This Thing of Darkness (70 page)
I don’t immediately share my discovery. Partly, it’s Sunday, and even Watkins doesn’t work every day and hour of the week. Partly, I’m not yet sure the best way to introduce my find. But partly too because when I go to pick up my car from its little parking place, I discover that it has outstayed its welcome and has been hauled off to the police pound. Rescuing it will cost me £200, which is bad enough, but it also costs me a trip by train to Cardiff to collect the stupid, stupid bits of documentation which the boring, boring enforcement people demand before they’ll give me my car back.
So: by train to Cardiff Central.
Taxi home.
The car waits outside, while I find my stupid insurance details, some stupid photo ID, and a stupid, stupid, pointless, pointless utility bill.
Those things, plus also a pair of shoes, so I can return the pair I borrowed from Cesca this morning. I play it safe. Avoid anything slip-on, because those are the sort most likely to go walkabout. Instead, choose a pair of lace-ups, which I tie with a double knot, in the theory that that way it’ll be harder for me to remove them without noticing.
Then back in the taxi.
Back on the train.
Once settled again, and the rhythm of the rails trotting in my ear, I vent some of my crossness by buying a whole set of fake identity documents from a Russian website,
buypassportsfake.cc
. I don’t know if I even need to really. Just, when I see a barrier saying Do Not Cross, I have an almost overwhelming impulse to cross it.
Anyway. I buy a fake passport, a fake drivers’ licence, and a set of fake utility bills. It costs me a thousand euros to get them all, and I have to set up a special account with Western Union to make the down payment because – as the website regretfully states –
Unfortunately, due to the nature of our business it has been difficult to obtain credit card or Paypal facilities.
The site promises me the documents in five days. I doubt if the papers would get me safely across borders, but they should be workable for most other purposes. And they’re the sort of thing I like to have.
As we leave Swindon, I get a text from Penry.
GOT PHOTOS
.
NOT DEAD. SUPPER
? I text back,
GOOD. GOOD. YOU BET
.
I use the rest of the journey to check if there’s been any progress on the Stonemonkey. There hasn’t, but Watkins has managed to swivel the inquiry in a remarkably short time so that it’s now focusing on any remarkably able British climbers active in southern Europe. She has – sensibly, I think – decided to use some of Nat Brown’s counterparts in France and Spain to help with the search. The decision increases the risk of information leaking, but it also vastly increases our chances of success.
The team, I notice, now includes three analysts from SOCA in London, which makes sense as they’ll have more international experience than we do.
I’m pleased Watkins is in control of all this. Dunthinking would have cocked things up by now.
London.
Paddington station.
Iron columns and pigeons. A flutter of wings beneath the glass.
I have an odd time-shift moment, when I can’t quite figure out what century I’m in. I keep looking up at that glassed Victorian roof, wondering why I can’t see clouds of steam and speckles of soot. It genuinely troubles me that the station floor isn’t a-scurry with gents in frock coats and women in gloves and bustles.
But the moment passes. Our own tiresomely attired century bumps at me until the scene in front of me and the one in my head line up, at least approximately.
I realise I’m feeling better again. Still a bit nuts, but somehow clarified. Hardened.
Made stronger by Cesca’s example.
When Gareth Glyn told me he thought my father was a murderer, I started to fall apart. To collapse in a way that even those Rhayader morons hadn’t managed to bring about. Faced with the same information, Cesca just said coolly that she’d help out. Nail her own father, because justice required it.
I’ll do the same, I realise. Pursue my investigation wherever it leads. Accept its consequences, no matter what.
What’s more, my recent discoveries have simplified things. I thought, originally, that I had two extra-curricular projects. One of those was investigating the mysteries of my own past. The second was bringing to justice those friends-of-Rattigan whom I suspected of being accomplices, or worse, in his crimes. But those accomplices now look like business associates of my father’s. My past and their crimes seem inextricably entangled.
One mystery and one solution.
And one battered little investigator to join the two.
A battered little investigator who now takes another stupid taxi to the stupid car pound, where she hands over stupid documents to a stupid person along with a stupid amount of money and all to get a car which was in no one’s way and which had stuffed the stupid, stupid parking machine with gold and silver until the damn thing belched in repletion.
My car is released from captivity. It blinks in the sunlight and promises to be good.
My shoes are still lashed firmly to my feet.
Drive to Central Saint Martins. Leave Cesca’s shoes for her, with a note saying thanks.
Thanks for the shoes. Thanks for the bed. Thanks for the ganja. Thanks for the photo.
Thanks for being nice about the burglary: not phoning Watkins, not ending my career, not sending me to jail.
Thanks, most of all, for showing me the woman I need to be. A daughter with steel. A woman with backbone.
When, finally, I point my car’s nose to the west, when we shake ourselves free of London-cluttering traffic, I press the accelerator down until we’re doing ninety miles an hour. Racing onward to the land of the Celts. Leaving the city of the Romans, the Angles, the Jutes and the Saxons far behind.
One mystery.
One investigation.
One solution.
Penry did well.
Worked sensibly, worked safely.
He bought a wristwatch from a place in London for fifty quid. A thing that looks and functions just like a regular watch, but one that shoots photos and videos in 1280 by 960 pixel resolution.
At the docks, he strolled ship to ship, getting into conversations, asking for work. The
Isobel Baker
wasn’t the first ship he stopped at, nor was it the last.
‘Getting pictures of the stern was easy. I just walked along the dockside and shot video. Getting a view of the deck fixings was harder. They stopped me on the gangway, about halfway up, but I did what I could. I don’t think it’s too bad.’
We spend the evening at his house, eating his version of spaghetti bolognese and examining his booty. We clip the best stills, delete any junk footage, send the good stuff over to Lowe.
Penry asks me about Watkins. Whether our data will give her enough to act.
I shrug. I don’t know.
He says, ‘There’s a bed and breakfast place on Lower Hill Street. It’s got rooms.’
I look at the place on Google Maps.
Lower Hill Street: a road with a perfect view of the docks. A long telephoto distance from the
Isobel Baker
. The B&B in question has net curtains on its windows and, because of what and where it is, there’ll be people coming and going all day long. One strange face more or less will never attract notice.
I say, ‘Perfect. Yes. Thank you.’
Show him the e-fit picture of the guy who gave Buzz a thumping. The guy who, almost certainly, was the second of the two goons in the barn. The one who smashed his buddy’s skull in. ‘If you see this guy, you might want to tell someone. He’s wanted for murder.’
‘OK. I’ve got a night-vision scope, but I’ll need a camera. A proper stake-out thing.’
‘Fine. Get it.’
‘I will, if you promise me to do this thing properly. You know,
properly
: as in actual police action with actual legal authority.’
‘I will. Yes. I’ve always said that if I can, I will.’
‘“If I can, I will.” That’s not the same as “yes”. Look, these guys are dangerous, you said it yourself. You can’t take them on alone.’
I stare at him. I don’t know what makes Penry think he has the right to come over all parental with me. Maybe it’s an older guy thing. Maybe he just can’t help it.
I say, softly, ‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding.’
Penry does a small double-take, but he’s a Welsh boy and knows his Ecclesiastes.
‘There’s not a lot of sunshine in Milford Haven, if we’re honest,’ he says. ‘And the swift tend to win their races, what with being swift and all.’
‘This ship. The
Isobel Baker
. How many crew members does she have?’
‘How many
crew
members?’
‘Brian, is it the kind of boat that needs a cook?’
Penry says, ‘Fuck.’ Says he won’t help. Says he doesn’t want to be part of this.
But he does. And he will. And before the evening is over, he promises to find out.
Monday. The first day of July.
Atlantic Cables have hooked up their line. This week and next: onshore testing. Thereafter: full line tests. Brean to Long Island. London to New York. Finding out if the line is clean. If it’s fast. I remember Whillans’s rule of thumb: that, for a largeish hedge fund, a one millisecond speed advantage is worth a hundred million dollars a year.
Slivers of time. Oceans of money.
I’m working hard on Stonemonkey stuff, when Jackson comes by my desk.
‘Fiona.’
‘Sir.’
He thumps his knuckles down on my desktop, watching them whiten. I watch them too. We both watch.
Then he says, ‘That van.’
‘
My
van.’
‘Your van, yes. We took a look at it. Bridgend, I mean, the forensics people. They found sodium hydroxide. The whole vehicle had been washed in the stuff.’ Sodium hydroxide: caustic soda. A way to destroy DNA. As effective as it gets. ‘You never quite know, though, do you? I mean, we might find something in a fabric seam. A tear in the floor. That kind of thing.’
I nod. Yes. We get ever better at that kind of thing. As Kyle Bransby knows. Which means he’d probably be very careful with seams, and tears, and that kind of thing.
‘We also asked Kirsty Emmett about smells. She couldn’t remember anything. Nothing at all. Only then – and this was planned – Mervyn Rogers pops some aniseed gum into his mouth. Starts chewing. Emmett started crying. Sobbing. So much we had to end the interview while Victim Support did their stuff.’
Mervyn Rogers. I don’t know who chose him as an interrogator – he’s not usually skilled at the nicey-nicey stuff – but he’s a fair physical fit for Bransby, give or take a ten year age gap.
A neat trick.
A neat trick, but a victim crying at aniseed gum isn’t the kind of evidence which will secure a conviction.
‘We set up an old-fashioned identity parade. Our girl picked out Bransby, but she wasn’t sure. Kept apologising.’
Those apologies will need to be handed to the defence team. The ordinary human reactions of an ordinary woman plunged into nightmare will play badly in court.
Jackson continues. ‘We’ve pulled in Bransby for questioning. He’s downstairs now. We’re going to play it long, hard and nasty.’
Long, hard and nasty: except that Bransby will know his rights. Know that he just has to tough it out a day or two and he’ll walk away without a stain on his loathsome rapist’s character.
Jackson says, ‘He’s a little shit. He won’t confess.’
I agree unhappily, but Jackson’s face wrinkles in an expression I can’t read.
A wrinkle that widens and widens, until he says, ‘Thing is, though, we also got a search warrant on his house. I’ve just had a call from the search team. Pair of female knickers, torn and stained. Located in a shoebox in the attic. Description of the garment matches the item worn by Emmett on the day of the attack.’ He laughs now. That open, broad, overdue laugh. ‘The silly fucking fucker, eh? You do all that and you keep a trophy. You’re a professional fucking SOCO and you keep a trophy.’
The joy of conviction washes over us. Conviction: not in the bloodless sense of philosophical certainty, but that most happy policeish one of knowing that your bad guy will be put away. The banging gavel, the guilty verdict. Handcuffs and the prison gates.
Closure. Literal and metaphorical.
I grin. ‘Have you told Bransby yet?’
‘Nope. Not going to tell him until one minute before we have to charge him or release him. We’ll get the CPS lads to push for the maximum of the bloody maximum. Probably get it too.’
We share the joy. A police officer who turns to crime – nasty crime, at that – is just about the lowest of the low. For any decent copper, putting those guys behind bars is a particular delight.
Then Jackson says, ‘That other crime you mentioned. I presume if you had any firm evidence, you’d share it?’
‘Wouldn’t just share it, sir. I’d give it to you on a tray lined with rose petals and kitten fur.’
‘Thought so.’
‘I mean, Dunthinking is a useless idiot, but he’s not
that
useless. I’ve never seen him that useless.’
‘No. Me neither.’
‘And those hospital swabs would have closed the case.’
‘Yes.’
Jackson thumps the desk again. Partly a ‘need to think about this’ gesture. Partly a ‘good work, Constable’ one. Mostly though, he’s just a big Welshman and their hormones go funny unless they hit something now and again.
He leaves. I work.
If I think about Rhayader, then I do. If I think about Gina Jewell, then I do. Neither thought appears to make me fall apart, go crazy or discard perfectly good shoes.
Progress. My version of it.
Then, at about eleven, Watkins marches in. Short hair. White shirt. Battle-grey suit. Her range-finders lock on to me and she trundles over.
‘Fiona.’
‘Good morning.’
‘You’re . . . you’re . . .?’
‘I’m OK. Yes, thanks. I’m fine.’
She scours my face, not quite believing my answer. Then, ‘Listen, we’ve got news from London. Do you know where Haston is? He’s not answering his phone.’
Mike has a theory that most calls are boring, so he often leaves his phone where he can’t hear it.
I say no.
‘He’s not at work,’ she says, disapprovingly.
‘At home?’ I offer. ‘The climbing wall? The climbing club place?’
Watkins says, ‘Would you mind going to look for him? We could really use him here.’
I say I’d be happy to.
Try his flat, a shared two-bedroom thing in Splott. No answer there. Try the climbing club place. Nada. As I’m leaving the car park, my phone buzzes.
Watkins.
She’s texted through a link to a Spanish video sharing site and the words,
TAKE A LOOK! THIS IS WHY WE NEED HASTON
.
I open the video, which has an upload date of January 2009: exactly when our boy would have been gearing up for his insurance scam. The video starts. No title, no intro. Just somebody starting off up a climb.
Sunshine. Golden limestone. Thorn-dotted Mediterranean hills.
The little film is a real amateur affair. There’s some messing about with rope. People chatting in Spanish. A climber climbing. No particular urgency or interest.
For a minute and a half, I watch, not sure what I’m watching or why. It just seems like a deeply boring climbing video.
Then something changes. Shouting from further along the crag. People running.
The videographer, whoever he is, pulls away from the guy who’s been climbing and there’s a moment or two of confused framing and bad focus.
Then the camera finds its target. A man picking his way up a cliff. The video zooms in to the limit of its range, perhaps fifty or a hundred metres distant.
It’s hard to see much detail, but the climber involved has the muscled leanness of his breed. Red trousers, no top.
Also: a harness, but no rope.
The climber is maybe eighty feet up and there is nothing at all to stop him falling.
The guy continues upwards. Cautious, but never static. It’s hard to figure out the angles from the view I have, but the cliff looks overhanging. An arch of stone that steepens as it rises.
The hubbub at the base of the crag continues, but it’s too distant for the microphone to pick up any detail. There are people holding out some kind of groundsheet, an improvised safety net.
The camera steadies. The climber climbs.
At one point, he pauses. Shakes out his right arm, shifting the lactic acid, restoring the blood flow. Chalks up.
Dark hair, worn short. A glimpse of face, a scatter of pixels.
Then nothing. He continues to climb, out of frame, out of sight.
The videographer and his half-forgotten climbing buddy, now dangling from an anchor halfway up the cliff, start talking excitedly in Spanish.
The video closes.
I don’t know what I’ve just witnessed.
Drive on to the climbing wall, where I find a super-excited Mike. He’s just bothered to look at his phone. Seen the same video. Spoken to the London analyst who found the clip.
Mike is fizzing with excitement. Starts to splurge as soon as he sees me, but I stop him.
‘Not here. Somewhere private.’
There’s not much privacy to be had – the place is heaving with schoolchildren – but Mike negotiates with the person on the door and we end up in some kind of internal kit room. Shelves, and ropes, and helmets, and boots. Cardboard and faded sweat. Mike thumps the door shut.
‘It’s him. It’s him. It’s him. I’d bet a million pounds. Look, that climb? It was 8b, an 8-bloody-b. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you, but it’s a seriously,
seriously
hard climb. And no ropes! Jesus. The guy just unclipped from his rope, Fi.’
I make him slow down. The story comes out in pieces – and backwards – but it all makes sense in the end.
The lead came to our team in London, via a climbing journalist, José Bereziartu, who’s based in Barcelona and does much the same sort of job for his magazine that Nat Brown does here. Bereziartu was notified of the story by the local grapevine, tracked down a couple of witnesses and ended up writing a short diary piece entitled simply ‘
Sensación Británica
’. A piece evenly divided between admiration for the unknown climber’s feat and fierce reproof for the bloodbath that could have resulted.
The story was this. A British climber, known only as John, was drifting round a crag near Rodellar, looking for partners to climb with. A strong local climber agreed to hook up with him, and they blitzed their way through various hard but not impossible routes. They then agreed to start working on the jewel of the crag, the route I was looking at in the video.
Both climbers were tested. The British guy was a fair bit stronger than his local partner, but even he kept falling when it came to the crux.
‘And bear in mind, Fi, the crux is at more than thirty metres. And the route is desperately overhanging, so if you fall, you won’t even bounce before you hit the ground. I mean, that’s a death-fall, no two ways about it.’
‘But you say he was roped,’ I complain. ‘The guy in the video was unroped.’
‘Exactly. This guy, John, was pissed off that he kept on falling. I mean, that’s already crazy. It’s like Usain Bolt being pissed off that he’s not breaking ten seconds in some routine training session. But anyway, this John guy is back on the route, trying again, when he just says, “Fuck this” and unclips. Just drops the damn rope. It’s like he’s telling himself, “You climb it or you die.” The video shows you what happens next.’
Mike’s excitement, I think, is mostly because of the athletic achievement of what he just witnessed. Mine is because this story is Nat Brown’s prediction coming true.
You know ’em when you see ’em
.
‘Names? Identities?’ I ask.
Mike shakes his head. ‘The guy gets to the top of the cliff and just walks away. Everyone was waiting for him to come down. He’d have been a frigging hero. The story would have been on every single climbing mag in Europe. But he just walked away. Vanished.’
He says that in a sombre voice – or as sombre as he can get, given his excitement – because he thinks he’s relaying bad news. But he isn’t. The opposite. Any normal person would have descended that cliff, to receive the adulation of his peers or simply to collect his gear. But not our boy. He preferred to walk away. Leave his equipment, his never-again moment of fame.
Who would do that except someone with an intense and specific desire for privacy?
I tell Mike this.
I’m
excited now. I want to get him straight over to the office to deliver him to Watkins, but it turns out that the kit-room door doesn’t work properly from the inside, and we have to bang and thump to get someone to let us out.
The banging and thumping brings us close together. Physically close, I mean. Mike had been on the wall climbing most of the morning and he’s lightly oiled with perspiration. But fresh-smelling. A clean, light smell. And even just thumping at the door, and laughing, and dancing back so that I can thump it too, he has a loose, muscular grace.
I realise, to my surprise, that I am strongly attracted to him. Strongly enough that I can see myself pulling off his horrible bit of hair elastic and spinning him round, my face upturned to receive his kisses.
I want to do that. Ache to do it.
Ache to, but go right on aching.
Partly because Jess, the person who gave us the kit room to conspire in, turns up again to let us out. And partly too, because I’m not the queen of spontaneity. Deliberately so. I avoid doing things on impulse, because I’ve learned that my feelings are too unreliable to trust.
So nothing happens. Jess opens the door. I walk out to the car park feeling Mike’s presence, hot and limber, trotting beside me. I am slightly breathless. Unsteady. Unsettled by gusts of almost teenaged desire.
We walk over to my car. I blip it unlocked, but don’t open the door, because I think I’ll fumble it, or drop my keys, or do something that betrays me as the hopelessly infatuated, teen-at-a-Justin-Bieber-concert girl that I have suddenly become.
He looks down at me, smiling.
There’s probably a technique somewhere for deciphering what that smile means, or if it means anything at all. But if there is, I don’t possess it.
We stand there in the sunshine, me leaning against the warm metal wall of my Alfa Romeo.
He jingles his car keys at me, reminding me he has a car here too.
‘Meet at your office, yes?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘It
is
exciting.’
‘Yes.’
I don’t move.
He gets into his car. Drives off with a wave.
I don’t move. Let the sunshine wash over me.
Text Watkins.
FOUND HIM. WE’RE ON OUR WAY.
Why did Watkins assume I would know where to find Mike? Why did Nat Brown make the assumption that Mike and I were together? Maybe the whole world has been seeing something that I’ve been too dippily slow to understand. Maybe I’ve been half in lust with Mike all this time and it’s taken me this long to notice.