Love Story, With Murders (25 page)

Nothing feels real.

I slam the boot down and get behind the wheel. Switch the engine on.

My exhaust plumes briefly in the air behind me. Ahead of me, a row of leafless trees and the slate water of Atlantic Wharf. A man dressed in a dark coat worn over a suit comes out of Celerity
Drive, looks at me, gets into a Volvo saloon and drives off. I wonder if his boot is full of giant red snow things.

Just for a moment, I have no idea why I am here, where I am going, or who I am.

It’s not a disconcerting failure, like that night in the Unicorn. It’s more a temporary lapse. Like an elderly lady mislaying her glasses or a garage mechanic groping for a wrench.
And sure
enough, I find the missing knowledge before much time goes by. I’m Fiona Griffiths. I’m driving up into the mountains to investigate murder. My boyfriend is Buzz. Detective
Sergeant David ‘Buzz’ Brydon, no less. I am working on a murder investigation run by DI Rhiannon Watkins and she has authorised this trip.

I lay these pieces of knowledge in front of me. Some of them make sense, others
don’t. I understand about driving up into the mountains. I understand about the murder, the investigation. I
can feel Khalifi’s chuckling interest in my labours, Mortimer’s sad despair. I find it harder to connect with Buzz, or even with myself if it comes to that, but those things come and go
at the best of times. Not something to worry about. I put the clutch in, drop the car into gear, and
glide out of the car park.

The journey out of Cardiff is fine. No snow. No ice. No multi-vehicle pileups or lines of shivering refugees reenacting the retreat from Moscow. The radio reports heavy snow in Scotland,
Northern Ireland, North Wales, and Pembrokeshire. Eight inches of snow over the Pennines. But I don’t live in those places. I’m not going to them.

I take the motorway to Newport,
then turn off to Cwmbran and Pontypool. Scars of coal mining above me. Pit explosions and dead miners.

Town built on corpses.

Then through the mining belt to Abergavenny and the mountains beyond. Mortimer’s cottage is in the Llanthony Valley, the most easterly of the valleys that divide the Black Mountains. Not
far past Abergavenny, I make the turn left for Llanthony.

A different
world.

The valley narrows as it climbs. Pasture and snippets of woodland on the valley floor. Green fields pasted as high up the mountainsides as technology and climate can take them. The flanks of the
hillside are grizzled with the rust-brown of bracken, humped with gorse and hawthorn, slashed with the rocky-white of mountain streams. There’s not much on these roads. A tractor carrying
a
roll of hay. An agricultural four-by-four with a couple of sheepdogs panting in the back. An old Rover 25 driving twenty miles an hour.

Just for once, the pace suits me. I’m not in a rush. I can feel Khalifi and Mortimer, of course, but I think about Buzz too. Why, of all the girls in the world, should he choose me? Is he
simply making a mistake or does he see things that have eluded
me? Human relationships aren’t my strong point, so I genuinely don’t know the answer to that. And that warmth I felt
toward him the other night is here now. All that nonsense in the boot of my car was placed there by hands of love. I feel grateful and humble and loving all at once.

I think this is how other people feel. How they feel if they’re lucky enough.

At Capel-y-ffin, the way
divides. The main route heads up to the valley head and the pass over the mountains to Hay. My fork cuts to the other side of the stream and runs up a side valley to a
dead end. Both roads are real Welsh mountain roads. A car’s breadth wide, no more. Hedges almost brushing you on both sides. If you meet a vehicle, one of you has to reverse back to the mouth
of a gate or a field turning. And when
the fields end, the transition to open moorland is abrupt. Exposed and dangerous.

Mortimer’s cottage, Pen-y-Cwm, is one of a straggle of houses linked by the dead-end road. Once, I suppose, each house would have been its own tiny farm. A few bony acres yielding a scant
living in good times, a starvation diet in times of hardship. These days, the fields are probably all operated from one
big mechanised hub farther down the valley. These houses, including
Mortimer’s, are relics of that earlier age. Adapted now for holiday rentals in the summer. Vacation cottages. Dinosaurs.

I drive slowly, searching for the right place. I would ask someone, but there’s no one to ask. On the far side of the valley, I can see a farmer on one of those four-wheel-drive mud
buggies rounding
up sheep, but he’s three miles away through the crystal air.

I get all the way to the farmstead at the end of the road. Talgarreg. There are sheep shuffling in a barn and a dog barking somewhere inside, but no one to ask the way. I turn back down the
valley and this time see the entrance to an unpaved track, with a carved wooden board marked P
EN
-
Y
-C
WM
. My car is a city car,
poor dear.
A coupé cabriolet. I point its wheels at the alarming slope above us and cautiously, in low gear, start to floor the accelerator. The surface is atrocious. Grey aggregate laid
over rock. Streams have formed in the path of the tyre tracks, washing away any smaller grit and leaving the occasional violent hole in the path. The car’s bottom hits rock deafeningly once
and there are a couple of other
scrapes, but we get to the top in one piece.

Pen-y-Cwm
. In English: the end of the valley.

Up here, you can see why it was named this way. The land flows away from the house in one long liquid scoop. It’s closer to the buzzards above than the cluster of houses down valley in
Capel-y-ffin. Cardiff feels utterly remote. A myth. A rumour once heard, never believed.

Cardiff, Swansea,
Newport, Barry.

Mortimer’s house is built of local stone, hard and grey. No whitewash. No snuggling into the mountainside behind. There is a little stand of rowans, mountain ash, but nothing larger.
Nothing offering shelter. A stream pours off the hill behind the house. The crash of water onto rock.

No lights on, no car outside.

I was expecting neither. When Konchesky and I discussed
this visit with Watkins, the main question was whether to arrive with a brace of uniforms and a forensics specialist, just in case. We all
agreed that that didn’t make sense. Not yet anyway. We don’t actually know that there’s anything here. Susan Konchesky was meant to have come with me today, but she never really
wanted to, and found an excuse to cry off. Watkins let me come on my own,
because there wasn’t much reason not to. My job is simply to ascertain if the site holds any secrets, if it calls for
a major deployment of resources. It’s the sort of task that will take forty minutes, if that.

I try the door to see if it’s unlocked. It isn’t. Then turn, so I’m standing with my back to the grey house, looking out at the fall of the hill. Ravens bicker in the valley.
The
distant farmer has his sheep gathered in a flock and is headed down. I look out for the black-and-white dots that must surely be there too, and finally see them. Sheepdogs loping in bracken. A
friendly sight.

The rowans cluster around a low outbuilding. A pigsty once? A small barn? The key is there, according to Sophie Hinton, so I get the torch from my car and peer around inside. The place
contains
some gardening tools. A bit of kidstuff: toboggans, a paddling pool, the limbs of a plastic climbing frame. I heave junk around looking for the key, without joy, then turn back to the doorway. The
wall is rough stone, in poor repair, but there’s one stone that looks looser than the rest. Looser and more polished. When I put my hand to it, it slides out easily. Something glimmers in
the
shadows. I reach in and take the key out.

The front door unlocks easily. I wasn’t certain that there’d be electricity up here, but there is. The lights flick on. The place is as cold as a tomb. The main heating is provided
by night storage heaters – which means that by this time tomorrow, the house might be getting warm – but in the meantime, I find an oil-filled electric radiator
and turn it on,
thermostat turned up to maximum. For good measure, I go into the kitchen and turn the electric stove on as well. Already I’m regretting not having bought that coat.

Silly girl, sensible Buzz.

But a bit of cold won’t kill anyone. I start to explore.

The living room has a mustard-coloured carpet laid over old stone flags. A black wood-burning stove, two red sofas, and
a non-matching armchair. Some cheap pine bookshelves filled with books.
Windfall from past bestseller lists. Some tatty boxed board games. On a windowsill facing down the mountain, a pair of binoculars and a bird-watching guide.

The kitchen is similar. China and glasses, plentiful but cheap. Some plastic picnicware. A mismatched assortment of pots and pans, but enough to cook with. The cupboards
have some basics –
salt, sugar, oil, some candles, a bag of tea, a scrunched-up packet holding some penne pasta, a bottle of malt vinegar – but nothing more.

A downstairs toilet smelling of some chemical pine freshener. A bootroom for coats and spare wood.

The vibe is comfortable enough, but low budget. Sophie Hinton’s worst nightmare.

I mess around for just long enough to get used
to the space, but it’s not downstairs where any secrets will lie.

I head upstairs, where everything is carpeted and feels newer. Three bedrooms – bland, neutral – and a tiny bathroom tiled in blue and white. The bathroom has frosted windows, though
the nearest neighbours would need a telescope to see anything. That plus a change in the curvature of the earth, because as far as I’ve been
able to tell, the house is out of sight of
everything else. You don’t get much farther from people than this.

The room I’m after, however, is none of these. The ‘study’ that Sophie Hinton referred to is really little more than an alcove on the landing. A small desk. A laptop. Lamp.
Books. Files. There’s a little bit of corkboard behind the desk pinned with photos of military hardware.
Boys and their toys. Soldier porn. Buzz doesn’t keep anything like that. He
doesn’t even like most action movies, probably because he once served himself. Served and saw action. If you’ve had the reality, I guess you don’t need the fantasy.

I turn the light on, get the laptop fired up.

Back in Cardiff, Watkins has a team exploring the data dump from Barry Precision. She’s confident,
I think, that it holds some answers, but so far as I know, nothing suspicious has yet
been found. I wonder if I should be there instead of here. But I’m pleased I’m not.

Because if anything it’s colder up here than downstairs, I rummage round in the bedrooms until I find a huge Aran wool jumper and put it on. It’s a man’s jumper, XL, and it
hangs around me in swags, as though a hot-air
balloon has collapsed and died on me. I’m as cold as I was before. I’ve got hiking boots in the car instead of my stupid office boots, but
can’t quite face going to get them.

The laptop is ready for action and I sit in front of it, expecting a torrent of secrets to come pouring forth.

The first things I try yield nothing, however. There’s no Internet connection up here. Mortimer could
have brought a mobile broadband dongle with him, perhaps, but the only web browser I
can find is years out of date and the pages stored in History don’t seem of any special interest. In any case, my phone doesn’t get a signal up here. Perhaps other networks have
coverage, but likely not. It’s not the kind of territory that gets phone executives hot and sticky with excitement.

So next,
I try any documents stored on the hard drive. There aren’t many. Some letters. What look like some school projects. Ayla and Theo are too young to have authored these, but their
cousins, Mark’s nieces and nephews, are presumably the right age to have compiled ‘reports’ on the Tudors, fossils, and the Battle of Britain. A giant history sandwich.

More interesting, in theory, are some technical
documents, but I don’t understand the language involved. The document headers are effectively in code. Not secret-agent-speak, just a
combination of engineering-speak and office acronyms. The documents are headed things like ‘MC Shpt 110305.’ They contain mostly compilations of technical specifications. Stuff that
seems broadly similar to the data I abstracted from Barry Precision. Same sub
headings, same layout. I should really have brought that other data here, so I could compare, but I think I was
expecting something simple, not some arcane technical conundrum.

I’m not immediately sure what to do, so go downstairs and fill the kettle. Turn it on. Make tea. There’s nothing herbal here, so I make do with a regular tea bag. No milk either, so
just brew a pint of hot, black
tea in a huge pottery mug. Contrary to my usual habit, I add sugar, to take away the taste of the metallic mountain water, the strongly tannined tea. It tastes like
sweetened bog water, but is nevertheless somehow welcome. A comfort against the cold.

And as I leave the kitchen, for the stairs that rise directly from the living room, I notice what must have been obvious from the kitchen window.
It’s snowing. Big heavy flakes. Falling
with a calm insistence, a sense of purpose

Against the grey sky above, the flakes look black. Like imperfectly burned coal ash settling back over a mining village. But the ground below gives the lie to that. It’s already covered.
Sheeted in white while I was at the alcove upstairs. Every field, every hedge, every stroke and line of moor and mountain.
The rowans stand black-fingered against the white. Farther down the hill,
little stands of oak and hawthorn seem to have contracted into two dimensions. Given up colour and volume for the purity of shape. The naked essence of tree.

I stand at the window for a while, watching.

Because I am who I am – and because I am
where
I am – I can’t help but feel the terrible peacefulness of death.
It’s as though the world has given up on life. As
though the sky is shredding itself and scattering its remains. One giant burial, robed in white.