This Thing of Darkness (26 page)

43

The next day. Thursday.

A review meeting to go over the work that Jane Alexander and her team have been doing. Watkins leads. Alexander seconds. Plus me, Jon, Essylt, Pete Pritchard and Mike.

From what I’ve read of the group’s work so far, there’s been nothing wrong with the intensity or breadth of its research. But still. Those things should mean we have a fistful of promising leads, active investigations already under way. And instead? Nothing.

Alexander’s best prospects are climbers who aren’t quite good enough. Or not quite bold enough. Or whose current lifestyles (mature geography student at the University of Edinburgh, living in a shared house with three other students) aren’t exactly typical of the just-scammed-ten-million-pounds set.

No names. No leads. No progress.

We’re doing something wrong.

We riffle again through our names. Our best possibles. Jane Alexander seems nervous. Worried that she’s been sloppy. I’ve a feeling she didn’t sleep much last night. Her normal sleek perfection now a matter of concealer and under-eye creams as much as the standard issue Alexandrian flawlessness.

But I don’t think she’s done anything sloppy.

Nor, for all her air of fuming ferocity, does Watkins.

During a break in our meeting, I say as much. Tell her, ‘Jane, you’ve done a really good job here. It’s amazing how much you’ve managed to get done in a short time.’

She says, ‘Oh, do you really think so?’, flashes me a grateful look and hurtles off to get coffee.

I make myself peppermint tea in the kitchenette and, as I wait for the kettle, call Warren at Atlantic Cables. Ask him how the project is going.

A few connection niggles, he tells me, nothing major. Onshore testing starts on schedule next week, Monday 1st July. ‘Then the full line tests right after that. Middle of July if all goes well. Basic tests first. Then speed tests. Signal quality, that sort of thing. We start to handle client traffic from mid-August, but on a mirror basis only. Basically replicating their existing data transfer and matching the two flows to make sure we’re not losing data. Proper live traffic from September.’

‘And what if something weird happens? What if there’s a line break or something like that?’

‘Oh, well, that sort of thing does happen. We assume 0.5 faults per thousand kilometres of cable per year – and we’ve got more than five thousand kilometres of line. But we can find those things right away these days. Just flash a signal down the line. Watch the reflection come back. We can locate any break to within a few metres. Just get a ship out to repair it and
boof!
, we’re motoring.’

I say thank you.

Make tea.

Let the steam wash my face, a pale green scented cloud.

As I’m steaming, I see Dunthinking walk past. No bootprints on the side of his head. No look of terror.

Bransby has not been arrested, or even interrogated.

I don’t know what’s going on.

I call Whillans, the telecoms guy. I say, ‘Eliot, if I wanted to mess about with someone else’s telecoms line – a brand new line, transatlantic – what would be the best time to do it?’

He laughs. ‘Like the Atlantic Cables line, right? A line like that?’

I acknowledge as much. Tell him what the testing schedule looks like. Tell him what I think is about to happen.

He says, ‘You’re going to need the full line to be operational and carrying enough traffic that you’ve got something to work with. Not too glitchy, but at the same time you’re hardly going to mind if there’s a little genuine noise to confuse things. If you were asking me to arrange the thing, I’d probably wait till the basic line tests were completed, then get started. The whole job should only take a day or so. A few hours even.’

I say thanks.

Cut the line.

On Whillans’s cheerful account, our bad guys have the last part of July to do what they want. Any earlier, and the line might be too glitchy to give reliable feedback. Too late, and they risk the line being open for business, no longer in beta.

We’ve got maybe three weeks to catch these guys red-handed. A three-week window that closes with every passing day.

The thought makes me feel sickish. Empty.

I hope Penry gets his photos.

I hope the
Isobel Baker
is the right ship.

I hope that Stuart Lowe gives us the kind of report that even my beloved bosses and the yet-more-dearly-beloved magistrates of South Wales can’t help but accept.

And then, more even than these other things, I hope that Watkins, and Jackson, and everyone right up to the Home Secretary herself authorises the use of helicopters and gunboats and a whole squadron of special forces to go and rip that ship apart. Rip it apart, until they find what they need: the evidence that will close this case.

The things I hope for I don’t always get.

I go back to the Stonemonkey meeting.

More paper. More questions. More long, complicated, unsatisfactory answers.

It’s Mike who sees it first. He’s standing at the window, his back to the room. With his ragged blond hair in its dirty green hair elastic, he looks a bit like the caveman version of Jane Alexander. What she might become if civilisation collapsed.

Mike says, ‘He’s not here, that’s the thing.’

Watkins doesn’t understand him at first.

Gesturing at the mass of data, she says, angrily, ‘It’s
precisely
to discover if he’s here that—’

Mike says, ‘No, what I mean is he’s not
here
.’ He gestures at the window. A view out over Bute Park. Green trees tossing in the wind. The weather is clear for the moment, but there are squalls heading towards us from the west.

Frown-lines written in cloud. The fish-scale gleam of rain.

Watkins says nothing.

I say, ‘Mike, we’re pretty sure he’s British. His blackmail letter was written in perfect English. And why scam British insurers if you’re really French, or whatever? Why not just scam your own insurers?’

Mike turns and answers me direct.

‘Oh, I’m not saying he’s not British. Just – you don’t reach elite standards these days without a lot of sport climbing.’

Sport climbing: he means climbers working on routes that have been protected by steel bolts drilled every two or three metres. The alternative – trad climbing – means making use of whatever natural protection a cliff does or doesn’t offer.

‘I know. We know that. We’re already prioritising those type of people.’

Mike shakes his head. ‘No we’re not. We’re acting like typical Brits. One of our young climbers goes over to France. Spends a winter there climbing on bolted rock. Comes back here in spring. Does some hard routes on gritstone or up in North Wales and everyone says this guy is the Next Big Thing. But the fact is that southern Europe has all the sun. And their rock is bolted, almost all of it. Here, you can’t even drill a bolt without some big theological discussion of whether you’ve just insulted the gods of the mountains.’

This has been a theme of Mike’s. One I’ve heard before, except that now I think maybe I haven’t
heard
-heard him.

In summary, Mike’s argument comes down to this: Brits are mad. Our best climbers climb on damp mountain rock without drilling bolts in it first. Their hardest climbs are terrifying do-or-die affairs, the kind of thing no self-respecting French, Spanish or German climber would think of attempting. On ‘traditional’ – that is, potentially lethal – routes, British climbers are among the best in the world.

Yet that excellence is bought at a cost. The cost is that you can’t push yourself to the very limits, because if you do, you will wind up dead. And our terrible weather means that our climbers don’t even get to climb as often as their competitors in southern Europe. With the result that – in terms of strength, fitness, and sheer damn standards of difficulty – British climbers are outranked by those of pretty much every other major climbing nation in Europe. On ordinary, safe, bolted rock, British climbers are little more than mediocre.

Mike shuts up.

Watkins’s stare swivels from him, to Jane, to me.

I interpret: ‘Mike is saying that our guy is a Brit who bases himself abroad. The reason we haven’t yet come across him – in those “Out and About” columns, the blogs, all the rest of it – is that our guy has hardly touched the British scene. He’s got the strength and fitness of those top French or Spanish climbers, but combines that with an all-British insanity when it comes to risk. We’ve been doing everything right, except for one thing. We’ve been looking in Britain, when we need to look overseas.’

There are quite often moments like this in an investigation. When you look at the same data from a different angle and all of a sudden that new view looks entirely compelling. Ungainsayable.

Even Watkins feels it. She does that rotary champing thing with her jaw that she, and no one else in the world, does.

Then, ‘OK. We look abroad. Mike, which countries do we need to prioritise? France clearly. Also Spain . . .’

The investigation revolves on a sixpence. Heads inexorably off on its new course.

I tune out. Watkins will do what she needs to do.

When the meeting breaks for lunch, I say to Watkins, ‘Ma’am, I’ll take the afternoon off, if I may.’

She nods. Happy that my needs are so modest. But her attention is elsewhere, as it should be.

The Stonemonkey.

European fitness married to British insanity.

A torturer and a killer, who belongs behind bars of good Welsh steel.

44

Leave the office. Find my car.

A few minutes later, I’m out of Cardiff, heading east.

Leaving Wales, entering England. The Severn Bridge a pale green arch through the heavens and Duffy on the sound system, yelling her little Celtic heart out, as seagulls ride the air above.

I’m doing
OK
, I’m doing
OK
.

That whole idea of doing this police-style or not at all: I think that could work. It could really work.

That’s possibly the first time I’ve had that thought since joining CID. It feels nice, the notion that I might not have to put life and limb on the line. That I could simply live a life more ordinary. Let Watkins and Jackson and the Home Secretary decide what to do with the
Isobel Baker
. That is, in theory, a possible way to do things. Other people, I understand, do it all the time.

Bristol.

Hullavington.

Malmesbury.

A hilltop town. One of the oldest fortified towns in England. Created by a charter from King Alfred in 880. A hilltop fort centuries before that. The two branches of the Avon curling below. A natural castle.

If the town is a castle, Glyn’s house is one of its less-lovely outbuildings. A down-at-heel semi, in a row of down-at-heel semis. I ring his doorbell. Smell moss and damp timber. A drain that isn’t discharging right.

Glyn – ‘Pollitt’ – comes to the door. Clean shirt. Oatmeal cardigan. Grey trousers worn with the kind of shoes that are halfway to slippers.

He lets me in. Takes me through to his ‘lounge’. Thick pile carpet and a flame-effect gas fire.

He sits me down. Says, ‘So. Your extension.’ His Cardiff accent feels stronger face to face than on the phone.

I say, ‘I’m not building an extension.’

I say, ‘You’re Gareth Glyn. In witness protection now, but that’s who you were. I’m Fiona Griffiths. Tom Griffiths’s daughter.’

He doesn’t say anything. Not straight away. Looks at me with sad eyes. The eyes of a spaniel left too long in kennels.

He picks food from between two molars with a long fingernail. ‘I suppose this had to come.’

He makes tea. I lean on the kitchen doorframe as he makes it. Neither of us say much. There’s a dog bed in the corner, but no dog.

Glyn comes back through with the tea. Teacups and saucers. But his hands have a tremor and the cups jiggle and shake on their china bases.

He’s scared, I see that. I don’t particularly want to frighten him but I do want information.

I say, ‘I just want to know what happened. Tell me what happened and I’ll get out of your life.’

He says nothing.

I say, ‘February 1985. You claimed that municipal planning decisions were being rigged. That there was corruption. I believe you. I’m sure there was. If you say my father was involved, I’d believe that too.’

He says nothing.

‘I’ve spoken to DCI Yorath and he told me you were on to something. I’ve spoken to your wife. I know you were taken into witness protection.’

Still nothing, but the silence has elongated now, stretching out till it’s too thin to hold.

I wait.

For some reason, I don’t know why, I think that Glyn’s dog is dead. The bed in the kitchen just a keepsake.

I don’t say anything.

And eventually, Glyn says, ‘You saw Delia?’

‘Yes.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s having a rough time. She found it hard, your leaving like that.’

I’m putting it mildly. When I saw her, Glyn’s wife, Delia, had the angry, injured look of the slightly mad. A house that badly needed a clean and tidy. Hair that needed washing. And clothes that weren’t quite right: a too-short flowery dress worn with bright red tights and heavy black shoes.

I don’t judge her for any of that. I’ve been to those places myself. Those places and worse. But I don’t know how Glyn would react if I told him the full truth, so I hold back.

‘She was always having a rough time.’

The bitter comment of a husband who chose to leave. But his eyes are watery and distant, and sometimes a bad marriage is better than no marriage at all.

More silence.

I say, ‘I’m sorry about your dog.’

The kitchen: there was no water bowl. No dog bowl. And nowhere else in this little house for those things to be.

Glyn says nothing, but his eyes are full. He wipes them with a handkerchief, taken from the sleeve of his cardigan.

‘Your father was on the fucking take,’ he tells me. ‘They all were. Councillors. The whole redevelopment company. The property developers.’

‘Go on.’

‘Look, I’d be the first to say that the old Tiger Bay was a shithole. It
was
. But it’s how you phase the development. Which pieces of land get built on first. Who gets to do what parts. So, if you’re given a slice of prime waterfront – the place where you’re going to get the big hotels, the luxury flats – you’re going to make a killing. Fifty yards back from the water. Same area, but no view of the Bay, and the profits aren’t there. I mean, yes, you’ll make money, but not on the same scale, nothing like.’

‘So the big developers, the corrupt ones, decided in advance what bits they wanted, then approached the key councillors with handfuls of cash? Rigged the whole thing in advance.’

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘And where did my dad come in?’

‘Where
didn’t
he come in?’ Glyn spits.

I don’t answer, but I want more than that and Glyn, I now know, wants to talk. Unless I mess up, this hummingbird is going to sing.

He wipes his mouth and proves me right. ‘Look, you don’t get gentleman’s agreements in these things. What if one of the councillors took the cash, then didn’t vote the way they said? Or what if two developers got into a fight about who got what? Remember that this was Tiger Bay. Your father’s stamping ground. His domain. Nothing happened there without his permission. The councillors and the developers divvied up who did what. Your dad provided the muscle.’

The muscle
.

Violence.

How much violence, I’ve never really known, but the thought makes me shift uncomfortably, slippery in my own skin.

For some reason, I remember the barn. When I was taped to the chair, alone in the silence. In those long hours before the questions started. When time fooled around in the straw and light died in the cobwebbed windows.

How dark did my father’s past get? I don’t know. Yorath and his fellow detectives didn’t know. Only my dad and his very closest associates, Uncle Em and people like that, only they would have known.

Increasingly spacey, I ask for names, dates, specifics.

Glyn doesn’t have much. Most of his suspicions arose from coincidences of timing. Minor oddities in the planning process which don’t signify much to me, but which told him, an insider, that things were being rigged. Where Delia, his wife, was rambling, obsessive and muddled, I would say Glyn is simply obsessive. That, and probably correct. The one absolutely clinching piece of evidence he brings to bear is a conversation overheard in a corridor of the planning department’s offices. A promise that a certain permission will be given, even though an appeal had yet to be heard. There was an activist, a Tina Jewell, who was successfully arousing local opposition, but the planner in question ‘promised’ – Glyn’s word – that she would be ‘sorted’.

‘And?’ I ask.

Silence floats in the air. The ghost of a dog. How many other ghosts, I can’t say, but too many. The room feels stifling.

‘She was sorted all right. Killed. That’s when I . . . that’s when . . .’

Glyn doesn’t finish his sentence, but I think I can guess his meaning. He snapped. His whistle-blowing wasn’t an act of courage exactly. It was a failure of nerve by a man who didn’t know how to handle the environment he found himself working in.

‘Who killed her?’

He shrugs.

I try again. ‘OK, who was the developer? Who profited?’

‘Look it up. Who had the waterfront? Who made the cash? They were all in on it.’

He has the exhausted face of a man who has spilled his all. The way my face must have looked after that first long night of interrogation. The way it looked before the bad stuff started.

Bad things, dark things, pluck at my awareness.

Ravens snatching at roadkill.

My head wobbles. Loses its bearings. I find myself thinking
Can I really do this? Is this too soon?

Not helpful. I
am
doing this.

Giddily – spacily – I ask one last question.

‘The witness protection programme. Why that? What was the threat? Why did all that blow up again?’

He shrugs. ‘Don’t know. Nobody bothered to tell me.’

‘You must have asked.’

‘“A credible, specific threat.” That’s what they told me. A credible, specific threat, now fuck off out of your life. You can take your dog.’

I push away at the same question, but Glyn is done with me now. Angry at me, as he’s angry at everything else. His crazy wife. His dead dog. The criminals who forced him out of one life. The intelligence services who forced him out of another.

I think again of this hilltop setting. This natural castle.

I wonder if that’s why Glyn ended up here. A sense of protection. Self-defence.

I say, ‘The River Avon. English people say that, don’t they?’

Glyn doesn’t respond.

I stand up. Leave him a card with my mobile number. ‘If you want to tell me anything else. I want to know.’

Glyn watches me with sorrowful eyes. Doesn’t get up. Doesn’t take my card.

Then, ‘I don’t. I never say that.’

No Welshman would. Avon – or
afon
– simply means
river
. When the English speak of the River Avon, they’re saying River River. Saxons too lazy to learn the language of the conquered.

Fuck ’em.

Malmesbury was our town before it was theirs. Our river, our hill, our castle.

Eilmer was, I think, a bad codename for Glyn. Eilmer might have been an idiot, but he was a romantic one. One who, for one furlong, some two hundred airborne metres, did what no human before him had done. Escaped gravity. Flew like a bird. Adventured out on the impossible.

Glyn is the opposite of all that. If his life had worked out the way he’d wanted it, he’d be finishing up his career in the Cardiff Planning Department, living in the same house, married to the same woman, doing the same things in the same way until arthritis stiffened him, cataracts dimmed him, muscles failed and cancers ate him.

Eilmer limped for want of a tail. Glyn limps for want of a backbone.

Fuck ’em all. Eilmer, Glyn, everyone.

I leave.

Drive far enough to get Glyn’s sadness out of my hair, the corners of my eyes. Get to the motorway, but pull off at the first service station, Leigh Delamere.

Smoothie. IPad. Google.

Tina Jewell. Community activist. Tiger Bay. Died mid-eighties.

I try the search different ways. Get nothing, or nothing much.

I find a million Tina Jewells – PR people in London, hairdressers in Alabama, a drag queen in Berlin – but none who’s dead enough and Welsh enough for my taste. I’m still doing OK. Despite my momentary tremor while I was with Glyn, I think I’m doing OK.

Then I try a different search string. The twentieth I’ve tried. Google offers some answers, but asks, Did you mean:
Gina Jewell reported dead 1985

Yes, Google, I’ve a feeling I did.

A feeling that’s like I’ve opened my front door – some ordinary errand, buying some milk, posting a letter – and finding that there is nothing but pale sky below me. The planet curved and distant beneath my feet.

I click through, away from the drag queens and the hairdressers, and step out into that empty sky. I’m twenty thousand feet up and there is no sound at all.

Gina Jewell. Campaigning for local residents’ rights. One of those old, redoubtable Tiger Bay tigresses. Welsh blood, Jamaican blood, Norwegian, God knows what. A fierce campaign, ended by her death.

Her death wasn’t murder or, rather, it wasn’t reported that way. A road accident, outside the Pewter Tankard, a poor man’s boozer in the rough end of town. Neck broken, died en route to hospital.

Your dad provided the muscle
.

Twenty thousand feet up and the same whispering silence that there was in the barn. Light dying. A girl taped to a chair, wondering what lies ahead.

I drive home, slowly. Blurrily.

I must recross the Severn Bridge at some point, but if so, I don’t notice. No pale green arch. No Duffy. No seagulls.

And when I get to the door of my house, a funny thing. I find that I’m barefoot. Tights yes, shoes no.

Going back to the car, I find one shoe – coffee-coloured suede, dark red trim, quite nice – rolling around in the footwell. Of its coffee-coloured sister, no sign at all.

And Gina Jewell dead.