Love Story, With Murders (39 page)

When we cross the Severn Bridge into Wales, her eyes stare out over the estuary, with anxiety, or sadness, or astonishment, or maybe something else altogether. I say, ‘Welcome to
Wales,’ and the interpreter doesn’t bother to translate.

I’m with Fatima about two days all told. Lend her a pair of socks and a thick cardigan. I’m with her as she enters her dead son’s apartment.
With her as we drive up to
Llanishen. With her as we go to the Muslim graveyard, where the graves lie perpendicular to Mecca and the headstones are as simple as possible, because orthodox Islam frowns on excess adornment. We
have a bunch of flowers bought from a local garage. Carnations, a mixture of white, pink, and yellow. Fatima lays them reverentially. We stand by the grave for about fifteen
minutes, until the cold
drives us away.

A few times, I try to have a conversation with her. Never get far. At first I think this is a failure on my part. Only later do I realise that this is maybe what Fatima needs. To spend these
days in silence. A pilgrim visiting the monuments of her son’s lost life. On the afternoon of my last day with her, I drive her down to the Mumbles. To the yacht
club. The grey, uneasy
sea.

‘He used to go sailing here. With a girl he liked. They were happy together,’ I tell her.

The interpreter translates.

Fatima says nothing, but she gazes out to sea, the fringes of her headscarf pulling in the breeze. As we get in the car to drive away, she pats my hand, then squeezes it. Her brown eyes find
mine. She says, in English, ‘Thank you.’ Then
again, ‘Thank you.’

I hug her. And that evening, when I drop her off at her cheapie hotel, I say it’ll be someone else looking after her the next day. She tries to say thank you again, but she can’t,
and this time there are tears in her eyes.

And when I’m back at work, I make a call I’ve been putting off. One I’m slightly scared of. But I do it anyway: phone Jack Yorath, the DCI whose
name Penry gave me. Trustworthy
Jack, Brian Penry’s pick of the old-timers.

I say who I am and ask if I can meet for a drink.

‘Fiona Griffiths?
The
Fiona Griffiths? Tom Griffiths’s girl?’

‘That’s me, yes. It’s my father I wanted to talk about.’

‘Bloody hell. Okay, yes, I’d be happy to talk.’

We agree to meet that evening. His house, because it’s more private than a pub. I
tell him that he needs to not mention this to anyone. Not even any former colleagues. Not for any reason
at all. He says okay.

We meet that evening. Yorath lives just outside Caerphilly, a nice house, nicely looked after. We sit in a little snug-come-office off a tiled hall. From a room somewhere behind us, someone
plays scales on a piano, interrupted now and again by a snatch of briskly
delivered Bach.

Yorath offers whiskey or tea. I say water. He gets that and drinks whiskey himself.

‘Bloody hell, Fiona Griffiths,’ he says.

I let him inspect me. He thinks what everyone thinks: I don’t look much like my dad. I suddenly realise I want to trust someone. Maybe Yorath could be that person.

I say as much. ‘Chief Inspector –’

‘Jack. Just Jack.’

‘Jack.’ He’s
sitting in a green leather chair. I’m on some kind of upholstered bench, which is more comfortable than it sounds. The room has low lighting, some lever arch
files, plenty of books. ‘I don’t know if you can guess why I’m here.’

‘Not exactly. But a daughter of Tom Griffiths in the CID? That’s not exactly your standard police background.’

‘No.’

Professional interrogators – as Yorath
and I are – don’t get uncomfortable with silence. The empty moments can be as revealing as everything else. Yorath just sips from his
whiskey, while Bach skitters behind us.

I say, ‘You probably know that I was adopted.’

Of course he does. The adoption process created plenty of paperwork. All that paperwork ended up in police records, and Yorath’s career was spent combating organised
crime. He could hardly
not have known. Quite likely part of his curiosity in seeing me was to find out what I looked like.

‘I know my father had his issues with the police, to put it mildly –’

‘You can say that again –’

‘But he was a good father to me. He and Mam, both of them.’

‘I don’t doubt that.’

‘I’m not here to – I’m not looking to nail my father for some offence he
may have committed twenty years ago.’

‘No, I wouldn’t expect that.’

‘But I need to know where I came from. Dad’s story has to do with me appearing mysteriously one Sunday, just found sitting in his car.’

‘Outside chapel,’ adds Yorath, smiling at the thought of my pa in the house of the Lord.

‘I don’t believe that story. I think Dad knows much more than he lets on.’

‘I bet.’

‘I can’t ask him direct, or if I do he’ll just give me his standard patter. If I ask any of his old friends, they might be helpful, but they’d always let Dad know
I’m asking. And if Dad hears I’m digging, my chances of finding anything out will disappear completely.’

Yorath nods. ‘You haven’t been in the job that long, not yet. But when you have been, when you’ve put in the years, you
get to know your quarry. Your dad was the most talented
criminal we ever chased. I shouldn’t say this really, but me and some of the older guys ended up admiring him. It wasn’t just his organisation, though that was always amazing, it was
the way his associates never dropped him in it. Those things go beyond discipline. It was a kind of love he inspired. Funny word to use, that, but I’m sure
I’m right. I think people
loved him.’

I nod. They did. I’m sure they did.

‘You’re also right that if the truth is out there somewhere’ – Yorath waves his whiskey glass somewhere in the general direction of Cardiff – ‘it’ll
disappear the instant your dad hears you’re on the trail.’

‘So I’m here to ask if you have any thoughts at all. I’ve read most of the files. I’ve got some more
reading to do yet, but I also know that there’s stuff that
never goes into the files. Things you know, things you might think, even wild speculation.’

Yorath raises his eyebrows. ‘This was twenty years ago.’

‘More. I’m twenty-six now. I was maybe two and a half when I was found.’ Yorath’s face starts to do the maths. ‘August 1986. That’s when I
appeared.’

Yorath’s face is a mask,
but a mask that conceals thought. He’s still for a moment or two, then puts aside his whiskey, grabs a pad and pen, swivels the light.

‘Nineteen-eighty-six. Tom Griffiths. Everything from hard truth to wild speculation. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘His car business. Stealing cars. Giving them makeovers. Selling them on. That was in full flow back then. Turnover? I don’t know. I’m going to say five
million. Profits?
Don’t know. Let’s say one million. Total people involved? Don’t know, but must have been dozens all told. Inner circle? Not many. Five, six. Probably people you know. He always
kept them close, people like . . .’

‘Emrys Thomas,’ I say softly. ‘He used to babysit for us.’

‘Emrys Thomas as your babysitter.’ Yorath laughs and shakes his head. ‘He was a kind of chief-operating-officer
type. Not the strategist. Not the general. But the guy who made
everything else tick.’

He starts listing other members of the inner circle. Names I’m familiar with. Dad’s intimate friends. Familes I know, homes I’ve visited.

‘I know them. Dad’s still close to them all.’

‘I bet.’

Yorath has been covering his pad with the basic data as he’s been speaking. He strikes a thick line
under it as his pen hovers over the next section of the page.

‘Then the sidelines. Drugs? It’d be the obvious thing. We always assumed there’d be some kind of drugs activity and I think there was. Ecstasy? Possibly. The drug was just
starting to become big then. Your pa would have had the infrastructure needed to distribute it. We’re pretty sure he distributed cannabis. Buying from the international
smugglers, taking care
of local distribution. But we never found links to anything harder than that. We looked certainly, but –’

‘Dad hates hard drugs. He wouldn’t have touched them. Mam would have killed him if he had.’

Yorath laughs again.

‘Okay. But mid-eighties, he’d have been at his peak, just about, so I’m going to say your pa did one or two big deals at least. Maybe it wasn’t
a regular thing for him,
but you know if someone approached him, needing to offload a big supply of cannabis coming in, I don’t think he’d have refused.’

I nod. ‘You’re right. He wouldn’t have said no.’

‘Okay, so you want to know names. Associates, the inner circle? Same as before. But then there’d have been the international end of things too, the Howard Markses, those guys. But he
probably didn’t know distributors elsewhere. The way the international sellers operate, they don’t want their buyers to know each other. Safer for everyone. So he’d have had some
offshore contacts, but not many and not close. Turnover involved? I don’t know. Let’s say two or three big deals, worth a million or two each. Profits on those things maybe fifty
percent of turnover.’

I nod
again, but thoughtfully. Dad is rich, but he’s not as rich as Yorath’s numbers would imply. He’s always spent money freely, but that means changing his Jag every couple
of years, building swimming pools he never used, buying single-malt whiskey back when he drank the stuff, buying huge bunches of flowers for Mam. But that’s not the kind of stuff that eats a
million or two a year. I would say Dad
must have a pot of money stashed away somewhere, except that Dad has never been a save-for-tomorrow kind of guy.

Yorath isn’t interested in my reservations. His pen continues to walk across the paper.

‘Construction. Municipal contracts. Development permits. There was a lot of money in Cardiff back then. The construction business was always dirty. If anyone was skimming something, then
your dad was. We had a big investigation into it. There was one guy, some middle-management type, who came to us as a whistle-blower. We took him seriously, did what we could, came up with
nothing.’

‘Did he name my dad?’

‘No.’

‘Links to Dad’s inner circle?’

‘No. Wild speculation, remember?’

‘Okay. What else?’

‘Prostitution? We drew a blank.’

I agree with that. ‘Mam
would have killed him. She almost killed him when he opened the lap-dancing clubs.’

‘Handling stolen goods? Definitely. Any fence in Cardiff would have needed your father’s say-so to operate. He’d have had his cut. We even had little bits and bobs of evidence.
Almost enough for a prosecution. At the time, we decided against it because the top brass wanted to get a conviction for something
big, and thought they’d achieve that by keeping your dad in
play. That was the wrong decision. We should have gone with anything we could.

‘And then, the bits and pieces. Let’s say someone wanted to send a warning to someone. Or wanted to extract protection money. Anything like that. I think your pa would have seen
Cardiff as his turf. If people didn’t go via your dad for that sort of
thing, they’d have regretted it.’

‘Yes.’ It seems strange here, sitting with Yorath, in this comfortable room, talking about my dad in this way. There’s a question sitting alongside us now, one that I have to
ask. ‘In terms of really serious stuff, I mean the worst things . . .’

‘Murder? That wasn’t his house style. When he was younger, working his way up, who knows? We never had anything
on him. Never heard rumours. But that was the point in a way. No one
ever told stories against Tom Griffiths. It’s like everyone knew he was at the centre of things, but you’d never get anyone on the stand to actually say so.’

‘How much violence was there?’ I whisper.

Yorath shrugs. ‘Enough.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning exactly that. If your father or the guys around him decided someone
needed their legs broken or their kneecaps smashed, it would have happened. A routine operational decision, I
imagine. But in a funny way, those things cut both ways. We never had a huge violent crime problem in Cardiff. Never any real gangs. Your dad
was
the gang. People knew what they’d get
if they crossed Tom Griffiths, so they didn’t cross him. If I had to guess the total number of punishment-style
beatings we handled through the eighties, I probably wouldn’t get to more
than a dozen. If that. Most big cities had a far worse problem than we did.

‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. He was a criminal, your dad, and belonged behind bars. But he wasn’t . . . I don’t know, he wasn’t a savage.’

I smile lopsidedly at that.
Not a savage
. That’s not much of a compliment to the man who was raised
me so lovingly for the past twenty-four years, but maybe it’s the one he
deserves. A sentimentalist, who used to go to chapel and who still always cries at weepies. A man whose affection for me and my sisters is entirely genuine and always full-hearted. Who has been a
steady husband to my mother. Who built the biggest criminal operation in South Wales. Who handed out punishment beatings the
way corporations hand out stock options. Who might or might not have
committed murder while he was ‘working his way up.’ Whose prosecution witnesses melted away on the witness stand.

This criminal, my father.

Yorath and I talk for another ninety minutes. By the time we’re done, I have a huge wodge of yellow paper, covered with Yorath’s thick scribbles. Almost none of what he’s given
me is verifiable. But that’s the point. The reason why you need to talk to the cop, not just read the notes.

At the end, I blunder out onto the street.

There are crusted ridges of snow still, to remind us what we had, but mostly the town looks like it always looks at this time of year. A new weirdness this, the weirdness of the normal.

And even though I know nothing, have no tangible
fact to walk away with, I feel like I’ve really started. Begun an investigation whose target is me. I drive away from Caerphilly certain
that my father’s secrets are my own. That he knew my biological father, knew my biological mother. That he knows – or guesses – the reason I turned so crazy in later life.