Sympathy for the Devil (7 page)

Shadowing Thomas around the offices of Major Crimes, she’d noticed that South Wales Area had recently upgraded to Niche One-Sign, a single sign-on system for all applications. Previously officers might have to use ten separate passwords to access the HOLMES enquiry system, National Criminal and SPIN intelligence and all other databases on the national mainframes and back-up servers. Now, for everything, they just needed a single seven-digit password, and an ID. But any security system was only as secure as its weakest link, and in this instance that link was DS Jack Thomas. He’d told her enough times to come up close, watch what he was doing over his shoulder.

She logged in his password and within less than a minute she was into the case file. She noted the case hadn’t been rated important enough to attract the attention of a major rank as SIO. As senior officer on the scene Thomas had been responsible for uploading all the notes. And there wasn’t much to see.

She copied everything onto a Zip file, encrypted it with her PGP key, then sent it all to an anonymous account on a server in the Ukraine. That way she wouldn’t ever need to carry the data on her, could access it from anywhere. She clicked out of the Area system, back into the case notes. Looking closer, there was even less to see than at first glance.

Thomas had played it by the book. The coroner’s inquest determined only how a subject met their death, not the whys and wherefores. In the file there were no witness statements, nothing relating to Rhys turned up by searches onshore. Only the CCTV footage, the pathologist’s tox data. Exactly the same data she’d already seen. No next of kin or associates interviewed, as there weren’t any. Played like this, the coroner’s verdict was a foregone conclusion. Category One, Death by Drug Dependence, Solitary.

The rest of the notes took up less than a page. The wallet found on the body had led to a room in a derelict council block in Riverside, the place Rhys had called home in his final weeks. There were some photos included, a list of contents. It was a short list. A life come down to nothing, just a backpack full of Oxfam clothes and three battered books of poetry. And a single origami bird they’d found in the fireplace. She stared at it, couldn’t even make out what type of bird it was.

She felt the warm tears beading her cheeks, gathering against her collar. But she was wearing her visor still, the place was empty, no one could see the tears.

3

It was the first time she’d heard the sound in over a week. Somewhere at the edge of her consciousness a phone was ringing. Catrin pushed her head further down under the cold pillow, but the sound didn’t let up.

The ringing was coming from under the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. Shuffling unsteadily across the room, she reached down, felt through the pockets and, without looking at it, switched the handset off.

She’d woken late at Pugh’s cottage. It was almost ten, the light outside was the ash grey typical of a Welsh winter. She went through a shortened version of her morning routine. First, a glass of tap water. Then she stretched through the twelve sun salutations from the Hatha, the only habit she’d kept up from her mam and her hippie hangers-on. Then half an hour of tae kwon do on an empty stomach, kicks and jabs. Krav maga, wing chun ending with regular squats and crunches.

She worked up a sweat, tried to push some of the anger and sickly guilt out, but found she couldn’t. At the end the sweat stung her eyes and tears still blurred them. She hated herself when she cried, it was something she thought she’d trained herself not to do any more. She took a long cold shower, focusing on a square of tile, nothing else, trying to make her mind go blank. Only a single image was left there. Floating up over the tile. Rhys’s face at the window of the dojo where she’d trained as a girl. His eyes watching her as she practised alone. He’d thought the tinted glass hid his face. He hadn’t known she could see him there. Of all the images of him this was the one which came back to her.

She went down to the kitchen for yoghurt, oats and frozen berries, then through to the living room. She didn’t pull back the curtains, made for the worn sofa.

She curled up a strip of card, adding a paper and some tobacco. Feeling through the pockets of her joggers, she found her bag of kanna and crumbled a pinch in. She’d switched to it from weed like others in the force since the new random testing had come in. An African herb used by Khoi tribesmen for hunting, it didn’t show up. It had much the same effect. The floor around the sofa was covered with empty smoothie bottles and all her notes. It took her a couple of minutes to find the remote.

Out of the darkness emerged the image of the alley. She saw the lights in the broken, lower window again. The two figures standing there, Rhys and the woman.

There was the struggle, Rhys pushing the woman back against the wall. Then he was hurrying away out of shot, down towards the water.

She ran it slowly, three more times, then frame by frame. She’d done this many times already, and as she closed her eyes she could see each frame as clearly as if it was still flickering in front of her.

She switched the remote to the next sequence, the shelters on the beach. Again she ran it slowly, then frame by frame.

Rhys approaching the man at the hut. The man passing over the bag of drugs. Rhys giving him the twenties, still clasped in his right hand.

Then Rhys hesitating, backing away, holding the broken bottle.

The man turning, Rhys moving in behind him, pushing the bottle at his back. Then the man falling inward, face first, disappearing from view.

After a few minutes she sat back, put her Mac on pause, stubbed her roll-up. The truth was she was seeing nothing new in the film. In fact, each time she watched it, she felt she was seeing slightly less. This wasn’t going to be one of those cases where a detail in the background would reveal some sudden unexpected truth.

The film showed exactly what it appeared to show. A man mugging a woman, assaulting another junkie, then passing out on the beach. Pugh and the others were right, there was no mystery here. She was wasting her time. You get exactly what it says on the tin with this one, she thought.

She lit another cigarette, opened the window a crack, then lay back on the sofa. There was only one detail that had struck her as odd in all her viewings of the film. It was not enough for her to doubt the basic truth of what she had seen. But it was a detail that didn’t entirely make sense all the same.

Before assaulting the second man, the other street junkie, Rhys had handed him the twenties. Why had he done this, if he was about to assault him? Why hadn’t he just assaulted the man from the outset? Why bother to give the twenties first?

Rhys had backed away a few paces, she’d noticed, before he had begun the attack. As if something the man had done had triggered what followed. But in the stills the second man had not altered his posture, had not even opened his mouth. It was an entirely unprovoked attack, or appeared to be.

Of course, not everything a junkie did would make sense. Maybe Rhys had only decided to attack at that moment, or had given the twenties first to put the man at ease. There were explanations, rationalisations, there always were. But something about this detail didn’t feel quite right to her.

She picked up her phone, dialled DS Thomas’s number.

‘The man in the hut, the street junkie,’ she said. She didn’t bother with greetings. He’d know what she was talking about straight off.

‘Yes? What about him?’

‘Has he been seen since the attack?’

‘No, nothing.’ He wasn’t showing any signs of caring she’d seen the tapes. He sounded relaxed, slightly bored with the topic. ‘We’re not seeing him as a suspect, if that’s why you’re asking.’

‘No?’

‘We have officers who saw him lying in exactly the position you see in the film. And that was after Rhys’s body had been found.’

‘They didn’t try to rouse him, call for an ambulance?’

‘They didn’t see signs of injury. Just thought he was a dosser sleeping it off.’

She pondered this for a few moments. ‘So he can’t have been that badly hurt, if he then got up and made off?’

‘I guess not.’ He was yawning now, not trying to hide it either. There was a tinny bleeping noise. It sounded as if it was coming from a computer game.

She thought she saw why Thomas wasn’t interested: if the man had been badly hurt he’d have turned up in an A&E somewhere along the coast by now. Most likely he was just lying low, not wanting to get involved in something he’d had nothing to do with.

‘No one seems to care that much,’ she said.

There was silence, he’d switched the game off.

‘It doesn’t alter what happened to Rhys, does it,’ he said. ‘Rhys may have committed an assault before he died. But his death was still an accident.’

It was difficult to argue with this logic. That was the problem with Thomas, he was detestable but he was logical.

‘So you don’t want to know why Rhys assaulted the man?’

Thomas was sighing, it was obvious the matter didn’t interest him in the least.

‘Rhys was a street junkie,’ he said, ‘assault is what street junkies do.’ He paused. ‘Rhys committing an assault before he dies, it’s about as significant as an average bloke having a couple of pints.’

She hung up. Though she hated to admit it, she knew he had a point. It was probably a routine enough act for Rhys. Not pretty, but not significant. She had been letting long-obsolete images of the man cloud her judgement.

There was an old telly in the corner. She switched it on, flicked the channels until she found tennis. A tournament somewhere hot, where the palm trees were casting shadows over the clay.

She’d played when she was younger, still played in her head sometimes. They’d said she could’ve been a champion, but tennis had been thought soft at her school. She’d had to play on the sly, in a park at the far end of town where no one had seen her. She didn’t follow the game closely now, but liked to watch when she could, found it therapeutic, a physical version of chess. Like the drink and the kanna, it helped to take the edge off things.

The taller player was serving. He was using a slice technique, hitting the ball into the outer corners, throwing the receiver way off the court.

Once he’d served, the taller man rushed the net, volleyed the return down into the opposite corner. It was a crude but effective tactic. At least it appeared so at first. The receiver was small, agile, but he couldn’t get back in time to reach the ball. When he did the shots went wide or were easy prey for the taller figure at the net.

She clicked into iTunes on her Mac, the tick-tock lilt of the Velvets’ ‘Sunday Morning’ filling the room as the tennis players moved in and out of time to the beat.

She watched three games go with serve, each player using the same basic tactic. It was now five games all. The taller man was serving. He whipped the ball down into the left corner, as before. This time, however, the receiver was already off court, waiting. His return was low and fast, down the line, passing the man rushing to the net.

The next serve was an ace. She found herself rooting for the smaller man. But not passionately so. She preferred to watch the game for the artistry, the tactics. It was never a matter of supporting one player blindly for her.

The receiver seemed to fret about at the far end, as if waiting for something from the crowd, but what she couldn’t understand. The server was in position, tossing the ball into the air.

But then, as if from nowhere the receiver was back at the place where the serve fell. It had been a feint, he had pretended to look unprepared. But he had known where the serve would land and was waiting for it. His return was low, precise, brutal. The server did not even reach it.

In the final game the shorter man won every point, the taller one’s fight seemed to have gone out of him. In a couple of minutes it was all over. The coverage on the channel changed abruptly to bowls.

She lit another cigarette. Everything can turn on a single point, she thought. The other player was the stronger, had all the natural advantages, but he hadn’t had the moral fibre to accept his own moment of weakness, and so he’d lost.

As she switched off the set, she noticed how pale her hands were. She hadn’t intended to become a recluse, but the weather had been so foul she hadn’t even walked out to the farmhouse down the hill.

The cottage was geared for summer renters. There wasn’t much in the way of home entertainment, just a row of paperbacks on the shelf, a couple of games, the old television under the window. On the sill was a picture of Rix, smaller this time, in the loud Hawaiian shirt. She turned it over: there was nothing on the other side. She wondered why Pugh had it, laddish humour wasn’t his style. She drew back the curtains. Outside was a long barn. Its doors were closed, but on previous evenings as the light faded she’d seen the farmer come that way on his muddy tractor.

All along the track, the dull sky hung low over shallow puddles where cows had trodden the grass into the earth. It could have been anywhere. The place wasn’t familiar to her, and so it didn’t feel like a homecoming – it felt like unknown territory, and all the better for that.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud clanging noise coming from the empty hall. She hadn’t realised there was a landline in the house. But now she saw the phone, a black Bakelite up in a niche by the door, covered in dust.

‘Catrin?’

She recognised the voice at once, though it had been many years since she’d last heard it. Catrin said nothing at first, she’d been caught off guard. But somewhere at the back of her mind she’d known all along this moment would come. She’d been waiting for it ever since her return.

‘It’s been a while – hasn’t it?’

The words came out in one of those Welsh purrs that could make the most innocent comment sound like an indecent proposal. Catrin still said nothing. She heard her heart beating but it sounded remote.