Tangled Web

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.

Gordon looked to both sides of the bath and underneath and finally found what he was looking for, lying on the frame cross members, a pair of long- handled tongs. His proximity to the uncovered bath was exposing him to too much in the way of fumes from the acid. He backed off for a few moments to take in a few deep breaths before returning to his task.

Holding the tissues to his face with one hand while fishing with the tongs held in the other proved successful, but only after half a dozen frustrating attempts with watering eyes and lungs bursting through holding his breath as long as possible. He finally extracted the bone to bring it over to a conventional sink, mounted on the wall to his right, to rinse away the acid and take it in his hand. He decided that he would examine it upstairs in daylight, maybe even outside in the garden: he felt the desperate need for fresh air and for more than one reason.

As he stood outside the kitchen door, running his fingers lightly along the smooth white bone he found no difficulty at all in identifying it at all but this in itself, posed a new problem and one that utterly confused him. What he was holding in his hands was a leg bone — the tibia of a small child. The trouble was it was a bone that Anne-Marie Palmer did not have; it could not possibly have come from her.

Gordon started to walk round the garden, his head bowed as he tried to think this latest twist through. He had the distinct feeling that he was playing three-dimensional chess with God but yet... he felt excited not dejected. He knew he was getting closer to the truth. He had the right pieces: they were just being played in the wrong order. If the child in the acid bath had had leg bones, then the child was not Anne-Marie Palmer... Oh, sweet Jesus Christ! It was Megan Griffiths!

It suddenly became clear to him what had happened. It had been Megan in the bath, not Anne-Marie. Megan’s dead body had been altered to make it look as if she was Anne-Marie Palmer! Her legs had been removed with the saw on the wall and then tissue damage inflicted, particularly on her lower extremities with acid in order to disguise the recent surgery. The whole exercise had been undertaken to create a corpse that would be accepted as that of Anne-Marie Palmer.

The why? was now obvious too. ‘Finding’ Anne-Marie’s body would stop people looking for her! He’d already considered the difficulties involved in stealing a cloned child from doting ‘parents’. Kidnapping had appeared to be a major stumbling block and one that he had not managed to see a way around. Dawes, or whoever he’d been in league with, had. Anne-Marie Palmer had been abducted but in order to stop a police hunt for the kidnapped child, the body of an already dead child had been made to look like her and then buried in the Palmers’ garden. The police, seeing no conceivable motive for the kidnap of a handicapped child, had followed their instincts, as the kidnappers must have reckoned they would, and this had led them to suspect the parents, unable to cope with their badly deformed child, had murdered her. They had found what they expected to find when they dug up the Palmers’ garden — a small legless corpse. Case closed. The child’s father even confessed to the crime. What a bonus that must have been, thought Gordon. But either way, it meant no more police hunt for Anne-Marie. The cloners had got clean away with their child.

In the same way that pain can be described as ‘exquisite’ Gordon found an almost mesmerising beauty about the whole horrific scheme. Whoever had dreamed up the scam was both brilliant and evil in equal measure. As everything started to fit, he wondered if thought had even been given to the type of acid used on the child’s body. Had they deliberately chosen hydrochloric over a more appropriate one because they knew that John Palmer would have had access to hydrochloric in his school science lab and the police would latch on to that fact?

Gordon returned to the cellar and took a last look around. The tissue from the teeth of the saw would be subjected to forensic study and there was no doubt in his mind as to what the outcome would be. The tissue would match that of the body found in the Palmers’ garden but neither would match the DNA profile of the Palmers — not because she wasn’t their biological child, but because she wasn’t even Anne-Marie!

Carwyn Thomas must have worked this out for himself when Fairbrother had given him his DNA fingerprinting results. The fact that he’d blurted out Megan Griffiths’ name at the time suggested that he’d made the connection and realised the motive for the theft of the cot death baby’s body.

Gordon sat down again behind Dawes’ desk to figure out where all this was leading him. There were two very important questions he still had to answer. Who had been cloned to produce Anne-Marie Palmer? And perhaps, most important of all, why? He was wrestling with this when he suddenly realised with a jolt that there was more to this than an intellectual puzzle. There was something that had to be considered urgently. Anne-Marie Palmer could still be alive!