‘Have you gone on any of those websites yet?’ I say neutrally.
‘Yes.’ She nods. She doesn’t have full control over her voice, which is half husky, half whispering. ‘I was going to ask, if you wouldn’t mind, sometime . . .’
‘We could take a look at your profile together. Make sure you’re presenting yourself right. I’d like that.’
Watkins nods. She’s red. Scarlet. Watkins the Ice Queen in a puddle at my feet. I think this is a real friendship. Or could become one. We’re awkward as hell now, but that’ll pass. Her eyes say the opposite of McCormack’s. No need to kick anyone in the coccyx.
I smile at her. Say, ‘See you soon.’ Go downstairs to start my day.
51
Humans want endings. Perhaps we need them. Tidy finishes. Christmas wrapping paper and a big red bow.
We don’t get them, though, except perhaps at Christmas. Maybe that’s why the festival endures. Maybe it’s not only children who need the myth.
This Christmas, here on our frozen island, is a spectacular one. Hoarfrost so thick, there’s as much as an inch lying on branches and twigs. Icicles four feet long hanging from gutters and balconies. Buzz tells me he’s seen icicles that he measured at over six feet, and he, unlike me, always tells the truth about these things.
Christmas Eve is sunny. I’m not working that day and Buzz is, so I use the freedom to drive out of Cardiff, away from the coast, up into the hills. My dad’s car. A Range Rover which isn’t going to get stuck anywhere. Which flies over these icy roads with a certainty altogether lacking in my late and still-lamented Peugeot. I hadn’t intended to go all the way, but I do. Up to Mortimer’s cottage. Then to the field where I almost died. I want to see it again.
The place is piercingly beautiful. White hills and infinite light. A bird of prey sharpens its wings on the air overhead. The barn that I burned down is still charred and black, but its remaining timbers are jewelled with diamonds. The stream in the little dip beyond the barn chuckles at my presence. A line of footprints – fox, I think – marks little blue dimples up the slope of the hill.
Tonight, Christmas Eve, they’re forecasting temperatures of minus sixteen degrees, which means minus eighteen or colder up at this elevation. That’s colder than it was when I was here last, but not much. Either way, it isn’t T-shirt weather.
When the Ice Age last covered Britain, these mountains lay on its fringes. Glaciated, but only just. These old red rocks, the sandstones and the siltstones, were scraped clean by moving ice. To them, this weather is just a reminder of things past.
I stay in that field awhile. The sun stares down without comment. The air flashes with cold fire.
The bird above me disappears, then returns.
And eventually, I don’t need to be there anymore. It’s gone. The whole car-death-cold thing has slipped from one place to another. From something that was still injuring me in the present to some other place where it no longer hurts. The past still happened, but I don’t have to live there. I don’t have to worry. The barn will get rebuilt. My skin grafts are increasingly looking like ordinary skin.
I drive down to the farm below. Arthur is in a barn, scattering feed for his sheep. Mary comes out of the kitchen when she sees me. I have presents for them both. A huge bottle of whisky for him. A bunch of flowers for her. Nice ones. They seem genuinely touched. And I am too. By their surprise. Their smiles.
They invite me in, but I say no. We stand a bit in the stone yard, looking out at the snow, and we agree that it’s cold, that it’s beautiful, that we’ve never had a Christmas like it.
I ask Arthur how his insurance claim is going. He says fine. I tell him that I distinctly recall the barn being at least three-quarters full of hay. I’ve already phoned him to say that, but I say it again now.
He shakes my hand with a grip so strong, I can feel bones starting to fuse in my hand.
And then I go. Dad’s beautiful big Range Rover driving on ice like it was just diddling over a suburban street. And McCormack in prison.
His boiler suit yielded no useful forensic evidence, but his boots did. And his gloves. And, stupid fucker, the plastic bag that housed them all. Khalifi’s blood. Also the blood of a Scottish man who disappeared two years ago, with suspected gambling debts. Also the blood of a third individual who has not yet been identified.
McCormack’s phone use links him to Cardiff Bay on the night of Khalifi’s murder. McCormack’s car – the one they used the night they tried to kill me – can be tracked via the ANPR database to both Cardiff Bay and then, later, Llanishen. Strathclyde Police tell us that they have a strong murder case for the gambling-debt guy too. In short, McCormack is fucked. He’ll spend the rest of his life in jail, near as dammit.
I don’t think about him often now. He’s history.
Watkkins wanted to add my attempted killing to the list of charges, but the CPS told us we had nowhere near enough evidence to secure a conviction. Watkins tried to argue them round, but I told her to leave it. I didn’t want the publicity or the hassle. As long as McCormack goes to jail, I’ll be satisfied.
There’s more good news too. McCormack’s phone was unlocked by Strathclyde’s technical staff. The call log contained outbound and inbound calls from a pay-as-you-go phone purchased in Denmark. That phone showed use in Glasgow, in London, in Bristol, in Copenhagen, in Oslo. And also in parts of rural Norway.
I’ve contacted the company that produced the ‘Experience Norway’ card I took from McCormack’s flat. They tell me that the picture was taken from a valley in the mountains about thirty miles south of Trondheim. The village in question has a population of just six hundred people. If I include everyone within a ten-mile radius, that still only gives me about fifteen hundred. And Norway, bless it, has a compulsory national register of all residents. The sort of thing you associate with the Stasi, but somehow an idea that’s taken root in this little Nordic paradise too.
I sift my list of possible names to exclude women, children, and anyone outside an age range of twenty-five to forty-five. All male Norwegians are obliged to perform military service, but I have a strong suspicion that Olaf will have done more than the minimum. These people usually do. If you like violence, have an aptitude for it, you’re drawn by the glamour of warfare. The training, the guns, the toughness. The Norwegian armed forces have a veterans’ administration which keeps information on one hundred thousand ex-service personnel. I ask it about veterans of the right age registered to the area I’m interested in. The agency is initially reluctant to divulge its data, but I get Watkins to apply a little pressure and, after a few little bureaucratic shenanigans, the data is promised. In the new year, sometime.
Good enough.
I’m back in Cardiff by four in the afternoon.
Buzz is spending Christmas day with his family, me with mine, so this evening we’re having our own private celebration. I’ve got everything I need. I’ve done a practice-cook, supervised by my mam, and I’ve written down all the timings.
Those timings don’t just apply to the chicken. They apply to me too. I want to do everything right. Clean hair. New dress. Proper makeup. Sexy underwear. Though my dress isn’t exactly new – it’s one of Kay’s cast-offs – it’s one that Buzz hasn’t seen. I can’t tell if it looks nice or not, but I know it looks passable. Most of Kay’s dresses don’t fit me brilliantly, because of our height difference, but she likes her dresses short and some of them suit me well. This one looks okay, I think. The mirror doesn’t say ‘woman of mystery,’ but it does say ‘girl looking nice for a special date’.
Good enough: my slogan of the moment.
Inevitably I don’t get my timings absolutely right. I was aiming to have dinner served by seven thirty, but it’s going to be more like eight fifteen. That too doesn’t matter. Buzz has strict instructions not to show up until I text him. He’s out at the pub with a bunch of people from the office, so he’s fine.
And then I am ready. I tell Buzz he can show up at quart
er past. There are candles on the table. Wine. The table’s laid. Everything is either cooked or just approaching perfection.
I’m a skitter of nerves.
I put my posh shoes on much too early, so my feet are killing me now, but I still skedaddle around, checking things I’ve already checked. I look at my watch five times in twelve minutes. Check myself in the mirror three times.
And then Buzz is here. My stomach flips, as though it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him.
I feel ridiculously anxious and I don’t know why.
He is about to say, ‘Bloody hell, Fi,’ because that’s what he usually says when I’m making a visible effort. But then he doesn’t. He just kisses me carefully and says, ‘Happy Christmas, love.’ I say, ‘Happy Christmas,’ too, but my voice is crooked and hoarse, like Watkins’s was when she asked me to help her with the dating sites.
We eat dinner.
The potatoes are crispy. The chicken is cooked enough to be non-lethal, not so much that it’s black. The gravy tastes good and there’s plenty of it. The veg is fine too. I got the right sort of wine.
We clink glasses and say, ‘I love you,’ and that feels like a real thing to do, not a TV-movie thing. All of it does. The whole thing.
I’m still nervous, but no longer skittering. For all I know, I even appear reasonably calm. When it becomes time to serve pudding, I realise that it’s still frozen hard. My list didn’t have an entry that read, ‘Remove pudding from freezer, you numpty,’ so I didn’t do it. Didn’t even think about it.
I must look crestfallen.
Buzz takes the pudding out of its wrapper and puts it into the microwave to defrost. He says it’ll take twenty minutes to defrost, then twenty-five minutes to heat in the oven.
‘I wonder if we can think of a way to pass the time for forty minutes,’ he says.
But he’s not allowed that. Not yet.
We sit on the living room floor and give each other presents. I give him a jumper that he looks really nice in. I give him a hockey stick with rave reviews on the hockey websites. This one is made of some special composite that’s meant to be much better than the knackered old wooden one he uses. It cost two hundred pounds. I’m a bit worried that he’ll have some manly attachment to his wooden one, but he doesn’t, or at least, he says, ‘Bloody hell, Fi, that’s fantastic,’ in a way that makes me think he means it. I give him some other things too. Nice things. Things I took care about when I bought them.
I have almost no money left in my account, or anywhere else for that matter. And that’s fine. I’m not very good with money, but I don’t starve.
Buzz gives me presents too. Girl things mostly, but I like that he thinks of me that way. Someone who wants scented candles. Who wants a cute little jacket from Oasis. I light the candle and try on the jacket and I still don’t feel like a TV-movie person. Giddy, but okay.
He also gives me a small box and I have a sudden terror that it might be jewellery. It is, but a necklace, not a ring, and I feel a surge of relief. I love this man, but I’m not ready to take that step yet. I don’t know if I ever will be, but more things are possible in this life than I ever thought likely.
‘Are you okay, love?’
I nod. Smile. Put the necklace on.
‘It’s lovely,’ I say. ‘I love it.’
We’ve used the word love or lovely three times in the space of nine words, and it doesn’t feel excessive.
Buzz takes the pudding out of the microwave and puts it into the oven. He does some other things in the kitchen too. Probably things I’ve forgotten.
I’m not looking at my list anymore.
When Buzz comes back, I give him my final present. A small box. Wrapped, with a red bow.
‘This is a funny present, really,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not something for you to keep. It’s something for you to destroy.’
He opens it, smiling. The box is full of seeds, like green lentils, only paler. Some speckled, with tones of buff and slate and pale grey.
He looks at me with his big blue eyes, puzzled. He has freckles on the end of his nose that make me want to kiss them.
‘What are they, sweetheart?’
‘They’re my cannabis seeds,’ I tell him. ‘The next generation. My seedbank.’
‘Fi, that’s amazing.’ He hesitates. ‘I mean, technically, giving an industrial quantity of Class B drugs to a police officer isn’t amazing, it’s criminal, but –’
I interrupt him. ‘I’m not saying I’m giving up. I’m not even promising that I will give up. I don’t know if I can. But I am promising to try. I want you to know I will try.’
He’s speechless. Then his freckles move in for a long kiss. His lovely freckles on his lovely nose.
We eat some pudding, but though there’s cheese to follow, we don’t touch it. We head through to the bedroom and do what we do best. Then there’s a muddle of showering and washing up and watching a bit of rubbish on the telly and cuddling up close as we watch it.
And eventually bed. Buzz says ‘Happy Christmas’ once more. I say the same to him, but it’s still not Christmas yet, only Christmas Eve.
Before the church bells toll the midnight, Buzz is asleep beside me. I have my hand on his chest so I can feel him breathing. Then, when that’s boring, I tickle the hairs in his nose to make him snuffle and shake his head.
I tickle his ears too, but that doesn’t work as well.
Time passes.
As soon as Watkins told me that Strathclyde forensics had found Khalifi’s blood in McCormack’s apartment – as soon as, that is, we knew for certain he would be going to jail – I asked Watkins for permission to request an appeal against Mortimer’s conviction. She nodded and instituted the necessary proceedings right away. There’s a time lag for these things, but we’ll get what we want, I’m certain.
I borrowed a patrol car and drove, with Susan Konchesky again, up to Droitwich.
Got Sophie Hinton, her mother, the two kids into one room together. Told them formally that Mark Mortimer had been wrongly convicted. Said that we were working to get his conviction reversed. Told them that, because of their father, a major criminal conspiracy had been uncovered. Said that the first man was under arrest and heading for prison.
I thanked them each personally – Sophie Hinton, Ayla, Theo – for their help.
Ayla and Theo cried buckets. Sophie Hinton cried too. I don’t know if I’ve given the children what they needed, but I’ve done all I can. Given them a father to be proud of. Not a criminal, a hero.
I’d still like to give their mother a good slapping, but I can’t have everything.
Afterwards, as we were driving back again, Susan said, ‘Back there. You were amazing. I just wanted you to know.’
She was at the wheel and had her eyes fixed on our snowbound motorway, but I thanked her and meant it.
I don’t think Mark Mortimer was a hero, not quite. It was brave of him to look into the arms dealing. It was fucking stupid of him not to alert the police. A courageous idiot: that would be closer to the truth, but his kids don’t need the truth. They needed their father back.
Somewhere beyond our window, a bell tolls midnight.
Buzz snores, his even, deep, masculine rumbles.
I’d like to find Khalifi, or Langton, or even Mortimer, but their spirits are silent. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Something a bit like peace.
The weapons systems that left the Barry Precision factory filtered out across some of the world’s nastier regimes. Egypt. Libya. Tunisia. Syria. Yemen and Somalia. Who knows how far those weapons travelled? In whose hands they ended up? The only thing that’s for certain is that none of them were destined for the hands of democratically accountable governments, because if they had been, the firm could simply have applied for, and obtained, export licences.
Barry’s weapons may never have been fired. The firm made parts for heavy weaponry and armoured vehicles. Artillery pieces and tanks, not small arms. It’s quite possible that few or non
e of those weapons were fired in anger.
Yet the burden of guilt is horrendous all the same. Those armaments protected regimes against their peoples. The dictator’s ultimate recourse. Barry Precision – and Jim Dunbar, and Idris Prothero – played their toxic little part in keeping those regimes intact.
I’d like to find the souls of those victims. To make contact, however dimly or however briefly. To touch hands with them, feel their existence.
I can’t do that, though. Perhaps there are just too many of them. Or they’re perhaps too distant. Maybe you can only feel the dead when you know them a little, the way I knew Khalifi.
A pity.
But even if you can’t feel the dead, you can think about them. Make them a gift of your time and care. So I do. As the bells of Cardiff count towards the first light of this frozen Christmas, and as Buzz snores beside me, his nose hairs now unmolested, I spend time with the dead. The countless, nameless, uncomplaining dead.
The city clocks chime over Cardiff.
Buzz rolls in his sleep, allowing me to kiss the back of his neck, which is beautiful.
Outside, the great freeze endures, tightening its hold. Ice thickens. In a snowy field somewhere above Capel-y-ffin, a burned-out barn flashes diamonds at the moon, while owls hoot in the solitary woods.
And sometime before dawn on Christmas Day, I fall asleep.
52
The Norwegian veterans’ administration comes back to me with names. There are five people in my target area who spent significant time in the armed forces. One of those was a naval officer, an improbable career choice for Olaf, I think. One of the others is just twenty-six, and I’m pretty sure Olaf is older. Of the three others, one served for seven years, most of that time in the Brigade Nord, Second Battalion, based in the far north of Norway. A place where you’d learn all about snow. About hypothermia.
Love Story, With Murders Page 35