Love Story, With Murders (12 page)

I don’t pick fights with Jim Davis or try to needle Rhiannon Watkins. Dunwoody notices my little worker-bee productivity and is pleased with me, albeit in a faintly patronising way. No one
gives me a bollocking for anything.
Susan Konchesky’s work on Khalifi’s bank records places him at two Cardiff lap-dancing clubs, Dad’s and one other. Trouble is, Langton
apparently never worked at Dad’s club and the dates of Khalifi’s visits to the other club all fell after Langton’s disappearance. A tantalising connection:
almost-but-not-quite.

And the more interesting stuff – well, that part I do the way I like it. Haunt
my targets. Make checks on my six names: Ivor Harris, Galton Evans, Trevor Yergin. Huw Allsop. Ben Rossiter.
David Marr-Phillips.

I add another one, Idris Prothero, to the list too. Bump him up from the B-team. He and Ivor Harris both have their thumbprints somewhere near this case.

Ivor Harris has had quite a lot to do with the university, including the engineering faculty, but you
wouldn’t expect anything less from a busy local MP. Not much of a thumbprint, in all
honesty.

Idris Prothero is a wee bit more interesting. He was a business associate of Rattigan’s more than a friend, which is why he was on my B-team, not my A-team. But Prothero has a variety of
venture-capital-type investments in local businesses, including the outright ownership of the late Mark Mortimer’s
firm, Barry Precision. I can’t really see how a financial investment
in a firm that once employed a not-very-competent drug smuggler ties Prothero into anything much – and still less does it suggest that Prothero was part of Rattigan’s fuck-an-Albanian
circle of buddies. But if you don’t seek, you don’t find. So I seek.

The same logic also impels me to scratch away at that Mark Mortimer
itch. I would prefer to do that solo as well, but I’ve already had one team-play bollocking from Watkins and I
can’t risk another one, not quite so soon anyway. So I run things past her. Give her notes on my interview with Hinton. Tell her, in so many words, that there was something strange in the
widow’s manner. A strangeness that, to a copper, suggests something being withheld.

Watkins
doesn’t like my theory of a possible Mortimer–Khalifi connection, but she can’t quite ignore it either. It’s not as though she has an obviously superior
alternative. So she allows me to investigate, but I’m on a short leash. Every call, every interview, I have to run by her first. I hate the supervision, but I welcome the chance to dig.

I call Mortimer’s ex-colleagues. University connections.
His brother and sister. I don’t get anything tangible, but I also don’t get the sense I’m looking at a drug
dealer. He just doesn’t have that smell about him. He seems to have been a scrupulous employee, never late, seldom absent. Then too there was that ‘Saint Mark’ comment of Sophie
Hinton’s. I’ve got nothing that would count for anything in court. Nothing even to justify a shift in investigative
resources. But I feel strongly that something is not quite right in
the picture we’ve been presented with.

Watkins only half agrees with me, but half is enough for now. The growing feeling is that our inquiry is getting nowhere. We don’t have a single useful lead on Mary Langton.
Khalifi’s another dead end. We’ve found out about a few sexual liaisons – the man was no hermit – but we’ve
found nothing to connect with Langton, nothing to suggest a
motive for his murder. The Mortimer–Khalifi link and Sophie Hinton’s odd evasion is as good as anything else we have. So Watkins lets me run with it.

I have nothing tangible to show for my efforts yet, but some flowers bloom slowly. I once watched a moody cow, a big Hereford heifer, start to lean against a post-and-rail fence on
my aunt
Gwyn’s farm. The heifer pushed, the fence resisted: nothing. But the cow didn’t give up. She just kept at it. Shifting her position from time to time, but all the time leaning her
nine-hundred-pound weight hard against the upper rail. And in the end, the rail broke. Just snapped into two jagged timber lances. The cow studied her work, then backed away peacefully, happy to
start munching
again. But it taught me a lesson, that. Apply pressure, keep going and things can snap even when they seem to be at their most static. If there’s a line of weakness, sooner or
later something will fracture.

And it does.

The engineering group at whose party Sophie Hinton once met Khalifi is called, rather pretentiously, the Welsh Circle of Engineering Excellence. Its chairman is a retired
engineer, Arwel Adams.
I call him up. He agrees to chat with me and says, if I’m in the area, I’d be welcome to pop by. He’s in Penarth, just down the coast from Cardiff proper. I hesitate briefly
– I told Watkins I would
call
Adams, not
visit
him – but even Watkins surely couldn’t care if I do a little more than promised. And in any case, it’s getting
towards the end of the day. I’ve had
enough of desks and offices and overhead lamps. I tell Adams I’m on my way.

His house, when I get there, turns out to be right by the shore, overlooking the sea. Picture windows that frame a strip of grass, a band of scrub, then a line of grey sea and a mountainscape of
grey cloud.

He offers me tea. I refuse, but add, ‘What is it like all day, looking out at this?’

He says the sort
of thing that people say. The light. The movement. The ceaseless change. But I think that’s wrong. Isn’t it the other way around? That it never changes. That you are
staring at a vision of eternity, sometimes sunlit, sometimes furious, but always there. Gazing at you gazing at it.

I say something along those lines and Adams laughs. ‘You could be right.’ He doesn’t put the lights on, so we’re
just there watching the light fail over water. There will
be rain before long.

I say why I’ve come. Routine inquiry, pursuant to the murder of Ali el-Khalifi. Blah blah. Start asking questions.

Adams is helpful, a good witness. He’s good on names and dates. Swift recall, documentary records, precise answers.

‘Ali and Mark certainly knew each other. They were both Circle regulars.
I’ve often seen them chatting together. I got the impression they knew each other outside these meetings
too.’

‘How far did their connection go back?’

Adams consults his attendance records. He has to put the lights on for this, and the sea beyond the windows recedes into the darkness. ‘I’ve only got records for the last four
years,’ he says, ‘but they were both booked to attend a meet
in July 2006. If it helps, I could talk to my predecessor and go further back.’

I shake my head at that. Instead, I poke away at the nature of their connection. ‘What were their shared interests? What did they talk about?’

‘I’m not sure. Ali’s passion was industrial plastics, which Mark wouldn’t have had much to do with. But Ali was a university man, of course. He needed to keep abreast
of
the literature. Barry Precision is all about highly engineered steels. If you needed a specific part with some demanding specifications – shock resistance, heat resistance, very narrow design
tolerances, that kind of thing – then Mark’s outfit would take care of that. Ali didn’t have a research interest in that kind of area, but he was still very well versed in it. And
of course Ali was
amazingly well connected. If you had a problem that Ali couldn’t solve, he’d know someone who could. In a way, that was his real expertise. Ali knew
everyone.’

‘What about geography?’ I ask.

I explain what I mean. One of the things that has niggled at me is that Khalifi was of Moroccan extraction. Mortimer tried to bring in his drugs via southern Spain, just north of Gibraltar. Now,
in itself, there’s nothing odd about Spain as an import route. Most cocaine enters the UK via Spain or Holland. Spain because of its Latin American connections, Holland because of
Rotterdam’s importance as a logistics hub. On the other hand, it’s possible in this instance that there’s more to Mortimer’s import route than mere probabilities. Khalifi
still had family in Morocco and the Spanish
supplier whose steel tubing Mortimer tried to use did business all over North Africa. It’s one of those tantalising almost-connections which might
nor might not prove significant.

Adams tries to help with that query, but can’t. He tells me that Khalifi still kept current with things in North Africa – we’ve heard the same from other sources and his bank
records show that he’s travelled
as far afield as Dubai and Jordan – but he can’t say whether Mortimer had any professional interest in the area.

We talk a bit longer. Adams was amazed that Mortimer turned out to have an involvement with drugs. He seemed somewhat less amazed that someone chose to chop Khalifi into several dozen pieces. No
tangible suspicion or anything like that, just less amazement. No knowledge whatsoever
of Mary Langton.

I leave Adams’s house unsure how to proceed. Adams’s grey sea has leaked into a dark night. Dark and rain-swept.

Because I’m in a mood to think, I start walking. And because I’m in Penarth, where Idris Prothero has his home, I decide I may as well drop by and have a snoop. Prothero: the owner
of the place where Mark Mortimer worked and the business buddy of Brendan Rattigan.

I walk the six or seven minutes to Marine Parade, Prothero’s street. I’ve already scanned the vehicles parked in his front drive – nothing of interest there – and
I’m checking the rest of the street for the sake of completeness.

It’s not a good night for it. Rain mixed with sleet and worse weather promised.

I’m wearing gloves and have to write in felt-tip pen, because it’s the only
thing that will mark the wet pages of my notebook. I’m trying to make notes, keep the notebook
vaguely dry, and avoid getting too soaked myself. I do okay at all that, but it means I’m slow to notice a couple of guys on the street. Dark coats. Scarves. One in a woollen hat, one not.
Close-cropped hair, the bare-headed one. They see me, stop, start moving along again, then stop and walk back.

I finish putting a registration number in my book, then look up, making proper eye contact.

‘Hi,’ I say.

The two men exchange glances. The shorter one – bare head, slightly ginger, late thirties tough – speaks.

‘You might not want to do that. People can get a bit funny about their privacy.’

‘Yeah, and maybe you could fuck right off,’ I suggest.

The taller man, the one who’s
been silent, enjoys that response. He smiles involuntarily and raises a hand to cover his mouth as though there’s a law against smiling.

‘Let me see that,’ says the other guy, gesturing at my notebook. He has a Scots accent.

‘Fuck off.’

I turn my back on them, or half-do. Take a few steps down the road to the next car. Ready to note down the next plate.

I get the number in my book,
then turn.

The street is lit and is a reasonably well-populated residential street, but there’s no one around, not even much traffic. Just the two men. Houses are set back from the road, so we might
as well be in a dark wood or a deserted inner city alley for all the protection I’ve got.

I can hear Watkins’s voice in my head.
Step away. Do not seek confrontation. Step away now
.

I hear Lev too.
Choose the fight you want, not the one they want. If you can’t win, don’t start. It’s okay to say no. Sometime, is the only smart thing to do
. And
he’s right. He always is. Lev: my martial arts instructor, if you want to call him that, though the term diminishes him. He’s not one of these fighting-as-meditation guys. He’s
strictly fighting-as-fighting.

I take a pace or two
back. The two men take a pace or two forward. They exchange glances. Some hidden exchange of communication, I can’t guess about what.

I continue to back away. Shove the book into my shoulder bag. Something drops as I withdraw my hand. A plastic-wrapped energy bar, I think. It splashes down onto the wet pavement. I don’t
bend to retrieve it. I don’t want to make myself vulnerable. I back
away another step, but hesitate, as though reluctant to part with whatever it was I’d dropped.

The taller guy, the one who’s been silent, whispers something to his companion, and the mood seems to shift. Any threat seems to be vanishing. The shorter guy bends to pick up my energy
bar. It is, I suppose, a gesture of peace.

Choose the fight you want, not the one they want. If you can’t
win, don’t start.

Lev’s words. Wise words.

I shift my body so that my weight falls over the ball of my leading foot, the left one. My heel comes just a little off the ground. Then I move. I bring my right leg round hard, lashing at the
man’s jaw. I make contact with the toe of my right foot. I’m wearing chunky winter boots. Designed for fashion, effective for combat. My toe strikes his
jawline almost dead centre.
Strikes it hard, smashing through bone.

I feel as much as see the man’s head jerk back with the whiplash.

Feel as much as see the bone broken, the jaw sagging loose and useless from its socket.

The man sprawls backward on the tarmac, disbelieving eyes raised to the pelting rain. His companion gawps at the fallen man, gawps at me. No one says anything.
No one cares about my energy bar
now.

I reach into my bag. Grab something. Hold it up in the feeble orange glow of the streetlights.

‘This is a rape alarm. If you fuckers, either of you, take one step closer, I’m going to let this off and tell everyone you tried to assault me.’

I move backward as I say this. Partly – mostly – to put more distance between me and them. But partly also
because I don’t want them to notice that it’s not a rape alarm
I’m holding, but a tube of deodorant.

I’m panting for breath as I talk. Nothing phony about the panting. Just nerves.

The guy whose jaw I’ve broken is staggering to his feet. Part of him is nakedly furious, wanting to finish this fight. The other part is bewildered. He keeps putting his hand to his jaw as
though he can
just slot it back into place, but pain drives his hand away. His face looks unmade. A waxwork in the process of collapse.