The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths Read Free Page B

grooves left in the soft plaster. Jones focuses his torch beam on the area. It’s hard to be sure, but the grooves look like tooth marks.
    Jones doesn’t say anything direct, just, ‘We’ll know when we examine her mouth.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Those things.’ He nods at the exposed block wall. ‘They’re made of compacted coal ash. Waste materials from a blast furnace. God knows what kind of chemicals in there.’
    ‘Yes.’
    He shines the lamp on Morgan’s face. Her personality somehow shrinks away under the illumination. Simplifying, reducing. There is dust on her face. The dust might be a combination of plaster and coal ash or it might not. He moves his lamp away and there is something reverential in the way he does it.
    I have my documents. He has his camera.
    ‘I’ll get on then,’ he says.
    I don’t know how to answer that either, so I just say ‘Yes.’

4.
    Later that evening. We’re in an evil little pub near Blaengwynfi. A red carpet, darkly patterned to compete with the beer stains and the ground-in food. Stone benches beneath the windows and a smell of damp. There are four drinkers here apart from us, all men. They attack their pints the way infantrymen march: slowly, knowing that the road ahead is long.
    I’m here with Dunwoody, Jon Breakell and Buzz. Buzz – Detective Sergeant David Brydon, as far as my colleagues are concerned – isn’t on the inquiry team, but when he was done for the day he cadged a lift out here with a scientific officer from Cathays. He’ll drive back into town with me later.
    Brydon and I are a fairly public couple now, treated by a unit as our colleagues. We’re careful to be properly professional while at the office, but out here, at the end of the day, in a time which might be an after-hours social or might, if Dunwoody is feeling generous, count as formal overtime, those rules are more relaxed. Buzz and I sit side by side on one of the stone benches. He had his arm around me earlier, as a way of showing that he was relaxed. He’s removed it now, but I can still feel its phantom weight across my shoulders, the warmth of him down my side.
    The table is littered. Bank statements. Phone bills. Water bills. Electricity. Correspondence. Everyone leaves the paperwork to me. Fi Griffiths, the paperwork kid. I don’t mind, except when Dunwoody puts his beer down on one of the phone bills, creating a ring mark.
    ‘That’s Exhibit A under your beer glass,’ I say.
    He moves the paper, not the beer.
    With Hayley Morgan, it’s the same deal as it was with Adele Gibson. For eighteen months she received money from the superstore, but that money vanished again, almost immediately, to an account operated by T.M. Baron. For most of that period, the rest of Morgan’s finances were untouched. She had a tiny income, tiny expenses, but she got by. Lived as she chose. Then twelve weeks ago, her account was drained. Every penny that came in was instantly taken. At the end of every day, her account registered a balance of £0.00.
    Before long, her phone was cut off. Then her electricity.
    I think of Morgan licking the sugar out of an empty packet, in a house gone dark. Think of her looking at the packet of rat poison and thinking, ‘How much longer?’ Wondering how long it was before she put her head to the wall for the first time wanting to see if plaster dust and breeze block could fill her belly.
    ‘I don’t understand it, really, not in these small places,’ says Dunwoody. ‘Why wouldn’t she just walk down the hill and ask for food? Or call the police and report a fraud? Or anything.’
    Buzz says, ‘Yes, but loads of people die where you could ask the same thing. Last winter, how many thousand pensioners was it died from the cold? All they had to do was phone the gas company or speak to a neighbor, but instead they let themselves freeze. Every year, thousands of people.’
    ‘That’s true, but still. Why let yourself starve?’
    There are a few answers to that, or none.