by Howard Marks
She’d wondered when she’d hear from Kyle. The dragon was in Tregaron. It was about time she felt its fire.
Gunning the bike into life, Cat headed back towards town, asking herself how she’d lost the Rover. Was it the withdrawal, dulling her instincts? She used to be good at this. But maybe the driver was good himself. She wasn’t thinking properly, not concentrating.
The road back to Tregaron offered little interest, just the usual high banks that hid the fields and the occasional glimpses of cud-chewing cows peering curiously through gates. In the background hung the shadowy outline of the mountains. As she blinked, she caught a flickering of light. A bar of sunlight breaking through between the clouds perhaps, but as she looked up the clouds looked as implacable as ever.
The road narrowed. There was a flash of darkness in the top right-hand side of her visor. A shape. Moving fast.
She was on the thing before she could react. There was a double impact. A hard one, painful, across her chest. A second, an instant later across her helmet. Something possibly on her arm too, though maybe she only felt that later.
Her head spun under the blow. Her arm jerked involuntarily. The bike swerved. She attempted to correct, but it was too late. The wheels hit mud on the side of the road and lost grip. She hit the verge, ramped up it, fell. She smacked back hard onto the ground, helmet crunking onto the edge of the road. The bike plunged on into the hedgerow, revved a moment longer, then the engine cut.
Cat found herself lying on her side, arm twisted, feeling concussed despite the helmet. Her boot had somehow got tangled in the bike wheel and her foot had been pulled on into the hedge, so that she was lying head downwards into the road.
To get her helmet off, she had to sit up. Which meant freeing her foot. Which meant getting enough of a view to see what was caught. Which meant sitting up.
She was just noticing the smell of crushed nettle and long grass, when she heard an engine bark to life somewhere close. The sound neared, increased in volume. She looked towards it, saw a long black car moving fast towards her. Too fast to stop.
She was snared by her foot, trapped between the hedge and the road. Her face met the hedge wall. Sticks of elder and hazel blocked her movement. She flailed at the blank green wall, groped for a hold, found nothing. She could feel herself falling back, headfirst into the road. The Rover closed on her. Air and gravel rushed her head. She closed her eyes.
The car swerved aside into the mud and came to a stop. It idled a moment, then glided off down the road.
Basic biker know-how kicked in. Check limbs, check breaks. She started flexing her joints one by one. Everything hurt but nothing too intensely. Her foot was still caught, but that could wait. Next step, visuals. Check for wounds. She twisted round, trying to view herself. No blood that she could see. Her suit seemed to have held. Next step, remove the helmet, check for any blood injuries. She didn’t think there was anything, but still.
She swore again, continuously, but quietly. Ran through her checks. Bones, joints, blood, head. Found a way to release her trapped leg. Everything hurt and her thigh hurt like hell, but nothing seemed broken. The worse thing was her nerves. She knew she’d been a second away from having her neck snapped on the lonely road.
She forced herself back through the hedgerow, and tugged her bike out onto the road. There was no question of trying to follow the Rover now. She looked at the bike. A few scratches, as with herself, but no real damage.
Had something been thrown from the car into her path? She looked but couldn’t see anything, though there were fallen twigs and bits of branch dislodged by the wind lying everywhere. It would be next to impossible to prove what had happened had been deliberate, if indeed it had been.
She flipped up her visor, lit a cigarette, felt tender towards her scarred bike. The drizzle turned into light rain and her mind turned to Kyle. She woke the bike and rode slowly on. Everything inside her was trembling from shock.
As part of your trank withdrawals regime, very definitely not APOTS.
The road curved gently to the right. A café was tucked in off the road about two hundred yards after it straightened out again. She let the lorry in front pull away, and steered the bike off the road. She pulled up outside the café, a prefabricated hut grey as the sky. It would barely have registered on the radar of anyone who didn’t know the area well and wasn’t looking for it. Cat parked as close as she could to the entrance, making use of the roof’s overhang to cover herself and the bike. She climbed off, walked in.
Inside, the air was a humid fug that steamed the windows and filled the lungs. The place held eight small tables but was empty, except for the frail-looking middle-aged couple behind the counter. She ordered a burger with fried onions, a cup of builder’s tea, went to sit at one of the Formica-topped tables. Sitting hurt. When she stripped off that night, she knew she would have huge, livid bruises.
Large windows reached almost halfway down the front wall of the café, allowing her a clear view. All the time she watched the road outside. Few vehicles passed. No black Rovers. She kept an eye on the road as she ate her gristly burger, drank the harsh tea.
With every chew, every gulp, she tried to calm. She texted Rob: Tell me I’m not mad. A reply came back within a minute: You’re lovely, Cat. What’s mad anyway?
She grinned and felt better, calming down.
She had the Rover’s registration plate and phoned it through to Cathays. They’d place it on the national Automatic Number Plate Recognition database and every ANPR-equipped camera and every police car would automatically flash through any sighting. If the Rover driver was an idiot, he’d be caught within an hour or two. If he wasn’t an idiot, he’d have ditched his car.
Cat dropped her phone on the table and sat staring out at the road a while, monitoring the flow of traffic. After half an hour of no traffic except two tractors and no lethally inclined Rovers, she got back on her bike, and checked Kyle’s postcode in the satnav. She felt all right about seeing Kyle. Cat knew she was in for a hard time of some sort, but she also felt they understood each other. And not because they were both tough women in a man’s game. No, it ran deeper than that. Something ran deeper anyway, though Cat didn’t know what, or quite how she knew it. But she planned to find out.
What do you do when fortune knocks?
No. That’s not the question. You don’t know who or what it is on the other side of that door, that Twitter handle. All you hear is the knock, the call, the invitation.
After all, it wasn’t her who chose her voice, chose to make herself open to song in this way. That came from outside, from somewhere else.
She doesn’t make a decision straight away, but he’s asking to meet her, loves her voice, believes they can go places. And why wouldn’t she believe that? Why wouldn’t she say yes? If you don’t open the door when you hear the knock, you’ll never know who it was came a-knocking.
She gives herself time to make her decision, but the truth is her mind was made up from the first minute.
Her answer is: Yes.
7
THE TURN-OFF TO Kyle’s place was just before the first sign that gave the town’s name, black letters on a white background, the type that identified small towns and villages all over Wales. The lane snaked for minutes, hedgerows thickening, looming higher, closer. The place was well out of the town. The entrance, much narrower even than the lane, led up a small incline, a rough path mostly overgrown with long grasses. A strip of crushed vegetation tattooed by tyre marks was the only sign that anybody ever visited.
Cat followed the marks along the track. It seemed to wind around on itself. Anyone not absolutely sure that this was the right way would be tempted to give up on it long before they reached the end. On the left of the track a stone wall blocked any sight of what was on the other side; on the right, branches from a line of rowan trees reached out onto the path. She heard the scrape of branches on her helmet, flattened her body on the tank to avoid them. A quarter of a mile later the tree
s came to an end, a low stone wall taking over from the rowans.
She stopped the bike at the entrance, climbed off, feeling her muscles ache. She was stiffening up. She swung the heavy wooden five-bar gate inwards. A large barn was set well back from the gate. In its day it must have been for farm machinery but now, like so many old barns in Dyfed, it had been turned into a home. A sign of a depressed county being revived with out-of-town money? Depended on how you looked at it. Depended mostly, she guessed, on whether you liked the look of who came in.
A generous area around the barn had been stripped of grass, laid with tiny brown and cream stones. She could see no car anywhere. She parked the bike in the carport, pulled off her helmet, left it with the bike.
She crunched her way over to the front door. In the cold, grey afternoon the carriage lamp above already cast a patch of yellowish light over the gravel. She knocked on the dark wood, then, when that provoked no response, with the knocker, a brass hand that connected with a satisfying rap. She counted to twenty, knocked again. The door, when she pushed her shoulder against it, was firmly closed. There was no handle, just a smooth knob that slipped beneath her hand when she grasped it. She slapped her hand against the solid wood, pushed her foot against the bottom, more in irritation than with any belief that it would yield.
Was this Kyle’s idea of a joke? Ordering her to come round even though Kyle herself was out, just to mess her about. Or maybe Kyle wanted her here because she didn’t want her somewhere else?
She stepped back. The gravel crunched. Simultaneously there was another sound, like the crackling of paper, but louder. Cat turned quickly, expecting to see something. But the driveway was as deserted as it had been when she arrived. She followed the noise along the line of the house. The gravel was a feature all the way around, although at the back it tapered to a narrow strip. To the right, on the lawn, near the wall, a rotary clothes drier was empty but for a peg bag designed to look like a tuxedo. It swung on its own orbit in the wet breeze. Cat thought she must have heard the sound of the drier, spinning on its axis.
Beyond it stood a small stable block, its doors secured with rusted padlocks. It looked as if it was long out of use. Next to this a paddock, empty apart from tall weeds and grasses gently shifting in the damp breeze. Unlike the rest of the property this area appeared semi-derelict. On the near side stood a large shed bleeding light onto the grass. It looked like a DIY store unit, but about twice as big. A home office maybe. Cat moved towards the shed’s light, came in close, knocked.
‘Hello?’
She edged the door open, flooding the yard with the brightness of several spotlights. The shed seemed abnormally bright. She paused at the threshold, blinking.
Her eyes adjusted. The outhouse had been fitted, on both sides of the room, with long shelves at hip height. Neatly stacked on the right-hand side of the door were a dozen mottled grey box files, labelled from one to twelve. The desk on the left was less orderly, untidy stacks of cardboard folders spilling their loads onto its top. Two enormous cork noticeboards had been fitted to the walls, one each side of the door. Both were plastered with photos and newspaper clippings. Cat stepped closer. She took it in.
This seemed a themed space, like a shrine or trophy room. The story that ran through it was the hunt for Griff Morgan. Of course Kyle had been in on the bust that finally collared him at the marina. She had made damn sure of that. But now, looking at all the clippings going back many years, Cat saw that Kyle’s interest in Morgan had long predated the bust.
The Morgan material on the cork boards was arranged roughly chronologically, starting with the sketchy details of his childhood. A journalist from Bild had managed to get hold of an alleged photograph of Morgan as a toddler, smiling shyly at the camera. The wealth of cuttings from around the world that covered the two noticeboards showed that Kyle’s obsession had been shared by many others.
The one theme that leaped from the chaos of the material was that Morgan had been a businessman first to last, seeking the biggest margins and biggest market share. He had specialised in only those sectors that yielded the greatest profit: synthetics, crack cocaine, and heroin if margins were right. Almost every major seizure on the British mainland for the ten-year period prior to the bust had been ascribed to product being imported by his network, but until the bust itself no gang members had been apprehended.
She reached up, unpinned one bulky item that had been folded, smoothed it out. Taken from the News Review section of The Sunday Times it tied Morgan to a number of North African Islamic organisations. The suggestion was that as violence had consumed his earlier hosts in South America, Morgan had built labs and airstrips in the Northern Sahara, closer to his home market. The cocaine had been landed at remote beaches in West Africa, then flown to bases to be processed, the precursor chemicals for the synthetics also flown up from small, failed African states; a cut of the end profits diverted back to the Islamic radicals. Yet the body of the text was merely a fine web of speculation and supposition with little fact to support its central thrust.
The stories went on, mutated. A later clump of cuttings hinted at Morgan, the criminal without political portfolio. This was a man who robbed security vans, high-end jewellers, banks. Increasingly Morgan seemed to have become a scapegoat for any serious criminal episode that remained unsolved. She noted that some of the crimes he had been accused of would have required him to be on different sides of the globe simultaneously. He had even been suspected for a time of being the Dusseldorf Ripper. A profile in the Guardian ridiculed the idea. It offered that Morgan was a man who had always acted for significant financial gain, something that he was unlikely to achieve raping teenage prostitutes.
Cat sighed, rubbed her hand over her eyes. Her concussion was still there, but not too bad. More a background buzziness than anything else, a buzziness that blurred into her withdrawal headache and merged with it. The bruising was worse. Her limbs felt too heavy, stiff.
Partially hidden by the box files, the edge of a porcelain picture frame poked out. Cat picked it up. The photo showed Kyle leading Morgan in cuffs to a police van, her face dourly professional. Probert, his black AR mask partly lifted, walked at Morgan’s other elbow. Who knows how much willpower Kyle must have drawn on to keep the triumphant smile from her face? This was an original, not a press clipping. Some photographer must have been paid or leaned on to provide her with this memento of the collar of her career.
Under the photograph, a plastic folder contained two pages photocopied from The Times. The report started with a short reminder of the bust, a small photograph of Kyle with Morgan, similar to the one in the frame but taken from a slightly different perspective.
Cat remembered those days well. The London press pack had rolled into Wales en masse, stunned that Morgan had finally been arrested.
Some of the more patronising comments by the press had infuriated the local force. This Times report was less noxious than many, but a sense of amazement that a regional police force should have been instrumental in the arrest of an international criminal bubbled just under the surface. The main focus here, though, was the incineration of the haul from Penarth Marina.
Cat took the two pieces of paper, laid them out side by side, as they would have originally appeared in The Times. Down the far-right column of the right-hand page and the extreme left of the left-hand page a series of photos recorded the event. South Wales Police had invited the press to be present when Morgan’s stash was destroyed. The first photos showed a large institutional building and a warehouse. She recognised it as part of the Queen Elizabeth Building near Heathrow. It was where most large drug hauls were incinerated.
Interior shots showed the sheer scale of the confiscated goods, the ten hollow kayaks, package after package wrapped tightly in transparent plastic, the cream-coloured tablets and powder showing through. At the far end of the room the incinerator was being tended by a figure in a silver, heat-resistant suit. Kyle and some of the coppers who had been present at Mo
rgan’s arrest stood by, watching as the parcels were piled up by the incinerator, an industrial oven with a reinforced glass door, behind which the flames bulged.
The last pictures showed the line-up of Kyle and the policemen, faces hidden by protective goggles and masks, watching as the packages were fed to the fire.
The next page showed operational details of the bust, with black-and-white diagrams of the sequence of events. After the first ten canoes had been placed on the deck and tarped over, the four men stayed on the boat and the cruiser had disappeared for three hours. The men had then returned to collect the ten remaining canoes and an ambush by Kyle.
The bust had been the result of quick planning on Kyle’s part. A security guard at Penarth Marina had noticed it was taking four men to carry canoes that would normally be light enough work for two. And though there was nothing strange about canoes in a marina, it was weird to see ten of them carried onto the deck of a motor cruiser. And at night. Suspicious, the security guard had called the operations room at Cathays Park, and then Kyle had taken control.
Kyle had got the security guard to lead her to the lock-up from where the first ten canoes had been removed. Inside, Kyle found the second ten. Opening one she had found it loaded with MDMA powder, the raw material used to make ecstasy pills.
Re-sealing the canoe, and knowing the men would be back to pick up the second half of their cargo, Kyle had summoned an Armed Response Unit – and lain in wait on the quay. She couldn’t afford to delay anything further, because the first load of drugs had already been shipped and she couldn’t yet risk sending teams out to search for it, in case those search teams inadvertently let Morgan’s gang know the police were on to them, in which case they’d just disappear into the night.