‘Of course not.’
‘I’ll make us something to eat.’ But as it turned out, neither of them had much of an appetite. So instead they just curled up together on the sofa, watching the fire. After a while Mariner couldn’t resist putting out an arm to her and she leaned in to him. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on here,’ she said. ‘You need to give me more of a clue.’
Mariner shifted uncomfortably. ‘I haven’t been entirely honest with you.’ He broke off. He’d never in his life discussed anything like this openly with anyone and now didn’t seem like a particularly good place to do so for the first time.
He took a deep breath. ‘My feelings about Anna only make up half of the story.’
‘So what’s the other half?’
‘When I said the other night that I might disappoint you, that’s exactly what I meant. I’ve had a couple of … unfortunate experiences in the past, when I haven’t been able to … deliver, as it were. I never know if … I really am afraid I’ll let you down.’
Suzy was mortified. ‘Oh God, and now here I am, making you talk about it. That’s even worse, isn’t it? But isn’t there something I can do to help?’ Instinctively she put her hand on his thigh, but immediately snatched it away again. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry. That’s probably not a good idea.’
That made Mariner laugh. ‘It’s all right, it won’t fall off.’
‘And this Anna. Are you certain it’s over?’
‘It’s definitely over,’ said Mariner. And though he hadn’t planned to, he found himself telling Suzy about Anna’s last hours. ‘I wasn’t there of course but there are certain advantages to being in the job and the Hereford police have been incredibly cooperative in terms of allowing me access to witness statements. I think the other woman involved was relieved to be able to offload to me too, in the mistaken belief that doing so might help to ease some of her own pain. She gave me enough detail to be able to reconstruct the chain of events reasonably accurately. Sometimes it just plays inside my head like a silent movie on a loop.’
‘Poor you,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose someone so suddenly.’
Mariner finished up staying the night at Gwennol. This time when Suzy moved over to his side of the bed he didn’t make any excuses, and Anna stayed away.
THIRTY-FOUR
Day Twelve
Still warmed from the pleasure of the night before, Mariner strode out across the fields and back towards the pub. He was feeling rather pleased with himself and with the day, and decided to extend his route back via the footpath that took him close to Abbey Farm. As he did so, he heard the sound of a vehicle starting up, and craning his neck, he saw over the hedge as Willow’s van drove out along the track and up to the farm gate. It stopped for Amber to get out and open the gate, before moving off again. They were still apparently going to market, to sell their fake organic produce. Mariner watched the truck bounce along to the end of the drive and make a left towards Llanerch. He thought about how calm Willow had been, in the interview room at the police station, despite having learned that his business was about to become discredited and go down the pan. The only reason he could have been that relaxed was because it didn’t matter. He must be seriously wealthy to get by. Even with the mark-up on vegetable prices, the profit margins couldn’t be that great. Turning away, Mariner’s gaze swept over the rows of poly tunnels. He wondered if they would be retained to keep up the illusion that the farm was still a working one, and that Willow’s product was a going concern.
For an instant, he thought he saw what looked like a faint plume of smoke rising from one of the structures. That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be smoke, it must be steam. On a warm day that might be explained by the sun heating off the moisture of dew, but not on a chill, cloudy day like today. In a sudden rush, Mariner recognized a possibility that both he and Griffith had overlooked.
The new barn may be there for refrigerating produce but what about those poly tunnels? Willow had said that they couldn’t be insulated, but what if he’d been lying about that? Climbing the flimsy fence Mariner went first to investigate the source of that vapour. Unfastening the flaps on the tunnel, he hoped and expected to see the rows of green plants that had eluded them in the barn, but he was to be disappointed for a second time. What confronted him instead was a vast expanse of brown and rotten vegetables with little sign of growth, very like the parsnips Willow had shown him on that first day he came here. The air inside the tunnel was warm and humid, which explained the steam he had seen, but it didn’t account for why there seemed to be nothing of value growing in such a carefully manufactured atmosphere. Kneeling down Mariner examined the growth more closely. Was this simply some kind of plant matter he’d never come across before? As he stooped he felt a blast of warm air on his face, as if he was leaning over a kettle spout, and lifting the vegetation he saw underneath the steel grille of some kind of ventilation pipe coming up from under the ground. Standing upright, he emerged from the tunnel and looked over at the farm buildings, about two hundred yards away. He thought back to the time he had worked on the farm, and suddenly he knew exactly where that steam was being vented from, and why. This was the moment he should contact Griffith to report his suspicion, but the principle of evidence-based claims was deeply ingrained in his psyche, and having come unstuck before, this time he wanted to be absolutely sure of what he thought he knew. It wouldn’t do any harm to just take a quick look first. Given the circumstances he would be in and out of the farm without anyone knowing.
Walking back up the track Mariner found, as expected, that all was quiet. He went round to the back door of the farm house which, with extraordinary vigilance for this neighbourhood, he found locked on both Mortise and Yale. Mariner rattled it, but could see that it wasn’t going to budge. He stepped back to survey the rest of the building. A small frosted-glass window on the ground floor to his left was slightly ajar. A pantry, if Mariner remembered rightly. Reaching up he was able to unhook the inside bar and open the window to its full extent, which gave him a rectangular opening of about two square feet; perfectly manageable if it hadn’t been more than six feet off the ground. This was where he wished he had Tony Knox’s agility. Pulling up on the crossbar, he managed to scramble up and get a toehold on the window ledge, then, hoping that the frame would take his weight, he thrust the upper half of his body in through the window. Not a pantry but a WC, the cistern and lidless bowl immediately below him.
Leaning in as far as he could, Mariner reached down, taking his weight on his arms, so that in effect he was doing a handstand on the cistern. Then he tried pulling the lower half of his body in through the window. But he was six feet tall and, unsurprisingly, ran out of space. The only way to get his legs through would be to ‘step’ down with his arms on to the rim of the toilet bowl, but that was at least a two foot drop, and if he missed, he ran the risk of crashing face first into the toilet or on to the stone flags of the floor. Meanwhile the balance of his weight had shifted, and trying to heave himself back out through the window again would place a huge strain on the wooden frame. He eased forward a little, yelping in pain as the spike of the window fastening drove into his groin. In an effort to alleviate the agony, Mariner did the only thing open to him, which was to shift even more of his weight forward. His arms were beginning to shake with the effort of supporting himself and suddenly the decision was taken out of his hands. Lurching forward with his right hand, Mariner managed to grab on to the toilet seat, but as the full weight of his body followed, his elbow buckled under the force and he fell, collapsing in a heap on the stone floor to the side of the toilet, his shoulder hitting the ground with an excruciating crunch. There was a noise outside the door. He listened, the only sound the rasp of his laboured breathing. A clock somewhere in the house finished chiming eleven, and Mariner relaxed. He lay there for a couple of seconds assessing the damage and found that, despite the indignity of it, he seemed to have remained intact. His shoulder and bollocks
would be sore for a couple of days, but he was otherwise unscathed.
Inside the house Mariner made his way to the kitchen, trying to get his bearings and recall where the entrance to the cellar had been. After prowling all the ground-floor rooms, he finally identified the door leading off a small utility room at the back of the house. It was bolted on the outside and swung open easily on a dark, cavernous void. It was here that Mariner realized what the biggest obstacle in all this was going to be: his own fear. As a young man, Mariner had been down to these cellars a couple of times with Bob Sewell. He’d never enjoyed the experience and had always been glad to get out again, and that was before his ordeal of a couple of years ago, when he’d spent days incarcerated in his own cellar, waiting to die. He took a deep breath to try and still his heart and ran his tongue around his mouth in an effort to moisten it, before taking the first faltering steps down the steep wooden stair case.
Almost immediately he was hit by an overpowering wall of hot, moist air, like stepping into a sauna, and he instantly felt the damp prickling of sweat gathering on his face and neck. The wooden stairs were greasy and he had to concentrate hard on keeping his footing, all the time fighting the urge to turn back and slam the door shut. All he needed to do was go down there, take a few photographs on his phone and get out again. Ryan Griffith would do the rest. He passed a light switch on the wall, but as Mariner neared the bottom of the stairs, it became apparent that he wouldn’t need it, for his way was lit instead by an eerie bluish glow emanating from the depths of the cellar. From the bottom step he finally looked up and gasped at the spectacle. The glow cast a light over thousands and thousands of spidery plants whose leaves, trembling in the moving air, gave the illusion that they were alive, and about to crawl all over him like a thousand scuttling creatures. The main cellar was as Mariner remembered it, a natural limestone cavern that extended backward into a further series of smaller caves. What he could see here were hundreds of plants at varying stages of growth, some as high as 4.5 feet tall, and the air was thick with a strong herbal smell. If the other caves were similarly full this was a massive operation.
Mariner made his way gingerly along past a couple of workbenches holding trays, plant pots and fertilizer and what was evidently the processing and packaging section. He saw what he recognized as a trimming machine – a rotating blade with a mesh above it and a bowl below, over which the trimmer would rotate. The largest leaves would be harvested by hand and fed through this machine, whilst smaller leaves would be harvested using hand-held garden shears, cutting them carefully from around the flowering buds. Somewhere in the operation, perhaps in one of the cellars at the back, or up in the main farm house, there would be an air-cooled room where the leaves would be placed on silk screens to dry. The plants themselves were lined up on long trestle tables that raised them up close to the high-powered lights that heated the air, and the cellar roof was lined with reflective foil for further insulation and to maximize the heat. Here Mariner took more photographs; he’d just get some shots to illustrate the scale of production, and then he could be gone. But at the far end of one of the benches something caught his eye that looked out of place. It was a black leather wallet, sitting alongside a mobile phone. He opened the wallet and a photograph of two little girls looked out at him.
Then a voice said, quietly, from a few feet away. ‘I don’t think that concerns you, does it?’
Mariner looked up towards the steps and into the twin barrels of a twelve-bore shotgun, behind which stood Amber, the light illuminating her hair in a golden haze, making her look like some ethereal, ancient goddess. Mariner’s head was beginning to pound, from both the heat and from fear. He could feel the sweat running off his forehead and down his face.
Amber’s voice, when she started to speak, was stronger and much more resolute than he expected. ‘I’m really sorry, but I won’t be able to let you leave here alive. You know that, don’t you?’
‘You can’t keep me here,’ Mariner said unconvincingly. ‘Sooner or later DI Griffith will start looking for me. Suzy Yin will tell him where I disappeared and it won’t take them long to track me down.’
‘Oh, I’ll probably let them find you,’ Amber said. ‘But sadly by then you won’t be in a condition to tell them very much. They’ll see that you met with an unfortunate accident.’
Mariner eyed the gun. ‘The kind of accident that involves a twelve bore?’
‘I’m of a very nervous disposition, Mr Mariner, or can I call you Tom? After what happened to Theo, and the possibility of Glenn McGinley being at large, it would be only natural that I should be afraid for my safety. It gives me every reason to defend myself, and I’m not terribly experienced with guns. Who’d be to say the whole thing wasn’t just a dreadful accident? After all, you are trespassing on private property. And we’ve never really met before, have we? As far as I’m concerned, you could be anyone.’
Mariner was still holding the wallet, trying to grasp its significance. ‘But I don’t understand. Why have you got …?’
‘Haven’t you worked it out yet?’ She was smiling. ‘I’m surprised. Elena says you’re very smart. Look at the photograph.’
Mariner did as she said and looked back at the two smiling little girls. Then he looked back at Amber. ‘Jeremy Bryce was your father,’ he said, understanding at last.
‘Not fully accurate on either count,’ she said. ‘His name wasn’t Jeremy Bryce; it was Jonathan Bruce – Jonny to his friends. Not that he actually had many of those. It’s one of the reasons the police haven’t been able to identify him yet. I expect he planned it that way. The beard and the hair helped too; not really his style at all. He was always clean shaven; hair cut with military precision.’
‘The other count?’ Mariner said.
‘I suppose technically he fathered me, but I stopped thinking of him in that way long ago,’ Amber said bitterly. ‘I reviled him. The man was a monster. Even if anyone has recognized him, it doesn’t surprise me that no-one has come forward to claim him. I can’t think of anyone who’d want to. He destroyed my whole family.’
‘He abused you?’ Mariner guessed.
She blinked, and for a moment the shotgun slipped in her grasp, but she quickly recovered. ‘He started on me when I was about five,’ she said. ‘Funny, isn’t it, how child abuse is so rife, so commonplace these days that we are almost inured to it. The idea of it ceases to be shocking. I remember the occasion of course in vivid detail, though not exactly how old I was at the time. Mum was a nurse and did shift work, so it was easy for him. He took such special care of me when she was on nights. And he was such a pleasant, likeable man that no-one would have suspected a thing. Even I didn’t at first. For such a long time I thought that all little girls shared those special secrets with their daddies. By the time I was old enough to have figured out how wrong it was, I was too ashamed to do anything about it. And as he reminded me on frequent occasions, by then I was making a choice. I’d been colluding with him for years.’
‘Did your mother know what was going on?’ Mariner asked.
‘I honestly don’t know. I prefer to think that she didn’t; it’s easier that way, although I still feel angry at her.’
‘You didn’t tell her?’
‘The first person I ever told was a total stranger. Theo.’
‘A stranger?’
‘I was going to kill myself, but Theo found me and stopped me. It was a complete fluke. He was delivering leaflets to the houses in our street. Our letterbox used to stick sometimes and he had to push it open. He saw me trying to tie one of Dad’s climbing ropes to the banister. He broke down the door and I ended up telling him everything. Somehow the fact that he was a stranger made it easier.’
‘So the baby wasn’t his?’
She laughed, a bitter, staccato laugh. ‘How could it have been? We never had sex. Ours was a chaste relationship. He hadn’t fathered my baby.’ It didn’t take much for Mariner to work out who had. ‘Theo rescued me. He brought me her
e, to Caranwy. He’d planned to run away here anyway, so he brought me with him. Theo was a romantic; he was certain that fate had intervened, that we would live here happily for ever after.’
‘But Theo is dead,’ Mariner pointed out.
‘The shame of what happened to me is unbearable sometimes and I’ve always been terrified that one day my father would find me and it would start all over again. Theo said he was going to end it once and for all. I didn’t know what he meant. He wrote to my father anonymously, hinting that I wanted reconciliation. When Joe Hennessey turned up in the village we knew Jonny had taken the bait. Theo told me he was going to talk to my father, to tell him what he knew and threaten him with exposure if he didn’t stay away for good. Then I realized he was planning something more final.’ Tears began to stream down her cheeks.
‘He was going to kill your father.’
‘When Theo didn’t come back that morning I knew something terrible must have happened.’
Mariner couldn’t believe how naive their plan had been. ‘But when you found out Theo was dead, why didn’t you tell the police?’
‘Because we didn’t know for sure what had happened. Willow and Elena said it would be better to wait. They didn’t want me to have to tell my story if it was all for nothing.’
‘Elena?’
‘She’s been a good friend since I came here; a better mother than mine ever was.’
A clatter at the top of the steps made them both look up, to see one of Shapasnikov’s sharp-suited henchmen descending the stair case and holding a handgun out in front of him. Sighing, Amber lowered the shotgun. ‘Dmitri, thank God. My arms were dropping off.’
‘You know each other?’ Mariner wasn’t sure why that should be such a surprise.
Blood and Stone Page 27
