Love Story, With Murders (5 page)

I swing the door open. There’s a desk, a table, and a cupboard, all from IKEA. Also a bed, covered by a sheet of plywood, and a felt-covered corkboard on the wall.

Papers. Photos. Files. Lists.

Also a laptop, a PC, a printer, wireless
router, automatic data storage backup. Not me who connected all that lot. One of Dad’s friends. A Tony somebody. From here I can access the PNC,
the Police National Computer, and most of its databases, the ones you don’t have to be a PNC analyst to get into. This is also where my Google alerts come into. Also where I keep my
subscriptions to things like LexisNexis, the news and business service.

I keep the curtains drawn, because it’s hard to reach them across all papers on the bed. But I prefer the room dark anyway. It smells of toner cartridges and warm electronics. In a locked
desk drawer, I have 460 bullets and no gun.

The ops room.

When we broke the Rattigan case – located Fletcher, the trafficked girls, those charming boys from Kaliningrad – my major concern was that
the principal bad guy, Brendan Rattigan
himself, was already dead, his bones rattling under two hundred feet of seawater. But Rattigan had friends. And some of those friends liked what Rattigan liked, fucked what he fucked, took
advantage of his whole deluxe fuck-an-Albanian conveyor belt. As far as I’m concerned, they were just as guilty as he was, just as deserving of punishment.

And
that’s the operation.

Find out who Rattigan’s fuck buddies were. Then destroy them.

I log my latest sheaf of number plates. I can’t track everyone who knew Rattigan, so I’ve limited myself to his closest associates. Those connected to him in multiple ways: company
directorships, racing syndicates, dining clubs, yachting holidays, weddings, investment partnerships, charitable boards,
political donations. I’ve picked six names, local ones, from a much
longer possible list, so I can give them the proper focus.

Ivor Harris.
Mostly seems to hang out with other wealthy, politically connected people. Spends more time in London than Wales. I haven’t been able to connect Harris to any obviously
suspicious types: drug suspects, pimps, prostitutes. No obviously odd patterns
to his movements.

Galton Evans.
Worth thirty million quid or so. A playboy, if you can still be a playboy at the age of fifty-two. According to the car registrations I’ve collected – easier in
his case, as visitors park on his drive – Evans gets visited by plenty of younger women, a couple of whom have minor possession offences. Trivial stuff. Hard to detect any pattern to his
movements,
because playboys do whatever they want whenever they want to do it.

And so on. Other names.
Trevor Yergin. Huw Allsop. Ben Rossiter. David Marr-Phillips
.

I’ve got a B-list too. People who knew Rattigan fairly well, but whose links weren’t quite as close. I’d be willing to bet that a fair few of my B-list knew at least something
about Rattigan’s proclivities, which makes them culpable
too.
Idris Prothero. Joe Johnson. Owain Owen
. A dozen others.

The latest batch of plates I’ve collected for Harris don’t yield anything new. I’ve got a new plate for Evans, which I’ll check when I get into the office. Check my
Google alerts for the names. Check some of the databases that I have access to via the PNC, the ANPR one – automatic number plate recognition – particularly. Some
data that seems worth
recording, but nothing much. I log it anyway.

I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly. Just that if there is anything to find, I hope I’ll notice it before anyone else does. Notice, and find a way to use it.

On the back of the door, there is a small pink dress with a white bow. Next to it, on a shelf, some shiny black shoes, a hair grip, a camera. On the corkboard,
held up by four neat red drawing
pins, is a photo.

The photo is of me.

The dress is my dress.

In August 1986, I was found by Tom and Kathleen Griffiths sitting peacefully in the back of their open-top Jag. Wearing this dress, those shoes. I was about two and a half – give or take
– and nobody knew who I was or where I’d come from.

Tom and Kathleen, my beloved new mam and dad,
adopted me. They asked me every question you would naturally ask a little girl in these circumstances, and for eighteen months I said nothing. I was
mute, unspeaking, silent. Then one day, I said, ‘Mam, can I have some more cheese, please?’ and my life began again. My puzzling, fractured life that has no beginning.

I can’t look at that dress without feeling dizzy. It’s as though I find myself
standing on the lip of a very deep well. No idea of how I came to be there, but weak at the knees and
looking down.

My dress. My life.

Buzz doesn’t know it, but the ops room has two missions, not one. Find Rattigan’s fuck-buddies. Find out who I am.

No progress on either front, but I can’t keep from looking.

I’m tired, the ironing still refuses to do itself, and it’s raining.
Before I know it, I’m in my car on the Ty-draw Road, heading for the muddy delights of Llanishen.

I break the speed limit all the way. I’m there in six minutes.

I’m on garden duty. Out in the fields and woods by the reservoir – where I’d sooner be – a long line of coppers, in wellies and fluorescent jackets,
inches forward. Shoulder to shoulder. The pace just five yards a minute, even less than that in the woods.

Our haul of body parts is growing all the time. Nothing more of Mary Langton,
but the male corpse has now yielded a harvest of both hands, both feet, a forearm, a liver, a calf, and a thigh. A
Labrador retriever was spotted with the liver in its mouth half a mile away, toward the upper reservoir, the one with water still in it, so the search is now covering an area at least a mile
square, and possibly much more than that if the search ends up reaching to the Saint Mellons
Road.

Nor is it just bits of corpse that we’re looking for. The forensics team want everything of possible interest marked. A straggle of fibre, a boot print, a single hair even. The whole area
is now tagged with a small forest of bamboo wands, marked with luminous paint. The space-suited SOCOs are travelling from wand to wand, photographing, bagging, collecting.

Even with all that,
the public land is the easy bit. At least the access is easy, even when the ground itself is overgrown and difficult. The gardens that back onto the reservoir make for a far
more difficult search. Flower beds, sheds, greenhouses, garages. Complicated spaces that come with complicated owners, fretting, watching, asking, needing.

I’m assigned to a team with three officers, all uniformed constables,
two from Swansea, one from Newport.

We do five gardens. We’re asked seven times if we want tea, and are told six times to be careful of various tedious-looking plants, which I make a point of standing on when no one’s
looking. The rain is intermittent now, but water still flashes from every hard surface, still fills every boot print with a curl of silver.

I’m finding my temporary colleagues
as annoying as the owners, and when we get to the next couple of properties – two newly built houses, with bland lawns and new brickwork – I
tell them I’ll make a start on the next one and hop over the fence to do just that.

Garden eight. A proper old-fashioned plot, framed by a lattice of espaliered fruit trees. Within, a patchwork of vegetable beds. Pegs, string, bean sticks. Marrows going
over, the leeks just
coming. Runner beans. Some unhappy-looking spinach, defeated by the turning weather. A tiny greenhouse, a wooden compost bin, a shed. Smells of sodden wood, wet leaves and creosote.

The owner, an old man, comes out to introduce himself. Arthur Price. Soft grey suit and tie. The national service generation. He invites me to check everything, then shoots back into the
house,
keen to show how little he intends to interfere. ‘Shout if you want me,’ he calls.

The light is starting to die. A violent orange sunset, tangled in trees. A flock of geese, V-shaped like a squadron of bombers, makes its noisy descent toward the reservoir mud. The helicopter
is long gone.

I do the shed first, because of the fading light. I have a torch with me, but don’t use
it. Just push open the door, walk inside, and stand there, letting the space and silence settle.

I realise I’ve been searching the wrong way. Systematic and disciplined. The police way, not mine. As though corpses had nothing to say to me.

Balls of twine, two sorts, green and undyed. Forks and spades hanging from nails. A hoe. A lawn mower. Garden chemicals. Bags of compost and sharp sand.
Those lovely old-fashioned things like
griddles and curved pruning saws. A pair of shears, its wooden handles polished from use.

And peace. Far too much peace for a tiny end-of-October shed.

I lean up against the workbench. If I had a joint with me, I’d smoke it now. Melting into the moment, as the geese fly overhead and my colleagues march shoulder-to-shoulder outside.

In the corner,
there’s the bottom half of a plastic barrel, filled with dark liquid. I’d initially thought it was water, but realise it’s not. Do lawn mowers need their oil
changed? Presumably they do. The barrel smells of old oil, collecting year after year, down there with the cobwebs and the dead wasps. How many summers have added their oil to that barrel?

There’s laughter around me now. A shared and
silent joke. I’m not exactly laughing, but I am smiling. It’s impossible not to. There’s a kind of joy in the air, vibrating
over into mirth. A gift, really.

I share the joke until the silence grows too strong, then kneel down by the barrel and thrust both hands in. They come out with Mary Langton’s blonde and dripping head.

Monday ends a weekend of mayhem. More searching in weather which has turned windy as well as wet, an ever-increasing collection of body parts, and media interest which has
turned so intense it seems like Cyncoed is sprouting a television camera at the end of every road.

Bits of information pop up through the weekend. We, the searchers,
only get to hear the news when we stop for a hot drink or gather something from a passing journalist or neighbour.

The male corpse has been identified: it’s Ali el-Khalifi, a lecturer at the Cardiff School of Engineering.

A lung has been discovered, bobbing like a clumsy grey balloon three-quarters filled with water on the leeward side of what remains of the larger reservoir.

In Cyncoed,
Mary Langton’s arms, bound together with duct tape and bagged up in polythene, have been found up amongst the loose timber and sheets of fibreboard that Ryan Humphrys, a
plumbers’ merchant from Cyncoed, stored up in his garage roof.

PC Jen Murray has been taken to hospital with possible hypothermia after getting too wet on Sunday morning.

Watkins publicly shouted at DI Staunton for some
bit of scheduling muddle on Sunday afternoon.

We hear these things, but aren’t sure how much is true, how much only rumour.

Meantime, the investigation accumulates ever more information, ever less direction. It turns out that Karen Johnston and her husband were both in Wales over the relevant period in 2005. Which
would be an interesting fact except that neither has a police record and,
so far, we have a whiteboard listing fourteen properties where body parts have been found. There are thirty-eight people
living in those properties. Including the extended families of those thirty-eight, there are at least seventy-one people potentially implicated. Adding in close friends or colleagues takes the
circle of ‘suspects’ to more than a hundred. And corpse pieces are still being
found, so that total is growing all the time. No one we’ve looked at so far has had any meaningful
brush with the police or any serious indicator of potential for sexual violence.

We’ve also checked on anyone living locally who has any kind of record for sexual assault, violence, or child sex offences. There are a few such people, of course, and we’ve started
to do the basics, but because
the reservoir is a well-used beauty spot and dog-walking area, we need to consider that all of Cyncoed, Llanishen, Lisvane, Llanederyn, and Pontprennau are potentially
relevant to the investigation – and, indeed, given that people come from all over Cardiff to the area, there’s really no part of the city we can rule out. We have two corpses and a
million suspects.

Buzz and I are both working,
though on different teams, all day Sunday, but we spend the night together at his apartment. Bacon and eggs for dinner. We start off watching a Coen brothers film on
the telly, only we end up talking through it and go to the bedroom to make love while George Clooney is still being a funny man in the living room. Afterward, I realise how tired I am, drag myself
to the shower, then fall
back into bed, while Buzz washes up and tells George Clooney to stand down. If I dream at all, it’s of Arthur Price’s garden and the geese flying overhead.

On Monday morning, the weekend’s scattered fragments are welded together for us by Rhiannon Watkins. She’s introduced by Detective Superintendent Kirby, but this is Watkins’s
show. The incident room is as full as I’ve ever seen it. Exhausted
faces and strong coffee. A thick stew of conversation. Watkins has given the operation a properly formal code name –
Operation Abacus, for some reason – but the office name is simpler and more memorable. Stirfry. Not a name anyone will use with the boss, but even DCI Jackson has been heard using it.

There were still people coming in late when Kirby was speaking, but Watkins calls us to order
with nothing more than a look. She stands up at the front, no podium, no notes. Low-heeled black
shoes, grey suit, zero humour.

Quickly, no wasted words, she summarises what we have.

Ali el-Khalifi first. It’s been a week since he was last seen at work, at a seminar for grad students in materials science. Owing to the vagaries of the university timetable,
Khalifi’s workload this last
week was very light, so although his absence was noted, no one was particularly worried. He travelled fairly extensively anyway and it was assumed he’d
simply turn up again when required. When an Arab-looking corpse was reported, the university called us with their concerns. We collected DNA from his office. A match was made.