecution. A case so hemmed around by qualifications and denials that it sometimes sounds like the opposite. I don’t comment except to say, ‘Bev, I’m sure you’ll make a good decision. Just listen to your heart.’
We kiss goodbye.
Then home to change. I wear one of Kay’s cast-offs, asparkle with gold at the neck. More attention-seeking than anything I’d normally wear, but nice, definitely nice.
I go crazy and wear a pair of heels too. Make-up. An itsy-ditsy dab of perfume.
Then on over to my parents’ place. That tinselled, fairy-lit, carolling, glittering, and much mince-pied, abode of glad tidings and Christmassy good cheer.
My father tiggers around like an over-excited eight-year-old. As he does most years, he’s just invented a new tradition. On Christmas Eve every year from now on, we will have fish pie and champagne and what he promises will be the ‘world’s biggest trifle’. He opens the fridge to show me the trifle, which is a mighty confection indeed, implausibly yellow on top and so spectacularly towered with cream that my mam has had to remove the shelf that would normally sit above.
Meanwhile, Mam scolds us, peels potatoes, shifts things in and out of ovens, and plucks at my waist, complaining that I can’t have been eating.
‘And where were
you on Friday?’ she asks. ‘You were supposed to be coming over.’
‘Sorry, Mam. It was a work thing. I was just totally buried.’
My younger sister, Ant, assesses the presents under the tree. She wants an iPad and worries that there’s nothing iPad-shaped for her there, which indeed there isn’t because Dad has hidden it, saying, ‘She’ll be absolutely blown away, she will, it’s the top one for iRAM or whatever, top of the range everything, and I can’t wait to see the look on her face.’ My other sister, Kay, is in a mood where she’s decided that she and I are the only grown-ups in the house and she snugs up to me on the sofa, poking me with her stockinged feet, and tells me in a low voice why she’s going to ‘do New Year’ with her on-off boyfriend Cai, whom we all thought had now been permanently ditched.
Kay is doing a course in fashion retail at Cardiff Uni. She’s messed around with other jobs and courses in the past, but this one, I think, has a chance of sticking.
I ask her if she has ever thought of interior design at all, whether that’s something she might turn her hand to.
She shrugs. ‘Yes. I mean, if you’re a visual person . . . But it wouldn’t ever be my main thing.’
‘What if I had a client for you? A paying one. You wouldn’t just have to choose everything. You’d also have to get it done. You know, get workmen in, all of that.’
She scrabbles at me with her feet, working herself upright. Sticks one of Mam’s brassy cushions behind her head so she can see me better.
‘How much? I mean, like how much per hour?’
‘I don’t know. What do you charge?’
She aims at thirty pounds. A look in her eye wonders whether she should have said thirty-five.
‘Kay! You don’t have any experience. This is a CV-building thing.’
We bicker companionably. She comes down to twenty. I say, ‘Eighteen and I give you an amazing foot massage.’
It’s a deal.
Then the fish pie is done and the champagne is opened and dad whacks up the carols so loud that I can feel the vibrations through the floor. I shout at Kay that she can have her massage tomorrow and we both dive – dive happily – into the full disorder of our family Christmas.
This is happiness. Rowdy. Human. Impermanent. Sufficient.
41
Christmas comes and Christmas goes.
I give Mam and Dad their big gift, the photo album. Not just photos either, but mementoes. Orders of service from friends’ weddings and christenings. Ticket stubs from our days out at the Barry Island Pleasure Park. Film mementos: a poster of Beauty and the Beast, which I remembered loving at the time.
They both love it, of course. Dad, being Dad, gets teary and hugs me until it actually hurts. Turning the pages, Dad has a fond, nostalgic eye but – unless I’m wrong, unless I’m just projecting – he’s also slightly wary of the gift. Checking, as ever, that this is a gift which comes with no dangerous reveals.
And there are none. None that I can see. This whole effort to uncover some revelatory corner of my father’s past has failed.
Except.
Except, except, except.
That one photo that caused my Uncle Em to see invisible specks of dust had the exact same effect on my father. A quick brushing motion at the picture’s right-hand edge.
It can’t be the horse’s bum that caused that reflexive pushing-away motion, so it must be that man’s arm. An arm in blue Prince of Wales check.
That’s not an insight I can do anything much with now, but it doesn’t vanish. If anything it hardens. Becomes smaller, denser, more solid.
An arm in blue Prince of Wales check.
An arm, which even sawn-off, even twenty-five years after the event, causes my father and Em to want to brush its memory away.
A clue. One hell of a puzzling one, but a clue for sure.
And, as it happens, I have a contact from a previous case, Al Bettinson, a racecourse photographer with a massive archive of his own and access to the archives kept by most of the bigger local courses.
I have a date. A horse. And a blue Prince of Wales arm. It’ll be a ton of work, but I think I’ll find that arm.
That, however, lies in my future. For now, I just plunge onwards in this family Christmas.
Ant gets her iPad and is as thrilled as everyone wanted. We all eat too much and then Dad forces us to watch an old DVD of Beauty and the Beast, which somehow worked better for me when I was seven and whose relevance to Christmas I find hard to discern.
On Christmas afternoon, a terrible time to choose but I can’t help myself, I get Dad alone in his ‘studio’, his grown-up playroom. He wants to white noise me. To continue with his Christmas prattle.
But I say, ‘Dad, I’ve got a big question to ask. One you won’t like.’
‘Don’t ask it then.’
‘I’ve got to.’
‘Then ask it.’
‘Murder. Did you ever kill anyone? Have anyone killed? Issue the orders, do the deed, I don’t care which.’
He wants to intervene, deflect, move us down a different road, but I can’t do that. I hold up a hand.
‘Dad, if the answer’s yes, just say so. I won’t investigate. Won’t share anything with my colleagues. If I have to, I don’t know, join a different force, then I will. And if there were other crimes, even serious ones, then I really don’t care. I mean, what’s a bit of arson between friends?’
‘You want to know if I’ve killed anyone?’
‘Or if you ordered it. Or conspired to have it happen. Anything like that. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not after some legal definition.’
He shakes his head. First I think that’s a refusal to answer. A reference back to the long ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ pact that has got us this far together. But then I realise it’s not that. He’s not saying that.
He says, ‘No. Not that. There was plenty of rough stuff, for sure. You know, I was building up. I had to show I was serious. But murder, no. Not that. Never.’
‘That’s real?’
He nods.
‘Dad, if that’s not true and one day I come across some evidence that says otherwise—’
I don’t finish my sentence, because I don’t know what I’m saying, but Dad interrupts anyway.
‘It is true. Plenty of rough stuff. Some of which your people knew about at the time, a lot of which they didn’t. But no killing. I’d never have allowed that.’
I want to believe my father is telling the truth. His face says, yes, he’s telling the truth, but there’s an expression there I don’t understand, can’t read, won’t be able to get to.
Then his face changes. He says, ‘That was it? The big thing? I thought you were going to tell me you were pregnant.’
He bellows with laughter at his own joke, whacks carols on the stereo, tells me about a bar he’s bought up. How he’s going to redevelop it as a private member’s club. ‘Really exclusive. High-end. Not like my normal rubbish.’
The conversation spins on and forward, as it should, and I let myself go with the flow.
Did I get an answer to my question, or only a polished lie? I don’t know. But that’s for the future. Carlotta is my now.
On Boxing Day, the Friday, I’m impatient, but mostly good. I do a little research on medieval religious traditions, but nothing too heavy.
Burnett has suspended all work until Saturday. Won’t ramp up to full speed again till Monday.
I hate that, of course. Hate it. But the man’s right. We won’t get proper support from the Met, the NCA or anyone else until Christmas has tinselled itself into oblivion. Burnett knows he won’t even get proper commitment from his own team until they’re sick of the sight of mince pies.
And I’m good.
Not just good-for-me – a weak-enough compliment, alas – but actually good. Aside from my week or so of obsessive excavating around that now-vanished brown pool, I’ve been really well behaved on this case. Not too obsessive. Not especially crazy. I’ve not even smoked all that
much. My mini-binge down in that damn cave was a rare, and more than permissible, exception.
So I keep the good habits. Stay disciplined. Let work be work and holiday be holiday.
On the Saturday morning, I go up to my Aunt Gwyn’s farm with the rest of my family and we all have another mini-celebration there. I like Gwyn. A proper good ’un, she is. Say hello to Iestyn and the dogs. Go for a super-massive walk on the hills, roaming the long north-western rampart of the Black Mountains to the Twmpa or, as the English weirdly call it, Lord Hereford’s Knob.
Sandstone and mudstone. A prominent limestone interpolation.
I think of what those things do below ground, unseen. Water acting on rock over the millennia.
On Sunday, unexpectedly, Cesca calls, and we end up driving up to the monastery.
Spend six hours there. Eating, working, praying. Cesca’s still serious, but less intense than she was the first time. Shirking work for a moment, sitting on a stone wall and eating cheese and apple, she says, ‘Yes, I’d still love to do a retreat, I suppose. But things are really busy for me in London. I’m feeling super-motivated at the moment.’ Her dark eyes flash a smile at me. ‘Is that really shallow?’ and we both laugh.
She asks how my case is going. I say, ‘Um. Nothing definite yet, but I think we’re getting there.’
After vespers, I ask Father Cyril about the thing with the icons at the end of each service. He’s happy enough to show me. Saint Hilarion. Saint Osmanna. Saint Aurelia. Saint Anthony.
‘They have chosen our community and we choose to honour them.’
There’s an empty spot further on down the same wall. The same darkened glass and an inset ready to take a candle, but no candle, no icon.
I say, ‘You’re waiting for another?’
Cyril smiles and deflects. ‘Not waiting, no. That would be presumptuous. But if we are chosen again, we are ready.’
I don’t ask about the choosing, because I know he’ll just lift his eyes upwards and wave a hand. We stick around for supper, then compline, then leave.
On that post-Christmas Monday, the 29th, I zoom over to Carmarthen super-early. Work is work and holiday is holiday all right, but nothing in that slogan says I can’t start work at 6.45 a.m. if I want to.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 29
