The Score

by Howard Marks

Cat met Pugh’s gaze. ‘A pathological sadist?’

  He pulled his mouth to one side.

  ‘No?’

  He shook his head. ‘This is not recreational torture. More likely someone was trying to extract information from the girls. With a sadist there is hysterical escalation in how the pain is applied, but this seems methodical. Whoever did this may have wanted to know something.’

  There was the sound of someone trying the door handle. Cat looked at Pugh. Knuckles tapped gently on the door. Cat minimised the files, stood up from the desk, found an empty coffee cup on one of the tables, clutched it. If anybody came in she was dropping in on an old friend for a brew. Nothing wrong with that. There was silence, then more knocking. They waited until they heard footsteps retreating. Cat hadn’t been keeping an eye on the time, but she was already past her five minutes.

  He clicked back to the first folder. ‘Toxicology prelims mostly showed nothing unusual internally. Except for this.’ He tapped the screen. ‘Methaqualone.’

  Methaqualone – ludes or Mandrax, the commonest street names – was a pharmaceutical sedative and muscle relaxant. Recreational use often took users to total blackout, with no recollection of events. Cat took in the information on screen. The lab’s logo and contact details were at the top of the page. She looked carefully at the lists of blood, urine and hair tests. None of the more usual drug categories showed strongly positive. Some cannabinoids found in hair samples – the same would be true of countless young people – but the traces were not present in large quantities.

  Cat was ready to pull back, having seen all the material she expected to, but Pugh had put a third folder on the desktop at the beginning. It sat ominously at the end of the row.

  ‘This is?’

  ‘You’re the copper, Cat, you tell me.’

  She clicked the file and saw autopsy notes on the body of an unidentified girl found at a landfill site in Stratford, East London, a year previously. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition, but she could see why the trauma cross-referencing search had flagged it up. The pattern matched the mine bodies, even down to the serrations of the jump leads used on the breasts.

  ‘That case was caught last year by one of the Met’s North London Murder Squads,’ Pugh said, ‘and it remains open.’

  Cat checked the notes. The Met’s investigation hadn’t got far. The body had been found naked, but a tongue stud had led to a tattoo parlour in Tower Hamlets. The owner remembered fitting the item to a girl living nearby. A search of her room had turned up no real leads on her identity. She had paid her landlord in cash, had never given a real name. The flat had been thoroughly cleaned out, presumably by her assailants. Some cash and Mandrax were found under the floorboards, leading the team to suspect she was part of a drug gang. After that the trail had gone dead.

  As Pugh shuffled uneasily, Cat clicked into the NCIS and the drug-related killings database. The information uploaded was the same but there were photographs of the drugs found. One of a transparent baggie with nine Mandrax in it, another a close-up of one of the pills.

  She pulled the second image up to maximum size and stared at it silently. To Emyr she knew it looked just a plain white pill with a linear score in the centre where it could be broken. But Cat was trained to see more than that.

  ‘Can I get a print of this?’

  ‘Come on now, Cat.’

  ‘OK.’

  She stared hard, memorising the image, then closed everything up on the screen. She acted the zipping of her mouth. Pugh double-checked that the desktop was clear, shut the computer down then moved their chairs back into their previous positions. He exited first, making sure the coast was clear, ushered Cat along the short passage to the waiting area. Behind her eyes, her mind felt tight and throbbing. They said goodbye.

  The train comes.

  She gets on, attracting glances. They don’t even know what she’s going to London for. They don’t know the dream that is just beginning to tip over into reality.

  She finds her seat. Headphones on. Listening to the song she’s going to cover.

  But today, unusually, she can’t find focus. Can’t get into it or anything else on her iPod. So she leaves the headphones on but stops the music. Wet fields slide past the window. Dripping trees, slow moving rivers, incurious cows.

  Why can’t she feel these things? The greatest day of her life. The start of everything.

  The fields make way for industrial sheds and those new brick housing developments that look as though they’ve been clipped together from prefabricated parts.

  She’s been to London before, but not often. At the station, she looks for the cab rank and climbs into a taxi.

  She tells the driver the address.

  ‘You sure, love?’ says the driver. ‘There’s nothing down there.’ She’s sure, yes. She says as much. His eyes catch her in his rear-view mirror. Friendly eyes.

  As they get closer to their destination, she sees what he means. This isn’t Soho. It isn’t Notting Hill. It’s not some cool backstreet full of indie film production companies and graphic designers. She falls silent.

  Then the cab stops. She has clutched her money in her hand the whole way and the notes are sweaty. She peels one off. Gives him just a little more than the fare on the meter and says, in what she hopes is a jaunty way, ‘Keep the change.’

  9

  CAT SAW THOMAS before he saw her. He was standing in the drizzle by her bike, kicking his foot at the back wheel and smoking. As she got closer she smelt the booze on him and noticed how tired he looked and the sweat stains on his collar. She knew then he had already seen the pictures of the girls and they had got to him. She guessed he’d probably been in Cardiff when they’d spoken earlier, checking up on the pathology.

  Thomas acknowledged her with a nod, but didn’t seem to want to talk at first. He led the way back along Museum Avenue, making for Plas Sant Andreas and, beyond that, the strip of pubs on Salisbury Road. He went into the first they came to. Inside it had been modernised to attract a young crowd. The ceiling was high and some tables were arranged in front of long benches.

  Thomas gave the place a disdainful look then headed straight to the bar. A sign over the bar offered ‘All-day Happy Hour’ specials of cocktails and Bacardi Breezers. He motioned at Cat to get a seat. She ignored him, stood at his shoulder as he waited behind the line of punters that stretched along the bar.

  Cat looked around. The modernising conversion had been a bodge and the place still looked tatty, with cracked plaster overhead and the mean, stained bar itself, retained to cut costs. And the new look had not been sufficient to see off the old crowd, the strip of all-day drinkers at the bar were young townie hard cases while silent older drinkers killed time alone in what nooks remained.

  She carried the drinks over to a long table and Thomas flopped down beside her, pushing the change into his pocket. He picked up a beer mat, leaned it against another. ‘I’m thinking whatever bastard did this was not expecting us to find the bodies.’ She’d had the same thought herself. ‘A couple more days,’ Thomas continued, ‘and that whole place was due for inclusion in the army’s target range. You saw the signs, it was getting blasted. We’d never have found them.’

  There was a scuffle and a bit of finger-pointing at the bar. A couple of lads got off their stools. Thomas turned abruptly, ‘Bloody lowlifes!’

  A few faces scowled angrily at him from the bar.

  Cat was surprised. Thomas was aggressive, but he usually managed to keep a lid on it. Their strange relationship meant she somehow enjoyed this. It made her feel more in control and it calmed her down. She picked up her bottled water and took a long sip, shook her head at him.

  The drinking at the bar grew fiercer. Three youths in jeans and Cardiff City football tops were downing shots. They roared and slammed their glasses down, congratulating themselves and ordering another round.

  Cat put her bottle back on the table. Thomas had shuffled along the padded bench until his t
high was squeezed against hers. This was a development; he had been relatively respectful in Tregaron, even though she had been on his patch. Cat thought his interest might have cooled. The pressure on her leg meant he’d just been hiding it better.

  She ignored him. A shadow fell across them. Cat noticed that Thomas was already looking up at one of the football boys who had been taking shots at the bar.

  ‘Pigs, aren’t you?’ said the kid.

  Thomas stood up. He wasn’t quite as tall, but the expression on his face made up for the imbalance.

  ‘Your sort aren’t welcome. There’s no grasses here,’ the boy continued.

  Thomas gave a short, sharp bark of laughter. ‘Do us a favour.’

  Thomas sidestepped the younger man’s charge but left his foot in. The lad stumbled over it, fell against the table sending the drinks onto the floor. Thomas reached down, hauled the boy up by his scruff. The lad shot out a fist. Thomas pulled his head back, avoiding the blow. Anger and drink made his opponent’s movements wild, uncontrolled, but Thomas was losing his cool too. He smacked the lad like he meant it. Cat glanced over to his friends, raised her eyebrows in caution.

  She got between Thomas and the kid, gave him a chance to stop without losing face. He took it, knowing she’d saved him a kicking, but still puffing out his chest. He moved off with a theatrical show of reluctance.

  ‘Idiot,’ she snapped at Thomas, steering him away from their table towards the door.

  Out into the fresh air she waited until his breathing returned to something like normal. Then while he stood outside, she went back in and got water. He drank it without dispute. He knew he’d been out of order.

  He said nothing, just looked at her with ‘oh yes?’ eyes.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I want you to see something.’

  She walked him round to the Drug Proactive Unit. Using her swipe card she went in at basement level. The car park was almost empty. There was no sign of Kyle’s Subaru. That was good. Cat didn’t feel like handling the strange dynamics of that particular relationship right at this moment.

  She took the stairs up to the presentation room on the first floor, Thomas tramping heavily behind. As she had expected, the room was empty. She drew the blinds and flicked the lamp over the lectern. Next she stood over the terminal until the screen was projected on the wall.

  She used the screen divide function. First she went into the NCIS file, and called up the data relating to the girl found on the landfill site. She found a photograph of one of the Mandrax pills recovered at the girl’s flat and dragged it onto the screen, so it filled the left side of the wall. It loomed over the room like the image of a distant planet surface. Thomas, she could tell, was studying the image carefully.

  ‘You want a quick Mandrax refresher?’ she asked.

  Thomas nodded. ‘Better had. Not really a big thing in Tregaron.’

  Cat went into the NCIS file on Mandrax and pulled up the video introduction they used in police drug training. The package was given by an academic from Berkeley. Period flavour was provided by a backdrop of West Coast discotheques and buggy cars. The basics were as she remembered. Mandrax – street name mandies or ludes – had been a popular prescription tranquilliser. Through the 1970s illegal use had been at epidemic proportions. Comprised of four parts Methaqualone, one part diphanhydramine, it had been a potent aphrodisiac and was highly addictive when smoked. Then in the early 1980s a number of deaths had triggered an international clamp-down. After Roche and the other manufacturers had agreed to cease production, supplies of the drug had dried up almost overnight.

  The package ended with a picture of a grinning Roman Polanski. Before it had been banned, the drug had achieved notoriety when the director used it on a thirteen-year-old model he had sex with at a private Hollywood party.

  ‘It’s a street drug with a kind of retro feel, if that makes sense. It’s got a sort of Beach Boys era California vibe, if you like. Most people, if they’ve heard of it at all, connect it with Roman Polanski.’

  ‘Right,’ Thomas said, his voice still slurred. ‘I remember all the jokes. What goes into thirteen twice and so on.’

  Cat clicked on the chart for Mandrax seizures in the last ten years. Each was shown on the map as a pill icon. In the margin were links to photographs of the drugs seized and persons charged.

  ‘Notice anything?’ Cat said.

  ‘It’s been creeping back.’

  ‘But not in any great volume.’

  She moved the arrow by date over each of the seizures. For the first five years the screen was blank. No seizures in the UK at all. Then the first seizure had been the million pills in the canoes at the marina bust of Morgan’s gang. Six months later, twenty pills had been recovered after a rave raid in North London. There had been several small seizures the next month at club busts in Greenwich and the Manchester area. No one had been charged. After that the nine pills found at the dead girl’s Tower Hamlets flat were logged. Several small seizures in single figures had followed, mainly at raves and festivals. Again, no one had been charged or cautioned.

  She clicked over to the European chart. It was almost blank. There were a couple of isolated incidents at free parties, one in Hamburg, the other in Northern Italy. The police had only realised later what they had seized and no one had been arrested.

  She went back to the UK map. ‘Notice anything about the timeline here?’

  ‘Everything post-dates the Morgan bust.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s more.’

  She filled the screen with close-ups of all the pills seized. On the left side of the wall still hung the giant image of the Tower Hamlets pill. Part of Cat’s job at the Drugs Proactive Unit was inputting this data. Her employers had reckoned that a cop fighting trank withdrawal shouldn’t be given any task more taxing than computer bashing. They were right enough to think so but, though the work had been as boring as crap, she’d come to know her subject in a new way.

  ‘Look at this,’ she commented.

  ‘I’m not getting it,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Look hard. They’re all the same batch as Morgan’s. Press, grain and scoring all match.’ She pulled up image after image, showing the tiny indications suggestive of identical manufacture. ‘The only difference is that the Tower Hamlets pills were wholes, the rest are halves.’

  Thomas sat forward, looking puzzled now. Cat did a quick search, and pulled up the press photos of the incineration of the drugs from the Morgan bust. They were the same pictures she had seen at Kyle’s. She kept a link open to the footage of the bust itself.

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t make sense. All the lab equipment that made Morgan’s stash was destroyed after the bust. How can they be the same? We know the canoes were loaded at the lab then taken directly to the marina. No leakage. The million pills from the marina were destroyed following strictest protocols. They were counted and photographed by independent observers before being incinerated. None went sideways.’

  Thomas said nothing as he took in the implications of this.

  To make her point, Cat magnified the shots of the incineration. They showed tests being done by independents on each package as it went into the incinerator. The drugs that had been seized were the same drugs that had been destroyed. Further interior shots showed the confiscated goods, all the packages clearly visible in transparent plastic. The cream-coloured tablets and powder showed through. Kyle and some of the coppers who had been present at Morgan’s arrest stood by, watching as the parcels were counted, weighed then fed into the reinforced glass door of the incinerator.

  ‘There is one other possible explanation,’ Cat said. ‘Remember that Kyle’s marina bust only recovered half the drugs involved. The first ten canoes were never found, the drugs never located. Now, everyone assumed, and Morgan among others confirmed it, that the whole thing was basically about ecstasy, or MDMA to give it its proper name. There were well-attested reports of large amounts of MDMA coming onto the market at around that time
, and no reports of any increase in Mandrax. So all the evidence pointed to the missing drugs – the stuff in the first ten canoes, in other words – as involving ecstasy and nothing else. We assumed that the Mandrax was just a side-show, an experiment – to test the market. If it had worked, they’d have made more. To be profitable they needed economy of scale, a real market out there for it and there wasn’t one.’

  ‘But you’re thinking maybe all that is wrong. Maybe some of those ten lost canoes were also Mandrax.’

  Cat brought the UK chart back, the pill icons showing the seizures.

  ‘This pattern suggests small samples, freebies. Someone trying to build a market, but build a market on a national scale. They wouldn’t be bothering to do that unless they had a lot to sell. Maybe there was Mandrax in the other canoes.’

  She knew Mandrax could not be wholesaled like Ecstasy. It was a less liquid asset. But the E market had been softening for a while. The Vietnamese gangs had been knocking out adulterated product at bargain-basement prices. Suppliers were looking for alternative product with better margins. Even if only half the canoes had been Mandrax and the sale price conservative, there was a potential net profit there of about twenty-five million.

  She told Thomas the figure, and he did a double-take. He came alongside her and stared at the chart. Since the marina bust all the seizures had indeed been small and at raves, clubs and festivals. Whenever the police arrived everyone had dumped their drugs so at each incident there had been hundreds of different pills recovered and no arrests made. It was a pattern he was familiar with. Such events provided an environment where drugs could be tested while the larger suppliers stayed out of sight.

  But none of this was necessarily helpful from a police perspective. There were thousands of people who had been at the clubs and raves where the seizures had taken place and many had given false IDs. Most were untraceable and there was no guarantee, even if they could locate suppliers, that they would know anything about the Tower Hamlets pills, the ones that connected to the three dead girls.