This Thing of Darkness (54 page)

As it is, I think the case should be easy enough to bring home. A nice one to work on.

It’s Thursday evening and I feel relaxed.

18

Fly home. Evening flight to Washington. Overnight to Heathrow. Coach back to Cardiff.

I don’t sleep much on the flight. I’ve hardly ever flown long haul and can’t get the hang of sleeping on my poky economy seat, so end up typing my notes instead. Jackson wants me in at two p.m. for an inquiry review, which should in theory give me ample time to get home, shower, change and blink myself into the right time zone. Alas, however, the coach hits traffic on the M4 – major accident up ahead – and we sit looking at an unremarkable bit of Wiltshire for two disconsolate hours. The coach has wi-fi, and I use it to check out my emails.

A few boring work things.

An email alert from one of my used-car websites. Cardiff University is selling off an old mini-van for £750, or nearest offer. I make a call to check things over, then buy it.

I think about calling Dunwoody. Telling him about my new van. Offering him a ride.

I look at Wiltshire a bit more. Try to sleep. Fail. Then the coach moves on again.

I get into the office fifteen minutes late, not showered, not changed and my brain still riding the jetstream somewhere between Chesapeake Bay and County Limerick.

Jackson glares at me, like multi-vehicle pile-ups are my fault. ‘Nice trip?’

I don’t know what answer he wants. Just sit down, say nothing.

We’re in a big conference room on the top floor. Jackson presiding. Watkins next to him.

Along with our team, there’s Creamer from Avon and Somerset. Also a DI, Bob Findlay. A female DS whose name I don’t properly catch. Jackson introduces me as, ‘DC Fiona Griffiths, our Acting Deputy Exhibits Officer.’

I don’t know why he uses that title for me. It’s not one he’s ever shoved at me before. He’s making a point, I assume, but I don’t know what.

Findlay is running through developments at their end.

Fingerprints, first. The obvious hope. But it’s good news, bad news, with the bad outweighing the good.

The good news is that the prints on that middle girder beneath the balcony were definitely made by a human hand. What’s more, to judge from the extent to which airborne dirt and particulates had built up, the prints are of approximately the right vintage. Created neither days ago, nor years ago, at any rate.

Also, there’s no possibility of them having been left by a window cleaner or anything of that sort. As Findlay – bluff, practical – commented, ‘They were a bugger to get to, quite frankly. We had six men on it and even so we had to pull in some firemen with high access training.’

That’s the good news. The bad news is that no usable prints were found for matching purposes. No big surprise that. Prints are delicate things. You can’t always pick them up the day after, let alone two months later. And in any case, sweat – the key ingredient of most latent fingerprints – would have been carefully blotted away by a climber’s use of chalk.

Findlay concludes, ‘Needless to say, they were forensically aware when inside. We’ve found nothing. Probably wouldn’t have done if we’d checked at the time. Entrance into the apartment from the balcony would have been easy enough. Door almost always unlocked, for obvious reasons, but easy to force if not.’

‘So,’ says Jackson. One of his big Jacksonian
so
s. ‘So. Murder it is.’

‘Yes. No question.’

Six sets of eyes track towards me. Six sets, plus Sharma’s tear-brimmed pair, plus Livesey’s puzzled pair. I last saw Livesey’s when DiGiulian peeled his face down from his forehead, blue eyes startled by the descending dark.

‘And torture,’ I say. ‘Not certain, but highly probable.’

I tell them about the faint traces of electrical burns on the inner thigh. Tell them what I know about the picana, its modern descendants. Watkins already knows some of this. For the others, I think it’s new, at least in large part.

‘The pathologist will confirm this?’ Jackson’s question.

‘Yes and no.’ I explain that DiGiulian is not, in fact, in any doubt about what he discovered, but there may be a gap between what he personally believes and what we can make stand up in court. ‘If he can prove the existence of subdermal damage, we’re OK. If not, I doubt if the indications are strong enough to make a more than circumstantial case.’

The eyes are still looking at me, so I say, ‘I spoke to Ms Sharma. She was aware of no threats to Mr Livesey. No attempted thefts. Nothing of that sort. I’ll distribute her statement as soon as I’m back at my desk.’

I’m still meeting a whole hillside of silence. Acres of tumbled stone and waving bracken. Sheep trails through the bilberries.

I say, ‘I interviewed one of Livesey’s ex-colleagues.’ Mention the curious fact of a big project being awarded to a minor operator. ‘I typed up my notes on the plane back. I’ll distribute everything properly soon.’

Then I shut up.

Findlay’s mouth moves, but no words come out.

The sheep still wander silently through the bilberries.

I don’t know what to say.

Jackson helps me out. ‘Fiona, I think what everybody is wondering is how come you knew that Ian Livesey had been tortured and murdered, when all the indications pointed to a common or garden suicide.’

‘Oh, I see. No. I didn’t know.’

More silence.

I can see I’m meant to say something further.

I say, ‘Derek Moon. It started with him. He took a blow to the head that didn’t come from his fall. Hence an assumption of murder. Nothing showed up on a regular investigation. Nothing in his personal life. No thefts of physical property. So it had to be something else. I didn’t know what. But then Livesey popped up. Same cable, same project. Moon’s death was carefully covered up. It seemed worth asking if Livesey’s was too.’

‘The salt,’ says Watkins. ‘You were looking for salt the very first minute you were in that apartment.’

I blink. Maybe it’s my brain still staggering out of the sky. Looking for baggage control and trying to remember where it left my passport. But as far as I remember, successful investigation is a good quality in a detective. Even in an Acting Deputy Exhibits Officer.

‘It was a long shot, maybe. But if you want to extract information, and if you happen to know your guy is an ex-Marine who keeps himself strong and fit, you would have to think that you might need some kind of physical coercion to extract the relevant information. That’s easy enough if you’re just planning to beat the crap out of someone. But they wanted this murder to look like suicide, so they had to find a way to inflict pain without leaving marks. I poked around a bit. The picana seems like the torturers’ tool of choice for those circumstances. But obviously electricity doesn’t conduct well through dry clothing, so . . .’ I shrug. ‘I don’t know if your team has had time to look at that chair?’

Findlay drills me with his gaze. Then nods. ‘Traces of duct tape adhesive. They cleaned it up pretty well. It looks like they wiped the chair down with surgical spirit, something like that. But there were a couple of recessed screwholes, hard to clean. We found something there.’

The discussion spools forward. I don’t participate much. But the conclusion everyone comes to is, I think, the right one.

Somebody wanted information on the undersea cable. We don’t know what or why, but have to assume that both Moon and Livesey had access to it.

Both men were killed. Livesey tortured and killed.

There’s discussion about the specifics of the Livesey murder. We have most of the essentials already. The rest is either possible to guess or perhaps doesn’t matter too much

It’s clear that someone climbed into Livesey’s apartment. The noise of that entry, presumably, is what alerted Livesey to the presence of an intruder. What prompted his, ‘Hey, babe, that’s weird.’

Livesey cut the call and stepped out to find the climber in his apartment. We presume that the climber was carrying a weapon, because Livesey was strong and capable and there were no signs of a struggle. We also presume that the torture required at least two men. Hard to manage otherwise. That implies that there was an armed climber, who threatened Livesey, and let an accomplice into the room.

Once there, the two men forced Livesey into a chair and taped him into it. Livesey was at gunpoint and had no option but to comply. He was probably also thinking that he just needed to give these guys whatever they came for and they’d leave him be. Logical thinking, but logic doesn’t always win the day.

Anyway. They tortured him. Obtained the information they needed. Then tied Livesey by the neck and hanged him. Cut him out of the chair only once he was already dangling.

Restore the apartment, pretty much to how it was. The accomplice left in the normal way. The climber then locked the front door and descended by abseil.

The discussion meanders.

Creamer says, ‘But why get a climber involved? Why not just arrive at the guy’s door and blag your way in? Or fight if you have to?’

That’s a fair question, but the general consensus – in which I share – is that although that strategy
probably
works, it would have been too risky to trust. If Livesey hadn’t liked the look of the people he encountered at the door, he’d only have had to yell once – down a long corridor, with other apartments leading off it – and the whole murder-as-suicide plan would have been a bust.

Entering the apartment by stealth and surprising him at gunpoint in his own room would have eliminated the risk of public exposure to almost nothing.

Someone asks about the coroner’s inquest on Livesey. Findlay wants to give the coroner access to our recent findings.

I say, ‘Maybe not such a good idea. If we have an advantage here, it’s that whoever we’re pursuing has no idea that we’ve figured this out.’

More chat. Withholding information from a coroner’s inquest is a big no-no. On the other hand, there are public interest exemptions which would permit us to hold back material. It seems to me that anything which increases our chances of arresting a murderer might well be in the public interest, but what do I know? I’m only an Acting Deputy Exhibits Officer.

Findlay says he can’t withhold evidence from a coroner.

I want to thump my head against the table, but don’t.

Nip out. Go to the loo. Make some peppermint tea. Go crazy: pick a big mug and use two teabags. This girl lives her life to the max.

Return to the meeting.

My entrance interrupts things. The conversation falls silent.

Watkins takes three manila folders. Drops them on the table in front of her with a papery thwack. They’re the ones I handed to her in the car on the way to Bristol.

Jackson says, ‘Fiona. Let’s move to the next item on our agenda. Peter Pan. Plas Du.’

I say, ‘He probably isn’t really called Peter Pan.’

That’s not a clever thing to say, but then Jackson’s interrogation technique isn’t always very clever either. If he’d wanted to ask a question, he needed to supply a main verb and a question mark. Those things, minimum.

‘Are we to gather that you suspect a connection between the Plas Du burglary and the Livesey murder?’

‘Um. Yes, I suppose so.’

‘And these suspicions were aroused
when
, exactly?’

That word ‘exactly’ bothers me. There’s an issue in philosophy about how you individuate things – how you figure out exactly when something stops being one thing and becomes another. It’s the sort of question which sounds obvious, and probably is if you’re dealing with stones or dogs or dinner plates. But
exactly
when did my suspicion come into being? I don’t know. I don’t think that has a clean answer.

Since I don’t know what to say, I say nothing.

Jackson waits to see if I have more to offer. I don’t. He says, ‘OK. Let’s try another one. I asked you to take a look at a number of cold cases. The burglary at Plas Du was one of them. Right?’

His question is still short of a main verb, but his question mark is as plain as a pikestaff, so I say, ‘Yes, sir,’ with perhaps more enthusiasm than the occasion quite warrants.

‘You took a look at Plas Du. You took the view that, despite the obvious difficulties of the ascent, somebody might have climbed in through an inaccessible second-floor window. On subsequent investigation, you discovered that, yes, that’s exactly what did happen. Right?’

‘Right. Yes, sir.’

I’m not quite sure where this is going, so I try to make my answers big, bright and shiny.

‘Now, Rhiannon here asked you to take a look to see if other recent thefts had followed a similar pattern. I think she was assuming you might take a look at recent high value art thefts or other unsolved thefts in the South Wales area. In actual fact, you took it into your head to look for thefts from fellow members of the British Insurance Association, specifically company executives serving on the BIA’s Evolving Security Risks Committee and, more specifically still, that committee’s Senior Working Group on Household and Small Business Security Threats.’

He stops. No question mark anywhere. Just a set of factual statements all of which he knows to be true. But I can see he needs me to say something, so I stick to my current strategy and say, ‘Right. Exactly. Yes, sir. Spot on.’

There’s a pause, a silence. No sheep, no bilberries, though. This silence is harder than that. Edgier.

Watkins takes over where Jackson left off.

She pushes the three folders I gave her out on the table in front of her. Taps the first and says, ‘Marianna Lockwood and Plas Du. Six etchings, two candlesticks. Total value £400,000.’

Taps the second and says, ‘John and Andrea Redhead. Lost various items of family jewellery from an luxury inner London apartment. Insured value, about £12,000.’

Taps the third and says, ‘Eleanor Bentley, known as Nellie, reported a break-in at her holiday property in Sussex. Nothing stolen except for a giant teddy bear. Value, don’t know, a hundred pounds, something like that. The matter was only reported to the police because a large curved plate glass window had been broken, and the replacement cost of the window went significantly over the insurance excess.