Love Story, With Murders (47 page)

I hope Watkins gets her conviction. I hope a judge awards the maximum sentence. I hope Prothero has a horrible time in prison. I hope his wife leaves him and his kids hate him and his former
colleagues steal all his money and some six-foot-six fucker with gnarly tattoos and strong homosexual inclinations shares a cell with him. And I hope
it all happens soon.

Though I might be biased. I do acknowledge that.

But first things first. Mary Langton has waited too long already. Five years, poor lass, almost five and a half. Time enough.

On Monday 3 January, I go to see Watkins. She’s deep in paperwork, but waves me into her office. She’s gone back to her Watkinsian monochromes, but less rumpled somehow. I
don’t know if
she’s bought new stuff, or if she’s lost a few pounds, or what it is, but she looks better. She still looks fierce, but the human sometimes peeps out anyway.

We have done some work on her website profile. Picked a photo of her that makes her look nice – nice in a scary way, admittedly, but nice. Rewritten her profile so it didn’t sound
like a two-page report for some corporate HR department.
She’s had her first emails and she’s about to set up her first ever proper date.

‘Do you have a moment?’

She does. I’ve brought coffee for her, a mug of peppermint tea for me.

‘Mary Langton,’ I say. ‘I’ve been looking at the case notes again.’

Watkins rubs her face. The Langton investigation bothers her, I know. It’s two failures for her, not one. The first five years back. The
second now. And she’s not used to
failure.

But she’s friendlier these days. Watkins-friendly, anyway. ‘Yes?’

‘I know who killed her.’

Watkins raises her eyebrows. Not angry eyebrows. Just prove-it eyebrows.

So I tell her. Who did it. How I know.

I connect up the bits and pieces. Elsie Williams’s insomnia. The garage. The conservatory. The hot summer’s day when PC Beynon gave
the old lady her caution. I talk about the old
woman’s vendettas: kids on bikes, people lighting garden bonfires. Stupid things, summer things. I talk also about the man stuff. Car mechanics and pressure washing.

Watkins listens to me intently.

Nothing that I say amounts to a single grain of proof. Nothing that would remotely stand up in court. But the hypothesis almost always comes
first. The proof comes after.

‘You’re right,’ says Watkins. ‘He’s our man. It’s him.’

I’m sure. She’s sure. But our guy doesn’t live in Britain, or even in a European country which will respond to a European Arrest Warrant. We would need to show
‘reasonable grounds’ for suspicion. My pruning manuals and theories about bird droppings make for pretty ropey evidence.

It’s not just that
he could fight extradition and probably win, it’s that we would lose all our advantages of surprise. Really, with a guy like that, you want to yank him off the
street, run him straight to an interview room, and give him a good hard interrogation before he’s had time to think through his strategies. Even if he gets lawyered up straight away, and
these days that’s hard to avoid, our chances
of success go up dramatically if we can hit hard and early.

Watkins is thinking these things through. The light in her office has gone back to ordinary Cardiff light. No snow. No frost. No mounds of gritty snow or fistfuls of diamonds. Just low-voltage
overhead lights. Nylon carpet and slatted blinds. And outside, that subdued January light that’s never far from a wash of rain.

The frozen
December island has already vanished into myth. Like something briefly escaped from the time of fairytale. When unicorns stalked the land.

Watkins is saying something. I’m not sure what. I interrupt her. ‘He’s coming to the UK tomorrow week. There’s an industry conference where he’ll be a guest
speaker.’

I give her details of the relevant website. She gets up the web page and stares
back at me.

‘You’re sure that’s him?’

‘Yes.’

I don’t say so, but of course I’m sure. It was me that booked him. I set myself up as a PR agent. Paid two hundred pounds for a cheapie website. Got an associated email address.
Bought a disposable phone. Invited our guy to a big industry conference as guest speaker. Offered to pay business-class travel in both directions. And accommodation.
And a generous speaking fee. He
haggled over the fee, so I said yes to his highest demand. Then contacted the conference organisers and said that this guy was going to be in the UK during their conference. Would they like him to
come and speak? There’d be no fee attached, because he was in the area anyway. They said yes. And that was that. Bish, bosh. Job done. I’ll need to pull the website
and ditch the phone,
but I won’t do that until he’s actually in the air.

‘Do you know what plane he’s on?’

I say no, which isn’t true, because he emailed me his itinerary, but it’s not hard getting passenger information.

Watkins’s smile starts in her eyes, flickers at the corners of her mouth, then ignites to reveal a full set of teeth.

‘Do you want to be there?’ she says.

Stupid question.

Bath.

We travel there, Bev and I, in the rain. I’m driving. My new car. It’s not a convertible, this one. Though I loved my little Peugeot and though it was hardly her fault that I almost
died inside her, I needed to move on. My first thought was to play safe. Get something less flippant, more German. I thought about a VW Golf, perhaps.
An Audi A1. But then I was seduced by the
South. By an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, all moody curves and sulky power.

It still has that new-car smell. Plastic and leather. New carpets. Volatile organic compounds creating a sweetly heady mix only a shade or two off toxic.

‘It’s lovely,’ says Bev, who can’t afford anything like this.

My dad bought me the car as a Christmas present. I knew
he would and he did. I told him that I would give him the insurance money when it comes through, and I will. But Dad also, I discovered,
put five thousand pounds in cash in the glove-box. There’s no rule which says police officers can’t take money from their parents. On the other hand, police officers who accept large
sums of undeclared cash from people strongly suspected of criminal activity
are likely to run foul of the Bribery Act. And I’m not going to declare the cash. But then, my dad isn’t a
criminal, is he? And he’s not asking me to perform my duties in an improper way. Or at least I don’t think he is.

So I keep the car and the cash and deflect Bev’s unspoken interest in my financial affairs.

There’s a light rain falling again. Wipers like a metronome. I normally speed
on the motorway, but because Bev is in the car I stay at a steady seventy. Sidelights on. Indicate when I
change lane.

Bev is wearing the dark jacket that she lent me when I made this journey three months back. I’m wearing my suit from Hobbs. It’s dark enough, formal enough, for this visit.

Watkins was right the first time. When she saw my jeans and didn’t approve. There are times when
clothes matter. When it matters what they signal.

We roll down the long hill into Bath. The day is drawing to its close. The city is a darkening bowl beneath us. The western sky is violet and orange. A lament for the departed. For the violently
lost.

‘They’re expecting us, aren’t they?’ says Bev.

She’s already asked that. I say, ‘Yes. They’re nice. They’ll be okay. I mean, okay given
everything.’

‘I’ve got Kleenex in my bag.’

‘It’ll be fine.’

The traffic is clogged. Jerky. Bev is telling me about her parents’ comical new puppy and I feel jabs of annoyance as she talks.

Then we’re there. A magnolia tree in a front garden. A middle-class street full of middle-class lives. A black cat trots away from us under a garden door.

I park. We get out. I smile at Bev
and ring the bell.

Rosemary Langton answers the door. She’s in a navy jumper and a charcoal skirt. Her husband hovers behind, dark grey suit, home early from work.

We go inside. To the kitchen. Rosemary makes us tea. I don’t want it and Bev isn’t a huge tea drinker, but it’s part of the ritual. What law-abiding people do when they have
police officers in the house. It’s our duty to drink,
theirs to pour.

Then we’re all at table. A clock ticks somewhere in the hall. Through French doors at the back, I see the long tresses of the willow tree and the same black cat motionless underneath.

‘You know why we’re here,’ I say. ‘We now know a lot about how your daughter died. We have arrested the man who killed her. He will be spending the rest of his life in
jail.

‘I also
need to tell you that this story isn’t a pretty one. It’s as we thought, as you feared. Mary was almost certainly raped before she died. She may well have been
physically hurt as well. There’s a lot that we can’t say for sure, but we can make some very good guesses.’

I stop there, trying to get the measure of my audience. I don’t always have good sensors in these situations, but I can trust
Bev’s and I look at her for guidance. Her face tells me
that I’m doing okay, so I go on.

I tell the story.

Almost six years ago, Mary Langton was coming out of the most important relationship of her life. We don’t know why it ended, or even really why it started. But the relationship in a
strange way both saved her life and ended it. First, it saved her. From the drink and the stripping.
From that self-destructive path glazed with black marble and red leather. She found love. She
found something strong enough and bright enough to change the course of her life. Her new course led her to the sailing clubs of Swansea Bay and Llanishen. She went back to her studies. She had
never exactly terminated them, but during those strip-club months her commitment had dwindled to almost
nothing. She found her way back to the life path that was first mapped out for her in these
confident Bath streets.

I don’t know why it didn’t work out with Khalifi. Probably just two people with too many differences. Any case, they stopped seeing each other, but Langton still liked to haunt the
places she had known with him. The Mumbles on Swansea Bay. Llanishen. Places that reminded
her of those times. She left that unfortunate party early because she wanted to see the reservoir again,
in the last of the light.

Which, as mischance would have it, was a bad idea.

Because Karen Johnston, Elsie Williams’s daughter, used to visit her mother for two or three weeks each summer. Her husband, Derek, accompanied her. When they were over here, Karen and
Elsie did whatever
a mother and daughter do. Derek attended to those household maintenance chores that never get done by elderly widows living alone. He hired a pressure washer to rinse
cherry-coloured bird poo off the driveway. He went down to Ryan Humphrys, the plumbers’ merchant, to buy the parts necessary for whatever plumbing job needed doing. He took his
mother-in-law’s car to the garage for its MOT and
service.

But Derek wasn’t a nice guy. He was a rapist and a killer. Walking in the area one evening, he came across Mary Langton, come to sit by the moonlit waters.

She was young. Pretty. Defenceless. Alone.

He raped her.

Raped her, then, I imagine, killed her to escape the consequences of his crime.

Which left him with a dead body to dispose of. And which might, under normal
circumstances, be a little tricky for a guy vacationing with his mother-in-law.

Option one, presumably the first thing that occurred to him, was simply to drag Langton into the woods, throw some soil over her, hope for the best. But the area round the reservoirs is a mecca
for joggers and dog walkers, and Johnston must have felt, rightly, that the chances of discovery were way too high.
Langton’s body would have contained his semen. Most likely his blood and
skin would have been under her nails too. He couldn’t afford the risk.

So he took Langton’s corpse back to his mother-in-law’s house. To the garage. There were garden tools there, easily sufficient to hack up a corpse. Also a big chest freezer: an easy
place to stash the body parts until a more permanent solution
could be arranged. There was even a hose and water supply, assuming that he wanted to wash down the garage floor.

Here the story becomes very speculative, but I feel confident all the same. The old woman was an insomniac. Had sleeping issues. The doctor gave her pills, but those things don’t always
work, as I know well myself. I guess that, on the night of Langton’s death, the old lady heard
noises coming from the garage. Went to investigate and found her son-in-law ankle-deep in blood
and body parts.

That’s how I picture it, but perhaps she heard everything, stayed in bed, and investigated quietly the next morning, when Johnston was out doing something else.

Anyway. He murdered Langton, brought her home, Elsie Williams found out. With most in-laws, that kind of thing would
be a problem. Fortunately for Derek Johnston, however, his mother-in-law was
a vicious woman. Not a murderer, but a quarrelsome, vindictive woman of nasty mind and nasty temper. Not the sort of person to let a good corpse go to waste – and she didn’t.

It was from about that point that Williams started to receive supplementary income from the Johnstons. It was a year after that she got her
new conservatory, paid for by Derek Johnston. The
loathsome old woman apparently didn’t mind too much that her son-in-law was a killer. Not if she could wangle some extra income and a house upgrade.

We only ever found 50 percent of Langton. I’m guessing Johnston disposed of the other half the way you might. Chunks of corpse wrapped up in polythene, weighted with a brick, dropped in
some
remote lake up in the hills. But he didn’t have much time. Langton’s death took place just thirty-six hours before the two Johnstons were on a flight back to Oz. Assuming that
Karen didn’t know anything, he’d have been limited in what he could do. Throw in the time needed to clean down the garage, come to some accommodation with his mother-in-law, plus the
time needed to pack up and generally
act like everything was fine, and I think he flew away the next evening, leaving plenty of Mary Langton in Elsie Williams’s freezer.