Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  Pugh played the last sequence again. She could see the man lying motionless on the floor of the hut.

  ‘But why does Rhys attack him? He’d already scored his shit.’

  ‘It often happens. Law of the street. The stronger junkie takes the weaker’s stash. Most of it was found on Rhys’s body when it was recovered from the water.’

  ‘And the twenties?’

  ‘Back on Rhys’s body.’

  Pugh crossed his arms. His smile was there again, warm but subdued, like a hearth seen through thick glass. He was trying to reassure her, but about what she couldn’t imagine.

  ‘The sad truth is that’s what Rhys had become, I’m afraid. Just another mugger, just another street junkie.’

  The final footage showed him heading down the beach, away from the hut. It was clear he’d had his fix now. Rhys was moving slowly, stumbling at times on the pebbles. He looked like a clown in an early silent movie. Then he lay down, on the strip of pale pebbles by the dark water.

  The water was covering his shins. He didn’t seem to notice. He just lay there, motionless, his eyes closed. The last frame showed the waves breaking over empty pebbles.

  ‘It was painless, at least.’ Pugh was getting up, his eyes no longer on the screen. ‘There are many worse ways to go.’

  She nodded. Rhys hadn’t looked in any condition to get up. It seemed the obvious explanation of what had happened.

  Pugh went into the next room, she could hear an electric kettle begin to boil. She stood up in front of the monitor. Moving fast, she fed a customised memory-cuff into the side of the hard drive. In less than fifty seconds she’d got everything she’d just seen.

  She sat down again, as Pugh brought through two City mugs. He passed one to her, his smile gently indulgent, as if at a child who was finally accepting the obvious.

  She put the tea down without sipping it.

  ‘And the autopsy?’

  He opened the file on the desk.

  ‘Just what you’d expect.’

  ‘In the tox report, no other incapacitants?’

  ‘No,’ said Pugh, the merest trace of impatience in his voice now. ‘It’s all straightforward enough. High levels of opiates consistent with long-term addiction. No surprises.’

  ‘The tests are clear on that?’

  He glanced at the notes. ‘His urine was significantly positive for opiates, though that’s not the only measure used.’

  She remained silent, waited for him to go on.

  ‘Heroin is metabolised to 6-monoacetylmorphine, then to morphine in the blood. It’s not like alcohol testing. You can’t get a definitive reading from the urine. But the level of morphine there shows he’d been heavily exposed to opiates prior to the test.’

  ‘You measured sweat levels?’

  ‘Positive again.’

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘Of course. Everything consistent with long-term use. No sudden spike at the end.’

  ‘Saliva?’

  Pugh sighed, barely hiding his impatience now.

  ‘Positive.’ He looked back down at the notes. ‘The legal limit of plasma morphine from OTCs, codeine and the like is twenty nanos per mil, equivalent to ten nanos per mil in blood. Rhys’s levels were about five hundred nanos per mil. That’s exactly what you’d have expected of a long-term user.’

  She waited, hoping there would be a ‘but’ somewhere, a catch that would open the situation to some new, healing light. But she already sensed there wasn’t going to be one coming. This was a case where things were as they seemed.

  Pugh was smiling wryly, sympathetically.

  ‘There’s no mystery here, lovey. It’s obvious what happened to the poor bastard. He’d just fixed a gramme of seventy per cent pure Afghani brown into his groin. He then passed out, as you saw, and drifted out on the tide.’

  He switched off the computer, and gathered his papers.

  She picked up one of the pictures from the file. It was a shot of Rhys lying there in his black jacket and biker boots. His eye sockets were empty, just blank slits in the pearl-grey skin, but otherwise the body looked perfectly intact.

  She didn’t ask about the eyes. She knew the fish ate them, it almost always happened, even if a body had only been under a few minutes. She glanced again at the picture, at the jacket and the boots.

  ‘His clothes look good quality,’ she said, ‘not charity shop stuff.’

  ‘They were traced to a new shop on the arcade, they’d had some lifted.’

  She knew that was the likely explanation. Street junkies were all expert shoplifters. She guessed Rhys was barred from most shops so would’ve targeted anywhere new opening up.

  Pugh closed the file.

  ‘Could Rhys have known I was back?’ she asked.

  ‘Doubt it.’

  She saw Pugh was looking dismissive but in a kind way. She suspected he’d already guessed what she was thinking, that the place where they found Rhys was about half a mile from her motel. But it was a small town, this meant little in itself. It was the time factor that niggled with her a little. Not that it meant anything sinister had occurred, Rhys could have been intending to see her, just out of curiosity, then OD’d in the meantime. But the likelihood was he hadn’t known she was back. Out on the streets he’d hardly be plugged into the police grapevine.

  Pugh turned and took down something from the wall. ‘If he knew you were back, which I doubt, he’d have wanted money off you.’ He was smiling to himself at the thing from the wall. ‘He’d not have wanted to upset you turning up unannounced. He’d have called first, but you never heard from him.’

  He glanced at her. He was looking at her kindly but with detachment. She thought she could read that look. He wanted to help with her grief but he didn’t want to encourage her to believe anything insubstantial. He knew that would just cause her more hurt. She looked at him and nodded, as if to signal she accepted there was nothing more to it.

  ‘It’s common for the bereaved to feel connected to what happened, that they could’ve prevented it, you know that,’ he said. ‘But Rhys was a junkie. Junkies die young, you just have to try to accept it.’ He’d taken down a photograph from the board. It was of a cottage with rolling hills and fields in the background.

  ‘It’s my holiday place up Monmouth way,’ he said, a hint of pride in his voice.

  She took it, without looking at it. ‘Must be nice to have something like that. Not one home, two,’ she said.

  The picture had fallen through her fingers onto the floor. She crouched down, reaching for it. She realised she was sobbing, warm fat tears dripping down on the linoleum, staining the picture. She struck the ground, with a sudden simple force. He was trying to stop her, but she wouldn’t let him, she kept hitting the ground, then abruptly she stopped.

  She didn’t like to show emotion like this, not in front of someone she hardly knew any more. She stood up quickly, composed, like an actress who’d just finished her scene. He took her arm, guiding her out into the fresh air of the stairwell.

  She looked up to see the Chief Constable, Geraint Rix, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Some office clown had hung the poster there, almost life-size. Not Pugh, it wasn’t his style. A joke for the benefit of the coppers trooping through. All Rix’s time, she’d heard, was spent on the media circuit sharpening his image for a safe Liberal seat at the next election. Being head of the Gay Police Association had given him a national platform, but he was the straightest-looking gay man she’d ever seen. Being gay in the force did that, she guessed.

  As she turned away from Rix’s blokey grin she felt Pugh press something into her hand. She looked down.

  It was a bunch of keys, the ring a miniature silver copy of the cottage in the picture.

  ‘Stay as long as you like, you need a rest,’ he said gently.

  Outside, she sat on her bike after he’d closed the door, not moving, staring out at the trees in the park. Then, after how long she didn’t know, she started the engine and pulled out into the t
raffic.

  Catrin wasn’t paranoid. She knew dealers so wacked out they thought they were being followed by bendy-buses, the numbers on the buses sending them personal messages. Now that was paranoid, but working ten years in Drugs, most of it under, still does things to a mind.

  Along City Hall Road, keeping a few cars behind her, she saw a dark van move out into the traffic. The same van had been there on her way in, parked up across the square. She noticed things like that. As she swung into North Road, it was still following four cars behind. She doubled back towards the public gardens. The van was keeping to the end of the dimly lit streets, not closing the space between them.

  She checked her rearview: it looked like a woman at the wheel. Well-cut jacket, big bouffant hair, almost like a wig. But it wasn’t close enough, it was too dark for her to get the number.

  She did a full circle, along Park Place down into City Hall Road. She waited but it didn’t reappear. She’d lost it, no chance to run the tag on the PNC. She waited to see if it would come round from the north. But nothing else passed. Through the trees she saw the lights of the empty offices.

  She rode east for half a mile, then pulled over. She took out her phone, logged on to the South Wales Police network, went into Human Resources and filled out a compassionate leave form. She copied it to Occupational Health. Then she switched off her phone. She didn’t want to have a mast signal for the location of what she was about to do.

  She rode on to the Newport Road and found an internet café in a side street. Unlike in the city centre, there were no cameras outside; none inside as far as she could see. The terminals were in booths for privacy. Keeping her helmet on, she took a booth at the back.

  The thought that Rhys had been so close to her, it wouldn’t quite let go yet. In her heart she wanted it to, but even if there was one per cent of doubt she knew she’d have to keep turning the stones. It was selfish of course, she’d be doing it to put her own conscience at rest. Not for him at the end of it, that’s what made her feel sick at herself.

  He’d been scoring, no doubt about that from the film, none at all. But junkies scored like a car takes on fuel. He’d have needed to score just to keep moving. There were places he could’ve scored nearer the alley where he’d snagged the twenties. But he hadn’t, he’d come down to the water. Was that his destination, or had he been on his way somewhere else, up to the streets around her motel? Or was he just going nowhere?

  She booted the drive, waited for the monitor to come to life. The place she was going to find an answer, if there was an answer, was in the case notes. She had no authorised access; only the SIO and the other officers assigned to the case had. She’d have to improvise a little. All the time she’d put in moling at the Hendon Data Centre had taught her how to do that without leaving footprints. She didn’t find hacks interesting in themselves, not at all, they were just a tool. A digital picklock. She was good at hacks because she was curious, and she was curious because she was one of those people who needed to know the truth about things, and in her experience the truth tended to get hidden.

  Shadowing Thomas around the offices of Major Crimes, she’d noticed that South Wales Area had recently upgraded to Niche One-Sign, a single sign-on system for all applications. Previously officers might have to use ten separate passwords to access the HOLMES enquiry system, National Criminal and SPIN intelligence and all other databases on the national mainframes and back-up servers. Now, for everything, they just needed a single seven-digit password, and an ID. But any security system was only as secure as its weakest link, and in this instance that link was DS Jack Thomas. He’d told her enough times to come up close, watch what he was doing over his shoulder.

  She logged in his password and within less than a minute she was into the case file. She noted the case hadn’t been rated important enough to attract the attention of a major rank as SIO. As senior officer on the scene Thomas had been responsible for uploading all the notes. And there wasn’t much to see.

  She copied everything onto a Zip file, encrypted it with her PGP key, then sent it all to an anonymous account on a server in the Ukraine. That way she wouldn’t ever need to carry the data on her, could access it from anywhere. She clicked out of the Area system, back into the case notes. Looking closer, there was even less to see than at first glance.

  Thomas had played it by the book. The coroner’s inquest determined only how a subject met their death, not the whys and wherefores. In the file there were no witness statements, nothing relating to Rhys turned up by searches onshore. Only the CCTV footage, the pathologist’s tox data. Exactly the same data she’d already seen. No next of kin or associates interviewed, as there weren’t any. Played like this, the coroner’s verdict was a foregone conclusion. Category One, Death by Drug Dependence, Solitary.

  The rest of the notes took up less than a page. The wallet found on the body had led to a room in a derelict council block in Riverside, the place Rhys had called home in his final weeks. There were some photos included, a list of contents. It was a short list. A life come down to nothing, just a backpack full of Oxfam clothes and three battered books of poetry. And a single origami bird they’d found in the fireplace. She stared at it, couldn’t even make out what type of bird it was.

  She felt the warm tears beading her cheeks, gathering against her collar. But she was wearing her visor still, the place was empty, no one could see the tears.

  3

  It was the first time she’d heard the sound in over a week. Somewhere at the edge of her consciousness a phone was ringing. Catrin pushed her head further down under the cold pillow, but the sound didn’t let up.

  The ringing was coming from under the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. Shuffling unsteadily across the room, she reached down, felt through the pockets and, without looking at it, switched the handset off.

  She’d woken late at Pugh’s cottage. It was almost ten, the light outside was the ash grey typical of a Welsh winter. She went through a shortened version of her morning routine. First, a glass of tap water. Then she stretched through the twelve sun salutations from the Hatha, the only habit she’d kept up from her mam and her hippie hangers-on. Then half an hour of tae kwon do on an empty stomach, kicks and jabs. Krav maga, wing chun ending with regular squats and crunches.

  She worked up a sweat, tried to push some of the anger and sickly guilt out, but found she couldn’t. At the end the sweat stung her eyes and tears still blurred them. She hated herself when she cried, it was something she thought she’d trained herself not to do any more. She took a long cold shower, focusing on a square of tile, nothing else, trying to make her mind go blank. Only a single image was left there. Floating up over the tile. Rhys’s face at the window of the dojo where she’d trained as a girl. His eyes watching her as she practised alone. He’d thought the tinted glass hid his face. He hadn’t known she could see him there. Of all the images of him this was the one which came back to her.

  She went down to the kitchen for yoghurt, oats and frozen berries, then through to the living room. She didn’t pull back the curtains, made for the worn sofa.

  She curled up a strip of card, adding a paper and some tobacco. Feeling through the pockets of her joggers, she found her bag of kanna and crumbled a pinch in. She’d switched to it from weed like others in the force since the new random testing had come in. An African herb used by Khoi tribesmen for hunting, it didn’t show up. It had much the same effect. The floor around the sofa was covered with empty smoothie bottles and all her notes. It took her a couple of minutes to find the remote.

  Out of the darkness emerged the image of the alley. She saw the lights in the broken, lower window again. The two figures standing there, Rhys and the woman.

  There was the struggle, Rhys pushing the woman back against the wall. Then he was hurrying away out of shot, down towards the water.

  She ran it slowly, three more times, then frame by frame. She’d done this many times already, and as she closed her eyes she could see eac
h frame as clearly as if it was still flickering in front of her.

  She switched the remote to the next sequence, the shelters on the beach. Again she ran it slowly, then frame by frame.

  Rhys approaching the man at the hut. The man passing over the bag of drugs. Rhys giving him the twenties, still clasped in his right hand.

  Then Rhys hesitating, backing away, holding the broken bottle.

  The man turning, Rhys moving in behind him, pushing the bottle at his back. Then the man falling inward, face first, disappearing from view.

  After a few minutes she sat back, put her Mac on pause, stubbed her roll-up. The truth was she was seeing nothing new in the film. In fact, each time she watched it, she felt she was seeing slightly less. This wasn’t going to be one of those cases where a detail in the background would reveal some sudden unexpected truth.

  The film showed exactly what it appeared to show. A man mugging a woman, assaulting another junkie, then passing out on the beach. Pugh and the others were right, there was no mystery here. She was wasting her time. You get exactly what it says on the tin with this one, she thought.

  She lit another cigarette, opened the window a crack, then lay back on the sofa. There was only one detail that had struck her as odd in all her viewings of the film. It was not enough for her to doubt the basic truth of what she had seen. But it was a detail that didn’t entirely make sense all the same.

  Before assaulting the second man, the other street junkie, Rhys had handed him the twenties. Why had he done this, if he was about to assault him? Why hadn’t he just assaulted the man from the outset? Why bother to give the twenties first?

  Rhys had backed away a few paces, she’d noticed, before he had begun the attack. As if something the man had done had triggered what followed. But in the stills the second man had not altered his posture, had not even opened his mouth. It was an entirely unprovoked attack, or appeared to be.

  Of course, not everything a junkie did would make sense. Maybe Rhys had only decided to attack at that moment, or had given the twenties first to put the man at ease. There were explanations, rationalisations, there always were. But something about this detail didn’t feel quite right to her.