Gentle Jennies don’t go to these places. This is not the Fiona Griffiths he wants me to be.
The possible future mother of Buzz’s possible future children stands waiting to hear their father’s verdict.
It doesn’t come. Lev says, ‘You are David Brydon, yes?’
‘Yes.’ The same rust. Cobwebs.
‘David, I think we go to the pub now. You and me.’
And all of a sudden, the biology flips again. To a place I’d not thought possible.
I’m standing in the room, not two yards from either man, and I’m not there at all. There’s some male-to-male thing being exchanged which bypasses me completely. I think Buzz is trying to make sense of Lev. To find the fighter in that unremarkable exterior. Lev is figuring out Buzz. Both men have been soldiers and they are soldiers again now.
Their eyes are military and I am not really here.
I think I say something, but my voice is without sound. Unimportant.
Buzz says, ‘Okay.’
He puts out a hand. Lev takes it. Shakes it. Their eyes are still hard, but it’s that masculine hardness which carries no personal implication. Which just is.
Buzz, remembering that I exist, half-turns to me and says, ‘You’ll be okay, babe?’ but it’s not a question and my nod isn’t an answer.
They leave.
I eat bendy carrots and throw away the bacon because it’s too old to eat.
Eat some egg and some caviar and some crackers with pesto. Throw away everything I haven’t eaten.
Tidy up a bit. Smoke, but with no real pleasure. Turn off Lev’s music, which is driving me nuts. Put on Annie Lennox, because that’ll drive him nuts.
They’re still not back. How long can it take to drink a pint of brown liquid?
I’m bored enough and agitated enough to clean the kitchen. Then hoover the living room. Dust it, for heaven’s sake. Then decide I have to stop cleaning in case I pop an artery and turn into my mother.
Start to text Buzz, but cancel without sending.
What the fuck can they be talking about?
I think about ironing something.
I don’t, but do remove limescale from the shower screen.
Pluck my eyebrows.
Walk downstairs, then walk back up again.
This is not going well. I am having feelings, but I don’t know what they are. I’ve got exercises for times like this – breathing exercises, mindfulness – but I’m too agitated to do them. And maybe I don’t want to do them. Maybe I want these feelings. Want to let them be whatever they are.
I’m just walking downstairs to fetch the hoover when I hear Lev and Buzz outside. I sit on the stairs waiting for the door to open.
I am the possible future mother of Buzz’s possible future children.
Sitting on the stairs. Waiting for the door to open.
46
Buzz and I. We’re okay, I think. I’m not sure, but I think so.
When he and Lev came in, they were best buddies. Backslappy and beery in Buzz’s case. Quiet but emphatic in Lev’s.
I realised I was desperate for a joint. Needed to sit there and smoke with both of them in the room, but I wasn’t at all sure that wouldn’t break the mood. But Lev just sparked up as normal. Buzz watched, lips compressed, but not saying anything. When Lev passed me the joint, I sucked on the damn thing like it was an oxygen line dropped to the sea floor. Both men laughed at me. When I realised what they were laughing at, I laughed too.
They arrived back hungry and I’d thrown most of the food away. But I hadn’t thrown the oven chips away, so I cooked them. There was also some tinned mackerel, a jar of korma sauce, some stale mini-pretzels, a tube of tomato paste, any crackers I could plausibly rescue from the bin, and some more bendy carrots. Lev inspected the feast I laid out and said solemnly to Buzz, ‘You’re a lucky man.’
More laughter. I redden, but with pleasure. That is the first time I think maybe this could all be OK.
They eat oven chips, tinned mackerel, bendy carrots, and Buzz sportingly puts korma sauce on his fish. He pretends to like the result.
It’s okay. It feels okay.
But then I want them both to go. I want them out of my house with an urgency I don’t dare express.
Luckily, Lev, he’s a nutcase too. Like me. He knows what it’s like to have problems with your head, doesn’t need me to tell him. After a while, he just gets his things, takes a couple of bags of weed, and leaves. I wave a weak goodbye from the kitchen table.
‘I will send you text,’ he says.
I give him a thumbs-up.
Buzz wants to take me back to his place and give me a good seeing to. He needs to assert his own proprietorship. And I want that too. In an only slightly different universe, that would be my choice too. But I need space and say so. Put my arms round his lovely neck, find the muscles of his lovely back, and say I’ll see him tomorrow.
He understands. I think he does. He says so anyway.
I ask if he’s all right. I mean emotionally. I mean him-and-me. I mean weed on the kitchen table and a cannabis plantation in the potting shed.
But Buzz just rubs his head where Lev slammed it against the wall, and says, ‘You might have told me the guy was Spetsnaz.’
Spetsnaz: the umbrella term given to the Russian special forces. I think Lev worked in their Vympel counter terrorist unit. First as an operative, then as a trainer. But I don’t really know. Lev has never told me much. It took me four years before I even knew for sure that he was Spetsnaz. I bet Buzz got there before he found the bottom of his pint glass.
I say, ‘You didn’t give me much of a chance.’
‘No.’
And then we kiss.
And then kissing isn’t enough.
And then Buzz is carrying me upstairs and dumping me on the bed and before very many seconds pass he is indeed giving me a good seeing to. And, I like to think, I reciprocate in a way likely to generate few complaints.
Afterward, we lie panting beside each other.
‘Any more secrets?’
I think about the gun in Pembrokeshire. The knife behind the bed. My special relationship with Rhiannon Watkins. My visits from Ali el-Khalifi. The amisulpride in the bathroom cabinet. The full story about McCormack’s jaw and the data leak from Barry Precision, and all the other details that can matter a lot to people like Buzz. But none of that stuff seems very significant. Not right now.
‘I think it is possible that my father used to be involved in some kind of crime.’
‘Really? You think?’
‘And I haven’t yet got you a Christmas present.’
He has his hand on my belly. Buzz is a fit lad and he eats his greens. He’s been known to recharge, reload, and fire, two or three or even (once) four times in the same night. I can see him wondering whether tonight might be one of those nights.
But it isn’t. I need my space and say so.
And after Buzz leaves, and the house is empty, and when silence returns to the kitchen and creeps like moonlight over the garden and steals upstairs like the last breath leaving a body, I become aware of my mind finding its peace.
I don’t smoke more – I’ve already had more than enough – but take a shower, darken the house, and drink peppermint tea. I’m sitting upright in bed. Castled in pillows.
I’ve been expecting Khalifi to come, but all I sense of him is a prickle of energy. The same sensation I first felt that night in Cathays with me, Buzz, Watkins, and Konchesky. I hadn’t known what it was then, but it was Khalifi making contact.
I think this dimmed presence is him fading out.
I’ll miss him, of course, but you can’t hang on.
They grow up so fast.
I wish I’d got closer to Mary Langton. I would have, but chasing after two murders limits the time you can give to either. I regret that, but I’m sure she forgives me. The dead are always forgiving. And I will give her what she needs.
I don’t know whether I sleep or not. All I
do know is that I am still sitting up when dawn arrives to reclaim the streets. My peppermint tea sits empty beside me. And my paring knife is in my hand. Finger through the finger loop. Blade pointing upward and outward at the lightening sky.
47
Later that same morning, Watkins comes by my desk.
She’s in a severe dark suit. Rumpled white shirt. Iron-grey hair that’s been recently cut. I like her this way. I want to smile at her, but don’t. She looks tired. I probably do too.
‘Fiona.’
‘Ma’am.’
‘I wanted to update you. The investigation into – your attempted murder. We’re not getting very far.’
She updates me, brusquely. Number plate recognition: nothing helpful. Forensics: nothing at all. Eyewitnesses: less than nothing.
‘As you thought, it’s going to be all but impossible to bring this to court, even if we find the perpetrators.’
‘I know.’
‘And we haven’t found them.’
I don’t know what to say to that. Unless today is the day where we go up to people and tell them stuff they already know. I move my face and hands, just so it looks like I’m doing my bit.
‘The team I’ve had looking into things. They’re on standby. They’re available if anything comes up. But otherwise . . .’
Kirby has had his way. The troops are being redeployed. And quite right too. I’d do the same if I were him.
But Watkins isn’t finished. ‘The other day. You mentioned there might be ways of finding McCormack.’
‘There might be. Yes.’ I stop, because I’m not sure where she’s going with this. Then add carefully, ‘I’m making enquiries. I don’t yet have anything concrete.’
‘Yes. I see.’ She raps down on my desk with her knuckles. Moves a yellow notepad which wasn’t in anyone’s way. Glares over my shoulder at the sombre grey stones of the Crown Court across the street.
Then she comes to a decision. Pulls something from her pocket. A small clear polythene evidence bag. ‘This is material attaching to the Khalifi enquiry. Would you please return it to the forensics lab? It shouldn’t have been removed.’
She hands it over. There are three dark hairs in the bag. Body hairs, I guess. From a hand or arm or leg or chest. Specks of skin at the root.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
She’s about to say something else, but thinks better of it and says nothing. Turns abruptly and stalks away. She is swallowed by the glass doors that lead to the lifts. A swinging monochrome reflection is all that remains.
That, and these three hairs. Perversion of the course of justice, if you look at it one way. Justice itself, if you look at it another.
I put the bag in my pocket.
No one needs to know about this.
When I looked this morning, there was only two grand left in my kitchen drawer.
48
Nothing happens.
The cold weather returns. First the cold, then the snow. There are satellite photos shown on the news. Britain re-created in ice. A white island floating on a sea that’s dark teal close into shore, a deep, inky aquamarine farther out.
There are close-ups of South Wales too, shown on local news, reproduced in local papers. The Bristol Channel is its usual dirty brown. The forests south of Ystradgynlais are white, but pricked through with evergreen. Holly and ice.
I’ve never seen anything like it. Nor has anyone. Temperature records tumble again. Night after night I revisit that field above Capel-y-ffin in my dreams. Trousers and a T-shirt, worn under starlight.
My dad doesn’t quite accept that I’m well on the road to healing and keeps putting pressure on me to go back and live with him and Mam, ‘at least until after Christmas, love. You don’t want to worry about cooking and that.’ I tell him, truthfully, that I don’t spend much of my time worrying about cooking, but compromise by spending more time at home than usual. Mam spoils us with huge meals. Kay has boyfriend troubles and wafts around, wearing black, an iPhone always glowing at her palm. Ant is on the verge of being a proper teenager, but her natural sweetness keeps popping out to overwhelm any incipient moodiness. Her Christmas list is already two pages long.
Dad’s not always around, of course. His work often claims his evenings. But he’s around enough. Enough that, one evening after we’ve eaten, as the family starts to scatter – Mam and Ant to watch TV, Kay to nurse her woes upstairs – Dad scoops me up and takes me through to his lair, his giant, cluttered studio. He clinks around with glasses, because he likes the whole palaver of the lead crystal tumblers and the heavy decanters, but neither of us drink much, me almost not at all. When I have something peaty and expensive in my glass, he shows me his latest toy. A chunk of rock, a meteorite supposedly. ‘Three and a half kilos,’ Dad says with awe. ‘Just imagine where that’s come from, how many miles it travelled to get here.’ He whirls the lump of rock through the air to show me how a meteorite travels. I’ve no idea whether the item is genuine or not, or how much you have to pay to get a three-and-a-half-kilo space rock sitting lumpenly on your coffee table, but I make the noises I’m meant to make. And if the meteorite is for real, then Dad’s right: It is an extraordinary thing.
Then Dad turns serious. Worried, even. I don’t know how to read Dad these days. Whether any expression can be taken at face value. I can’t tell the difference between him acting and not acting.
‘Listen, love, I should probably tell you.’
He composes his features, but I interrupt. I think I know what he’s going to say.
‘About Capel-y-ffin?’
He nods.
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I say. I explain briefly what happened. ‘They were professionals. I was unlucky to get caught. None of us had any reason to suppose there was a risk. But I was lucky to get away, so it all evened out.’
Dad is sitting by a heavily shaded lamp. His face intersects the angle of the light, so his face is a jigsaw of shadows. It’s not surprising to me that he’s already heard the story. He’ll still have contacts in the police. He’ll still hear the talk.
‘You shouldn’t have been there alone,’ is all he says.
‘No, I shouldn’t really. There’s an internal enquiry into whether we judged the risks appropriately. Someone was supposed to come with me. At the last minute, she couldn’t come. I chose to go anyway. No one made me go.’
I shrug. And if Susan Konchesky had been there with me? Olaf and Hamish might well have gone ahead anyway.
In any case, I don’t think we did judge the risks inappropriately. The police service was under massive pressure because of the weather. In the end, I was just going to an empty house where there might or might not have been useful evidence, relating to a line of enquiry which was still highly exploratory. I’ve said all that to the in-house review team, who, I think, accepted it.
But Dad isn’t an in-house review team.
‘Love –’ he begins.
‘Really, Dad? Really? You’re going to say I should have told you that first day in the hospital. When you were most worried about me. Most likely to act on impulse. Let’s say I had told you. That day. Or the next. The first time we were alone together. If I’d said, “Hey, Dad, two professional killers did this to me and I’m lucky to be alive,” you tell me: what would you have done?’
‘I’m not . . . I’m not a young man anymore. I don’t just do the first thing that comes into my head.’
‘I know you’re not.’
‘And my business activities these days . . .’
‘Are one hundred percent legitimate. Yes, I know. But you haven’t answered my question. What would you have done?’
Dad moves his face out of the light. It darkens, but simplifies. He hasn’t touched his drink.
‘I don’t know. I’d have made some calls. Have you located the people?’
I shake my head.
‘I could still make the calls.’
‘Dad, I’m a police officer. We’ll find the people, arrest them, and jail
them. It’s what we do.’
Dad’s face flickers with a smile. ‘It’s what you do if you manage to catch them.’ He likes this: his unblemished record of having escaped our clutches.
I smile right back. ‘But back when you were doing your stuff, I wasn’t a police officer, was I?’
For a moment, our smiles hang in the air together, pushing at each other. A flickering contest, then a truce.
‘Tell you what, love. I will make some calls. If I find out anything, you’ll be the first to know. I won’t take any other action. And if they’re local, I’ll definitely –’
‘They’re not local. One of them is Scottish, one of them Scandinavian.’
I give him a bit of further information: height and build, that sort of thing. I don’t mention Drumchapel. I don’t give him McCormack’s name. I don’t want Dad to be the one who locates them first.
He nods. Dad never had national reach. His contacts and buddies are, as far as I know, mostly Welsh or West Country. He doesn’t make any promises.
We talk a bit more, then the conversation switches to other things, then I yawn and Dad drives me home in his big silver car. We say good night at my door.
It was a nice evening and I’m pleased that Dad raised the subject with me. I’d been worried he might act without talking to me first. But though I came away feeling reassured about his immediate intentions, I realise he said almost nothing to reassure me about his current activities. I’m not a young man anymore. I don’t just do the first thing that comes into my head. Read it one way, and it’s a statement of current innocence. Read it another, and it’s a fancy way of saying that he no longer commits criminal or violent acts without careful advance planning. And it wasn’t him but me that stated his current business activities were all legitimate. And when I asked him what he’d have done, he said I’d have made some calls, without saying what he’d have done with the information received.
I still think I was right not to have told him straight out. Still want to pursue this my way, not his way.
I don’t hear back from Lev.
Love Story, With Murders Page 32