The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths

by Harry Bingham

  Lower in the valley, I can see the orange glow of street lighting. The buggies are heading away from all that, into an area where there are no lights, no sodium glow.

  As I thought, we’re in the mountains, or on their very edge. The ragged line between man and mountain.

  Once again, Tinker is ahead of us. I see it as clearly as I see the last of the fires licking out the remains of the oil tank. A column of smoke, inky and foul, is lit in orange from below. A slow rain, quietly falling, murmurs regret.

  Brattenbury will be coming, and coming fast, but I’m the officer in charge and on the scene. These are my decisions and I will make them.

  Shotgun in hand, Glock in waistband, knife in pocket, I start to pursue.

  53.

  The night is dark. The moon is full enough, I think, but the sky is wadded in great rolls of cloud, unspooling from across the Irish Sea. As I move away from the farmhouse, my eyes grow used to the night, but even so visibility is very poor. I run up towards the gate, pass through to the fields beyond.

  The buggies are unlit, but they’re diesel-engined and hardly quiet. I hear the thump of the motors. There’s a track, of sorts, cut into the field. Red mud and jutting stone. Coarse mountain grasses growing freely in between. A rising path, and moorland beyond.

  My shoes are Jessica’s shoes. Ballet pumps. Black and white polka dots. Quite nice actually, and comfortable enough. But not well suited to running, or even walking, on this terrain. I lose one shoe almost straight away, and fall as I lose it. The other I discard on purpose, because the effort of trying to keep it was slowing me down.

  No shoes, no problem.

  I’ll do this barefoot.

  I can’t see enough to be confident of running fast, but move at a pace I think I’ll be able to sustain. Far down in the valley, I hear the first wail of sirens. Blue lights on hedgerows.

  I think about going back to the farm. Simply reporting to Brattenbury, or whoever is to be in charge of the assault. But as I’m debating this, I catch a momentary flash of lights up ahead. Not headlights. Just the quick dart of a torch, furtive and brief.

  There’s a change in the sound too. Up till now, the two vehicles have driven fairly steadily, moving with a steady, puttering rumble. What I’m hearing now is different. A sudden revving. A low-gear yowl. Perhaps the sound of a wheel slippage.

  Then headlights. Again only brief, but angled sharply upwards, at right angles to the track I’m on. An abrupt lurch forward, then the lights are killed.

  They’re turning, I realize. Fighting to turn up the slope and double back on themselves.

  They can’t want to return to the farmhouse. The sirens are close now, a minute away at most. So why double back?

  I’ve answered my question almost as soon as I’ve framed it. The track they’ve taken gives them the quickest, easiest access to the open hill. Once there, they have, in effect, the freedom of the Brecon Beacons. No hedges, no walls, no boundaries.

  But that freedom comes at a price. The hills themselves are very open: bare and windswept. Henderson’s security brain will be keenly aware of the risk of pursuit from above. So the escapees have to get back to the broken ground of a valley floor as soon as they can. But not the valley of the original farmhouse. That’s their plan. Get out onto the hills. Skirt the base of the ridge until they can drop down into the adjoining valley. Then lose themselves in the woods. Or hide out in an outbuilding till dawn. Or switch vehicles and just drive calmly away.

  That’s what they’re doing. But what is Brattenbury doing? What is his countermove?

  And again: no sooner have I framed my question than I’ve answered it.

  Priority one: find Roy Williams. Find me.

  Priority two: secure the property. Put out the fires. Check on victims. Save those that can be saved. Secure any evidence that has escaped the flames.

  Priority three: pursue and capture any suspects that have left the property by road: the type of pursuit that any police service handles as a matter of routine.

  Nowhere on Brattenbury’s list will there be a memo item Check to see if there are any all-terrain farm utility vehicles creeping, without headlights, on the margins of the hillside above. Even if, in theory, Brattenbury had considered the possibility of such an escape, he couldn’t, given the tiny gap of time, have prepared a response. He’d need all-terrain vehicles of his own. Night vision equipment. A mass deployment of officers in this valley and the neighboring one. None of which could, realistically, be assembled in the time available.

  I see all this, with the same clarity as I see the yard in front of the farmhouse now filling with blue lights and armed officers. See it and think, We’ve blown it. After all this. They’re getting away.

  Only my feet are moving faster than my thoughts.

  I’m scrambling directly uphill. There’s no track here, just roughly thistled grass. This isn’t a place where you want to be barefoot but then Ernest Shackleton probably didn’t want his ship to sink under him in the Antarctic. Those guys in Apollo 13 probably weren’t best pleased when they found themselves in a crippled ship two hundred thousand miles from Earth.

  Shoes, schmoes. We don’t always get what we want.

  I go on jogging upwards.

  Jogging up, until I see a hedge looming black against the skyline. Hawthorns, stunted by the wind. Barbed wire. Blackthorn and maple. A couple of fenceposts, softly lichenous and rotten at the base. The sigh of open moorland.

  It’s too dark to tackle the hedge with any strategy, so I just shove myself into what looks like a weak spot. I flail around for a few moments, struggling for a foothold in the jumble of black branches and wet leaves, but I push through somehow. Emerge into the sudden wideness of the mountain proper.

  As I do so – face flat on the muddy ground, legs still thrutching free of the hedge – the beat of a diesel engine draws near. So near, I can feel the stones in the ground shaking under my cheek. I’m half lying on my shotgun and can’t get the Glock out from my wet jeans.

  I heave forward on my elbows. Heave and roll. Get the shotgun free.

  Fire.

  Not at anything. The gun is still half under my body and I can feel the blast of shot and escape gases warm beneath my face. I just want to cause havoc. Disrupt the smooth ease of this escape.

  Want to, and do.

  I think the buggy must be a few yards from me when I pull the trigger, no more. The detonation – its sight and sound – acts like a stun grenade discharged at point-blank range.

  I don’t know if I’ve hit the driver. I don’t think so. But the buggy veers from the blast, lurching uphill. A hard right-angled turn at speed and on a nastily climbing slope. I hear, and half see, the buggy’s engine shriek as its left-sided wheels lose contact with the ground, as it bucks up on its side.

  There’s a moment of astonished equilibrium. The vehicle held in temporary balance, a mountain trapeze.

  I’m urging it to overturn. Urging it to continue its toppling curve.

  But it stands steady against the night, then lurches back. Jounces hard on its springs. Hits mud and stone, slithers down a small bank, and ends, still pointing up the mountain, perpendicular to its original direction. It took a hard knock or two, for sure, but the engine is still running and those damn things are made for rough ground, rough use.

  I seize the moment. Fire the shotgun flat and low into the nearest tire. I’m not much of a markswoman, but at this range it’s impossible to miss. Fire a second shot to be sure. The gun takes five cartridges and I want the last two available if I need them. Wrestle the Glock out of my waistband – cursing Jessica for the needless skinniness of her skinny jeans – and fire that too. Into the air. I’m not trying to hit anyone. I just want the confusion. The confusion and the noise.

  Down at the farmhouse, they will hear the shooting and be starting to respond.

  As all this is happening, I can hear people clambering out of the buggy. The driver – Allan, maybe? Vic? – is swearing as he trie
s to get the thing into gear and back onto the level. Whoever it is, he can’t do it. Not with one tire blown out, the slope and mud against him.

  But I’m not the only one who can play at this brutal, muddy, rain-blunted game.

  A shotgun blast, not mine, roars out into the night. A second shot follows, then a third and a fourth. An arc of fire, splitting the air. An arc that would threaten to saw me in half, except that I’m lying face down in the mud and whoever’s shooting will be seeking a chest shot. The lethal stroke.

  I try to wriggle forward and sideways, but my leg is caught in something. A twist of wire, a loop of root. I’m not sure. Either way, I’m stuck and lying flat, when another voice – male, rough, not one I recognize – shouts, ‘Leave it! Leave it! Just run!’

  Two men – perhaps three or four – stampede past me. They pass so close in the darkness that one of them hits my head a glancing blow with his boot. The blow makes me drop my guns momentarily. When I recover myself, I fire low with the Glock, hoping to hit a foot or a leg. Don’t know if I succeed. Blaze off the shotgun at the same flat angle, the muzzle flash so bright that I have to close my eyes against the glare.

  Only one shot comes back out of the night. I see it more than hear it, but feel a sudden burning in my right foot and calf. The sensation is so hot, so fiery, that it takes me a moment to realize I’ve been hit. I try to kick free of whatever is holding me back and this time, my movement is unimpeded, as though the shot unhooked me from whatever held me back.

  Shove more cartridges into my gun.

  Two buggies left the farmhouse and I’ve only disabled one.

  I try standing. I feel slightly vertiginous with shock, but more OK than not. My ankle is stiff and a strange state – simultaneously hot and numb – but when I take a trial step or two, I don’t fall over.

  Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you, I say to myself. Out loud or in my head, I’m not sure.

  I start limp-jogging back up the valley in the direction that the first buggy came from. In the direction where I assume the second buggy still lurks. I don’t have a plan, don’t have a strategy. Just can’t bear the thought that these bastards might be getting away.

  Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you.

  I limp-jog for four minutes, maybe five.

  My injured ankle feels hot to begin with, then feels nothing at all. I’ve lost all sensation in my feet, but when I look down I see them still there. Ghostly white, mud-spattered, still attached to my legs.

  Good enough.

  Behind me, police vehicles, Land Rovers at a guess, approach the spot where the shooting took place. They’ll have found the injured buggy. Be searching for runaways.

  I don’t know if any of my shots found their target, but at least I directed our resources to the right spot and deprived the first batch of fugitives of their getaway vehicle.

  The second batch I’ll handle alone.

  And ahead of me, not far away, I can still hear the puttering beat of that other buggy. It’s not moving fast, not on this terrain, not in this light. I try to figure out what they’re trying to do. We’re moving up the valley, into the mountains. These are glacial valleys, scooped out by the last Ice Age. The sides of the valleys are steep – too steep for any farm buggy – and the headwall itself is only fifteen or twenty degrees off being perfectly vertical.

  At some point, surely not far off, the buggy will find itself in a dead end. A cul-de-sac of the mountains.

  I’m just starting to doubt myself. Question the whole pursuit, when I realize – with stupid slowness – that I can no longer hear the buggy ahead of me. Taken aback, I move forwards with extreme caution. My limp, I notice, has become more exaggerated, and even my good foot seems clumsily reluctant to obey my brain.

  Shoes, schmoes, and feet will heal.

  Shotgun levelled, and Glock easily accessible in the front waistband of my jeans, I creep on. Watching, listening – hearing nothing.

  Then I hear something. The tick of an engine cooling. A fan. A drip of water.

  See the gleam of light, curved over metal.

  The buggy, empty, no humans present.

  I do what I can to search the landscape round me for possible threats. It’s not yet dawn, not yet close. But the clouds have thinned. There’s more moonlight than there was, and over towards England there’s a hint of brightening, a vinegary silver, a first glimpse of the coming day.

  The track that we’ve been following leads on to the head of the valley. A track for farmers and ramblers and nobody else.

  A track without exit.

  Above me, there’s a spur of rising ground leading up to the main ridge high above my head. The incline is as much as forty-five degrees and the slope is tussocky and uneven.

  A car won’t cope with that, not even a four-by-four, but human legs will cope just fine. The fugitives will even now be climbing up to the ridge, and from there, they’ll be able to scatter wherever they want. Brattenbury won’t be able to throw a cordon round these mountains. There aren’t enough police officers in the country to do it.

  I can’t follow. Not sensibly, not realistically. Not with my poor fitness, my injured ankle, my bare and increasingly tattered feet. Plus I don’t fancy the thought of creeping up the slope above me into Tinker’s waiting guns.

  We’ve lost, I think again, we’ve lost.

  Reason says: fire your guns. Set fire to the buggy. Summon help. Do what can be done. At least play out a losing hand. Stay in the game to the last hopeless shake of the dice.

  Reason, my old buddy. Reason, the only friend I never quite lose.

  But even friends need a good kick from time to time, and this is one of those moments.

  For some reason, I can’t quite bear the thought of encountering my colleagues just now. Not under these circumstances. Just can’t bear to watch the police machine clanking energetically into action on this losing cause. Like watching some industrial automaton, mighty but blind. A King Kong of the Cambrian mountains. Raging, brave, defeated.

  For no real reason except tiredness, wanting to sit down, I ease myself into the buggy’s driver’s seat.

  Ease myself in, and catch a glimpse of something moving. Keys swinging from the ignition. A little cluster of metal and hope.

  A stupid oversight that, to leave the buggy still drivable – except that the buggy can’t make any ground on the slope above and the runaways can’t have known I was only a few hundred yards behind. Can’t have known, come to that, that they were even being pursued. A regular police pursuit involves light, machinery, and noise. My pursuit involved next to nothing. A girl with bare feet and skinny jeans. One blonde Jessica, two vengeful Fionas.

  They don’t know that they’re being pursued, I think.

  Swinging keys, sighing wind. Those things, and empty air. A smell of peat.

  We’ve lost, I think, except just possibly not.

  The fugitives will work slowly upwards to meet the ridge at the top. Then logic will tell them to put as many miles between themselves and the farmhouse as they can. The high ridges of these mountains all bear footpaths, good ones, well maintained and even paved in places. The getaways might scatter left or right once they hit the top, but either option would be better than working their way down the difficult opposite slope in bad light.

  I put my hand to the ignition and start the buggy.

  A poor chance is still a chance.

  54.

  I ride the buggy up to the head of the valley. My feet, no longer forced to carry my weight, are sending a long, slow swell of pain up to my brain, which listens gravely to their complaints. Then tells them to fuck off.

  Has my language got worse since all this started? I think it has. I like riding the buggy though. It has a tough but easy power, like the best sort of men.

  Like Buzz, actually. I wish he were here. Or would wish it, except that he would definitely want to stop me doing what I’m about to do and I would definitely want to do it anyway.

  I drive on.
A bouncy, jouncy, tussocky ride. A puttering growl trotting alongside, like a dog.

  The mountains gather me in and encircle me, a huge bowl of silence.

  A glassy silver starts to lift the rim of night.

  I don’t know these mountains well. My father has never been the outdoorsy type, and when we did leave the city, we usually headed for my Aunt Gwyn’s farm in the Black Mountains. All the same, we did make excursions now and again. Often led by Gwyn herself, my mother in slightly frightened but acquiescent support. We visited the ruined monastery at Llanthony. Paddled rubber dinghies on the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal. Explored the disused tunnel at Torpantau, once the highest train tunnel in Britain. And we went for walks in the Brecon Beacons. For all I know, we used to walk and picnic in this very valley.

  So though I don’t know these mountains well, I perhaps know them well enough. The valley headwalls look vertical from some angles, but they’re not quite. They’re twenty degrees off, even more in places. And there are lines of weakness. Gullies that break these clean lines, the dirty drainage pipes of geology.

  Once, in a valley like this, my father dared me to climb one of these gullies. The sort of dare my father couldn’t help but invent, then couldn’t help but try to meet. So we did. Him and me. Panting our way up the weakness in the headwall. Strips of rock and near-vertical grass to right and left. The gully itself a torrent of clay, peat, rock and streaming water. We emerged from the top of that damn thing slathered in mud. Head to toe. Creatures of earth and bogwater. Aching, frightened, incredulous, elated.

  That day, we climbed in broad daylight, properly shod, without a wounded ankle, and without a fistful of guns. But phooey to that. I’m here to catch bad guys. I drive the buggy up to the headwall, till it looms above me like the fall of a dam. Drive it, till the wheels spin on the rising slope and the sodden moorgrass.