Just like our case against Barry Precison. Against Idris Prothero.
I won’t leave it there, of course. The man is an arms smuggler who tried to have me killed. But I’ll leave it there for now. I’ve got no other option.
Two final postscripts.
The first is a weird one. I did go up to Dolgellau. Found the whistle-blower’s wife: Mrs Glyn – Delia. In her early sixties. Living in a council flat, nice enough, but no spare cash. She had the angry, injured look often worn by the slightly mad. Her clothes weren’t quite right either. A too-short flowery dress worn with bright red tights and heavy black shoes. Hair not very recently washed. I don’t judge these things. I’ve been there. Ticked all those boxes and then some. Truth is, I feel comfortable around such people. At ease.
Delia made tea. Concentrating hard to do it right. Made it, poured it, complained about her back. We sat at a small Formica table in her kitchen. Unlined cotton curtains splattered with grease from the frying pan.
‘He was killed, you know that, he was killed.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Gareth. They never found him. They said he walked out but he wouldn’t have done that, not that we were a perfect couple, but I know Gareth, he had an optician’s appointment that week, I’ve got the booking confirmation right here. I’ve got everything, you know, I haven’t thrown away a thing.’
She told her story. It felt like one long run-on sentence, all commas and not a pause for breath. She said that her husband ‘wouldn’t give up, that wasn’t Gareth, see? Not a giver-upper, because it’s not what you do, it’s who you know, isn’t it, and that was our problem, never knew the right people.’
At some point, she handed me three notebooks crammed with tiny writing – mostly his, but later hers – plus press clippings, receipts, photos, invitation cards. I wanted to look through the material, but Delia wouldn’t stop talking, not even for a moment.
I interrupted to ask, ‘Why did they kill your husband in 2002, when the allegations of corruption date back to the mid-eighties?’
I got an answer – four breathless minutes of it – but nothing that made an ounce of sense.
I asked, ‘Who killed him? Who specifically wanted him dead?’
Six minutes that time, by the end of which Delia was quite upset. Repeating herself, adjusting her hair, getting muddled by her own line of thought. But her answer began, ‘They all do, see, that’s the whole problem . . .’ and the gist of her thesis seemed to be that everyone in Wales with the tiniest bit of money, power, or influence felt threatened by Gareth Glyn and sought to have him killed. Nevertheless, her rambling list of names intersects with at least six people on my mind-map diagram of Dad’s connections. I realised that that’s the first connection of any kind I have. A useless one maybe, but a connection. A lamp glowing dimly in the dark.
‘What does your doctor have you on, Delia?’ I asked. ‘Buspar, maybe?’
She told me about her drug history. She wasn’t on Buspar, a new-generation anxiolytic, but she was on Prozac, topped up by Xanax. She got the pill bottles to show me. Complained about her back, her sleep.
As a witness, she was terrible, neither coherent nor consistent. Prozac is a drug for depression, Xanax for anxiety disorders. The notebooks are no better, the sort of evidence that would destroy a witness’s credibility in court.
But we weren’t in court. This isn’t that kind of investigation.
I tapped the notebooks and said, ‘May I borrow these?’
She said yes.
And stupid as this evidence is, worthless as this witness will probably prove to be, I came away from Dolgellau elated. So much so that, intead of driving back to Cardiff, I drove down to the beach at Barmouth. Mudflats on the river, grey sands facing the sea. Ate a sandwich with a fitful west wind snatching at my clothes and hair.
Ate a sandwich and contemplated my past.
A little girl in an open-topped car. A little girl who, when grown to be a teenager, lost everything. Her optimism. Her feelings. Her sanity. Who lost so much that, when she inspected the ruins of her mind, found only death. A teenage girl who thought she was dead.
And now?
I don’t know. My mental equilibrium is still fragile. That night when I thought I felt Khalifi in my room, I was experiencing full-blown psychosis. The sort of hallucination which plagues the homeless, which makes drunks and schizos yell at invisible beings on the street.
But a little run-of-the-mill psychosis doesn’t feel too scary to me now. I’ve swum in stormier seas than those, stormier by far. And my investigation of my past – the mystery of my birth and the origins of my madness – feels for the first time like a real enterprise. One with substance and purpose. One that will have its solution.
Crazy as Delia Glyn may be, she’s my first witness. Cramped and nutty as her notebooks may be, they constitute my Exhibit A.
I’m on the case and on a roll.
I’ve called that a postscript, but really it’s a prologue. A statement about my future. The real postscript – the last, sad note of the bugle – sounds on a different coast, a different day.
The Langton family did, finally, hold a funeral service for their daughter. It was a private service, so I didn’t go, though I’d have liked to. But they also hold a memorial service. At a little grey church in the Mumbles. A lot of Mary’s student friends come along – not that they were students anymore. A group of people about my age, my sphere of life. Heterogeneous and identical, both at once.
Rosemary and John Langton are there, of course. They recognise me. Are surprised to see me, but not unhappy, I think. They say they’re pleased.
I don’t usually get a lot from church services. Christianity doesn’t understand dead people very well, I think. It seems embarrassed by them. But this is a good service. Dignified and sad and celebratory and uplifting. Some people cry. I don’t, but I like it when others do.
Watkins comes along too. I didn’t see her when I arrived. I think she slipped in at the back, after it started. But I’m pleased she came.
And after the service, everyone troops down to the seashore. Rosemary Langton scatters her daughter’s ashes onto a west wind and the west wind blows the fine grey dust far out over Swansea Bay. People clap. Some people cheer. It’s a good parting. The right way to finish.
I don’t hear from Ali el-Khalifi anymore these days, but I bet he’s here now. Overhead, in the wind, in the unreliable sunshine, in the scream of the gulls. Following Mary’s ashes as they spread out on the glittering water. It’s a good ending for them both. I wish them well.
Khalifi both saved Langton’s life and, by accident, helped to end it. But by a strange twist of events, his death ended up mirroring hers. Two men who killed him for money needed a way to dispose of a corpse. Because Adrian Condon and I happened to report the discovery of a corpse of our own, Olaf – I’ll bet it was him – thought to use that discovery to throw a nice fat red herring our way. A red herring that, to a large extent, succeeded in subverting our whole enquiry.
And yet every circle closes in the end. Khalifi never quite found unity with Langton in life. But he did in death. Operation Stirfry: their own macabre wedding celebration. It’s hard not to feel a sorrowful sense of completion. Like something satisfied.
As we crunch back up the beach towards the cars, Watkins walks alongside me. She says, ‘Are you able to stay a little or do you have to rush off?’
I can stay, I say. I don’t have to rush off.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘That’s good. Because there’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
Her eyes have the luminous excitement of young love. In my pocket, I have a little plastic boat. Round my neck, I have the necklace that Buzz gave me at Christmas. On my wrist, I have the little shell bracelet that a little girl gave me.
‘I’d like that, Rhiannon,’ I say. ‘I’d like that very much.’
Endnote
The inspiration for this book arose from a bizarre, but genuine, sequenc
e of events that unfolded in the early 1990s.
A Midlands-based machine tool company, Matrix Churchill, was acquired in 1989 by an Iraqi consortium. Two of the company’s new directors worked directly for Saddam Hussein’s security services and set to work building and shipping advanced machine tools to assist with Saddam’s weapons programme. Certain aspects of that programme were, it has to be admitted, more ditzy than actually dangerous. (A super-gun that could fire projectiles into space? Hmm.) But the company was still selling advanced technology to help a dictator threaten his neighbours and oppress his citizens. That sort of thing isn’t supposed to be legal, so the company was duly prosecuted.
Unfortunately, during the course of the trial, it emerged that one of the company’s directors was working for British intelligence. It further emerged that the government knew all about the company’s activities and had done what it could to assist. The trial collapsed in acrimony and political infighting.
That’s history now, but the business of selling arms is far from being history. Fiona Griffiths comes across a government outfit known as the UKTI DSO. That organisation is not an invention. You can check out its website, if you like, or download its chirpy little brochure. It employs 160 people and it is there solely to promote the export of arms, and related goods and services, many of which have ended up with precisely the regimes that the Arab Spring revolted against. A recent parliamentary report concluded that ‘both the present Government and its predecessor misjudged the risk that arms approved for export to certain authoritarian countries in North Africa and the Middle East might be used for internal repression.’
Misjudged the risk? I doubt it. I suspect they knew perfectly well what was happening. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade welcomed the parliamentary report, saying, ‘If the government is serious about arms control and human rights, it should stop using public money to promote arms sales to dictators.’ Well, yes. Quite.
But we can’t leave a charity to have the last word; this is Fiona Griffiths’s book, after all. And as she would probably put it, the fuckwits are winning and they’re using your taxes to do it.
Harry Bingham
About the Author
Harry Bingham is an author of fiction and non-fiction. When he isn’t writing, he’s either walking the dogs or running The Writer’s Workshop, a leading editorial consultancy. He lives in Oxfordshire.
Also by Harry Bingham
Fiction
Talking to the Dead
The Money Makers
Sweet Talking Money
The Sons of Adam
Glory Boys
The Lieutenant’s Lover
Non-Fiction
This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World
Stuff Matters
Getting Publishing . . . and Staying Published
Copyright
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Orion Books
This ebook first published in 2013 by Orion Books
Copyright © Harry Bingham 2013
The right of Harry Bingham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The lines from ‘somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond’. Copyright 1931, © 1959, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmage., from COMPLETE POEMS: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 4091 7
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Dedication
Contents
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2
3
4
5
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Endnote
About the Author
Also by Harry Bingham
Copyright
Love Story, With Murders Page 40