The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Read online

  Burnett looks like a man who’d know what to do with a bacon butty, but he’s holding it away from him like someone who’s found an unexploded mortar shell in their garden.

  I say, ‘Jackson isn’t into land grab just for the sake of it. I mean, if this investigation is being properly conducted, why give himself more work?’

  Burnett nods.

  ‘Manpower shouldn’t be a problem,’ he says.

  ‘Or womanpower,’ I say, for no reason, except to be annoying.

  ‘Or womanpower,’ he echoes, but in a way that doesn’t really tell me if he’s annoyed or not.

  I take another bite of my butty. He starts in on his and, once he’s had the first mouthful, he realises how good it is and starts to snarf it down.

  ‘Theoretically,’ I say, with my mouth still full, ‘if this investigation was taking place in Cardiff?’

  That isn’t, I know, a complete sentence, and I did that annoying teenage thing of letting my voice rise towards the end. A High Rising Terminal, it’s called in the lingo.

  Burnett says, ‘Yes?’

  ‘OK, we’ve already covered a lot of the basics. Divisional surgeon has confirmed death. Corpse secured and removed. Scene’s been secured. Photographs taken. Movable evidence removed. I know there were some delays in doing all that – ’ Burnett and I have already yapped about whose fault it was that they arrived so late – ‘but no real harm done.’

  Burnett nods. Chews and nods.

  ‘Now it’s daylight, we’d be looking at a fingertip search of the churchyard and the field the other side. Every damn officer you can get. SOCOs to supervise. Exhibits officer on hand the whole time.’

  Burnett nods.

  ‘And any CCTV at all. Vehicle movements from the ANPR system. Given where we are, we’d be incredibly lucky to get anything useful, but we have to do it anyway. There were plenty of police vehicles on the A40, so we’ll have a very full record of any movements there.’

  Burnett nods.

  ‘We’d need to interview everyone in the village. What their movements were. If they saw anything out of the ordinary. Any vehicle they didn’t recognise or which looked too clean or out of place. These small villages, people know each other. You can ask questions which wouldn’t make sense in town.’

  Burnett nods. He knows that, of course.

  ‘Missing Persons. Check the Bureau website, obviously, but you need to call as well.’ I give him the names of some people at the NCA he should talk to. ‘Get one of their analysts on it and stay right on top of whatever they’re doing. That’s where an ID is most likely going to come from.’

  Another nod. But now Burnett is taking notes as well, his fingers still agleam with bacon fat.

  ‘The pathologist,’ I say. ‘I assume you’ll be working with the University Hospital?’ Cardiff, in other words, not Carmarthen.

  Burnett nods. ‘Yes. We wouldn’t have the experience . . .’

  ‘Good, then you’ll be working with a pathologist who knows what he’s doing. First thing to get is a cause of death, of course. But I think you’ll want to be a bit more specific in your briefing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK, the deceased was a young, attractive woman. Her hair was clean. Washed sufficiently recently that it still smelled of shampoo. But I think her nails were cut, not filed, and they were cut quite close too. That hair on her legs. I think maybe she hadn’t shaved them for a week or more. I mean, plenty of women don’t, but ones who look like Carlotta? They shave their legs.’

  ‘Carlotta?’ Burnett is doing raised eyebrows at me. He’s laughing at me, I think. ‘Carlotta?’

  ‘She needs a name. I always give ’em one anyway.’ I shrug and continue. ‘We need whatever a pathologist can give us there. Were the nails cut or filed? How much hair growth was there on the legs? Other things too. She has highlights and lowlights in her hair. When do we think those were last done? Can we identify any products used? Her lips. Did you notice those? Look, it’s hard to tell without professional examination, but her lips didn’t lose fullness the way I’d have expected. I think there might be fillers there. Collagen or whatever. If that’s correct, and if we can identify anything about the kind of filler used, we might be able to get a list of the clinics that use that type of filler, then show them photos, see if we can get an ID. If there’s evidence of other cosmetic procedures, that would be potentially helpful in the same way.’

  I continue. The black leather book was a Bible, of course. We suspect that it and the candles were both taken from the vestry, but that conjecture still needs to be verified. Carlotta was also wearing a dress that was totally unsuited to the weather. Any forensic data regarding her dress or her underwear could be critical. I run through a handful of other points, including the boring technicalities which matter a lot. How to run an incident room. The importance of getting a really good indexer. That, and a top-quality action manager. ‘Those two roles are the most important, really. I mean, apart from the SIO, obviously.’

  I shut up.

  My face moves involuntarily, I don’t know why or what it signifies.

  Burnett looks at me.

  ‘You done?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, for now.’

  ‘We’re not total newbies, you know. We do get incidents like this.’ He mentions a death in Rhayader last year. A dead man in a burned-out van. Something the year before. A dead girl, Nia Lewis, found dead in a tangle of nettles in a wet field edge by Tregaron.

  I say, ‘Yes.’

  I don’t say that I had something to do with both incidents. That the first occupant of that unholy van was me.

  Maybe my face indicates something, maybe it doesn’t. In any case, Burnett stares at me a couple of moments, then clicks his biro to the off position. Jabs its now-blunted end at the vestry door, and the church and outhouse beyond.

  ‘Weird, though. Why here? I mean, of all the places to choose.’

  I say something to that. Yes, Ystradfflur is small, but then if you want to deposit your corpse somewhere remote . . .

  Get halfway through that interesting and investigatively useful soliloquy before realising that I’ve misunderstood. Burnett signals my misunderstanding with broad shakes of his head.

  ‘No, I get that. This village, I mean. But that building out there. I mean, how many churches still have them? One in a hundred? Probably not even that.’

  I’m muddy with lack of sleep, but his words wake me.

  I don’t know what my face does or says, but he says, ‘You don’t know what it is, do you? That place you spent the night?’

  No. No, I don’t. But all of a sudden I feel the touch of something even stranger than the various varieties of strange I’ve already encountered these past few hours. The cold fingers of premonition, an icy déjà vu, tingle on the back of my neck.

  Burnett says, ‘A beer house. They used to be quite common, but . . .’

  I don’t understand.

  ‘Beer house? Beer as in pub?’

  He laughs. ‘Bier, as in funeral bier. It was a Victorian thing. Back in the day, if your granny died, you just laid her out in your front room till it was time to bury her. Nowhere else to put her, nowhere respectful. Of course, a lot of families didn’t even have a front room. They just had a common living area below, a sleeping area above. So the corpse was laid out right in the middle of the family accommodation, sometimes for days at a time. The Victorians didn’t like all that – unhygienic, you know – and built these bier houses. So your granny could lie out, under shelter and on consecrated ground, until it was her time to go below.’

  I shiver a little at that. A shiver of delight, really, at the perfection of it all. Carlotta was only the last of the many corpses to have lain out there. Perhaps vigils were common too. Perhaps my long night’s watch was once commonplace too. Carlotta and I, the unknowing inheritors of a much-longer tradition.

  Burnett chuckles at me wanting to see if I’m creeped out, but he’s chuckling at the wrong girl, and I think h
e sees it.

  Disappointed, he checks his tea – cold, but still worth swigging down – and butty: crusts only, nothing worth salvaging. He stands up.

  ‘They’re not mostly called bier houses, though. Too formal, I suppose. I don’t know what they call theirs in Ystradfflur, but we had one in the village where I grew up and everyone just called it the dead house.’ He grins at me, summoning energy for the long day ahead. ‘A corpse in a dead house? It’s only natural.’

  And with that, we exit that gloomy vestry into an Ystradfllur October dawn.

  An eastern light, the colour of floodwater, fills the valley. Damp rags of early morning mist hang, unmoving, between the yew trees. The same mist exhales from the fields beyond, dewy and silver, standing no more than a foot or two high, but thick, almost solid. Fifty yards away, a bullock stares at us. Its feet are invisible and the big animal appears to float. A magic trick, no strings.

  Hills rise to either side.

  Who are you, Carlotta? And what brought you here?

  Poor, dead Carlotta doesn’t have an answer, but answers aren’t her job. They’re mine.

  4

  Midday, or a little after. I’m eating an apple and one of the sandwiches that arrived with one of the vanloads of uniforms from Carmarthen. I’m sitting on a stone wall and turn my face up to gather any warmth being offered by an unconfident sun.

  Yawn.

  Burnett, passing, sees me.

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You didn’t get any sleep though. When did you start yesterday?’

  ‘Eight-thirty. In the morning, I mean. I wasn’t on duty last night.’

  ‘Twenty-seven hours, twenty-eight? OK. Bugger off. Go home. Sleep. Call me tomorrow.’

  I nod. Technically, I’d say Burnett is within his rights to tell me to bugger off, but is exceeding his authority in telling me to go home. When I cross back over the Beacons, I’m off his patch and can go anywhere I like.

  I don’t say that, though. Just hold up my sandwich, meaning, ‘I’ll go after this.’

  In the churchyard, twenty-five officers in hi-vis jackets comb the ground. Any scrap of fallen tissue, every thread of agricultural twine is being meticulously photographed, collected, bagged and logged. Same thing in the field, except it’s bigger and there are, so far, only ten officers, fanning out from the entrance gate.

  By now, Burnett’s guys have knocked on every door in Ystradfflur. Not just the little village centre, but the cottages and farms up in the surrounding hills too.

  Have you lost a twenty-something woman, last seen wearing a pretty little cotton sundress? Thing is we’ve found one. She’s basically fine – I mean, yes, a bit dead, admittedly – but apart from that, really fine.

  Nothing.

  Nothing but puzzlement. A bit of surprise too, maybe, but nothing as strong even as shock. I don’t think that’s a sign of some collective guilt, just the rhythm of these country parts is different. Less labile. More accepting of what comes. Storms and sunshine. Birth and death. Dead girls in village churchyards.

  Burnett says, ‘Thanks for your help. It’s made a big difference.’

  I shrug. All part of the service.

  And the investigation does feel tidy now. Well organised. Resources have been moving north from Cardiff and Bridgend all morning, but they’ll go home reporting on an efficiently managed scene, a properly conducted inquiry.

  I finish my sandwich.

  Burnett’s face says, ‘Bugger off.’ It might even say, ‘Bugger off, right now, no excuses.’

  So I do.

  I don’t want to go home yet, but I don’t feel like going back to Cathays, to the office.

  So to start with, I just drive. Anywhere my car feels like going. We choose our road according to how the light gleams from the asphalt and whether the hedges are full of wild clematis and the tilt of brown-flanked hills above.

  I don’t drive fast. Don’t drive slow. Leave the radio on silent and ignore my phone.

  Drive without plan, except that when the Beacons’ four peaks – Corn Du, Pen y Fan, Cribyn, Fan y Big – gather on the horizon, steel shapes clustered against the sky, I’m not surprised.

  I drive the last part of the way with only one hand on the wheel, the other groping emptily inside my jacket, the pocket on the car door. It’s a gun I’m looking for, I realise, but I don’t have one. Not here. Haven’t so much as touched one since the last time I was here.

  The road rises abruptly. A dirt track curves off to the left.

  I take the track.

  A farmhouse. Cleaned up, but scorch marks still visible on the grey stone.

  A barn converted into offices once. Nicely done. Fancy fittings. Expensive.

  The place is a mess now. Ruined walls, blackened rafters. Old black-and-yellow caution tape flaps from an empty doorway. The interior still crunches with cinders and fallen masonry.

  A couple of years back, I was meant to have died in that barn. Me and a handful of others, no longer wanted by the gangsters who employed us. I escaped, obviously, but the whole situation descended into mayhem, only partly of my making.

  I sit on the barn steps, wanting a cigarette. I don’t have one, but the craving is strong enough that I go to my car and get a joint from the little stash I keep with the tyre irons and my emergency chocolate.

  Smoke.

  Grey smoke, grey sky.

  If I wanted to die one windy October day, I probably wouldn’t choose a little broderie sundress to do it in.

  If I was going to the trouble of washing my hair, all ready for my death-day, I’d probably file my nails and shave my legs at the same time.

  But if I wanted to lie out, dead, one stormy October night, I don’t think I could have chosen a better place to do it. Carlotta, it seems to me, is a woman of style, taste and tact. I’ll enjoy getting to know her.

  I finish my joint.

  Lean back against the wall.

  Let the pale sun watch me as I snooze.

  5

  The next day.

  Jackson wears glasses now. I don’t know if he always did, or if he really needs them even. I half-suspect they’re just a sort of stage prop. A way of lending an academic touch to his natural jowly toughness.

  He reads, or sort of reads, from an email on-screen.

  ‘Blah, blah. Death being treated as suspicious. Blah. Limited resources. Blah. Dyfed-Powys Force confident of managing the operation effectively blah.’ He looks over and interprets for me, ‘Basically, don’t think we’re thick-as-pigshit country coppers.’

  ‘Sheepshit,’ I say. ‘It’s not really pig country, is it?’

  ‘No, but “sheepshit” doesn’t sound right.’

  ‘And pigs are intelligent. They’re meant to be cleverer than dogs.’

  ‘That’s not saying much. My dog’s an idiot.’

  There’s a pause while we wonder whether we’ve got off track and whose job it is to get us back again.

  Jackson’s, it turns out. He returns to his email. He still skips chunks, but the blahs have gone. ‘“Various specific resource requests . . . In particular, maintain current level of forensics support . . . data analysts as needed . . . supply a constable or similar with strong experience as an indexer in an MIR,” and, what about this?, “supply a DS with good experience in Major Crimes to support DI Burnett in a variety of roles.”’

  I keep my face flat.

  ‘Mervyn Rogers,’ says Jackson, ‘He’s got a ton of experience. Or Jane Alexander.’

  My face stays motionless.

  Jackson’s glasses come off. Tap the screen.

  ‘Did you actually dictate that email?’ he asks me. ‘Did you say, “Dear Alun, I really, really want to be part of your murder investigation, and I’ll make myself really, really useful in the early stages without telling you anything about what a pain in the arse I actually am, and, if you want, I’ll draft the email to Jackson, so you get the resources you need and I get the posting I want.”?�
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  I look at him wondering whether that’s a real question.

  I decide that it is.

  ‘No, sir. I mean, I know that’s the sort of thing I might have done, but on this occasion I didn’t.’

  ‘But you do want the posting?’

  That’s a stupid question, in all truth, and Jackson isn’t stupid. I just say, ‘When was the last time we had anything as good as this? You’d probably have to go back to Mary Langton, and even then . . .’

  How do I tell him? How do I even express this thing?

  To have spent the night with a dead woman, quite likely murdered, and to have spent it alone, in a dead house, in a blowing country churchyard – some things are beyond improvement. I couldn’t imagine a sweeter start to an inquiry. I’m already more than half in love with this case, this corpse.

  Jackson stares.

  ‘You do remember that you are full time on Operation April? An investigation which you personally convinced us to initiate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Operation April: an investigation into a possible criminal conspiracy amongst some of South Wales’s most prominent entrepreneurs and businessmen. It was me that persuaded senior command to take the possibility seriously. It was me who christened the investigation. April, after April Mancini, a six-year-old murder victim and my first proper corpse.

  ‘And you do realise that we have other detective sergeants with – what did he say? – “good experience in Major Crimes” and ones who are a damn sight senior to you? Damn sight more reliable at that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jackson echoes. He taps around on his screen, looking at I don’t know what. Current officer assignments, I’m guessing.

  I say nothing.

  Look down at my feet. I got a new pair of boots recently. Black leather. Knee height. More of a heel than I normally go for, but quite comfortable. My sister helped me buy them and said, ‘Fab’ when I did.

  I try to figure out why they’re fabber than my old ones, but don’t succeed.

  Jackson looks at me again.

  ‘OK. Mervyn Rogers doesn’t have much on at the moment. He certainly doesn’t have a full-time assignment on a major operation. He gets first dibs on this. If he says he doesn’t want it, I’ll let you assist, but I’m not letting this turn into a Fiona Griffiths marathon. If Rogers says no, I’ll give you a couple of weeks with Burnett. Help him get organised. Then that’s it. You come back here and do your work.’