He played the beam of the torch over the bare feet of the corpse. He squinted thoughtfully for a moment. He rose, and saw a strange symbol on the wall opposite. He played the torch beam over it. A circle in black paint, a cross in the centre, a star in the middle of it all. His eyes narrowed. The circle turned out to be a snake or something, eating its own tail. Fucking barbarians, he thought again.
He edged around the room, avoiding any of the blood, careful not to touch anything, not to brush against the blood-spattered furniture and walls. His gloved hand pushed open one of the two bedroom doors revealing an unmade bed, a cheap, chipboard cabinet at its side, a chest of drawers — an ancient-looking thing, dark varnished wood and probably 1930s. He went over to the drawers first, going through them one by one. Cheap women’s clothing — T-shirts, underwear, a jersey. Precious little. Hardly enough to support a life. This place was temporary, he thought, a stopping-off place. To where, he wondered?
The cabinet yielded nothing except a plastic alarm clock which had stopped at ten thirty-four. He lifted the mattress. Nothing underneath. He ran a speculative hand down the mattress edge and at the foot of it discovered a slit, six inches long, not easily detectable unless you knew what you were looking for. His fingers probed inside and he took out an envelope. He shone the light on the contents: a number of documents, including a plastic driver’s licence bearing the name Daniel Burgess, and a birth certificate for the same guy. He didn’t recognise the face on the photo. He stuffed it all back inside the envelope and back into the mattress, shining the torch around the room. By the window was a pair of women’s shoes. He picked one of them up. But on the way out he was drawn to two stylish photographic prints on the wall, incongruous because they didn’t seem to fit with the other taste in decor, or distinct lack of it, and because they were the only two things adorning the walls anywhere in the flat. Black and white photos. Coastal landscapes.
In the corner of each, written in pencil on the white paper margin were limited edition numbers. And the name of the photographer: Gareth Davies.
He took one of them down from the wall. On the back was a London gallery labeclass="underline" Foster Specialist Galleries, Chelsea. They would have been expensive to buy. He made a mental note of the name and address and hung it back up.
A noise on the walkway outside caused him to stiffen, flick off the torch. He stood motionless in the dark, waiting for the voices to thin and disappear. Only then did he make his move. He paused by the hardly recognisable heap of human remains and placed the shoe he’d found in the other room near the dead woman’s foot.
As he suspected, the foot was too big for the shoe. One thing he was almost certain of now; the woman lying here on the floor wasn’t Beth Heaney.
16
She was cold. Shivering. Though the room was chilled, her tremors were because of the reason why she was here. What she had to do.
She found her mind shooting back to when he was little, her Billy, though in truth she hated it when everyone called him Billy. His name was William, she said, getting progressively more annoyed each time. How could they corrupt it so? It was William. In the end she gave up the fight. But to her he was always William, nothing else. Her little William.
How she’d longed — ached — for a baby. How she’d clutched him to her sweated breasts, a tiny, bloodied lump of a baby boy. But he was hers. She promised she would love him come what may. She was a mother, and he was her little boy. A bond that lasts forever.
‘This way, Mrs Krodde,’ said the man.
He had a comb-over. Youngish but with a comb-over. She thought such things were dead and gone these days. Men preferred to shave their heads entirely. It was the fashion.
There was a horrible smell in the room. A sharp, chemical smell that prickled the nostrils and made her feel nauseous.
He was lovely till he was twelve years old, she thought. His mother could do no wrong. He worshipped her. He loved that. My William, she’d tell him, and he’d respond by kissing her on the cheek. Then all that fizzled away when he became a teenager and it never came back. One moment a sweet puppy; the next a snarling hound you couldn’t put your hand near. She could just about put up with the cold shoulder from her husband — there’d been no fire in that particular oven for years — but not from her William. It cut her up.
So she ate away the misery but that just made her fat and feel even more miserable. Eventually she turned off from the hateful William he’d become, drowned her long tiresome hours in long bouts of mindless TV and chocolates. One life swapped for another. You are what you eat, people say. What did that make her?
The man with the terrible comb-over took her to a table. A long form laid upon it, covered with a sheet. There was another similar mound on another similar table. She wanted to turn and run away, but folded her arms against the cool atmosphere and sucked in a breath.
His fingers gripped the edge of the sheet. He observed her closely, a tiny smudge of empathy in his eyes. She glanced at him, nodded quickly.
He peeled back the sheet. It crackled as if it were new and straight out of the polythene wrapper.
The face was so white, she thought, like that of a statue she’d seen in a park.
‘Is this your son, Mrs Krodde?’
She wanted to say no, because her son, her little William, had died a long time ago. But she nodded again, putting a hand to her mouth. ‘Yes, that’s my son William,’ she said. ‘You say he was found in the canal?’
He said yes, and explained that he was found by two young people out jogging. ‘Drowned, by all accounts,’ he said. ‘No sign of any other injuries. He had his wallet on him, and his watch, so not a mugging gone wrong, one presumes. You say he’d been out drinking?’
‘Yes, he was depressed because he’d lost his job at the supermarket. I told him drinking wasn’t the answer.’
‘Probably had one too many, took a walk, went too close to the canal and fell in.’
‘He couldn’t swim. I couldn’t afford for him to have swimming lessons when he was little. Maybe if I had he’d be alive today.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said clinically. ‘Perhaps not. Depressed, you say?’
She said yes. ‘You think that’s a reason? You think he drowned himself?’ The thought cut her up. She knew all about depression. She was drowning in chocolate.
‘Hard to say, but it could be a contributory factor.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She allowed herself to be led meekly to the door. ‘Do you think if I could have afforded swimming lessons for him, like other mothers did, he would be alive today?’
‘Difficult to say, Mrs Krodde. Difficult to say.’
17
A Prickling of Fear
December 2011
Christmas was fast approaching, a week or so away. The snow came down hard and relentless. But that was what winter could be like in Wales. Gareth Davies wasn’t complaining; it was part of the attraction, being cut off, isolated from everyone and everything. Isolation did have its drawbacks, namely the weather; he had risked the elements and driven out in his wheezy old Land Rover to stock up on exorbitantly expensive provisions from the Cavendish sisters’ store during one of the few windows of opportunity the weather presented. It had been a nightmare getting out, driving down the lanes and small single-track road; the council’s gritting trucks only concentrated on the major routes so when the blizzards came they experienced a total wipeout, with the small side road and neighbouring fields becoming one under the heavy drifts of snow.
He had loaded his carrier bags into the back of the Land Rover and was making his careful way back. Night had fallen and the snow came down again in Arctic proportions. He cursed. He didn’t want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere. The final mile stretch down to his cottage was on quite a steep incline, the road giving way to a muddy track, heavily rutted and frozen solid. It was covered in a fresh blanket of fine snow. The old headlights didn’t do much to light up the track, and the windscreen wipers came from an era when slow and erratic represented British quality. He was concentrating hard, struggling to keep to the track and avoid letting the vehicle slide into one of the deep, snow-filled ditches.