The Score

by Howard Marks

A song. It could be anything. Anything, that is, that reached out from the singer to the listener and changed them both.

  She remembered the first time she had that experience. She’d been only four – so family tradition reported it anyway – and she’d heard the Beatles singing ‘Let It Be’. She couldn’t really remember much of the incident except the music itself. The astonishing sound. The sense that here was something removed from ordinary life, something better than it.

  The sound had been magical, alluring – and inaccessible. The story was that the radio had been up on a high chest of drawers. She’d been too small to reach it, so she pulled the drawers out and started to climb. The adventure had ended the only way it could: with the whole thing falling down on top of her, a broken radio, a trip to casualty and three stitches just above her eye, the pale shadow of that scar still just visible through her eyebrow.

  Her family liked to recount it as a tale of childish misadventure. She went along with that for the sake of peace, but she’d never thought of it that way.

  Music called to her. She answered it. So what, if there had been a crash? So what, if there had been blood?

  Music had called. She had answered.

  That was all that mattered.

  2

  REALLY, THERE WAS no decision to make. Although it was pledged more than half a lifetime ago, and although she now found their intense behaviour almost ludicrous, still, they had made a blood bond. They had meant it at the time, and once meant, well, one couldn’t take that lightly. She noticed how good it felt to be needed again.

  An unusual optimism seized her. She would take the Laverda on a run up to Tregaron, she would open up the bike, feel the wildness of old Wales that still clung on up in the hills. It would be a drive back into a better past. Suddenly everything felt up for grabs again.

  Cat turned fluidly, delivering a roundhouse kick to a hanging punchbag. So this was what feeling good felt like? She had forgotten. She palmed her phone from her joggers and called her new boss, DCI Gwen Kyle, hoping to get the answerphone. Requesting permission for the trip was just a formality. Cat was on flexi-time, doing desk work while she dealt with her withdrawal. Out of the loop on the Drug Proactive Unit’s current operations as she was, notifying Kyle was just a courtesy.

  A secretary answered, a new girl, nervous and clearly a jobsworth, because she covered herself by telling Cat to talk in person with Kyle about it. The girl said Kyle was on the set of a docudrama about the drugs bust at Penarth Marina. She would be back in the office in about an hour.

  Cat decided to go and talk to Kyle in person rather then risk missing her again. Kyle was a prickly sort, she would be easier to handle having just visited the site of the bust, her greatest triumph, where her ego would have been getting a stroking.

  Some old scaffolding resting between the breeze blocks had become her clothes rail, and Cat flipped a hanger off the pole. On it was her battered all-in-one leather suit. She had bought it second hand and because it lacked logo or graphic design, and was scuffed up on the arse and back and knees, it was her favourite. She pushed legs and arms in, then eased up the chunky zipper to snug herself in.

  Cat found gloves and helmet then swung the door open. She started the Laverda and nosed it out. The journey wasn’t far. Although some po-faced Penarth burghers might dispute the fact, Penarth was now just another suburb in the sprawl of Cardiff. She could have ridden into town with her eyes closed – in fact, she might have been tempted to try had there been no other traffic on the roads.

  On the far side of the water the familiar streets and shapes of the city gave abruptly into the Bay development. Up-scale regeneration had bulldozed the old streets, sooty terraces become proud civic structures and landmark hotels, cocktail bars and pizzerias. Even after all these years it still felt wrong.

  Cat took the flyover into the centre of Cardiff, rat-running from the Bay to the DPU building in Cathays Park. The unit had oversight of drugs policing for all Wales but from the outside it looked like a tax office, which was essentially what it was.

  Her office was at basement level next to the parking. There was damp on the walls and the window overlooked a toilet block. It was one of the spaces allocated to officers on flexi-time, far from the operations hub on the upper floors. But she didn’t mind the solitude.

  Cat quickly checked her work emails. There had been over twenty minor seizures since she had last checked in, mostly skunk and Es. Her task was to upload details of busts in Wales onto the National Criminal Intelligence database for use nationally. This allowed officers to track supply networks and vectors of transmission for each drug type. The uploading was usually given to civilians or officers on disciplinaries. But it could be important work. The charts might predict where moody gear would turn up next. Pills with one gang’s press showing in another’s territory could signal the start of a messy turf war. Classic brands were often bootlegged by the challenger’s labs. D&Gs, Calvin Kleins, M25s, Mitsubishis, once a sign of purity and quality, were stepped on with adulterants and cheap amphetamines: small differences in the press could distinguish real product from knock-offs and potentially save lives.

  Cat called Kyle’s secretary again: Kyle was delayed on the film set, she wasn’t sure how long for but thought at least another hour. Cat scanned the room quickly to check no new files had been dumped on her. They hadn’t. Mostly, she guessed, because nobody from the plusher upstairs above could be bothered to carry them down so far. She sighed, looking at the two personal items she had added to the decrepit office: a photo of Giacomo Agostini taken at the Isle of Man TT, his sunburnt features incongruous in the damp half-light, and beside it, an origami raven which she had owned since she was sixteen years old. She nipped the raven between two fingertips and stared at it. The past weighed so much, while the future she had glimpsed earlier that afternoon, the image of her hooning deep into old Wales to help an old friend, still weighed almost nothing in her mind.

  She thought she heard footsteps, glanced outside. But no one was there. On the wall the same graffiti had been up for months and no one had cleaned it off. ‘Narc Dog’. This was the term used of undercover drug officers, and she had been one once, but the letters had long preceded her period in the office. She didn’t know who had put it there, or who it had been directed at, but she left it. She shut down the computer, put down the raven and headed to the marina.

  By the time she reached the road above it, dusk had fallen. Ropes clacked against masts, along the quays the small weekender cruisers bobbed next to unmoving ocean-goers. The marina was another regeneration project, older than the Bay. She had mucked about there as a child, sploshing its crumbling pieces down into the bay water, feasting on the bilberries that grew up around its concrete. She saw the part of the marina where the bust had gone down was starkly lit by the film crew’s arc lights. The near side was blocked by two film trucks, and glowing behind them were the cigarettes of the crew, hunkered down out of the stiffening wind.

  Some gulls flapped slowly back towards the shore, seeking discarded chips and KFC. Further out, a large black bird she didn’t know the name of glided at an even height, hardly moving its wings, above the glistening foam.

  Cat toed the Laverda into neutral. She let the heavy bike glide down the ramp to where a line of rubberneckers were being kept back by the uniforms. A crowd was pressing around a large black car, but she couldn’t see who was in it. Most of them looked young, student-types. One of the PCs recognised her and waved her through.

  Inside the filming cordon, Cat spotted Kyle on the far side of the lights. She was talking to another tall blonde – the actress playing Kyle, Cat guessed. The actress looked healthy and attractive. Kyle would be happy about that. The omens were good, Cat thought, for her trip to Tregaron.

  Despite all the people on set, there was a respectful hush. No one was speaking above a whisper. Cat walked forward and stared at Kyle, trying to catch her attention. Kyle flicked out a glance but then quickly turned her attent
ion back to the actress. Cat had the sense she was ignoring her.

  She leaned back against one of the crew’s trucks. In front of her, a man in a puffer jacket – the director maybe – was studying some grainy footage on a monitor. She recognised it immediately. This was the famous security footage of the bust, now presumably being used to choreograph the reconstruction.

  On the screen, four gang members could just be made out, their heads covered by hoodies, walking slowly along the quay towards the shore. The four men then disappeared out of shot, off the marina’s walkways and into the shadows of the shoreline’s buildings. Cat looked up from the footage towards the arc lights of the marina – four actors, dressed identically to the men on the screen, clustered, their heads down.

  The man in the puffer jacket raised his hand, and the silence deepened. The quay was still except for the gently shifting shadows of boats and gulls.

  Then, from the right-hand corner of the quay, the four actors walked out. They were heading back towards their boat, heads still covered. They carried on their shoulders an object that looked like a large coffin. Their burden was heavy as the four men moved slowly, in swinging, syncopated steps.

  On the screen the men were a few steps ahead now, moving closer to the boat. Cat knew the footage well, knew what was coming. It had become something of a cliché. Every week one of the news channels would find a reason to drop it into a package, and it was a favourite on YouTube. Like the shots of Diana on the fateful night, or those of the 7/7 bombers walking through the station, the film seemed to hold a fascination for the public. It had become iconic, as had the leader of the busted gang, Griff Morgan. It had been the largest synthetic drug haul in recent memory, and Morgan had risen to a cross between Dillinger and Moriarty in the popular imagination, a pin-up in squats and student houses all over the land.

  It took a while before she could make out the shape the actors were shouldering. As they passed under a light it became clear that it was a four-man canoe. A sea-going kayak, a serious piece of kit.

  The men lowered the canoe carefully onto the deck of a large motor cruiser, visible just on the edge of the shot. Then the taller man – the one playing Morgan – covered the canoe with a tarp and the men climbed back onto the quay.

  The shot cut and the men walked hastily back to their marks. A bulky arm shot across the screen as the man in the puffer jacket reached forward and sped up the original security footage. It just showed the same moves being repeated many times: four men leaving the motor cruiser then returning to it with a canoe held between them. After ten canoes had been placed on the deck and tarped over, the four men stayed on the boat and the large cruiser – now visible on the grainy night footage as a receding blur of white – purred out of shot towards the sea lock.

  The sequence was still running in fast forward. Cat didn’t need to watch to know what happened next. The men would return to collect more canoes and would be ambushed by Kyle.

  The director had stood up. Over by the canteen van, he was talking with the actors who had been joined by others dressed as armed officers. Cat’s attention was caught again by the crowd around the black car. Whatever was inside was apparently more interesting than the filming. Some looked like students, and were wearing T-shirts with Griff Morgan’s face in iconic Warhol style. Others looked like press and passers-by who had got drawn in out of curiosity. At the edge, a woman in strappy heels and a sharply cut trouser suit was trying to peer through the car’s back window. Despite the heels, she was pushing and shoving like the best of them. Cat recognised Della Davies, former police press officer and her one-time love rival, her suit creasing as she scrummed in deeper. People were pressing in around the car from all sides now, but whoever was inside seemed invisible behind the heavily tinted glass.

  Out on the quay the final scene was taking shape. The arc lights had dimmed, and the concrete pathways lay in near darkness. On the cruiser deck, the actor playing Morgan was pulling the tarpaulin over a canoe. For a moment he glanced upwards, face still hidden, his eyes a momentary flash of light. At his side was his lieutenant, Mike Tulle. The third gang member, Huw Tulle, Mike’s baby brother, was walking down the gangplank, ready to move back to the warehouse. The fourth man had his back to the scene and was staring out towards the open sea.

  Tulle junior was the first to notice something was wrong. He stepped back towards the boat, his hand reaching instinctively into his hoody’s front pocket. Looking at the original on the screen, she thought he was over-acting it a touch. The first shot caught Tulle in the shoulder. He staggered backwards like a drunk. On the second impact, he fell on the gangplank and lay still. Tubes of light flashed, the torches of the black-clad Armed Response, their faces masked, closing in around him. Quickly they were on him, and he was secured with plastic cuffs and left in place for the medics.

  Then the actress playing Kyle appeared. Colleagues had levelled many accusations at DCI Gwen Kyle but nobody could ever call her a coward. Because although the ARs had taken out one gang member, there were still three more, and judging by the actions of the first, they were all armed. The woman stood now in full view of the gang, in full view also of the cameras. She was shouting at Morgan to surrender. In front of her, the ARs had fanned out in a semicircle, their Heckler lights trained on the men on the deck. Everything seemed to slow down. Kyle stood on the edge of the water. In the darkness there was a spark above her, rising into a long flame.

  Later it had come out that Morgan had threatened to blow the boat and everything with it, but somehow in those desperate seconds Kyle had persuaded him to surrender. He had come quietly along with his lieutenant, Mike Tulle. Only the fourth man, one of Morgan’s soldiers known as Diamond Evans, had swum for it. On cue, there was a splash. The AR actors immediately tramped the gangplanks, swinging torches across each bobbing inch of water and peering down the sides of the marina’s every boat. The Kyle actress loudly called for back-up and for the entire marina to be locked down and searched. But to no avail. Somehow, in the darkness and the confusion, lucky Diamond Evans had got away.

  Cat remembered how the press briefings had played down the escape of the fourth man, a minor player who had only recently joined Morgan’s crew. The main prize had been the capture of Morgan himself, a fugitive who’d been on the run for ten years. He was that rare thing, a major criminal with no previous record, a figure so elusive that some, encouraged by the internet’s conspiracy centrifuge, had even begun to doubt his very existence. But there he was, banged-up courtesy of the smart reactions and operational nous of DCI Gwen Kyle.

  The criminal spook had human form after all.

  Of the canoes recovered at the marina, nine were found to be loaded with MDMA, and the tenth with almost a million Mandrax pills. These were a niche product, but highly profitable. The street value of the total haul had been estimated at an eye-watering fifty million. A lot of money, Cat thought, and maybe twice that if the first ten canoes had not been lost. In all the hoo-ha over trapping the elusive Morgan, this point was also conveniently glossed over. Neither that first load nor the men that handled it had ever been found.

  ‘Price.’

  Cat looked up to see that the real Kyle was standing next to her.

  Cat realised it was the first time they had been one-on-one. Since being transferred to Kyle’s unit, Cat had been working down in the basement, and when they had passed each other in corridors Kyle was always hurrying along with a secretary or task-force officers and merely levelled a stiff, silent glare.

  ‘Ma’am,’ she replied.

  Kyle said nothing, just looked away across the set. Kyle’s face appeared so often in the press that it was like looking at someone Cat had known all her life. The short, fair hair, cut close to the scalp Joan of Arc style, the strong, classical nose and small, decisive chin. But closer, there was a dusky pallor to the skin, the long work hours showing in black circles beneath her eyes, a fragility uncaught by the camera’s gaze.

  ‘The thing is,’ Kyle�
�s cut-glass voice broke in. She turned to face Cat then, scrutinising her and making no attempt to hide it. She was taking in Cat’s scuffed leathers and witchy hair. ‘Everyone’s telling me you’re a screw-up, Price.’

  Cat looked down to her hands and finished making her roll-up.

  ‘Want one?’ Cat asked.

  Kyle looked at the roll-up as though it were dog shit.

  ‘I think you probably are up a screw-up.’ It was the kind of forthright remark Kyle had a reputation for, then momentarily her face seemed to soften. ‘But I keep an open mind.’

  Kyle was clearly in a hurry to leave. She was raising her hand towards a man parked in a Range Rover up on the marina’s ramp. He was keeping his distance. Through the driver’s window, Cat could make out the broad chest and bull neck of a body-builder, Kyle’s driver presumably.

  ‘I know why you’re here.’ Kyle sounded irritated. ‘Jill at the office told me.’

  ‘Ma’am.’ Cat could feel a throbbing over her left temple, one of the more persistent symptoms of her withdrawal. The timbre of Kyle’s voice was making it worse.

  ‘Don’t leave town, not on my time,’ Kyle said.

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  Their conversation was interrupted by movement beyond the cordon. The black car at the centre of the crowd was pulling out at speed. Following were a couple of other cars, one of them a convertible driven by Della Davies. Kyle silently watched her pass, her feelings expressed by a pair of pursed lips and an extra frown line.

  ‘Who’s in the Volvo?’ asked Cat, curious.

  Kyle shot a palely amused look at Cat. ‘The Volvo? Griff Morgan. Who else would it be? It’s his film.’

  Cat couldn’t really see much through the tinted back windows, but as the car turned the angle and the light shifted she got a brief view through the windscreen, beyond the driver into the back of the car. In the rear passenger seat, she saw the bunched-up shape of a man in a dark coat. He seemed thin. His pose somehow exhibited anxiety or something fragile, rather than anything commanding or curious. The man had long hair, fashionably unkempt – not unlike Griff Morgan’s hair in the iconic poster shot – but it was grey and pitifully thinning.