This Thing of Darkness (53 page)

DiGiulian washes his hands again and, with fingertips still slightly damp, draws his index finger over the site on the inner thigh. Once, twice, three times.

Grimaces.

To me, he says, ‘My skin’s kinda hard, I don’t know if . . .’

‘Sure.’

I wash my hands. My skin is quite soft anyway, but the washing helps exfoliate a bit. Increases sensitivity. I stroke Livesey’s thigh. The first time I think I have it. The second time I’m sure. ‘Here,’ I say. ‘Entrance burn. Leathery texture. And is it maybe . . .?’

DiGiulian angles the light so it shines across the spot I’d marked with my finger.

To the recorder he says, ‘Area noted as somewhat leathery to the touch is mildly depressed.’

His eyes and mine shift to a slight reddening of the skin about an inch from the depressed area. He readjusts the lamp, says, ‘One inch from possible entrance marks, we note mildly elevated area, some reddening visible.’

He and I both look at the dead man’s genitals, but if there are marks there, we won’t find them without tissue removal and microscope analysis. The skin is just too uneven, the colouration too variable.

DiGiulian goes through the same thought process as I do, turns back to the thigh.

He takes some photos. Tries to feel the leathery patch. Can’t. Says, ‘My wife is always on at me to moisturise.’ Takes some super-close-up photos of the inner thigh area under different lighting set-ups. Gets a couple of shots which shows the hard spot I’d found. Skin a little browner, a bit more crusted over.

‘Sheezus.’

His face is grim, his eyes on Sharma.

‘Listen, Carolyn, I’ve got some tidying up to do here . . .’ He sends Sharma to wait outside, in a voice that does not admit refusal, then says to me, ‘I did a couple of tours in Iraq. I’ve seen burns before, but nothing at all like this. Christ, there’s hardly anything there.’

‘Will you find anything subdermally?’

‘Maybe, I don’t know. It’s not an area where I have any experience. But there’ll be research on this kind of thing. I’ll hit the books.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And hey, I don’t know what kind of process you folks have, but I wouldn’t want you to bust any balls over this. If I’d been that first pathologist . . .’

‘Thanks, but there’ll be no busted balls.’

He grins. Turns back to the cadaver.

I go out to find Sharma. Walk her out to a pizza place, with a view out over the glittering sea. Order food and water and a huge bowl of green salad and make her tell me about how she met Livesey, about their romance, about the plans they’d made. Make her tell me in detail and with feeling. Make her do all that before I tell her what flavour of horrible she now has to live with.

‘What we were seeing there was an electrical burn. Very high voltage, very low current. The massive voltage causes the pain. The low current means there’s pretty much nothing to see.’

These aren’t things that you discover from ordinary British policing work. They weren’t even things that DiGiulian, a military man, came across during his time in Iraq. But if you fool around on Wikipedia, you find what you need. Electric cattle prods were used as tools in human torture – simple, cheap, nasty – until the 1970s when various Latin American governments developed the picana. The picana worked on the same basic technique, except that voltages were increased to ten or twenty thousand volts and the current reduced to as little as a thousandth of an amp. It’s assumed that contemporary devices now run to far higher voltages yet. Exactly how high nobody knows, because the folk who work with picanas don’t generally seek publicity.

I knew none of this myself. Only found it out because I wanted to discover if there were ways to torture someone without leaving any marks that a SOCO or pathologist might find.

Suicide is a hard sort of horrible, but there are other sorts, and not necessarily kinder to those left behind.

Sharma’s face is very still. Ashen beneath the tan. A face etched with the realisation of the final act in her lover’s biography.

She says, ‘The salt. That was because they . . .’

‘Wanted to improve electrical conductivity, yes.’

Whoever applied the picana to Livesey preferred to avoid the whole business of dressing and undressing him. Too hard. Too difficult to achieve without possible struggle or errors in the re-dressing. So, instead, a little salty water on the trouser leg. Application of the picana. To the thigh certainly. To the genitals, probably.

Then death by hanging.

All that done in a locked, inaccessible room.

A room from which nothing was missing, nothing stolen.

The perfect crime, the perfect murder.

Sharma, I can see, is on the verge of tears again, but something steers her away from that place and, without any change in her tone, she asks, ‘How bad was it? Please tell me the truth.’

‘We don’t know. Probably won’t know, even after DiGiulian has completed his work. But if you want my guess, then I think not all that bad. Whoever attacked your fiancé did so because they wanted some information. I don’t know what that information was or why it was needed. But from Ian’s point of view, it was just work. Something to treat with care, but not worth dying for. My guess is he just gave them what they wanted. Why wouldn’t he? He had bigger things to live for. Way bigger.’

Sharma nods. Says, ‘Thank you, Fiona. Thank you.’

We say goodbye under the restaurant’s little porch, hung with vines, thick blue shadows massing on the tiles. We hug.

I say, ‘Hang in there, Carolyn.’

‘Fiona, when DiGiulian is done, we’re going to hold a funeral service. Very small. Just intimate friends and family. But we’ll have a memorial service too and, look, I’m sure you won’t want to come, but—’

‘I do.’

I’m too abrupt. I’ve slightly shocked Sharma with the speed and force of my response. ‘Sorry. I get too involved. I always do.’ My finger, I notice, is pointing at my head again. ‘They matter to me. Ian Livesey, you, your families.’

‘I’ll let you know when we’ve got the details sorted. If you can come . . .’ She shrugs. A light one, which says it’s nice if you come, OK if you don’t.

‘Thank you.’

She punches me, very softly, on my shoulder. ‘Just get the bastard, Fiona. You just get that sonofabitch.’

I tell her I will.

I think I’m forgiven my lack of moustaches.

I have one more meeting that day, before heading back to the airport and my flight home.

The meeting is with one of Livesey’s former colleagues. Stuart Lowe. A fellow engineer. One who stayed working for a big company, when Livesey struck out on his own.

We meet by the water, inevitably – everywhere in Norfolk is by the water. You turn your back on the sea at one corner, drive away from it, leave it shining in your rear-view mirror like a golden penny, then two blocks later, your windscreen starts to fill again with dancing blue, the heave of another bridge.

Lowe’s office is a squat brown block jammed between a car park and a quay. Lowe – fiftyish, outdoorsy, silver hair shaved down to a prickle – looks cut from the same cloth as Livesey. Maritime engineers, a breed apart. Lowe meets me in the lobby, gives me a handshake like some kind of shipboard clamp and asks me if I want to come up.

I do, but the docks have my interest first. The clutter of shipping. Steel hulls. Thick white and yellow paint. Company colours.

Lowe says, ‘Sure.’ Bounds along the dock, pointing to boats. ‘The
Moonflower
. One of our main workhorses. Sub-sea construction. Oil industry mostly. See that crane there?’ The boat he’s pointing to has a low stern mounted by a chunky white crane and other handling equipment I can’t understand. ‘That little sweetheart operates in pretty much any kind of sea. Automatic movement compensation. If we need to launch an ROV or pick one up, we can do it in pretty much any sea state.’

‘ROV?’

‘Remote Operated Vehicle. Any construction work we do happens down there. You can use divers for inshore work, or sometimes on rigs, but any deep-sea stuff we do with ROVs. We can lay pipeline or cable. Trench it. Recover it. Mend it, even.’

He continues with his tour. Points out trenchers and ploughs. Cable carousels, able to hold two thousand tonnes of cable. The
Rakekniven
, a specialist vessel equipped to work in extreme latitudes, her hull thickened to resist ice.

‘Not that our equipment is mostly here,’ he tells me. ‘If it’s in dock, it’s not earning its keep. Any one time, we aim to have eighty or ninety per cent of it at sea.’

I understand almost none of what I’m being shown. But I like it, all of it. Like the blue, gull-dotted sky. The thick steel hulls. The friendly nursery-coloured paint. The creak of metal against dockside, the slap of water, the smell of brine. I like the sense that all these incomprehensible digital things still rely, when it comes to the point, on men sailing ships like these, operating cranes, handling equipment which you can still see, feel and kick.

When I’ve had my fill of the docks, we go up to Lowe’s office. Cheap windows, cheap carpet, cheap fittings, wonderful view.

I say, ‘Ian, you used to work with him?’

He says yes. Says all the things you say about an ex-colleague, whom you liked, whom you shared summer barbecues with, but who wasn’t a deep, essential part of your life.

‘He was good at his job?’

‘Yes, sure. Very – very regular, capable guy.’

‘Meaning, he was good at his job, but nothing outstanding? That plenty of people are just as good.’ When Lowe hesitates, I add, ‘I’m not family. I’m not going to pass your comments on. I just need to know.’

He grins. Says, ‘Ian was a good surveyor, but nothing so special. When he quit this firm to set up on his own, I thought he was stepping away from the big time. I mean, we’re a global outfit. The big, interesting projects tend to come our way because there just aren’t that many firms who can do what we can do. When Ian left us, he went from working for Exxon to working for’ – he waves his hands – ‘I don’t know. Port authorities needing to upgrade their harbour equipment. Coastguards needing chart updates.’

‘You know what he was working on when he died?’

‘Yeah. Big cable project.’ He names the company, Atlantic Cables. ‘It surprised me, that. We normally expect to win assignments like that. Or if not us, one of our major competitors. But you know, what we expect, we don’t always get.’

‘And Ian was capable of handling something on that scale?’

‘Oh sure. It’s just a seabed survey. He wasn’t pitching for the trenching work, nothing like that.’

‘So he made a map . . .?’

‘Yeah, picking up from the estuary out to the edge of the Irish Sea.’

This is news to me. ‘He handled a
portion
of the route, that’s all?’

‘Yeah. They wanted to chop it up into segments. I don’t know why.’

We discuss that a bit. The approach doesn’t seem either so normal or so strange. I drop the topic and go back to what exactly Livesey was doing for his money.

‘Right, sure. The product from his survey would have been a map and a route plan. He’d have been able to highlight any potential problem areas. Inshore, that might be wrecks or other obstructions. Deep sea, you have to think about seabed stability. Any sharp cliffs or trenches. Debris. Dumping grounds. Seabed composition if you want to bury the cable. That kind of thing. If he came across real problem areas, he could always bring in a highly equipped specialist like ourselves to deal with the issue.’

‘Cables are buried? I thought they were just dropped out of the back of a boat.’

‘Mostly, sure. But you’re from Wales, right? Take a situation like the Bristol Channel. You have a lot of traffic, a lot of movement. Ships dropping anchor, for example. If you leave cable exposed in a place like that, you’re pretty much asking for snags or breaks. So if the seabed type makes it an option, you’ll probably choose to bury the cable. Keep it safe.’

Somewhere, audible through an open window, a wire taps against metal. A ship slips through a channel beyond us. From where I’m sitting, I can’t actually see water, so it looks like a big ship is travelling smoothly down some city boulevard, gliding past offices and burger joints.

Nothing here feels real.

I say, ‘I never met Ian in life, but I’ve just come from the autopsy. He looked fit. Strong.’

‘Once a marine, always a marine.’

‘Did he work out, do you know?’

‘Yes, always. Running. Weights. Some kind of martial arts thing, I don’t know what. I’m sure Carolyn could tell you.’

‘No, it’s fine. Just a passing thought.’

We talk some more. Lowe shows me some 3-D maps of the seabed. Coloured images, all strange peaks and inky troughs. The maps mean nothing to me.

I thank him for his time.

I need to leave for the airport soon but before I do, I find a bit of dockside where I can sit and watch the sea.

The air is warm. The sea inviting and blue. The concrete I’m sitting on still holds the day’s heat. Trash washes up against the sea wall in front of me. Discarded packaging. A fast food carton. Some dirty polystyrene filmed with algae. A fishing float, or buoy, bright orange in the blue.

I think that the broad shape of the case is fairly clear. Who did what to whom and why. Not just the Livesey case, but the Plas Du one too. One of those things where we don’t have remotely enough facts to go on. Not for a courtroom, of course. The basis for a confident investigative hypothesis, nothing more. But I don’t have names, not meaningfully, and my guesses tend to run a long away ahead of my colleagues’ own, more routine-focused, process. There’s a lot of work yet to do, I see that.

Briefly, I find myself thinking,
I’d like to try to do this police-style. Run the case in a way that means Jackson wouldn’t kill me, even if he knew everything I got up to.
I don’t quite know what to do with that thought. I’m not good at staying within police rules, or at least not when they start to conflict with the needs of the investigation. I also think:
Bronwen Woodward, Cesca Evans. Those things weren’t very police-style.
Not that they were so bad, either. And they produced useful intelligence in both cases. So I don’t reflect long, before I revise my early opinion to:
I’d like to try and do this police-fashion if I can. And if I can’t, Jackson will just have to kill me.