It’s not like that now. I feel like I always do. Maybe even a bit sharper, a bit clearer. That might not be very sharp or clear by the standards of others, but I am who I am. And as far as I’m concerned, things are okay. I feel my heart beat. Feel the knife in my hand. When I move my feet, I feel them too.
Khalifi, though, is still here. I feel that cold intensification. His chuckling laugh, the pressure of his gaze.
Feel it too much, too intensely.
This isn’t real. It’s illusion.
This isn’t real. It’s psychosis.
In my bathroom cabinet, I have a bottle containing about a hundred and fifty 100-milligram tablets of amisulpride. A second-generation antipsychotic. During my time in hospital, I must have taken pretty much every psychiatric medication known to man, but amisulpride was the only one I ever had much time for. It didn’t conquer my illness, but perhaps it took the edge off it. Introduced some flickering note of doubt. Perhaps that little advantage was what my body and mind needed.
In any case, long after my shrinks thought I was cured, long after they thought I had completed my course of medication, I kept those pills as a safety precaution. Bought more from an Indian pharmacy on the Internet when it first became possible to do things like that. I haven’t touched them in years, but I still know exactly where they are. I carry some in my bag. If I travel, I take a bottle.
I could take a pill, maybe two, and watch Khalifi fade away. Drive away this flash of craziness. Let the world return to normal.
I put my knife back, sit up in bed, breathe deeply. In-two-three, out-two-three. Reach down and massage my feet, until I’m sure I feel them properly. My cuts and burns and bruises help.
I am who I am.
I am all that I am.
And in the process – the breathing, the massaging, the movement – I no longer feel afraid. At least for the moment, I won’t touch those pills. Perhaps if the psychosis gets worse – if Khalifi starts speaking? If I start to see him? – I’ll change my mind. I don’t have a stupid pride about these things. Survival is all that matters. But for now, I’m okay. I’m just me. A kooky detective with an unreliable brain. If a corpse wants to come and visit me in the night, he’s welcome to do so.
I grin at Khalifi, welcoming him for the first time.
He grins back.
The room trembles with laughter. It reminds me of that lovely moment I had with Langton’s head. That lovely, spacious moment. That black and gaping mouth. The feel of bone.
Time passes. I feel comfortable. With Khalifi. With my crazy brain.
I realise too that this particular psychosis isn’t as new as I first thought it. In a way, I’ve always connected too much with the dead. Felt them too much. Felt them in a way that runs far beyond reality.
Strangely – but I am strange – that thought settles me. I feel myself welcoming them all. Mary Langton. Mark Mortimer. Ali el-Khalifi. And others too. Cases from my past: Janet and April Mancini. Stacey Edwards. A night for all souls. The faithful departed.
Me and my crazy head in an empty room.
I get up and go to the bathroom. I fashion another joint, lighting it from the burning candle. Then go back to bed. Plump up the pillows. Sit there smiling in the company of the dead.
Finish my joint.
The chuckling quality in the room has faded to something quieter and more peaceful. But it’s a good sort of peace. A special one. The sort you only get from the dead.
I wonder what Khalifi wants from me, but the truth is I already know. He wants to be with me. He wants me to complete my acts of justice on the men who killed him. And he wants to see me do right by Mary Langton. The only girl he ever truly loved.
I want those things too. We grin at each other, enjoying the communication. At some stage, I don’t know when, I must fall asleep. When my alarm goes off in the middle of a grisly December dawn, I am still sitting up. I ache like hell. And I am all alone in my room.
42
I don’t make it in by eight thirty. Some of my wounds need their dressings changed and it takes longer than I expected. So I text Watkins to tell her I’ll be late and do the job properly. One of the cuts on my hand opens up any time I move it too much, so there’s fresh blood on the bandage by the time I’ve finished. I’m fairly sure that even the Watkinsian Handbook of Personnel Management prohibits you from ripping someone’s head off when they are newly wounded in the line of duty.
I dress with more formality than normal. Skirt, shirt, jacket. Not quite Hobbs-posh, but still. All part of my gossip-suppression strategy. Put a handful of aspirin in my jacket pocket. A couple of amisulpride tablets as well, just in case.
I’m with Watkins in the interview room by eight fifty. She glowers, but doesn’t give me a bollocking. The room is bare. There’s a video camera, a computer screen, a table, a couple of chairs. The place ought to look like the movies, where everything is painted battleship grey and maverick cops beat crap out of the suspects, but mostly it just looks like the sort of thing you have in local government. Budget cuts and equipment compromises.
A technician whose name might be Michael hovers around until Watkins shoos him away.
‘When you’re ready,’ she says to me.
I nod.
Watkins turns the camera on. Gives place, time, names. She’s a little senior-officer awkward about these things. It would have been a routine part of her job once, but the rules and the camera will have changed since then. She’s only doing it now because violence against a police officer is treated more seriously than violence against anyone else.
I look at the photos on-screen. Sequentially, not simultaneously. The evidence you collect is stronger that way, less prone to challenge. If, for example, you identify photograph number three from a group, where you haven’t seen the later photos, it’s strong proof that you’re picking the right person, not merely the person who’s the best-fitting candidate from the ones on offer.
I don’t react to the first three photos. Hamish was a gingery blond. The first three don’t even come close. I just say no decisively and move on.
The video camera makes a difference. You’re always aware of it. You act for it. Auditioning for the courtroom drama which may one day follow.
Number four I need to look at twice. He’s bearded and there’s something about his face shape which is approximately correct. But the eyes are wrong. The face is wrong. I say, ‘No.’
Then number five.
It’s Hamish all right. Younger. Longer haired. But Hamish.
I say, ‘This is one of the two men who tried to kill me. When I saw him on November 27th, his hair was shorter than in this photograph. Additionally, since this photograph was taken, his jaw appears to have been broken and badly reset. At any rate, there is some disturbance to the jawline not depicted in this photo. On that night of the twenty-seventh, I struck this man in the face and I believe, but cannot be certain, that I broke his nose. I would expect his nose to retain some sign of the injury, but cannot be confident of this. I am, however, completely certain of my identification. I do not need to see any further photographs to confirm my opinion.’
Watkins shows me more photographs anyway. Ten more. I say no to them all. She shows me Hamish again, a different photo this time. I repeat my identification.
Watkins nods. ‘Good.’ Turns off the recording equipment. Then, ‘I take it that you are sure, Constable?’
‘Yes. No question. His jaw has been injured since that picture. I’m not sure about the nose, but I thought it worth mentioning.’
I took care to do so that would bring us courtroom brownie points if I was right, but wouldn’t lose anything much if I was wrong.
Anyway. Watkins is satisfied. She tells me what I want to know. ‘His real name is Callum McCormack. He’s got a conviction for armed robbery. He’s wanted for an assault on a police officer in Aberdeen. But he’s been on the wanted list for five years now, so we have to assume a new identity.’
She passes a wodge
of paper to me. McCormack’s record as it appears on our system. There are a couple more photos. Foster homes or institutions for much of his childhood. Joined the Army aged seventeen. Served three years. Then a drink-related assault-and-battery incident, for which he served time and was discharged from the Army. Then in and out of trouble, until the Aberdeen assault, at which point he dropped off our radar completely. No mention of any Scandinavian partners in crime.
‘The car registration number,’ says Watkins. ‘The plates were stolen from a car in Glasgow a week ago.’
She doesn’t spell out the rest because she doesn’t have to. McCormack and the man I still have to call Olaf will have stolen the plates off a car locally, but driven to South Wales with their own legitimate registration plates showing – the stolen ones would instantly have been flagged by cameras and passing police cars. Once they were deep into the Llanthony Valley, beyond the reach of police surveillance, they’d have switched to the stolen plates. Then, if any local had noticed any abnormal activity, they’d have only the wrong plates to report.
‘Where in Glasgow?’ I ask.
Watkins gives me an address. Drumchapel. The name doesn’t mean anything to me.
I shrug.
It’s a dead end. That’s what this is. My killers were professionals who have successfully protected their identities for five years. I’m certain they killed Khalifi, but we have not a shred of evidence to prove it. Although I know damn well that McCormack tried to kill me, we have no evidence that any crime even took place.
A dead end – yet I can’t help but smile like an idiot. I can feel Khalifi’s laughter in the room with me now. So I sit in the interview room, alone with Watkins the Badge and the chuckling spirit of Ali el-Khalifi. And I smile.
Watkins, I imagine, doesn’t realise she’s in here with Khalifi, so she probably assumes she’s here with an idiot. She smiles awkwardly, then says, ‘I hear you and Beverley Rowlands made a breakthrough yesterday.’
For a second or so, all I can remember is the snowy pier jutting out into an empty sea. The breaking of waves and a hover of gulls. I can’t remember what the breakthrough was.
Then I do.
‘The yacht club,’ I say. ‘The two of them signed up together.’
‘Rowlands tells me that you knew beforehand. I gather she wanted to start in Penarth and work her way west.’
‘They were her spreadsheets. I just made one phone call. And I didn’t know. We were lucky, I suppose.’
Watkins makes a noise at that. Not a noise with words. Just a noise.
I say, ‘Khalifi took a holiday in Dubai. Spring 2009.’
‘Yes?’
‘And a holiday in Jordan, May 2010.’
‘Your point being?’
‘He used to go to Spain. His holiday destinations changed.’
Watkins’s face says so what? She’s on the edge of angry, but her tents are never pitched far from that fierce edge.
‘Maybe it wasn’t Dubai he was interested in. Maybe they weren’t holidays.’ Watkins doesn’t do or say anything much, so I continue. ‘Dubai is just down the road from Abu Dhabi. And his holiday dates happened to coincide with IDEX 2009. That’s the International Defence Exhibition. The biggest arms fair in the Middle East.’
Watkins finds her voice now. ‘And Jordan?’
‘SOFEX. The Special Operations Forces Exhibition. The dates match.’ He also travelled to Doha, the scene of another major arms fair. The dates for that trip didn’t coincide with the fair, but presumably the city remained a good place to meet the middlemen and buyers. I’d guess that Lausanne, Vienna, and Cairo see their share of Middle Eastern arms traders too.
‘So your theory is that Mortimer wanted to expose illegal arms trading, but Khalifi wanted to indulge in it? Mortimer was framed for a drug bust as a way to shut him up. Khalifi simply set about building his own contacts. He wanted to do what Barry Precision was doing, but take the profits for himself?’
‘It’s a theory, yes. Khalifi had everything he needed: the technical expertise to replicate anything that Barry was doing. Engineering contacts all over the UK. Fluent Arabic. He’d have been perfect. Better than Barry Precision, in fact. They attracted Mortimer’s suspicions because so much of what they made was dual use. In the end, there was no innocent explanation available.’
Watkins thinks about this. Draws the same conclusions I do.
‘He’d have been perfect, wouldn’t he? One of the fattest contact books in the industry. An academic job which would give him cover. And as you say, the Arabic.’
I nod. ‘If I’d been him, I’d have placed one order here, another one there, a third one there. Not even all in the UK, necessarily. He had dealings with manufacturers from further afield too. Perhaps he was hoping to build his own virtual arms company. Anyone looking at the output of any single firm would never have identified the trade that was taking place. But from the end user’s point of view, what’s not to like? British- and European-engineered components with all the hassle removed.’
‘That’s speculation.’
‘Yes, but verifiable.’
And easy to verify. We simply track every firm on Khalifi’s contact list. Ask if he was involved in any recent orders. Get the data on all such orders and pass it over to Stuart Brotherton. If Brotherton says the orders look suitable for armaments, then our current speculation will turn to solid fact.
Watkins makes some notes. ‘Good. That’s easily done. I’ll get that actioned immediately.’
I say something neutral. My theory remains to be proven, but I’ll be surprised if I’ve got it wrong. Good Saint Mark came to his engineering buddy Ali worried about an illicit trade. The bad man Khalifi thought he saw a route to making his fortune. Neither of them realised the dangers they were getting into. Clever fools, the pair of them.
And it’s odd. I like Khalifi as a corpse, get on with him very well. But I’d have detested him when he was alive. Loathed him. He was no better than Prothero. Selling guns to dictators, because he wanted a more expensive car.
Watkins’s thoughts turn back to the murder itself. ‘Let’s assume your idea proves correct. You think that when Barry Precision found out what Khalifi was up to, they decided to have him killed?’
‘Maybe. Yes, I don’t know.’
Khalifi was in competition with Barry Precision, certainly, but he was also in competition with Saadawi and his peers. Either of those forces might have ordered the killing. Or the two of them acting together. Or something else. We may never know.
Watkins nods as she traces through the logic of this.
‘But Prothero did have eight mobile phones,’ I point out. ‘There’s no way he’s just an innocent businessman.’
‘And Dunbar? Khalifi’s other colleagues and contacts?’
Dunbar, I guess, is not much more than a fuckwit. As for Khalifi’s other contacts, I doubt if any of them knew much. Perhaps McKelvey guessed something, but I doubt if he knew the whole thing. I don’t think he knew about gunrunning or murder. His wasn’t that sort of silence.
I say these things, adjusting vocabulary as necessary.
Watkins nods again. She’s been sitting on the table while we’ve talked. Now she gets up. She’s wearing a pinstriped jacket, trousers, and a shirt in some kind of aubergine colour. Some sort of shiny fabric, which might look nice, but only if it was worn by somebody completely else in some completely other way. I prefer Watkins when she’s fierce and monochrome.
She says, ‘That’s very good work.’
She says more than that too. Words of praise. I nod and look down at my hands. It’s what I do when I’m getting a bollocking, but the technique is adaptable. It works both ways.
Eventually she stops, changes tack.
She tells me that Khalifi’s mother is coming to Cardiff soon, and did I still want to see her? I say yes.
Then she says, ‘How long have you been a Detective Constable?’
That’s one of those tricky questions. It means a
rranging my life into years and dates and reading them off, like figures from an electricity meter. But I figure it out.
‘I joined the force in November 2006,’ I say. ‘I switched to the CID as soon as I could.’
Taking account of my training period, that means I’ve been in the CID about a year and a half.
‘You’ll take your Detective Sergeant exams when you can, I imagine?’
Another tricky one. A question about the future. I’ve never quite understood normal people’s relationship to time. Most people seem riveted by questions about what might happen to them in a year or two or twenty. Not me. Most of the time, I find it hard to get my head round what might happen next week. I don’t remember much about my past. I’ve certainly never given a moment’s thought to my Detective Sergeant exams. Why would I?
I don’t say that, though. I say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You ought to.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you discussed your career direction with anyone? At a senior level, I mean. DCI Jackson? DCI Matthews? DCI Howells?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Well, we ought to do it. Lunch maybe? Are you free today?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. If you come by at twelve thirty, we’ll go somewhere.’
I nod. ‘Okay. Thank you.’
She nods. Gestures at the bandage on my hand. ‘You’re healing up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Well. I’ll see you later then.’
She stomps off. She probably has to be extra horrible to someone, because she’s been nice to me. She’s left me with the bundle of paper on McCormack. My copy, I guess. There’s nothing very useful there, but I take it anyway.
I finger the pills in my pocket. Crunch up an aspirin. Check that the amisulprides are there, which they are.
Khalifi’s presence hasn’t gone exactly, but he’s not here the way he was. I remember the time on the stairwell round at the Engineering Faculty. When I stumbled. Wondered about morning sickness. It wasn’t that. It was Khalifi. The first jostling manifestation of his presence. He doesn’t need to jostle now. He’s just tagging along.
Love Story, With Murders Page 28