Love Story, With Murders (14 page)

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 comes 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.’

I nuzzle Buzz’s shoulder with my head. He kisses and releases
me, gently freeing himself from my hand.

We go inside.

Dad doesn’t notice us straight away. The grand opening is in three days’ time and the place is still a blizzard of sawdust and power tools. There are five workmen still on site. The
place looks a long way from ready, but these last stages happen fast.

We stand and watch. The place is smaller than I’d realised. His pole-dancing
clubs, the two of them I’ve seen, are big. Black, shiny, ugly things. Moneymaking machines. Turning girls
into profit. Not prostitution, but it feels almost the same.

This place is classier, smaller, more intimate. It doesn’t repel me.

Dad sees us and breaks into a huge smile. He comes over and has to introduce us to everyone.

‘Kevin, you know David Brydon, do you?
Detective
Sergeant
Brydon, no less. Make sure he doesn’t see your bloody electrical work in that corner or you’ll be doing time
for attempted murder, eh? Murder by electrocution.’

He shouts, he introduces, he charms. He makes sure everyone knows that Buzz is a police officer, not, presumably, because anyone here is doing anything illegal but because Dad has never kicked
his old habits. Disciplines of an
earlier time.

We spend forty minutes admiring the bar. The place looks a mess but, seeing it through Dad’s excited eyes, you can see how nice it’ll become.

We end up in a room upstairs, furnished like an ordinary office, drinking Labatt’s from the bottle. Or rather, Buzz and Dad do. I just fool around with my bottle and sip tiny bits of foam
from the head.

‘Keeping busy? That Mary
Langton business, no further ahead on that, are you? Not that you can tell me, but what a horrible business, eh? Imagine that, if it was your daughter, imagine how
you’d feel.’

I tell them both about going to see Langton’s parents. I’ve told Buzz before, of course, but differently. I say how the mother cried. The father too.

‘You know, I’ve always thought it was funny how we never came
across the girl. I mean, a girl like that in South Wales, you’d think she’d have shown up at our club once
or twice.’

Buzz throws me a sharp look but I keep my face flat. He says, carefully, ‘We interviewed your managers at the time. Inspected payroll records and so on.’

Dad says, ‘Payroll! Trouble is, when you’re the boss, you want everything to be done just so. Every box ticked. So
you tell everyone you want it done right, but then, you know how it
is, the minute your back is turned. A girl doesn’t turn up when she’s meant to. Someone has the flu. The night manager is short handed. What’s he going to do? Probably make a few
calls and pay someone under the table. I said all that to Emrys, in fact. Told him to ask around. They’ll tell him stuff they’d never tell me.’

A thought strikes him.

‘In fact, sod that, I’ll call Em now. Think of that poor girl in someone’s bloody freezer!’

He pulls out his phone and stomps off, incapable of making a phone call while sitting still. It must have been torture for him, the days before mobiles.

I smile at Buzz. He doesn’t know how to read this. Is my dad genuine? Or is this all prearranged? He tries to get
a clue from my expression, but my face is a smooth, clear wall of
nothing.

After a few moments, Dad comes back in. ‘Do you have photos? Of the girl? Mary?’

We say yes. Not on us, but we can call them up from anywhere with Internet access. Dad leaves again. Buzz and I talk about the bar downstairs for a couple of minutes, until he comes back.
‘Let’s go,’ is all he says.

Downstairs
and outside to the Range Rover.

Buzz in the front alongside Dad. Me in the back. Dad starts talking to Buzz about the Wales–Australia rugby match. We lost it apparently. There’s another match against South Africa
in a couple of days. Dad thinks we’ll win. Buzz thinks we’ll lose.

Dad and Buzz are both tall, big men. I am five foot two and hardly big. There’s something about the scale
of the car, the size of the two men in the front, and me all alone in the back
which makes me feel about eight years old. Like I’m swinging my heels on the way to the beach while the grown-ups talk about grown-up things.

The city moves past the windows.

The rain has returned, but not much. Speckles on the windscreen. Buzz and Dad are talking about a rugby player called Jones. I listen
in for a while, but there seem to be at least four different
Joneses in question, which seems excessive, even by Welsh standards.

We leave town, or sort of leave town. Arrive in Saint Fagan’s, a village which just about remains that rather than a mere suburb. Dad turns aggressively onto the Crofft-y-Genau Road, then
right again when we get into the village. Buzz has stopped talking about
rugby. Dad too.

He parks outside one of the houses. White stucco. Modern. Decent-sized garden. Garage.

‘Rhys Jordan, one of my managers,’ Dad tells us.

We all get out.

The rain softens the air. I feel it on my face and, for a moment, have no self-consciousness about it. I’m just someone feeling rain on my face and I like it.

Dad bangs on the door, rings the doorbell and shouts,
‘Hello, Rhys?’ He starts telling us that Jordan probably isn’t in, although there are lights on inside and only a matter
of seconds have passed since he started banging, ringing, and shouting. Then there’s a shape behind the glass, and the door opens. Mid-forties. Black hair thinning on top. Dishevelled, but in
a way that inclines toward handsome rather than repellent. Rhys Jordan seems sleepy,
but I suspect that’s all part of the look.

He sees Dad and says, ‘Oh, Tom, okay, do you want to –’ but Dad doesn’t need to be invited into places, he just needs an open door. We’re already inside. The hall,
then the living room. The living room is larger than I expect and looks all early seventies. A big, curvy orange sofa. A fake zebra skin. A gas fire. A couple of lava lamps. The look
is so
carefully retro, I imagine it’s achingly hip. There’s even a record player and a stack of vinyl by one of the lava lamps.

There’s a woman on the sofa. Pale skin. Long black hair. Immaculately smooth, the way Welsh hair gets only with straighteners. Black sweater over black jeans. Jewellery and red nails.

‘Corinne, isn’t it?’ says Dad, who never gets a name wrong. ‘How are you,
love? Rhys behaving himself, is he? You’ll tell me if he doesn’t. These two ruffians
are police officers, would you believe? Detective Sergeant David Brydon, this one. That’s Fiona, my daughter. You’ve met before, have you? You must have. No? That’s terrible,
Corinne, we must have you over. Look, sweetheart, be a dear, will you, and give us a few minutes? No problem, we just need to talk to Rhys.’

Corinne sways gracefully up from the sofa. She’s going to go upstairs but a quick conference with hubby in the hall sends her out into the night. We see her vanishing down the garden path
in a long coat, her hair wound up inside a woollen hat.

Dad looks at Jordan, who looks at Buzz first, then Dad. I don’t exist, not in this duel of glances.

Dad says, ‘Emrys has spoken to you, has
he?’

Jordan: ‘Yes.’

Then Dad, explosively: ‘Fuck it, man! Why the bloody hell didn’t you come clean? Years back. There’s a dead girl involved here.’

‘Look, Tom, we gave the police –’

‘Don’t give me crap. I never take crap.’ Dad’s eyes are blazing. He is either genuinely angry or giving a master class in how to act it. I can’t tell. But Jordan is
scared. Not pretending, the real
thing. ‘Fi girl, be a love, would you, and –’

But I’m already on the case. There was a laptop closed up beside the sofa. I’m booting it up, waiting for a Wi-Fi connection.

The computer processes slowly. Buzz watches the scene silently.

Then we get a connection. Jordan gives us the password. I log myself into the police portal and bring up photos of Mary Langton. Not the ones of her
dead: the leg, the head, the other bits and
pieces. I like those photos, the head shot especially, but my tastes aren’t widely shared. I bring up the others.

Langton playing hockey. Langton at graduation. A family photo. The one of her at the party wearing her Shoes of Death. A couple of her swivelling around a pole.

Jordan nods.

‘Yes,’ he says. His voice is husky on his first attempt,
then he clears his throat and repeats the word.

Buzz says, ‘Are you able to identify this girl as a dancer at your club?’

‘Yes. Or no, I’m not sure. Waitress probably.’

Dad nods, a micro-nod not intended for general consumption. I suspect he thinks Langton didn’t have the physique required for a dancer in one of his clubs. Her plump hips would have been
fine in a spangly miniskirt,
her breasts would have nestled nicely in their cutaway bikini top. But that uniform was for the waitresses and bar staff. The dancers wore less and earned more.

Buzz goes back to his question. ‘Can you confirm that you employed this girl, Mary Jane Langton, in some capacity – either waitress or dancer – at your club?’

‘Yes. She wasn’t employed, exactly. She was never on the payroll. But
she was on our list of phone numbers to call if we were shorthanded. And . . .’

And
?

Buzz runs through the inevitable follow-up questions. I take notes as he does so.

How often would Langton have been employed on that basis? A couple of times a month, probably. She had a reputation for being a steady worker. Under pressure from Buzz, Jordan’s ‘a
couple of times a month’ changes to
‘pretty often, I suppose.’

How was she paid? In cash, from the till. Payments weren’t large, because waitresses could make up to £120 an evening in tips. On busy evenings, waitresses would be expected to work
for tips alone.

Why was this information not disclosed to the police at the time of the original investigation? Because the payments were under the table. Jordan was worried about
the taxman. Dad had to
interject at this point, ‘Fuck’s sake, Rhys. A dead girl. A
dead
girl and you’re worried about a stupid little tax thing.’ An exchange of glances follows, which I
can’t read.

Back to Buzz. Over what period of time was Langton employed? Jordan offers us one answer – a few months – then corrects that to more like six – then says he doesn’t
know.

Dad asks him
how he can find out. Jordan says he’s not sure, then says there’ll probably be a cashbook somewhere, so they can reconcile till takings to the electronic cash register.
Then he says he’s not sure if a book would still be around from so many years back. Dad gets antsy again and makes Jordan phone someone called Colin at the club. The person called Colin says
he’ll get straight back to us.

The room goes quiet.

Dad is still fuming. Buzz lets him fume. Outside, I see Corinne coming back, a dark shape gliding up to her own front door. I go to intercept her and we stand outside together.

‘Is there a problem?’ she asks.

‘Not really. Rhys withheld some information from a murder investigation and we may want to give him a bollocking, but that’s about the limit of it.’

She smiles. White teeth, red lips.

I ask her if she has a cigarette. She does. We stand there on her own front doorstep, smoking. I don’t usually smoke tobacco, but it feels nice, this.

I ask her what she does. She says, ‘Music production.’ I don’t know what that means, not really.

The phone rings inside the house. There’s a conversation.

Corinne and I talk about what we’re doing
for Christmas. She and Rhys are going to her family in Merthyr. I say, ‘Same here,’ then have to explain my family isn’t in
Merthyr, but in Cardiff.

There’s a crashing sound behind us. Dad yelling. Corinne and I are suddenly keenly aware that my father is furious at, what – her partner? her husband? – in the house behind
us. An awkward silence. Corinne says, ‘They say it’s going to get
a lot colder soon. Freezing, apparently.’ I say, ‘Really?’