Love Story, With Murders

by Harry Bingham

  I’m not strong enough to argue with her, but Watkins is wrong. Scattering Khalifi’s corpse was exactly the right thing to do. The way we found the corpse sent us chasing after connections between Langton and Khalifi instead of concentrating our firepower where it was most needed. If Khalifi had simply gone missing, we’d have been forced to look at his activities in the round. Instead of being obsessed with his sexual and romantic past, we’d have been drilling away at his business contacts, among them Mark Mortimer and Barry Precision. As it was, if it hadn’t been for my perverse insistence on following that line of attack, the investigation might never even have touched those things.

  Even Watkins sees this logic. ‘Of course, it did push the investigation toward the sexual angle.’

  I nod. Yes. It did.

  But Watkins’s thoughts are already moving on.

  ‘On the other hand, we don’t know that any of this Barry Precision stuff is connected to Khalifi. To Mortimer, yes, but not necessarily to Khalifi.’

  I shrug. I don’t agree with that either. The two men knew each other well. Were buddies. Fellow engineers. Both died violently. What more connection do you want? And if it comes to that, the two men who tried to kill me did so with a bit of grace. A little flourish of invention and quick thinking. It seems to me that the same house style is apparent with Khalifi’s death too.

  Watkins stares at me. I don’t look away.

  She doesn’t say so, but I can tell she agrees.

  ‘Why try to kill you? That’s another question. But presumably they didn’t go to the cottage to kill anyone. They learned – from Sophie Hinton, I suppose – about that laptop and they went there to retrieve it. They found you there. They didn’t know how far their operation was compromised, so decided to kill you, take the laptop, hope for the best.’

  I nod. I agree, but it is odd to be spoken about in this way.

  ‘There’s no phone signal up there,’ I add. ‘They probably figured there was a reasonable chance I hadn’t managed to communicate my find to anyone – which indeed I hadn’t. If you’d found me dead in a field from hypothermia, you wouldn’t necessarily consider foul play. That’s why I broke the guy’s nose. I wanted to leave a clue at least.’

  ‘I’d have found it. I’d be sure to have found it.’ Watkins looks severe and authoritative when she says that, but she tries to jam a smile into the expression too. The smile doesn’t work. It looks clumsily out of place. A child’s pink party bow stuck onto a formal business suit.

  I say, ‘Yes.’

  I tell Watkins that she should get a log of calls to and from Sophie Hinton’s line. I assume the Olaf-Hamish-Dunbar-Prothero axis is careful about calling from untraceable numbers, but you never know.

  She nods and makes a note. ‘And Mortimer? Any theories on him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he thought he needed to kill himself to protect Sophie and his kids. Perhaps he just thought that his life was fucked anyway. Either way, he was pushed into it.’

  Watkins doesn’t like the word ‘fucked,’ but she doesn’t rebuke me.

  Instead, she picks up my hand, the one nearest her, and turns it over. There is some blood leaking from the bandage. Her touch is oddly gentle.

  ‘How did you hurt your hands?’

  ‘When I was cutting the seats up. I don’t know exactly how.’

  She turns my hand over again, to leave it as it was, but she keeps holding it. We are hand to hand, fingertip to fingertip. We stay like that for a bit. I’m not that far from going to sleep again.

  ‘Dennis told me about this,’ she says after a while. ‘The things you put us through.’

  Dennis: Dennis Jackson. My boss on the last big murder case. Apart from that, I don’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t elaborate.

  For a while we just drift on the silence. But there’s something else I need to say.

  ‘We won’t get a conviction for what happened last night. Not a chance.’

  ‘We might.’

  It’s all very well having Hamish’s blood on my coat. That proves that he and I were in contact at some point. But we’ve got no way to prove when or where that contact happened. We can’t even show that a crime took place. The word of a police officer: that’s all. And it’s not enough. For a modern jury, under modern rules of evidence, it’s not remotely sufficient.

  ‘They’re good,’ I tell Watlans. ‘They were careful last night. Gloves all the time. Hats. Wiping the car down. They didn’t touch me even when I smacked the Scotsman. They’ll have been professional about Khalifi too. Very clean. Careful about CCTV, numberplates, forensics. All that stuff.’

  Watkins nods. ‘We’ll see.’

  There’s not much more to talk about. The world outside is still very grey, very cold. Watkins says they are talking about the coldest winter on record.

  I fall asleep with her still holding my hand. I lean my head against it, because it is nice having the human contact. I say, ‘Thank you,’ or I dream I do.

  When I wake, darkness has fallen and I’m on my own.

  36

  A cold world spins. Time organises seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days.

  I’m released from hospital. To Mam and Dad’s, because Buzz needs to be at work and because I’m still not much good for anything.

  I have my old room back. Mam has filled it with flowers. Dad has ordered special support pillows from a supplier in London and a contraption that fits under the mattress to raise and lower it like a hospital bed. I laugh at him, but it’s nice to have. He puts a TV in there too, and Mam and I watch recordings of Downton Abbey. Mam is so absorbed in the show, I think she half lives it.

  I spend hours with Ant and Kay too. Kay buys me a phone, which is really nice of her, even though I know she’ll get the money back from Dad. She also goes round to my house with Mam and brings back clothes and my laptop. Mam goes shopping and buys a winter coat for me which is weirdly similar to Watkins’s granny coat, the one Amrita so despised. Kay takes it back and brings me something from Monsoon instead. Furtrimmed. It looks nice. She also gets, at my request, a proper padded coat, the sort of thing people go skiing in. It’s going to be a while before I walk out underdressed for the cold again. That’s not logical: Olaf and Hamish would have removed any coat I’d gone out in. But somehow it makes sense. Even the idea of cold is frightening now.

  Ant just likes snuggling with me. She’d worm right in alongside, except that there aren’t many bits of me that want a wriggly thirteen-year-old bumping up against them. So I pile pillows up against my side and let her bump against those instead. We do a school project of hers together and she tells me stuff about what’s happening on Facebook and the music she’s into.

  Buzz visits too. Office gossip and low-intensity snogging. He wants to know, a bit upset, why I didn’t tell him what I told Watkins. He feels that I didn’t trust him.

  I look at him like he’s an idiot. ‘I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.’

  I explain: if Buzz had known how come I ended up in hospital that morning, he’d hardly have been able to keep his feelings under wraps.

  ‘Fi, you know it’s okay to have feelings –’

  ‘Yes, my dear Buzz, but your feelings would have ended up letting my father know what happened. You might not have meant it that way, but –’

  ‘You think he’d –?’

  ‘Well, what do you think? How do you honestly think my father would react if he knew someone had tried to kill his daughter?’

  Truth is, I don’t know the answer to my own question, but nor do I want to find out. I don’t think Dad is involved in his old games anymore, but he still has his friends from those days, his contacts, his resources. If he wanted to find a couple of underworld figures, he’d have a fighting chance of locating them before we do. And if he did, I don’t think they’d ever see the inside of a jail, which is where they belong.

  Buzz sees this logic. His mouth falls open with it. ‘Bloody hell, Fi. Your fa
mily!’ It must be strange for him. A well-behaved boy from a nice family. Finding himself dating the more-than-slightly crazy daughter of one of Wales’s best-known criminals. Probably not what he imagined for himself. Life’s like that: It never serves up what you think it will.

  He’s also seen my name on a list of people down for the undercover training thing. He’s upset I didn’t run that by him first. He reckons, probably rightly, that undercover cops – the real ones, the long-termers – never manage a successful relationship. I agree with him. Say I don’t see myself doing anything like that, not really. I just fancied adding some new skills.

  Which is almost true. But it’s not really the skills I want, more that I don’t like the idea that I might be prohibited from doing something I want to do. Any police officer can go undercover in small ways – buying drugs from a dealer, seeking to sell stolen goods – but you’re not allowed to go deep undercover without special training. And what if, one day, a case needs that kind of tactic? I don’t like the idea of being barred from something just because I haven’t been on some stupid course.

  Buzz accepts this, or sort of does, and the conversation moves on. We watch a bit of TV and cuddle. After a bit, I want to sleep and Buzz takes himself off. It’s been a nice, peaceful, contented time.

  But I’m not ill. I’m a bit knocked about, that’s all. My burn wounds need gentle treatment for a few weeks. My cuts are already healing. The tips of my toes are, in some cases, looking black, but the cheerful junior doctor at the Royal Gwent told me that the rule was ‘frostbite in January, amputate in July.’ So: my toes might need surgery at some stage. Or they might not. In any case, there’s nothing to stop me working, so – when I’m not watching Downton Abbey or protecting myself from a wriggling younger sister – I work.

  Although I shrink from what I might find, I force myself to start reading those police reports on my father. Though I can’t ask anyone to get the printouts from my office desk, I can access the same material via the force intranet.

  And I do. I read. Thomas Griffiths known to have . . . Thomas Griffiths believed to be . . . Telephone interception reports on Thomas Griffiths . . . Thomas Griffiths, formerly of . . . Thomas Griffiths was identified by . . . Prosecution case for Thomas Griffiths . . . Anonymous caller reports that Thomas Griffiths . . .

  It’s endless. It feels endless. The language, criminal law, and police procedures have all changed since then, but not so much. Twist the lens a little, and I’m seeing myself – or rather, my brothers and sisters on the force – on my father’s trail. Doing everything they can to secure a conviction. Earlier on in the paper trail, you can see the cops expecting victory: securing a conviction for one of those banker offences, achieving one of those ten-year-plus sentences that every good copper loves to see.

  The first prosecution was for armed robbery. Two eye witnesses. Both reliable. Nice clean statements. No awkward alibis. Identity parades all tickety-boo. The sort of case that the CPS can manage in their sleep. Then the damn thing came to trial, and both witnesses retracted in full. Their retractions were stumbling and awkward, but they made them. Insisted on them. The case collapsed.

  In the years that followed, you can see my colleagues getting tighter, sharper, willing to run with any little offence they thought they could pin on him.

  And all the time, I see my father waltzing through the shadows. Laughing at his pursuers. I try to imagine how deft he must have been. How constantly cautious. What must it be like when you can never use a phone without assuming that someone is listening? Never send a letter, never trust that innocent-looking stranger?

  I don’t think I learn much from the files, not directly, but I do start to break that sense of fear I have. My sense that I can’t investigate these things, that it’s better not to know.

  And of course there are leads: so many leads, it’s hard to know where to start. Known associates. Associates not known but suspected. Friends. Associates of those friends. At one stage, the Serious Crime Unit put together a chart trying to trace major associations between the South Wales underworld. The chart is a whirlwind of circles, arrows, interconnections, with my father standing at the very centre. A Mr Popular of the criminal fraternity.

  I try to do two or three hours each day I’m in bed. I get through about a third of the material, no more. There’s far more to be done, but I’m already certain that my father’s past holds the clue, in some way, to the mystery of my origin. I’m just daunted by the scale of the investigation.

  When I need a break, I retreat to the sweet enchantments of Operation Stirfry. I’m missing the briefings, and the incident room all aflap with paper. But I have the intranet and I have my phone. Watkins is now investigating, as well as Langton and Khalifi, the matter of possible illegal arms export, the possible framing of Mark Mortimer, and any threats that may have been made against Sophie Hinton. Oh yes, and the small matter of the ‘attempted murder of DC Fiona Griffiths,’ on which a team of three is now labouring full-time.

  It’s clear that the dramas of Capel-y-ffin have revived Stirfry. Interest from senior command has revived. There’s a new intensity about the operation. And part of that is for my sake. I appreciate it. I get a home visit from none other than Detective Superintendent Kirby, who sits awkwardly on the edge of my bed and praises me for my courage and resourcefulness in the line of duty.

  I don’t think it’s seeing one of his young female officers in her nightdress that makes him awkward. More that he’s in the home of Tom Griffiths and speaking to his daughter.

  I look at my hands and say, ‘Thank you, sir.’ The weird thing is that I mean it. Then my mam brings in tea and biscuits, and we all sit around and talk about the weather.

  I’m still involved in interesting stuff too.

  Watkins phones to ask if I have any suggestions about reviewing those engineering drawings from Barry Precision. I do. I know a guy called Stuart Brotherton, an engineering lecturer at the University of Leeds. I knew him when he was a junior research fellow at Cambridge – he was my first ever drug dealer, in fact, though Watkins doesn’t need to know that. I tell Stuart what we need and why we need it. I say he can charge us a consultancy fee if he likes. He says he’ll be happy to do it.

  I also log into the secure network and keep up to date with what’s been going on while I’ve been adventuring. Less than I’d hoped, in truth. Although Watkins’s demand for more manpower is now being treated sympathetically by those above her, the cold weather has drained the force of resources. Officers are managing blocked roads, failed power lines, and abandoned vehicles and supporting a programme that aims to protect the elderly against the cold. Until the weather relents, we’re struggling to cover what we need to do.

  But progress is slow, not absent.

  I click through to Bev’s researches. She’s listed, with true Rowlandian neatness, every payment made on Khalifi’s bank card, every payment on his credit card. The same for Langton, though her transaction record is so meagre as to be almost silent.

  Bev’s work is wonderfully literal. When Khalifi bought stuff from Tesco, her notes report, ‘Tesco: large supermarket.’ When he spent seventy quid at the Swansea Bay Yacht Club, her notes say, ‘Swansea Bay Yacht Club: primarily a yacht club. Also windsurfing and similar social/recreational activities.’ I can see why, if you’re a Watkins or a Jackson, you want plenty of Bev Rowlands on your team, not so many Fiona Griffithses.

  But still, I’ve got my uses. I spend hours studying Bev’s spreadsheets. They are things of beauty. A life photographed in data. The commercial imprint of a man. And these things are strangely informative. I check some websites, phone through to the yacht club. Call up and study as many photos of Langton as I can find.

  My orchard of knowledge grows another apple.

  Langton and Khalifi. The leg and the lung.

  Her grinning blonde head rising from its barrel of oil. His freshly scattered parts gleaming in the Llanishen mud.

  I still feel close to Mary La
ngton, but I’ve got a better relationship with Khalifi now too. That mobile, ambiguous face feels friendly, not just evasive. I realise too that I think of them as a pair, Langton-and-Khalifi: the way you think about friends who are dating steadily.

  My colleagues are excited because Khalifi might have led them to an arms-smuggling ring, as though that’s where the glamour and the excitement really lies. For me, all corpses count the same. One dead body might lead to Barry Precision. Another to nothing more than a love poem lost down the back of a sofa. There is no eminence here, no lowliness. We are all equal under Death’s scythe.

  I silently apologise to Mary Langton for my colleagues’ mood of indifference. Promise her that it’s temporary. I’ve been a little neglectful myself, in truth. Because I’ve had to work hard on Khalifi–Mortimer, I haven’t quite given Langton the attention she deserves. But time enough for that now. I think we’ll get her killer too.

  Meantime, I research Saadawi. Some of the websites I need are in Arabic, but the English-language Egyptian Gazette has a story which seems to identify Saadawi as a businessman with trading and construction interests. Whose brother is a procurement officer in the Egyptian defence ministry.

  What you might call a smoking gun.

  I also research Barry Precision’s other overseas buyers. The company boasts a Libyan buyer. Also Lebanese, Moroccan, Saudi. I can’t yet find obvious connections between those names and defence or security services, but there’s a limit on what you can do with Google alone, and I’ve not been on the case for long. I mention these things to Watkins, who tells me brusquely that she has a pair of DCs on the case already.

  Stuart phones me back the afternoon after getting my data – my third day at home. He tells me I’m right. Barry Precision makes bits and pieces for all manner of people, but a sizeable portion of its business appears to be manufacturing parts that are weapons-suitable. Blast protection equipment for trucks and armoured cars. Gun barrels for tanks. Probably a whole lot more besides.