Love Story, With Murders (45 page)

‘Evening,’ I say.

His mouth says nothing,
but his eyes say
Fuck you
. I walk round and kick him hard in the coccyx. No particular reason why. I suppose I wanted to see what I would feel, kicking the man who
tried to kill me. But the answer is: not much. It’s just a kick. It feels right and good to have this part of things tidied away, but I don’t feel much personal triumph.

Also, Hamish seems amazingly naked. There’s something about
our situation which somehow emphasises that he’s wearing nothing but duct tape and an air of hatred. I cover his gingery
cock with a bathroom towel. His nose is crooked, which means I did break it that night in the car.

Now that I’ve got time, I can go through the apartment at more leisure. Don’t find anything more than I did the first time, except that I’ve now got Hamish’s phone, if I
want it.

I
do
want it, only decide not to take it. Strathclyde will have access to technical specialists who can get through any password protection Hamish may have. And the phone may yield
evidence that’s wanted in court. Plus I’ll be able to access anything that Strathclyde gathers. So logic wins out. I leave the phone.

It’s time to clean up. It’s already been reported that Hamish
has been in recent contact with me, so any small particles of my DNA that are found would likely be consistent with that
contact. On the other hand, I don’t want it to look like I was physically in the apartment at any point, so I want to erase any significant traces of my presence. I set to work with a hoover,
cleaning the area under the bed where I lay all through the evening. Although I kept
on clothes, gloves, and hair protection, it’s impossible to remain that long in one place and leave no
trace.

After hoovering, I mix half a bucket of water with a whole bottle of bleach. Rinse down anything I’m worried about. Bleach doesn’t guarantee destruction of DNA but it does a pretty
good job. It’ll do more than enough.

It’s one thirty in the morning and I’m done.

I tell
Hamish I’m going.

He gives me those
fuck you
eyes again, so I give him another kick. Basic stuff, I know, but it’s still communication. Human contact.

I douse the parts I’ve kicked with bleach, just to be on the safe side.

Then go to the bathroom. Take the showerhead off its stand and drop it on the floor. Turn the cold tap on to maximum. Water starts to spray around.

I help myself
to the Norwegian postcard. If Strathclyde want it, that’s tough. Also the hoover. I take that too.

Leave the apartment door open.

Take the lift down.

Trudge wearily to my car.

It’s not the beating the crap out of people that takes it out of you. It’s the waiting around beforehand, the cleaning up afterwards. You should be able to get support staff for that
kind of thing.

I drive south to Lancaster. That’d be two and a half hours normally, but it takes four hours because of the weather. At a service station along the way, I find one of those big commercial
wastebins and dump the hoover. I’m so tired now that my eyes keep glassing over. I almost nod off, repeatedly, and need the vibration of the car tyres hitting the icy roadside snow to wake
me.

At Lancaster
railway station, I park the car, buy a ticket for cash. Wait for a train to take me south. First to Crewe. Then on to Cardiff. When the train has pulled a few minutes out of
Lancaster, I throw my car keys out the window. They disappear down an embankment into a stand of blackthorn. There’ll be loads of my DNA in the car if anyone were to choose to swab it. But
they won’t. It’s just a car.
Bought for cash, never registered, then abandoned. In a few weeks’ time, it’ll be towed by the police and destroyed.

I sleep till Crewe. Wait on a cold platform until the Cardiff train comes in, then gratefully get on board. The ticket collector has a South Welsh accent and I feel like I’m already
home.

I’ll do a roast chicken with all the trimmings. Roast tatties, bacon, gravy, two
veg, cranberry sauce. Probably cheat and buy a ready-made pudding. I’ll do a practice cook with Mam
and write down all the timings.

On Monday morning, Rhiannon Watkins phones me. Orders me up to her office.

I go. She greets me and says, ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard. Strathclyde Police think they’ve got McCormack.’

‘Oh, that’s good.’

She tells me the news. Water pouring from
an upstairs bathroom brought down the ceiling in the flat beneath. Then, because that flat was unoccupied, the ceiling one storey down was next to
follow. The occupants of that flat called the landlord, then went upstairs to investigate. Found the door unlocked. Called the police, assuming theft.

‘McCormack was found with a severe blow to the skull, but no long-term damage. He had been secured
with duct tape, apparently. Swaddled like an Egyptian mummy.’

‘Or baby Jesus,’ I say, trying to be seasonal.

Watkins doesn’t answer right away, maybe because she’s not very Christmassy, so I take her evidence bag out of my pocket. The one with the body hairs.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I forgot to return these to the laboratory. What do you want me to do with them?’

She takes the bag.
She seems moved. Moved and grateful. She takes the bag, half-closing her eyes as she does so. Nodding to herself. ‘Thank you. Thank you, Fiona.’

It’s strange to see her like this. I guess that never in her life has she knowingly contravened rules of evidence, or any of the other laws that govern our investigations. By returning the
bag to her, I’ve kept her one hundred percent record intact.
I realise how much it must have taken for her to have given me the bag in the first place.

‘If they’ve got McCormack, I probably don’t need to pursue my enquiries?’

‘No. No, you don’t.’

‘Good. That’s all good.’ I think Watkins has said everything she wanted to say, but I’m still standing here. She’s not telling me to go. There’s something
uniquely clear about the light in here. It’s
the snow, I think. Seconds and minutes float into the room, then get hypnotised by the light. Accumulating in little drifts of time.

‘Have you gone on any of those websites yet?’ I say neutrally.

‘Yes.’ She nods. She doesn’t have full control over her voice, which is half husky, half whispering. ‘I was going to ask, if you wouldn’t mind, sometime . .
.’

‘We could take a look at your
profile together. Make sure you’re presenting yourself right. I’d like that.’

Watkins nods. She’s red. Scarlet. Watkins the Ice Queen in a puddle at my feet. I think this is a real friendship. Or could become one. We’re awkward as hell now, but that’ll
pass. Her eyes say the opposite of McCormack’s. No need to kick anyone in the coccyx.

I smile at her. Say, ‘See you soon.’ Go downstairs
to start my day.

Humans want endings. Perhaps we need them. Tidy finishes. Christmas wrapping paper and a big red bow.

We don’t get them, though, except perhaps at Christmas. Maybe that’s why the festival endures. Maybe it’s not only children who need the myth.

This Christmas, here on our frozen island, is a spectacular one. Hoarfrost so thick,
there’s as much as an inch lying on branches and twigs. Icicles four feet long hanging from gutters and
balconies. Buzz tells me he’s seen icicles that he measured at over six feet, and he, unlike me, always tells the truth about these things.

Christmas Eve is sunny. I’m not working that day and Buzz is, so I use the freedom to drive out of Cardiff, away from the coast, up into the hills.
My dad’s car. A Range Rover which
isn’t going to get stuck anywhere. Which flies over these icy roads with a certainty altogether lacking in my late and still-lamented Peugeot. I hadn’t intended to go all the way, but I
do. Up to Mortimer’s cottage. Then to the field where I almost died. I want to see it again.

The place is piercingly beautiful. White hills and infinite light. A bird of
prey sharpens its wings on the air overhead. The barn that I burned down is still charred and black, but its
remaining timbers are jewelled with diamonds. The stream in the little dip beyond the barn chuckles at my presence. A line of footprints – fox, I think – marks little blue dimples up
the slope of the hill.

Tonight, Christmas Eve, they’re forecasting temperatures of minus sixteen
degrees, which means minus eighteen or colder up at this elevation. That’s colder than it was when I was
here last, but not much. Either way, it isn’t T-shirt weather.

When the Ice Age last covered Britain, these mountains lay on its fringes. Glaciated, but only just. These old red rocks, the sandstones and the siltstones, were scraped clean by moving ice. To
them, this weather is just
a reminder of things past.

I stay in that field awhile. The sun stares down without comment. The air flashes with cold fire.

The bird above me disappears, then returns.

And eventually, I don’t need to be there anymore. It’s gone. The whole car-death-cold thing has slipped from one place to another. From something that was still injuring me in the
present to some other place where
it no longer hurts. The past still happened, but I don’t have to live there. I don’t have to worry. The barn will get rebuilt. My skin grafts are
increasingly looking like ordinary skin.

I drive down to the farm below. Arthur is in a barn, scattering feed for his sheep. Mary comes out of the kitchen when she sees me. I have presents for them both. A huge bottle of whisky for
him. A bunch
of flowers for her. Nice ones. They seem genuinely touched. And I am too. By their surprise. Their smiles.

They invite me in, but I say no. We stand a bit in the stone yard, looking out at the snow, and we agree that it’s cold, that it’s beautiful, that we’ve never had a Christmas
like it.

I ask Arthur how his insurance claim is going. He says fine. I tell him that I distinctly recall
the barn being at least three-quarters full of hay. I’ve already phoned him to say that,
but I say it again now.

He shakes my hand with a grip so strong, I can feel bones starting to fuse in my hand.

And then I go. Dad’s beautiful big Range Rover driving on ice like it was just diddling over a suburban street. And McCormack in prison.

His boiler suit yielded no useful forensic evidence,
but his boots did. And his gloves. And, stupid fucker, the plastic bag that housed them all. Khalifi’s blood. Also the blood of a
Scottish man who disappeared two years ago, with suspected gambling debts. Also the blood of a third individual who has not yet been identified.

McCormack’s phone use links him to Cardiff Bay on the night of Khalifi’s murder. McCormack’s car – the one they used
the night they tried to kill me – can be
tracked via the ANPR database to both Cardiff Bay and then, later, Llanishen. Strathclyde Police tell us that they have a strong murder case for the gambling-debt guy too. In short, McCormack is
fucked. He’ll spend the rest of his life in jail, near as dammit.

I don’t think about him often now. He’s history.

Watkkins wanted to add my attempted
killing to the list of charges, but the CPS told us we had nowhere near enough evidence to secure a conviction. Watkins tried to argue them round, but I told
her to leave it. I didn’t want the publicity or the hassle. As long as McCormack goes to jail, I’ll be satisfied.

There’s more good news too. McCormack’s phone was unlocked by Strathclyde’s technical staff. The call log contained outbound
and inbound calls from a pay-as-you-go phone
purchased in Denmark. That phone showed use in Glasgow, in London, in Bristol, in Copenhagen, in Oslo. And also in parts of rural Norway.

I’ve contacted the company that produced the ‘Experience Norway’ card I took from McCormack’s flat. They tell me that the picture was taken from a valley in the mountains
about thirty miles south of Trondheim.
The village in question has a population of just six hundred people. If I include everyone within a ten-mile radius, that still only gives me about fifteen
hundred. And Norway, bless it, has a compulsory national register of all residents. The sort of thing you associate with the Stasi, but somehow an idea that’s taken root in this little Nordic
paradise too.

I sift my list of possible
names to exclude women, children, and anyone outside an age range of twenty-five to forty-five. All male Norwegians are obliged to perform military service, but I have
a strong suspicion that Olaf will have done more than the minimum. These people usually do. If you like violence, have an aptitude for it, you’re drawn by the glamour of warfare. The
training, the guns, the toughness. The Norwegian
armed forces have a veterans’ administration which keeps information on one hundred thousand ex-service personnel. I ask it about veterans of
the right age registered to the area I’m interested in. The agency is initially reluctant to divulge its data, but I get Watkins to apply a little pressure and, after a few little
bureaucratic shenanigans, the data is promised. In the new year, sometime.

Good enough.

I’m back in Cardiff by four in the afternoon.

Buzz is spending Christmas day with his family, me with mine, so this evening we’re having our own private celebration. I’ve got everything I need. I’ve done a practice-cook,
supervised by my mam, and I’ve written down all the timings.

Those timings don’t just apply to the chicken. They apply to me too. I want to do everything
right. Clean hair. New dress. Proper makeup. Sexy underwear. Though my dress isn’t
exactly new – it’s one of Kay’s cast-offs – it’s one that Buzz hasn’t seen. I can’t tell if it looks nice or not, but I know it looks passable. Most of
Kay’s dresses don’t fit me brilliantly, because of our height difference, but she likes her dresses short and some of them suit me well. This one looks
okay, I think. The mirror
doesn’t say ‘woman of mystery,’ but it does say ‘girl looking nice for a special date’.

Good enough: my slogan of the moment.