Theo is watching me now, or half-watching me anyway. I’m neck-and-neck with the cartoon.
‘That’s why I don’t have a police car either. Detectives aren’t usually allowed them.’
‘Do you have a gun?’
Theo: the boy’s question.
I say, ‘No, they don’t let us have guns,’ but I show him my warrant card, and he likes that.
‘My daddy went to prison.’
Theo again.
Ayla’s eyes travel to a photo on the windowsill. Of Mark Mortimer, with his family. I haven’t noticed any other photos of him anywhere.
I mute the TV and, acknowledging Ayla’s look, say, ‘That’s your daddy there, is it? He looks nice.’ I don’t know what to say.
Ayla nods.
I get the photo and sit on the floor with my back against the sofa. The kids sit either side of me. Ayla quite close, Theo still keeping his distance.
I bet Mark Mortimer doesn’t get much airtime in this house. Not from Sophie Hinton, not from anyone else either.
‘Tell me about your daddy,’ I say. ‘Anything you remember.’
They don’t say much at first, but then Ayla volunteers something – ‘He was really tall’ – and then Theo does, and then both kids are talking. They’re not crying exactly, but tears aren’t far away.
I don’t say much. Just let them keep talking. This isn’t me in police mode – the children couldn’t possibly have any useful evidence – but it seems fair to let them remember their father, in their way, at their pace. Whatever Mortimer did or didn’t do, his children don’t deserve to have him airbrushed from their lives.
Then Theo says, ‘Why did he go to prison?’
Ayla, who had been saying something, shuts up completely.
‘If you’re in the police,’ adds Theo, pushing.
‘I don’t know,’ I whisper. ‘I know what they say he did, but I don’t really know. The real reason, I mean.’
‘Was it a mistake?’
A very good question, as a matter of fact. Was it a mistake? Nothing about Mortimer shouts drug smuggler – or at least, nothing beyond a steel tube packed full of cocaine.
‘Maybe,’ I tell Theo. ‘I don’t know. We’re trying to find out.’
‘Is that why you’re here?’
‘Sort of. Yes.’
And, unexpectedly, what I say feels like the truth. Two other corpses brought me here, but Mortimer’s corpse matters too. His children do. I can feel their questions plucking at me. Demanding something. Theo’s a good interrogator, actually. He’s done what we’re trained to do: extract truths and insights that the subject had no intention of disclosing.
To myself as much as them, I repeat, ‘We’re trying to find out.’
Time goes by.
The kids switch their attention to other things with the alarming ease of the very young. The TV comes back on. Car chases and shouting.
No sign of Sophie Hinton or of her mum. I don’t care, but I’ve been here twenty minutes, not the promised five.
After more time passes, we hear a car stopping outside: Hinton’s mother. I go to meet her. Explain who I am and offer to see myself out. She doesn’t seem all that amazed to find a stranger looking after her daughter’s children.
I say, ‘They seem lovely. Must be so hard for them after losing their father.’
Hinton’s mother, Geraldine, tuts at that. Scowls. Another airbrusher.
I bend down to the kids. ‘I’ll do my best. To find out if it was a mistake.’
Theo nods, as though he’s swearing some sacred oath. Ayla is wearing a little bracelet: seashells on a piece of elastic. She takes it off and holds it out to me. ‘For you.’
I put it on. ‘Thank you, Ayla. Thank you, sweetheart.’
I leave. Their grandmother shuffles them inside. Geraldine likes me almost as much as her daughter did.
I walk over to my car, but don’t get in right away. I go to the boot and root round in the tyre irons until I find a joint and a lighter. I light up. Smoking outside the prison would have been against my rules, because it would have been a bad response to a temporary emergency. This smoke isn’t like that. It’s not breaking my rules.
I’m about halfway done when Sophie Hinton’s red Mini sweeps down the cul-de-sac. Stops. She gets out, with something liquid in her eyes. I wonder if whatever she’s been out doing involved a glass or two of white wine. I’m guessing yes.
‘You’re still here.’
‘Just leaving. The kids are terrific. Your mam’s in with them now.’
She nods brusquely.
‘Sophie, that office party where you met Khalifi, who threw it? Mark’s firm? The university? Or what?’
‘I don’t know. Some engineering thing. Circle of Welsh Engineers or something.’
‘Okay. And if you remember anything else, you have my number.’
Hinton nods, heads inside.
I’ve got half my joint left, but don’t want it now. Take one more puff, then drop the end down a storm drain.
Conflict doesn’t bother me, but what I’ve had from Sophie Hinton wasn’t conflict. Was she pissed off with me because she didn’t want to be reminded of her troublesome former husband? Pissed off because she had been threatened and didn’t want to risk any police involvement? Pissed off because she resented the police for jailing her husband? Or was she just a spoiled pretty-girl whose life wasn’t running the way she’d intended and who was perfectly ready to let her bad mood spill out on anyone who got in its way?
Who knows? Not me.
I swing my car door open. Sophie Hinton glowers from the kitchen window. Skinny jeans and a biker jacket. I try to imagine myself in those clothes. Long-haired and petulant. Different look, different me.
I wave at her, then head for the motorway, head for home. Keep my shell bracelet on all the way. The journey time is eighty-three minutes.
16
The next few days, I mix it up. Do the work that Watkins and pink-faced Dunwoody want me to do. Do some more interesting things too.
So, I come in on time. Make stupid calls. Write stupid lists. Check bits of paper. Write up notes. Listen to briefings: the Stirfry morning show. For the first time since the start, Supterintendent. Kirby misses two briefings in a row. The incident room board listing our people of interest now shows a tally of 221. That’s not a sign of progress, but one of failure.
I don’t pick fights with Jim Davis or try to needle Rhiannon Watkins. Dunwoody notices my little worker-bee productivity and is pleased with me, albeit in a faintly patronising way. No one gives me a bollocking for anything. Susan Konchesky’s work on Khalifi’s bank records places him at two Cardiff lap-dancing clubs, Dad’s and one other. Trouble is, Langton apparently never worked at Dad’s club and the dates of Khalifi’s visits to the other club all fell after Langton’s disappearance. A tantalising connection: almost-but-not-quite.
And the more interesting stuff – well, that part I do the way I like it. Haunt my targets. Make checks on my six names: Ivor Harris, Galton Evans, Trevor Yergin. Huw Allsop. Ben Rossiter. David Marr-Phillips.
I add another one, Idris Prothero, to the list too. Bump him up from the B-team. He and Ivor Harris both have their thumbprints somewhere near this case.
Ivor Harris has had quite a lot to do with the university, including the engineering faculty, but you wouldn’t expect anything less from a busy local MP. Not much of a thumbprint, in all honesty.
Idris Prothero is a wee bit more interesting. He was a business associate of Rattigan’s more than a friend, which is why he was on my B-team, not my A-team. But Prothero has a variety of venture-capital-type investments in local businesses, including the outright ownership of the late Mark Mortimer’s firm, Barry Precision. I can’t really see how a financial investment in a firm that once employed a not-very-competent drug smuggler ties Prothero into anything much – and still less does it suggest that Prothero was part of Rattigan’s fuck-an-Albanian circle of buddies. But if you don’t se
ek, you don’t find. So I seek.
The same logic also impels me to scratch away at that Mark Mortimer itch. I would prefer to do that solo as well, but I’ve already had one team-play bollocking from Watkins and I can’t risk another one, not quite so soon anyway. So I run things past her. Give her notes on my interview with Hinton. Tell her, in so many words, that there was something strange in the widow’s manner. A strangeness that, to a copper, suggests something being withheld.
Watkins doesn’t like my theory of a possible Mortimer–Khalifi connection, but she can’t quite ignore it either. It’s not as though she has an obviously superior alternative. So she allows me to investigate, but I’m on a short leash. Every call, every interview, I have to run by her first. I hate the supervision, but I welcome the chance to dig.
I call Mortimer’s ex-colleagues. University connections. His brother and sister. I don’t get anything tangible, but I also don’t get the sense I’m looking at a drug dealer. He just doesn’t have that smell about him. He seems to have been a scrupulous employee, never late, seldom absent. Then too there was that ‘Saint Mark’ comment of Sophie Hinton’s. I’ve got nothing that would count for anything in court. Nothing even to justify a shift in investigative resources. But I feel strongly that something is not quite right in the picture we’ve been presented with.
Watkins only half agrees with me, but half is enough for now. The growing feeling is that our inquiry is getting nowhere. We don’t have a single useful lead on Mary Langton. Khalifi’s another dead end. We’ve found out about a few sexual liaisons – the man was no hermit – but we’ve found nothing to connect with Langton, nothing to suggest a motive for his murder. The Mortimer–Khalifi link and Sophie Hinton’s odd evasion is as good as anything else we have. So Watkins lets me run with it.
I have nothing tangible to show for my efforts yet, but some flowers bloom slowly. I once watched a moody cow, a big Hereford heifer, start to lean against a post-and-rail fence on my aunt Gwyn’s farm. The heifer pushed, the fence resisted: nothing. But the cow didn’t give up. She just kept at it. Shifting her position from time to time, but all the time leaning her nine-hundred-pound weight hard against the upper rail. And in the end, the rail broke. Just snapped into two jagged timber lances. The cow studied her work, then backed away peacefully, happy to start munching again. But it taught me a lesson, that. Apply pressure, keep going and things can snap even when they seem to be at their most static. If there’s a line of weakness, sooner or later something will fracture.
And it does.
The engineering group at whose party Sophie Hinton once met Khalifi is called, rather pretentiously, the Welsh Circle of Engineering Excellence. Its chairman is a retired engineer, Arwel Adams. I call him up. He agrees to chat with me and says, if I’m in the area, I’d be welcome to pop by. He’s in Penarth, just down the coast from Cardiff proper. I hesitate briefly – I told Watkins I would call Adams, not visit him – but even Watkins surely couldn’t care if I do a little more than promised. And in any case, it’s getting towards the end of the day. I’ve had enough of desks and offices and overhead lamps. I tell Adams I’m on my way.
His house, when I get there, turns out to be right by the shore, overlooking the sea. Picture windows that frame a strip of grass, a band of scrub, then a line of grey sea and a mountainscape of grey cloud.
He offers me tea. I refuse, but add, ‘What is it like all day, looking out at this?’
He says the sort of thing that people say. The light. The movement. The ceaseless change. But I think that’s wrong. Isn’t it the other way around? That it never changes. That you are staring at a vision of eternity, sometimes sunlit, sometimes furious, but always there. Gazing at you gazing at it.
I say something along those lines and Adams laughs. ‘You could be right.’ He doesn’t put the lights on, so we’re just there watching the light fail over water. There will be rain before long.
I say why I’ve come. Routine inquiry, pursuant to the murder of Ali el-Khalifi. Blah blah. Start asking questions.
Adams is helpful, a good witness. He’s good on names and dates. Swift recall, documentary records, precise answers.
‘Ali and Mark certainly knew each other. They were both Circle regulars. I’ve often seen them chatting together. I got the impression they knew each other outside these meetings too.’
‘How far did their connection go back?’
Adams consults his attendance records. He has to put the lights on for this, and the sea beyond the windows recedes into the darkness. ‘I’ve only got records for the last four years,’ he says, ‘but they were both booked to attend a meet in July 2006. If it helps, I could talk to my predecessor and go further back.’
I shake my head at that. Instead, I poke away at the nature of their connection. ‘What were their shared interests? What did they talk about?’
‘I’m not sure. Ali’s passion was industrial plastics, which Mark wouldn’t have had much to do with. But Ali was a university man, of course. He needed to keep abreast of the literature. Barry Precision is all about highly engineered steels. If you needed a specific part with some demanding specifications – shock resistance, heat resistance, very narrow design tolerances, that kind of thing – then Mark’s outfit would take care of that. Ali didn’t have a research interest in that kind of area, but he was still very well versed in it. And of course Ali was amazingly well connected. If you had a problem that Ali couldn’t solve, he’d know someone who could. In a way, that was his real expertise. Ali knew everyone.’
‘What about geography?’ I ask.
I explain what I mean. One of the things that has niggled at me is that Khalifi was of Moroccan extraction. Mortimer tried to bring in his drugs via southern Spain, just north of Gibraltar. Now, in itself, there’s nothing odd about Spain as an import route. Most cocaine enters the UK via Spain or Holland. Spain because of its Latin American connections, Holland because of Rotterdam’s importance as a logistics hub. On the other hand, it’s possible in this instance that there’s more to Mortimer’s import route than mere probabilities. Khalifi still had family in Morocco and the Spanish supplier whose steel tubing Mortimer tried to use did business all over North Africa. It’s one of those tantalising almost-connections which might nor might not prove significant.
Adams tries to help with that query, but can’t. He tells me that Khalifi still kept current with things in North Africa – we’ve heard the same from other sources and his bank records show that he’s travelled as far afield as Dubai and Jordan – but he can’t say whether Mortimer had any professional interest in the area.
We talk a bit longer. Adams was amazed that Mortimer turned out to have an involvement with drugs. He seemed somewhat less amazed that someone chose to chop Khalifi into several dozen pieces. No tangible suspicion or anything like that, just less amazement. No knowledge whatsoever of Mary Langton.
I leave Adams’s house unsure how to proceed. Adams’s grey sea has leaked into a dark night. Dark and rain-swept.
Because I’m in a mood to think, I start walking. And because I’m in Penarth, where Idris Prothero has his home, I decide I may as well drop by and have a snoop. Prothero: the owner of the place where Mark Mortimer worked and the business buddy of Brendan Rattigan.
I walk the six or seven minutes to Marine Parade, Prothero’s street. I’ve already scanned the vehicles parked in his front drive – nothing of interest there – and I’m checking the rest of the street for the sake of completeness.
It’s not a good night for it. Rain mixed with sleet and worse weather promised.
I’m wearing gloves and have to write in felt-tip pen, because it’s the only thing that will mark the wet pages of my notebook. I’m trying to make notes, keep the notebook vaguely dry, and avoid getting too soaked myself. I do okay at all that, but it means I’m slow to notice a couple of guys on the street. Dark coats. Scarves. One in a woollen hat, one not. Close-cropped hair, the bare-headed one. They see me, stop, start moving alo
ng again, then stop and walk back.
I finish putting a registration number in my book, then look up, making proper eye contact.
‘Hi,’ I say.
The two men exchange glances. The shorter one – bare head, slightly ginger, late thirties tough – speaks.
‘You might not want to do that. People can get a bit funny about their privacy.’
‘Yeah, and maybe you could fuck right off,’ I suggest.
The taller man, the one who’s been silent, enjoys that response. He smiles involuntarily and raises a hand to cover his mouth as though there’s a law against smiling.
‘Let me see that,’ says the other guy, gesturing at my notebook. He has a Scots accent.
‘Fuck off.’
I turn my back on them, or half-do. Take a few steps down the road to the next car. Ready to note down the next plate.
I get the number in my book, then turn.
The street is lit and is a reasonably well-populated residential street, but there’s no one around, not even much traffic. Just the two men. Houses are set back from the road, so we might as well be in a dark wood or a deserted inner city alley for all the protection I’ve got.
I can hear Watkins’s voice in my head. Step away. Do not seek confrontation. Step away now.
I hear Lev too. Choose the fight you want, not the one they want. If you can’t win, don’t start. It’s okay to say no. Sometime, is the only smart thing to do. And he’s right. He always is. Lev: my martial arts instructor, if you want to call him that, though the term diminishes him. He’s not one of these fighting-as-meditation guys. He’s strictly fighting-as-fighting.
I take a pace or two back. The two men take a pace or two forward. They exchange glances. Some hidden exchange of communication, I can’t guess about what.
I continue to back away. Shove the book into my shoulder bag. Something drops as I withdraw my hand. A plastic-wrapped energy bar, I think. It splashes down onto the wet pavement. I don’t bend to retrieve it. I don’t want to make myself vulnerable. I back away another step, but hesitate, as though reluctant to part with whatever it was I’d dropped.
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