This Thing of Darkness (18 page)

‘Yes.’

‘And you were and are aware that your evidence could have changed the course of a police inquiry into a violent death, a death which we are now treating as murder? Shall I put—’

‘Yes. Yes. Yes, we got it wrong. I’m sorry.’

From that point on, we have them surrounded and they know it. Our guns on the hills, their little settlement defenceless below.

Watkins takes occupation. Findlay – enjoying the show – struts along behind.

‘We’ll need complete customer lists,’ says Watkins. ‘Everyone who’s signed up with you. Everyone who’s been approached. Everyone who’s ever received technical data from you.’

‘Our customer lists. Those are
very
commercially sensitive. They—’

Harding runs straight into Watkins’s stare. Her jaw. The barrels of her guns. He says, ‘Of course. Of course. We’ll give you everything.’

And they do. Findlay and Watkins demand documents, get them, add more requests to an ever-swelling list. Creamer and I, the Project Associates of the policing world, trot wherever our elders and betters direct us.

We don’t even know what information we’re looking for. Don’t even know that it lurks within these stuccoed walls, behind that glossy door. But the smell of blood is stronger now. Visceral and thick. We can feel it clotting on our hands and clothes, feel the stick of it gumming our hair, squelching inside our city shoes.

I feel those things easily anyway. Too easily. But I’m not the only one now. Death’s dark wing hovers over our little company and Harding and his fellows are not loving the experience.

Watkins also homes in on the big unanswered question of the hour. Are there, in fact, any rival cable companies competing to build a superfast cable? Is there, in fact, a group of people who might, even now, be profiting from any stolen data?

Harding is emphatic in his response.

‘No. Nobody.’

Watkins: ‘How can you be sure?’

Harding’s answer is long, but remains confident, even under interrogation. Basically, laying an Atlantic cable is a big deal. It involves too many people, too many contractors and specialisms, for it to remain quiet. ‘We spent three years putting the operation together before we dropped so much as an inch of cable,’ says Harding. ‘And we must have talked to literally thousands of people in that time. Investors, clients, telecoms companies, a whole bunch of IT companies, marine engineers, surveyors, a whole bunch of sub-sea specialisms. You just can’t keep that lot quiet. Not a chance. Not a chance in hell.’

Watkins doesn’t respond directly, but she shoots me a glance and I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking that the main reason Harding and his merry men didn’t contact the police when Livesey died was that they believed they were past the danger point. They were about to complete their damn cable without a competitor in sight. They’d plotted their route, dropped most of their cable, encrypted their data, divided the assignment. Even if a would-be competitor had coerced Livesey to reveal what he knew, he only knew a tiny fraction of the whole. He knew too little to be worth worrying about.

So why call the police? That would just have introduced a headache they didn’t need. Sure, they contemplated the possibility that their dear colleague had been murdered for his knowledge, but they thought, what the fuck, we’ve won this game anyway. Let’s just go and make some money.

Nice guys.

Harding and his merry men. Nice guys.

We work all day, breaking into teams, collecting documents. Making arrangements for further documents to be sent to Cathays and Portishead, the Bristol HQ. We arrange for data sharing too. Our security procedures are, in fact, excellent and Harding’s reservations about the ability of a bunch of provincial coppers to handle his data confidentially start to dissipate as we work with him on the detail.

In an upstairs room, Warren starts to print off customer lists.

I ask, ‘What’s your timing? When does the cable go live?’

He says, ‘Everything will be laid by the end of June. The connection centres are both ready, so it should be pretty much plug and play. July’s set aside for testing, sorting out any gremlins. We start to carry customer traffic in August.’

‘Gremlins,’ I say, huskily. ‘You do expect some niggles, do you?’

Warren shrugs. ‘Basically yes. Think of this as a giant IT project. You have to have a beta-phase before launch. That’s when you want your cock-ups to happen.’

It’s already the second week of June. If the bad guys are to make their play, they have, I reckon, about seven weeks in which to do it.

Seven weeks
at most
. A mere scrap of time in which to make my doing-things-police-style plan work out.

And how’s that going, Griffiths? The whole by-the-book thing?

Warren hands me sheets still warm from the printer.

Client lists.

Investment banks. Hedge funds. Names I recognise and names I don’t.

But one that I do. One that belches a little stink of greed, violence and theft.

Grim-faced, I take the lists down to Watkins, who is doing something horrible enough to Harding that his face is tense and pale.

‘May I have a moment, ma’am? Sorry.’

She sprays us both with an omnipurpose glare and tells Harding to wait outside. A lovely touch that, I think: to order someone out of his own room because she wants privacy.

‘Yes?’

I show her the customer lists. Ring the name that caught my eye.

Idris Gawr Investments LP.

‘It’s Galton Evans’s investment fund, ma’am.’

‘Is it now?’

‘And the name,’ I say, tapping it.

‘Yes?’

‘Idris Gawr. I mean, that’s a perfectly ordinary choice for a Welsh company, in one way.’

‘But?’

‘The cliff where Derek Moon fell. It had four climbing routes going up it. The hardest and most famous is Critterling. The easiest and most popular is Crack and Slab. But there’s another route, on the same cliff, Idris Gawr.’

Watkins doesn’t say anything, but she breathes fire and kills small animals for fun. Her look now makes words redundant.

I add, ‘Moon died in late September 2011. Idris Gawr Investments LP was formed in November of that same year.’

‘That’s circumstantial,’ she murmurs.

‘Yes, but the kind of circumstantial that never lies.’

‘Do we know who else is an investor in that company?’

‘No. I’ve looked. It’s all offshore bullshit.’

Watkins normally rebukes me when I swear, but not now.

‘Of course, he’s a finance guy,’ she says. ‘Insurance. For all we know . . .’

‘Yes, the others on that committee. Maybe their firms connect to this cable as well. More than possible. I can look, if you want, when we get back to Cardiff.’

‘No. You’re on Chicago. But yes, I’ll get someone to look.’

That’s a disappointment, but not a grievous one. I wanted to be in the thick of it, and here I am: so in the thick of it that my ankles feel claggy with blood.

I work hard all day, but do nip out a couple of times, once for a cigarette, once for a sandwich and something to drink. The sandwich shop is pretty fancy, so I end up walking out with a mango smoothie and a warm chicken, chorizo and butternut squash wrap. It’s tasty and I think,
I should learn how to make a sandwich like this
, then remember that I’m an atrocious cook and dismiss the idea.

At five thirty that evening, we’re winding up. I look for my phone and can’t find it. Not in my bag. Not in reception. Not in the main meeting room or the desk that I’ve been using this afternoon.

I find Creamer.

‘Luke, you lost your phone recently. You mentioned it at it that meeting in Cardiff.’

‘Yes?’

‘When? When did you lose it?’

‘Oh, I’ve got a new one now. Insurance covered it, luckily.’

‘When? Sorry, I need to know.’

Answer: a day or so after our trip to that Bristol apartment.

‘And how was it lost? Was it stolen, or do you remember leaving it somewhere, on a train or anything like that?’

Answer: no, he didn’t remember leaving it anywhere. Maybe it was stolen, maybe not.

I don’t remember leaving my phone anywhere either. Thinking back, there was a little crush at the door to the sandwich shop. An ordinary city-centre jostle, but in that jostle, I think, there lurked a theft.

I borrow a phone and walk out onto the street.

My mam and dad hold a key to my house. So does Buzz. Penry doesn’t, but I did teach him to pick my front door lock, so he’s an option too..

Dad. Buzz. Penry.

There are objections to calling any one of them, but I light on Buzz as the least bad option.

Call him.

He answers. He’s leaving work, going off to the gym.

I say, ‘Buzz, I’m really sorry, can I ask a favour?’

‘Probably. What’s up?’

I tell him. Say I’m worried that someone is seeking to obtain data on a confidential inquiry. That I’m worried about the security of my home computer.

‘Have you spoken to Watkins? She could get a couple of uniforms.’

I don’t want that, no. Partly, I can’t see Watkins authorising the effort. Two stolen phones: it’s hardly compelling evidence. But partly also there’s material in my house which I wouldn’t want any formal police investigation to get close to.

I say that, adding that my phone has access to my emails. Also to my home wi-fi. And my home computer will have stored passwords that could give access to police files. A security no-no, of course, but plenty of my colleagues do the same.

A sigh.

A long, fat Buzzian sigh.

‘OK, Fi, I’ll get over there.’ Asks if I fancy like a late supper.

I hesitate.

He says, ‘We’re friends, Fi. We can risk supper now and again.’

I say, ‘Buzz, sorry, that would be lovely. I’d love to see you.’

And I would, except that the caverns of our loneliness yawn beneath us. I hope that Buzz meets someone soon, starts dating. I’ll find that hard, but it’ll feel better to know that he’s OK, or I imagine it will anyway.

As for me: I don’t know. I don’t know what rescues me.

I hang up.

On the train home with Watkins, we sit opposite each other. Faces reflected in the glass. The world slides past us. A world of back gardens, closeboard fencing and trackside weeds.

Watkins settles a scarf at the side of her head, ready to snooze, but before she closes her eyes, she says, ‘That was productive.’

I say, ‘Yes.’

She used the correct policeish term, I suppose, but I don’t think she spoke quite as she meant.

I add, ‘And bloody good fun.’

She smiles. ‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it?’

Then sleeps.

And when the train slides underneath the River Severn, she’s still sleeping so I can’t tell her about Alexander Lambert and his flooded tunnel.

The loneliest place in the world. Total darkness and total submersion.

26

Home.

Front of the house: normal.

Open the door. All normal.

Put the hall light on.

Normal.

Not so normal: Buzz at the top of the stairs. Limping. Blood and water down the side of his face. Blood on his jeans. A grin hanging lopsidedly, like a broken door.

‘I’m fine,’ he says, ‘I’m really fine.’

I rush upstairs, awash with emotions I can’t name.

And he
is
fine, he really is. I tug Buzz into the bathroom, remembering the big male weight of him, the heft of his arms. I make him sit on the edge of the bath and dab at his face with water and face cleanser and cotton wool. Do a better job than he was doing or would have done, but the truth is there are only two cuts – on his lip and just under his ear – which have bled, and they’re neither of them deep or serious. I clean them up, put sticking plaster on the cut by his ear, tell him that he’s going to have some nasty bruises.

On my orders, Buzz drops his trousers so I can attend to the gash on his leg. As I kneel in front of him, he tells me what happened.

He came over more or less directly after I called. Let himself in. Removed my computer and router from the house. Put them in his car and drove far enough away that no casual searcher would be able to link his car to my house. Came back to get some supper ready. ‘It was all quite clean and tidy,’ he comments, with a note of impressed surprise.

Then he heard movement at the door. Assumed it was me. Opened up. There were two men, some shouting, a short fight. ‘I hit one of them quite hard. I think there’ll be some blood anyway. Then tried to get a piece of the other, but . . .’ He shrugs. ‘It was two against one.’

He has that simple male way of talking about violence, as though there’s nothing more at stake than the outcome of a rugby match. You want the red team to win, but then the blue team gets a try, and what can you do, that’s just how it is.

I’m still down on my knees with my water and cotton wool, but his leg is fine, really, and there’s nothing much for me to do. I’m exquisitely aware that my head is just eighteen inches from Buzz’s boxer shorts. He’s semi-hard inside them, and I’d only need to reach out, to lean my head in, and we’d be back to where we were. In lust. In love. An inch away from starting all that again.

I want to do it. Really do. Feel a physical ache as I’ve not experienced for six months now.

But I don’t do it, or don’t quite. I just lean my head against the sink, leave a hand on his knee, and say, ‘Oh, Buzz. Oh Buzzling. I’m sorry.’

Don’t even know what I’m sorry for, but he strokes my shoulder and lets me lie there and I say, ‘Did they hurt you? Do you feel OK?’ and he says ‘Fine, I’m really fine,’ and then we just stay there some more. When I do lift my head, I see that ‘semi-hard’ is no longer accurate at all – nothing ‘semi’ about it now – but we both behave ourselves, and Buzz pulls his trousers back on, and the unyielding bathroom light watches us clamber back to responsible adulthood.

Buzz says, ‘You’ll want to phone Watkins?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right now, or . . .?’

‘Shall we eat first? Give ourselves a break?’

He nods. Buzz In Slightly Less Than Professional Police Mode Shock. I tell him he must have taken quite a bang to his head. Standing on tiptoe, I kiss the side of that lovely head and send him out to recover my computer junk, while I go to the kitchen and see that Buzz has already got almost everything ready: cooked rice, fried some chicken, done something nice with tomatoes and courgette.

I fill two glasses with water and put them on the table.

Buzz comes back. We start to eat. Two mouthfuls in and he starts laughing at me. ‘It’s typical. Let DC Griffiths loose on a case and—’

I object. Creamer was actually the first target. On this occasion, I did absolutely nothing to provoke anyone. ‘
And
it wasn’t me who got hit.
And
,’ I say, hammering away my advantage, ‘I haven’t shot anyone or blown anything up. I’ve been good as gold.’

‘
Yet
. You haven’t blown anything up
yet
.’

We eat.

We drink.

We call Watkins.

Buzz finds some wine which he once gave me and which I’d forgotten I had. He opens it. Pours a proper glass for him, a pretend one for me.

Watkins arrives. Jeans and an old jumper. She looks less tired than on the train, maybe, but older. Hints of actual human fragility.

She says, ‘Fiona, Cal brought me over. She’s happy to wait in the car . . .’

But that’s silly, so Cal comes in. Cal-short-for-Caroline, Watkins’s extremely nice partner. Ringlety dark hair, slim build, lovely coffee-coloured skin. Warm and wifely and protective.

Wine for everyone. Watkins summons a SOCO. Ditto an e-fit operator. She says, ‘We’ll just do a voice recording now, take a proper statement tomorrow. OK?’

More than OK. This is now Watkins In Very Slightly Less Than Hyper-Professional Police Mode, and that’s beyond a shock, it’s an earthquake.

Watkins quickly runs Buzz through what happened, and records his answers.

Cal and I go into the kitchen and find cheese and crackers and Cal tells me about a painting course she’s doing. I tell her that Watkins – Rhiannon, as I still find it odd calling her – is about a million times happier since she’s been with Cal. Cal glows with happiness. I ask if they’re going to get married, and she says, ‘I really want to. We’re talking about it.’

A SOCO comes to swab for blood. No need to dust for fingerprints, because both intruders were wearing gloves.

The e-fit guy comes. The system is as good as it gets, but still only generates good results about twenty per cent of the time. But not much time has elapsed and Buzz’s police training means that even as he was being punched, he’d have been mentally logging face shape, hairstyle, mouth formation and the rest.

He and the e-fit guy go to work, muttering over a laptop in the corner of my now-crowded living room.

Watkins – Cal sitting beside her on the arm of the chair, hand on the back of her neck – asks me what I think is going on.

I say, ‘Atlantic Cables is clearly under some kind of attack. Moon first, then Livesey. A very sophisticated attack too. Invisible thefts. Murders all but undetectable.

‘My guess is that the attackers kept some kind of watch on the Livesey apartment. Either that, or they had some route into the Somerset Police inquiry. In any case, as long as that inquiry was trotting down the road to a suicide verdict, they just let things roll. As soon as Findlay started releasing new data to the coroner, however, they realised they were potentially compromised.

‘They went after Creamer first, because it gave them unobtrusive entry into the Somerset-led inquiry. They’d have assumed that it was Somerset mostly driving things because Livesey’s death was the one with the open coroner’s inquiry. I guess they took Creamer’s phone, looked at his email, broke into his home computer, took a good look. Then, I don’t know, they were either just being thorough or they realised that the inquiry had its real centre in Cardiff, and they wanted to repeat the trick with me. Find a junior level copper. Take her phone, check her computer, steal some passwords, keep a watch on things.’

Watkins considers this. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d lost your phone.’

‘I knew Creamer had lost his. That could have been coincidence. For all I know he’s one of these people who’s always losing their phones. But it seemed wise to play it safe.’

‘We’ll need to tell Findlay. Check home security for everyone on the project.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we’ll get our IT guys to do whatever they need to do to increase security. Here and Bristol.’

Nod.

‘Physical protection? Do you think we need to worry about that? They killed Livesey.’

That’s true, but we’re police officers and it’s a much bigger deal to kill a police officer, not least because any police force will dedicate more or less unlimited resources to finding those that kill our kind.

I say, ‘Nicking a phone is a lot different from killing someone. And anyway, the scale we’re at now . . .’

Watkins nods at that. The Zorro briefings are attended by about a dozen officers, most of them only part time on the case, but all of them with access to the data. There’ll be a similar number in Bristol and arranging round-the-clock protection for two dozen officers is well beyond the capacity of two mid-sized regional police forces.

I go on thinking Findlay was an idiot for sharing as much as he did with the coroner. In effect he was sending out a red and white stickered warning notice to criminals:
TAKE CARE. COVER YOUR TRACKS. PLEASE INFILTRATE OUR INQUIRY
.

I don’t say that. I do say, ‘I still think we should watch the ports. Sorry, but I do.’

Watkins performs a strange anatomical contortion, her version of a smile. ‘It doesn’t work like that, Fiona. To justify those sorts of costs, we have to have a specific inquiry-related objective. We can’t just do things because they might be interesting.’

That’s different from her usual type of answer. Not a snappish rejection of a subordinate’s request, but the sort you give a capable detective sergeant, a second-in-command type. I realise again how determined Watkins and Jackson are to grow me into the kind of officer who is not a disgrace to her force. I’m slightly awed by their patience. Their determination to get me right.

The truly strange thing, though, is that their strategy seems to be working. In the past, I might well have launched into a less-than-entirely respectful explanation of why my elders and betters were completely wrong. I still think Watkins
is
wrong, of course. I haven’t changed to that dramatic an extent. But for now, my only reaction is to wander across to the bookshelves by the TV. Fetch a copy of
The Sting
which I recorded from a late-night showing a few nights back.

‘Have you seen it?’ I say. ‘You should watch it. It’s really interesting.’

Cal says, ‘Oh, Paul Newman. I love Paul Newman.’

Watkins thanks me, sort of, and yawns.

Buzz and the e-fit guy are done with their imaging work. Two men on screen, tough customers both. Buzz points to the guy on the left. Says, ‘I’m pretty sure of him. The other one’s a bit more sketchy. But he
was
stamping on my leg at the time, so . . .’

The SOCO has his swabs in labelled evidence bags. Waves them cheerfully. ‘Should have something here,’ he says.

Those damn bags will need to be handled by an exhibits officer, but not me, I’m happy to say. Procedure wouldn’t allow me to be both sort-of victim of the attack and the person who handles exhibits, so these bags will end up on Laura’s desk, not mine.

The SOCO goes. The e-fit guy goes.

Watkins and I look at the images. Thin eyes, hard faces. The kind that decorate Police Wanted notices in every country in the world.

Is one of these the Stonemonkey? We’re both wondering the same thing, but it seems unlikely. Why use expensive labour, when cheap should have worked just fine?

Watkins does what she has to do to enter both pictures onto a national wanted list. On the security designation, she writes, ‘Very dangerous. Proceed with extreme caution.’ What they did to Buzz wasn’t such a big deal. If one or both of these guys was present with Livesey, on the other hand . . .

Cal runs her fingers into Watkins’s scalp and says, ‘Home.’

Cal likes me, not least because she views me as her fairy godmother, the person who got Watkins out and dating. She gives me an extra big hug, as she always does, and tells me I should drop by more, as she always does. I realise that she means it too. That it’s not just something she says. I find myself realising that I have one more friend than I knew I had.

A little triumph. Another yard or two of Planet Normal claimed for my own.

They go.
The Sting
DVD ended up in Cal’s bag not Watkins’s.

Just me and Buzz left.

I turn the overhead light off, leaving just a sidelamp still on.

In the old days, that would have been the signal for a march upstairs to the bedroom. Now, we linger in the living room. The same sofa, but opposite ends.

‘Thanks for coming round tonight, Buzz. Sorry about what happened.’

‘That’s OK.’ Shadows in his face. Shadows and lines. ‘Listen, Fi, I wanted you to know – know it from me first – that I’ve started dating again. My first date, last Friday.’

‘How was it?’

‘OK. I’m seeing her again. I think she quite likes me.’

‘Everyone likes you, Buzz. And the girls I know all fancy you.’

Which is at least eighty per cent true. Some girls don’t do freckles, though, which seems a pity when they speckle so nice a face.

We sit in one of those mobile silences, which could go anywhere, do anything. I don’t know what I’m feeling. Something warm and rapid flutters in my chest, but I can’t interpret what that means.

He says, ‘You’re OK, are you?’

Meaning his date. Our break-up. My always wobbly head.

‘I’m OK. Miss you all the time, but I’m OK.’

We dwell a little longer in that darkened silence. If Buzz took me in his arms now, kissed me, took me upstairs, I don’t think I’d resist or have the willpower to say no. But he doesn’t. I don’t know if he even thinks about it.

Instead, he says, ‘Penny. Penny Haskett. That’s her name. Works at Napes Needles in town, the soft furnishings place.’

I stand up. Give him a sisterly kiss on the back of his head. ‘Choose well, dear Buzz. You deserve the best.’

He goes, and I realise we’ve crossed a threshold, an important one. One which, between us, we’ve handled well. Another little triumph for me, another yard of Planet Normal.

In my hallway, there are some dabs of blood. I should clean them off now, before they’re properly dried on, but I can’t be bothered and anyway, I like them.

Livesey and Moon are with me now. Looking at the blood, these marks of violence.