I’m not immediately sure what to do, so go downstairs and fill the kettle. Turn it on. Make tea. There’s nothing herbal here, so I make do with a regular tea bag. No milk either, so just brew a pint of hot, black tea in a huge pottery mug. Contrary to my usual habit, I add sugar, to take away the taste of the metallic mountain water, the strongly tannined tea. It tastes like sweetened bog water, but is nevertheless somehow welcome. A comfort against the cold.
And as I leave the kitchen, for the stairs that rise directly from the living room, I notice what must have been obvious from the kitchen window. It’s snowing. Big heavy flakes. Falling with a calm insistence, a sense of purpose
Against the grey sky above, the flakes look black. Like imperfectly burned coal ash settling back over a mining village. But the ground below gives the lie to that. It’s already covered. Sheeted in white while I was at the alcove upstairs. Every field, every hedge, every stroke and line of moor and mountain. The rowans stand black-fingered against the white. Farther down the hill, little stands of oak and hawthorn seem to have contracted into two dimensions. Given up colour and volume for the purity of shape. The naked essence of tree.
I stand at the window for a while, watching.
Because I am who I am – and because I am where I am – I can’t help but feel the terrible peacefulness of death. It’s as though the world has given up on life. As though the sky is shredding itself and scattering its remains. One giant burial, robed in white.
It’s not a bad feeling at all. On the contrary, it’s calming. Under other circumstances, I would allow myself to sink into it. Relish it. And I do. For a while I do. Just stand at the window and watch the landscape disappear. Cardiff is no longer even a rumour. Abergavenny lies on the outer edge of the world. The storm and fury of Watkins’s police investigation means nothing up here. The rules, the files, the tasks, the duties. All that stays real is this whitening mountainside and the presence of those who died. Mary Jane Langton. Mark Mortimer. Ali el-Khalifi. The two halves of the human race joined by this snow. A temporary unity.
I don’t know how long I stare out at the scene, but the untidy realities of the present summon me back.
It’s four in the afternoon and the light is failing. I need to leave now or spend the night here. There’s no option really. The lane is already under two inches of snow and the temperature is below freezing. There are steep hills and sharp turns on the road back into Capel-y-ffin, and I don’t trust either me or my car to navigate them. Still less do I want to attempt it at the onset of more than fifteen hours of darkness.
So I leave my bucket of tea and bustle around trying to be sensible. Buzz-style sensible. Very cautiously, I turn my car, then take it, skidding, to the bottom of the drive. There’s another hideous encounter with a rock about halfway down, but the car still seems to be in one piece. I’m guessing that there will be tractors or four-wheel drives moving in the morning. Once they’ve dug out the road for me, I should be able to slide down their tyre tracks into the valley bottom. And if the worst comes to the worst, I can always walk. If I allow myself enough daylight, I can’t see myself getting seriously lost.
I check my phone again so I can text Watkins, but there’s still no whiff of a signal. It’s annoying, but not the end of the world. Buzz will worry a little, but he knows I’m likely to be out of signal.
So much for that. The next issue is getting through the night as warmly and safely as I can.
I change into hiking boots and grab Buzz’s biscuits and chocolate. I wonder about taking a joint as well, but I don’t need one. Joints are mostly for when I get stressed and I’m not stressed. I’m happy.
I plough my way back up the hill to the cottage. Hard work. Not just the steepness of the hill and the uncertainty of the track, but the snow is already thick enough that I can feel it dragging against every movement. I’m panting by the time I reach the front door.
The next thing is heating. I’m wearing the ridiculous Aran jumper with my coat buttoned over it. The jumper’s sleeves are so long, I use them like gloves. There’s not a glimmer of warmth from the storage heaters, but they’ll presumably start kicking out heat in the morning. The oil radiator is ridiculously underpowered for the size of the property, but I suppose it’s only there to top up the storage heating. I do, however, manage to rustle up paper, firelighters, wood, and matches and get a fire burning in the stove.
I think how little Sophie Hinton would have liked this way of life.
The room is still cold, but between the stove, the radiator, and my unerringly fashionable outfit, I’m warm enough. I throw out the tea I made before and make a fresh mug. I bring the laptop down from the alcove, along with a heap of Mortimer’s files. Thinking about it, I go up and drag down a couple of duvets. The only room in this house that’s going to be even half warm is the living room, and I can sleep well enough on one of the sofas.
Food is the next puzzle, but one with a refreshingly simple solution. There is nothing to eat except the stuff I brought up from the car, plus the pasta, oil, and sugar from the kitchen. So I’ll eat that. I won’t starve.
I make a nest of sofa cushions and arrange the duvets around me like some Ottoman sultan. The laptop snuggles with me in the centre of my nest.
This is good. How it should be. I realise that there’s something about the way police officers work that’s utterly inimical to real investigation – or at least, inimical to the way I like to work. The office is about institutions and procedures and all the false realities of any large organisation. None of that stuff makes any sense up here. All I have is words that a dead man wrote, here in the place where he wrote them.
I light a couple of candles and turn the living room lights off. I’ll work by candles, the light of the laptop screen, and the red glow from the stove.
Turn my attention back to Mark Mortimer. Already I know I’m going to find what I came for.
31
Outside the cottage, the early evening darkness hardens into something blacker. I can see a single light from my window, from a barn miles away in the valley. Aside from that: nothing. A black sky, no moon, a million stars.
The cold is intense. It’s chilly enough inside the house, with the stove burning nonstop, but I venture outside a couple of times – simply to see and feel the diamond hardness of the night – and the cold has a physical presence I’ve read about but never previously experienced. It’s like the entire world is being tightened up. Waterfalls are being frozen into place, trees stiffened, the air clarified, the ground plated over with iron.
I like it. It’s easier to feel myself at times like this. In opposition to something, not just wading through Cardiff’s too-ordinary air.
When I get hungry, I eat Buzz’s biscuits. When I get hungry again, I cook the pasta and eat that.
Most of my time, though, I spend with the laptop and the files. The answer lies here. It’s up to me to find it. I decide I will read every piece of paper, examine every computer file. By eleven in the evening, I’ve more or less accomplished that. No joy. I’ve got a notepad filled with little questions to myself. Things to check later. Things to check when I’m in a warm office with access to the Internet. But nothing screamingly obvious. Nothing that feels like the secret for which Mortimer died.
I make more tea. I probably haven’t drunk as much caffeine as this in my entire life. It feels okay though. Part of the experience. I’m feeling clear, not buzzy.
Back at the laptop, I’m uncertain what to do. I’ve tried every Word document. Every spreadsheet. There aren’t many emails and those that there are are very old – presumably dating from the period before the laptop was brought to this cottage. I don’t really know my way around Powerpoint, and Mortimer doesn’t quite strike me as slick-presentation man, but I can’t find any Powerpoint files anyway.
I’m puzzled.
There is a puzzle here. Hinton’s silences virtually confirmed it. Penry’s head wound and the incident on Marine Parade Drive certainly do. But w
hat’s the mystery? Had Mortimer hidden some documents somewhere in the house, or loft, or outbuilding? I even spend an hour or so rummaging around everywhere I can think of. Examining floorboards for loose nails, that kind of thing. I don’t venture into the outbuilding, because it has no power, and I would need daylight to search it, but mostly I end my search more certain than ever that the laptop must have the answers. You don’t come up here to hide stuff. You’re hidden just by being here. And it wasn’t as though Mortimer was on the run from anyone. He wasn’t. He lived in Barry and had a good, ordinary job. Until things went pear-shaped with his prettily petulant missus, he probably had a regular, happy family life too.
So the computer is the answer. I heave more logs on the fire, resettle in my nest, and go back to the screen.
File Manager this time. I want to make sure I understand where all the files are. And as soon as I do, I realise what I’ve been missing. It’s a doh! moment. Mortimer was an engineer. Of course he used Microsoft Office from time to time, but that wasn’t the centre of things for him. There’s a program on the computer called Solid Edge. I open it up. It’s a CAD program: computer-assisted design. It has heaps of files associated with it. In terms of memory usage on the hard drive, there is almost fifty times more data associated with Solid Edge than with everything else put together.
Here. The answer is here.
I’m not an engineer, have no training in Solid Edge, and don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. But I fool around, learning how to open files, how to look at what they contain. It’s slow work – and I’m starting to feel tired, hungry, and cold – but I start to get the hang of it.
Shapes appear from the computer. I find I can revolve them, inspect them. Virtual steel turned by virtual hands. Tubes, rings, flanges, gears. Countless things whose names and uses I don’t know. A mass of associated technical data and computations. There’s a kind of beauty in it all. A flowing exactitude.
In my next life, I’ll learn maths.
A lot of this looks like the data I took from Barry Precision. I haven’t yet looked at the technical drawings in any detail, but presumably the two datasets have a lot in common. On the other hand, the Barry data was far more copious than just this. This is an oldish laptop and its hard drive is barely one-third full. This data was carefully selected. Those selection criteria will, I’m certain, be key to the riddle, but how to know what they were? How to guess?
Then I realise that Mortimer worked up here. That is, he didn’t just examine documents brought from work, he did creative modelling work of his own. By tracking back on the document histories, I can find the documents that he either worked on or created up here. I go through my notes marking documents that seemed to have had extensive work, and those that didn’t. The files divide into two sets. If there’s a forged hollow tube in the set of files brought up on disk from Barry Precision, there’ll be an analogous file created up here. If there’s a gear coupling in the Barry dataset, there’ll be a gear coupling created up here. Pinion rods. Moulded steel.
I understand something else as well. The Barry dataset comprised only the volumes themselves. That is, a virtual metal shape floating in a 3D cyber-void. But that was all. No technical data, no calculations.
Then it clicks. Mortimer wanted to understand those shapes for himself. He needed to understand them the way any engineer would: through maths, through design. So he rebuilt them. From the ground up. Reverse engineering the technical data from the shapes.
The Barry dataset was impoverished. It contained pictures, but not the maths. Up here, Mortimer reconstructed the maths. And the maths taught him something which would end up killing him.
Six in the morning. I make more tea and take it outside with the rest of the biscuits.
The stars are gone. Someone has come along in the night and stolen them all. Cloud has rolled in again and it’s snowing again. I’ve come out in the giant jumper, my coat and a duvet over my shoulders, and it’s still cold.
I wonder if anything will drive down the lane in the morning.
I wonder how long my wood will last.
I go back into the cottage. My eyes need a rest from the computer screen, so I prowl the house, still wearing everything, including the duvet.
In the living room, I top up the stove. There’s a weak heat starting to come from the night store heaters. In the kitchen, I boil the kettle again, not because I want more to drink but to create a little heat. In the bootroom, I inventory my wood stack. There’s not a lot there, but if the storage heaters work properly, I shouldn’t be so reliant on the stove during the coming day.
Upstairs, the bathroom is so cold there is ice on the inside of the window. The bedrooms are bland and dull. I’m about to go back downstairs again when my eye falls on the alcove.
Tanks. Artillery pieces. Rocket launchers.
Soldier porn.
Ich bin ein fuckwit.
This is what I’ve been looking at all night. I’ve been looking at weapons. Not the whole assembly, but individual parts. One of the photos is of a tank firing in a desert somewhere. The gun barrel has a distinctive shape. It’s not a single smooth tube, there are areas of greater thickness, parts that move. And I’ve seen that exact object downstairs, floating in a 3-D void. I didn’t recognise it because I didn’t know what I was looking for. Maybe also because I’m not a guy. My mental attic doesn’t have much soldier porn kicking around its dusty spaces. All the same, there’s not much doubt in my mind now. Another hour’s work and there’s no doubt at all.
From the photos pinned to Mortimer’s wall, I can identify at least six different weapons parts, plus three maybes. That still leaves numerous files without an obvious linkage to weapons, but no doubt if I put the whole lot in front of a procurement officer at the Ministry of Defence, I’d learn exactly what those links are. The unlicensed export of weapons is a serious offence. And, though I’ll need to check when I’m back at the office, Barry Precision holds no export licences, I’d bet my life on it.
Sophie Hinton’s words from that original interview come back to me. He had this Saint Mark thing going. Butter wouldn’t melt, and all that. Then what is he, really? A drug dealer who was busted and sent to jail. She couldn’t have been much wronger. Her children’s silent belief in their father couldn’t have been much righter.
And this, I bet, is the story. Barry Precision decided that the manufacture and export of weapons parts would be a profitable – if illegal – sideline. Mortimer found out what his employers were up to. Made certain that he was correct before levelling any accusation. No doubt discussed the whole thing with Khalifi. No doubt, in his patient engineer’s way, became remorseless and obsessive in documenting the entire profitable, lethal scam.
He pissed off his wife. Neglected her. Nudged her just enough to get her started on her path of sulky self-pity. The one ally he might have been able to trust was increasingly lost to him.
His employers somehow found out. Or perhaps he told them. Either way, they decided, fuck you, we’ll destroy your life. And did. Framed him on a drug-smuggling charge. Something so clumsy, so crass in design, that if he had wanted to fight it, he probably could have. But I bet they also threatened him. His wife, his kids. Told him that if he didn’t accept his time in jail, his family would all be killed or injured.
So he took it. Saint Mark took the drug charge. Lost his job, his wife, his means of making a living. Accepted that he couldn’t take the risk of divulging what he knew. A martyr to his own purity of purpose. The suicide, I guess, was simply the outcome of all that. When your life is completely fucked, what’s the point of continuing?
Other parts of the puzzle start clicking into place too. Some clearly. Others dimly. Like water trickling under ice or a weight of snow settling on a roof.
And that’s fine. I don’t need the whole thing now. I have what I need.
I’m still wearing Ayla’s little bracelet. I touch it and promise her and Theo, once again, that we’re going to drag this w
hole mess out into the open.
Their father: not a criminal, but a fighter for justice.
How much difference will it make to the children to know that? I think it’ll make all the difference in the world. I imagine Theo’s serious dark-eyed little face when I tell him, Yes, it was all a mistake.
But back to me and back to now.
It’s past 7 AM. It’s still dark. Nothing has moved on the lane. Nothing will until full daylight. The snow is above my boots now. Still falling, still beautiful.
I decide I’ll get two or three hours’ sleep, then get down the hill early enough that I can walk it if I really have to. I’ve enjoyed my night up here, but there’s almost no food left and not much wood. I’m exhausted, I realise. Bone-tired.
Pull my nest closer to the stove. Add logs to the fire. I’m asleep within the minute.
32
Wake up. Achy and cold. It’s dark.
Dark and it shouldn’t be.
Cold and it shouldn’t be.
Check my watch: it’s half past two in the afternoon. I’ve slept almost eight hours, rare for me at any time, no matter now tired I am.
The room is dark because more snow has fallen and the window is occluded. A dim white light filters in. The room’s not supposed to be cold. The stove is long gone out, but the storage heaters should be burning the place up and they’re not.
A moment’s experiment shows that the electrics are all dead. None of the switches have tripped. It must be a full-scale power outage. Hardly surprising, I suppose, and up here there won’t be engineers racing to restore power.
Love Story, With Murders Page 20