Speechless

by Stephen Puleston

  I swirled the dregs of my espresso around the cup. ‘He’s the eldest of the three boys and the one who still feels more Italian than the rest.’

  She cupped a mug of tea and sat back.

  ‘When Nonno Marco died he left the ice cream business to Papà, the café in Aberdare to Uncle Gino and a lump of money to Uncle Franco who started a rock group and toured the world. And there’s the old place in Pontypridd.’

  ‘Really, the Marco Empire.’

  ‘Papà worked hard building the business – two ice cream parlours and a business that supplied supermarkets – he even had a contract with the prison service. Uncle Gino is the lazy brother who spends his time serving toast and milky coffees to the people of Aberdare.’

  ‘Does Uncle Gino still work?’

  ‘Every day and all he does is pine for the old days that have disappeared. He still wants to be Italian, even though the number of Italian families and businesses left in South Wales is small. My father’s worked really hard to get the business where it is. He mortgaged the house up to the limit when he was younger.’

  ‘Does Uncle Gino have kids?’

  I took another sip of the cold espresso. ‘Mary and Jeremy.’

  ‘Do they work in the business?’

  ‘Jeremy does as little as humanly possible. He works in the café occasionally, but mostly sponges off a rich wife for a living.’

  ‘And Mary?’

  ‘She married an estate agent. Lives up in Whitchurch. Two kids.’

  I looked down at the coffee cup and then glanced at my watch, realising that I didn’t have the time for another.

  I stood by the mirror in the hallway and Trish straightened the tie she had chosen for me, which matched the shirt with the light-blue stripe and single cuffs. She ran a dampened finger over my eyelashes, pushing the thick black hair into place. It was my best feature, she would say, although I reckoned I had at least one better. She kissed me on the cheek, lingering to smell the aftershave she’d bought, and I left the flat.

  * * *

  ‘What do we know so far?’

  Cornock had miscued the gel on his hair that morning and a blob had landed at the back of his parting.

  ‘Paddy says it was strangulation.’

  He glanced over at the fish in the tank. ‘Any forensics?’

  ‘Nothing substantive, sir. Paddy says the tongue was cut out before death.’

  Cornock made a look of revulsion before continuing. ‘The second death has changed things of course.’

  I nodded, uncertain what exactly he had on his mind.

  ‘You’ll need some additional resources.’

  I could sense Dave Hobbs lurking in the background.

  ‘I’ll allocate two detectives from the Regional Crime Unit to assist.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, pleased that Hobbs’s name hadn’t been mentioned.

  ‘The press are going to be all over this like a rash, John.’

  ‘No one has contacted me yet.’

  ‘Good, then perhaps it’s early days – I’ll talk to the press office.’

  I made to leave but Cornock had one last thing on his mind.

  ‘I’ve had contact from the Polish embassy. They want to send someone to liaise on the case.’

  ‘Liaise?’

  ‘Home Office has been in touch with the ACC and then it got passed down to me.’

  ‘That was quick work. How did they hear about Leon’s murder?’

  Cornock shrugged. ‘All seems cloak and dagger. Just humour him and keep me informed.’

  * * *

  I’d taken a couple of mouthfuls of tea when the telephone rang.

  ‘Marco.’

  ‘Constable John Williams, sir. I don’t know whether this is something for you but we had a complaint about a break-in at a health club last night. Thing is, sir, nothing seems to have been stolen but my boss saw in the system that you might have an interest in…’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Radyr, sir.’

  I listened as he gave me the details. ‘And when did the call come in?’

  ‘First thing.’

  ‘Has the CSI team been called?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But they haven’t arrived.’

  ‘And why the bloody hell not?’ I was standing by the desk now. ‘Don’t touch anything and treat the place like a crime scene.’

  I slammed the telephone down, shouted for Boyd and left the tea.

  * * *

  It was thirty minutes until we pulled into the car park of the Sunshine Sport and Social club in Radyr. It was part of one of those out-of-town developments that needed to be refreshed or simply knocked down. The building had an old door that needed a sharp tug to open it and wooden windows that were beginning to rot. A heavy smell of chlorine hung in the air.

  A uniformed officer stopped talking to a woman behind a small counter when he saw us and walked over.

  ‘DI Marco?’ he said, introducing himself as the officer I’d spoken to earlier. ‘It’s through here,’ he added, pointing to a door that said Staff Only.

  Since the call on Sunday morning I’d become accustomed to seeing rooms that had been trashed and this locker room was no different. The doors had all been forced open and contents thrown all over the floor. I heard a noise behind me and, turning, saw a woman with long blond hair and a troubled look on her face.

  ‘This is the manager,’ Williams said.

  ‘Maggie Furlong.’ She blinked quickly.

  ‘Who’s been in here?’ I asked, more sharply than I’d intended.

  ‘It might take some time…’

  ‘Now. Please. And nobody leaves the building until I say so.’

  She turned on her heels and left.

  ‘Boyd, can you please find out where the CSIs have got to? And don’t let them give you any shit about operational imperatives.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  The prospect that the crime scene had not been contaminated was remote and that meant the evidence could be questioned and challenged by even the most incompetent barrister. And if we ever got anyone in front of a court then we’d need a lot more than unreliable forensic evidence. I gave the door of the room a kick of despair as I left Constable Williams chewing his lip, with orders not to let anyone in until the CSI team arrived.

  Maggie Furlong still displayed the worried look when I sat down beside her in a windowless room that passed as an office. She pulled her blond hair over her ears and I noticed her pronounced jaw line and thin figure. She was wearing a tracksuit on top of a pale-pink T-shirt.

  ‘I’ll need a full list of all your customers and a list of your employees. Everyone, including cleaners and part-time people employed here. And a list of everyone with a locker here – including their mobile numbers.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Do have any Eastern Europeans working here?’

  ‘One or two. Why do ask?’ There was a reluctance in her voice.

  ‘I’ll need all their details too.’

  ‘They’re good workers. No trouble at all. The girls, in particular, work hard.’

  Furlong sounded guilty about employing Eastern Europeans, as though there was something wrong in doing so.

  ‘Sergeant Boyd will stay until the crime scene investigators arrive. You can give him all the details.’

  She nodded and turned to the computer on her desk.

  I headed for the front door, motioning for Boyd to follow me. Outside, I found the cigarettes in my jacket pocket, and lit up. Lately I’d not been counting my daily consumption as carefully as I should have done, knowing that I had to justify to my mother that it really only was five a day. But that morning I was certain it was my second – I hadn’t had time for any more.

  ‘CSI team are on their way,’ Boyd said.

  ‘Have you heard anything from the BTP?’

  ‘No, boss. Once they’d found Janek they were going to contact me.’

  I drew on the dying embers of the cigarette and then ground it
into the loose gravel under my feet.

  * * *

  Dagmara sat opposite me in the conference room on the first floor we used for witnesses. When we had first met I was convinced she was telling the truth. I’d been doing this job a long time and I could tell when someone was lying. It was in the eyes, in the lips and in the way they held themselves. The experts called it body language. Then there were the hands and the listless answers. I’d done all the management courses on reading body language and knowing when a witness was lying or not. The first interview I’d done after the course was with a drug dealer who sat and stared at me without blinking, sitting on his hands. Watching me. I scribbled down the side of the interview plan whenever I thought he was lying and tried to drag out the interview with long silences. Later, I discovered he had a borderline personality disorder and that no amount of reading his body language would have worked. I went back to the old-fashioned way.

  Trusting my instincts.

  Dagmara had warm, green eyes and a pale complexion that suggested she needed sunshine. Her hair was jet black and it fell past her shoulders down her back. I guessed she was around twenty-five.

  ‘Where do you work?’

  ‘In agency helping immigrants with business set-up.’

  She pushed a bilingual business card over the desk – Welsh and English with a sentence of what I took to be Polish on the back.

  ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘Two years – since coming to Cardiff.’

  ‘Do you like working in the UK?’

  She nodded and then smiled at me. ‘It is much better than Poland. The conditions are better. Back home it is bad.’

  ‘Are you going to go back to Poland?’

  ‘Maybe I stay here and marry an Englishman.’

  ‘Or a Welshman?’ I replied and she gave me another smile. ‘Where had you been on the night of Leon’s death?’ I asked, looking at the initial notes of her evidence.

  ‘I’d been staying with a friend. We go to Polish club. We have too much drinks.’

  ‘Where does your friend live?’

  She flicked back her hair and gave me the details.

  ‘What time did you get back?’

  ‘It was after half past four. I know for sure because I look at my watch.’

  The eye contact was good and the body language relaxed. Unless Dagmara had been on the same management courses as me she was telling the truth. I noticed her high cheekbones that moved upwards when she smiled.

  ‘Tell me what you saw.’

  ‘It was still early.’ She cradled a beaker of water on the desk in front of her before taking a sip. ‘I saw two men leaving the house.’

  ‘Did they see you?’

  ‘I do not think so.’

  ‘Can you describe them?’

  I jotted down the descriptions she gave, occasionally stopping for her to clarify the details about height and weight and hair. There’d been nobody else around at that time of the morning.

  ‘Would you recognise these men again?’

  ‘Maybe. I was far away when I saw them.’

  ‘And what about the car?’

  Like most women she managed only a summary – it was big and blue with four doors. Dagmara didn’t drive but she knew her father had an Opel and she thought the car was a BMW, maybe a Mercedes. She was pleased with herself and surprised me when she gave me the first four digits of the registration number.

  ‘How well do you know Michal?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Was he a friend of yours?’

  Her eyes darted around the room. ‘For sure he was friend. Not good friend but he was from Warsaw same as me. Same as Leon.’

  ‘Who were Michal’s friends?’

  Another shrug before she replied. ‘Leon was good friend of Michal and Pietrek and Gerek. They all work in the factory and clubs.’

  I wrote down their full names and the little details that Dagmara knew.

  ‘And Leon? Did you know him better?’

  We spent the rest of the interview filling in the gaps, colouring in the background details. Dagmara laughed at my lame jokes, smiled at all the right places and occasionally threw me a sideways look with her eyes.

  * * *

  Boyd returned from Radyr, his tie loosened, just enough to be respectable without him looking dishevelled. He gave me a summary of the CSI feedback and complained that the uniformed officer had been awkward when he’d asked for a lift back to Queen Street.

  ‘And did the CSIs find anything?’ I said, knowing what the answer would be.

  ‘Nothing, boss. There were prints all over every door and every surface. And they took away a pile of other material. But…’

  He slumped back in his chair and blew out his cheeks.

  Before I could reply, the telephone rang.

  ‘There’s someone in reception for you.’ The voice sounded tired. More tired than I felt and more jaded than Boyd at that moment in time.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Bloke with a foreign-sounding name. Kam… something or other. One of them East European names.’

  She made it sound exotic as though it was unusual instead of commonplace, now that the EU extended into Eastern Europe.

  ‘Put him into the interview room.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And give him some tea.’

  Boyd straightened his tie, sat up in the chair and looked interested now that we had some real policing to do. It was a short walk to the interview room and when we opened the door Kamil was blowing on the surface of a plastic cup he was clutching in one hand.

  ‘Have you found anything?’ he said.

  He stopped blowing and started chewing the nails of the fingers of his right hand while he looked at me.

  ‘It bad. I am scared.’ He broke off a piece of nail and spat it into his palm.

  ‘We’re doing everything we can,’ I said.

  ‘Has anything happened?’ Boyd asked.

  Kamil shrugged. ‘Nothing, but I need to know what happening. What you are doing.’

  ‘We’re doing what we always do,’ I said.

  ‘Have you found who killed Michal?’

  I crossed my arms and sat back, thinking this was a waste of time.

  ‘Look Kamil, this sort of case takes time. And we don’t know enough yet.’

  ‘You not understand.’ He raised his voice.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There are bad things happen.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He leant forward, his eyes wide open. ‘It is not safe for me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Kamil was on his feet now. ‘You need to keep me safe.’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ I explained.

  ‘You have witness protection. I can help with case. You must help,’ Kamil shouted.

  ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

  ‘You don’t know what going on.’

  ‘I haven’t got time for this,’ I said, pushing the chair away, glancing at my watch and knowing I was late for the post mortem.

  ‘Come back when you want to cooperate.’

  * * *

  Every senior investigating officer had to attend the post mortem in a murder inquiry, and the exhibits officer should have been with me, but he’d been called to a fatal road traffic accident on the motorway so Boyd had to deputise. He stood by my side making no attempt to hide his discomfort. Blood and guts obviously disagree with a man who has to shag on demand in the hope of leaving his mark on society.

  ‘It’s the Fourth Cycle of The Ring,’ Paddy said.

  ‘I prefer the Fifth,’ I said.

  Truth was, I didn’t know the First from the Fifth Cycle, but I did know it was the music of Wagner thundering through the mortuary. It reminded me of Christopher Lee in Lord of the Rings on top of the tower, hair billowing, watching the massing hordes of Orcs attacking the good guys.

  ‘Did you watch the City game against Chelsea?’ he asked, holding
a saw in his right hand.

  ‘Missed it. I had a ticket but the floater got in the way.’

  ‘Bloody good game.’

  The electric saw rattled and slowed as it cut through bone. Boyd put a hand to his mouth and coughed loudly.

  Paddy began dictating into the microphone suspended from the ceiling and settled into a routine. Occasionally he called out some comment of interest.

  ‘Much the same as the other one,’ he said. ‘Healthy and evidence of good muscle tone,’ he added, lifting up the right arm.

  ‘Forces?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe.’

  It would make sense to have ex-forces as bodyguards for the night clubs and for the protection that the massage parlour racket needed. Eastern Europeans guarding Eastern Europeans – neat. And Michal was gay so he wouldn’t be tempted to dip his toe in the water.

  By the time Paddy was finished he’d explained that a single knife wound from a right-handed assailant had killed Leon. His clothes had been stored to one side in a neat pile ready for the forensic lab.

  Leon had fewer belongings than Michal. The contents of the bed-sit had been emptied and catalogued. Apart from his telephone and a television there was little of value. Some Polish paperwork and his payslips, and I had another Polish family to see and explain about their son.

  Once the post mortem was finished I stepped out of the mortuary with Boyd and the fresh air hit us. Thick white clouds scuttled across the sky and we stood, letting the autumn chill refresh our faces. I could see how working in the mortuary could be a one-way ticket to the bar. What was the career progression in pathology? It was always the same: cutting up dead people.

  Chapter 11

  I saw Hobbs and Cornock talking privately, nodding to each other, exchanging confidences. Then Alvine Dix came in and smiled at me; she even showed some teeth. I heard the words John and investigation. I felt warm, as though a blanket had been thrown over me. I raised my hand but my arm was heavy.

  Then I woke up.

  The air in the bedroom was stale and dank. I ran a hand around my neck and felt the perspiration. I kicked off the sheet and blankets and stared over to look at the clock. Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I sat up, stretching, rubbing my hands over my face.

  The dream was still vivid and I pondered whether there was some hidden message from my subconscious. A Jungian analyst had offered to interpret my dreams a couple of years ago, but because I’d arrested her for kicking the shit out of a Freudian analyst when they had a disagreement outside a pub in St Mary Street I doubted her bona fides.