Gwilym returns, with a membership ledger. He leafs through the years. Finds the right year, the right month. There were only three new memberships that March. The first of them belongs to Langton and Khalifi. Two signatures side by side on the page.
Evidence.
Bev is awed and relieved in equal measure. Relieved because she’s escaped the Wrath of Watkins. Awed because she credits me with some sort of divine inspiration. A divinity I don’t possess.
I say, ‘Gwilym, we’re not sure how often Ali came here, but I’m guessing that you don’t have a huge North African membership . . .’
Not huge, no. Gwilym phones a colleague and we hear him talking about a ‘brown gentleman.’ The colleague – Delyth – says she’ll come on over.
She does. She’s forty-something, knows everything, remembers everything. Ali el-Khalifi never owned a boat, but he used to borrow one from a Swansea-based friend of his. He and Mary Langton used to come every weekend or so, ‘for a while’ – we think probably a couple of months. Then less often. Then not at all. Khalifi and Langton were definitely a couple. ‘Oh, they were quite sweet on each other,’ Delyth tells us. ‘He was a terrible sailor, to be honest. And she wasn’t any better. They’d get into trouble if there was any breeze up.’
She recounts a hard-to-follow story about a time when the pair of them brought their boat back with a spinnaker only, after lowering the mainsail because the wind was too much for them. That sounds sensible enough to me – and to Bev – but Delyth and Gwilym are laughing hard.
I ask, ‘Do you think they stopped coming because they weren’t cut out for the water. Or because their relationship ended?’
Delyth isn’t sure. Gwilym has no idea. But there’s an upcoming Christmas dinner at which there’ll be plenty of old hands. Bev says she’ll aim to be there. I evade.
We don’t really need to take a statement, but Bev wants to get all the main points in writing. I leave her to do just that – sitting there with Gwilym and Delyth over a police notebook and cooling tea. I get a glass of water from the kitchen and swallow a couple of aspirin. While I’m still in the warm, I find a number for Marr-Phillips’s office and call it. Arrange an interview. His secretary takes the call in an efficient, unflustered way. Then I walk outside and over the road. There’s a little car park. A clutter of food and tourist kiosks which might be busy in season but are deserted now. A concrete ramp leading down into the water. The slope is thickly armoured in plates of snow and ice. I don’t step onto it. Walk instead to the end of a little pier to the right. Blue iron balustrades. An orange life buoy.
I try to feel Khalifi and Langton here. The lecturer and the student.
He: a little uncertain. An immigrant who never quite settled. Who never quite realised that the uncertainty he felt didn’t come from others, but from within. Who kept on trying to prove himself because he never quite had the confidence to be himself.
Langton was different. I don’t know what made her turn to exotic dancing, but the spring that she went sailing with Khalifi was surely the time when she turned things around. Quit the clubs, stopped dancing. Remembered that she was a middle-class English kid who rode horses, chased hockey balls, and wrote essays about Dylan Thomas. Out here, by these grey waters and chattering halliards, those spangly mini-skirted nights must have seemed a million miles away.
You’d say that Khalifi’s was the relationship which saved her life. Rescued it from that adventure into darkness. You’d say that, except that within a few months Langton was dead. Not much of a rescue if your leg ends up in a Cyncoed freezer, your arms in a plumbers’ merchant’s roof, your head in a barrel of lawn mower oil.
I’ve been missing Langton, I realise suddenly. I like the thought of her and Khalifi together. It’s like when two people who are special to you shyly tell you they’ve been on a date, that it went well, that they’re seeing each other again.
I want to reward her with the only gifts I have to offer. Investigation, arrest, prosecution, conviction.
The girl who chased hockey balls and was crap at sailing. I’m smiling at that thought when I hear Bev walking over the yard toward me. I turn to her, still smiling.
‘Got what you need?’
She nods, waves her notebook contentedly at me.
We drive back to Cardiff and night has fallen long before we arrive. It’s been a long day for my tired body, and I ask Bev if she minds driving me all the way home. She doesn’t mind and drops me at the door. I ask her in, but she says no. I’m relieved to be alone.
This is the end game now.
Langton.
Khalifi.
Mortimer.
Their ghosts are bustling now. Restless. Their satisfaction rests with us, the living. I make a cup of peppermint tea and drink it in my dark kitchen. Lights off, heating off. I’m still in my warm clothes. Crunch some aspirin with the last of my tea.
This is the end game now and I have scores to settle.
41
The night is a strange one. Buzz wants me to spend the night at his place. Mam and Dad want me to go back there. I know that I need to be on my own. Need it for many reasons.
One, I want a joint. The last time I even had a joint between my lips was the moment just before I threw it into a tank of petrol. There’s some strange way in which I need a long uncluttered smoke to vanquish the memory of the blaze that followed. The memory itself I can handle, but I need to soften its edges. Smudge it into something a little less than real. There are probably better ways of doing that, but marijuana is my way.
Two, and on a related point, this cold weather won’t have been any good for my marijuana plants. The poor things have been trying to get by with heat lamps set to come on for just twelve hours a day. They’ll need more than that in these temperatures. I go to my potting shed, check water levels, adjust the timers on the heat lamps, and help myself to a little cube of hash by way of reward. My plants aren’t too happy with me, but they’re not at death’s door either. They’ll survive.
Three, I need space. Need to feel myself in control and alone. It’s thinking time, but it’s also being time. Being constantly with other people places a pressure of normality on me that I can’t always bear. Here, alone, I can be the way I am. My version of ordinary.
And finally, tonight, I can feel the clamour of the dead. The restless ghosts. Tonight, they must have their proper share of my attention. The living can wait.
I crumble resin on tobacco. Plenty of the former, not much of the latter. I’ll smoke only one joint tonight, but I’ll make it a rich one.
Rich and fat.
Lights on, heating up. Start running a bath. Talk to Buzz by phone. He knows I need time alone, but wants to know I’m okay. I say I am.
He tells me that Watkins was angrier than anyone had ever seen her after interviewing Prothero this afternoon. The guy had brought not one, but two solicitors up from London. Two glossy solicitors from some magic-circle law firm. Fuckers with money. They both seem to have been well briefed, long in advance of our raid.
‘Apparently they’re going to sue us if we don’t have everything back at Barry Precision within forty-eight hours.’
Removing data takes much longer than that if you do it properly, recording where it’s come from and how it fits together. Even a week would be good going.
‘They’ll lose if they sue us,’ I say.
‘Yes. But we’ll still be sued.’
He’s right. If we’re sued and we lose some portion of the case, or are adjudged faulty on some narrow technical point, we may end up having to pay costs. Legal costs can quickly rip huge holes in our budgets. A couple of stories in the local press about overzealous cops recklessly placing Welsh jobs at risk could be a career wrecker for Watkins.
Buzz chuckles. I don’t.
We talk twenty minutes more, affectionate nonsense mostly, and hang up.
My bath has grown cold, so I run half of it out and start refilling it with hot water, when my phone rings again. Not B
uzz. Not Mam or Dad.
Watkins.
I turn the tap off and answer.
‘Fiona Griffiths.’
‘Fiona. It’s Rhiannon.’
I had no idea that we were on first-name terms now, but I don’t pass comment. In any case, Watkins has news. Nothing about Prothero. Nothing about Dunbar. This is about Hamish.
‘The blood on your coat. We’ve got a DNA match,’ she says. ‘No address, but we’ve got a name and a picture.’
I know what she wants to know, so I tell her. ‘I’m happy to look at photos.’
‘The light can’t have been great.’
‘It wasn’t. But we had lights on inside the car most of the time.’ Before they faded, that is. Faded into the night I was never meant to leave. ‘I’m certain I can identify him. If the photo is even halfway like him.’
‘It’s a 2005 photo. He’s been on the run since then.’
Watkins is deliberately not telling me much. It would be easy to nudge me in the right direction. Give me enough information that I could be sure to pick the right candidate from a parade of photos. But Watkins isn’t that kind of copper. I tell her again that I’ll be sure of fingering him. And she’s already told me to expect the photo of a man looking five years younger than the man whose nose I broke. I’d quite like to ask about facial hair – the Hamish I saw was clean-shaven and might not always have been – but I don’t.
Watkins says, ‘Good. Is eight thirty tomorrow too early?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Then come down to the interview rooms first thing. Don’t go to your desk first.’
‘Okay.’
If I went to my desk first, the office grapevine might well find a way to prime me with the name or the face the moment I got there. And if Watkins wants this clean, that’s fine. We’ll do it clean. We may or may not be able to secure a conviction for what happened to me on that mountainside, but it’s still better to do these things and to do them properly. You never know.
‘I’ve checked Hinton’s call log. She received a call from a mobile, pay-as-you-go, used once, then apparently discarded.’
‘They’re good. They’re very careful.’
It’s sort of nice to know that they called Sophie, not vice versa. Hinton needs a slapping, maybe, but not necessarily jail time.
‘Yes. Look, I’ve been having words with my SIO.’ SIO: Senior Investigating Officer. In this case, Robert Kirby. Watkins sounds stressed, but I already know what she’s going to tell me. That the team tasked with investigating my attempted murder is coming up with no meaningful leads. That Kirby wants to shift resources away to Stirfry proper.
I say, ‘I don’t care. I mean, I want the men arrested and jailed. But we’re more likely to get them for the Khalifi killing. We’ve got more to go on there.’
‘Yes.’
‘We can’t even prove a crime took place.’
‘I’ve told Kirby to give me more time. He’s agreed.’ She pauses in case I want to say thank you, but I resist the temptation. Then, ‘I appreciated your help today.’
‘I didn’t really help. I mostly sat around.’
There’s a moment’s silence. One of those shared telephone silences that seem to expand forever. As though you have your ear pressed up against some instrument that lets you listen directly to the emptiness of space. A background crackle that reminds you how little you can truly hear.
That’s how it is for me anyway. I don’t know what it’s like for Watkins.
Then she says, ‘You can help tomorrow.’ There’s a line of steel in her voice when she says that. Watkinsian steel.
We ring off.
I finish running my bath.
Get in.
I’m still wearing dressings but they can get wet. The hot water is painful on my more battered surfaces, but good overall. I take a moment to adjust, then start to relax.
I’m about to light my joint, but I don’t. Someone – Mam, I think – gave me a scented vanilla candle in a glass jar. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I put it by my bath. I’ve never used it before, but I light it now. Get out of the bath, dripping, and turn the overhead lamp off.
Light my joint. Take the first puff or two. Long inhalations.
The sweet, sweet weed.
I call Buzz. I say, ‘We should have some candles by your bath. We could take baths together.’
‘I don’t have a bath, remember? I only have a shower.’
Oh yes. I’d forgotten that. ‘Well, maybe we should get one.’
‘Maybe we should.’
We say good night again.
I finish my joint.
Go to the kitchen, hunt down some food.
Slim pickings, it would appear, but I have a jar of pesto sauce and some crackers. I put pesto on the crackers and eat until I can’t be bothered to eat anymore.
Clear up.
Do my teeth. Bed.
I sleep easily for once. The bath and the joint probably helped. That, plus a long day in pursuit of a short night.
I sleep easily and without dreams.
Then, after maybe two or three hours, something wakes me abruptly. The sudden, jolting wakefulness that arrives with a wash of adrenaline. Of fear.
At first I don’t do anything at all. Just listen into the silence, seeing if I can detect the thing that woke me in the first place.
I can’t.
Aside from the candle that’s still burning in the bathroom, there’s no light on anywhere in the house. A street light outside beyond curtained windows. I can see the shape of the windows. A glimmer of mirror.
I breathe through my mouth. I don’t move a muscle.
There is someone in the room with me. Someone here now.
I don’t know where they are. I don’t know how they woke me. But there is someone here now and I am terrified.
I don’t sleep with a gun anymore. I’d like to, of course, but part of Miss Griffiths’s Be-More-Normal Project involved hiding my gun in a Pembrokeshire sheepfold. The 460 bullets I have in a locked drawer of the ops room are as useless as tinsel.
Whoever is here isn’t moving. He’s being very silent.
Perhaps I made a sound when I woke up. Perhaps he’s waiting for me to move. And I’m not fond of waiting games.
Although I gave up my gun, I didn’t leave myself defenceless. In a holster made of sellotape and kitchen towel behind the brass bars at the head of my bed, there is a knife. The knife was originally an ordinary kitchen knife. A paring knife with a four-inch blade. Black-handled. Not particularly expensive.
But there are a couple of Gypsies who knock on doors round here from time to time. They have a grinding wheel in the back of their van and sharpen stuff for cash. Pruning hooks. Lawn mower blades. And knives.
I got them to sharpen my knife till it had the devil’s own edge, the devil’s own point.
I got, from a place online, a rubber finger loop that allows you to attach the knife to your finger, so even if you lose your grip on the handle in the course of a fight, you don’t drop it. It remains attached. Ready.
So I slide my bare arm through the bars of the bed to reach the knife. Find the handle. Find the finger loop. I come back with the knife in a fighting grip. Ready for whatever follows.
I remember Lev’s words.
Don’t trust the stab. The blade isn’t long enough to do reliable damage, and in any case, the heart is trickier to reach than you think. Shielded. You have to go in at the right place and angle to stand a chance.
Rely on the slashing movement. The face or neck ideally, but really it’s okay to land the stroke anywhere. Draw blood. Stay out of reach. Let the bleeding do your work. You need a lot of blood. Much more than you think. A person contains four or five litres of blood and you might need a litre of that splattering your home furnishings before your antagonist is seriously weakened. So be patient, take your time, wait for the moment.
And I do.
I hold, as far as possible, my original sleeping position
, my original posture. Keep my striking arm clear of the bedclothes. Listen and watch.
Listen to silence.
Watch emptiness.
Something’s strange about this silence. I’m still completely certain that there’s someone here, but silence of this intensity is unnatural. No creak of a floorboard, no suppressed breathing.
The energy in the room feels weird too. As though the space has acquired a chilly pressing quality. A solidification of the emptiness. A cold incandescence.
I don’t know how long passes like this.
Not long probably. When you watch with this intensity, each second seems to stretch forever.
And then I realise.
Realise and laugh.
My laughter is silent and I don’t let go of my knife, but I understand what’s going on. Yes, there is someone present in my room. But the person in question is a dead one. Khalifi. It’s his spirit that I’m feeling here.
If my first response is relief, my second is terror. It comes to me as sharp and fierce as I’ve ever known it. Sharper and fiercer than anything I felt up on that snowy mountainside.
It’s not fear of the dead. Far from it. I like the dead. I’m comfortable in their presence.
Rather, it’s a fear of my own head. A fear of craziness.
Ghosts and dead presences don’t exist. What I have here isn’t a spirit from the other side, it’s psychosis. Madness. And that madness, the sort I had as a teenager, killed me – pretty literally killed me – for two years. I’m terrified that that illness is returning now. And that if it does, I’m not strong enough to stop it.
For a few minutes – five? ten? – I lie trapped in my own alarm. Is my Cotard’s returning? Am I going mad again?
Then logic, the sweet cold stream of reason, starts to wash those fears away.
When I was a teenager, I lost all bodily sensation. I couldn’t really feel hot or cold. I couldn’t really feel my heart beat except as some repetitive tapping from an adjoining room. I never felt my feet. Never. They didn’t belong to me at all. Some sufferers with Cotard’s report ‘seeing’ their flesh crawl with maggots. I never had that, but I used to turn my hand over again and again, scared I would find that seething crawl of decomposition.
Love Story, With Murders Page 27