Love Story, With Murders

by Harry Bingham

  I do drive off, but don’t know how safe I am. My thoughts are with that sunny street, that empty car. I’ve already asked the most obvious questions about my past. Asked them, and got answers that take me nowhere.

  Do I, in fact, have some genetic relationship to my father? The most obvious question of them all. A man, known to be something of a rogue, finds a little girl in the back of his car. If he’d fathered me with some woman other than my mother, and if something happened to that other woman, might he not engineer it that I was ‘found’ in his car one sunny Sunday?

  Well, the answer on this occasion is no. I’ve taken DNA swabs from me, my mam, and my dad – they didn’t know I was taking them – and sent the material to a private laboratory for analysis. There was no genetic relationship between any of the three samples.

  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.

  13

  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.’

  I leave her with that thought, and go back upstairs with the mugs, entering Watkins’s room without knocking. She doesn’t say thank you, just, ‘The Mortimer suicide seems straightforward. And we haven’t found drug traces in Khalifi’s flat or anywhere else.’

  ‘He’s a plastics man.’

  Watkins isn’t as interested in the various uses of industrial plastics as I am and just glares at me, which I take as an invitation to educate her.

  ‘One of his areas of expertise was high-modulus polyethylenes. That’s like the stuff you use to make plastic shopping bags, only far tougher. The super-high-density stuff, Khalifi’s speciality, can be used as glide rails in industrial equipment, docking gear, that kind of thing. The high, but not super-high, density plastics are what you make buckets out of, water pipes, plastic milk bottles, stuff like that.’

  ‘Packaging. You think he created packaging systems for drugs shipments? No smell. No leakage. Shockproof. Completely sealed.’

  ‘It’s possible. Mortimer and Khalifi probably knew each other. Khalifi worked with Mortimer’s company, which has only ninety people on its payroll, and Mortimer was one of only six mechanical engineers there.

  ‘Mortimer was busted because his packaging was amateurish. He had the stuff put in a steel tube and had the ends welded up. Khalifi is probably the go-to guy in Cardiff – maybe in Britain – for plastics expertise. The university doesn’t have manufacturing facilities as such, but Khalifi would have known precisely where to go for that. He’s the department’s champion networker.’

  Watkins ponders all this. Nothing
that I’ve said is evidence. It’s mere possibility. But then again, we don’t have any evidence of any sexual link to Langton, so that’s all speculative too.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this earlier?’

  ‘It’s in my notes.’

  ‘It’s not in your notes. I’ve just looked. Not properly.’

  ‘I wanted to look further before bothering you. I wanted something tangible.’

  ‘What does that mean? Look further? You’re a police officer. You don’t conduct private investigations.’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘You carry out your designated tasks, Constable. You report when they’re completed. Then you’re assigned further tasks.’

  ‘I have carried out my designated tasks.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I know one of the inmates in Cardiff Prison. I’m seeing him on Saturday.’

  Watkins shakes her head. ‘You won’t get anything –’

  ‘Brian Penry. He’s a former police officer. A good one. Good apart from being an embezzler, I mean.’

  ‘And you’ll do what?’

  ‘Ask him for gossip about the Mortimer suicide. See what he can find out.’

  Watkins thinks for a bit. Her jaw moves like she’s masticating something chewy or cartilaginous. If she was a man, she’d probably be clamping her jaw muscles or doing something testosteroney like that.

  ‘Jim Davis is an idiot,’ she says eventually. ‘You are not an idiot. But Jim is part of a team and you are no use to me if you can’t play with the team.’

  I trained as a philosopher at Cambridge, and the thing about a discipline like that is you can’t help but be offended by lapses of logic. In actual fact, the most useful things I’ve done so far have had nothing to do with team play, and all the most boring things have been because some idiot like Jim Davis asked me to do them. It seems to me the evidence strongly suggests that I’m vastly more useful to Watkins working the way I like to work and, in any case, I’ve hardly been working off-piste at all. Not by my standards.