This Thing of Darkness (31 page)

I say something.

Other people say things.

I don’t hear it, not really. Or hear it, but don’t feel it.

All I do know is that Penry bends down to my ear, low down. Says – his angry voice – ‘You are a fucking idiot.’

I say, ‘Change of scene. Do me good. Fresh air, a spot of cooking.’

52

Albarracin, Spain.

Time away. A change of scene.

I’m here with Mike. Not holiday, exactly, but halfway there.

The Spanish police were hellishly fast.

Following
that
video and the story from Bereziartu, our team in London – the SOCA analysts – dug up five other possible sightings, all in Spain, of the Stonemonkey,
la sensación Británica.
Some of those sightings yielded actual photos, better quality than the one in the video.

Putting together what they had, SOCA were able to construct a reasonably precise likeness of the man, whom we still know only as John. His image and description was distributed internationally via Interpol, but it was the Guardia Civil in Spain who led the charge. Watkins, with SOCA’s murmurs of support, presented the Stonemonkey as a wanted terrorist. (Torture, murder, bomb threats.) No police agency loves anything more than a hunt for a terrorist, particularly if the person involved is most unlikely to detonate a bomb. I think they also wanted to show off, to show us what they could do.

And in the end, it wasn’t that hard. Officers fanned out across Spain’s leading climbing areas, discreetly harvesting the local knowledge, the local rumours. A tip in Rodellar led to a climber near El Chorro, who claimed to have spent a week or so bouldering with a phenomenally able Brit, ‘John’, here in Albarracin. Said that John claimed to live in the area, albeit travelling often.

The Guardia Civil did their stuff. They’ve located the guy: his house, his car, his climbing haunts. The man goes by the name of John Wilson – a sturdily fake identity, if you ask me, and not one that sounds any particular alarms on our databases.

I’ve come out in order to confirm, on behalf of the South Wales Police, that Wilson is indeed the man we want arrested. I’ve got no more information than the Spanish, but they want to ensure that any consequences of a wrongful arrest flow to us, not them.

Mike and I flew to Madrid. Drove three hours on heat-whitened roads to Albarracin. Mike – thrilled to be here – headed straight for the pine forest that surrounds the village. The forest is full of red sandstone boulders, pebbles scattered by a giant. It’s high season now, and warm, so most climbers have headed for cooler climes. But Mike and a few others perform their strange, unattainable gymnastics in the silence amongst these rocks, beneath these whispering trees.

Aragonese deer step out of the shadows, stare at us, then vanish with a flourish of dusty heels.

I sit with my back to a pine tree, eating peaches and cherries from a warm paper bag, watching Mike climb. I run my eye over the width of his shoulders, his narrow waist, the changing muscles of his back. Between climbs, he bounds over to me like a springer spaniel, shakes blood into his arms, steals bites from my peach and tries to persuade me to attempt one of the easier climbs.

I smile and say no.

I decide that I fancied him when I first met him. At the wall, yes, but especially at Plas Du. Rhod was clearly the better climber of the two, but there was something simpler, friendlier, cleaner about Mike. An easy grace.

I don’t know why I didn’t see it then. I don’t know how it works for other people.

We don’t see anyone who looks like our John Wilson, or climbs like him. The only cars in the little car park look ordinary, dusty, local.

We drive to the place we’re staying: a little whitewashed cottage just outside Teruel.

We have supper outside on a little clay-tile patio shaded by an extravagantly flowered bougainvillea. We eat warm tomatoes and black olives. Bread and tinned sardines and ewe’s milk cheese. We open a bottle of red wine and I drink the teeniest weeniest smidge, feeling brave.

When Mike wipes his mouth and pushes his plate back, I do the same.

Say, ‘So, tonight. Were you thinking we would sleep together?’

53

We do sleep together, yes, and very nice it is too. It’s like I’ve been thirsty for months and only now that I drink do I realise how thirsty I was.

We make love in a big white bed, with the windows open and a loose white cotton curtain stirring in the breeze. We have a bath together afterwards. Lukewarm water and a huge yellow sponge. Nibble at each other as we get ready for bed.

Mike has this honourable scamp thing going. He’s anxious for me to understand that he’s not really the settling down type, not yet, not until he’s climbed more, travelled more, done more. Needed all that clarified before he would head for the bedroom. I tell him I hadn’t thought of him as the settling down type. That a bit of happy shagging would do me fine.

We make love again in the morning. Eat fruit and bread and yogurt in the sun. Albarracin is a thousand metres above sea-level but even so, by the time we’ve cleared breakfast, the clay tiles of the patio are too hot to walk on.

I break a few twigs of bougainvillea and put them in a vase, while Mike traces the line of my spine through my sundress.

We walk back to the forest and its field of boulders. This time, in the car park, we find a yellow Lotus Elan with Spanish plates. HU: Huesca, a local car.

Mike and I exchange looks, say nothing.

He climbs. I sit and watch, puddled in my own contented lust.

At eleven thirty, we go to refill water bottles from a tap in the car park. There’s a guy there. Spanish. Mid-forties. Jeans and old shirt.

He murmurs his name as we fill our bottles. Teniente Estefan Marin, a lieutenant. The rank sounds odd to my ears, but the Guardia Civil is technically part of the Spanish armed services and their ranks, unlike ours, are military.

I say my name, but without the rank. He nods, but barely. We don’t shake hands.

Marin indicates the Lotus with a look. Says, in English, ‘This man, Wilson, climbs usually till
mediodía
, middle of the day. We can make a little picnic, and we will see.’

We make a little picnic at the wooden table which Marin indicates. He’s well-prepared – in surveillance terms, I mean, although the preparation translates into food too. Ham. A thick slab of cold Spanish omelette in foil. More peaches. A little camping stove, at which Marin brews espresso in a silver pot.

Mike wears flip-flops and leaves his boots and chalk on the ground behind him. Marin has come equipped with the same props, and wears tape on a couple of his fingers: something I’ve seen climbers do – to protect finger tendons, I think. We drink, talk, pick at the omelette.

I ask Marin if he’s a climber. He says no.
El windsurf
is more his thing. Mike’s done a bit of windsurfing and they talk about it a bit. I happen to mention that a friend of mine, Ed Saunders, is a windsurfing nut and, to my surprise, Mike says, ‘Ed? Ed the Wildman?’

I say I don’t think my Ed is much of a wildman, but it turns out we are talking about the same guy. There was some rock and wave weekend in Gower, where Cardiff’s climbers showed their sport to the windsurfers and vice versa. Ed, who’s part of some surfing club, was there, as was Mike, the president of his. Ed, apparently, placed third in the windsurfing race they had on the Sunday afternoon, and on the rocks the day before he was ‘basically mental. I mean, he was attempting these DWS routes – deep water solos – where he didn’t stand a chance of getting to the top. He just liked seeing how far he could get before he dropped.
Brilliant
guy.’

I can’t quite square that image of Ed with the one I know. The collar-and-tie wearing psychologist. The only man I know who makes his own tagliatelli and who wanted my help to locate the broad and steady waters of his Forever Married Life.

But a few cross-checks prove that his Ed is definitely also mine. And it shouldn’t surprise me really. I mean, detective work repeatedly proves that we only ever know the face that turns towards us, not the face that turns away. As detectives, we know our targets as killers, rapists, thieves. But those same people’s mothers know them as children, who turn up for Sunday dinner, unblock drains and help get the lawnmower started. How often has
he can’t have
turned into
he did
?

The conversation moves on.

At about midday, a guy walks out of the forest.

The guy in the video. The guy whose image is now with Interpol. The guy who unclipped his rope on a climb whose difficulty made Mike breathless with admiration.

I look long enough that I can be sure that it’s him, then look away. Mike gives a little hello-style nod. Marin doesn’t do much at all.

And that’s it. The guy gets into his Lotus and drives away, a kettle drum of exhausts as it pulls from the car park dirt to the tarmacked road. The forest echoes briefly, then falls silent.

I call Watkins. ‘It’s him’: the gist of my call.

She asks to speak to Marin and I put the phone on speaker. He says they’re planning to make the arrest that evening. The Guardia will come in force. Surround the house. All officers will be armed. ‘Also dogs,’ says Marin. ‘Also, I don’t know how you say,
helicóptero
,’ moving his fingers round in a circle to help with the translation.

Watkins, I can tell, is stressed because she doesn’t like an important arrest happening in a place and via a force she can’t control, but Marin doesn’t strike me as anyone’s fool and the Guardia were more than slick enough in finding their man in the first place. And the truth is, this should be easy enough. ‘Wilson’ is a dangerous man, for sure, but he’s not a terrorist, not really. We’ve no reason to think he has any particular skill or interest in weaponry.

Marin says that he’ll come to collect us at six. The raid will be made later that evening.

Mike goes back to his beloved rocks. I go back to the house.

Read a book. The
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius, a second-century Roman emperor and a notable Stoic philosopher.

Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time
, he tells me.
The twining strands of fate wove these two together: your own existence and all that befalls you.

That’s not necessarily true, in fact. As the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, pointed out, there are two logical possibilities. One is that everything is preordained, à la Marcus Aurelius. The other is that there is an element of pure randomness – quantum chance, as we’d now think of it, unknown and unknowable.

But as Hume also made clear, those two things look much the same when you get down to it. It’s somehow comforting to think that all we do and say and think and choose is akin to the movement of a cork bobbing on a current. Perhaps preordained, or perhaps the outcome of cosmic chance, but on neither model would we blame the cork for its final position.

Me. My father. Gareth Glyn.

Buzz. Watkins. Jackson.

John Wilson, the Stonemonkey. A cork whose course – whoops-a-daisy – happened to bump up against the rocks marked Theft, Murder, Torture. Whose course, I hope and trust, will soon be swept up in the little circular eddy called Category A Prison, an eddy whose motion repeats and repeats until the cork itself dips beneath the waters, never to return.

You have the power . . . to consider time everlasting, to think of the swift change in the parts of each thing, of how brief is the span from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and the void beyond dissolution are equally infinite.

I call my sister. She’s coming to meet me in Portugal after all this. A long holiday, my treat. We chat, then hang up.

Time passes.

I watch the violet shade of the bougainvillea. Watch a chain of tiny sand-coloured ants busying itself with some fallen cherry stones.

Run a bath of cold water – as cold as it gets here – and sit on the edge, shaving my legs.

Light moves across the wall.

Mike said he’d be back at three. He arrives well after four.

He’s breathless and apologetic and has a mouthful of explanations.

I shrug. Say, ‘You were climbing.’

He says, ‘You didn’t mind?’

‘No.’

‘Is that
no
, as in actual-no? Or
no
as in I’m-secretly-very-pissed-off-but-you’re-going-to-have-to-guess-how-to-put-it-right-no?’

‘The first of those. Actual-no.’

He bites my shoulder and I pull his T-shirt off and he gets in the bath and submerges himself. His long hair floats in the water, Ophelia Neanderthalensis.

When he’s emerged, washed and dressed and as civilised as he ever gets, he says, ‘You seem very simple. For a girl, I mean.’

I laugh at that. Tell him I’m the least simple girl he’s ever met. That I have to keep some bits simple, because otherwise even I lose track.

He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but I don’t care.

We drink gazpacho – which we bought in cartons and kept in the fridge – outside in the shade.

Marin arrives at six, looking grim. He’s in plain clothes, but has a radio, black and crackling, in his hand. A gun is holstered at his waist.

They’ve lost Wilson.

He went into Teruel to shop. Parked his Lotus outside a shopping centre, went inside. Nothing out of the usual.

The Guardia, leaving nothing to chance, had a tracking device on his car. Didn’t want to maintain visual contact with Wilson beyond a point, for fear of being burned. Kept a loose watch on exits, but mostly just waited for Wilson to return to his vehicle.

He never came back. The Lotus is still there, empty, in an emptying car park. Guardia officers – first plain clothes, then also uniformed – combed the shopping centre without joy. ‘We are looking at cameras also,’ says Marin, ‘but . . .’

But CCTV is always less helpful than you want it to be and Spain, for some strange reason, hasn’t decided to cover the country in cameras the way we’ve done, presumably out of some bizarre concern for the privacy and civil liberties of its citizens.

Marin is expecting me to be angry, I think, but I’ve spent the afternoon with a Roman emperor.

A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, ‘And why were such things made in the world?’

I say this to Marin, not those exact words maybe, but he gets the drift.

We go to Wilson’s house.

No dogs, no helicopters.

Any police vehicles are kept well back and unmarked, in case Wilson decides to return.

Six officers inside, however. All armed. Checking for occupants first, then gathering in the cool tiled hall to determine priorities.

They look at me as though I might know. I don’t.

I explore the house with Marin at my side. It’s big, rich, well-maintained. My sandals – cute, strappy, holiday things – sound a little frivolous on these tiled floors, between these echoing walls.

A living room with a big fireplace. Sofas in pale leather.

Climbing paraphernalia everywhere. Not just ropes and harnesses, but photos. Some arty stuff too. Badly painted canvases of sunlight on rock. Alpine sunsets.

Perhaps it’s just my mood, but I sense a kind of loneliness here. When Wilson chose to burgle his way to riches, he gained something material, but he lost something too. The climbers I’ve met – Mike and Rhod, Nat Brown and his little world, even the press of schoolchildren down at the wall – have something that binds them together. A passion hot enough that it causes a little melt of community wherever it touches.

If Wilson had chosen to use his talents in a more ordinary way, he’d have had all that. The friendships. The rivalries. The competitions. The expeditions.

As it is, he has this huge, grand, echoey house, with wistful prints of Alpine sunsets, and climbing buddies that never last longer than a week, because he can’t afford to let his profile rise too high.

We search on.

No computers. No phones, except the landline.

Not much personal stuff, either. I mean clothes and that kind of thing, yes. Shorts and trousers. Some old T-shirts. One –
Plas-y-Brenin, The National Mountain Centre
– looks like a memento from the long-ago past. At any rate, it’s two sizes smaller than everything else.

But that’s it. No personal photos. No family letters. No postcards. No board by the fridge with lists of important numbers and a reminder to ring Auntie Joan.

I drift around. Remind Marin that we want any climbing boots, to see if we can match them against the rubber we found both at the lighthouse and at Bristol. We do find some boots but, better still, we find an indoor training wall. A slab of overhanging plywood studded with holds – and bootmarks. I tell Marin we’ll want to forensicate the whole damn wall.

Call Watkins. Break the news. She’s grim, but not, I think, utterly surprised. ‘He must have an informant in the Guardia,’ she says.

‘Or in South Wales,’ I say. ‘Or Bristol. Or SOCA. Or Interpol. And it might not even be him, it might be the gang he works for.’

I don’t mention the Voice, because I haven’t discussed any of that side of thing with Watkins or anyone else, but it strikes me that my friend, Mr Voice, would be more than likely to take precautions along those lines.

Watkins says she’ll be on the first flight out. She’ll bring the officer in charge of the Bristol crime scene analysis. She says other stuff too.

I don’t listen.

I’m on holiday
, I think. Eating gazpacho and wearing sandals and having that no-strings-attached holiday sex which is meant to be really nice and is, in fact, as nice as it’s meant to be.

Watkins asks if I’m planning to hang around. I say no, probably not, that Mike and I are moving on to Portugal. That’s not what we had arranged, but I don’t want to see her. Don’t feel like standing next to her bristling, angry, effective energy.

Marin drops me back at our little cottage.