Is what we have love? He may well feel it for me, the poor fool. But what about me?
I check he’s fast asleep, then speak to him.
‘Buzz, my beautiful man, I think I’m in love with you.’
It doesn’t feel wrong, so I say it again, only this time without the ‘I think,’ and it still doesn’t feel wrong, though that’s not the same thing as feeling right.
Buzz doesn’t care. He snores away. The city around us snores away. A cold front rides in from the north and industrial trash thrashes against the walls of an unused dockside in Barry.
Where’s Penry? Still in hospital or returned to prison? And where are Ali el-Khalifi and Mary Langton? Where is Mark Mortimer and his secrets? And what was it that DI Watkins meant with that odd, repeated chopping gesture when we said goodbye?
Lots of questions, not many answers.
I think about some of those questions for a while, but at some point, I’m not sure when, my attention shifts. To myself. To a little girl in a pink and white dress. Sitting mute in the back of an open-top Jaguar, a camera hanging round her neck. One sunny Sunday in a past beyond memory.
I haven’t been fair to myself. I see that now.
I’ve investigated Khalifi’s death, and Langton’s, and over these past months I’ve done all the other work my duties have thrown at me. But I’ve neglected my own mystery. My strange origins.
Ed Saunders helped me see that I’ve been afraid to look, but the excuse I’ve given myself is that I haven’t known what to do. No clues. No evidence. No witnesses. No leads. Nothing beyond that tiny distortion of the camera lens.
And I’ve lied to myself. It’s been obvious all along what I need to do. I have a giant clue, built in the exact size and shape of my father.
Naturally, it could be coincidence that somebody chose my father’s car as a place to leave me but, really, what are the odds? I guess, though I don’t actually know, that my father was at that time Wales’s most successful criminal. His main business, I believe, involved trade in stolen vehicles. According to those of my brother officers who were in CID at the time, my father acquired stolen cars from all over the UK. Some of those vehicles were stripped down and sold for components or scrap. Others were repainted and resold, either using false or stolen documents, or just sold for cash.
Dad operated on an industrial scale. He kept ahead of my predecessors because he was smart, cautious, and well organised. His workshops were always on the move: flitting from barn to barn in the hills of South and Mid Wales. The farmers would enjoy a few weeks of tidy cash payments. A short whirlwind of profitable activity. Car transporters moving at night. Cardiff accents in the country lanes, city faces in village pubs. And Dad always kept himself one step beyond trouble. Except, presumably, at the start of his career, he kept himself remote from the coal face, always operating through lieutenants, like Emrys, never directly. He never put anything in writing. Never conducted his business on the phone. He somehow inspired such trust and love in his colleagues that he was never troubled by a single significant betrayal.
Or so I believe. That’s the story as I know it, as I’ve chosen to know it. But the criminal underworld is an unstable place. You don’t get to the top and stay there without making enemies. Without using your fists, or worse.
When I wanted a handgun on the Rattigan case, my father supplied one with a deftness that was almost breathtaking.
I don’t know whose daughter I am. I don’t know why I ended up in my father’s car. Why I was mute so long. Or what happened in those first two years of my life. But I know these things are connected.
My past is also my father’s past. My mystery is also his.
I’m still sitting up when I fall asleep, left hand thicketed in Buzz’s sand-blond hair.
I dream of Theo and Ayla all night long. I keep telling them I’m going to find out why their father killed himself, but I can see they don’t believe me.
28
The next day the morning news is full of the coming cold spell. It’s been predicted for a while, but the forecasters are more confident now, their prognostications darker. Snow, ice, blizzard and freeze. I hope they’re right.
Buzz says, ‘Do you have an emergency kit in your car?’
I start to say yes because of the chocolate and the joints, then realise that he means things like shovels and torches, so say, ‘No.’
‘I’ll get you the basics. You ought to have them.’
‘Thank you.’
He doesn’t approve of my coat, so I tell him I’ll get one.
‘Right then,’ he says.
He has already been for a run, shaved, showered, made breakfast, washed up both his breakfast and our supper from last night, is dressed and ready to go into the office. I’ve showered and am sitting around in one of his T-shirts. I haven’t eaten anything and don’t know if I’m going to.
‘Right then,’ I say.
Buzz gives a military nod, we kiss, and he marches out. He’d like it if I were a bit more like him. Up early. Off for a run. Quick to attend to those little domestic duties. On the other hand, if he truly wanted someone like him, he’s chosen the least suitable girl in the world. So I don’t understand. His choices don’t make sense.
By way of experiment, I try being a bit more like him. I don’t do anything drastic, like go for a run, but I do eat something, wash up, get dressed, make the bed. In the same spirit of investigation, I even hoover the living room, which doesn’t need it as far as I can tell, but my mother always seems to be hoovering rooms that seem perfectly clean to me.
By the time I’ve done all that, I realise I’m going to be forty minutes late for work and bolt out of the flat, leaving the hoover in the middle of the floor.
Cold is whitening the streets and I’m stuck behind a lorry scattering grit. There’s a white-blue sky above, paling to frost at its edges. I spend too much time looking up at it and I almost run smack into the back of the gritter when it stops at the lights. Only the metallic patter of grit against my bonnet alerts me in time.
From the car park to the office. I can feel the shift in temperature. Buzz is right that my coat – a blue woollen affair – is too thin to keep out any real cold. Then again, we live in a world that has doors, walls, and central heating, so Buzz’s survivalist anxieties seem a little out of place.
When I get to my desk, there is no knot of senior officers angrily demanding explanations for my absence. Indeed, it looks like no one has noticed at all, which doesn’t say much for my impact on world affairs. The mail will have arrived in the post-room but hasn’t yet chugged its way over to my desk. I can’t quite bring myself to sit prettily and wait, so I make tea and spend ten minutes chatting to Amrita, who wants to know all about my day out with Watkins yesterday. I’m feeling uppy today, so I tell her that Watkins was lovely to be with.
‘Honestly? Oh my God, you are too nice, really!’
I make up for my gossip-failings by agreeing to criticise Watkins’s cold-weather coat, a padded green affair which makes her look like a pensioner of indeterminate gender. It’s meagre fare, but Amrita seems pleased with it.
Then I drift over to Bev’s desk. She’s not instantly happy to see me, which normally means that she has some actual work to do. Delightful company as I am, I don’t always help create a purposeful working atmosphere. This time, though, I’m good as gold.
Bev has been allocated the tedious task of collecting Khalifi’s bank records from five and six years back and seeing if she can match them against anything that crops up in Langton’s record.
The Langton end of things is easier to work with. Because she earned essentially all of her income in cash, her bank records show a few college-related items – charges for rent, a parking permit, a bookshop account – settled by bank card or standing order. Little else shows up. Investigation is also made simple, because we still have the entire data set from the earlier investigation. Everything filed and boxed, nothing missing. Because we’re now reaching f
ar back into Khalifi’s past, the data we have for him is patchier. A tidy-minded engineer, he was pretty good at his record-keeping, but not perfect.
‘There’s nothing here,’ Bev complains, once she’s decided I’m not here to waste time. ‘I mean, I’ve started listing all the places where Ali spent money, but since Mary hardly ever used her bank card, I don’t know why that helps.’ Bev isn’t normally complainy, but the spectre of Watkins’s icy disapproval is making her anxious. She’s the only copper I know who always refers to victims by their given names. ‘Half these places don’t even exist anymore.’
I see her point. She’s tried the Internet for help, but businesses that have changed their name or gone defunct in the last few years are hardly likely to have web pages still operative.
‘The library should have some old Yellow Pages,’ I say and a couple of phone calls proves they do.
A prissy-voiced person on the other end of the phone starts listing their collection in date order.
‘That’s wonderful,’ I interrupt. ‘My colleague, Detective Constable Beverley Rowland, will be over in a few moments to pick them up.’
I scrunch my eyes at Bev to check she’s okay with me saying that, and she is. She’s relieved. That’s part of how our friendship works. She links me to Planet Normal. I do the bossy, conflictual stuff which her sweet-as-milk personality recoils from.
Prissy Voice tells me that she can’t let reference material leave the building. I tell her that she will if we send a van full of uniformed policemen to seize it. She says something betokening sour surrender and I grin at Bev when I replace the phone.
‘Get the volumes for Cardiff and Swansea,’ I tell her. ‘Check any dead businesses against the directories, mark them on a map, and see if any of the places are close to Swansea Uni or places where we know Langton or students hung out. You’ll get a map of those from the notes on the first enquiry.’ I scrutinise Bev’s list of Khalifi’s credit card payments. He was always mobile. A good proportion of his charges were made in what look to be Cardiff-based businesses, but plenty weren’t. ‘You might want to make sure you get Yellow Pages for the whole of South Wales,’ I say. ‘Better safe than sorry. And Bath and Bristol, if the library has the information. Langton was a Bath girl, after all.’
Bev nods. ‘Thanks, Fi.’
She starts winding herself into enough woollen outerwear that she starts to resemble an accident in a knitting factory. The library is a bare ten-minute walk away and we live in Cardiff, not Stromness or Tromsø. And the cold front, the real one, has not yet arrived.
‘You’ll be all right, won’t you? You can have my scarf too if you want.’
Bev looks puzzled, then anxious, then decides I’m joking and laughs. I would go with her, except that I’ve spied the lovely internal-mail cart tootling past my desk and want to sup of its bounty. Bev leaves but, instead of going to my desk right away, I spend some time studying Khalifi’s spending habits. Not just the historical data which Bev is interested in, but the more recent stuff too. Dates. Places. Figures. Orderly columns that might offer a peep into murder.
They certainly offer a peep into his personality. Whenever his spending was essentially invisible, he held the purse strings tight. We know, for example, that he used price comparison websites for his utility supplies, his broadband service, his home and car insurance. He had no private health care. He wasn’t mean, but he was careful. And yet, when it came to spending money that people might see, that flashy edge was always there. A spring break in Dubai last year. A week spent in Jordan this year. Paul Smith suits. City-breaks to Lausanne, Doha, Vienna, Cairo.
That prickling feeling I’ve had off and on recently intensifies again. It’s a good feeling. A sense of being in the presence of the dead.
I print off all the data that Bev has compiled, then fiddle around on the system until I find his tax returns too. Print those.
The way I saw things once, Mary Langton had nothing to do with Khalifi. Khalifi had, as I saw it, plenty to do with the violent death of Mark Mortimer. I still think the latter, but I’m less sure about the former. The fact that Langton once danced in a bar where Khalifi drank is, as far as I’m concerned, the weakest of weak evidence. There must be literally thousands of people in South Wales who saw Langton in her itsy-bitsy little bikini. That Khalifi was one of them is hardly more remarkable than any other big-city coincidence you could think of: sharing a bus route, having the same postman. But still, it’s the angle that Watkins is bombarding with her massed artillery. It’s the angle that is sending the much-bescarved Bev out to do battle with sour-voiced librarians. Is it maybe the angle that is making me prickle now?
In the incident room, we still have the 275 ‘persons of interest,’ but all the papers in the centre of the board have been moved aside, to be replaced by a photo of Langton, a photo of Khalifi, and a thick black line running between them. Someone has adorned that black line with a little red cutout heart. Mark Mortimer’s name isn’t on the board anywhere.
Paper pours from the printer until the output tray overflows. I grab the pile and take it to my desk, where on the top of my regular mess and clutter is a plain manila envelope with a small bulge at one end and a postmark from Barry. I open the envelope, remove the memory stick, bring up the documents it contains. I can’t conceal a grin. The joy of investigating.
I call Watkins and tell her about my treasure.
She comes down to my desk and stands beside me, looking at the documents on the screen.
‘Someone wants us to know something,’ she says.
‘Yes. Someone does.’
I’m not lying. Ayla and Theo. Maybe Khalifi. And then there’s Mary Langton. Her, her parents, her brother and sister. I feel the pressure of these people, the living and the dead, clustering round my desk. I feel crowded by them, and Watkins’s bad-tempered presence doesn’t make it easier.
We stare at the list of file names on screen.
An incomprehensible amount of data. A mountain of secrets.
29
Police work always moves in circles. The witnesses stay the same, but each time round you drive a little closer to the target.
In one way, the archive from Barry Precision has been disappointing. In another way, it’s been a game changer. It’s been disappointing because it’s hard to see anything awry. Neither I, nor Susan Konchesky, who has been assigned to help me, is an engineer or an accountant, but the material we’ve looked through so far seems exactly what you’d expect from a midsize engineering company. Tedious, orderly, baffling.
On the other hand, any real secrets aren’t going to be blazingly obvious. If, for example, the company has been running drugs from Gibraltar, they’d presumably ensure that any related documents were encoded in some way. So for all I know, Susan and I have been looking at a mountain of highly incriminating data that we don’t yet know how to interpret.
One thing we have found is that El Saadawi, the Egyptian businessman whose car was on Marine Parade that time, is one of Barry Precision’s buyers. That’s an interesting fact to me – because I know about the Marine Parade incident and no one else does – but even so, it’s elusive. Saadawi was, presumably, visiting Prothero. But why shouldn’t he? There’s nothing wrong or even underhand about a major buyer visiting a company’s owner. I know nothing about business, but presumably those sort of contacts are part of how stuff gets done.
In any case, the main thing is that Watkins is now certain that there’s something here worth investigating. From her point of view, she has three pieces of evidence all pointing in the same direction. In mounting order of importance: that weirdly unproductive interview with Dunbar, the memory stick, the assault on Penry. I know the memory stick doesn’t quite mean what she thinks it means – but still: Penry was assaulted and my little altercation of Marine Parade did take place. There’s something here, and Watkins knows it.
So committed is she to this new line of enquiry that it was she who ordered the reinterview with Sophi
e Hinton. Susan Konchesky and I are to conduct it, and tape it. We discussed taking Hinton down to a police station for a formal video interview, but instead settle on requisitioning a patrol car so that Hinton’s neighbours will see the police presence. It’s the sort of non-intimidatory intimidation that can work very well. That can sometimes force disclosures from people who are reluctant talkers, not hardened criminals.
We arrive at the appointed time.
Same kitchen. Same sulky, pretty Sophie Hinton. She’s in a grey pinstripe skirt, boots and a camel-coloured polo-neck. The police car is visible through the kitchen windows. The kids are not back from school yet, but I’m wearing Ayla’s shell bracelet just in case.
She makes coffee, which neither Susan nor I wanted or asked for, and bangs things around to show how petulant she can be. Which is fairly petulant.
‘I’ve put milk in. There isn’t any sugar,’ she says.
I don’t respond directly. Just turn the tape recorder on, give names, place, and date. Because I’ve interviewed Hinton before, I’ll lead this one. Konchesky is here so that we can confer if anything unexpected arises.
‘Ms Hinton, are you happy for us to call you that? Or should we call you “Sophie”?’
‘Yes. Either.’
‘We’re here in connection with the suicide of your former husband. With his conviction on drug charges. And with the murder of Ali el-Khalifi.’
She doesn’t answer, just pulls her sleeves down over her hands, tucks her chin into her polo-neck and gives eyes that smoulder. If I were a guy, I’d probably roll over onto my back and drool with desire. As it is, I want to slap her.
I continue with the basics. When she met Mark Mortimer. When they married. When he joined Barry Precision. She gives her answers resentfully and briefly. After a while, she says, ‘I should probably have a lawyer here. Aren’t I supposed to have a lawyer?’
‘Why? We’re not charging you with anything. Do you think you need a lawyer?’
Love Story, With Murders Page 18