Tangled Web (33 page)

The tag on the key ring said
13, Beach Road
. It suggested to Gordon a cottage in one of the narrow streets fronting the water but, as it turned out, Beach Road stretched a good bit inland and the houses on the outlying part of it were really quite large. Number thirteen turned out to be a sandstone, Victorian family house on two floors, possibly built for a retiring businessman in its day. It had clearly seen better times; its gardens were unkempt and its roof looked as if it could have done with some attention but all the same, Gordon was impressed with it. It had character.

At first, he walked past the house, feeling it possible that he might be being observed from the neighbouring house he’d just passed – pedestrians would not be too common on this road. On the way past number 13, he noted that there was a side door to the garden; this was on the blind side of the neighbouring house. He decided to try for entry there, hoping that one of the three keys on the ring might fit the back door, which again, would be sheltered from view.

He was lucky: the side door to the garden opened after a turn of the iron ring handle and a hefty push with his shoulder to clear beech leaves and other debris piled up behind it. He stood for a few moments after closing the door in the wall behind him and took in the broody silence of the place. He wasn’t sure if the unpleasant atmosphere he sensed was associated with knowing that Dawes had lived here or down to the house in its own right, but he certainly didn’t like it. He walked round the back and found that the long key on the ring fitted the kitchen door. It opened with a slight shudder due to an imperfect fit in the frame and Gordon stepped inside to a smell of dampness and old carpets.

He could see that Mrs Marsh had obviously not stayed to carry out her cleaning duties today. Breakfast dishes from the previous day still lay in the sink and a packet of cereal stood on the draining board, the back of which advertised subsidised air fares to Paris through the collection of tokens on packet lids. ‘Guess not, Ran,’ Gordon muttered, as he started a tour of the ground floor rooms, not entirely sure of what he was looking for but alert to everything.

TWENTY SIX

It was clear that Dawes had only made use of three rooms on the ground floor - the kitchen, a large bay-windowed room he’d used as a sitting room - evidenced by a portable television and various books and magazines left lying around, and a small study. There were three other rooms on this level, including a dining room, but the lack of any personal objects in them suggested that Dawes hadn’t used them. In fact, a general absence of personal possessions made Gordon wonder why Dawes had needed or wanted such a large house in the first place. It must have been like living in a Victorian museum. It even had a stuffed owl in a glass case sitting on top of an old upright piano.

One thing he realised as he neared the end of his tour was that he had seen no evidence of any recently stripped or re-varnished furniture in any of the rooms, but then he hadn’t expected to. Such an activity would have been out of character for the man, especially as he had so little in the way of worldly goods.

Gordon returned to the study and sat down behind the desk. The desk itself was an old oak twin-pedestal model with an apple tree carved on the front panel and with two deep, brass-handled drawers on either side of the knee hole. He pulled each out in turn, reluctant to touch anything unnecessarily, just as he had been with Thomas’s personal things at the hospital, but this time he reminded himself that it really didn’t matter. Dawes was dead.

He caught sight of a letter bearing a Barclays Bank logo and recalled what Mary had said about Dawes being a hired hand rather than the prime mover in the cloning affair. He pulled it out: it was a bank statement for February in the name of Ranulph Joseph Dawes and gave details of a cheque account with a current balance of £740.16. Gordon glanced down the list of entries for the past month and saw nothing untoward. The largest figure paid in over the period had been, £1511.34 – presumably Dawes’s last salary cheque, and the largest single outgoing had been £500, paid by standing order to the woman in Felinbach from whom he was renting the house. At least the rental for the place was reasonable, he thought.

Gordon returned the statement to the drawer but, again bearing in mind what Mary had suggested, he started looking for anything else connected with Dawes’ financial affairs. He found a current Visa bill and scanned through the entries. Nothing exciting, he concluded; petrol, off license, petrol, Interflora, petrol, a shop in Llandudno. The total came to £137.27. He was about to put the bill back in the drawer when the figures at the top of the page caught his attention. The previous balance had been £2725.14 but a credit payment for that amount had been received on the 17
of the month. Dawes had paid off the entire sum owing on his credit card last month. That was more interesting, he thought, and continued his search with renewed vigour. Dawes had clearly not paid the bill from funds in his cheque account – at least not the one he’d found details of, so maybe he had another account? Maybe he had several?

He carried out an exhaustive search of all the drawers but found nothing else to do with money save for an electricity bill and a plastic wallet containing mobile phone bills. Thinking back to the hiding place where he’d found the key to Thomas’s lab, Gordon took a look underneath the desktop but found he wasn’t going to be that lucky twice. But Dawes
had
lived here alone and was out at work all day; it was certainly conceivable that he might have felt the need to hide away secret or valuable items. It was just a question of where.

Gordon hadn’t seen any signs of a safe on his tour but it was possible that the safe itself might be hidden, not that finding one would do him much good if he didn’t have access to the key or combination. He supposed he could look behind the pictures on the walls, like they did in films, but first he thought he’d take a look in some of the more obvious and mundane hiding places – under things, on top of things, behind things.

The house had central heating and was equipped with old-fashioned iron radiators and large bore piping. Gordon looked behind the two radiators in the study, thinking that this might be a possible place to hide something. He found nothing but did notice that a piece of rag had been stuffed into what seemed to be a hole in the floor near the valve of the radiator below the window.

He felt a twinge of excitement as he bent down to pull out the rag. The hole was large enough to get his hand into so he reached down inside, spreading his fingers out to make contact with anything that might be lying there. He was disappointed when it really seemed to be just a hole, not a secret hiding place after all.

He withdrew his hand and crouched down, close to the floor to see if he could see into it by finding the right angle for the light. He was almost directly on top of it when he suddenly had to recoil as he breathed in a lungful of fumes that made him feel as if his chest was on fire. He rolled away, coughing and spluttering, his eyes watering as he stumbled his way to the back door and staggered outside to gulp in fresh air.

‘When he’d finished cursing and had calmed down sufficiently to think clearly again, he realised that he must have come across the fumes that had made Mrs Marsh so ill, the ones that had made him suspicious when he realised that the house had been rented by Dawes. Now he knew that had been right to doubt the story about furniture stripping. He recognised the smell, not least because he’d come across it in the recent past. It had been in the PM room at Ysbyty Gwynedd; he’d been watching French perform the PM examination on Anne-Marie Palmer. The smell was hydrochloric acid.

Gordon went back into the house and returned to Dawes’ study. He replaced the rag in the hole in the floor, keeping his face well away from it and then opened a window to help clear away the lingering smell – or at least replace it with that of moss and wet earth from the garden. He slumped back down in the desk chair for a few moments, thinking about what he had to do now.

He was quite sure about the smell. It was the acid that had been used on Anne-Marie’s body and it was coming from a cellar below. In the course of her cleaning, Blodwyn Marsh must have removed the rag from the hole in the floor and breathed in the fumes just as he had done. He would have to go down there and investigate.

The door to the cellar, as Gordon found after a brief search, was located in a small pantry leading off the kitchen and it was no great surprise to find it locked. Nor was it any great surprise to find that the key was nowhere to be seen. There was a hook in the wall by the door, but no key. The door itself did not seem all that substantial and moved quite a bit in the frame when Gordon pushed and pulled the handle so he reckoned that he had three choices. He could search for the key; he could stop now and suggest to the police that it might be a good idea to take a look at the house, or he could simply put his shoulder to the door. Choice number three won by a clear margin. The door parted company with its lock at the third attempt and swung back to judder off the stone cellar wall.

Gordon found an old-fashioned, brass light switch on the wall and clicked it on before pausing at the head of the stairs for a moment. He could smell acid in the air but it was nowhere near as strong as it had been by the hole in the floor. He went down slowly, giving his eyes time to get accustomed to the gloom, as there was only one light bulb to illuminate a pretty big cellar. Although it was unshaded, he doubted if it were more than forty watts.

The smell of dampness, evident upstairs, was much stronger down here and was mixed with the smell of old wood from the stairs and of course, acid fumes. He took out some paper tissues from his pocket and held them over his nose as a precaution as he made his way over to the area he reckoned would be directly below the radiator upstairs. It was dark there because it was a good way away from the light bulb but when he got closer, Gordon could see that there was a workbench there with two modern Anglepoise lamps sitting on it. He clicked them on to illuminate the rough bench like an island in the darkness.

At the side of the bench was a heavy porcelain sink mounted on a frame constructed of thick wooden stilts. It had a loose polystyrene cover on it but it was quite clear to Gordon that this was what held the acid. He took the tissues away from his face for a moment, gingerly testing the air at this location and found to his surprise that the fumes still weren’t as strong he’d anticipated. The lid, although light, seemed to contain them quite well. This posed the question of why they had been so strong upstairs.

Gordon was pondering this when the question answered itself, thanks to a gust of wind outside. There was a wall ventilator mounted in the stonework below the bath – a simple iron grid leading to the outside. Every so often the wind would gust through it, sending an up draught that caught the polystyrene lid and raised it a little. Fumes would escape and be wafted directly upwards to where the hole in the floor was located. It was a very localised concentration of the fumes. Both he and Blodwyn Marsh had just been unlucky to be near the hole when the wind had blown.

There was no evidence of any furniture-stripping activity in the cellar although Gordon could see that there were some tools hanging up above the bench. Had he misjudged Dawes after all, he wondered? After all, many professional men did find relaxation in carpentry. He re-directed the light from one of the Anglepoise lamps upwards to the rack but his blood ran cold as he saw that they were not woodworkers’ tools at all but pathology instruments comprising several knives and a bone saw. He noted with added horror that the saw bore evidence of tissue trapped in its teeth.

His mind rebelled against the images this invoked but it looked to him as if this was the place where the attempt had been made to dissolve Anne-Marie Palmer’s body in acid. Ranulph Dawes had been the guilty party. ‘Oh Christ,’ he muttered, as the horror of such a scene fired his imagination. He pressed the tissues to his mouth, this time more in an effort to head off the urge to vomit than shut out the fumes, as he continued to take in everything around him. Next to the acid bath a heavy apron hung on the wall, the one Dawes must have worn while he was doing the job, thought Gordon. ‘Bastard!’

He backed away from the area and sat down on the cellar steps for a moment, glancing upwards for the reassurance of daylight at the head of the stairs where he’d left the door open – maybe a subconscious admission of unease. There was a conflict going on inside his head. On the one hand, he was recoiling in horror at the images this place conjured up, on the other, his brain was telling him that there was something wrong with what he concluding.

He tried to home in on what it was until finally, he thought he could see it. Dawes was a professional scientist, not some bumbling criminal playing around with acids without knowing anything about their properties. If Dawes had really wanted to destroy Anne-Marie’s body by dissolving it in acid, he could have and
would
have done just that: he would not have failed and had to resort to something else. If it came to that, he would not have used hydrochloric acid in the first place; there were many more efficient acids available for the purpose … and what were the surgical instruments all about? No attempt had been made to cut Anne-Marie’s body into pieces.

There were just too many unanswered questions floating about for Gordon’s liking. The pieces seemed to fit but the final picture was flawed. Something was terribly wrong with his reading of the situation. He went back over to the bench and stood there, looking first at the instruments and then at the acid bath. Once again, he held the paper tissues over his nose and mouth as he slid back the lid, feeling apprehensive as he looked down into the gently fuming liquid. He blinked quickly to keep his eyes moist, knowing that he should be wearing goggles or a face visor but not having access to either.

He was relieved to see that the acid seemed clear enough and wondered if it had been changed after or during the ‘failed’ attempt. He was about to replace the lid when something lying in the foot of the bath caught his eye; it looked like a short white stick but instinctively, he knew it must be a bone. At first he thought that it must have been missed but then he had to wonder what bone it could possibly be. Anne-Marie’s body had suffered tissue damage from the acid but no skeletal destruction.