Prothero, it turns out, spent the winter chasing up his connections. A rich, well-connected businessman murmuring in his buddies’ rich and well-connected ears. Ivor Harris stood up in Parliament, denouncing our pending case – though no charges had yet been brought – calling for ministers to intervene on behalf of ‘this fine local firm.’ Initially, his speech appeared no more than empty showmanship. He was speaking to an almost empty Chamber. Any response he got was evasive and placatory.
Except soon it wasn’t. A senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence issued a paper ‘clarifying’ the regulations on the licensing procedures for weapons export. The paper referred obliquely to ‘persistent misunderstandings arising from inadequate MOD guidance.’ It launched a consultation paper aiming at an intended regulatory reform.
The document was bullshit. The original regulations were crystal in their clarity and Barry was in breach. But following the ‘clarifications,’ the UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Organisation – a government body designed to promote the sale of arms and one that employs, at taxpayer expense, some 160 people – called Barry Precision in for meetings, the upshot of which was that Barry signed a Memorandum of Understanding which made certain representations as to its future conduct. A small contribution was made to charity by way of recognising possible past infractions, without admission of liability. A junior minister issued an apology for poor communication.
Blah, blah, blah.
A junior minister at the Ministry of Defence and a more senior one at the Foreign Office had lunch with the Director of Public Prosecutions. We don’t know what happened at that lunch – what threats, what lies, what blandishments – but, after a DPP-ordered ‘review,’ the CPS told us that they could no longer be certain that any prosecution would be successful or that any such prosecution would be in the public interest. They wimped out, backed down, surrendered, gave up.
Me and Watkins. Alone in the ruins. No boots, no ammo, nothing to eat but the rats, and Soviet armies surrounding us on every side.
We couldn’t launch a prosecution on our own. So, like Paulus, we flew the white flag. Dropped the whole damn case.
Far from injuring Barry, we’ve helped it. The UKTI DSO has taken the firm under its wing. Helped it secure new contracts. The firm now plans to sell openly at the IDEX arms fair. At SOFEX. At others too. Farnborough in the UK. Defexpo in India. Defence Services Asia. The firm is expanding. Negotiating for new industrial space adjacent to its existing facility. Idris Prothero’s only mistake was to have gone undercover in the first place. If he’d just had the wit to ask the British government for its specialist Selling-Guns-to-Dictators marketing support, he’d have got it. The whole nine yards. He wouldn’t even have had to frame Mark Mortimer. Ali el-Khalifi, silly sod, could have won himself a knighthood for export services, instead of getting himself chopped to pieces and scattered throughout his favourite Cardiff beauty spot.
Watkins tries to cheer me up. McCormack is certainly heading for a life sentence. Johnston too.
But I’m not cheered. Johnston was a nut. A sadistic dangerous nut, who deserves jail and will get it. It’s our job to put people like him away and we did our job. Nothing more. As for Olaf and Hamish: they were trivial. Units moved around the battlefield by a distant field marshal. What those two did was wrong, but you still want to hang the general, not shoot the infantryman.
I’m starting to think I’m playing a game whose rules have been tampered with. The fuckwits are winning. Perhaps they always do.
Except that the game isn’t quite over. One part – Olaf – is still in play. Idris Prothero either directly ordered the Khalifi killing or was involved in it. I can’t prove that, but we do know that one of Prothero’s phones received a call from Capel-y-ffin the night I was almost murdered. We do have very strong evidence to suggest that Prothero’s employee, Mark Mortimer, was framed for a drug deal as a way to silence him. It would seem remarkable, to say the least, if Prothero had not also authorised, or at least assented to, the Khalifi murder.
And if so, Olaf is our one remaining chance to prove it.
I hang around on the seafront long enough to get chilly, then buy sausage and mustard from a fast-food place. Eat it standing up.
I should drink a litre of beer and grow facial hair or long blonde plaits. I’d fit right in.
When I can’t think of anything else to do, I drift back to the hotel. No Lev. I lie on my back and read an airport paperback until it annoys me, a process that takes all of seven pages.
When I studied philosophy as a student, one of the first topics we examined was David Hume’s theory of personal identity. Hume didn’t believe in a fixed view of self. He wrote that when we look inward, ‘we are never intimately conscious of anything but a particular perception; man is a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement.’ Look as he might, Hume couldn’t find anything permanently fixed. When he searched for the pencil marks that demarcated his own boundary, he found nothing. They weren’t there.
My fellow students – even my tutors – regarded Hume’s theories as a kind of intellectual con trick. A game of three-card monte where the eye is always deceived into overturning the wrong card. My colleagues thought, Of course we exist, of course our selves are permanent and enduring, so how can we prove Hume wrong? I thought the opposite. I was honestly surprised that anyone thought Hume wasn’t simply expressing the obvious. My whole teenage experience had been about trying to construct a sense of self that didn’t collapse. Like trying to build a house on a raft of floating logs.
It’s better than that now. I don’t know why, but those logs jam together better than they used to. I can walk across my kitchen without finding myself falling waist-high into freezing water. But still. David Hume, right or wrong? I go on thinking he was right.
At half past eight, I get hungry and eat a sandwich from the bar downstairs.
At half past nine, Lev comes to find me. He taps lightly at my door and walks straight on in. He has hash, rolling tobacco, and cigarette papers. We throw the window up, though there’s a light frost outside, and smoke. There’s nothing much else to do, so we get properly stoned. I get hungry again, Lev too, and we go outside for a prowl. Find more sausages and mustard. We eat ourselves stupid.
At midnight, Lev says, ‘Okay. We leave now.’
I stare at him. He’s serious?
He is.
I don’t argue. We drive out of the underground car park. Lev wants me to drive, so I do. Lev helps me navigate out of Oslo, but it’s hard to get lost. Once I pick up signs to Trondheim, I just stick with them. It’s the E6 most of the way. Six and a half hours according to my telephone satnav. I could probably cut the time if I was willing to speed, but I’m not.
I drive. Lev sleeps.
The road’s not like any British motorway. One lane in each direction. Tarmac creasing where the land has moved.
Water and ice on the road.
Flashing stems of silver birches. Snow. Grey rock walls and a million whispering pines.
The roads are all but empty.
At three in the morning, I stop and pee by the side of the road. There are stars overhead, more numerous than you ever see in Cardiff. A million stars. More stars than people. I spend a few minutes stretching.
As I’m doing that, I’m surprised to find Lev beside me. He stretches too, but briefly. Rummages in the back of the car, pulls out a rifle and a couple of handguns.
I don’t think they were there before. They didn’t come with the car.
I say, ‘We’re not here to shoot anyone.’
‘I know.’ Lev’s voice and gaze are level.
‘I just want a clean capture. Nothing messy. Nothing . . .’ I gesture at the guns.
‘I know.’ He gives me one of the handguns, the smaller one. ‘That’s why you need this. So no one want to be silly. Here, try this. Is for little hands.’
I
fire a few rounds at a tree trunk. Lev adjusts my grip and my stance. Then nods. ‘Okay.’ He wants me to go on firing, though, so I do. Fifty rounds. Concentrating. Waiting for the weapon to stop feeling alien. I’ll have gunshot residue all over my wrists, but I’m rather hoping no one’s going to be swabbing them.
As I do that, Lev tinkers around with his rifle. He’s firing from behind the car at a tree trunk caught in its headlights. Each time he fires, he checks the shot through the telescopic sights, then adjusts the calibration. He checks the settings until he’s satisfied, then blazes off ten shots in rapid succession, checks the target again. He fires a few rounds with his handgun, but doesn’t bother with any calibration.
He reloads all the guns and puts them back in the car.
‘Accuracy International,’ he says. ‘Arctic Warfare type.’
I don’t know what that means. I don’t ask. We’ve made a real mess of a couple of trees, and there’s a litter of cartridges on the ground. But who cares? Norway’s a big place. It can afford a couple of messed-up trees.
I drive on. Lev sleeps. The din of our shooting is still echoing in my ears. For the first time, I’m wondering if I made the right call in coming here. I feel afraid.
The road unspools under my wheels. Trees, rocks, stars.
I’ve been pursuing my investigation of my father’s past with increasing rigour. I have over eight thousand pages of documents, over forty thousand words of notes. My investigation of the Rattigan boys has been sidelined for the moment, but that’s okay. A girl’s got to prioritise.
I don’t have a lead that means anything, but Jack Yorath’s comment about the whistle-blower still echoes for me. The notes we have on file say that the individual concerned – Gareth Glyn, a mid-ranking planning officer on the city council – alleged corruption in the award of development contracts. The complaint was investigated at the time – intelligently and appropriately, as far as I can tell – but no firm evidence was ever found. Glyn lost his job. Set up as a planning consultant, then faded from view. Walked out on his wife in 2002, who subsequently sold up and moved to Dolgellau. I haven’t been able to find anything further.
I think, I need to go and speak to Mrs Glyn. The right time to start interviewing is when your preliminary investigation has given you a platform to work with. When you’re in a position to ask the right questions. That moment has come.
But I don’t think very much. The car feels different now I know there are guns in the back. Heavier. More purposeful.
The dope I smoked in the evening feels like it’s left the system. I feel wrung out and cold.
After a while, it’s time to turn off the E6. I glance at Lev, wondering whether to wake him, but find that he’s already awake.
‘Okay. I drive.’
We swap over. It’s colder up here than it was in Oslo. Partly the night. Partly being higher and out of the city. But also these accumulating northerly miles.
We’re in late March now. It’s not spring, as I’ve ever known it, but this is what passes for spring up here. Although everything is hard frozen, you can see the streaks and marks where ice has melted during the day. When we stopped in the middle of the night, some of the snow had that granular, crystalline quality you get when snow softens during the day and refreezes at night.
Lev says, ‘You want him alive, yes?’
‘Yes.’
I want more than that. I want evidence. His phone, his laptop, his papers. Anything that might expose the line that links Khalifi’s murder with Mortimer’s suicide and Barry’s weapons. The line that links Khalifi’s corpse to Prothero’s silky arrogance. Olaf might well be cautious enough not to retain anything that might connect him to murder, but perhaps not. Out here, on the very edge of the habitable world, he might figure that keeping a mobile phone wouldn’t prove disastrous.
Lev drives on. It’s not yet sunrise, but there’s a softening of the darkness.
When we’re ten miles away, Lev stops. Drinks from a thermos of black tea. Also something else. I don’t know what. Maybe ethanol or something of that sort. To reduce muscle tremors. I know marksmen use it.
He offers me tea. I say no.
The guns in the back seem huge.
I want to pee again, but don’t. Lev does, though. Gets out, pees against a tree. Walks a few feet away, to a patch of clean snow, and rinses himself down with it. Face, neck, hands, wrists. He’s brisk and businesslike, as though washing in a basin of warm water.
I’m scared now. Not so much for myself – not with Lev next to me – but because of the scale of these choices I’m making.
Going to Glasgow didn’t strike me as a big deal at the time. I hadn’t expected to encounter Hamish, but was reasonably confident of managing him if I did. Likewise, the other little things I’ve done off-piste in this case. I’m not a Watkinsian by-the-book type, and I’m happy with the compromises and decisions I’ve made.
But now? I’ve had in my head a picture of what ought to happen. Lev and I surprise Olaf in his sleep. We tie him up. We search the house. We locate all incriminating items and place them where the Norwegian police will surely find them. Then leave. Back to Oslo. An anonymous phone call to the local cops. Let the ordinary processes of justice do their stuff.
But a picture in my head is one thing. Reality is another. I didn’t drive up to Glasgow with a carful of guns.
We could still turn back. I almost say something when Lev returns to the car, but when I open my mouth no words come out.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
Lev does, though. He drives with alertness. I’ve never seen him like this. In hunting mode, not training mode. When the satnav says we’re five miles from our target, Lev flicks his headlights off. The road is a channel of dark grey through ribbons of snow.
We ride uphill. Rocks on both sides of us. Grey cliffs blotting out the stars. When the road forks, we take the one that’s unpaved. A rough track, leading up.
As we get to the top, Lev travels slower, searching for the crest. He drives like a man who knows the landscape. I don’t think he can have been here before, but perhaps he’s scoped it out on maps, on Google Earth.
He comes to a halt, just before the final rise. We get out. Lev shoves his handgun into his coat pocket. Then takes his rifle. Checks the wind. It was still earlier, when we stopped in the night. It’s not windy now, but there’s a whisper of breeze running down the valley. Lev feels the wind and makes a small adjustment to his sights.
I take my handgun, feeling like a girl in pigtails. Her first day at school.
We walk up to the top of the hill, but don’t stop. Lev doesn’t want us silhouetted against the light.
We start descending.
The track is worse on this side. Exposed rock wherever water has washed away the surface.
It’s gently freezing. Our breaths make steam ghosts in the air that hang a moment, then disperse. Pines whisper to each other in Old Norse.
There’s only one dwelling visible below us. A rust-red wooden house. Not big. Single-storey. Huddled against the cold. There’s a single outbuilding, a log store perhaps. A patch of dirt with a parked four-by-four.
Beyond the house, the valley flattens into silver. The river coming down from the mountains widens out to a kind of lake, before narrowing again, bolting through a gap in the cliffs that wall off the valley end. The lake is ice. The slopes on the far side forested and steep.
It’s getting lighter all the time.
We work our way farther downhill, until Lev stops us. He pulls out some binoculars. Night-vision things, I assume.
He scopes things out. There’s no light in the house. No smoke in the chimney. No dog in the yard.
I let him do his stuff. I’m starting to feel better. Almost relaxed. As though this stupid plan might actually work.
And because I’m relaxed, I don’t notice that Lev isn’t.
He passes me the glasses.
‘There,’ he says, pointing. ‘Also there, there, and th
ere.’
To start with, I can’t find what he’s pointing me towards. Then I can. Dots that glow a bright green through the glasses. That are otherwise all but invisible in the frost.
I don’t know what they are, what I’m looking at.
‘Is surveillance device. All round house.’
Then I do feel fear. The real thing. A wash of cold that pricks open every capillary. I look at Lev, because this is his world, not mine.
He shrugs. ‘We leave. We kill. We try to capture.’ Lev offers me three options, like a waiter offering a choice of soups. Tomato. Chicken. Minestrone.
‘I don’t know. I mean, isn’t there some way to . . .?’
‘Disable or evade device? Yes, is no problem. Give me six men. Counterterrorist training. Also arctic experience. Easy.’
He looks at me, waiting for an answer.
‘Let me think.’
It feels weird standing out here, in the three-quarter dark, the surveillance cameras in front of us, a professional killer in the house below. A gun in my hand and Lev tooled up beside me.
I ask, ‘If we go in, what are our chances of making a clean capture? No shooting, no blood?’
‘Twenty prozent. Maybe ten. I don’t know this man.’ Lev uses the German word prozent, instead of percent. The odds are terrible in either language. ‘If we continue, is better to start now.’ Lev gestures up at the sky. He doesn’t want it to get any brighter.
My mouth says, ‘We can’t leave.’
I hear the words. Understand why someone would think that way. Jan-Erik Fjeistad is a professional killer. Leaving him untouched means allowing him to continue his bloody trade. If we drive away from here now, someone will pay for that decision with their life.
But I don’t move. I’m a motionless thing in a motionless world.
Lev makes a tiny gesture, asking me to commit. And this time, I say, ‘We can’t leave.’ Not just my mouth. Me. Give a little nod of decision.
‘Okay,’ says Lev. ‘So we try to capture. Otherwise kill.’
Minestrone it is. If they’re out of minestrone, we’ll go for the chicken.
I nod. ‘Okay.’
Love Story, With Murders Page 38
