Love Story, With Murders (46 page)

Inevitably I don’t get my timings absolutely right. I was aiming to have dinner served by seven thirty, but it’s going to be more like eight fifteen. That too doesn’t matter.
Buzz has strict instructions not to show up until I text
him. He’s out at the pub with a bunch of people from the office, so he’s fine.

And then I am ready. I tell Buzz he can show up at quarter past. There are candles on the table. Wine. The table’s laid. Everything is either cooked or just approaching perfection.

I’m a skitter of nerves.

I put my posh shoes on much too early, so my feet are killing me now, but I still skedaddle around,
checking things I’ve already checked. I look at my watch five times in twelve minutes.
Check myself in the mirror three times.

And then Buzz is here. My stomach flips, as though it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him.

I feel ridiculously anxious and I don’t know why.

He is about to say, ‘Bloody hell, Fi,’ because that’s what he usually says when I’m making a visible effort. But then
he doesn’t. He just kisses me carefully and
says, ‘Happy Christmas, love.’ I say, ‘Happy Christmas,’ too, but my voice is crooked and hoarse, like Watkins’s was when she asked me to help her with the dating
sites.

We eat dinner.

The potatoes are crispy. The chicken is cooked enough to be non-lethal, not so much that it’s black. The gravy tastes good and there’s plenty of it. The veg
is fine too. I got the
right sort of wine.

We clink glasses and say, ‘I love you,’ and that feels like a real thing to do, not a TV-movie thing. All of it does. The whole thing.

I’m still nervous, but no longer skittering. For all I know, I even appear reasonably calm. When it becomes time to serve pudding, I realise that it’s still frozen hard. My list
didn’t have an entry that read,
‘Remove pudding from freezer, you numpty,’ so I didn’t do it. Didn’t even think about it.

I must look crestfallen.

Buzz takes the pudding out of its wrapper and puts it into the microwave to defrost. He says it’ll take twenty minutes to defrost, then twenty-five minutes to heat in the oven.

‘I wonder if we can think of a way to pass the time for forty minutes,’ he says.

But he’s
not allowed that. Not yet.

We sit on the living room floor and give each other presents. I give him a jumper that he looks really nice in. I give him a hockey stick with rave reviews on the hockey websites. This one is
made of some special composite that’s meant to be much better than the knackered old wooden one he uses. It cost two hundred pounds. I’m a bit worried that he’ll have some
manly
attachment to his wooden one, but he doesn’t, or at least, he says, ‘Bloody hell, Fi, that’s fantastic,’ in a way that makes me think he means it. I give him some other
things too. Nice things. Things I took care about when I bought them.

I have almost no money left in my account, or anywhere else for that matter. And that’s fine. I’m not very good with money, but I don’t starve.

Buzz gives me presents too. Girl things mostly, but I like that he thinks of me that way. Someone who wants scented candles. Who wants a cute little jacket from Oasis. I light the candle and try
on the jacket and I still don’t feel like a TV-movie person. Giddy, but okay.

He also gives me a small box and I have a sudden terror that it might be jewellery. It is, but a necklace, not a ring,
and I feel a surge of relief. I love this man, but I’m not ready to
take that step yet. I don’t know if I ever will be, but more things are possible in this life than I ever thought likely.

‘Are you okay, love?’

I nod. Smile. Put the necklace on.

‘It’s lovely,’ I say. ‘I love it.’

We’ve used the word
love
or
lovely
three times in the space of nine words, and it doesn’t feel excessive.

Buzz takes the pudding out of the microwave and puts it into the oven. He does some other things in the kitchen too. Probably things I’ve forgotten.

I’m not looking at my list anymore.

When Buzz comes back, I give him my final present. A small box. Wrapped, with a red bow.

‘This is a funny present, really,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not something for you to keep. It’s something for you
to destroy.’

He opens it, smiling. The box is full of seeds, like green lentils, only paler. Some speckled, with tones of buff and slate and pale grey.

He looks at me with his big blue eyes, puzzled. He has freckles on the end of his nose that make me want to kiss them.

‘What are they, sweetheart?’

‘They’re my cannabis seeds,’ I tell him. ‘The next generation. My seedbank.’

‘Fi, that’s amazing.’ He hesitates. ‘I mean,
technically
, giving an industrial quantity of Class B drugs to a police officer isn’t amazing, it’s
criminal, but –’

I interrupt him. ‘I’m not saying I’m giving up. I’m not even promising that I
will
give up. I don’t know if I can. But I am promising to try. I want you to
know I will try.’

He’s speechless. Then his freckles move in for a
long kiss. His lovely freckles on his lovely nose.

We eat some pudding, but though there’s cheese to follow, we don’t touch it. We head through to the bedroom and do what we do best. Then there’s a muddle of showering and
washing up and watching a bit of rubbish on the telly and cuddling up close as we watch it.

And eventually bed. Buzz says ‘Happy Christmas’ once more. I say the same
to him, but it’s still not Christmas yet, only Christmas Eve.

Before the church bells toll the midnight, Buzz is asleep beside me. I have my hand on his chest so I can feel him breathing. Then, when that’s boring, I tickle the hairs in his nose to
make him snuffle and shake his head.

I tickle his ears too, but that doesn’t work as well.

Time passes.

As soon as Watkins told me
that Strathclyde forensics had found Khalifi’s blood in McCormack’s apartment – as soon as, that is, we knew for certain he would be going to jail
– I asked Watkins for permission to request an appeal against Mortimer’s conviction. She nodded and instituted the necessary proceedings right away. There’s a time lag for these
things, but we’ll get what we want, I’m certain.

I borrowed a patrol
car and drove, with Susan Konchesky again, up to Droitwich.

Got Sophie Hinton, her mother, the two kids into one room together. Told them formally that Mark Mortimer had been wrongly convicted. Said that we were working to get his conviction reversed.
Told them that, because of their father, a major criminal conspiracy had been uncovered. Said that the first man was under arrest and heading
for prison.

I thanked them each personally – Sophie Hinton, Ayla, Theo – for their help.

Ayla and Theo cried buckets. Sophie Hinton cried too. I don’t know if I’ve given the children what they needed, but I’ve done all I can. Given them a father to be proud of. Not
a criminal, a hero.

I’d still like to give their mother a good slapping, but I can’t have everything.

Afterwards,
as we were driving back again, Susan said, ‘Back there. You were amazing. I just wanted you to know.’

She was at the wheel and had her eyes fixed on our snowbound motorway, but I thanked her and meant it.

I don’t think Mark Mortimer was a hero, not quite. It was brave of him to look into the arms dealing. It was fucking stupid of him not to alert the police. A courageous idiot: that would
be closer to the truth, but his kids don’t need the truth. They needed their father back.

Somewhere beyond our window, a bell tolls midnight.

Buzz snores, his even, deep, masculine rumbles.

I’d like to find Khalifi, or Langton, or even Mortimer, but their spirits are silent. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Something a bit like peace.

The weapons systems that left the Barry Precision
factory filtered out across some of the world’s nastier regimes. Egypt. Libya. Tunisia. Syria. Yemen and Somalia. Who knows how far those
weapons travelled? In whose hands they ended up? The only thing that’s for certain is that none of them were destined for the hands of democratically accountable governments, because if they
had been, the firm could simply have applied for, and obtained,
export licences.

Barry’s weapons may never have been fired. The firm made parts for heavy weaponry and armoured vehicles. Artillery pieces and tanks, not small arms. It’s quite possible that few or
none of those weapons were fired in anger.

Yet the burden of guilt is horrendous all the same. Those armaments protected regimes against their peoples. The dictator’s ultimate recourse. Barry
Precision – and Jim Dunbar, and
Idris Prothero – played their toxic little part in keeping those regimes intact.

I’d like to find the souls of those victims. To make contact, however dimly or however briefly. To touch hands with them, feel their existence.

I can’t do that, though. Perhaps there are just too many of them. Or they’re perhaps too distant. Maybe you can only feel the dead
when you know them a little, the way I knew
Khalifi.

A pity.

But even if you can’t feel the dead, you can think about them. Make them a gift of your time and care. So I do. As the bells of Cardiff count towards the first light of this frozen
Christmas, and as Buzz snores beside me, his nose hairs now unmolested, I spend time with the dead. The countless, nameless, uncomplaining dead.

The city clocks chime over Cardiff.

Buzz rolls in his sleep, allowing me to kiss the back of his neck, which is beautiful.

Outside, the great freeze endures, tightening its hold. Ice thickens. In a snowy field somewhere above Capel-y-ffin, a burned-out barn flashes diamonds at the moon, while owls hoot in the
solitary woods.

And sometime before dawn on Christmas Day, I fall asleep.

The Norwegian veterans’ administration comes back to me with names. There are five people in my target area who spent significant time in the armed forces. One of those
was a naval officer, an improbable career choice for Olaf, I think. One of the others is just twenty-six, and I’m pretty sure Olaf is older. Of the three others, one served
for seven years,
most of that time in the Brigade Nord, Second Battalion, based in the far north of Norway. A place where you’d learn all about snow. About hypothermia.

I check out all five names. It’s not hard. Armies like regimental photos. Ski teams. Biathlon contests. Those things need teasing out, but they’re not private. I pose as a
documentary maker researching a series on winter
warfare. I get all the co-operation I could ask for. I get photos. I get a photo of Olaf.

His real name is Jan-Erik Fjerstad. He is thirty-five. He is, indeed, my man from the Second Battalion. He represented his battalion in long-distance cross-country skiing competition, before an
ankle injury ended all that. He is registered to an address outside a remote hamlet in the mountains of middle
Norway.

Olaf doesn’t sound like a person I’d like to tangle with one-on-one. Hamish was just as tough, just as strong, but he was stupider. Not as careful. And Hamish’s arrest will
have put Olaf on his guard.

So I text Lev. Ask him if he fancies a trip to Scandinavia.

I don’t hear back from him for a while, but when I do, it’s a yes. We set a date for March.

In the meantime –
work. Lots of it.

I’ve been working with a team of two on Khalifi’s little adventures in the arms trade. We can track thirteen separate orders split across seven different firms, all of which appear
to be for weapons-parts. There are a further eighteen suspect orders, either commissioned or planned, which probably relate to weaponry too. There’s no use, however, in detailing these things
beyond a certain point. Khalifi is dead and can’t be jailed. I draw up a report presenting our conclusions, then I and my colleagues are assigned to other things.

Barry Precision itself is where the action is, and our battle with the firm is turning into a fuckery of lawyers. Like Stalingrad, only with legal arguments in place of mud, snow, and tank
manoeuvres. But they’ve miscalculated,
I think. If they wanted to sap our resolve, our budgetary capacity, they’ve actually done the opposite. Our Chief Officers and the top decision
makers at the CPS are determined to proceed. There’s a rare institutional unanimity in pursuing the case, and pursuing it hard.

Plus Kirby and Watkins, it turns out, are superb at this sort of thing. Kirby is wonderful at the politics, the lawyer
stuff. Watkins is relentless in her accumulation of evidence. Presenting it
in a way guaranteed to break down any opposition, to destroy any counter-argument. At the same time, she’s scrupulous about conducting every aspect of her investigaton according to the proper
standards. Every procedure followed, every box ticked.

Barry Precision’s lawyers are still snapping away, but so far they’ve
accomplished nothing at all. They’re snapping on air.

Dunbar and Prothero are going to prison.

Once a week, on a random day and using different stationery every time, I send Prothero a card. A picture of Cardiff jail. No message.

Idris Prothero made his money in private equity. Pays UK tax at a rate of 18 per cent, but keeps most of his business interests offshore, so his effective
tax rate is well under 10 per cent. I
say this to Buzz, who says cheerfully, ‘Well, we must be mugs then,’ and goes to work, being a mug.

Except we’re not mugs. We do a good, honest job at a fair rate of pay. That’s not stupid, it’s responsible. It’s an attitude responsible for every good thing in society.
And though there’s nothing illegal about the way Prothero pays his taxes, for someone
to make that much money, and to pay that little tax, and then to make yet more money by selling weapons
to dictators and to compound all that by giving, calm as you like, the order to kill DC Fiona Griffiths because she might, just
might
, put an end to your stream of profits –
there’s something breathtaking in that approach to life. Something so stunningly don’t-give-a-fuck that, as far as
I’m concerned, ten years in jail is never enough.