Oh crap. I need to get out of here and my brain is feeling muddy after too much sleep. There’s half a packet of biscuits left. Otherwise only oil and sugar. I shove the biscuits in my pocket and go carefully down the drive to see if my car will start. The poor lamb is completely buried in snow. At first the door is frozen shut, but when I yank it hard enough, it opens. Key into the ignition. A quick prayer to whichever god protects sporty little cabriolets of dubious mechanical reliability, then turn the key. The engine fires up on the second attempt. Quick thank you to the god in question.
And there have been vehicles moving on the lane. There are tyre tracks already part filled in, but at least they point me in the right direction. I’m a little uncertain as to whether I’ll be able to get my car out of the drive and onto the lane, but I set to work with Buzz’s precious shovel. It is indeed ridiculously oversized, but what the hell. Needs must when the devil rides.
I work hard until the car stands clear of its snowy curtains. Clear enough that there is, at least approximately, a way through onto the lane.
Then nothing for it but to try. Get in the car. Put it in gear and try to get it out onto the road. It needs to clear a little ridge of snow and turn hard through ninety degrees, if I’m not to ram the hedge opposite.
Buzz, I know, would have an instinctive feel for how to do this. ‘Back up a little, Fiona. Rock it, don’t let that wheel spin. Easy now. No, no, half-lock only. Don’t try to force it.’ Buzz would ease that car out onto the road and make it look as easy as pie.
Me, my technique is different. I try easing the car over the ridge, but nothing doing. Then I start panicking and start revving the engine and gritty snow flies in a gale of fury from my front tyres. Then I stall. Then restart the car and leave the engine running as I hack away with the shovel again.
I wish Buzz was here.
Wish, but also don’t. When your head has been as muddled as mine, for as long as mine, you see things in a different way. Right now, I’m alive. I don’t just know it with my head. I feel it in my painfully cold fingers. Feel it in my sodden boots. Feel it in my racing heart. I even feel it in these intricate little computations of survival. A dead person wouldn’t care, and I do. I really do.
Anyway. I’m done digging. Back into the car. Try again. First nothing happens, then the car shoots forward out of its rut. I turn the wheel, skid, slide straight into the bank opposite, bounce off and end up pointing downhill, the right way, square in the tyre tracks. I drive a few yards, just to check the car can do it. And it can. The clever beast. It can.
My thinking now is completely clear. I know what I’m doing. I go back up to the house as quickly as I can. Unmake my nest. Put the duvets back on the bed. Wash anything I’ve used in the kitchen. Dry it. Replace it. Watkins is a stickler for these things. Hinton gave me permission to enter the house, not to eat all the food in the kitchen and sleep there overnight. I don’t want to provoke complaints. For the same reason, I take off my supersized Aran jumper and leave it back in the drawer were I found it.
I do take the laptop, though. It’s evidence in relation to a major offence, and if I don’t take it, there’s a risk of data being lost. I’m operating well within police powers here, so I don’t care if anyone complains or not.
Leave the house, lock up, return the key to its resting place. Back down to the car.
I wish I hadn’t left it so late – the light is dimming behind thick cloud – but I’m not too concerned. I’ll follow the road down to Capel-y-ffin, then either stop there for the night or, if the roads are okay, get out to Abergavenny or even back to Cardiff.
If for any reason the car gets stuck, and it might, I’ll simply follow the tyre tracks by foot. It’s no more than a few miles to Capel-y-ffin. Probably not even as far as that to the first inhabited house. It’s cold, but hardly murderous. I have a torch. I’ll walk fast. And if that really doesn’t work for any reason, I’ll spend the night in the car. I have a sleeping bag, water and chocolate – my chocolate, that is, not the stuff Buzz gave me, which is already gone. My petrol tank is nearly full. I’ll run the engine through the night if I have to.
You’ll get through this, Griffiths. No worries.
And it’s true. I will get through this. I’m not worried.
I change my wet hiking boots for my dry office ones, which are in any case easier to drive in. Then, proceeding with extreme caution, headlights on full beam, I start to creep down the hill.
33
It goes okay. I’m not likely to win prizes for extreme-cold-weather driving, but I don’t have to. Admittedly I do get stuck early on. I’m going so slowly that when I come to a slight rise in the road – it mostly curves steadily down – I don’t have the speed or the traction to ascend.
Silly girl.
What would Buzz do?
He’d ramp it up. I reverse back up the road as far as I can. The snow is cold enough and hard enough that the existing tyre tracks nudge me back onto the road if I start to drift off. I move forward with more speed. Get higher up the hill this time, before coming to a stop, wheels spinning purposelessly on ice. So reverse back again, farther than before. Move forward faster. It’s exciting, actually. This time, I sail up the hill no problems and am so pleased with myself that I have to stop the car to enjoy the moment. In the valley far below me, I see the first lights twinkling through the twilight.
I feel a rush of something. I’m not always good at naming my feelings – it’s something I used to practise by rote with doctors – and pride isn’t something I feel often enough for me to feel very confident about spotting it when it comes. But this feeling – warm, happy, a bit excited – is pride, I think. I spend a few moments letting myself feel it, what it’s like. It’s partly, of course, the computer I have on the back seat. The fact that I was right to explore Mortimer.
But it’s not mostly that. I know my detective work is good. It’s not something I worry about. But driving a car in the snow? That’s something I’ve never done and would expect myself to be plain useless at. This whole twenty-four hours, I’ve lit fires, cooked pasta, made tea, kept warm, shovelled my car out, got it out onto the road. That doesn’t make me Buzz. Still less does it make me Lev. But a girl’s got to start somewhere and right now I feel pleased with myself.
Slipping back into gear, I drive on.
Get to a fork in the road. I don’t remember this from before, but I was driving the other way, looking forwards. One way looks a bit more roadlike, but there are no tyre-tracks – or no recent ones anyway – and the other route looks freshly driven. Peering cautiously down the slope, I see, joy of joys, a pair of red lights. Lights attached to that thing of beauty: a Land Rover four-by-four. Not caring now, I turn down the hill and drive up to the back of the Land Rover. As it sees me coming, it ploughs off into the snow to let me past.
I don’t especially want to pass it. I want to stick close and let the Land Rover watch me all the way down to Capel. So I pass the Land Rover, then stop.
Stop for two reasons.
One, to stay close to my saviours. Two, because the track ends at a low barn, standing just above the rise of a stream.
This isn’t the road, it’s a field.
It’s not the way to Capel-y-ffin, it’s a dead end.
Sod it.
Not a big sod it, mind you. A small one. I’m pretty certain that my sporty little town car isn’t going to have the muscle to climb back up the hill I’ve just come down, but I can either get the Land Rover to tow me or I can just dump my car, come and get it when I can. The bright edge is taken from my pride, but not too badly.
I’m about to change back into my hiking boots, go and talk to the farmer, when I see that the farmer has swung his car round, pointing back up the hill. He probably knows he’s going to need to tow me out of here.
The Land Rover cuts its lights. Two men tramp towards me through the snow. I can’t see them. It’s not fully dark now, but almost.
One of the men comes to the passenger
side of the car. One to the driver’s side. I’ve wound my window down to talk to them, letting the cold air in.
Only they’re not a farmer and his mate. And they’re not here to rescue me. They’re my friends from Marine Parade. Jaw Guy and Silent Guy.
The men who, I’ll bet, killed Khalifi.
Fear has a colour. A taste and feel. Cold, mostly. That’s mostly what I notice. The chilly touch of adrenaline finding its way into those places I never normally feel. The very tips of my fingers. The soles of my feet. A cold burning in my ears. The taste is like an absence. I’d say like a mouthful of cotton wool, except it’s emptier than that. My mouth feels both choked and as if it’s biting down on a vacuum. That same vacuum fills my stomach. I feel scooped out, empty. Like one of those corpses on the pathologist’s table that look vaguely normal but whose cavities have been filled out with pipe insulation and Sealed Air plastic bags.
These people have come to kill me.
‘Evening, gents,’ I say.
Silent Guy gets into the cramped little back. Jaw Guy gets into the passenger seat beside me. I let them because I can’t stop them. Because I don’t know what else to do.
I’m not sure how they knew I was at the cottage, but then I realise they didn’t know. I’m sure they – or their employers at Barry Precision – do have some kind of hold over Sophie Hinton. They’ve either threatened her or paid her. In any case, Hinton must have felt worried enough by my visit to contact them. To mention that I seemed to have an interest in the cottage. That was likely enough the first they knew of the cottage, so they came here to clean up. When they arrived, they found me here too. Two birds, one stone.
When Hinton called whoever it was she called, she probably didn’t mean to kill me, but she also wouldn’t have bothered to think through the possible consequences of her actions.
One loose word, one dead body. Not her concern. I can hear her voice in my head now. ‘I don’t want to sound awful. I’m very sorry and everything.’
Petulant cow.
I should have given her that slapping.
But Silent Guy and Jaw Guy don’t kill me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t even seem to want anything from me. Sure, they take the laptop. Just walk it over to their Land Rover, drop it on a back seat, then saunter back again. Mostly, though, they just sit in my car. I keep the engine running for warmth. I’ve got loads of petrol and I do remember to check. Headlights on, because it would seem too weird sitting there in the dark.
On my left is Jaw Guy, Scottish guy. The broken jaw looks both normal and not quite. Like something’s askew, but in the poor light it’s hard to see exactly where the problem lies.
Behind Jaw Guy is the other man, who hasn’t yet said anything audible in my presence. My car is a three-door convertible and though there is space in the back, it’s not really the sort of space designed to accommodate reasonably large, reasonably well-padded contract killers. But that’s not really my issue.
I wait a bit for them to say anything or start anything, but they don’t.
‘This is fun, isn’t it?’
No response.
To the Scotsman whose jaw I broke, I say confidentially, ‘How’s the jaw? Bit sore, maybe?’ Since I still get no response, I push a bit harder. Turning around to the guy in the back, I say, ‘Did he have to drink through a straw? Or did you have to bottle-feed?’
The guy in the back chuckles, and says, ‘Something like that.’
He’s wearing hat and gloves. So is the other guy. They’re not removing them even though the car is warm. I guess they’re being cautious about DNA. I like to see that in a contract killer. Professionalism. Attention to detail.
But they’re not killing me.
‘Dunbar,’ I say. ‘Jim Dunbar at Barry Precision. He’s sort of got the motivation, but does he really have the pizzazz? I mean, you’re a fairly top-end pair of murderers. I don’t think Dunbar is quite in your league.’
No response.
‘But maybe you don’t know about things like that. Why you kill the people you kill. Maybe you’re just given a name and a face. Ali el-Khalifi. He lives here. He looks like this. Go kill.’
No response.
‘Whose idea was it to copy the Mary Langton killing?’ To Silent Guy, I add, ‘I’m guessing that was you. I think your friend might be a bit stupid, yes?’
Still no response and the silence is getting tiresome, so I change the subject. ‘Okay, shall we play I Spy?’ There’s nothing in the sweep of my headlights except snow and some trees. The barn too, dimly. ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with S.’
No response.
I give them two minutes by the dashboard clock to think of something, but they don’t manage it. I give them the answer. ‘It was snow. I’m slightly disappointed, to be honest. I was trying to start with something easy.’
‘Ja, I thought of snow.’ The guy in the back. He has an accent of some sort. Not British. Scandinavian, I guess, and he looks Nordic. His eyes are dancing with amusement. He’s enjoying this. His Scottish buddy just glowers at me or avoids my gaze. I don’t think he likes me.
‘I don’t know your names and it seems a bit weird doing this without them. You are . . .?’ I ask this question of the Scottish guy, but get no answer. ‘Hamish, is it? Hoots mon and och aye the noo.’ My Scottish accent is crap. ‘You know, your jaw looks a bit funny.’ I turn to the guy in the back. ‘It does look funny, doesn’t it? I’m not making it up.’
The guy in the back shrugs, but it’s a gesture. A communication of a sort. His eyes are laughing.
‘What shall I call you? Bjorn? Ulf? Sven? Mikkel? Olaf? Jakob?’ My well of Scandinavian-names-suitable-for-contract-killers is beginning to run dry, but the guy rescues me.
‘Olaf. We’ll go with that.’
‘Hamish and Olaf. Olly. Okay. This is nice, isn’t it?’
We sit around some more. I switch my lights to sidelights only. The engine is still running. The car is warm.
When I cut my headlights, I sensed, or thought I did, a ripple of alertness from my two silent companions. There’s no point in having lights up here, except as a signal. Are we meeting someone here? Now, that is an interesting thought. If so, I’m guessing Prothero. Or – more interesting still – maybe Mostafa el Saadawi. Dunbar might be another possibility, but what I said to Hamish and Olly about him is true. I bet he knows what’s going on, but he’s too small-time to hire killers. Not enough skin in the game.
I say, ‘Just so you both know, Detective Inspector Watkins knows where I am and why I’m here. So does the entire chain of command. And if anything happens to a serving police officer, there will be a total shitstorm.’
And as I say those words, I feel them. Feel their truth. I know Watkins doesn’t know what I found up there in the cottage. She sent me there. She debated sending a team in and decided against it. It was meant to be me and Susan Konchesky, but when Susan weaselled out, Watkins sent me anyway. I agreed with that decision – lobbied for it – but Watkins isn’t one to shirk responsibility, legal or moral. If something happens to me, she’ll be on the case.
I realise something else too. That I do now belong to the police. Part of the family. I’m far from being Cathays’s favourite copper. We don’t have an employee-of-the-month contest, but if we did, I’d never win it. I’ve had more than my share of bollockings, more than my share of office feuds. Truth is, there’s a fair-sized kernel of people who actively dislike me. But none of that matters. I’m part of the family, a wayward daughter. If anything happens to me, there truly will be a shitstorm.
I feel a pricking in my eyes.
I know what that pricking means. Not tears, but whatever comes before tears. I’ve only cried once since I was a very young child. This moment now isn’t the second time exactly, but it comes close. It’s the best feeling in the world. Dead people can’t cry. I bet their eyes don’t even prick.
I’m sitting there, thinking these things, when I notice that the lights on the dashboard se
em dimmer than they were. I flick the headlights onto full beam again and now I’m pretty sure. There’s a loss of power somewhere.
Olaf says, ‘You need to turn the engine off and on again.’
So I do. It seems logical enough, but I’m not very practical about these things and in any case I’m still cuddling up to that lovely pricking feeling in my eyes. Result: I’m not thinking about the electromechanical aspects of my situation.
Which is an error.
I turn the engine off, then turn the key the other way. The starter motor chokes weakly. That’s all. My first thought is, That’s stupid, the engine is warm. My second thought is, Ah, so this is how they intend to kill me.
Olaf, reading my mind, says, ‘I think there maybe is a small electrical fault with your alternator.’
I don’t know what an alternator is. I assume the thing that recharges the battery. In any case, it’s clear what they’ve done. It was they, not the snow, that cut power to the cottage. They wanted to drive me out of there and they did. At the same time – while I was sleeping, presumably – they sabotaged my car. They drove down into this lonely patch of nowhere and kept their tracks fresh enough and deep enough that they could be sure I would follow. How sweet. How beautifully simple.
I try the engine a couple more times, but each try is weaker than the last.
Hamish has opened his door. The car’s temperature drops immediately. Both men are dressed in heavy boots, down jackets, gloves, hats. They’ve probably got thermal undies on too. Me, I’ve got a thin blue coat and opaque tights.
Olaf says, ‘Can I have your coat, please?’
I think about that. I could fight, of course, but they’re ready for that. There are two of them and they’re miles stronger. I could try running, but I couldn’t outrun this pair. Not uphill, not in snow, and not while wearing slippery-soled boots.
So I get out of the car, take off my coat, fold it, hand it to Olaf. He says, ‘Thank you.’ I’m wearing black trousers that I normally wear to the office. Tights. Woolly socks. A long-sleeved T-shirt with a poloneck over the top. That’s all. It’s minus whatever and the cold is already starting to bite.
Love Story, With Murders Page 21