Love Story, With Murders (31 page)

I tell her about what really happened in that field. About Olaf and Hamish. She asks
how come I didn’t die, so I tell her that too. The whole thing, except I say ‘cigarette’
instead of ‘joint.’

‘Does anyone else know this?’

‘No.’

She spreads the coat out until she finds some marks. There’s plenty of my blood on that coat, but there’s some of Hamish’s too. The forensics people will find both.

I memorised the Land Rover’s registration number too. I give her that
and she makes a note.

‘You think they killed Khalifi?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because he knew? Because he was going to spill the secret?’

‘Maybe. I suppose so. I’m not sure about that part yet. There could be other reasons.’

‘And the method? The dissection of the corpse? That’s . . .’

I shake my head at that. As I’ve always said, the case has always had coincidence at its heart. Whichever
way you look at it. If Khalifi was killed as some kind of revenge for his murder
of Mary Langton, it was an extraordinary coincidence that his death coincided so neatly with our discovery of Langton’s corpse – a discovery which was essentially random in nature. On
the other hand, if Ali el-Khalifi was being coolly murdered by a pair of contract killers, their decision to scatter his corpse
à la Langton
was simply an inspired piece of
improvisation suggested by the news spreading on radio and TV.

I say that. Not very clearly, but I mumble something along those lines.

Watkins doesn’t hide her disagreement. ‘Why do that? If, as you say, they’re professional killers, why not just make a clean disposal of the corpse? Quite likely they’ve
done it before.’

I’m not strong
enough to argue with her, but Watkins is wrong. Scattering Khalifi’s corpse was
exactly
the right thing to do. The way we found the corpse sent us chasing after
connections between Langton and Khalifi instead of concentrating our firepower where it was most needed. If Khalifi had simply gone missing, we’d have been forced to look at his activities in
the round. Instead of being obsessed with
his sexual and romantic past, we’d have been drilling away at his business contacts, among them Mark Mortimer and Barry Precision. As it was, if it
hadn’t been for my perverse insistence on following that line of attack, the investigation might never even have touched those things.

Even Watkins sees this logic. ‘Of course, it
did
push the investigation toward the sexual angle.’

I nod.
Yes. It did.

But Watkins’s thoughts are already moving on.

‘On the other hand, we don’t
know
that any of this Barry Precision stuff is connected to Khalifi. To Mortimer, yes, but not necessarily to Khalifi.’

I shrug. I don’t agree with that either. The two men knew each other well. Were buddies. Fellow engineers. Both died violently. What more connection do you want? And if it comes
to that,
the two men who tried to kill me did so with a bit of grace. A little flourish of invention and quick thinking. It seems to me that the same house style is apparent with Khalifi’s death
too.

Watkins stares at me. I don’t look away.

She doesn’t say so, but I can tell she agrees.

‘Why try to kill you? That’s another question. But presumably they didn’t go to the cottage
to kill anyone. They learned – from Sophie Hinton, I suppose – about
that laptop and they went there to retrieve it. They found you there. They didn’t know how far their operation was compromised, so decided to kill you, take the laptop, hope for the
best.’

I nod. I agree, but it is odd to be spoken about in this way.

‘There’s no phone signal up there,’ I add. ‘They probably figured
there was a reasonable chance I hadn’t managed to communicate my find to anyone – which
indeed I
hadn’t
. If you’d found me dead in a field from hypothermia, you wouldn’t necessarily consider foul play. That’s why I broke the guy’s nose. I wanted to
leave a clue at least.’

‘I’d have found it. I’d be sure to have found it.’ Watkins looks severe and authoritative when she says that, but she
tries to jam a smile into the expression too. The
smile doesn’t work. It looks clumsily out of place. A child’s pink party bow stuck onto a formal business suit.

I say, ‘Yes.’

I tell Watkins that she should get a log of calls to and from Sophie Hinton’s line. I assume the Olaf-Hamish-Dunbar-Prothero axis is careful about calling from untraceable numbers, but you
never know.

She
nods and makes a note. ‘And Mortimer? Any theories on him?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps he thought he needed to kill himself to protect Sophie and his kids. Perhaps he just thought that his life was fucked anyway. Either way, he was pushed into
it.’

Watkins doesn’t like the word ‘fucked,’ but she doesn’t rebuke me.

Instead, she picks up my hand, the one nearest her, and turns it over.
There is some blood leaking from the bandage. Her touch is oddly gentle.

‘How did you hurt your hands?’

‘When I was cutting the seats up. I don’t know exactly how.’

She turns my hand over again, to leave it as it was, but she keeps holding it. We are hand to hand, fingertip to fingertip. We stay like that for a bit. I’m not that far from going to
sleep again.

‘Dennis told me
about this,’ she says after a while. ‘The things you put us through.’

Dennis: Dennis Jackson. My boss on the last big murder case. Apart from that, I don’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t elaborate.

For a while we just drift on the silence. But there’s something else I need to say.

‘We won’t get a conviction for what happened last night. Not a chance.’

‘We might.’

It’s all very well having Hamish’s blood on my coat. That proves that he and I were in contact at some point. But we’ve got no way to prove when or where that contact happened.
We can’t even show that a
crime
took place. The word of a police officer: that’s all. And it’s not enough. For a modern jury, under modern rules of evidence, it’s not
remotely sufficient.

‘They’re good,’ I tell Watlans.
‘They were careful last night. Gloves all the time. Hats. Wiping the car down. They didn’t touch me even when I smacked the
Scotsman. They’ll have been professional about Khalifi too. Very clean. Careful about CCTV, numberplates, forensics. All that stuff.’

Watkins nods. ‘We’ll see.’

There’s not much more to talk about. The world outside is still very grey, very cold. Watkins says they
are talking about the coldest winter on record.

I fall asleep with her still holding my hand. I lean my head against it, because it is nice having the human contact. I say, ‘Thank you,’ or I dream I do.

When I wake, darkness has fallen and I’m on my own.

A cold world spins. Time organises seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days.

I’m released from hospital. To Mam and Dad’s, because Buzz needs to be at work and because I’m still not much good for anything.

I have my old room back. Mam has filled it with flowers. Dad has ordered special support pillows from a supplier
in London and a contraption that fits under the mattress to raise and lower it
like a hospital bed. I laugh at him, but it’s nice to have. He puts a TV in there too, and Mam and I watch recordings of
Downton Abbey
. Mam is so absorbed in the show, I think she half
lives it.

I spend hours with Ant and Kay too. Kay buys me a phone, which is really nice of her, even though I know she’ll get
the money back from Dad. She also goes round to my house with Mam and
brings back clothes and my laptop. Mam goes shopping and buys a winter coat for me which is weirdly similar to Watkins’s granny coat, the one Amrita so despised. Kay takes it back and brings
me something from Monsoon instead. Furtrimmed. It looks nice. She also gets, at my request, a proper padded coat, the sort of thing people
go skiing in. It’s going to be a while before I walk
out underdressed for the cold again. That’s not logical: Olaf and Hamish would have removed any coat I’d gone out in. But somehow it makes sense. Even the idea of cold is frightening
now.

Ant just likes snuggling with me. She’d worm right in alongside, except that there aren’t many bits of me that want a wriggly thirteen-year-old bumping
up against them. So I pile
pillows up against my side and let her bump against those instead. We do a school project of hers together and she tells me stuff about what’s happening on Facebook and the music she’s
into.

Buzz visits too. Office gossip and low-intensity snogging. He wants to know, a bit upset, why I didn’t tell him what I told Watkins. He feels that I didn’t trust him.

I look at him like he’s an idiot. ‘I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.’

I explain: if Buzz had known how come I ended up in hospital that morning, he’d hardly have been able to keep his feelings under wraps.

‘Fi, you know it’s okay to have feelings –’

‘Yes, my dear Buzz, but your feelings would have ended up letting my father know what happened. You might not have meant it that way, but –’

‘You think he’d –?’

‘Well, what do you think? How do you honestly think my father would react if he knew someone had tried to kill his daughter?’

Truth is, I don’t know the answer to my own question, but nor do I want to find out. I don’t think Dad is involved in his old games anymore, but he still has his friends from those
days, his contacts, his resources. If he wanted to find
a couple of underworld figures, he’d have a fighting chance of locating them before we do. And if he did, I don’t think
they’d ever see the inside of a jail, which is where they belong.

Buzz sees this logic. His mouth falls open with it. ‘Bloody hell, Fi. Your family!’ It must be strange for him. A well-behaved boy from a nice family. Finding himself dating the
more-than-slightly crazy
daughter of one of Wales’s best-known criminals. Probably not what he imagined for himself. Life’s like that: It never serves up what you think it will.

He’s also seen my name on a list of people down for the undercover training thing. He’s upset I didn’t run that by him first. He reckons, probably rightly, that undercover cops
– the real ones, the long-termers – never manage a successful
relationship. I agree with him. Say I don’t see myself doing anything like that, not really. I just fancied adding
some new skills.

Which is almost true. But it’s not really the skills I want, more that I don’t like the idea that I might be prohibited from doing something I want to do. Any police officer can go
undercover in small ways – buying drugs from a dealer, seeking to sell stolen
goods – but you’re not allowed to go
deep
undercover without special training. And what if,
one day, a case needs that kind of tactic? I don’t like the idea of being barred from something just because I haven’t been on some stupid course.

Buzz accepts this, or sort of does, and the conversation moves on. We watch a bit of TV and cuddle. After a bit, I want to sleep and Buzz takes himself
off. It’s been a nice, peaceful,
contented time.

But I’m not ill. I’m a bit knocked about, that’s all. My burn wounds need gentle treatment for a few weeks. My cuts are already healing. The tips of my toes are, in some cases,
looking black, but the cheerful junior doctor at the Royal Gwent told me that the rule was ‘frostbite in January, amputate in July.’ So: my toes might need surgery
at some stage. Or
they might not. In any case, there’s nothing to stop me working, so – when I’m not watching
Downton Abbey
or protecting myself from a wriggling younger sister – I
work.

Although I shrink from what I might find, I force myself to start reading those police reports on my father. Though I can’t ask anyone to get the printouts from my office desk, I can
access the same
material via the force intranet.

And I do. I read.
Thomas Griffiths known to have . . . Thomas Griffiths believed to be . . . Telephone interception reports on Thomas Griffiths . . . Thomas Griffiths, formerly of . . .
Thomas Griffiths was identified by . . . Prosecution case for Thomas Griffiths . . . Anonymous caller reports that Thomas Griffiths . . .

It’s endless. It feels endless.
The language, criminal law, and police procedures have all changed since then, but not so much. Twist the lens a little, and I’m seeing myself –
or rather, my brothers and sisters on the force – on my father’s trail. Doing everything they can to secure a conviction. Earlier on in the paper trail, you can see the cops expecting
victory: securing a conviction for one of those banker offences,
achieving one of those ten-year-plus sentences that every good copper loves to see.

The first prosecution was for armed robbery. Two eye witnesses. Both reliable. Nice clean statements. No awkward alibis. Identity parades all tickety-boo. The sort of case that the CPS can
manage in their sleep. Then the damn thing came to trial, and both witnesses retracted in full. Their retractions were
stumbling and awkward, but they made them. Insisted on them. The case
collapsed.

In the years that followed, you can see my colleagues getting tighter, sharper, willing to run with any little offence they thought they could pin on him.

And all the time, I see my father waltzing through the shadows. Laughing at his pursuers. I try to imagine how deft he must have been. How constantly
cautious. What must it be like when you can
never use a phone without assuming that someone is listening? Never send a letter, never trust that innocent-looking stranger?

I don’t think I learn much from the files, not directly, but I do start to break that sense of fear I have. My sense that I can’t investigate these things, that it’s better not
to know.

And of course there are leads:
so many leads, it’s hard to know where to start. Known associates. Associates not known but suspected. Friends. Associates of those friends. At one stage,
the Serious Crime Unit put together a chart trying to trace major associations between the South Wales underworld. The chart is a whirlwind of circles, arrows, interconnections, with my father
standing at the very centre. A Mr Popular of
the criminal fraternity.