Love Story, With Murders (35 page)

We don’t, of course, know
that Khalifi was necessarily buying the membership for himself and Langton, but the dates would fit with everything else we know about them. That plus, if you
look back through the photos we have of Langton, she looked fit and tanned that spring. An outdoorsy sort of tan, that doesn’t reach to the neck. The sort of tan you’d get, almost
inadvertently, on a boat out on Swansea Bay. That wasn’t
how she looked in her year of exotic dancing. You can never be sure about those things from photos, but it was confirmation of a
sort.

Gwilym returns, with a membership ledger. He leafs through the years. Finds the right year, the right month. There were only three new memberships that March. The first of them belongs to
Langton and Khalifi. Two signatures side by side on the page.

Evidence.

Bev is awed and relieved in equal measure. Relieved because she’s escaped the Wrath of Watkins. Awed because she credits me with some sort of divine inspiration. A divinity I don’t
possess.

I say, ‘Gwilym, we’re not sure how often Ali came here, but I’m guessing that you don’t have a huge North African membership . . .’

Not huge, no. Gwilym phones a colleague and we hear
him talking about a ‘brown gentleman.’ The colleague – Delyth – says she’ll come on over.

She does. She’s forty-something, knows everything, remembers everything. Ali el-Khalifi never owned a boat, but he used to borrow one from a Swansea-based friend of his. He and Mary
Langton used to come every weekend or so, ‘for a while’ – we think probably a couple of months. Then less often. Then
not at all. Khalifi and Langton were definitely a couple.
‘Oh, they were quite sweet on each other,’ Delyth tells us. ‘He was a terrible sailor, to be honest. And she wasn’t any better. They’d get into trouble if there was
any breeze up.’

She recounts a hard-to-follow story about a time when the pair of them brought their boat back with a spinnaker only, after lowering the mainsail because
the wind was too much for them. That
sounds sensible enough to me – and to Bev – but Delyth and Gwilym are laughing hard.

I ask, ‘Do you think they stopped coming because they weren’t cut out for the water. Or because their relationship ended?’

Delyth isn’t sure. Gwilym has no idea. But there’s an upcoming Christmas dinner at which there’ll be plenty of old hands. Bev says she’ll aim
to be there. I evade.

We don’t really need to take a statement, but Bev wants to get all the main points in writing. I leave her to do just that – sitting there with Gwilym and Delyth over a police
notebook and cooling tea. I get a glass of water from the kitchen and swallow a couple of aspirin. While I’m still in the warm, I find a number for Marr-Phillips’s office and call it.
Arrange
an interview. His secretary takes the call in an efficient, unflustered way. Then I walk outside and over the road. There’s a little car park. A clutter of food and tourist kiosks
which might be busy in season but are deserted now. A concrete ramp leading down into the water. The slope is thickly armoured in plates of snow and ice. I don’t step onto it. Walk instead to
the end of a little pier
to the right. Blue iron balustrades. An orange life buoy.

I try to feel Khalifi and Langton here. The lecturer and the student.

He: a little uncertain. An immigrant who never quite settled. Who never quite realised that the uncertainty he felt didn’t come from others, but from within. Who kept on trying to prove
himself because he never quite had the confidence to be himself.

Langton
was different. I don’t know what made her turn to exotic dancing, but the spring that she went sailing with Khalifi was surely the time when she turned things around. Quit the
clubs, stopped dancing. Remembered that she was a middle-class English kid who rode horses, chased hockey balls, and wrote essays about Dylan Thomas. Out here, by these grey waters and chattering
halliards, those spangly
mini-skirted nights must have seemed a million miles away.

You’d say that Khalifi’s was the relationship which saved her life. Rescued it from that adventure into darkness. You’d say that, except that within a few months Langton was
dead. Not much of a rescue if your leg ends up in a Cyncoed freezer, your arms in a plumbers’ merchant’s roof, your head in a barrel of lawn mower oil.

I’ve been missing Langton, I realise suddenly. I like the thought of her and Khalifi together. It’s like when two people who are special to you shyly tell you they’ve been on a
date, that it went well, that they’re seeing each other again.

I want to reward her with the only gifts I have to offer. Investigation, arrest, prosecution, conviction.

The girl who chased hockey balls and was
crap at sailing. I’m smiling at that thought when I hear Bev walking over the yard toward me. I turn to her, still smiling.

‘Got what you need?’

She nods, waves her notebook contentedly at me.

We drive back to Cardiff and night has fallen long before we arrive. It’s been a long day for my tired body, and I ask Bev if she minds driving me all the way home. She doesn’t mind
and drops
me at the door. I ask her in, but she says no. I’m relieved to be alone.

This is the end game now.

Langton.

Khalifi.

Mortimer.

Their ghosts are bustling now. Restless. Their satisfaction rests with us, the living. I make a cup of peppermint tea and drink it in my dark kitchen. Lights off, heating off. I’m still in
my warm clothes. Crunch some aspirin with the last of my tea.

This is the end game now and I have scores to settle.

The night is a strange one. Buzz wants me to spend the night at his place. Mam and Dad want me to go back there. I know that I need to be on my own. Need it for many
reasons.

One, I want a joint. The last time I even had a joint between my lips was the moment just before I threw it into a tank of petrol. There’s some strange way in
which I need a long
uncluttered smoke to vanquish the memory of the blaze that followed. The memory itself I can handle, but I need to soften its edges. Smudge it into something a little less than real. There are
probably better ways of doing that, but marijuana is my way.

Two, and on a related point, this cold weather won’t have been any good for my marijuana plants. The poor things have
been trying to get by with heat lamps set to come on for just twelve
hours a day. They’ll need more than that in these temperatures. I go to my potting shed, check water levels, adjust the timers on the heat lamps, and help myself to a little cube of hash by
way of reward. My plants aren’t too happy with me, but they’re not at death’s door either. They’ll survive.

Three, I need space.
Need to feel myself in control and alone. It’s thinking time, but it’s also being time. Being constantly with other people places a pressure of normality on me
that I can’t always bear. Here, alone, I can be the way I am. My version of ordinary.

And finally, tonight, I can feel the clamour of the dead. The restless ghosts. Tonight, they must have their proper share of my attention. The living
can wait.

I crumble resin on tobacco. Plenty of the former, not much of the latter. I’ll smoke only one joint tonight, but I’ll make it a rich one.

Rich and fat.

Lights on, heating up. Start running a bath. Talk to Buzz by phone. He knows I need time alone, but wants to know I’m okay. I say I am.

He tells me that Watkins was angrier than anyone had ever seen her after interviewing
Prothero this afternoon. The guy had brought not one, but two solicitors up from London. Two glossy
solicitors from some magic-circle law firm. Fuckers with money. They both seem to have been well briefed, long in advance of our raid.

‘Apparently they’re going to sue us if we don’t have everything back at Barry Precision within forty-eight hours.’

Removing data takes much longer than
that if you do it properly, recording where it’s come from and how it fits together. Even a week would be good going.

‘They’ll lose if they sue us,’ I say.

‘Yes. But we’ll still be sued.’

He’s right. If we’re sued and we lose some portion of the case, or are adjudged faulty on some narrow technical point, we may end up having to pay costs. Legal costs can quickly rip
huge holes in
our budgets. A couple of stories in the local press about overzealous cops recklessly placing Welsh jobs at risk could be a career wrecker for Watkins.

Buzz chuckles. I don’t.

We talk twenty minutes more, affectionate nonsense mostly, and hang up.

My bath has grown cold, so I run half of it out and start refilling it with hot water, when my phone rings again. Not Buzz. Not Mam or Dad.

Watkins.

I turn the tap off and answer.

‘Fiona Griffiths.’

‘Fiona. It’s Rhiannon.’

I had no idea that we were on first-name terms now, but I don’t pass comment. In any case, Watkins has news. Nothing about Prothero. Nothing about Dunbar. This is about Hamish.

‘The blood on your coat. We’ve got a DNA match,’ she says. ‘No address, but we’ve got a name and a picture.’

I know what she wants to know, so I tell her. ‘I’m happy to look at photos.’

‘The light can’t have been great.’

‘It wasn’t. But we had lights on inside the car most of the time.’ Before they faded, that is. Faded into the night I was never meant to leave. ‘I’m certain I can
identify him. If the photo is even halfway like him.’

‘It’s a 2005 photo. He’s been on the run since then.’

Watkins is deliberately not telling me much. It would be easy to nudge me in the right direction. Give me enough information that I could be sure to pick the right candidate from a parade of
photos. But Watkins isn’t that kind of copper. I tell her again that I’ll be sure of fingering him. And she’s already told me to expect the photo of a man looking five years
younger than the man whose
nose I broke. I’d quite like to ask about facial hair – the Hamish I saw was clean-shaven and might not always have been – but I don’t.

Watkins says, ‘Good. Is eight thirty tomorrow too early?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Then come down to the interview rooms first thing. Don’t go to your desk first.’

‘Okay.’

If I went to my desk first, the office grapevine might well find a way to prime
me with the name or the face the moment I got there. And if Watkins wants this clean, that’s fine.
We’ll do it clean. We may or may not be able to secure a conviction for what happened to me on that mountainside, but it’s still better to do these things and to do them properly. You
never know.

‘I’ve checked Hinton’s call log. She received a call from a mobile, pay-as-you-go, used once,
then apparently discarded.’

‘They’re good. They’re very careful.’

It’s sort of nice to know that they called Sophie, not vice versa. Hinton needs a slapping, maybe, but not necessarily jail time.

‘Yes. Look, I’ve been having words with my SIO.’ SIO: Senior Investigating Officer. In this case, Robert Kirby. Watkins sounds stressed, but I already know what she’s
going to tell me. That
the team tasked with investigating my attempted murder is coming up with no meaningful leads. That Kirby wants to shift resources away to Stirfry proper.

I say, ‘I don’t care. I mean, I want the men arrested and jailed. But we’re more likely to get them for the Khalifi killing. We’ve got more to go on there.’

‘Yes.’

‘We can’t even prove a crime took place.’

‘I’ve told Kirby to
give me more time. He’s agreed.’ She pauses in case I want to say thank you, but I resist the temptation. Then, ‘I appreciated your help
today.’

‘I didn’t really help. I mostly sat around.’

There’s a moment’s silence. One of those shared telephone silences that seem to expand forever. As though you have your ear pressed up against some instrument that lets you listen
directly to the
emptiness of space. A background crackle that reminds you how little you can truly hear.

That’s how it is for me anyway. I don’t know what it’s like for Watkins.

Then she says, ‘You can help tomorrow.’ There’s a line of steel in her voice when she says that. Watkinsian steel.

We ring off.

I finish running my bath.

Get in.

I’m still wearing dressings but they can get wet.
The hot water is painful on my more battered surfaces, but good overall. I take a moment to adjust, then start to relax.

I’m about to light my joint, but I don’t. Someone – Mam, I think – gave me a scented vanilla candle in a glass jar. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I put it by
my bath. I’ve never used it before, but I light it now. Get out of the bath, dripping, and turn the overhead
lamp off.

Light my joint. Take the first puff or two. Long inhalations.

The sweet, sweet weed.

I call Buzz. I say, ‘We should have some candles by your bath. We could take baths together.’

‘I don’t have a bath, remember? I only have a shower.’

Oh yes. I’d forgotten that. ‘Well, maybe we should get one.’

‘Maybe we should.’

We say good night again.

I finish my joint.

Go to the kitchen, hunt down some food.

Slim pickings, it would appear, but I have a jar of pesto sauce and some crackers. I put pesto on the crackers and eat until I can’t be bothered to eat anymore.

Clear up.

Do my teeth. Bed.

I sleep easily for once. The bath and the joint probably helped. That, plus a long day in pursuit of a short night.

I sleep easily and without dreams.

Then, after maybe two or three hours, something wakes me abruptly. The sudden, jolting wakefulness that arrives with a wash of adrenaline. Of fear.

At first I don’t do anything at all. Just listen into the silence, seeing if I can detect the thing that woke me in the first place.

I can’t.

Aside from the candle that’s still burning in the bathroom, there’s no light on anywhere in
the house. A street light outside beyond curtained windows. I can see the shape of the
windows. A glimmer of mirror.