Rogers beats away at the phones. Gets nothing. Literally nothing for the most part: Prothero remains largely silent.
This is the third major tack that Rogers has tried. The first had to do with Barry’s products. The second with Mark Mortimer’s history at the firm.
And then, Rogers steps back and asks a straightforward question which, with hindsight, is where we should probably have started.
‘Okay. Let’s go back to some basics. You are the owner of Barry Precision, correct?’
‘Yes.’ But there was a hesitation there, which Rogers picked up on.
‘Yes, but . . .?’
‘But nothing. I own a hundred percent of the shares in Barry Precision. I do, however, have a cross-ownership arrangement with a partner of mine, David Marr-Phillips.’
Marr-Phillips: another one of Rattigan’s buddies. Another name on my A-list of people to investigate. A guy who inherited twelve hundred acres of Glamorgan land from his father. Used his business savvy to trade up to a property empire worth seventy million or more.
I’m semi-surprised to hear the name in this context, but only semi. South Wales isn’t London. All our rich guys know each other. Most of them have probably done business together. But neither Rogers or I know what a cross-ownership arrangement is. Rogers asks. Prothero explains.
‘The company is legally mine, one hundred percent mine. But I have a contractual arrangement with David whereby he picks up twenty percent of the risks and rewards from the company. In exchange, I have an equivalent interest in some of his properties. It’s an arrangement which simplifies certain tax issues and which diversifies risk. It’s common enough and perfectly legal.’
His tone adds the words you pig-ignorant, piss-poor, provincial cretins.
My look sticks a seven-inch steel dagger between his eyes and twists it around. Mervyn Rogers is probably wondering how fast he could beat this guy to a pulp.
We all enjoy a little moment of silence.
Rogers and I don’t immediately know how to respond. The ownership structure creates a weird little wrinkle. Unanticipated. Maybe a so-what thing, but one that needs investigation.
‘Risks and rewards,’ says Rogers. ‘Would that include the risk of prosecution for illegal arms export?’
Prothero gives a smile so thin it was probably manufactured in an Apple design lab. ‘Financial risks and rewards. David has no vote on operational matters. He trusts me to do my job.’
‘We’ll need to see the agreement.’
Prothero shrugs.
‘And,’ I add, ‘we’ll need to understand what you got in return. The “equivalent interest” you mentioned.’
If Prothero was disconcerted by having revealed more than he’s intended, that moment is over. His glossy, disdainful confidence is back. Prothero’s figured out that I’m the junior cop in pretty much any gathering. I’m so unimportant, he doesn’t even deign to sneer at me properly. Just raises a hand in a ‘fine, who cares?’ sort of way. His look doesn’t get within two feet of my face.
Fuckwit.
Rogers starts again with his questions, but Prothero has pushed his chair back. A gesture which indicates, I think, that he’s irritated with himself for having made the Marr-Phillips disclosure. If Prothero stays like this, which he most likely will, we’ll get nothing until the lawyer comes, at which point we’ll get a glossier, shinier version of nothing. Reading the interview the same way, Rogers shoots me a glance and says, ‘Take over a moment, would you?’ He steps out. He’ll want to get on the phone to Watkins, see if she has any bright ideas.
The door clangs shut. My arse hurts where the skin was taken for the graft. I take out some painkillers and swallow them without water.
I already know we’ll get nothing from this interview. We’ll get nothing in the morning, less than nothing in the afternoon.
I hold Prothero’s supercilious gaze and tell him, carefully, ‘Fuck you.’
Then I get up and leave the room.
39
Leave the room, find Rogers.
We quickly agree that there’s not much point in pursuing the interview until Prothero has his lawyer. For form’s sake, Rogers and another DS will put in shifts, one hour on, one hour off, asking the same battery of questions. There’s no evidentiary purpose in doing so. Prothero will say nothing. But you get more from suspects if they’re tired and angry. Plus you piss them off. Both good reasons to keep at it.
But Rogers doesn’t need me, and I don’t want to stay. It’s not much fun sitting opposite your probable would-be murderer, unless you’re sure of nailing the bastard. And we’re a long way short of that.
‘You could always go down to Barry,’ Rogers says.
So I do. Find a patrol car going down there and hitch a ride. We arrive around nine thirty. A civilian vehicle, an Astra, enters the car park with us. The woman who gets out of the Astra wears a red-and-white bobble hat and says she’s an Export Manager. She doesn’t look like a dealer in illegal arms, but maybe she didn’t know that’s what she was. Or maybe arms dealers like to wear Christmassy bobble hats.
We escort her into the building, which has grown mountains of computers, wires, printers, laptops, phones. Boxed or in stacks. Yellow police stickers marked with reference numbers. Every item logged and signed for. And not just electronics. Boxes and boxes of paperwork too. Personnel records, employment contracts, bank records, invoices, technical drawings, visitor sign-in books. Everything.
And it’s not just a question of lugging the stuff out of there. A CID IT specialist wants to map the network architecture, whatever that means, so there’s potentially hours of fiddling around before we can carry off any booty. Whatever excitement there must have been when they forced entry earlier in the morning has long gone now. It’s like a massive furniture removals project, only with lots of data complications and the risk of massive legal liabilities if we fuck up. The mood is simultaneously tense and frustrated.
DI Ken Hughes, who led the Barry raid this morning, is overseeing interviews with the bad-tempered snappishness that is native to him. There’s a swirl of confused surprise around his desk as employees are paired up with officers.
But it’s surprise, I note, not fear. It’s as though our presence here is like the snow. Unexpected. A disturbance of the normal order. But somehow also accepted, a freak of the climate. An IT guy helps our CID specialist with the network architecture. Someone shows an officer how to get the coffee machine to produce hot chocolate.
Watkins is in with Dunbar, giving him the third degree. She’ll be a good interviewer, I bet. Naturally scary. Dunbar has a lawyer sitting in with him, but Dunbar’s budget doesn’t run to some arsehole from London. His guy is local. A cheap grey pinstripe and a voice that’s higher pitched than Watkins’s.
I greet DI Hughes and offer my services. He doesn’t much like me, which makes for a neatly symmetrical relationship, as I dislike him. He assigns me to interview a spotty boy from sales, who looks eighteen but claims to be nearer my age. We make a space for ourselves on a workbench under the windows that overlook the dock.
The kid knows nothing. He keeps asking, ‘How are we going to do our work?’
Not my fucking problem, matey, I want to tell him. If you want to work, you probably shouldn’t have started dealing in illegal arms. Shouldn’t have framed Mark Mortimer, shouldn’t have killed Khalifi, shouldn’t have left me to die in a fucking snowfield.
I don’t say that, though. I act like a copper out of a training video. ‘We will keep any disruption to a minimum, sir. We do have a warrant to impound items that may be required for our inquiry.’
The kid looks at me blankly with eyes the colour of peat water. I run my tape recorder and write my notes.
Finish that interview. Do another. There’s a flavour here that’s missing. A fear.
I think of Theo and Ayla. Theo’s question: Was it a mistake? Yes, Theo, it damn well was.
The atmosphere tastes like potatoes boiled without salt.
> The lads who, earlier this morning, broke open a door with a steel battering ram are now reduced to figuring out schedules for the return of property. The vending machine runs out of coffee. A couple of uniformed coppers drive into Barry to get supplies.
I do another interview.
At midday, Watkins takes a rest from the business of throwing hostile questions at Jim Dunbar. She goes for a prowl so she can blast anyone who offends her.
By this point, I’m not doing anything at all. I don’t think the interviews are helping us, so I’ve stopped doing them. I don’t want to load paperwork into boxes, so I don’t. Nor can I be doing with the whole logistical mess of figuring out what stuff Barry needs to continue in business and how soon we can get it back to them. As far as I’m concerned, we should take everything, without apology or excuse, keep what we need and dump the rest in Cardiff Bay.
So I drift around, make stupid jokes, and try to stop other people from working. I’m sitting on a desk chatting with a couple of uniformed officers when Watkins heaves into view. She lasers a couple of people, just to demonstrate her weapons are in order, then rolls over to us.
Gives us the glare.
We look like what we are: two people trying to work, one person being annoying.
Watkins does that circular jaw action thing she does. The uniformed cops don’t know her well enough to be terrified. But that jaw action is normally a prelude to launch, a countdown to detonation.
I give her a sunshiny smile, all tropical beaches and swaying palms.
She says, hoarsely, ‘How are you feeling?’
I say, ‘Fine. Mending up.’
She nods. Makes a half gesture at my outfit. ‘You’re looking smart.’
‘Hobbs,’ I say.
She makes some incoherent noise in the back of her throat – probably a glitch in her missile ignition system – and trundles away without remembering to reprimand us for existing. I turn to my two workmates with a grin, but they’re not impressed. They don’t know how close they came to incineration.
And after a while, I’m bored.
I quite like the factory hall itself. The incomprehensibly complex machines. The manufactured parts and works in progress. The precision of surfaces whose form and function is entirely beyond me to fathom. Aside from that, though, the place weirds me out. The offices at the front of the building are poky and lightless. Even worse than ours. We’re here, barrelled up in a metal shed, close by the black water seething in the docks, the ice hardening its grip on walls and roads and ironwork, and we see none of it.
I need to get out.
Need to get out, but don’t have a car.
Think about bothering Buzz, but his car is at the station and he’s busy being a good, dutiful copper. So I call Jon Breakell in the office. No joy: he’s on something and can’t talk. I’d normally try Mervyn Rogers, because he quite likes me and because his attitude to work isn’t always rigorous either, but I don’t want to get sucked back into interviewing Prothero, so I avoid calling him.
Instead I try Bev, and am instantly in luck. Watkins has her driving round the various businesses that Khalifi patronised all those years ago. Not the Tescos or the SWALECs, of course, but those businesses small enough and personal enough that they might just remember a repeat customer. Watkins’s hope is that if Bev flashes photos of Khalifi and Langton in front of enough people, she might just jog a memory or two. It’s not even clear how that would assist the investigation, but Watkins is remorseless. She’ll keep going till there’s nothing more to do. I like that about her. Bev is in Penarth, just up the coast, feeling anxious that she’s doing something wrong.
I start sweet-talking her into coming to pick me up, but she agrees right away and I ring off, smiling.
I’m bored no longer.
Ayla and Theo.
Al el-Khalifi.
Mary Langton and her grieving family.
Different victims, different remedies. It’s good to act.
40
‘The yacht club?’ Bev sounds dubious. ‘In this weather?’
I know what she means. The Swansea Bay Yacht Club is hardly likely to be humming with life. But it won’t be closed either.
Bev is wearing a padded coat in sky blue. She has unnaturally blue eyes anyway and a clear complexion. In this weather, she has the clarity and perfection of a china doll. When she blinks, she looks like Bambi in pursuit of a butterfly.
She says, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to work more systematically? Go back to Penarth, finish up there, then do Barry, and so on.’
She’s suddenly worried that she made an error in coming to get me. She wanted me in Penarth with her because she thought I’d help protect her from any Watkinsian rage. Now she worries that I’m going to lure her off-piste and end up bringing that rage down upon her.
I say, ‘Bev, did Watkins specifically ask you to start in Penarth?’
‘No, I just thought it would be logical to –’
‘Then trust me. Let’s go to the Mumbles in Swansea Bay. Start at the Yacht Club. If we don’t have any luck there, we’ll do it whichever way you like. And Watkins won’t be pissed off with you. If she’s pissed off – and she won’t be – I’ll tell her it was all my idea.’
‘Okay then.’ Bev sounds uncertain, but compliant. That’s all I need.
I’m sitting in the passenger seat next to Bev. Like her, I’ve still got my coat on, but have shed my hat, gloves, and scarf, which lie on a woolly pile on my lap. Reaching round for my seatbelt is difficult – I don’t want to stress the skin starting to grow back on my burn – and there’s a moment where a small gasp of pain escapes me.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Yes.’ I try to sound nonchalant. Try to make my yes sound like a yes-and-why-wouldn’t-I-be.
‘I thought you were going to be more, I don’t know, more . . .’
‘Char-grilled? A bit crispy?’
Bev is shocked at my flippancy, but also reassured. She gives me a smile, puts the car into gear, and drives cautiously out of the snowy car park. The roads ease once we get into Barry proper. Still more so once we’re on the A48. Channels of brown slush gouged into banks of dirty snow. Cars drive with their lights on. Snow doesn’t just whiten a landscape, it quietens it. Sounds are deadened, speeds reduced. Bev drives sitting forward, hands on the wheel in the ten-to-two position.
When she’s confident with the driving, she starts asking me about what happened up in the mountains. I give her my downsized version of the truth.
‘Goodness gracious, Fi.’
That’s just about as close as Bambi ever comes to swearing, so I work a bit harder to tone things down. I think it mostly works. She ends up saying, ‘You do look okay. Really fine actually.’
‘Hey, thanks.’
‘No, I didn’t mean it like that.’
We shift the subject to the weather. When I see Amrita, I’ll give her the same super-low-key version of things, and with a bit of luck my weekend adventures won’t have added too much to my reputation. Funnily enough, I think Buzz was right. The suit helps.
Swansea looks nothing like itself. It looks like some town in Norway, remade with Welsh-language road signs. The sea chafes all along the seafront. A contest of salt and ice.
The yacht club is disappointing. The Mumbles is Swansea’s nicest suburb. I was expecting its yacht club to have a little moneyed swagger to it, but no. It lives in one of those buildings created when grey was the only colour, rectangles the only shape.
A white iron balcony daggered with icicles. Single-glazed windows in iron frames.
From the roof, a row of flags stick frozen to their flagpoles. In the yard next door, boats sit on metal trailers, each one swaddled in its winter tarpaulin.
There’s only one person inside the clubhouse, an older man repinning notices to a corkboard. We introduce ourselves. He’s Gwilym Jenkins and he’s happy to help. He asks if we want tea. Bev starts to say no, because she is still worried about not havin
g accomplished enough today. Not having ticked enough rows on her spreadsheet.
I say yes, because I want this man to relax and confide.
He makes tea, very slowly, but he finds us chairs and handles the china with a courtesy that amounts almost to chivalry.
When we’re all done, sitting at a Formica table by a radiator, Bev lays out her photos. She starts to ask her questions.
‘Are you able to identify either of these people? Did either of them use the facilities here?’
I interrupt. I say, ‘Gwilym, these two are Mary Langton and Ali el-Khalifi. We think they took out a joint membership in March 2003. She was murdered a few months later.’
‘Good heavens. Well, I’ll certainly take a look . . .’
He goes off to fetch some records. Soft footsteps on wooden floors. Bev does Bambi eyes at me. I answer her unspoken question.
‘Bev, it was your data that gave us the clue. According to your spreadsheet, Khalifi spent seventy pounds here. Seventy pounds exactly. That doesn’t sound like a drinks bill. It’s too large and too exact. It’s not for boat hire, because they don’t hire boats. So it seemed to me like it had be some kind of membership fee. I called the club here and asked them about their prices. The prices have changed since, but back then the charge for a double membership of the club was seventy pounds. The price for a single was forty-five. For a family, ninety.’
Bev’s mouth has dropped open and her eyes, if possible, have widened.
We don’t, of course, know that Khalifi was necessarily buying the membership for himself and Langton, but the dates would fit with everything else we know about them. That plus, if you look back through the photos we have of Langton, she looked fit and tanned that spring. An outdoorsy sort of tan, that doesn’t reach to the neck. The sort of tan you’d get, almost inadvertently, on a boat out on Swansea Bay. That wasn’t how she looked in her year of exotic dancing. You can never be sure about those things from photos, but it was confirmation of a sort.
Love Story, With Murders Page 26