The Score

by Howard Marks

  Cat jumped the gate. The top had been rimmed with broken glass to deter trespassers. A concrete path led round the back of the house. There were some arrow-slit windows, not visible from the other side. The glass was opaque, revealing the outline of a bottle of toilet cleaner on a shelf inside.

  She stepped off the path, picked up one of the large stones that lay on the grass verge. She spun round to see a figure looming behind her. Thomas. He had followed through the trees. He could move pretty fast still.

  She threw the stone through the window, clearing the glass away with the sleeve of her jacket before clambering up. The sound of the search dogs was closer now as they headed to the house.

  She knocked the toilet duck to the floor, stepped over the cistern onto the seat and then to the floor. She opened the bathroom door and saw a short passageway leading to the front entrance. The door had been fitted with several heavy dead-locks.

  The first room was entirely empty, the other contained a three-seater sofa and two battered armchairs. The arms of the sofa leaked stuffing. A coffee table bore the marks of countless mugs, a thin covering of dust mingled with cigarette ash.

  Cat left the room and walked to the far end of the passageway, glancing through an open door into the kitchen. She flipped on the harsh strip light. The worktops were piled with pizza cartons; an empty vodka bottle, the same brand as the empties at the tunnel, lay on its side on the lino floor. A plastic ashtray from the Owain Glyndwr overflowed with butts.

  Cat heard Thomas behind her, his breathing ragged after the climb through the window. She looked round at him.

  ‘What is this place? There seems a lot of security.’

  ‘Holiday cottage. Owner died. It’s been locked up since.’ He sniffed the stale air. ‘The lad who ID’d the Moses girl said she came up here sometimes when she wasn’t working. Looks like it was another teen drinking hole.’

  Cat pointed to a small pile of clothes in the corner of the kitchen, woollies and socks topped by a hairbrush, some Dove moisturiser, and a pink make-up bag embossed with a cartoon image: Betty Boop.

  ‘Same socks as with Nia’s stuff, and the same cheap vodka.’

  They moved over towards the shelf. Thomas stared at the objects intently. Cat rifled through the pile of clothes, pulled out a grey T-shirt, the logo of the College of Music and Drama on the front. Beneath the logo, just above the T-shirt’s ribbed bottom, was a rusty stain the size of a clenched fist.

  She put it to her nose, thought she caught the metallic whiff of blood.

  ‘Anyone else in town a student at that college?’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Looks like Esyllt was here too,’ she said. ‘All three of them, seems like.’

  ‘This will all need going over by the SOCOs,’ Thomas said, looking out of the window beyond the garden. The dogs were standing on the edge, shuffling, their breath clouding the air.

  On the table, there was an A3 sheet of paper. Cat picked it up by the corner. Under it were several ‘Free Morgan’ T-shirts. The face was instantly familiar from the YouTube footage at the marina. Familiar from newspaper photographs. Familiar from student posters and cartoons.

  The portrait showed Griff Morgan as he was that day of the bust. Simultaneously dangerous and alluring. It had all the glamour of sin.

  The image was predictable enough in the setting. Morgan was a popular icon, especially so with the counter-cultural young. But then as she moved away, she felt Thomas tap her shoulder and saw he was pointing to the inner wall. The whole central section had been covered with scarlet graffiti. It looked as if it had been done hastily, with no interest in its artistic merit. There was a Kilroy figure staring morosely over a wall, with the typical droopy nose and wide peeping eyes. The words underneath read: Griff Morgan was here and he did the girls. Chwith.

  Thomas stared at it wide-eyed.

  ‘Fuck you make of that?’ she said.

  Thomas’s face twisted, though his expression was hard to read. ‘Looks like someone’s trying to yank our chain. Matthews said Nia has been dead over two days, and the other girl definitely has. That rules out Morgan. Morgan was still in a maximum-security prison at the time these girls died. Probably the second most guarded man in Britain after the Yorkshire Ripper. Not the most likely murder suspect, is he?’

  ‘No, not exactly.’

  Cat palmed her phone and waited for a signal. The online version of the Echo article about Morgan’s release flickered over her small screen. His movements were described hour by hour and fully accounted for. Morgan had been released the previous day at noon, a pack of journalists had been waiting for him and followed him down in convoy to the film set, then back to his house to Hampstead. It was inconceivable that he had made the five-hour round trip to Tregaron, and even if he had, it would have been after the girls had died.

  Thomas was right, of course. A celebrated prisoner in a maximum-security prison was not a likely murder suspect. But the house they stood in looked as if it had been used by the dead girls, Nia and Delyth. If the grey T-shirt matched back to Esyllt, then the house had been used by two dead girls and one missing one. And someone in the house had named Morgan as the killer. It made no sense, but Cat knew that life often didn’t.

  One of the things you learn early: music is never only about music.

  That’s what they don’t tell you when you start. You think it’s about the purity of your voice. The ability to hit a note and hold it. The ability to find the heart of the song and let yourself dissolve into the song, let the song merge with you.

  And then, slowly, you figure out that music is about more than that. It’s an industry. Men in suits who want things from you. Men in suits who smile at you with their teeth just as they’re still doing sums in their head.

  You don’t have to be a genius to do the maths on that particular combination. But she’s no fool. You don’t get anywhere by hiding. You just have to keep your wits about you, know what you want.

  She looks back at that Twitter message.

  @purevoice94: Saw your YouTube film. You have REAL talent.

  How do these things start? Answer: you never know. It could start any way at all. A song in a nightclub. A YouTube video. A message on Twitter.

  It could start right now.

  5

  CAT WOKE. THE room was narrow, one wall taken up by a window with a view between thin curtains onto an empty square. In the corner was a wardrobe made out of plywood and a dressing table with a pink plush seat. This was the only furniture as far as she could see; the place smelt of beer and industrial detergent.

  Then it came back to her. She had refused Thomas’s loaded offer to stay over and buzzed up to The Lion, a pub in town with rooms. The light outside told her it was already dawn and she had overslept.

  Cat cursed and clicked into her messages. There was only one, from Thomas, telling her the dog search of the vicinity of the mine had been completed and nothing else had been turned up. He added that all the items found in the tunnel and the cottage had been bagged for prints and DNA. Some items had been confirmed by her employer at the café as belonging to Delyth Moses, others as Nia’s. He had been unable to get hold of Martin Tilkian, but one of the DCs had seen Esyllt wearing a similar T-shirt around town; as no other locals were students in Cardiff it was a fair bet that the T-shirt was hers. His voice sounded bored, as if he would rather have stayed in bed. Although he’d been shaken the night before on finding the bodies, it seemed that his compassion had passed.

  She tried Martin’s number but his phone was still switched off. She left a quick message telling him to call. He had probably not slept, she thought, maybe he’d knocked himself out with pills. She went looking for a bathroom, found one and showered quickly. Downstairs no one was up. She made herself a quick breakfast in the kitchen. She felt shaky, her balance slightly out of kilter, but she knew it was the withdrawal from the tranks and tried to ignore it. She made herself a roll-up and sprinkled it with
canna, already feeling she’d find it hard to keep it level through the day ahead. When standing in the kitchen, she kept one hand on the counter for balance.

  At the police station she found the street silent, the two-storey terrace with its Chinese takeaway under morning mist. The station looked as quiet as the neighbourhood. The entrance to the holding cells at the back was locked behind a pull-down metal flap.

  She tried the front door: locked, a small glass panel revealing only a faint light that appeared to be coming from somewhere deep inside. She knocked but there was no reply. She couldn’t see a bell. Finally, feeling along the chipped paintwork of the doorjamb she found a small bump. She pressed it without any particular hope.

  The door was solid, so the buzzer was barely audible, but there was the sound of the door swinging open. Ahead she could see the reception desk. Behind it slouched the PC she had seen the previous night, the one who had yakked his lunch into the grass at the sight of the dead waitress. He seemed to have recovered his appetite by now, though: a small piece of escaped breakfast dangled from a frond of his moustache. He looked half-asleep still.

  In front of him was an old magazine, the pages yellowed, the spine broken; some true-crime publication, one that had already done the rounds, by the look of it. She noticed how his hair was tousled at the back. He suppressed a yawn as he turned to face her.

  ‘DI Thomas?’

  His face contorted as he lost the battle with a second, more powerful yawn, glanced down at the magazine, his attention focused on a black-and-white image of a woman sprawled on a grassy bank. She was young and attractive, wearing only underpants and bra.

  He flapped his hand in the direction of the door she had just entered. ‘He’s at the Hopkins place.’

  His posture relaxed, now he knew that Cat wasn’t looking for him, and he turned his attention back to the magazine. She pulled her phone from her jacket, clicked through to a map of the area. Thrust it across the desk. ‘Where is it?’

  He took it from her, screwed up his eyes. First he held the phone right up to his face, then he extended his hand as far as it would stretch. Seconds passed.

  Tapping the screen he pointed to an area roughly in the centre. It looked like a farm, not a large place. The satnav’s map showed it to be surrounded by wooded areas and a couple of miles from the mine.

  It didn’t take her more than ten minutes to get there. There was little traffic. She had to stop only once as a herdsman helped his Friesians across the road from their field. The size of their udders suggested that they were off to be milked; their legs bowed under the weight, their teats like the fingers of huge latex gloves.

  The farm was signposted, a warped hardboard with the name roughly painted in black. A sharp sweep left off the road took her into a yard piled with manure and feed bags.

  She kicked out the Laverda’s stand, took off her helmet and gloves. To the right a shed contained an old tractor, its paintwork flaked and peeling. To the left there was a cavernous barn with milking equipment in it. She took a muddy path up an incline at the side.

  Thomas was standing by a pile of wood stamping his feet, hand cupped around a cigarette. In the other he held a stick. He was staring down at something in the mud at his feet. Beyond him, the ragged line of the police search team was moving slowly over the land. Mostly it was open pasture, there was little ground cover. The cottage they had visited the night before was just visible, maybe a mile or so further over to the right. Arranged on top of the hill opposite were some small, free-standing barriers which the army used for target practice.

  Thomas had disturbed a blackbird, which showed its disapproval with a loud rattle. She walked over. The mud at Thomas’s feet was covered in a series of wavy lines. Some were already losing definition in the ooze, but she saw he had been trying his hand at Kilroy cartoons. They had the same droopy nose and peeping eyes as the figure on the wall. They were the sort of eyes that seemed to follow you as you passed.

  He acknowledged her presence with a wry nod. He looked as if he’d been up most of the night, the skin around his eyes dark and drawn.

  ‘Someone’s trying to mess with our heads, Price.’

  He pointed down at the figures, and passed her some crumpled sheets from his jacket. They were printouts from the internet, short histories of the Kilroy image. Some of it was already familiar from her own reading the previous night. It seemed the original Kilroy of Kilroy was here fame had been an American rivet inspector. He’d marked work he passed with the famous line, which had then appeared in inaccessible parts of the ships carrying the troops over during the Second World War, high up on hulls, on chimney stacks and down in the bowels of the ships in crevices no person could reach. The idea caught on and a graffiti craze spread. The cartoon of the figure with the eyes had originally been British, its origin was obscure, but when British soldiers took up the craze they had yoked the two traditions together. The man with the eyes had become the ubiquitous Kilroy.

  ‘These little fellows don’t mean much in themselves,’ he said. He was giving her a knowing, apprehensive look. ‘But do you remember Operation Plato?’

  It was a rhetorical question. Any Wales copper who had anything to do with drugs had come to hear of the operation. It had been perhaps the most embarrassing in a long string of failed attempts to capture Griff Morgan prior to the marina bust. Cat had not been in Drugs then but she knew the basics: reliable intelligence had placed Morgan alone in a remote cave on the Pembrokeshire coast. A rival drug lord had got the details through a leak from Morgan’s gang, and passed them on. Morgan was said to be waiting in the cave while the Tulle brothers and minor soldiers unloaded cargo somewhere further up the coast. The intelligence had been precise on the location of the cave, and that Morgan would be there alone. It was a particularly inaccessible spot, halfway up a cliff. The escape routes had been cut by land, air and sea, and the area tightly encircled: it looked like they had finally snagged him.

  But the operation had proved a damp squib. The AR squad found the cave empty, except for some recently smoked cigarettes and a half-eaten snack. An exhaustive search of the area failed to find him. After the marina bust, during a long grilling Morgan had finally admitted being in the cave alone that day. It turned out they had missed him by only half an hour.

  At the time of the op, Cat remembered, Della Davies had still been press officer at Cathays. As the affair had been a costly failure, she had run a press blackout afterwards, and no details of the operation had ever reached the public.

  Thomas was staring at Cat intently. She had a horrible feeling she already knew where this was going. Tentatively, he passed her a faxed photograph. She recognised the old evidence sheet numbers from five years back. She was looking at a photo from the Operation Plato evidence file. It wasn’t that well defined, but the basics were clear enough.

  ‘Last night, when I saw the wall,’ he made a clicking sound, ‘it reminded me of something, then I remembered this.’ He hesitated. ‘At the time no one really made much of it. Everyone was too pissed-off at having missed Morgan.’

  The focus of forensics at the time had been the objects recovered at the cave and not the place, so the picture was not a close-up. It showed the narrow base of the cave, about six feet across. Among black pools was a dry patch with some cigarettes stubbed out on the rocks, some sandwich wrappers and a couple of empty water bottles. On the wall above was a solitary Kilroy, smaller than the one on the wall, but visibly in the same style.

  ‘I’ve scoured online,’ Thomas said. ‘All the true-crime sites, but there’s no sign any member of the public has ever seen this picture. Difficult to imagine how they could since it’s locked away in the evidence vaults under Cathays. No one has looked at this file for years.’

  Cat remembered vague rumours going around at the time about how Morgan had someone on the inside. This had been floated as the reason that he was always one step ahead of all the attempts to snatch him. The Kilroy looked like Morgan was taking the piss
out of the officers he knew were coming for him. Could it mean something else? She wasn’t sure. Despite exhaustive investigations, no inside man in the force had ever been identified as having assisted Morgan, and under questioning he had never admitted to having one. The inside man was likely a myth, the paranoid reflex of a provincial force that had repeatedly failed to catch their man. But over years the rumours of one had created an ever tighter information loop around any Morgan-related operations. The day of Operation Plato, only Kyle and a few trusted officers close to her would have known who the target was. These were the same officers in on the marina bust, and Morgan had not got away that day.

  She glanced back at the picture. The eyes seemed to stare back at her, mocking. If someone wanted to fuck with their heads, they had found a good way to do it. The graffiti, she reckoned, had been phrased to be understood as a plain statement of fact. The Kilroy figure had been offered as proof of its bona fides. Whatever its original private significance to Morgan may have been – if it had any – it came over as a crudely territorial gesture, like a piss on a lamppost, or a notch on a tree.

  They were being taunted.

  ‘The only person we can safely say at this stage did not kill these girls is Morgan,’ Thomas said. He paused. He looked visibly shaken. ‘I checked in with the governor at Belmarsh. He thought I was short of a deck for even asking. He assured me Morgan had been in the secure unit and had no day releases. The last few months he’s been so unwell he could barely walk more than a few paces unaided.’

  Cat took this in. None of it was any great surprise. She knew all security protocols in Category A prisons were rigorously monitored and enforced. It had been over two decades since there had been a break-out by an A’er, and this had been from a transfer van; as for a break-out followed by a break-in, and by a sick man, it was fairyland stuff.