Love Story, With Murders (34 page)

I already know we’ll get nothing from this interview. We’ll get nothing in the morning, less than nothing in the afternoon.

I hold Prothero’s supercilious gaze
and tell him, carefully, ‘Fuck you.’

Then I get up and leave the room.

Leave the room, find Rogers.

We quickly agree that there’s not much point in pursuing the interview until Prothero has his lawyer. For form’s sake, Rogers and another DS will put in shifts, one hour on, one hour
off, asking the same battery of questions. There’s no evidentiary purpose in doing so. Prothero will say nothing. But you
get more from suspects if they’re tired and angry. Plus you
piss them off. Both good reasons to keep at it.

But Rogers doesn’t need me, and I don’t want to stay. It’s not much fun sitting opposite your probable would-be murderer, unless you’re sure of nailing the bastard. And
we’re a long way short of that.

‘You could always go down to Barry,’ Rogers says.

So I do. Find a patrol
car going down there and hitch a ride. We arrive around nine thirty. A civilian vehicle, an Astra, enters the car park with us. The woman who gets out of the Astra wears a
red-and-white bobble hat and says she’s an Export Manager. She doesn’t look like a dealer in illegal arms, but maybe she didn’t know that’s what she was. Or maybe arms
dealers like to wear Christmassy bobble hats.

We
escort her into the building, which has grown mountains of computers, wires, printers, laptops, phones. Boxed or in stacks. Yellow police stickers marked with reference numbers. Every item
logged and signed for. And not just electronics. Boxes and boxes of paperwork too. Personnel records, employment contracts, bank records, invoices, technical drawings, visitor sign-in books.
Everything.

And it’s not just a question of lugging the stuff out of there. A CID IT specialist wants to map the network architecture, whatever that means, so there’s potentially hours of
fiddling around before we can carry off any booty. Whatever excitement there must have been when they forced entry earlier in the morning has long gone now. It’s like a massive furniture
removals project, only with
lots of data complications and the risk of massive legal liabilities if we fuck up. The mood is simultaneously tense and frustrated.

DI Ken Hughes, who led the Barry raid this morning, is overseeing interviews with the bad-tempered snappishness that is native to him. There’s a swirl of confused surprise around his desk
as employees are paired up with officers.

But it’s surprise, I note,
not fear. It’s as though our presence here is like the snow. Unexpected. A disturbance of the normal order. But somehow also accepted, a freak of the
climate. An IT guy helps our CID specialist with the network architecture. Someone shows an officer how to get the coffee machine to produce hot chocolate.

Watkins is in with Dunbar, giving him the third degree. She’ll be a good interviewer,
I bet. Naturally scary. Dunbar has a lawyer sitting in with him, but Dunbar’s budget
doesn’t run to some arsehole from London. His guy is local. A cheap grey pinstripe and a voice that’s higher pitched than Watkins’s.

I greet DI Hughes and offer my services. He doesn’t much like me, which makes for a neatly symmetrical relationship, as I dislike him. He assigns me to interview a spotty boy
from sales,
who looks eighteen but claims to be nearer my age. We make a space for ourselves on a workbench under the windows that overlook the dock.

The kid knows nothing. He keeps asking, ‘How are we going to do our work?’

Not my fucking problem, matey
, I want to tell him.
If you want to work, you probably shouldn’t have started dealing in illegal arms. Shouldn’t have framed Mark Mortimer,
shouldn’t have killed Khalifi, shouldn’t have left me to die in a fucking snowfield
.

I don’t say that, though. I act like a copper out of a training video. ‘We will keep any disruption to a minimum, sir. We do have a warrant to impound items that may be required for
our inquiry.’

The kid looks at me blankly with eyes the colour of peat water. I run my tape recorder and write my notes.

Finish that interview. Do another. There’s a flavour here that’s missing. A fear.

I think of Theo and Ayla. Theo’s question:
Was it a mistake?
Yes, Theo, it damn well was.

The atmosphere tastes like potatoes boiled without salt.

The lads who, earlier this morning, broke open a door with a steel battering ram are now reduced to figuring out schedules for the return of property. The
vending machine runs out of coffee. A
couple of uniformed coppers drive into Barry to get supplies.

I do another interview.

At midday, Watkins takes a rest from the business of throwing hostile questions at Jim Dunbar. She goes for a prowl so she can blast anyone who offends her.

By this point, I’m not doing anything at all. I don’t think the interviews are helping us, so I’ve stopped
doing them. I don’t want to load paperwork into boxes, so I
don’t. Nor can I be doing with the whole logistical mess of figuring out what stuff Barry needs to continue in business and how soon we can get it back to them. As far as I’m concerned,
we should take everything, without apology or excuse, keep what we need and dump the rest in Cardiff Bay.

So I drift around, make stupid jokes,
and try to stop other people from working. I’m sitting on a desk chatting with a couple of uniformed officers when Watkins heaves into view. She
lasers a couple of people, just to demonstrate her weapons are in order, then rolls over to us.

Gives us the glare.

We look like what we are: two people trying to work, one person being annoying.

Watkins does that circular jaw action thing
she does. The uniformed cops don’t know her well enough to be terrified. But that jaw action is normally a prelude to launch, a countdown to
detonation.

I give her a sunshiny smile, all tropical beaches and swaying palms.

She says, hoarsely, ‘How are you feeling?’

I say, ‘Fine. Mending up.’

She nods. Makes a half gesture at my outfit. ‘You’re looking smart.’

‘Hobbs,’ I say.

She makes some incoherent noise in the back of her throat – probably a glitch in her missile ignition system – and trundles away without remembering to reprimand us for existing. I
turn to my two workmates with a grin, but they’re not impressed. They don’t know how close they came to incineration.

And after a while, I’m bored.

I quite like the factory hall itself. The incomprehensibly
complex machines. The manufactured parts and works in progress. The precision of surfaces whose form and function is entirely beyond me
to fathom. Aside from that, though, the place weirds me out. The offices at the front of the building are poky and lightless. Even worse than ours. We’re here, barrelled up in a metal shed,
close by the black water seething in the docks, the ice hardening
its grip on walls and roads and ironwork, and we see none of it.

I need to get out.

Need to get out, but don’t have a car.

Think about bothering Buzz, but his car is at the station and he’s busy being a good, dutiful copper. So I call Jon Breakell in the office. No joy: he’s on something and can’t
talk. I’d normally try Mervyn Rogers, because he quite likes me and because his attitude
to work isn’t always rigorous either, but I don’t want to get sucked back into
interviewing Prothero, so I avoid calling him.

Instead I try Bev, and am instantly in luck. Watkins has her driving round the various businesses that Khalifi patronised all those years ago. Not the Tescos or the SWALECs, of course, but those
businesses small enough and personal enough that they might just remember
a repeat customer. Watkins’s hope is that if Bev flashes photos of Khalifi and Langton in front of enough people, she
might just jog a memory or two. It’s not even clear how that would assist the investigation, but Watkins is remorseless. She’ll keep going till there’s nothing more to do. I like
that about her. Bev is in Penarth, just up the coast, feeling anxious that she’s doing something
wrong.

I start sweet-talking her into coming to pick me up, but she agrees right away and I ring off, smiling.

I’m bored no longer.

Ayla and Theo.

Al el-Khalifi.

Mary Langton and her grieving family.

Different victims, different remedies. It’s good to act.

‘The yacht club?’ Bev sounds dubious. ‘In this weather?’

I know what she means. The Swansea Bay Yacht Club is hardly likely to be humming with life. But it won’t be closed either.

Bev is wearing a padded coat in sky blue. She has unnaturally blue eyes anyway and a clear complexion. In this weather, she has the clarity and perfection
of a china doll. When she blinks, she
looks like Bambi in pursuit of a butterfly.

She says, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to work more systematically? Go back to Penarth, finish up there, then do Barry, and so on.’

She’s suddenly worried that she made an error in coming to get me. She wanted me in Penarth with her because she thought I’d help protect her from any Watkinsian rage. Now she
worries that I’m going to lure her off-piste and end up bringing that rage down upon her.

I say, ‘Bev, did Watkins specifically ask you to start in Penarth?’

‘No, I just thought it would be logical to –’

‘Then trust me. Let’s go to the Mumbles in Swansea Bay. Start at the Yacht Club. If we don’t have any luck there, we’ll do it whichever way you like. And Watkins
won’t be pissed
off with you. If she’s pissed off – and she won’t be – I’ll tell her it was all my idea.’

‘Okay then.’ Bev sounds uncertain, but compliant. That’s all I need.

I’m sitting in the passenger seat next to Bev. Like her, I’ve still got my coat on, but have shed my hat, gloves, and scarf, which lie on a woolly pile on my lap. Reaching round for
my seatbelt is difficult – I don’t want to stress
the skin starting to grow back on my burn – and there’s a moment where a small gasp of pain escapes me.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Yes.’ I try to sound nonchalant. Try to make my
yes
sound like a
yes-and-why-wouldn’t-I-be
.

‘I thought you were going to be more, I don’t know, more . . .’

‘Char-grilled? A bit crispy?’

Bev is shocked at my flippancy, but also reassured. She gives
me a smile, puts the car into gear, and drives cautiously out of the snowy car park. The roads ease once we get into Barry proper.
Still more so once we’re on the A48. Channels of brown slush gouged into banks of dirty snow. Cars drive with their lights on. Snow doesn’t just whiten a landscape, it quietens it.
Sounds are deadened, speeds reduced. Bev drives sitting forward, hands on the wheel
in the ten-to-two position.

When she’s confident with the driving, she starts asking me about what happened up in the mountains. I give her my downsized version of the truth.

‘Goodness gracious, Fi.’

That’s just about as close as Bambi ever comes to swearing, so I work a bit harder to tone things down. I think it mostly works. She ends up saying, ‘You do look okay. Really fine
actually.’

‘Hey, thanks.’

‘No, I didn’t mean it like that.’

We shift the subject to the weather. When I see Amrita, I’ll give her the same super-low-key version of things, and with a bit of luck my weekend adventures won’t have added too much
to my reputation. Funnily enough, I think Buzz was right. The suit helps.

Swansea looks nothing like itself. It looks like some town in Norway, remade
with Welsh-language road signs. The sea chafes all along the seafront. A contest of salt and ice.

The yacht club is disappointing. The Mumbles is Swansea’s nicest suburb. I was expecting its yacht club to have a little moneyed swagger to it, but no. It lives in one of those buildings
created when grey was the only colour, rectangles the only shape.

A white iron balcony daggered with
icicles. Single-glazed windows in iron frames.

From the roof, a row of flags stick frozen to their flagpoles. In the yard next door, boats sit on metal trailers, each one swaddled in its winter tarpaulin.

There’s only one person inside the clubhouse, an older man repinning notices to a corkboard. We introduce ourselves. He’s Gwilym Jenkins and he’s happy to help. He asks if we
want tea.
Bev starts to say no, because she is still worried about not having accomplished enough today. Not having ticked enough rows on her spreadsheet.

I say yes, because I want this man to relax and confide.

He makes tea, very slowly, but he finds us chairs and handles the china with a courtesy that amounts almost to chivalry.

When we’re all done, sitting at a Formica table by a radiator,
Bev lays out her photos. She starts to ask her questions.

‘Are you able to identify either of these people? Did either of them use the facilities here?’

I interrupt. I say, ‘Gwilym, these two are Mary Langton and Ali el-Khalifi. We think they took out a joint membership in March 2003. She was murdered a few months later.’

‘Good heavens. Well, I’ll certainly take a look . . .’

He goes off to fetch some records. Soft footsteps on wooden floors. Bev does Bambi eyes at me. I answer her unspoken question.

‘Bev, it was your data that gave us the clue. According to your spreadsheet, Khalifi spent seventy pounds here. Seventy pounds
exactly
. That doesn’t sound like a drinks bill.
It’s too large and too exact. It’s not for boat hire, because they don’t hire boats. So it
seemed to me like it had be some kind of membership fee. I called the club here and
asked them about their prices. The prices have changed since, but back then the charge for a double membership of the club was seventy pounds. The price for a single was forty-five. For a family,
ninety.’

Bev’s mouth has dropped open and her eyes, if possible, have widened.