Love Story, With Murders

by Harry Bingham

  The taller guy, the one who’s been silent, whispers something to his companion, and the mood seems to shift. Any threat seems to be vanishing. The shorter guy bends to pick up my energy bar. It is, I suppose, a gesture of peace.

  Choose the fight you want, not the one they want. If you can’t win, don’t start.

  Lev’s words. Wise words.

  I shift my body so that my weight falls over the ball of my leading foot, the left one. My heel comes just a little off the ground. Then I move. I bring my right leg round hard, lashing at the man’s jaw. I make contact with the toe of my right foot. I’m wearing chunky winter boots. Designed for fashion, effective for combat. My toe strikes his jawline almost dead centre. Strikes it hard, smashing through bone.

  I feel as much as see the man’s head jerk back with the whiplash.

  Feel as much as see the bone broken, the jaw sagging loose and useless from its socket.

  The man sprawls backward on the tarmac, disbelieving eyes raised to the pelting rain. His companion gawps at the fallen man, gawps at me. No one says anything. No one cares about my energy bar now.

  I reach into my bag. Grab something. Hold it up in the feeble orange glow of the streetlights.

  ‘This is a rape alarm. If you fuckers, either of you, take one step closer, I’m going to let this off and tell everyone you tried to assault me.’

  I move backward as I say this. Partly – mostly – to put more distance between me and them. But partly also because I don’t want them to notice that it’s not a rape alarm I’m holding, but a tube of deodorant.

  I’m panting for breath as I talk. Nothing phony about the panting. Just nerves.

  The guy whose jaw I’ve broken is staggering to his feet. Part of him is nakedly furious, wanting to finish this fight. The other part is bewildered. He keeps putting his hand to his jaw as though he can just slot it back into place, but pain drives his hand away. His face looks unmade. A waxwork in the process of collapse.

  The taller guy restrains him, stops him doing anything, and already the energy is bleeding from the situation. I’m feeling safer already.

  ‘Just so you know,’ I say, ‘I’ve been parking here and twice now someone has keyed my car. I wanted to know who, that’s why I was looking at the number plates. I don’t know who you are. I don’t care who you are. Now I’m going to walk away and if either of you comes after me, I will let off this alarm and press charges for assault.’

  I back away, until there are twenty yards between us, then turn and walk normally, but keeping constant watch over my shoulder. The two men stay where they are, until they too start walking, but away from me, not towards me. At the street corner I turn. There is nothing now ahead of me but sleet and parked cars and the sigh of the sea beyond.

  I realise I’m shaking. Literally. Huge waves start in the soles of my feet and rise up through me. I bob on their surface like a boat at anchor.

  My car is parked in the other direction. I’m not going back to get it. Buzz will bring me back to retrieve it tomorrow. I’ll just have to concoct a sweetly plausible lie about how I came to leave it here.

  I don’t know Penarth all that well, but navigate toward the bright lights of Stanwell Road. When I get there, I find a guy waiting at a bus stop, sheltering from the rain.

  I stand next to him, because it feels safer. I’m still shaking, but I think the waves have gone inside now, not visible.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘Hi.’

  After a bit, he says, ‘Are you all right?’

  I say, ‘I don’t know.’

  I want to ask him to punch me on the arm, to see if I can feel anything, but I don’t.

  He smiles and shifts his weight.

  We stand there together until I see a taxi. I try to flag it down, but walk straight into the glass wall of the shelter instead. My bus-stop buddy does the honours, flags the taxi and sees me into it. He handles me as you’d handle a figurine of antique china.

  When I get home, I start to run a bath, then get a joint from the shed.

  While the bath is still running, I call the A&E department at Llandough Hospital in Penarth. I tell them I’m a police officer. Say we’re looking for two men, one of whom sustained a broken jaw in an altercation. I use that word – altercation – wondering who would keep it alive if policemen and women didn’t.

  They tell me that there’s no one in like that yet, but I leave my number. I turn the tap off, light my joint, and get into the warm water. Call University Hospital in Cardiff, the Morriston Hospital in Swansea, and every other hospital I can find in the semi-circle bounded by Bristol, Brecon and Camarthen.

  Nothing. I get nothing. I finish my joint, the first I’ve had since Droitwich. My shaking is no more than a memory. I bruised my forehead on the wall of the bus shelter and I can feel a darkening circle of pain when I press it with my finger. Which is good. I’m okay, in touch with myself. I’m feeling my feelings. I press my bruise every minute or two for reassurance.

  I drain the water.

  Then, finally, get a call back. Bristol. Frenchay Hospital. Two men entered. One with a serious compound fracture to the jaw. He was seen immediately. An A&E nurse and junior doctor corrected the dislocation by simply thumbing the bone back into place, but prepared the patient for immediate surgery on the fracture. They placed a temporary bandage over the jaw to limit movement, then left to arrange the operation. When the nurse returned with the necessary consent paperwork, both men had vanished.

  The patient had given his name as Neil Moggach, a name that will certainly prove to be false, and an address in Bristol which will be equally useless.

  Damn.

  Mostly I’m pleased with the way I handled things. I chose the fight I wanted, not the one they offered. My kick was good. My actions afterward rapid and well planned. Except for one thing. I’d assumed I’d be able to get at my targets in the hospital. I assumed I’d be able to get a pair of handcuffs on my guy in the post-op recovery room and interview him under caution. I’d probably have threatened him with some bullshit threatening-a-police-officer charge, which I’d never have been able to sustain but wouldn’t have needed to. I’d have done enough to secure a verifiable ID, a registration plate, phone data, address. Not merely the guy I kicked but, quite possibly, his buddy too. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that the injured man would simply walk into hospital, get bandaged up, and walk out again. How the hell is he even planning to eat?

  I call Frenchay again, ask to speak to the relevant nurse and get her to look for any paper towels or bed coverings that might have gleaned a drop or two of blood. She promises to do what she can, but her voice tells we’ll get nothing. I’ll be able to secure CCTV footage from the admissions area, but I doubt if the images will be clear enough to secure a visual ID. I request the footage anyway.

  It all sounds uncomfortably like a dead end, a tree without fruit, but somehow it doesn’t feel that way.

  I remember the cow, the leaning, the break.

  When Buzz calls to chat – we always talk on the phone if we aren’t spending the evening together – I’m talkative and warm and charming and flirty. I can almost feel the force of attraction that is making him fall in love with me, and I feel like a fraud. The worst girlfriend in the world, not the supergreat and perfect one I aspire to be.

  What I ought to tell him is this:

  ‘I’m only this nice because I’ve had a joint, smashed someone’s jaw, and feel alive. When I walked into the bus shelter, it hurt and went on hurting, and in my crazy world that’s good news. Beautiful news. The sort of thing that makes me want to flirt and have sex and make my lovely boyfriend fall in love with me. But I’m still a total disaster and sane boyfriends would be well advised to run a thousand miles. You, my dear Buzz, would be a million times happier with the kind of woman whose sense of adventure would be amply satisfied by baking a different type of cake.’

  I ought to say that, but I don’t. I just talk too much and remember the cow.
r />   The leaning weight. The sudden break.

  And jagged timber lances flashing in the sun.

  17

  The next day at work I can’t tell anyone about the incident on Marine Parade. I’m no expert, but I’m fairly sure that the narrow minds of the Police Misconduct Panel would take a dim view of my jaw-smashing activities, particularly given the fact that I have a little history along those lines.

  The Internet tells me that fixing a complex fracture of the jaw is a difficult business. Elastics are used to hold any loose teeth into place. Jaw wires are extended from the fractured bone to the line of teeth opposite, to provide stability during healing. The patient can eat only fluids and very soft foods for six to eight weeks following surgery. In days gone by, a broken jaw could often prove lethal, because you can’t chew with a fractured jawbone.

  The two men last night may not have been experts on these matters, but it’s telling that they chose to drive an hour to get medical attention, when the nearest hospital was just a few minutes away. Telling that they gave a false ID. (I’ve checked it and it is.) Telling also that my victim chose to walk out of the hospital with nothing more than a bandage and a couple of paracetamol.

  Trouble is, I’m not sure what to do next. I saw their faces, of course, but not for long and not in good light. Experience with e-fit technology places day-after accuracy at worse than twenty per cent. And in any case, e-fit technologies work when you have a suspect whose identity needs confirmation. I have nothing. No name, no phone, no address.

  I tried running the various car numberplates I’d collected, but no joy, or no obvious joy. One car, a Mercedes, was rented by an Egyptian man, Mostafa el-Saadawi, at Heathrow Airport. Given the vague North African connections in the case so far, Saadawi’s nationality rings some kind of bell, but not loudly. It’s two thousand miles from Cairo to Casablanca.

  On the other hand, Prothero does own Barry Precision, which does sell to North Africa, which could account for Saadawi’s presence.

  Or not.

  My ignorance is boundless.

  I don’t even know why the hell the men were interested in me. Because I’d been talking to Adams? To Sophie Hinton? Or because I was on Prothero’s street, looking into his front yard and collecting vehicle registrations? Or none of the above?

  I don’t know.

  All this is a lot of ignorance, but it seems like a rich unknowing, not a poor one. Watkins’s investigation has gathered lots of facts, but increasingly her orchard seems a barren one. It has neither buds nor flowers.

  For example: Two more pieces of Langton have been found. A small plastic-wrapped bit of calf was found in yet another Cyncoed outbuilding. It was only found because the mother of the family concerned became worried about all the stories in the press, and organised a major clearout of her garden shed and bike store. She found a Tupperware box, hidden out of sight in the sloping roof of the shed. The box was filled with table salt, turned pink with blood, and a chunk of Mary Langton, about the size of two fists placed end to end.

  The woman, Sian Phillips, used to be a primary school teacher, but now – with four active kids under fifteen – is a full-time parent, who works as a churchwarden at the local church. Her husband, Karl, works in local government finance. Neither of them seems like the slice-up-a-dancer type. Neither knew Elsie Williams, Ryan Humphrys, Arthur Price, or any of our other tremendously non-suspicious suspects. No connection with Langton either. The shed had no doors and was just a step or two away from the street, so anyone could have had access to it.

  More weirdly still, a jam jar was found tucked into the spare tyre compartment of a Volkswagen Passat. The jamjar, which according to its label once contained 454 grams of Pembrokeshire honey, was now found to hold only vegetable oil and a thumb, speedily identified as Langton’s. The Passat belonged to a garage mechanic, George Thomas. Thomas was Ryan Humphrys’s regular garage guy, but the two men play in the same pub football team, declare themselves to be friends, and don’t strike us as members of some body-part swap club. Thomas may once have handled an MOT on a car belonging to Elsie Williams, but only may have done, it would have been only the once, and the total fee was fifty pounds, which hardly suggests a transaction of any great moment to either party. Thomas also once fixed Arthur Price’s lawnmower, or thought he had. No known connection to Langton.

  It’s the lack of any clear centre to the investigation which is freaking everybody. How do we even start to investigate?

  The incident room wall now has 268 ‘people of interest.’ The phone directory is back too, not as a joke, but as a practical resource. Stirfry/Abacus now has not one but two full time data managers. The investigation feels like it’s teetering on the brink of failure.

  You can feel Watkins’s anger at the turn things have taken. She’s like a volcano in some Nordic myth. Wreathed in smoke. Spitting fire. Concealing dragons.

  I’m busy with these thoughts when the phone rings. It’s Dad.

  ‘Fi girl?’ he bellows.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  ‘Morning, love, I’ve probably interrupted you in the middle of something important, have I? I expect you’re applying the thumbscrews to some poor bugger right now.’

  Dad is always like this when he calls me at work. Too loud, too jokey. That’s part of the house style, of course, but it’s also because he’s uncomfortable with calling the station, knowing the lines are probably monitored. Old habits, dying hard.

  It turns out he’s calling to invite me and Buzz round to see his latest project. A city-centre bar. No pole dancers at this one – that market is saturated, Dad says – but a 1920s-themed American bar. It’s a new game of his. He uses the recession to take short leases on good-quality properties at ridiculously low rates. Then he crates in some cheap junk from U.S. suppliers and, under low lighting, makes the place look great. Cocktails from £4.95. Imported beers from £3.25. If the Cardiff formula works, he’ll roll the format out. Swansea, Bristol, Newport.

  I check Buzz’s availability. He’s available. We tell Dad we’ll meet him at the bar at six that evening.

  I do my boring crap for Dunwoody, pester Frenchay Hospital until they get me some CCTV footage, then print off the best stills the footage yields. They’re not much, but better than nothing.

  A memo comes round, asking if anyone is interested in applying for the NPT Undercover Training and Assessment Course. I say yes. I don’t know why.

  At five-thirty Buzz comes by my desk.

  ‘Ready?’ he asks brightly, wanting me to be and knowing that I won’t be.

  ‘Almost,’ I say.

  I finish an email, look at the paper on my desk, then shove it into a drawer. I go to the Ladies to ‘freshen up.’ I never really do much there, but Buzz thinks that women need to undergo some mysterious completion process before they can go out for the evening, and I don’t like to disappoint him. Bev Rowland’s just leaving as I go in, so we chat for a couple of minutes.

  Then I stare at my face in the mirror for a minute or two, wondering if it feels like mine. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the dark count is invisible in mirrors and I often feel something similar is true of me too. I can’t feel any deep relationship between the face that is mine and the person I am. Like they’re two different things.

  I don’t know if this is something that everyone feels.

  I put water on my face and wipe it off.

  Then put the vaguest bit of makeup on. Lipgloss, mascara, blusher. I mostly don’t buy my own makeup. I wait for my sister Kay to give me stuff for Christmas or birthdays, then either eke it out till she gives me some more, or buy exact replacements when the item in question runs out. Or, of course, just forget.

  I put my hands on my hair and move it around a bit, wondering what I would do to it if I were Kay. Or sulky Sophie Hinton. Or the red-cheeked, cow-toothed Mary Langton, getting ready to spend an evening churning her hips around a pole.

  Then I lose time and simply stand there doing nothing. When someone c
omes in, I remember what I’m supposed to be doing and go to find Buzz. It’s 5:55.

  He says, ‘Done?’

  I say, ‘Done!’

  He gives me one of those male expressions which says simultaneously: (A) you look great and it’s going to be an immense pleasure to be with you this evening, and (B) what in God’s name took you so long? I counter his look with a mysterious feminine smile of my own devising.

  The bar is only a twenty-minute walk away and parking could be difficult, so we walk. After a couple of minutes, Buzz puts his arm around me and squeezes me in close. It’s a gesture that moves me every time he does it. Like I’m not just being hooked in close to one large and well-proportioned male body, but like I’m being gathered back into the world of the living.

  It makes me think of those astronauts dangling in space on the end of their tethering ropes. You think that those ropes are pipes feeding air to the space suit, but they’re not. They’re just ropes. If someone cut the rope or unhitched it from the spacecraft, the astronaut would be left dangling forever, hanging a thousand miles above the Earth, waiting to die. Buzz’s enfolding arm brings me in from the void, through the airlock, back to the community of the human race.

  I usually become girly and affectionate when I feel these things. I become that now.

  The streets are dark. The shopping scrums are finished and the drinking scrums are yet to form. No rain. Buzz keeps on hugging me, shortening his steps so I don’t have to gallop.

  ‘Only twenty minutes late,’ says Buzz as we get to the bar.

  ‘Dad will be late anyway,’ I say. I have my hand inside Buzz’s jacket, feeling the flex of his pectorals.

  ‘Well then, you won’t mind if I put a parking ticket on that Range Rover.’

  Buzz indicates a spot a little farther down the street, where Dad’s big silver Range Rover is indeed illegally parked.

  ‘I think you should give it lots of tickets,’ I say. ‘It would make Dad respect you.’