Love Story, With Murders (9 page)

Do the clothes, shoes, or hair grip that I was wearing provide
any useful clue as to their provenance?
No. All the items I’ve been able to trace were widely sold in the UK in the
1980s. Some may have been sold overseas too. The items were neither expensive nor cheap. The sort of thing that more or less anyone might have bought.

Are there any useful DNA traces on the clothes, shoes, or camera?
Harder to check that one, but I did get them all checked
at a forensics lab. No DNA showed up, except my own, my
mam’s, and my dad’s. Which makes sense. DNA is quite easily destroyed. Sunlight, for example, can destroy a sample. Washing certainly can, and my mam would have washed my dress before
putting it away. The only DNA samples that were found probably date from the very recent past: when Dad, Mam, and I were passing the items around the kitchen
table.

Does the camera provide me with any other kind of clue?
No. Again: it was a fairly ordinary camera. A few years old, but people back then didn’t change their gadgets as often as
they do now. There were no pictures on the film in it other than of me in that car.

I’ve looked at other questions too. I was found when my mam and dad came out of chapel. The minister could perhaps have
engineered something, but I’ve spoken privately to him and
investigated his background as much as I could and found nothing there. Him, two churchwardens, and a family friend my mam used to go to chapel with. I’ve tried to figure out something from
the location of the chapel itself.

And got nowhere.

The investigation of my own life is not one whit further forward than it was when my
dad first told me the truth about of my arrival.

I don’t drive home straightaway. Drive instead to the reservoir. A thumbprint of darkness pressed down on a neon city. Muddy grass, inky trees, and that dark, aquatic mud.

Langton was at a party on the Lisvane side of the railway line, just near the Llanishen stop. She’d left the party early, before it was properly dark. The initial investigation
was unable
to find out whether Langton had ever boarded a train, so the inquiry was unable to restrict itself to a single geographical focus. It
had
however, been assumed that any abduction would
either have taken place in Central Cardiff – Langton’s intended destination – or on the streets directly connecting the party address with the railway station.

But maybe not.

Some people like
twilight. Maybe the reservoir called Langton drew her away from those lighted, populated streets. There’s something creepily welcoming about this place. The way it’s
unlike everything else.

Would you come here in a party dress, in party shoes, and at twilight?
I
wouldn’t and I like darkness. But Langton: you never know. An August evening. A bad party. Maybe she came
out here to clear her
head. Or smoke a joint. Or pop a pill. It’s only a few hundred yards from the station. Why not?

I don’t know.

Home.

In the bathroom, I check the little disc with my contraceptive pills in. I haven’t missed a day – I never do – and the contraceptive pill is better than 99 percent safe if you
take it right. So I don’t know what it was, that moment on the stairs.

In the ops room,
I take Em’s photo and the one of me sitting in the Jag and compare the two. It’s the same car, but different times and places. Though the angle is much the same,
it’s still different enough that you can’t just measure across from one photo to the other.

And yet, the thing I thought was there
is
there. In the earlier photo, Em’s one, the Jaguar’s long bonnet rises in one long, smooth curve
from the radiator grille. The
leaping-jaguar statuette pounces from a sloping metal bank. In the later photo, the one with me in it and one taken with a different camera, the bonnet is almost, but not quite, the same. In the
left centre of the picture, the reflections don’t fall quite evenly. It looks as though the smooth curve has been briefly interrupted by something linear, something flattened.
I stare as hard
as I can at the picture under the desk light, until I’m certain: either the Jaguar bonnet has been dented and repaired, or else the camera lens has a tiny flaw on it. A slight smudge of
imperfection.

I have the camera still. It was left hanging round my neck the day Mam and Dad found me in their car. Tomorrow I’ll buy film and test it out.

Another puzzle. Too many already.

Bed.

Days go by. Short, blustery days. Long nights. No progress.

Watkins and Kirby continue to hold well-attended briefings at the start of every working day. Kirby’s presence grows increasingly less. This is Watkins’s show and everyone knows it.
Information accumulates, but not much wisdom.

We can’t find evidence that Khalifi ever
met Langton.

On the morning of his death, Khalifi withdrew two hundred pounds from a cash machine in the centre of town at 9.43
AM
. CCTV has him entering a coffee shop immediately
thereafter. He stayed nineteen minutes, then left. CCTV has him walking out of shot. Not hurried, not scared, not furtive, not anything. Just a man walking calmly to his death.

He made one phone call that morning:
to a Midlands machine tools company about some piece of research work they were both involved in.

The coffee shop staff have been interviewed. Ditto the machine tools people. No reports of anything interesting. Nada.

I don’t hear back from Emrys.

Buzz plays his hockey game and wins it, even with two boys out on the naughty step.

I do buy film for the camera I was found with. I
take pictures of straight lines. Horizontal, vertical, diagonal. In grids and on their own. Get them developed – there are still places
that can do that – and study the resultant pics. The answer is yes, the lens is flawed. In that spot just left of and somewhat below centre, the lens imposes a slight distortion on the image,
dragging shapes a little downward and leftward. The distortion laid
over the image of the Jaguar’s bonnet caused that slight flattening. An effect you’d never notice unless you had two
photos to compare, and even then one you’d never notice unless you were obsessed.

Which I am.

It’s a rotten clue but all I have. Somewhere in the country, presumably, is a photo album that has photos in it taken with this same camera, with this same flaw. That photo album,
presumably, belongs to the person who left me in that car. My mother or father presumably. My biological mother and father.

I’ve checked my dad’s photo album and it seems normal to me: no flaws that I can find.

Meantime, I’ve interviewed more students, more faculty staff. On the downside, they’re all still boring. On the upside, I’ve had no more episodes on the stairs and I’m
basically
certain that I’m not pregnant.

We’re no longer searching for bits of Khalifi. We’ve recovered about 60 percent of his corpse, and we assume that dogs, crows, and foxes will by now have taken the rest. All of
Khalifi’s parts were found in open land, or in gardens or unlocked outbuildings backing onto open land.

We’ve found about 50 percent of Mary Langton. I’ve found a leg and a head,
which puts me way out at the top of the Langton Collectors’ League, but for some reason no one wants
to give me a medal. Weirdly – and disturbingly – we found a chunk of her thigh, sawn up and skin removed, wrapped in an unlabelled plastic bag in somebody’s garage freezer.
Because of the way the chunk was packaged, it looked more or less like a joint of pork.

There’s some debate in the
office about whether such packages would be noticed. It seems that with smaller, kitchen freezers, people tend to know what’s in them with reasonable
accuracy. With larger chest-type cabinets, the sort you keep in an outbuilding, or at any rate away from the main living areas, it seems that no one really keeps accurate tabs on things. Garden
vegetables get put there in season. Ditto leftovers,
ditto soft fruits, ditto any cuts of meat that are on special offer locally. Sometimes these things are properly labelled, but often enough
they’re not, or the labels fall off, or become illegible.

No one quite wants to say it, but it’s pretty clear that, for a proportion of people at any rate, there’s a fair risk that mistakes could have been made. That pieces of Mary Langton
could have
been mistaken for something else. Mistaken, cooked, and eaten. That’s not information we’re keen to spread too widely, but the press is already full of snickering innuendo.
The Cyncoed cannibals.

We have, of course, interviewed the lady in whose freezer the pork was found. She knew who Elsie Williams was but had never spoken to her. Her husband, now deceased, had a driveway-cleaning
business
– operating a pressure washer to remove bird poo, as far as I can make out – so knew plenty of people in the area, and indeed across all of Cardiff. No connection that we can
find to Mary Langton. And in any case, the freezer was kept in their garage, which was left unlocked most of the summer months. So, in short, anyone at all could have placed the item in there.

One wall of the incident
room is completely given over to our ‘People of Interest’: those people in whose homes bits of Langton or Khalifi were found, plus immediate family and close
associates; also anyone living in the area with a history of sex offences or violence. We now have 167 ‘people of interest.’ Someone, for a joke, pinned the local phone directory to the
noticeboard. The directory was removed, but the point
echoed.

Our investigation lacks a centre. We don’t know where we ought to be looking.

By Thursday, the first reassignments begin. It’s not a formal change. A burglary in Llandaff. An attempted rape in Caerau. Staff are peeled off to deal with them, and not assigned back
afterward. Overtime drops back to normal levels. The leave which was cancelled is uncancelled.

Because it’s Watkins,
the pressure is still there. She stomps around the building, with her short iron-grey hair and dark, dykey suits, asking for lists, questioning facts, demanding
notes. She distributes happiness the way a storm cloud distributes sunshine. Truth is, though, I like working for her. There’s something about her bad-tempered relentlessness which appeals to
me. If she’s spiky with me, I’m spiky
right back at her. She knows about my episode with McKelvey, because Jim Davis found a way to tell her, so she drags me into her office and asks
about it.

‘McKelvey wasn’t on the interview list, but you went up there anyway.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Why?’

‘Khalifi was killed because of sex or money. If it was sex, we’re already covering every possible angle. If it was money, then McKelvey
is the only person we know who’s both
connected to Khalifi and has control of large sums of cash.’

‘McKelvey?’

I tell Watkins what McKelvey told me about engineering budgets. Also what I’ve been able to glean from public accounts. Also the public accounts of those companies with whom Khalifi struck
partnership deals. The smallest of them has a turnover of twenty million pounds. The
largest has revenues of more than one billion. His contacts ranged much further still.

Watkins hears me out without commenting. Then: ‘Were you going to tell me any of this, Constable?’

‘It’s in my notes, ma’am.’ Which it is. Though, admittedly, presented in a way that hardly drew attention to the issue.

Watkins glares at me. Or rather, scrutinises me, the way an entomologist looks
at a pinned butterfly. Which doesn’t bother me. I like directness.

‘Go on.’

‘These two deaths are weird. Because they’re weird, we’re looking for connections. Because Langton was who she was, we assume we’re looking for something sexual. But
it’s possible we’re looking in the wrong direction. Those two aren’t the only violent deaths there have been recently. And Khalifi’s death has some
clear connections with
one of the others.’

Watkins’s eyebrows are high now. Her face is angry, or I think it is.

I continue.

‘Early September, a prisoner in Cardiff Prison, Mark Mortimer, committed suicide. Slashed both wrists with broken glass. He worked for a precision engineering company in Barry. His firm
had an ongoing development project with the university.’

‘Any money
involved?’

‘No. I mean yes,
some
money. But peanuts. Not slash-your-wrists-and-chop-lecturers-into-pieces money.’

Watkins does laser eyes at me to show how much she appreciates my turn of phrase, then calls up stuff on her computer. She doesn’t say stay or go, so I just stand there while she taps
away. I can’t see what she’s looking at, but if I were her I’d be looking at my notes and
details of the Mortimer inquest. I’ve already studied the inquest files. They
conclude exactly what you’d expect them to conclude. A promising young man screws up his career with a stupid drug deal. He loses his job, renders himself unemployable, sees his wife and kids
bugger off back to her mum’s house in the West Midlands. He can’t take the mess he’s made of his own life and chooses to end
it.

I don’t want to watch Watkins sit and read, so I say, ‘Would you like some coffee?’ She glowers at me and says, ‘Black. No sugar.’

I make treacle for her, peppermint tea for me. Amrita, who manages the office and shares my addiction for peppermint tea, is in the kitchenette too. We chat. Amrita is the queen of office gossip
and I worship before her throne for a while. Then I tell
her that I’m in the middle of being bollocked by Rhiannon Watkins and better make a move.

‘Oh my God, that woman.’

I shrug. ‘Jim Davis complained about me.’

Amrita wants to know more and I tell her. My version. I was having my period, cramping up, having problems. Davis wouldn’t believe me when I told him. Telling that stuff to Amrita is like
broadcasting it on some in-house Twitter
service. ‘And you know his breath really stank that day. Do you think he drinks, maybe? He seemed quite, I don’t know, unsteady or
something.’