11
That evening, I’m with Buzz. His place, not mine. A two-bed flat down by Atlantic Wharf. It’s nice. A bit bachelor-ish. A bit IKEA-ish. But nice. Not as IKEA as my place, and at least Buzz has made an effort. There are pictures on the wall, cushions on the sofa, photos on the shelves, candles on the table.
Every time we have dinner together, I have this slightly spacy, buzzy feeling. Am I really here? Is this really me? A reasonably pretty girl, reasonably nicely dressed, sitting opposite this handsome and capable man, who moves around the room setting food on the table, dimming lights, lighting candles, arranging glasses.
I help, of course. I do what I’m meant to do, but I still feel like an actor from a TV movie, who opened the wrong door one day and stepped out into real life, and is here still, feeling the lights on her, the cameras, the invisibly watching eyes. My performance is probably good enough for a TV movie, but I’m always being caught out in little things. I remember to dim the lights, but forget to light the candles. Or I forget that there are napkins, real cloth ones, in a drawer, and don’t put them out. Or sit down at the table before we’re ready.
Buzz is never impatient with me. Never once, which I find a bit creepy. I’d be impatient with me all the time. Shift your bloody arse, Griffiths, this isn’t a restaurant, you know. That’s what I’d say.
And Buzz doesn’t. He is the world’s nicest man, maybe. I worry that he’s too naïve to have a girlfriend like me. Shouldn’t someone warn him? Shouldn’t I?
Anyway. We’re ready. We plate up. Buzz real-lifes himself over to the table with his plate, I TV-movie myself over. Then there’s always this moment. Buzz says something like ‘Well, Fi,’ looks into my eyes, and chinks glasses. I do likewise. I feel spacy when I do it, but I do it.
Then we eat.
I want to talk about the case, but Buzz has these rules, good ones, about not letting the office intrude too much on the relationship. So we talk a bit about other things. Buzz plays hockey, which I used to think was mostly a girl’s game, only he plays it aggressively and well, captaining the Cardiff third team, and leading his team out of whichever league they’re in, into whichever league they’ll be in next. Two of his players got stomach bugs after eating fast food from a van. He’s angry with them because of breaches in team discipline and is unsure how to replace them for the upcoming game.
I’m silently amazed that all this is taken so seriously. Amazed that there are even multiple leagues for this kind of thing. And for grown-ups too. Adult men with jobs. But I don’t say so. I try to follow the ins and outs as best I can. Say the right things. Evince the right emotions.
Then I say, ‘Mary Langton played hockey. She had a photo in her room.’
Buzz looks sharply at me, then laughs.
‘Okay, Fi, fair enough. Let’s talk about murder.’
I laugh at myself too, but relax into shoptalk.
I say, ‘Do you think it was a sex killing?’
‘Which one?’
‘Either.’
‘Mary Langton. Must be ninety-five percent likely.’
I know the logic. The logic says that if it wasn’t close family or a dodgy boyfriend – and Watkins would have caught any of those if they’d been the killer – then it had to be a sex-related thing. Partly because Langton was a twenty-something girl. Partly because of what she did – or had done – for a living. Put those two things together and the stats say it has to be a sex crime. Ninety-five percent probably undercooks it.
‘And Khalifi?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘I was with his students today.’ His boring, boring students. ‘No frisson from them. If he was some lecherous professor type, I reckon we’d have picked it up.’
‘Right, but sex doesn’t have to be like that, does it? I mean, maybe Khalifi’s a perfect professional at work. Then, maybe not even that often, once a month or whatever, he goes down to a club, has a few, loses control and gets involved in something that he can’t handle. Susan Konchesky has been going through his bank records and says that he’s been up for a party in his time. A bit of a bad boy.’
McKelvey hinted the same thing, more or less.
‘Okay,’ I nod. ‘Let’s assume that’s right. That doesn’t mean there’s any connection at all with Langton. She’s a twenty-something girl who died five years ago. He’s a late-thirties man who died on Friday.’
‘True, but . . .’ Again, Buzz doesn’t trace the logic all the way through, but he knows I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking that this is Cardiff. We just don’t get bodies chopped like stir-fry and scattered over town. Maybe that happens in Baltimore or Mexico City, but not here, not Cardiff. So if it does happen, it’s weird, a once-in-a-century thing. If it happens twice, and in the same part of town, there must be a connection. That connection will suggest an avenue for investigation. We find the connection and investigate hard. Get a break. Get our killer.
‘It could be copycatting. Could be. I mean, I know the timing’s not helpful.’
‘Not helpful? Honestly, what are the chances? You’re a murderer. You hear about the Langton find on the radio, so you think, “That sounds fun,” and, quick as anything, you grab a victim, bump him off, and scatter his body parts. You do all that the very same night that you hear the first radio or TV broadcast. Within hours, probably.’
‘Or, more likely, you’ve already got a victim and have been wondering what to do with him.’
‘Same thing, though. I mean, what are the chances? “Bloody hell, we’ve just killed someone, what shall we do with the body? I know what, let’s listen to the wireless, see if we can pick up some tips on Radio 4.” It’s hardly likely, is it?’
That’s true. But the coincidences cut both ways. The Langton body parts had been waiting seven years to be found. Even if both victims did have the same killer, how did that person know to kill Khalifi at essentially the same time we found the first piece of Mary Langton? Whichever way you look at it, something improbable happened.
I’d like to go on talking about it, but Buzz doesn’t. He’s good at switching off. Or rather, he knows that we don’t yet have enough information, so he’s not interested in speculating.
Not like me then.
Buzz starts asking me about my day. I tell him. About Jim Davis. The tedious students. My sense that the whole process was somehow over-managed.
‘Jim told me you went AWOL.’
‘Women’s troubles.’
‘Bullshit.’ A friendly ‘bullshit,’ that, not a mean one.
‘Okay, I went to interview the Head of Faculty.’
‘Really? You just–?’
‘I did it Cagney and Lacey style. Smashed the door down. Gun to his head. Now start talking, punk.’
‘What’s that accent meant to be? Was that Cagney or Lacey?’
‘He was quite boring too, though. He didn’t tell me anything.’
‘Not surprising. You sounded more Pakistani than American. Now start talking, punk.’ He does Cagney in an American-Welsh-Pakistani accent. Then says it a couple more times, perfecting the voice. Funny man.
I’m about to tell Buzz about the thing that happened on the stairs. The moment when my knee buckled. My panic about a possible pregnancy. Then I realise that I can’t tell him a thing. If I said I might be pregnant, he wouldn’t treat that as some awful drama. He’d be pleased. Calming. Treating it as an opportunity. I don’t think he’s about to propose exactly, but I realise that, if everything works out between us, Buzz sees marriage as being the ultimate destination. What this whole thing is about. The candlesticks. The glassware. The patience.
I feel suddenly panicked. More than I did on the stairs. Like TV Movie Girl has stumbled into some real-life scene which she has to play for real. She’s been doing dummy fights with dummy weapons and now all of a sudden she’s facing a real-life Johnny Depp with a real-life cutlass.
Sharp steel in front of her and the ocean pounding at her back.
‘Are you okay, lov
e?’
I nod.
Yes. Yes, I am okay. Nothing bad has happened. In fact, the very worst thing in my life at this moment is that a thirty-three-year-old police officer and former paratrooper, with an impeccable record in both services, happens to love me. And be committed to me. And be patient with me. That’s my worst thing.
My best thing too, of course. But definitely the scariest.
Buzz waits a bit, then says, in his concerned voice, ‘It’s not your stuff, is it?’
My stuff. The Cotard’s. My illness. And no, it isn’t that. It wasn’t that on the stairs either.
I mumble my way out of wherever it is we are, and the meal goes on, except that nothing’s quite how it was. We have sex quite often, pretty much every night that I stay over, and this was meant to be a staying-over night. But we can both feel that’s not where this evening is headed now. We finish eating. Find a little rhythm again. Have a nice cuddle on his sofa, but we both realise that I need some head space and so, before too long, I make my move and go.
Downstairs and outside.
A wet cold autumnal street. Today is the first of November. Is this the last month of autumn, or the first of winter? I don’t know, but I like it. I like any weather that feels hostile.
This part of town is tidy now. Modern, functional, well designed. And yet, in comparison with the old Tiger Bay, the place is void of life. Before the developers arrived, the area was a warren of rusting docks, narrow streets, and dark, secretive little pubs. The people were different too. A stew of foreign sailors, Welsh prostitutes, and Somali-Norwegian-Yemeni-Caribbean immigrants with their maze of accents and unknowable intrigues.
That’s where my Dad came from, back in the day. The place he grew up. The place that made him.
Because I can’t revisit that world, I just get in my car and start driving home. No music. I don’t even speed.
I’m almost there. About to turn off Eastern Avenue. Then just Pentwyn Road, Croescadarn, and home. Home to bed.
That’s the theory.
Only where I should turn off, I don’t. I keep going, up toward Saint Mellon’s. Not too sure where I’m going. Hoping to navigate from old memories, sepia-tinted prints up in the attic of my mind. I get lost in the cul-de-sacs, swear a bit, wonder if this is a good idea – then, suddenly, I’m there. My headlights shining on hooped iron railings. The lawn. The circular flower bed, rosebushes cropped against the weather.
The house is dark. I’m looking at the dashboard clock – 11 PM and too late to knock – when I see a light come on downstairs.
A sign.
I don’t believe in signs, but I do believe in light switches.
I go to the door and knock.
12
Emrys Thomas doesn’t seem to have aged. Or perhaps when I was thirteen he just struck me as so amazingly old, I can’t tell the difference now. Not that he is old, even. Sixty, sixty-five. White haired and courteous. A bit slow, but he was always slow.
I want to sit with him in his yellow-walled kitchen and ask some questions, but that’s all too fast for him. He has to take my coat, shake it out, hang it on a peg by the door, then he decides it won’t dry out there, so he moves some other coats so mine can stretch across two pegs for better drying.
‘There!’
I didn’t mind my coat wet.
We exchange comments about the weather. Then he sees me through to the kitchen. Then goes back to the living room to reset the heating controls. Then back to the kitchen and the kettle. Then biscuits, which I refuse but which he gets anyway. Then tea. I ask if he has herbal and, bless the man, he does, so I have herbal.
‘You’ve grown, haven’t you? A bit, anyway.’
‘Not much, Em. You should see the others, though. Kay’s as tall as you are, and Ant’s my height. She might even be taller now.’
Emrys did some babysitting for Mam and Dad at one point. Not babysitting exactly. It was more like he acted like an honorary uncle for a while. If Mam and Dad went off to London for something, they’d drive us round to Em’s for the evening. We’d sleep here even. Me in a little room next to Em’s. Ant and Kay in the twin beds down the hall. It was a safe place. Boring, but in a nice way. Em and Kay and I would sit on the living room floor and play Monopoly or Cluedo, while Ant fell asleep upstairs. Then Kay would get sleepy too and I’d have an hour or so reading or watching TV with Emrys, before I too headed up. They were nice times. Normal and quiet, in a way that life with my dad never was.
Then I got a little older, and my illness muddled everything, and we stopped coming. Still saw Em at family events and the like, but far less than we used to. No big bust-up or anything like that. Just life moving on.
‘I saw the light on,’ I explain for the second time.
‘Oh, that’s all right, dear. I don’t sleep as much as I used to.’
‘You know – well, you know that I’m a detective now.’
Stupid question. Of course he does. Emrys and my dad go way back. Right to the beginning. You couldn’t have that kind of background and not know when someone in your circle joined the CID.
Emrys waits.
I don’t know quite why I’m here, except that it seems to make sense.
‘There was this girl, Mary Langton. You’ll have heard about her. The girl whose body keeps popping up all over Cyncoed.’
Emrys nods, but says nothing.
‘She was a lap dancer. Pole dancer. According to our records, police records, she worked for the other two clubs in Cardiff, but never for Dad. Never for the Unicorn.’ The Unicorn: strictly speaking the Virgin & Unicorn, but I never call it that. Dad’s first club. Source of his first fortune, or his first legitimate one anyway.
‘I don’t know,’ murmured Emrys. ‘We must have checked at the time, but . . .’
‘Oh, I’m sure she was never on the payroll or we’d have known about it. But presumably these girls dance for cash. If you’d needed emergency cover one night and you found a girl willing to do it for tips alone, someone might have agreed to it. I’m not saying that’s how you normally operate, or would want to operate, just that if the need arose, the manager might have made his own decision.’
There’s no way Dad would ever admit anything to a police officer and nor would Emrys, because he’s stamped from the same mould, cut from the same cloth, hacked from the same block. Still, he tilts his head in a way that doesn’t outright deny what I just said.
‘And maybe if some of those managers were asked again about Langton, on the strict understanding that there’d be no comeback, they might remember things differently from the first time around. Especially if, let’s say, it wasn’t me asking, if there wasn’t any police interest at all, if it was just you asking people what they could remember.’
Emrys doesn’t say anything to that at all, but nor is he moving me onto neutral conversational territory.
‘And then there’s this other guy, Ali el-Khalifi. His is the other body that’s keeping us busy. My colleagues are very keen to connect him to Mary Langton. Trying to see if he knew her when she was still alive. And let’s just say that Mary Langton did dance a few nights at Dad’s club. And let’s just say that you’ve got credit card receipts or CCTV footage that places Khalifi in the club on one of those nights – well, wouldn’t that be interesting?’
Emrys has gone very still and now, as I finish, he shakes himself alert.
‘No CCTV,’ he says. ‘We wouldn’t have that. Not that far back.’
‘I haven’t come here. I haven’t asked you anything. I won’t push for any answer at all. I don’t need to know anything. Just if certain things turned out to be true, they might be interesting.’
Emrys nods. Doesn’t say yes. Doesn’t say no. Doesn’t acknowledge anything I’ve said. Which is fine. I let the conversation shift off to other places. It’s nice being with Emrys. I always liked him.
Then he yawns or I do, and he gets up, back to the living room to readjust the heating.
I follow.
I pick up the photo and stare at it closely. Because it’s the same kind of angle, the same kind of sunny street, it feels weird to me that the car ever existed without me in it.
‘When was this, Em?’
‘When your dad bought it. What, eighty-four, was it? Eighty-five?’
Before me, in other words. I’m looking at life before me. Or rather: I was alive, somewhere, with someone, doing something. I just don’t know where or who or what.
‘It must have been strange for you. Dad finding me like that.’
It’s the first time Emrys has allowed his expression to wobble at all. I guess he hasn’t prepared for this particular contingency. Hasn’t been instructed on how to react. But he rides the swell. ‘Strange, yes. But your dad – Kathleen and him, both of them – were delighted. I’ve never seen your pa so happy. Quite right too, eh? He did well, didn’t he?’
I shrug and put the photo back. ‘I’m pleased it was him. I’ve never wanted any other dad.’
‘You did well. You chose well.’
‘Yes.’ I look at the photo again. Interrogating it. ‘Yes.’
An empty car.
An absent girl.
A road filled with sunshine and secrets.
‘Em, can I borrow this? I’ll give it back.’
‘You want to borrow it? Of course you can.’
I thank him and hold on to the photo. On the shelves, below where the photo was sitting, there’s a pile of magazines, some videos, and a photo album in fake burgundy leather.
‘It’d be nice to spend some proper time together sometime, Em,’ I say. ‘A bit less last minute.’
He agrees. I think he’s pleased. We promise to make a date and mean it. He sees me to the door and tells me to drive safely.
Love Story, With Murders Page 6