Love Story, With Murders (23 page)

A helpful little guide that comes with the recorder informs me, that the back-pointing arrow with a cross in it represents the backspace key. The other back-pointing arrow represents the enter
key. Dunbar
looks like he’s in his fifties, so the 57 is probably his birth year. I don’t know what the ‘shelby’ is. A pet. His mother’s maiden name. His wife’s
maiden name.

Don’t know, don’t care.

My laptop is picking up two available networks, one labelled BarPrec1. That’ll do. I click the button that says connect. It asks me for a password. I offer shelby57. It makes a gracious
little salaam
and admits me to the network. Only two bar strength out of five, but good enough. I go to File Manager and check what the system has to offer. The answer is everything. Everything I
could want, and more. All neatly filed. Accounts. CADCAM. Email_archive. HR. IT. Facilities. Invoices. Letters. Tenders. Suppliers_EU. Suppliers_UK. Tech.

I poke around for a few minutes, then start to copy everything
that looks even half interesting. I select about eight gigabytes of data and hit go.

I cram in six interviews that afternoon. All uninformative, but who cares? Behind me, my laptop has finished copying.

Before I leave, I copy my lovely new data from my hard drive to the memory stick I took when I was here before. Drop the stick into an envelope addressed to Cathays. Post the envelope from
the
main post office in town.

Then tootle back home, feeling happy.

That night, my good mood remains intact. I had been intending to spend some lovely private hours investigating my pilfered stash of documents, but instead decide on an impulse to cook for Buzz.
Properly, I mean, not something found in the fridge and dropped in a saucepan. I announce that I’m going to cook a chicken
stew – an Italian version, with red wine, tomatoes and
anchovies – and zoom out to get ingredients, then zoom out a second time when I realise my shopping haul somehow failed to include either chicken or anchovies.

Then get cooking.

I concentrate hard but somehow it’s long past nine thirty before the food is cooked. Buzz keeps wanting to help, but I shoo him away. Won’t even let him
set the table or light
candles. I want to show him that I can do these things if I put my mind to it. Or rather: want to show myself. Train myself into it. Real life, not TV movie.

It’s almost ten when we sit down to eat. But Buzz tastes, smiles, appreciates, clinks glasses. He would do all that anyway, I know, but I think he’s doing it for real and I feel a
wave of warmth towards him.

Or love. Quite possibly love.

That thought is in itself somewhat stunning, so I’m relieved when Buzz – who has manfully eaten not just seconds, but thirds – pushes his chair back and says,
‘We’ll wash up tomorrow, shall we?’ In Buzz-speak, that sentence has nothing to do with keeping order in the kitchen. It’s strictly a question about my appetite for sex.
Which is perfectly healthy.
So we take my still-stunned brain off to the bedroom, where we find other ways to occupy it.

Afterwards, when Buzz is snoring and I’ve grown bored of playing with his hair, I turn my attention back to that rush of warmth I felt as we were eating.

Is what we have love? He may well feel it for me, the poor fool. But what about me?

I check he’s fast asleep, then speak to him.

‘Buzz,
my beautiful man, I think I’m in love with you.’

It doesn’t feel wrong, so I say it again, only this time without the ‘I think,’ and it still doesn’t feel wrong, though that’s not the same thing as feeling
right.

Buzz doesn’t care. He snores away. The city around us snores away. A cold front rides in from the north and industrial trash thrashes against the walls of an unused dockside
in Barry.

Where’s Penry? Still in hospital or returned to prison? And where are Ali el-Khalifi and Mary Langton? Where is Mark Mortimer and his secrets? And what was it that DI Watkins meant with
that odd, repeated chopping gesture when we said goodbye?

Lots of questions, not many answers.

I think about some of those questions for a while, but at some point, I’m not sure when, my
attention shifts. To myself. To a little girl in a pink and white dress. Sitting mute in the
back of an open-top Jaguar, a camera hanging round her neck. One sunny Sunday in a past beyond memory.

I haven’t been fair to myself. I see that now.

I’ve investigated Khalifi’s death, and Langton’s, and over these past months I’ve done all the other work my duties have thrown at me. But I’ve
neglected my own
mystery. My strange origins.

Ed Saunders helped me see that I’ve been
afraid
to look, but the
excuse
I’ve given myself is that I haven’t known what to do. No clues. No evidence. No witnesses.
No leads. Nothing beyond that tiny distortion of the camera lens.

And I’ve lied to myself. It’s been obvious all along what I need to do. I have a giant clue, built in the exact
size and shape of my father.

Naturally, it could be coincidence that somebody chose my father’s car as a place to leave me but, really, what are the odds? I guess, though I don’t actually know, that my father
was at that time Wales’s most successful criminal. His main business, I believe, involved trade in stolen vehicles. According to those of my brother officers who were in CID at the
time, my
father acquired stolen cars from all over the UK. Some of those vehicles were stripped down and sold for components or scrap. Others were repainted and resold, either using false or stolen
documents, or just sold for cash.

Dad operated on an industrial scale. He kept ahead of my predecessors because he was smart, cautious, and well organised. His workshops were always on the move:
flitting from barn to barn in the
hills of South and Mid Wales. The farmers would enjoy a few weeks of tidy cash payments. A short whirlwind of profitable activity. Car transporters moving at night. Cardiff accents in the country
lanes, city faces in village pubs. And Dad always kept himself one step beyond trouble. Except, presumably, at the start of his career, he kept himself remote from
the coal face, always operating
through lieutenants, like Emrys, never directly. He never put anything in writing. Never conducted his business on the phone. He somehow inspired such trust and love in his colleagues that he was
never troubled by a single significant betrayal.

Or so I believe. That’s the story as I know it, as I’ve chosen to know it. But the criminal underworld is an unstable
place. You don’t get to the top and stay there without
making enemies. Without using your fists, or worse.

When I wanted a handgun on the Rattigan case, my father supplied one with a deftness that was almost breathtaking.

I don’t know whose daughter I am. I don’t know why I ended up in my father’s car. Why I was mute so long. Or what happened in those first two years of my life. But
I know these
things are connected.

My past is also my father’s past. My mystery is also his.

I’m still sitting up when I fall asleep, left hand thicketed in Buzz’s sand-blond hair.

I dream of Theo and Ayla all night long. I keep telling them I’m going to find out why their father killed himself, but I can see they don’t believe me.

The next day the morning news is full of the coming cold spell. It’s been predicted for a while, but the forecasters are more confident now, their prognostications
darker. Snow, ice, blizzard and freeze. I hope they’re right.

Buzz says, ‘Do you have an emergency kit in your car?’

I start to say yes because of the chocolate and
the joints, then realise that he means things like shovels and torches, so say, ‘No.’

‘I’ll get you the basics. You ought to have them.’

‘Thank you.’

He doesn’t approve of my coat, so I tell him I’ll get one.

‘Right then,’ he says.

He has already been for a run, shaved, showered, made breakfast, washed up both his breakfast and our supper from last night, is dressed and ready
to go into the office. I’ve showered and
am sitting around in one of his T-shirts. I haven’t eaten anything and don’t know if I’m going to.

‘Right then,’ I say.

Buzz gives a military nod, we kiss, and he marches out. He’d like it if I were a bit more like him. Up early. Off for a run. Quick to attend to those little domestic duties. On the other
hand, if he truly wanted someone like
him, he’s chosen the least suitable girl in the world. So I don’t understand. His choices don’t make sense.

By way of experiment, I try being a bit more like him. I don’t do anything drastic, like go for a run, but I do eat something, wash up, get dressed, make the bed. In the same spirit of
investigation, I even hoover the living room, which doesn’t need it as far as I can tell, but my
mother always seems to be hoovering rooms that seem perfectly clean to me.

By the time I’ve done all that, I realise I’m going to be forty minutes late for work and bolt out of the flat, leaving the hoover in the middle of the floor.

Cold is whitening the streets and I’m stuck behind a lorry scattering grit. There’s a white-blue sky above, paling to frost at its edges. I spend too much
time looking up at it and I
almost run smack into the back of the gritter when it stops at the lights. Only the metallic patter of grit against my bonnet alerts me in time.

From the car park to the office. I can feel the shift in temperature. Buzz is right that my coat – a blue woollen affair – is too thin to keep out any real cold. Then again, we live
in a world that has doors, walls,
and central heating, so Buzz’s survivalist anxieties seem a little out of place.

When I get to my desk, there is no knot of senior officers angrily demanding explanations for my absence. Indeed, it looks like no one has noticed at all, which doesn’t say much for my
impact on world affairs. The mail will have arrived in the post-room but hasn’t yet chugged its way over to my desk. I can’t
quite bring myself to sit prettily and wait, so I make tea
and spend ten minutes chatting to Amrita, who wants to know all about my day out with Watkins yesterday. I’m feeling uppy today, so I tell her that Watkins was lovely to be with.

‘Honestly? Oh my God, you are too nice, really!’

I make up for my gossip-failings by agreeing to criticise Watkins’s cold-weather coat, a padded green
affair which makes her look like a pensioner of indeterminate gender. It’s
meagre fare, but Amrita seems pleased with it.

Then I drift over to Bev’s desk. She’s not instantly happy to see me, which normally means that she has some actual work to do. Delightful company as I am, I don’t always help
create a purposeful working atmosphere. This time, though, I’m good as gold.

Bev has been
allocated the tedious task of collecting Khalifi’s bank records from five and six years back and seeing if she can match them against anything that crops up in Langton’s
record.

The Langton end of things is easier to work with. Because she earned essentially all of her income in cash, her bank records show a few college-related items – charges for rent, a parking
permit, a bookshop account
– settled by bank card or standing order. Little else shows up. Investigation is also made simple, because we still have the entire data set from the earlier
investigation. Everything filed and boxed, nothing missing. Because we’re now reaching far back into Khalifi’s past, the data we have for him is patchier. A tidy-minded engineer, he was
pretty good at his record-keeping, but not perfect.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Bev complains, once she’s decided I’m not here to waste time. ‘I mean, I’ve started listing all the places where Ali spent
money, but since Mary hardly ever used her bank card, I don’t know why that helps.’ Bev isn’t normally complainy, but the spectre of Watkins’s icy disapproval is making her
anxious. She’s the only copper I know who always refers to victims by
their given names. ‘Half these places don’t even exist anymore.’

I see her point. She’s tried the Internet for help, but businesses that have changed their name or gone defunct in the last few years are hardly likely to have web pages still
operative.

‘The library should have some old Yellow Pages,’ I say and a couple of phone calls proves they do.

A prissy-voiced person on the other
end of the phone starts listing their collection in date order.

‘That’s wonderful,’ I interrupt. ‘My colleague, Detective Constable Beverley Rowland, will be over in a few moments to pick them up.’

I scrunch my eyes at Bev to check she’s okay with me saying that, and she is. She’s relieved. That’s part of how our friendship works. She links me to Planet Normal. I do the
bossy, conflictual
stuff which her sweet-as-milk personality recoils from.

Prissy Voice tells me that she can’t let reference material leave the building. I tell her that she will if we send a van full of uniformed policemen to seize it. She says something
betokening sour surrender and I grin at Bev when I replace the phone.

‘Get the volumes for Cardiff and Swansea,’ I tell her. ‘Check any dead businesses
against the directories, mark them on a map, and see if any of the places are close to Swansea
Uni or places where we know Langton or students hung out. You’ll get a map of those from the notes on the first enquiry.’ I scrutinise Bev’s list of Khalifi’s credit card
payments. He was always mobile. A good proportion of his charges were made in what look to be Cardiff-based businesses, but plenty
weren’t. ‘You might want to make sure you get Yellow
Pages for the whole of South Wales,’ I say. ‘Better safe than sorry. And Bath and Bristol, if the library has the information. Langton was a Bath girl, after all.’

Bev nods. ‘Thanks, Fi.’

She starts winding herself into enough woollen outerwear that she starts to resemble an accident in a knitting factory. The library is a bare ten-minute
walk away and we live in Cardiff, not
Stromness or Tromsø. And the cold front, the real one, has not yet arrived.