And when I say it, I try to figure out what I feel. Is this love? Do I feel as a person ought to when they’re in love? And if I do, does that mean that Buzz and I are forever? That we need to get married, have children, buy a nice house in a pleasant district, and, in general, that I need to model myself on Gentle Jenny with bread on the sideboard and a bun in the oven?
Those thoughts make me dizzy. And some problems don’t need immediate solution. Buzz, I hope, knows me well enough not to force the issue.
I haven’t told him, or anyone, about my lunch with Watkins. Nor will I. I hope she finds someone.
Khalifi’s mother does come to Cardiff. I guess there are forms to sign and things to organise, but she speaks almost no English. I pick her up from Heathrow along with a police interpreter. The mother, Fatima, is veiled and wears sandals over bare feet. I doubt she’s ever seen a northern winter. Her face is lined with the sort of wrinkles that go beyond age into some kind of other state altogether.
When we cross the Severn Bridge into Wales, her eyes stare out over the estuary, with anxiety, or sadness, or astonishment, or maybe something else altogether. I say, ‘Welcome to Wales,’ and the interpreter doesn’t bother to translate.
I’m with Fatima about two days all told. Lend her a pair of socks and a thick cardigan. I’m with her as she enters her dead son’s apartment. With her as we drive up to Llanishen. With her as we go to the Muslim graveyard, where the graves lie perpendicular to Mecca and the headstones are as simple as possible, because orthodox Islam frowns on excess adornment. We have a bunch of flowers bought from a local garage. Carnations, a mixture of white, pink, and yellow. Fatima lays them reverentially. We stand by the grave for about fifteen minutes, until the cold drives us away.
A few times, I try to have a conversation with her. Never get far. At first I think this is a failure on my part. Only later do I realise that this is maybe what Fatima needs. To spend these days in silence. A pilgrim visiting the monuments of her son’s lost life. On the afternoon of my last day with her, I drive her down to the Mumbles. To the yacht club. The grey, uneasy sea.
‘He used to go sailing here. With a girl he liked. They were happy together,’ I tell her.
The interpreter translates.
Fatima says nothing, but she gazes out to sea, the fringes of her headscarf pulling in the breeze. As we get in the car to drive away, she pats my hand, then squeezes it. Her brown eyes find mine. She says, in English, ‘Thank you.’ Then again, ‘Thank you.’
I hug her. And that evening, when I drop her off at her cheapie hotel, I say it’ll be someone else looking after her the next day. She tries to say thank you again, but she can’t, and this time there are tears in her eyes.
And when I’m back at work, I make a call I’ve been putting off. One I’m slightly scared of. But I do it anyway: phone Jack Yorath, the DCI whose name Penry gave me. Trustworthy Jack, Brian Penry’s pick of the old-timers.
I say who I am and ask if I can meet for a drink.
‘Fiona Griffiths? The Fiona Griffiths? Tom Griffiths’s girl?’
‘That’s me, yes. It’s my father I wanted to talk about.’
‘Bloody hell. Okay, yes, I’d be happy to talk.’
We agree to meet that evening. His house, because it’s more private than a pub. I tell him that he needs to not mention this to anyone. Not even any former colleagues. Not for any reason at all. He says okay.
We meet that evening. Yorath lives just outside Caerphilly, a nice house, nicely looked after. We sit in a little snug-come-office off a tiled hall. From a room somewhere behind us, someone plays scales on a piano, interrupted now and again by a snatch of briskly delivered Bach.
Yorath offers whiskey or tea. I say water. He gets that and drinks whiskey himself.
‘Bloody hell, Fiona Griffiths,’ he says.
I let him inspect me. He thinks what everyone thinks: I don’t look much like my dad. I suddenly realise I want to trust someone. Maybe Yorath could be that person.
I say as much. ‘Chief Inspector –’
‘Jack. Just Jack.’
‘Jack.’ He’s sitting in a green leather chair. I’m on some kind of upholstered bench, which is more comfortable than it sounds. The room has low lighting, some lever arch files, plenty of books. ‘I don’t know if you can guess why I’m here.’
‘Not exactly. But a daughter of Tom Griffiths in the CID? That’s not exactly your standard police background.’
‘No.’
Professional interrogators – as Yorath and I are – don’t get uncomfortable with silence. The empty moments can be as revealing as everything else. Yorath just sips from his whiskey, while Bach skitters behind us.
I say, ‘You probably know that I was adopted.’
Of course he does. The adoption process created plenty of paperwork. All that paperwork ended up in police records, and Yorath’s career was spent combating organised crime. He could hardly not have known. Quite likely part of his curiosity in seeing me was to find out what I looked like.
‘I know my father had his issues with the police, to put it mildly –’
‘You can say that again –’
‘But he was a good father to me. He and Mam, both of them.’
‘I don’t doubt that.’
‘I’m not here to – I’m not looking to nail my father for some offence he may have committed twenty years ago.’
‘No, I wouldn’t expect that.’
‘But I need to know where I came from. Dad’s story has to do with me appearing mysteriously one Sunday, just found sitting in his car.’
‘Outside chapel,’ adds Yorath, smiling at the thought of my pa in the house of the Lord.
‘I don’t believe that story. I think Dad knows much more than he lets on.’
‘I bet.’
‘I can’t ask him direct, or if I do he’ll just give me his standard patter. If I ask any of his old friends, they might be helpful, but they’d always let Dad know I’m asking. And if Dad hears I’m digging, my chances of finding anything out will disappear completely.’
Yorath nods. ‘You haven’t been in the job that long, not yet. But when you have been, when you’ve put in the years, you get to know your quarry. Your dad was the most talented criminal we ever chased. I shouldn’t say this really, but me and some of the older guys ended up admiring him. It wasn’t just his organisation, though that was always amazing, it was the way his associates never dropped him in it. Those things go beyond discipline. It was a kind of love he inspired. Funny word to use, that, but I’m sure I’m right. I think people loved him.’
I nod. They did. I’m sure they did.
‘You’re also right that if the truth is out there somewhere’ – Yorath waves his whiskey glass somewhere in the general direction of Cardiff – ‘it’ll disappear the instant your dad hears you’re on the trail.’
‘So I’m here to ask if you have any thoughts at all. I’ve read most of the files. I’ve got some more reading to do yet, but I also know that there’s stuff that never goes into the files. Things you know, things you might think, even wild speculation.’
Yorath raises his eyebrows. ‘This was twenty years ago.’
‘More. I’m twenty-six now. I was maybe two and a half when I was found.’ Yorath’s face starts to do the maths. ‘August 1986. That’s when I appeared.’
Yorath’s face is a mask, but a mask that conceals thought. He’s still for a moment or two, then puts aside his whiskey, grabs a pad and pen, swivels the light.
‘Nineteen-eighty-six. Tom Griffiths. Everything from hard truth to wild speculation. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘His car business. Stealing cars. Giving them makeovers. Selling them on. That was in full flow back then. Turnover? I don’t know. I’m going to say five million. Profits? Don’t know. Let’s say one million. Total people involved? Don’t know, but must have been dozens all told. Inner circle? Not many. Five, six. Probably people you know. He always kept them close, pe
ople like . . .’
‘Emrys Thomas,’ I say softly. ‘He used to babysit for us.’
‘Emrys Thomas as your babysitter.’ Yorath laughs and shakes his head. ‘He was a kind of chief-operating-officer type. Not the strategist. Not the general. But the guy who made everything else tick.’
He starts listing other members of the inner circle. Names I’m familiar with. Dad’s intimate friends. Familes I know, homes I’ve visited.
‘I know them. Dad’s still close to them all.’
‘I bet.’
Yorath has been covering his pad with the basic data as he’s been speaking. He strikes a thick line under it as his pen hovers over the next section of the page.
‘Then the sidelines. Drugs? It’d be the obvious thing. We always assumed there’d be some kind of drugs activity and I think there was. Ecstasy? Possibly. The drug was just starting to become big then. Your pa would have had the infrastructure needed to distribute it. We’re pretty sure he distributed cannabis. Buying from the international smugglers, taking care of local distribution. But we never found links to anything harder than that. We looked certainly, but –’
‘Dad hates hard drugs. He wouldn’t have touched them. Mam would have killed him if he had.’
Yorath laughs again.
‘Okay. But mid-eighties, he’d have been at his peak, just about, so I’m going to say your pa did one or two big deals at least. Maybe it wasn’t a regular thing for him, but you know if someone approached him, needing to offload a big supply of cannabis coming in, I don’t think he’d have refused.’
I nod. ‘You’re right. He wouldn’t have said no.’
‘Okay, so you want to know names. Associates, the inner circle? Same as before. But then there’d have been the international end of things too, the Howard Markses, those guys. But he probably didn’t know distributors elsewhere. The way the international sellers operate, they don’t want their buyers to know each other. Safer for everyone. So he’d have had some offshore contacts, but not many and not close. Turnover involved? I don’t know. Let’s say two or three big deals, worth a million or two each. Profits on those things maybe fifty percent of turnover.’
I nod again, but thoughtfully. Dad is rich, but he’s not as rich as Yorath’s numbers would imply. He’s always spent money freely, but that means changing his Jag every couple of years, building swimming pools he never used, buying single-malt whiskey back when he drank the stuff, buying huge bunches of flowers for Mam. But that’s not the kind of stuff that eats a million or two a year. I would say Dad must have a pot of money stashed away somewhere, except that Dad has never been a save-for-tomorrow kind of guy.
Yorath isn’t interested in my reservations. His pen continues to walk across the paper.
‘Construction. Municipal contracts. Development permits. There was a lot of money in Cardiff back then. The construction business was always dirty. If anyone was skimming something, then your dad was. We had a big investigation into it. There was one guy, some middle-management type, who came to us as a whistle-blower. We took him seriously, did what we could, came up with nothing.’
‘Did he name my dad?’
‘No.’
‘Links to Dad’s inner circle?’
‘No. Wild speculation, remember?’
‘Okay. What else?’
‘Prostitution? We drew a blank.’
I agree with that. ‘Mam would have killed him. She almost killed him when he opened the lap-dancing clubs.’
‘Handling stolen goods? Definitely. Any fence in Cardiff would have needed your father’s say-so to operate. He’d have had his cut. We even had little bits and bobs of evidence. Almost enough for a prosecution. At the time, we decided against it because the top brass wanted to get a conviction for something big, and thought they’d achieve that by keeping your dad in play. That was the wrong decision. We should have gone with anything we could.
‘And then, the bits and pieces. Let’s say someone wanted to send a warning to someone. Or wanted to extract protection money. Anything like that. I think your pa would have seen Cardiff as his turf. If people didn’t go via your dad for that sort of thing, they’d have regretted it.’
‘Yes.’ It seems strange here, sitting with Yorath, in this comfortable room, talking about my dad in this way. There’s a question sitting alongside us now, one that I have to ask. ‘In terms of really serious stuff, I mean the worst things . . .’
‘Murder? That wasn’t his house style. When he was younger, working his way up, who knows? We never had anything on him. Never heard rumours. But that was the point in a way. No one ever told stories against Tom Griffiths. It’s like everyone knew he was at the centre of things, but you’d never get anyone on the stand to actually say so.’
‘How much violence was there?’ I whisper.
Yorath shrugs. ‘Enough.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning exactly that. If your father or the guys around him decided someone needed their legs broken or their kneecaps smashed, it would have happened. A routine operational decision, I imagine. But in a funny way, those things cut both ways. We never had a huge violent crime problem in Cardiff. Never any real gangs. Your dad was the gang. People knew what they’d get if they crossed Tom Griffiths, so they didn’t cross him. If I had to guess the total number of punishment-style beatings we handled through the eighties, I probably wouldn’t get to more than a dozen. If that. Most big cities had a far worse problem than we did.
‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. He was a criminal, your dad, and belonged behind bars. But he wasn’t . . . I don’t know, he wasn’t a savage.’
I smile lopsidedly at that. Not a savage. That’s not much of a compliment to the man who was raised me so lovingly for the past twenty-four years, but maybe it’s the one he deserves. A sentimentalist, who used to go to chapel and who still always cries at weepies. A man whose affection for me and my sisters is entirely genuine and always full-hearted. Who has been a steady husband to my mother. Who built the biggest criminal operation in South Wales. Who handed out punishment beatings the way corporations hand out stock options. Who might or might not have committed murder while he was ‘working his way up.’ Whose prosecution witnesses melted away on the witness stand.
This criminal, my father.
Yorath and I talk for another ninety minutes. By the time we’re done, I have a huge wodge of yellow paper, covered with Yorath’s thick scribbles. Almost none of what he’s given me is verifiable. But that’s the point. The reason why you need to talk to the cop, not just read the notes.
At the end, I blunder out onto the street.
There are crusted ridges of snow still, to remind us what we had, but mostly the town looks like it always looks at this time of year. A new weirdness this, the weirdness of the normal.
And even though I know nothing, have no tangible fact to walk away with, I feel like I’ve really started. Begun an investigation whose target is me. I drive away from Caerphilly certain that my father’s secrets are my own. That he knew my biological father, knew my biological mother. That he knows – or guesses – the reason I turned so crazy in later life.
Perhaps he’s been a better father for that knowledge. More protective. More loving. More strategic and more thoughtful.
I’m not angry with Dad. Whatever I find out, I think I won’t be angry. But his secrets are mine too. And I intend to find them.
45
Stirfry trundles on.
When I get back into the swing of the morning briefings, I find things have changed. Kirby is there every single time. Adding the senior officer gloss to Watkins’s parade-ground bark.
The ‘people of interest’ have been swept away into a single corner of the noticeboards – all 288 of them. The photos of Khalifi and Langton still dominate. The red love-heart too. But now there’s a whole slew of material being generated by the Barry investigation. More names, data files, lists of statements and interviews. The operation now has a third full-time data of
ficer.
Some key facts are pouring in.
The biggest: Stuart Brotherton has sent a preliminary report which confirms that Barry Precision was, beyond doubt, manufacturing arms. Not entire weapons systems, but spare parts for other people’s systems. Gun barrels for heavy artillery. Firing pins. The gears and calibration equipment needed for range adjustment. Laser-cut ballistic-grade steel of the sort used for tank armour. Self-sealing fuel tanks. IED blast protection gear. Suspension and chassis systems built to the kind of specifications you’d need for an armoured car. The hydraulic gear needed to raise a multiple rocket launch system to its firing position. Anti-blast screens that just so happen to fit the multiple rocket launch systems in most widespread use across the Middle East.
There are still a handful of suspect items where Brotherton hasn’t been able to track down their likely use, but his investigations continue. Equally, in some cases, it seems that the items sold would have needed some modest reengineering to make them fully functional as weapons-parts, but the sophisticated work had already been done.
By Barry Precision.
Which has no export licence.
Watkins has also had a trio of DCs investigating the firm’s buyers, who existed all across North Africa and the Middle East. Its biggest customer was Saadawi, whose eldest brother buys weapons for the Egyptian military. And whose family owns a slew of construction and trading interests, primarily in Egypt, but operating across the entire Middle East.
Numerous other buyers also look as dodgy as hell. The Libyan buyer was an affiliate of the state-owned Libyan oil company. Its purchases were theoretically all drilling-equipment related, but Brotherton says that at least 50 percent of the items involved had clear military use.
The Lebanese buyer: a trading company with links to the Syrian regime.
The Saudi buyer: a probable intermediary for a putative Yemeni end buyer.
My hunch about Khalifi is also proving to be right. Watkins has had officers contact every firm on Khalifi’s sizeable Rolodex. We’ve sought information about what he talked to them about. In particular, any orders he helped arrange for them.
Love Story, With Murders Page 30