Love Story, With Murders (37 page)

‘Where in Glasgow?’ I ask.

Watkins gives me an address. Drumchapel. The name doesn’t mean anything to me.

I shrug.

It’s a dead end. That’s what this is. My killers were professionals who
have successfully protected their identities for five years. I’m certain they killed Khalifi, but we
have not a shred of evidence to prove it. Although I know damn well that McCormack tried to kill me, we have no evidence that any crime even took place.

A dead end – yet I can’t help but smile like an idiot. I can feel Khalifi’s laughter in the room with me now. So I sit in the interview
room, alone with Watkins the Badge and
the chuckling spirit of Ali el-Khalifi. And I smile.

Watkins, I imagine, doesn’t realise she’s in here with Khalifi, so she probably assumes she’s here with an idiot. She smiles awkwardly, then says, ‘I hear you and
Beverley Rowlands made a breakthrough yesterday.’

For a second or so, all I can remember is the snowy pier jutting out into an empty
sea. The breaking of waves and a hover of gulls. I can’t remember what the breakthrough was.

Then I do.

‘The yacht club,’ I say. ‘The two of them signed up together.’

‘Rowlands tells me that you knew beforehand. I gather she wanted to start in Penarth and work her way west.’

‘They were her spreadsheets. I just made one phone call. And I didn’t
know
. We were lucky, I suppose.’

Watkins makes a noise at that. Not a noise with words. Just a noise.

I say, ‘Khalifi took a holiday in Dubai. Spring 2009.’

‘Yes?’

‘And a holiday in Jordan, May 2010.’

‘Your point being?’

‘He used to go to Spain. His holiday destinations changed.’

Watkins’s face says
so what?
She’s on the edge of angry, but her tents are never pitched far from that fierce edge.

‘Maybe it wasn’t Dubai he was interested in. Maybe they weren’t holidays.’ Watkins doesn’t do or say anything much, so I continue. ‘Dubai is just down the
road from Abu Dhabi. And his holiday dates happened to coincide with IDEX 2009. That’s the International Defence Exhibition. The biggest arms fair in the Middle East.’

Watkins finds her voice now. ‘And Jordan?’

‘SOFEX. The Special Operations
Forces Exhibition. The dates match.’ He also travelled to Doha, the scene of another major arms fair. The dates for that trip didn’t coincide
with the fair, but presumably the city remained a good place to meet the middlemen and buyers. I’d guess that Lausanne, Vienna, and Cairo see their share of Middle Eastern arms traders
too.

‘So your theory is that Mortimer wanted to expose illegal
arms trading, but Khalifi wanted to indulge in it? Mortimer was framed for a drug bust as a way to shut him up. Khalifi simply set
about building his own contacts. He wanted to do what Barry Precision was doing, but take the profits for himself?’

‘It’s a
theory
, yes. Khalifi had everything he needed: the technical expertise to replicate anything that Barry was doing. Engineering contacts
all over the UK. Fluent Arabic.
He’d have been perfect. Better than Barry Precision, in fact. They attracted Mortimer’s suspicions because so
much
of what they made was dual use. In the end, there was no
innocent explanation available.’

Watkins thinks about this. Draws the same conclusions I do.

‘He’d have been perfect, wouldn’t he? One of the fattest contact books in the industry.
An academic job which would give him cover. And as you say, the Arabic.’

I nod. ‘If I’d been him, I’d have placed one order here, another one there, a third one there. Not even all in the UK, necessarily. He had dealings with manufacturers from
further afield too. Perhaps he was hoping to build his own virtual arms company. Anyone looking at the output of any single firm would never have
identified the trade that was taking place. But
from the end user’s point of view, what’s not to like? British- and European-engineered components with all the hassle removed.’

‘That’s speculation.’

‘Yes, but verifiable.’

And easy to verify. We simply track every firm on Khalifi’s contact list. Ask if he was involved in any recent orders. Get the data on all such orders and pass
it over to Stuart
Brotherton. If Brotherton says the orders look suitable for armaments, then our current speculation will turn to solid fact.

Watkins makes some notes. ‘Good. That’s easily done. I’ll get that actioned immediately.’

I say something neutral. My theory remains to be proven, but I’ll be surprised if I’ve got it wrong. Good Saint Mark came to his engineering buddy Ali worried
about an illicit trade.
The bad man Khalifi thought he saw a route to making his fortune. Neither of them realised the dangers they were getting into. Clever fools, the pair of them.

And it’s odd. I like Khalifi as a corpse, get on with him very well. But I’d have detested him when he was alive. Loathed him. He was no better than Prothero. Selling guns to
dictators, because he wanted a
more expensive car.

Watkins’s thoughts turn back to the murder itself. ‘Let’s assume your idea proves correct. You think that when Barry Precision found out what Khalifi was up to, they decided to
have him killed?’

‘Maybe. Yes, I don’t know.’

Khalifi was in competition with Barry Precision, certainly, but he was also in competition with Saadawi and his peers. Either of those forces
might have ordered the killing. Or the two of them
acting together. Or something else. We may never know.

Watkins nods as she traces through the logic of this.

‘But Prothero
did
have eight mobile phones,’ I point out. ‘There’s no way he’s just an innocent businessman.’

‘And Dunbar? Khalifi’s other colleagues and contacts?’

Dunbar, I guess, is not much more than a fuckwit. As
for Khalifi’s other contacts, I doubt if any of them knew much. Perhaps McKelvey guessed something, but I doubt if he knew the whole
thing. I don’t think he knew about gunrunning or murder. His wasn’t that sort of silence.

I say these things, adjusting vocabulary as necessary.

Watkins nods again. She’s been sitting on the table while we’ve talked. Now she gets up. She’s wearing a pinstriped
jacket, trousers, and a shirt in some kind of aubergine
colour. Some sort of shiny fabric, which might look nice, but only if it was worn by somebody completely else in some completely other way. I prefer Watkins when she’s fierce and
monochrome.

She says, ‘That’s very good work.’

She says more than that too. Words of praise. I nod and look down at my hands. It’s what I do when I’m
getting a bollocking, but the technique is adaptable. It works both ways.

Eventually she stops, changes tack.

She tells me that Khalifi’s mother is coming to Cardiff soon, and did I still want to see her? I say yes.

Then she says, ‘How long have you been a Detective Constable?’

That’s one of those tricky questions. It means arranging my life into years and dates and reading them
off, like figures from an electricity meter. But I figure it out.

‘I joined the force in November 2006,’ I say. ‘I switched to the CID as soon as I could.’

Taking account of my training period, that means I’ve been in the CID about a year and a half.

‘You’ll take your Detective Sergeant exams when you can, I imagine?’

Another tricky one. A question about the future. I’ve never
quite understood normal people’s relationship to time. Most people seem riveted by questions about what might happen to
them in a year or two or twenty. Not me. Most of the time, I find it hard to get my head round what might happen next week. I don’t remember much about my past. I’ve certainly never
given a moment’s thought to my Detective Sergeant exams. Why would I?

I don’t say that,
though. I say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘You ought to.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you discussed your career direction with anyone? At a senior level, I mean. DCI Jackson? DCI Matthews? DCI Howells?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Well, we ought to do it. Lunch maybe? Are you free today?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. If you come by at twelve thirty, we’ll go somewhere.’

I nod. ‘Okay. Thank you.’

She nods. Gestures
at the bandage on my hand. ‘You’re healing up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Well. I’ll see you later then.’

She stomps off. She probably has to be extra horrible to someone, because she’s been nice to me. She’s left me with the bundle of paper on McCormack. My copy, I guess. There’s
nothing very useful there, but I take it anyway.

I finger the pills in my pocket. Crunch up an aspirin. Check
that the amisulprides are there, which they are.

Khalifi’s presence hasn’t gone exactly, but he’s not here the way he was. I remember the time on the stairwell round at the Engineering Faculty. When I stumbled. Wondered about
morning sickness. It wasn’t that. It was Khalifi. The first jostling manifestation of his presence. He doesn’t need to jostle now. He’s just tagging along.

This
psychosis: this presence of corpses. I realise I’ve always had it. Certainly ever since I got better from Cotard’s. There was a student in my year at Cambridge who committed
suicide. I’d bumped into him occasionally at lectures, but wouldn’t say that I knew him well. I remember now that he felt somehow brighter after his death than he had done before. There
was some way in which I felt it easier
to relate to him dead than him alive. Having Khalifi’s presence come barging into my room at midnight isn’t really so different from that.
It’s craziness for sure, but not new craziness.

Just me being me.

I go to find Amrita, to start my gossip suppression campaign. I show her the dressing on my right hand, but make it seem that that’s the worst of my injuries. Amrita doesn’t even
hide her disappointment.

‘They were saying you almost died out there,’ she says contemptuously.

‘Well, the hospital
was
worried about tetanus,’ I say. ‘I needed two injections.’

Amrita looks at my hand again, but her disgust is evident. Quite soon we’re discussing whether Owen Dunwoody is going to be headhunted for the Gwent Police and whether Jane Alexander is
pregnant again.

After Amrita, I go looking for Bev, but she, bless her cotton socks, is going to every other business listed on her spreadsheet. There’s a note from her on my desk, saying she looked for
me earlier in case I wanted to come.

I’m at work, but no one is giving me anything to do, because they’re not quite sure whether I’m well enough to work or not.

I chew another aspirin.

My bum hurts
where they took the skin graft.

The wound on my hand has opened up again. I can feel the trickle of blood under my bandage.

Callum McCormack stole some car number plates in a place called Drumchapel and the Strathclyde police won’t find him because they’ve been trying for five years already.

We don’t know who Olaf is.

Although we seem to have busted an arms-smuggling ring, not
only are they not rolling over and playing dead, they’re threatening to sue us, which is not a welcome behavioural trait in
criminals.

And Idris Prothero, who has been collecting his fat little dividends from Barry Precision’s murderous endeavours, is still a free man of unblemished reputation despite the fact that he
very likely sought to have me killed. Which is not a welcome behavioural
trait in anyone.

I get my phone out. Send a text. To Lev.

It says: ‘
DON’T KNOW IF YOU’RE INTERESTED BUT I MIGHT HAVE A JOB FOR YOU . FI
.’

Sometimes I hear back quickly. Other times I don’t hear back at all. I don’t know if Lev has a home, but I assume not. I don’t even know how much time he spends in the UK. He
once spent three weeks on my sofa, smoking weed and listening to twentieth-century
Russian music, all sweeping strings and self-created sorrow. Then he vanished and I didn’t see him again for
eight months.

I poke around on the network.

Bev’s spreadsheets are now things of beauty, with items underlined and coloured according to some runic coding I can’t be bothered to fathom.

There’s a mass of data coming in from the raid on Barry Precision, but it’s way too early
to see what we’ve got.

Nothing more from Stuart Brotherton and it’s too soon to start hassling him.

I need to know more about pruning techniques. I need to check that I’m right in remembering a cherry tree on Elsie Williams’s drive. That and other things. I get stuck into my
research and these things are always more interesting than you think.

I’m six and a half minutes late for
Watkins.

I don’t want to be a Detective Sergeant.

I haven’t heard back from Lev.

Lunch.

Oh my God. Lunch.

It doesn’t start well. Me late. Watkins shivering on the brink of something nuclear – perhaps only the tactical-battlefield version of nuclear, because six and half minutes late is
only six and a half minutes, even in Watkins-land – but still on the brink of detonation. I mutter something. She works her
jaw and says never mind. She’s added a gauzy scarf in pale
blue to her outfit, which doesn’t suit her. Chain mail would be better.

Anyway. We tramp outside and head toward Queen Street. She asks if I like Italian food. I say yes. It’s still ridiculously cold. We don’t talk about the case. It’s as though
Watkins has been on some weekend course in Being Nice to Humans. She’s got all the
tricks – the gauzy scarf, the small talk, the asking where we should eat – but she’s
missed the somewhat essential element of actually being nice.

This new Watkins disconcerts me. I never do well with the nicey-nicey stuff. I like Watkins best when she’s most up-and-at-it. Disguising fair nature with hard-favoured rage. At least you
know where you stand.

But we get to the restaurant
intact.

Breadsticks. Ciabata. A little tiny dish of olive oil and some fancy vinegar. A bottle of water.