Love Story, With Murders (4 page)

Nothing obvious to link anyone in the area to Mary Langton. Langton’s own excursion into exotic dancing seemed a fairly temporary thing. As far as we can tell, her first encounter with the
industry was Easter 2004 and had more or less ended up by early 2005 – that is to say, several months before her death. So maybe the lap dancing had nothing to do with it.

Remarkably, Mrs Williams had an official caution on her record: she had jammed her walking stick into the spokes of a child’s bicycle, while a boy was riding it. The boy had fallen and
started crying. An altercation ensued, which led to the boy’s mother being warned for using abusive language to a police officer. The officer in question subsequently also issued Mrs Williams
with an official caution.
The incident took place in 2007 and wouldn’t appear to have any direct link to Mary Langton’s leg, except insofar as the episode shed some light as to Mrs
Williams’s general character and outlook. Which does not seem to have been sunny.

I think of saying something to Watkins, but she’s busy, so I don’t.

I finish my reading and let the countryside slide by. It’s wet and the wipers are
going all the time. The police driver keeps the car at a precise seventy miles an hour, moving out from
the slow lane when he needs to overtake, moving back again as soon as he can. Indicators on and off every time.

Watkins is on her BlackBerry. Making calls, checking and sending emails. Handling media, forensics, neighbourhood inquiries, public information appeals. Progress reports to Robert
Kirby, the
Detective Superintendent who has overall supervision of this investigation and is, in effect, Watkins’s boss for the duration. There’s also Interpol liaison, because of the Aussie
angle. Getting updates on anyone whose names cropped up in the first, 2005, phase of the Langton investigation.

A communications blizzard. The nature of command.

But eventually she’s done. She
hasn’t had any more sleep than I have, and she has that pink soap smell about her too. She looks at my jeans with taut disapproval but doesn’t
say anything. She’s wearing a grey woollen dress that she must have had ready in her office.

‘The leg was at the back of the freezer,’ I say, because it’s weird not saying anything.

She looks at me, waiting, so I continue.

‘Mrs Williams was
only an inch or so taller than me and arthritic. The freezer was almost a metre high and two feet deep. If I had to bundle a leg in there, I could probably manage it, but
I don’t think I could have laid it neatly along the bottom of the back wall unless I virtually climbed into the thing.’

‘No.’

‘And the polythene didn’t match any of the other packages.’

‘I don’t think Elsie Williams
is our killer.’

‘Do we know if she left her garage unlocked? Or if any of the neighbours had a key?’

Watkins raises a chin to acknowledge the questions. Those things might have been on her to-do list anyway.

We’re off the motorway now, in the hills above Bath. Farmhouses and villages glimmering through the rain, then the long plunge downhill into the city.

The driver lets the satnav
guide him to an address just west of Victoria Park. Ordinary, pleasant streets. Watkins puts her BlackBerry away, braces herself for the brutal moment.

She says nothing about how she wants to conduct the interview, but when she gets out of the car, I follow. She rings the doorbell. Lights on inside. Noise. A shape moves behind the door, then it
opens. A woman. Langton’s mother, dark hair,
jeans, rugby top. Her face is composed in a ‘how can I help’ look, which collapses completely the moment she recognises Watkins.

‘Oh.’

Nothing else. Just ‘Oh’. She takes us on wordlessly through to the kitchen. Same thing with her husband. The collapsing face, the wordlessness. A telly on in the background, which he
mutes.

We sit down and Watkins says what she has to say.

‘I’m
sorry. Yesterday evening, DC Griffiths here was called to a house in Cardiff. We found some human remains, your daughter. We’ve been able to identify her from clothing and
DNA. I’m very sorry.’

The husband has that numbed look. That thing where you’re only partly present in the room, where feelings and sounds and sensations all feel deadened, as if glimpsed through a glass wall.
That’s
the place where I’ve spent so much of my life: behind that wall, watching it thicken and cloud till I could hardly see through it at all.

The wife, Mrs Langton, isn’t like that. She’s crying without sound, tears falling like sand. She has some instinct toward hospitality, and keeps starting to offer us a drink, but
never quite gets there. In the end, I get up, power off the TV and put the
kettle on, then just stand behind her with my hands resting on her shoulders.

I’m good in these situations because I don’t have normal feelings. I operate the way I usually do, relying on my brain more than my heart or instinct. Mrs Langton is sobbing now.
Noisy, juddering sobs. The sort you’re supposed to have at this kind of moment. I don’t intervene, just stand there and let her cry.
Watkins and the husband make tea.

When things are calmer, Watkins continues. Tells the truth. That we have a leg, not a daughter. That we can’t say how she died. That we can’t offer any comfort or close off any awful
possibility. That the worst of those possibilities are all too likely. Some sexual, sadistic, long-drawn-out weirdness ending in a macabre death. Watkins doesn’t say that last
bit, of course,
but it’s there, present in the room, as real as the rain.

Finally, we’re through the tears. Mrs Langton says that they’d never really given up, that they’d always hoped, that her daughter’s room is still ready for her
upstairs.

I ask to see it.

My request is unexpected. Not what I’m meant to do, either from Watkins’s point of view or the Langtons’. But still. Mrs
Langton says all right, because that’s easier
than saying no. I go upstairs behind her. Beige carpets. A willow tree beyond the landing window. Then the room. Scrupulously tidy. Student books. A revision chart. A poster with a Dylan Thomas
poem on it.

I sit on the bed, Mrs Langton on the desk chair.

‘I’m really sorry, Mrs Langton –’

‘Oh, call me Rosemary, dear.’

‘I’m Fiona.
Fi. Whichever.’

‘Fiona. My niece is Fiona.’

‘This is how her room was? This tidy?’

‘Oh, she was always tidy.’

I look in a wardrobe. Her clothes are still there. Not night-clubby, spangly miniskirt things either. Just normal student stuff. If anything, a bit tame, a bit dorky.

‘Sorry, is it okay to look around? I always like to get the feel of someone.’

‘I know it looks
strange. Keeping it like this. But we’re not . . . I mean, we use it as a spare room too. It’s just nice keeping her things around.’

There are photos on the desk. No pole-dancing ones. A formal school one. A family shot. One of her on a pony. Another of her playing field hockey, red-faced, in pursuit of an invisible ball.

We sit for a while. I try imagining myself as Mary Langton, Rosemary
as my mother. I’m about the right age. Hockey and Dylan Thomas. That isn’t me, but it could have been. Some
parallel life.

‘You’ll be okay, will you?’ I say.

‘You know, it never leaves you, but life has to go on. We have two others, a boy and a girl. Twenty-three and twenty-seven.’

She wants to show me their rooms, their photos, but I’m not interested.

I say, ‘Inspector Watkins
is very good, you know. She’s a bit scary, but she’s the best investigator we have.’

‘Oh, I’m sure. That’s nice to know, actually. Thank you.’

We sit a bit longer, then go downstairs.

Watkins is pissed off with me for going AWOL, but she can’t say anything with the Langtons there. We say goodbye. On our way to the car, I say, ‘She needed a hug. I thought she might
be better off doing
that one-on-one. She had a good cry, then felt better.’

Watkins looks at me with one of her speciality looks, storm clouds over glaciers. But she doesn’t say anything and we simply drive off in silence.

Back through the city centre, up the hill, through the rainy countryside, back to the motorway. Only once we’re there, and the driver is doing a hypnotically exact seventy miles an hour,
wipers going like a metronome and the indicators blinking on and off each time we change lanes, does she wave her BlackBerry at me.

‘They’ve found a hand.’

‘Ah!’

I wait further news.

‘A right hand. Three hundred yards from the house. On the banks of the reservoir.’

I keep waiting. This should be good news. Important. A step forward. But something’s hanging out of sight, something
wrong.

I wait for her to tell me more and she does.

‘It’s a man’s hand. Dark-skinned. Arab, Mediterranean, something like that. And fresh. It’s completely fresh.’

Home.

I didn’t want to come, but Watkins ignored my protests and had the driver drop me at my door on our way back in to Cathays. When we arrived and I had the one door open ready to get out,
she said coldly, ‘If you want to investigate a bedroom, then do so. Don’t lie to me about hugging Rosemary Langton.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I say,
wondering how she knew.

‘Does she still have that poster up?’

‘The Dylan Thomas one? “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”? That’s still there.’

‘Weird poem.’

I shrug. I don’t know if the poem is weird or not. But I don’t care. Nor, all of a sudden, does Watkins. She slams the door, has the driver drive off. I go inside.

I’m feeling tired, but I find it
hard to sleep when it’s daylight outside. I run a bath, but don’t get into it straightaway. Think about rolling a joint, but can’t be
bothered to do even that.

Instead I make peppermint tea and drink it slowly, watching the rain fall. I like the rain. When I was ill, I always felt less ill when it was raining. I used to go outside to get wet. It was
one of the things I could almost always
feel: the cold, the wet, that sense of falling.

Eventually I finish my tea, have a bath, wash that icky pink soap smell away, and sleep for a couple of hours. Not good sleep, though. It feels like it’s raining body parts. A hand. A leg.
An ear or two. A drizzle of humanity.

Eventually I wake up, feeling worse than I did when I went to bed. Make more tea, look out at the rain, think about
a smoke.

I call Buzz.

He takes the call with his voice set to formal, then walks away from wherever he is and says, in his intimate voice, ‘Hey, babe, have a nice time with Watkins?’

I tell him about my night, except not the bit about going down to Pontcanna or up to Whitchurch, or the bit about calling my dad, or the bit about going into the dead girl’s room, or the
drizzle of body
parts, or the joint which I thought about twice but didn’t have. Apart from that, I’m as open as sunshine.

Buzz fills me in on the investigation, because he knows I won’t let it go until he tells me.

They’ve found another hand, a foot, and a forearm, all apparently belonging to the same dark-skinned male body as the original hand. ‘Better fresh than frozen, eh?’ he says.
The inevitable
policeish joke.

‘On public land, or in gardens, or where?’

‘One of the hands and the foot in that little bit of wood just down from the Williams house. Public access land. The other hand and the forearm in back gardens no more than three hundred
yards from the Williams house. The hand maybe could have been lobbed in there from the open land behind the garden. The forearm looked placed,
not thrown.’

‘No ideas who yet?’

‘Nothing. Not a clue. Too early for DNA, but we might have something by this evening. No one on the MisPer register who looks likely. No one local, anyway.’

I know what he means. At a national level, the missing persons register is always well stocked, not least with Londoners of every possible ethnic background. That doesn’t mean we’d
be smart to
go chasing after every missing Arab-Londoner, Mediterranean-Londoner, or whatever. The DNA may reveal more once it’s analysed.

‘You’re up at Llanishen now?’ I ask.

‘Me and every other officer in South Wales. A
fingertip
search.’ More policeish humour, a thing I dearly love.

We chat a bit more, or try to. Any room we might have found for personal chitchat feels drowned out by what we’ve
just talked about. My fault. Buzz is better at switching his police mode
on and off. Me, if I’m on the hunt for something, I can never really let it drop. In my mind, I’m already up there in Llanishen, walking across the sodden slopes, examining every
tussock of grass, hoping always to find something – a foot, an ear, a pair of fingers – shining in the mud like an autumn mushroom. So though
we try having a personal moment, and sort
of do, it’s not great. It’ll be better when we can spend an evening together.

We ring off.

I wish I was better at those little intimacies. I’m lucky Buzz is patient.

There’s been a thumping noise in my head for some time and I now realise I’m hearing the beat of a chopper overhead. I live only a couple of miles from Llanishen – eight
minutes
by road, five if no one’s watching – and the helicopter, presumably, is part of the operation.

Partly that’ll be for aerial observation. Looking for a change in the vegetation, discolouration in the soil. But shallow graves are the hardest to find. They don’t disturb the earth
enough. In a drought, maybe, a corpse will be revealed by the moisture it holds, but not in Wales, not in Llanishen,
and certainly not at the dead end of a wet October. So the chopper is also there
as a warning to nutcases. We’re watching you. Stay away. Hunker down. Be good.

I try to think of some positive ways to spend time – ironing, food shopping, hoovering, gym – but I already know what I’m going to do.

I go upstairs. The spare room, as I used to call it. Then Buzz took to calling it, disapprovingly,
the operations room, so it’s been that, or just the ops room, ever since. A good name.
Military. One that handles like a gun, serviceable and clean.