This Thing of Darkness (16 page)

23

Really nothing. In practice, everything.

In the spring, summer and early autumn of 2009, the various members of the BIA’s Senior Working Group on Household and Small Business Security Threats experienced a series of improbable burglaries. Bentley. Redhead. Galton Evans. A couple of other break-ins, not reported to the police, because the items stolen were of trivial value and the damage inconsequential. There were eight members of the committee, five break-ins. Bentley’s London home wasn’t touched, her holiday home was. Galton Evans’s Cardiff townhouse wasn’t targeted, the country home he shared with Marianna Lockwood was.

The common thread to all the incidents was simply their improbability. Bentley’s Holland Park home, for example, contained much more of value and was vastly easier to access than her Sussex lighthouse.

Which was the point.

In Bentley’s words, spilled under interview at Charing Cross, her face pale, her voice low and fragile: ‘We came into the BIA’s offices for one of our regular meetings. Nothing special about it. Just a routine review. And there was all our stuff. Galton’s etchings. John’s wife’s jewellery. The ribbon from my teddy bear. All there in a big pile on the table.

‘Our meeting room was on the
tenth
floor. A
tenth
-floor conference room with this bloody great hole in the window and the glass lying on the inside of the room.’

Along with the stolen goods, there was a note. The note, now in our hands, read as follows:

Dear Insurance People,

Here’s your stuff back. As you may have noticed, I can enter any building, anywhere, any time. So far, I’ve avoided causing any real damage and – as you see – you haven’t even lost your stuff. (Well, except for your teddy, Nellie, but it
is
rather big.)

Still, I’m sure that as insurance execs, you’ll have considered that someone with my talents could cause a lot of destruction. A fire in a bank’s trading room. Lost artworks. Maybe an explosion here and there (only when a building is empty, of course.)

Now I don’t want to get nasty and I’m sure you don’t want me to either. So why don’t we compromise? You pay me £10,000,000 and I go away. Make the payment and you never hear from me again. Don’t make the payment and I can promise you that I will inflict a minimum of £50,000,000 of damage in the month following your non-payment. Then £75,000,000 in the second month. And so on. Oh, and my fee would go up too. An extra £5,000,000 for every month you’re in arrears.

Does that sound like a deal? I hope so. Anyway, think about it. I’ll be in touch. And please don’t call the police. I wouldn’t like that at all.

Yours,

‘The Stonemonkey’

The note was typed and printed out on ordinary paper, nothing special. The name, ‘Stonemonkey’, sounds like the sort of self-adulating name a serious climber might choose to give himself.

As for the threat itself, Bentley and her colleagues took it seriously. They couldn’t do otherwise. Until now, they hadn’t compared notes on their various break-ins. Why would they? Their meetings were strictly for business. But with their stolen goods on the table and a hole gaping in their tenth-floor window, they could hardly avoid the subject. Nor, indeed, could they avoid the conclusion that the Stonemonkey could do exactly as he claimed.

‘When you think about it,’ Bentley said, ‘the entire structure of the security industry assumes that intruders are bound by the laws of gravity. When we advise clients on alarm systems, CCTV networks and all that, we concentrate on the ground floor and perhaps the floor above. Secure the lower levels, and the rest will take care of itself. But if you can just float in through a tenth floor window . . . no one in the country has security against that. No one.’

The committee also discussed the man’s threat to cause tens of millions of pounds’ worth of damage.

Bentley again, ‘I mean, yes. A couple of Old Master paintings. That could be fifty million in a single pop. But that’s not what disturbed us, not really. Truth is, a hit of fifty million, even a hundred million, is kind of routine in our industry. But what if the guy poured a few cans of petrol over a bank’s trading floor? Or chucked anthrax in the air conditioning?

‘Suppose he achieved, I don’t know, a relatively small outage in a mid-sized investment bank, maybe something that took a day or two to fix. Our colleagues in the Financial Industry Risks team reckoned the costs of that kind of incident could easily run to a hundred million pounds. Maybe more. These finance industry types are merciless. If they know one of their competitors is struggling, they’ll go in for the kill. Make trades that just rip that competitor apart. And if you up the ante – let’s say the guy chooses to target one of the biggest banks, that he has access to explosive devices, or whatever – you could easily, easily be looking at a billion pounds’ worth of damage. He might not even
mean
to cause that much damage. But it’s not something he’d be able to judge in advance, because it would depend on things he couldn’t see, like a bank’s particular trading position. He might aim to do fifty million pounds’ worth of damage and end up costing us billions.’

All that day, Bentley and her colleagues discussed the threat. The insurance industry isn’t, for good reasons, in the habit of succumbing to blackmail. On the other hand, spending a billion pounds or more on defending a point of principle seemed a little excessive. There was a risk, of course, that the first request for £10,000,000 wouldn’t be the last, but given the sums involved it seemed worth taking the chance.

‘And that’s what we decided. To make the payment. We didn’t know when he would contact us. Or how. Or which one of us he’d reach. But when he got in touch, we resolved to say yes.’

Redhead, in an interview room next to Bentley’s, confirmed those details. His story was the same in all crucial respects.

Over in Cardiff, Galton Evans was being worked over by DI Watkins, an experience roughly comparable on the pleasure scale with undergoing a seven-day capture-and-interrogation exercise with the SAS. Evans did well, or thought he did, cleaving hard to his original statement, the one that ended, ‘This statement is true to the best of my knowledge and belief,’ with his name and his signature beneath.

By eleven in the morning, Watkins started to go gentle on him – like the others, he’d been picked up at five thirty – and he clearly started to think he’d done all he needed to do. Then Watkins played him the audio we’d recorded in Charing Cross. Bentley spilling everything. Redhead doing the same. Evans’s statement being revealed as a hatful of lies and evasions.

I’ve watched the video of that moment. Watkins hitting the off button. Redhead’s voice vanishing into nothing.

Evans swallowed once, tried to speak, then swallowed again. ‘I was trying to prevent a crime,’ he said eventually. ‘We all were. Trying to prevent crime.’

Bentley and Redhead have both been released. They should have informed us of the Stonemonkey’s blackmail threat at the time, but they had strong reasons not to do so, and a failure to inform the police of criminal acts is not in itself a crime.

Evans’s case is different though. He lied, by way of a formal written statement, to an active police inquiry. His lies attempted to cover up a substantial crime and his actions were both premeditated and, as Watkins’s interrogation that morning proved, persistent. Those things amount to a serious attempt to pervert the course of justice. Evans was charged before he left the station.

Neither Evans, nor Bentley, nor Redhead have anything to tell us about Livesey, about Moon, about undersea cables, about Oxwich Bay, or anything else. Ditto the various other members of the committee when we pulled them in too. Truth is, they all sounded puzzled when we asked.

According to Bentley, Redhead, and everyone else involved – including, finally, Evans – the Stonemonkey did indeed make his demand for payment. The demand came via an email from a recently created Hotmail address.

The BIA made payment of £10,000,000 to a Swiss bank account, which was listed with a number only, no name. Neither Bentley nor any of the others knew what happened thereafter, but we’ve found out that the money swiftly exited the Swiss account and moved on to Belize. We can’t trace its movements from there.

We asked Bentley and the rest if any further blackmail demands were ever forthcoming. They said no.

We asked if they were aware of thefts or cases of criminal damage where the Stonemonkey appeared to have been implicated. They said no.

We asked if there had been any other contacts between any of them, their companies, and the Stonemonkey. They said no.

In Bentley’s words, ‘He wanted a ten million pound payoff and we gave it to him. He stuck to his end of the bargain. And, look, we got it right. We helped prevent some very substantial crimes and saved ourselves money at the same time. The truth is, sorry, but I’d do it all again.’

24

The new information propels Zorro into a hive of busyness, but my role remains one of observation only. Watkins hands out assignments – reinterviews, CCTV analysis, number-plate tracking, forensic work – leaving not a crumb for me.

At each morning briefing, I watch the light sparkling over the ocean, then plunge back downstairs, into my world of Chicagoan darkness.

Data entry.

Data checking.

Data management.

The number of exhibits has levelled out at about four thousand two hundred. Because Dunthinking hasn’t, despite his frenzy of ill-coordinated activity, managed to find a single actual lead, we have no idea which, if any, of those four thousand exhibits may strike the lethal blow in court, so we have to treat every damn one of them as sacred.

Which I do, no matter that I still want to push biros into my eyes.

Each week, I have a review session with Laura Moffatt. She is, I think, somewhat freaked by my room makeover and by my reputation, which has a certain whiff of wildness. I don’t normally mind that, but I want Laura to leave me in peace. So, when I’m Chicagoing, I dress the way I think Laura would if she were my age. Not demure, exactly, but safe. Restrained. And each week, I create three folders for her. A ‘Log of Exhibits’. A ‘Log of Movements’. And a ‘Log of Forensic Activity’. Ifor kept similar documents – they’re essential in our line of work – but he just kept them on computer and printed them off when and if he had to. I get mine printed and bound in the print room, with a red cover for the first document, green for the second, blue for the third, and each cover titled and dated.

I give Laura the bound logs, still warm from the binder, and sit with my hands either on the keyboard or on my lap as she reviews my work. On the table with the HOLMES terminal, I have a packet of digestive biscuits, a line-up of pens in different colours, and some hand lotion. I don’t use any of those things, but it gives the table a tidy feel.

In the early days, she used to take individual exhibits and check I had dealt with them correctly. Back then, I used to answer her questions from memory – I have good recall for stuff like that – but I realised that Laura was unnerved by that ability, so now I just go to the data itself and review it on screen. As she’s come to trust me, our sessions have become ever briefer and less formal.

Once she indicated my picture wall and said, ‘I’m amazed you can work with all that staring down at you.’

I answered, primly, ‘I think it’s important to remember why we’re here. Why it matters.’

There’s one new addition in my picture gallery. A picture, a modern artist’s impression, of Eilmer of Malmesbury, an eleventh-century monk who built himself a pair of wings and hurled himself off a tower at Malmesbury Abbey. A chronicler recorded that he flew for about a furlong – two hundred metres – but ‘
agitated by the violence of the wind and a current of air, as well as the consciousness of his rash attempt, he fell and broke both his legs, and was lame ever after. He used to relate as the cause of the failure that he had forgotten to provide himself with a tail.’

I like that story. The crazy adventure of it. Its basic success: had anyone ever flown so far before? And most of all, I like its wistful conclusion, a lifetime of lameness and all for want of a tail.

Laura stares but says nothing.

Our session goes well, as they always do. And – Lord be praised – I do now get to work in peace and quiet. Hours and even days go by with no interruption, apart from the odd visit from Dunthinking, offers of tea from Laura, a hatful of phone enquiries from various people connected with the inquiry.

Better still, I’ve discovered that the drying machine in the corner of my room vents into the building’s general waste air extraction system. If and when I feel the need, I put my head into the machine, pull the glass front down as far as it’ll go and light up a joint, with the fan set to maximum. I don’t even hide my joints. Just package them up in an evidence bag and leave them on the exhibits shelves with everything else. If anyone needs to enter, they have to knock. Which means that, except that my hair sometimes has a somewhat herbal perfume, I’m as safe from detection as I can reasonably expect, give that I’m in the heart of a busy police headquarters.

Carolyn Sharma does call me, at crazy hours of the night, but I like her calls. Look forward to them.

But still. Those things ameliorate the awfulness. They do not give me what I want, which is a release from Chicago and a proper role on Zorro.

Then, one day, the Thursday of the week following the raids, Jackson comes down to my basement. Watkins occupies the corridor behind. It’s Jackson’s first time down here. He takes in my nest of cushions, my photo wall. Says, ‘This is nice.’

I agree wholeheartedly.

Unlike Watkins and Laura Moffatt – and indeed, anyone else who has set foot in here – he examines the pictures up close.

‘Mary Langton, yes. She’s hard to forget, isn’t she?’ He’s referring to her head, her blackly dripping head, that I recovered from a barrel of oil in what is still probably my best ever moment in CID. ‘And Khalifi here. What was his name? Ali. A silly bastard, that one. And this pair, the Mancinis. Poor little devil,’ he says, meaning the girl, April, who was six when she died. I have to help him remember the names of Stacey Edwards and Mark Mortimer, but he’s right on the money with Hayley Morgan and Nia Lewis. Saj Kureishi, too. The pictures of Livesey and Moon he studies without speaking. I don’t have a full-face picture of Moon up for some reason. Just various shots of the blows to his skull, his face an awkwardly obstructive intrusion to an otherwise tidy anatomical view.

The only pictures I have that aren’t of corpses are the sketch of my flying monk and the daffodils on Moon’s grave.

Once he’s done he stares at me.

A Jacksonian silence. Wind moving over ice.

In the end, he just says, ‘OK, lunch. You, me, Rhiannon.’

We walk to a restaurant on The Friary.

A nice day. A summer’s day – or our own skittishly unreliable version of one anyway.

But I can’t make sense of it. The continued existence of the outside world always weirds me out after long hours spent in my dungeon. It’s as though I emerge from below with no particular belief that the season will be the same or even that the basic frame of place and time will have endured through my absence. I honestly think that if, after working eight hours in the basement, I stepped outside to find the cars and vans of 2013 Cardiff replaced by pedlars and horse-drawn carts, or hooded men riding by torchlight, or if I found that the city had somehow leaped forward into an age of jetpacks and hover-cars, I wouldn’t really be surprised.

At the Boulevard de Nantes, Jackson flings out an arm to stop me from stepping straight out into the traffic. When it is safe to cross, he asks, ‘The exhibits role. You enjoying that at all, or are you still finding it hard going?’

That is, I realise, a perfectly good question. An appropriate question from a boss to a subordinate, nicely pitched between the personal and the professional. But I can’t find a tune in my head to match the one he’s playing. I’m mostly just aware of the din of traffic, these sadly non-flying cars.

All I can find to say is, ‘The exhibits thing. Yes. No, it’s OK. I’m managing, anyway.’ A response which crams every shade of answer into a few grammatically mangled words.

We get to the restaurant.

Glass and steel. A menu full of no doubt tempting and nutritionally satisfying choices. A waiter who does the things that waiters do.

I order a salad, because I know I like salads. Jackson has a burger, a fancy one. Watkins has fish of some sort. The grown-ups talk amongst themselves while I sip a sparkling water and try to remember who I am and where and when and why.

I get there, or near enough. Say, ‘Sorry. I get absorbed in stuff, then it takes me time to . . .’

I wave my hands instead of finishing the sentence. To me, the gesture means, ‘remember that we don’t have jetpacks.’ I don’t know what it means to them.

Jackson says, ‘OK. Well, Fiona. Congratulations.’

‘Congratulations?’

For a moment, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Then remember that I had an email from the OSPRE people, which I didn’t open because it looked boring.

‘You passed,’ Jackson tells me.

‘Oh. Good.’

‘Seventy-eight per cent. An excellent score. Really excellent. Congratulations.’

I make out that I’m delighted. I don’t know if I am, though. Not really. I didn’t want to take their damn exam in the first place.

Jackson wants to order three glasses of champagne, but I remind him that I don’t drink, and he cancels the order with a frisson of annoyance.

Watkins congratulates me too. I say thank you, pretending to care, and they accept my thanks, pretending not to notice that I’m only pretending to care, and then, to our joint relief, Jackson changes the subject.

‘Moon. Livesey. Evans. Plas Du.’

‘Yes.’

‘Question one. How the hell – no, no, correct that – how the
bloody
hell did you know to investigate the affairs of some totally obscure insurance committee? Just what exact process led you to that particular group of people?’

‘The exact process? Um, shaking every tree I could find. The thing is, I knew he was lying to us, so I just went on digging.’

Watkins: ‘How did you know he was lying? He was holding back, clearly, but that’s not the same as actual lies.’

And we get into it all. My reasoning on the case so far. Why I was so sure that Evans was lying. The procedures that weren’t followed. The artwork that wasn’t authenticated. The clues that said Evans’s story was basically a lie.

Explain these things and eat my salad, which tastes nice, except that it’s like a car crash of fashionable health foods. Edamame beans and artichoke hearts. Pumpkin seeds and quinoa. It’s like someone figured out which ingredients were most voguish among health-faddy urban professional types, then dumped the whole lot into a bowl. Lime juice, coriander leaves, done.

I look at Jackson’s chips and wonder if he would mind if I stole one.

He says, ‘OK. You decided Evans was concealing something and you decided to go down every possible path until you found what that thing was.’

‘Yes, exactly that. Yes.’

And I explain my whole reasoning on the case so far. The evidence that persuaded me to look at the lichens at Plas Du. The reason why I thought Moon’s death looked climbery. The absence of plausible motives, which made me wonder about the installation at Oxwich Bay. The process of widening enquiry that led me to Livesey and Bristol and the realisation, with Mike’s help, that what looked impossible was in fact very doable.

Because I’m intent on sculpting my answer into the sort of thing that junior constables are meant to say to their wise, if grizzled, superiors, I also, without really noticing, steal and eat one of his chips.

‘Sorry,’ I say, when I do notice.

He ignores the theft and says, ‘OK. So far, so good. Now, any ideas on why a climber who scams ten million quid from some insurance folk should have an interest in transatlantic telecoms?’

‘No. I mean, I doubt if he knows anything at all about telecoms.’

‘Any ideas on who he is?’

‘No.’

‘Anything linking this climber with, I don’t know, the cable company? Any telecoms companies? Anyone in that line of business?’

‘No.’

He asks some more questions along similar lines. I answer them honestly, but always in the negative. I do reiterate my strong suspicions regarding Galton Evans and Idris Gawr, but my actual evidence is, I’m aware, very scanty.

At the end of my little grilling, Jackson exchanges a look with Watkins. I realise something about this lunch. The reason why they’ve taken me to a restaurant to have this conversation, instead of just summoning me upstairs.

No doubt the congratulations thing was part of it, the thwarted champagne. But it was also because they’ve learned that I have to be treated like a difficult witness in a murder case. Not a suspect precisely, but one whose openness and truthfulness cannot be taken for granted. This lunch, this fancy salad and the occasional stolen chip, is aimed at getting me to drop my defences, to be a better officer.

I share that general aim. I really do.

I say, ‘I think it might help if we spoke to the cable people.’

Watkins: ‘We agree. Are there particular lines of inquiry you think we should pursue?’

‘Yes.’ I explain where I think we should direct our questions.

‘Anything else we should be thinking about?’

‘Well, ma’am, I think it might be quite a good idea to arrest this climber.’

To my right, I can see Jackson smiling.

Watkins’s face doesn’t flicker. It just says, ‘We’ve got one out-of-date Hotmail address. We’ve got some marks on a girder in Bristol, but nothing that gives us DNA or a fingerprint. No CCTV. No witness statements. No one who has ever seen or spoken to the individual. We can’t track the money. We can’t connect him to any other crimes. No police force has any intelligence to offer. We don’t know the most basic things about him: age, nationality, anything. We don’t actually even know that he’s a “he”.’

I try eating a bit more salad as she’s speaking, but the thing seems suddenly very complicated, more complicated than I can manage. I look longingly at Jackson’s little white bowl of chips. He says, ‘Christ,’ and shifts them over.

I take one and say, ‘Obviously, it’s full steam ahead on Chicago.’

A Jacksonian rumble echoes, ‘Obviously.’

‘And I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the inquiry proper, but . . .’

‘But?’

‘I think I can find him, if you let me look.’

Jackson looks at me. I feel the red dot of Watkins’s gaze on my forehead. They’ll want to know more, of course. The
No flying solo, Fiona
rubric still applies, as it always will. But they’re going to say yes. They can’t do otherwise.

Even when I explain what’s involved, they give me permission to go ahead. Better than that, they formalise things. Watkins allocates me a role as Research Officer on Zorro, the first designation that actually ties me into the inquiry proper.