Love Story, With Murders (28 page)

I wait a bit for them
to say anything or start anything, but they don’t.

‘This is fun, isn’t it?’

No response.

To the Scotsman whose jaw I broke, I say confidentially, ‘How’s the jaw? Bit sore, maybe?’ Since I still get no response, I push a bit harder. Turning around to the guy in the
back, I say, ‘Did he have to drink through a straw? Or did you have to bottle-feed?’

The guy in the back chuckles,
and says, ‘Something like that.’

He’s wearing hat and gloves. So is the other guy. They’re not removing them even though the car is warm. I guess they’re being cautious about DNA. I like to see that in a
contract killer. Professionalism. Attention to detail.

But they’re not killing me.

‘Dunbar,’ I say. ‘Jim Dunbar at Barry Precision. He’s sort of got the motivation, but does he really
have the pizzazz? I mean, you’re a fairly top-end pair of
murderers. I don’t think Dunbar is quite in your league.’

No response.

‘But maybe you don’t know about things like that. Why you kill the people you kill. Maybe you’re just given a name and a face. Ali el-Khalifi. He lives here. He looks like
this. Go kill.’

No response.

‘Whose idea was it to copy the Mary Langton killing?’
To Silent Guy, I add, ‘I’m guessing that was you. I think your friend might be a bit stupid, yes?’

Still no response and the silence is getting tiresome, so I change the subject. ‘Okay, shall we play I Spy?’ There’s nothing in the sweep of my headlights except snow and some
trees. The barn too, dimly. ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with
S
.’

No response.

I give them
two minutes by the dashboard clock to think of something, but they don’t manage it. I give them the answer. ‘It was
snow
. I’m slightly disappointed, to be
honest. I was trying to start with something easy.’

‘
Ja
, I thought of
snow
.’ The guy in the back. He has an accent of some sort. Not British. Scandinavian, I guess, and he looks Nordic. His eyes are dancing with
amusement. He’s enjoying
this. His Scottish buddy just glowers at me or avoids my gaze. I don’t think he likes me.

‘I don’t know your names and it seems a bit weird doing this without them. You are . . .?’ I ask this question of the Scottish guy, but get no answer. ‘Hamish, is it?
Hoots mon and och aye the noo.’ My Scottish accent is crap. ‘You know, your jaw looks a bit funny.’ I turn to the guy in the back. ‘It
does
look funny, doesn’t
it? I’m not making it up.’

The guy in the back shrugs, but it’s a gesture. A communication of a sort. His eyes are laughing.

‘What shall I call you? Bjorn? Ulf? Sven? Mikkel? Olaf? Jakob?’ My well of Scandinavian-names-suitable-for-contract-killers is beginning to run dry, but the guy rescues me.

‘Olaf. We’ll go with that.’

‘Hamish and Olaf. Olly. Okay.
This is nice, isn’t it?’

We sit around some more. I switch my lights to sidelights only. The engine is still running. The car is warm.

When I cut my headlights, I sensed, or thought I did, a ripple of alertness from my two silent companions. There’s no point in having lights up here, except as a signal. Are we meeting
someone here? Now, that
is
an interesting thought. If so, I’m guessing
Prothero. Or – more interesting still – maybe Mostafa el Saadawi. Dunbar might be another
possibility, but what I said to Hamish and Olly about him is true. I bet he knows what’s going on, but he’s too small-time to hire killers. Not enough skin in the game.

I say, ‘Just so you both know, Detective Inspector Watkins knows where I am and why I’m here. So does the entire chain of command.
And if anything happens to a serving police
officer, there will be a total shitstorm.’

And as I say those words, I feel them. Feel their truth. I know Watkins doesn’t know what I found up there in the cottage. She sent me there. She debated sending a team in and decided
against it. It was meant to be me and Susan Konchesky, but when Susan weaselled out, Watkins sent me anyway. I agreed
with that decision – lobbied for it – but Watkins isn’t one
to shirk responsibility, legal or moral. If something happens to me, she’ll be on the case.

I realise something else too. That I do now belong to the police. Part of the family. I’m far from being Cathays’s favourite copper. We don’t have an employee-of-the-month
contest, but if we did, I’d never win it. I’ve had more than my
share of bollockings, more than my share of office feuds. Truth is, there’s a fair-sized kernel of people who
actively dislike me. But none of that matters. I’m part of the family, a wayward daughter. If anything happens to me, there truly will be a shitstorm.

I feel a pricking in my eyes.

I know what that pricking means. Not tears, but whatever comes before tears. I’ve only cried once
since I was a very young child. This moment now isn’t the second time exactly, but
it comes close. It’s the best feeling in the world. Dead people can’t cry. I bet their eyes don’t even prick.

I’m sitting there, thinking these things, when I notice that the lights on the dashboard seem dimmer than they were. I flick the headlights onto full beam again and now I’m pretty
sure. There’s a
loss of power somewhere.

Olaf says, ‘You need to turn the engine off and on again.’

So I do. It seems logical enough, but I’m not very practical about these things and in any case I’m still cuddling up to that lovely pricking feeling in my eyes. Result: I’m
not thinking about the electromechanical aspects of my situation.

Which is an error.

I turn the engine off, then turn the
key the other way. The starter motor chokes weakly. That’s all. My first thought is,
That’s stupid, the engine is warm
. My second thought
is,
Ah, so this is how they intend to kill me
.

Olaf, reading my mind, says, ‘I think there maybe is a small electrical fault with your alternator.’

I don’t know what an alternator is. I assume the thing that recharges the battery. In any case, it’s
clear what they’ve done. It was they, not the snow, that cut power to the
cottage. They wanted to drive me out of there and they did. At the same time – while I was sleeping, presumably – they sabotaged my car. They drove down into this lonely patch of
nowhere and kept their tracks fresh enough and deep enough that they could be sure I would follow. How sweet. How beautifully simple.

I try the engine a couple more times, but each try is weaker than the last.

Hamish has opened his door. The car’s temperature drops immediately. Both men are dressed in heavy boots, down jackets, gloves, hats. They’ve probably got thermal undies on too. Me,
I’ve got a thin blue coat and opaque tights.

Olaf says, ‘Can I have your coat, please?’

I think about that. I could fight, of
course, but they’re ready for that. There are two of them and they’re miles stronger. I could try running, but I couldn’t outrun this
pair. Not uphill, not in snow, and not while wearing slippery-soled boots.

So I get out of the car, take off my coat, fold it, hand it to Olaf. He says, ‘Thank you.’ I’m wearing black trousers that I normally wear to the office. Tights. Woolly socks.
A long-sleeved
T-shirt with a poloneck over the top. That’s all. It’s minus whatever and the cold is already starting to bite.

‘And maybe your pullover.’

That’s harder for me to remove. Scarier. But I hand it over. Olaf says, ‘Thanks.’

I wonder if there is going to be a sexual attack here. It’s funny, as a woman, you can’t help but wonder. Even when you’re about to die. But this pair seem too professional
for
that. They want the emergency services to find a hypothermia victim, not a rape victim.

Hamish meantime is patting down the car. He’s found the torch, the sleeping bag. The things that might keep me alive. He does something to the torch in the snow and kills its light.
There’s a brief discussion with Olaf about the sleeping bag, which I gaze on with longing. I can’t hear their muttered
conversation, but it ends with Hamish taking the sleeping bag to
the Land Rover. I imagine they’ll take it back up to the cottage and leave it there. Buzz, the only person who knows that it was in my car, will assume I just forgot it at the house. Typical
Fiona, he’ll think. And he would, most of the time, be right to think so.

Poor Buzz. This will be very hard on him. Not supergreat and
perfect at all.

‘The last part,’ I say to Olaf. ‘The very last part. I’d like to be left alone, if that’s okay.’

He thinks about that briefly, but nods. ‘Sure.’ He holds eye contact with me. ‘It’s quite fast, you know. And after a while you don’t feel much.’

He’s trying to be nice. The contract-killer version. I say, ‘Thanks.’

Hamish comes back. The two men complete their check
of the car. They’re looking for blankets, tools, anything that might help me out of this. They don’t find anything. The car
battery is pretty much dead now. There’s a dim spark left in the headlights, but almost nothing.

‘Can I get back in?’

‘Sure.’

We get back in, though mine is the only door that’s closed. The other one is wide open and a convertible isn’t exactly the most heat-proof
conveyance at the best of times. A faint
breeze – a whisper of air, no more – wanders through the car.

It is profoundly cold.

We’re sitting in the same configuration as before. Me on the driver’s side. Hamish to my left. Olaf behind. He has my coat and jumper folded on his lap. He takes my phone, checks it
for signal – which is registering zero,
null points
, forget-about-it – and hands
it to me.

‘You can write texts if you like.’

So I do. Write my last words.

To Buzz. To Mam and Dad, Ant and Kay.

I tell them I love them. That they’ve been my most important people. That I wish every good thing in the world for them.

None of it is original or clever or witty. Not one word of it. But it is real. My eyes are pricking again. If I weren’t so cold, I might even
cry.

I love those people. Love them with all my heart. Nothing else matters. Not really. I hope Buzz and the others know that. I wish I had more time to communicate. More time to express those
thoughts.

I’m shivering now. Shaking with cold. As I was completing my texts, my fingers were jittering on the keys.

I hand the phone back to Olaf, who wordlessly scrutinises my texts. Checking
I haven’t said anything about how I came to die here like this. I haven’t. Maybe there’s some
clever code I could have used, but I’m too cold to think of anything like that. In any case, that’s not the most important message for me right now. Olaf says, ‘Okay.’ He
gets out of the car – Hamish has to pull the seat back so he can get out – then he walks up the track into the darkness, comes
back a few minutes later without the phone.

‘They’ll find it. I’ve made sure they’ll find it.’

‘Thank you.’

We sit in silence.

These are the minutes in which I die.

Temperature isn’t a feeling anymore. It’s not like a spectrum of colour, a range of smells. Cold and pain are the same thing. They’ve merged, become one. Colder means more
painful. A pain that expresses itself
in every part of my body. My now compulsively shaking body.

‘Hamish?’ I say.

He turns to me. His stupid, gingery, violent face. I shoot my right arm out and strike his nose as ferociously as I know how. Heel of my hand. Shoulder backing up the arm. All of Lev’s
good teaching in the blow.

There’s a spray of blood. I think I’ve broken his nose. He thinks so too. He claps one hand to
his face. The other hand wants to get right on and murder me now.

Might even do so except that Olaf physically restrains him.

‘To match his jaw,’ I say to Olaf. ‘Even things up.’

Olaf’s somewhat amused by that, but mostly pissed off. I’ve broken our lovely little murder-in-the-snow compact. Taken the sweetly amiable edge off it. More to the point,
there’s blood all over the car and
they have to clean up. Olaf releases Hamish’s arm but growls at him not to touch me. There’s a fierce authority in his voice. He always felt
like the boss of these two.

He orders me out of the car and guards me as Hamish wipes down the surfaces. But there’s a limit to what he can do. There will still be blood in the seams of the leather seats. Blood on my
trousers. Blood on my T-shirt.
And they can’t take those things if they want this murder to look like an idiot-girl-gets-lost-in-snow death.

Truth is, I don’t know if anyone will order forensics on this crime scene. Why would they? There’s little enough that will look suspicious. It would be totally like me to get stuck
in the snow. Like me to be underdressed. Like me to set out at night in an unsuitable car. Like me
to forget my sleeping bag. That spray of blood is a lovely little clue that could lead straight to
the murderer and no one may ever find it.

But maybe not. Watkins will be the grim angel of this investigation and she’s not one to undercook things. She sent me here. She’ll do this right.

I stand in the snow as Hamish does his business. Olaf keeps me standing there long after he’s finished.
Partly punishment. Partly just wanting to get on and finish the job.

A T-shirt in this weather.

I am practically naked.

These are long, freezing minutes.

The cold is bewildering now. My feet are burning with the cold. A fire I can’t step out of. My hands are the same. But what’s worse is the shudders from within. I can feel my body
retracting into itself. Like the last warm ember
in a dying fire. I feel myself get stupider. I try to say something to Olaf and I hear myself slurring the words. Like my tongue is lolling about in
my mouth, useless as whale meat. Any movements I make are gross, clumsy. On the edge of failure.

I don’t know how long I stand there. When I’m too cold to stand anymore, I fall over.

More minutes pass.

I’m not even shaking now.

Finally Olaf says, ‘I think it’s time you had your clothes back.’