I wear my woman-of-mystery suit into the office and get loads of compliments.
Aside from the frostbitten spots on my toes, which will be there for some time, my skin is returning to normal. I hardly ever need aspirin now.
I am getting on okay with Buzz. We still live in a world where Buzz’s current and actual girlfriend and the mother of Buzz’s possible-future children might be one and the same person. That first person isn’t sure if she wants to be the second one – isn’t sure if that second thing is even achievable – but she’s very sure that she wants to carrying on being the first of those things. And so far, Buzz seems to be okay with that. One time, I cook him a meal and get all the ingredients right and the cooking just right and the candles just right and everything just right and we even sit down to eat on the right side of nine o’clock.
Whenever I have free time, which is quite often, I work on investigating my father. I don’t know what to explore first, so I start by simply trying to make a map of his connections. Try to figure out who he knew in 1986. Who he was close to. Who owed him something. Who might be afraid of him.
I make lists and write notes, but the centrepiece of my work is a mind-map-style diagram, with my father’s name in the middle, everyone else radiating out from there. People like Emrys Thomas are there, of course. Others too, all those who formed Dad’s inner circle back in my early childhood. Family connections. Friends.
Also criminals, major and minor, convicted and merely suspected. Not just ones in the same line of business as Dad, but anyone really. Anyone who was a pro criminal, who was a player.
Businessmen too. Dad had a golf-playing phase, which came to an end in the early nineties according to Mam. I doubt if he ever really liked the game – it would have been too slow for him – but it would have given him an excuse to spend money and rub shoulders with business types. Money always attracted him, and the moneyed have always had a fascinated attraction to Dad’s supposed glamour.
And cops, I don’t exclude them. Cardiff has never had a terrible problem with police corruption, but we weren’t as clean in the 1980s as we are now, and in any case you never really know these things for sure. So I list Yorath too. Jack and his colleagues.
It’s slow work. These days, you can Google around and find connections quite easily. But both online and public sources have far less dating back a quarter of a century. I use microfiches from local papers. Photo archives. Land Registry records. Business registries. Police files. Family photo albums. I’ve spent a couple of lazy evenings with Emrys, and towards the end of the second one, flipped through his photo album, reminiscing. Emrys was relaxed and chatty. I took care not to appear too interested, but noted every name down as soon as I was out of his house.
I don’t have any leads, exactly, but I’m learning the territory. I feel as I do at the start of a case. Eager. Alive.
Every now and again, alas, I’m expected to do my real work. Stirfry stuff.
We’ve investigated Idris Prothero’s stack of mobile phones. None of them have been used but – an interest tidbit, this – we do know that the whole lot were purchased as part of a batch of fifteen from an Internet retailer. One of the phone numbers sold as part of that transaction received a call from the Capel-y-ffin area on the day of my almost-murder. That’s not remotely strong enough evidence to secure a conviction for anything, but as far as I and Watkins are concerned, it largely eliminates doubt that Idris Prothero issued the order to kill me. Hamish and Olaf asked for instructions. Prothero told them to kill the copper. They drove back up the hill and tried to do just that.
Fuck him. And fuck them.
I want to see them all in jail – Prothero, Hamish, Olaf – with a passion that takes me by surprise. Fuck them all.
My flame of anger burns brightly for Mary Langton too. I want her killer too. And now, at last, I think I’m getting closer. The officer, Dai Beynon, who cautioned Elsie Williams comes back from his time away. He tells me that he remembers the day concerned. He’d rung the front-door bell and got no answer. But the doors to the garage had been open. Both doors: the big one at the front, the small one at the back. ‘So I walked straight through,’ he told me. ‘They were all there.’
I nod. The garden furniture was stored in the Williams’s garage. It would have been easier taking it in and out via the large front opening, and it would have been natural to leave the door up. Natural too for Beynon to stroll through the garage into the garden. See if he could find his quarry there.
‘And they were all there? Elsie Williams? Her daughter and son-in-law?’
‘That’s it,’ said Beynon.
‘Did you stop in the garage for any reason? Move things around? Make a noise?’
Beynon shrugs. There are limits to memory. He doesn’t say that exactly, but he sort of does.
He stands at my desk answering my dippy questions, lifting up my stapler and tapping the surface of my desk with it.
And that too is an answer of a sort. The fidgety PC David Beynon. Moving through the garage, banging things around, because he’s the banging-around type.
I don’t have proof, or anything that resembles it, but I do have a theory.
I get on the phone, trying to locate the firm that built Elsie Williams’s conservatory. It takes sixteen calls, but then I locate a builder in Llanishen who says that yes, he did the job. Ewan Jenkins, his name is.
‘I need to know how you were paid. If you were paid in cash, if you fiddled your VAT, I don’t care. There will be no repercussions. Just tell me how you were paid.’
‘Yes, well, I do sometimes take cash. I mean, I wouldn’t normally, but like I say . . .’
‘I really don’t care. I’m not a VAT person. You can do what you like as far as I’m concerned. I need to know who paid you, Owen. Who physically gave you the cash?’
‘It would have been the old lady, Mrs Williams. But there was a young man there too. Her son-in-law maybe? I think it was his money. I’m not sure. It felt like there was a bit of an atmosphere. Like there had been a row or something. The job had been okay, actually. The conservatory went up pretty well, considering, and there wasn’t a problem in getting paid, exactly. But I didn’t like it. There was something funny there. You know. Not just one thing. But other, little things.’
‘Go on.’
I’m holding the phone so hard I can feel the plastic handset creak in my grip.
‘Well, like I had to take tools and everything off-site all the time. I’ve got a lock-up, so that’s not a problem, like. But normally, I’d just use the garage. Keep it tidy obviously, but . . .’
Jenkins goes on talking, but I’m only half-listening.
Gotcha!
Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
I tell Jenkins that we’ll need him to come in and make a statement at some point. Reassure him again about the VAT. Hang up.
And then – because I want a conviction, not just a story – I start to research things. Always an illuminating process. SNAXPO, for example. An entire conference in Arizona, just to discuss the humble snack. If you didn’t know those things existed, you’d never guess. Not just one conference, dozens of them. Interpack 2011. Or who would believe that there is even something called the International Cheese Technology Expo? That delightful event takes place in Wisconsin – you get good cheese technologists in Wisconsin, I bet – but the UK turns out to have its own thriving equivalents.
Which is all good. I check some dates, make some calls. I can be smiley and nice when I need to be. That, plus I offer a load of money which I’m never going to pay. While I’m working on my laptop, Buzz looks over my shoulder and says, ‘What you are doing?’ I say, ‘I’ve decided to move into PR.’ He says, ‘No, really what?’ I say, ‘I’m catching murderers.’ He says, ‘No, really what?’ and I smack the laptop closed and give him a kiss long enough that he stops asking boring questions to which I have already given two perfectly accurate answers.
Other things go well too.
Stuar
t Brotherton submits his completed report on Barry Precision. It’s lethally comprehensive, utterly devastating. We hand it over to the Crown Prosecution Service along with six files of additional evidence. Brotherton lists 188 counts of weapons export. Whether you judge it by the number of offences or the value of the items shipped, this is the UK’s biggest-ever arms-smuggling case. Watkins, Kirby, Dunwoody, Jones, and a couple of other senior officers go out for a celebratory lunch. Come back drunk.
I send Idris Prothero a homemade Christmas card with a picture of Cardiff Prison in the snow. Inside I write, ‘10-year sentence. Home in 6.’
I visit Brian Penry a couple of times. He’s okay now. Head down, doing his time. He asks how I’ve been getting on with Mortimer. I tell him that I can’t say much now, but things are going well. After I’ve seen Penry, I don’t run straight out of the prison. I linger. Feeling the walls, the cells, the bars, the keys. It’s not a comfortable sensation, but it’s not insupportable either. I manage it OK.
I wonder – and this is a thought I do run from – I wonder if I might be getting more normal.
I think the answer is probably no. But for the first time in my ridiculous life, I have a small but increasing pile of evidence to the contrary.
Item: I have a stable relationship with a proper boyfriend.
Item: I have a good job and am respected (if not always liked) by my colleagues.
Item: I can sometimes cook an edible meal in less than seven hours.
Item: I have been known, if not often, to clean, dust and hoover.
Item: I go clothes shopping with my sister and sometimes wear the clothes that I buy. I have even plucked my eyebrows.
It’s not, now that I think about it, the most impressive list of achievements, but you can’t measure impressive from the height of a wall alone. You have to consider the depth of the hole you started with.
I am sometimes scared by how much progress I’ve made.
And then I hear from Lev. Nothing much. Just an address and a name. The address is of a flat, in an area just outside Drumchapel. The name, I assume, is the one McCormack uses at the moment: Callum Frasier.
I check the place on Google Maps. Then Street View.
The building is five storeys high. Unpainted stucco. Flat roof. Either council housing or ex-council. Net curtains in most of the windows. Some washing on lines. Concrete balconies and plastic garden chairs. Skies the colour of stucco.
No visible contract killers, but Lev doesn’t get these things wrong.
I’ve got what I wanted.
I’ve got what I wanted and I don’t know what to do next. My most obvious option, the one any half-normal police officer would take without a moment’s thought, is to call Strathclyde Police. Give them McCormack’s current location. Wait for them to do the rest. That’s what I ought to do. The correct option.
And yet, what would we do if we got a call like that? We’d send a couple of plainclothes detectives to the property, ready to make an arrest if McCormack entered or left. We wouldn’t be able to force entry, because we have no evidence to put in front of a magistrate that McCormack even lived there. If he was away for a few days, it’s unlikely that Strathclyde Police would maintain surveillance. If he was alert enough to check his surroundings for two men waiting around in a car all day, he’d be sure to wait them out, or just move on under cover of darkness.
And that would be that. He’d never come back.
Also, the Strathclyde Police do not have in their possession three body hairs taken from a corpse in Llanishen.
So, though I say I don’t know what I’m going to do next, the truth is that I’ve only got one option. I tell Buzz I’ll be away for the weekend. I haven’t yet replaced my car, so buy one for three hundred pounds in cash. It’s a VW Polo, a wreck really, but it works. I don’t tell anyone I’ve bought it. I park it a mile and a half from my house. I don’t insure it.
There are a few other bits and pieces I need, but I have most of them already. A couple of things to practise, but I’m reasonably practiced already.
Oddly, I’m quite relaxed. I don’t have big anxieties over what I’m about to do. I do bits and bobs at work without getting myself into trouble. I spend time with Buzz and my family and it all feels pleasingly ordinary. The snow remains. Each night we look at the latest satellite picture.
An ice-bound island, waiting for something to break.
49
Glasgow feels appropriate in the cold. A northern city, chained in ice. There’s something industrial about the way they handle the cold up here. The gritters and snowploughs have a dirty, used look to them. A clanking brutishness in nursery yellow.
I arrive after dark, which is to say after four in the afternoon. I haven’t had a good drive up and I’m in a foul mood. The GPS on my phone guides me straight to the block of flats, as awkward and graceless in real life as it was on Street View. Four apartments on each floor. My man, Frasier-McCormack, is in Flat 5B, so on the top storey.
I ring his bell, get an answer, mumble an apology for pressing the wrong button, then go back to my car.
Sit there and wait.
Three hundred pounds doesn’t buy much of a car or much of a sound system. I try listening to Classic FM, but the radio picks up two signals simultaneously: Classic FM’s own tedious repertoire and some strange Nordic station, all folk music and improbable, excessive laughter.
I switch off. Stay gazing at the front door of the building. On McCormack’s floor, there are two apartments with lights on, two without. I’m parked as far as possible from any streetlight.
Time goes by.
I have the engine off. Sit back, out of sight. I don’t know how alert McCormack is likely to be, but I don’t want to do anything that could attract attention. At least I’m wrapped up warm.
Two kids pass my car. One of them raps on my window. I wind my window down and say, ‘Yes?’ The kid says something in an accent so thick I don’t understand it. I reply in Welsh, the same thing as I said to Sophie Hinton. Twll dîn pob Sais. Every Englishman an arsehole. He goes off muttering. He might as well be speaking Icelandic.
Someone leaves the apartment block, but it’s not McCormack. It gets past six o’clock. How long can a person take this freezing city, this darkness, before they’re driven to the boozer?
Another forty-three minutes, it turns out.
The lights go off on the remaining top floor apartment. A minute or so later, a shape enters the lobby. Then the door opens and McCormack is briefly visible under the outside light. He’s wearing a woollen hat and a padded coat: the same ones, I think, as he was wearing when he tried to kill me. There’s not much of him to see. But everything fits. The clothes. The way he moves. The brief view I have of his face. It’s him.
I feel a cold spill of excitement. Capillaries opening up to adrenaline, fingertips awakening. A sense of life.
But it’s brief, the feeling. I’m here to do a job. I’m not looking for hassle and not expecting any. The adrenaline goes away. The fingertips close down.
McCormack walks off up the street. I wait ten minutes, then leave the car. I’ve got some cigarettes with me – bought specially, because I hardly ever smoke tobacco – and hang around outside the apartment smoking.
After a while, a couple of people approach the block. One of them is dredging keys out of her bag. I throw my ciggy away and follow her in.
There’s a lift and stairs. The two I’ve followed in take the stairs. I take the lift. It carries me stutteringly to the top floor. A faint smell of piss travels with me.
The landing has a low-energy bulb restrained behind thickly frosted plastic. A single-paned glass window stares blankly over the city. A silent rectangle of lights, darkness, cold. The floor is some kind of composite stone. Cheap and durable.
Metal railings lead downstairs but I’m not heading down. There’s a bag of rubbish sitting outside one of the apartments, but not McCormack’s.
I put on an elasticated hair cover, the sort
of thing they use in food preparation. Also latex gloves. Get tools out of my bag.
A set of lockpicks. I bought them off the Internet for about forty quid a couple of years back. No particular reason why. I just prefer to have that sort of thing. I bought a few practice locks, watched some YouTube videos on how to use the picks. Practised on my own locks and on any others that came my way. I became reasonably adept, reasonably swift, then shoved the tools away in a bottom drawer. I didn’t forget about them exactly, but they weren’t top of my list of things to worry about.
I turn my attention to McCormack’s lock. My tools are probably good for about 90 percent of the locks in the UK, maybe more, but they’re good for all the cheap ones. And these are cheap. Probably just five pin. Easy.
The light is poor, but in a way that helps. Lock-picking is all about feel.
I slot a torque wrench into the lower part of the lock, the part where the shaft of the key would normally fit. Work it in both directions till I figure out which way the lock normally turns, then place a little gentle pressure on it. Inside the lock, the pins will be pressed tight against a ridge in the locking barrel. That’s the way I want ’em.
I take a raking tool – something whose business end looks not unlike the grippy half of a hairclip – and slot that into the lock above the torque wrench. I jiggle it in and out, applying upward pressure all the time. I can’t exactly feel any pins releasing, but there’s a little give in the torque wrench, so I’ve probably scored a couple of successes already.
Then start the more detailed work with my picks. I’ve chosen a fairly basic pick, because I don’t think this lock will have any real complexity. And sure enough, it’s not long before I feel the first definite pin-release. I work a little more, then feel a second one go.
I rake the lock again, looking for an easy win. Don’t get it, but try a couple of different picks on the remaining pin and it gives too. The torque wrench moves all the way round.
I turn the handle, open the door, and walk on in.
I haven’t known what to expect. But it’s just ordinary. Vinyl flooring in the little kitchen, tacky underfoot from poor-quality cleaning. Beige carpet in the living room and bedrooms. Charity-shop furnishings. A big plasma TV.
Love Story, With Murders Page 33