Love Story, With Murders (2 page)

Typically, Watkins is in the lead car. Typically, she’s the first out. Typically, there’s a black-jacketed army spreading out behind her. Taping off the crime scene. Starting to talk
to neighbours. Getting the
removals van moved to a police pound, to safeguard our chain of evidence. Starting to interview the removals men. Separately, so their statements can be compared. And all
the time, phone and radio constantly on the go back to Cathays Park.

I’m fooling around on my phone, trying to keep my head down, but I can hear Watkins criticizing the Scene of Crime boys for their slowness. Probably for
other things too, when she gets the
chance. Lack of moral fibre. Inattention to detail. Off-centre trouser creases. Having once smiled.

Condon also gets lacerated for something. I don’t know what, but he stalks past me looking ashen. Then my turn.

Watkins – severe black suit, white shirt, the uptight-lezza look – beckons me over.

‘You entered the house. Why?’

I give her my full-beam
smile. One of the good things about my crazy brain: these stupid mind games don’t particularly faze me, so I quite like playing them.

‘We didn’t know if there was further evidence inside the property, and if so whether that evidence was appropriately secured. I made it my business to check.’

‘The interior of the house is a crime scene and –’

‘I touched nothing. I didn’t want to confuse
the picture for the SOCOs. I assume you noticed the shoe?’

DI Watkins likes that. She likes it the way a snake would like it if a vole popped up to ask if anyone was hungry. Strike, swallow, digest.

She smiles at me, so I smile back. Sharing the joy.

‘Did I notice the shoe?’ This said slowly, lingeringly.

‘Yes, ma’am. The leg we found was wearing a shoe.’

‘Well, yes, I did
take a look at the leg, and my twenty-eight years of experience in the CID helped me notice, even through the polythene, that –’

‘Sorry, ma’am. I wasn’t clear. That shoe is not a contemporary style.’ I show her my phone and the pictures I’ve just downloaded from the Internet.
‘I’ve only had a few moments, but I’d place the shoe as being approximately 2001, 2002. That suggests any crime could
be as much as ten years old. I assume that you’ve got
people back at Cathays searching for investigations where no body was ever fully recovered. You might wish to direct those team members to focus their efforts on the first few years of the last
decade.’

I give her my loveliest smile. We’re standing in the property’s little forecourt and the last of the sun is going down in a boil of
cloud to the northwest. Watkins wants to bite my
head off, but she can’t. Worse still, she has to stand there and let me watch as she calls Cathays to relay my information.

Behind us, I can see other cars start to darken the street. Flash photography. The print media are normally first to these things, but this story could be big enough to attract a film crew
before long.

Watkins rings
off. She’s seen what I’ve seen. I don’t know what her take on it is. No senior officer is indifferent to media attention. Some love it. Some loathe it. I
don’t know Watkins well enough to know which way she swings. But even though her attention is refocusing on the press guys, she hasn’t forgotten that she needs to be horrible to me.

She tells me, icily, that that was useful information
about the shoe and, since I was obviously alert to such things, would I kindly go to back to Cathays to join the research team there. I
could present a summary of our conclusions to her in the morning.

She thinks she’s been a pain in the arse, because I’ll have to work half the night. I’m feeling happy, because I wanted to do that anyway, and go skipping off to find Condon so
he can run
me down into town.

I find him on the road outside. He’s talking to one of the guys, who wants to know when he’s going to get his van back. Condon is handling the situation the way we’re trained
to, but I can see that he’s still vibrating internally from his encounter with the Ice Queen.

‘Hey, Adrian.’ I pat his upper arm in what’s meant to be a supportive but professionally acceptable
way. To the clearance guy, I say, ‘You’ll get your van back when
DI Watkins says. And she’s a bitch, so it could be a while. Sorry.’

The guy laughs at my frankness, and I continue into the laughter. ‘When you found the leg, where was it stored, exactly? I mean, in the freezer, I know, but lying exactly where? At the
front, back? Deep down? On top?’

When he understands my question,
the clearance guy – who has a name it turns out, Geoff – is helpful. The leg was lying along the back wall of the freezer, not quite at the bottom
but almost.

‘And neatly?’ I ask. ‘Like it had been tidily packed away, not leaving any gaps? Or more like it had just been dropped in a hurry?’

‘Oh no, quite tidy, like. If you, if . . .’

Geoff is turning green, not that I can really tell
in the ebbing daylight and the first sodium glow of the streetlamps. There are, strictly speaking, two reservoirs at Llanishen. The smaller,
upper reservoir still has water in it, but the other one – the one people still mean when they talk about
the
reservoir – was drained earlier this year. Drained, fenced off,
studded with black and yellow security notices. Some company wants to redevelop
the site as upmarket housing, which I wouldn’t mind except that Llanishen used to shelter grass snakes and
toads and slowworms and waxcap fungi, and I like all those things more than tarmac and luxury homes.

Skins like silver pebbles and a soft slither into the dark.

I tell Geoff not to worry, that he’s been helpful. Take his phone number just in case, then cadge a lift from Condon,
telling him I’ll just be a moment.

I run back up to the house. My version of running, I mean, which doesn’t always involve actual running. Back to the garage. A SOCO photographer is there, wearing one of those white
polypropylene suits with elasticated hood and cuffs, setting up lighting.

I ask him to give me some dates from the packages still in the bottom of the freezer. He’s not sure
whether to be helpful, because somewhere along the way he’s eaten a training
manual which is telling him to do things in a different order. I ask him if he wants me to pass his professional reservations along to DI Watkins and he decides to get helpful, bending down into
the freezer with a torch.

As he does so, I inspect the packages lying loose on the floor. Not all of them are dated,
but some are. There’s a whole pile of thin little freezer bags of apple compote, dating from
2005. Some butcher’s packages dated 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. One package of I’m not sure what is dated 1984, but in such wavering handwriting that I’m inclined to suspect the
old lady’s mind had wandered.

The SOCO pulls out of the freezer. He has a mask on, which I don’t, but even so it must
have stunk in there.

‘Can’t see ’em all, and I won’t move anything till we’re done with the imaging. But what I can see – oldest is ’96, newest maybe 2002. Possibly 2003,
because the ink has run and . . .’ He shrugs. ‘We’ll know once we can start moving them and get a proper look.’

I take some pictures of the dead girl’s shoe with my phone, and the SOCO promises to email some better-quality
shots through to me when he’s got to that stage.

I give him the thumbs-up and head back to Condon, ready for my ride.

Home.

I asked Condon to bring me here, not Cathays. If it’s going to be a long weekend, I might as well get ready. Swap skirt for jeans, shoes for my most comfortable pair of boots. Jumper. Put
a toothbrush and toothpaste into my bag, along with a change of knickers and tights. I think about eating, but I’m not hungry, so I don’t.
Think about taking a shower, but can’t
be bothered.

I don’t put any lights on. Just let the house grow dark around me, seeing what I need to from the streetlamps outside.

Somebody cut a young woman into pieces and put her left leg into a suburban freezer in Cyncoed.

Up by the reservoir, it’s as dark as it is here. The voles and the snakes and the toads and the bats are either going
to bed or coming out to hunt. And we’re coming out to hunt too.
Me, Watkins the Badge, and the might of South Wales’s finest.

For me, these things aren’t only about finding the killers, but about giving peace to the dead. It’s not primarily a question of justice. The dead don’t care about that. The
murder investigation, arrest, and conviction are just part of the funeral rite, the final
acts of completion. Gifts I bring the dead in exchange for the peace they bring me.

The peace of the dead, which passeth all understanding.

I’m moving slowly now. No reason. Just waiting for my energies to gather. When they do, I find a cereal bar in my dark and silent kitchen and start chomping it on the way to my car.

I should drive straight to Cathays. I
do
drive straight to Cathays,
only when I get there, I find myself driving straight on through, over the river to Pontcanna.

Big Victorian houses. Over-ornamented. High-ceilinged and respectable. I stop at a house in Plasturton Gardens. Home of Piers Ivor Harris, MP. One of his homes, I should say. He also has a house
in Chelsea in London and a place in France.

I’m in luck. His car is here, a silver Jag. His wife’s
car too, a cream and black Mini. Lights on inside the house, curtains drawn.

I wander up and down the road, noting down numberplates. Most of them I recognise – this isn’t exactly the first time I’ve done this, to put it mildly – but some of which
are new. Of the new ones, none look immediately interesting. The cars either not posh enough or not parked close enough to the house to suggest
that they’re connected with the Harrises. I
note the registrations anyway.

Then back to my car. Then up to Whitchurch. Same thing again. The object of my interest: Galton Evans, an agricultural insurance guy, who made a packet of money ten years ago when he sold his
business to a private equity buyer, then decided to devote the rest of his life to becoming a major-league arsehole.

That’s my theory anyway. Maybe Evans is a nice guy. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never met him.

I don’t think I’ve got anything useful from the trip, but that’s why you have to do these things as often as you can. Fishing takes patience. One of my fortes.

I wonder about hitting some of my other targets, but my mood has changed and Cathays is calling me now. I send a text to DS David Brydon, David
‘Buzz’ Brydon, my official-as-anything
boyfriend, to let him know where I am and what I’m up to. Truth is, he’ll already have heard about the case and will know that I’ve probably been sucked into it, but I’m
working hard to be Girlfriend of the Year and good girlfriends text their boyfriends to tell them about changes of plan, so that’s what I do too. It’s how we behave on Planet
Normal.

I zoom back into Cathays, ready for a long night hunting corpses.

At four in the morning, I get my corpse.

Mary Jane Langton. Disappeared August 2005. A student at Swansea University, twenty-two years old. Reported missing. Media hoohah. Investigated as well as these things can be. No leads of
consequence. The case never closed. Rhiannon Watkins the officer in charge of that one too.

I know Langton’s
our girl because one of the photos we have of her shows her at some kind of party. Slightly plump, short dress, reasonably good looks, blonde hair. And the shoes. Pink
suede things with round toes and narrow wedge heels. She probably bought them two or three years before her death. Liked them so much, she wore them through the passing fashions. Is wearing them
still, in death and beyond.
In a stinking freezer by an empty reservoir.

I’m the last person in the office. The other people researching went home around midnight. Late enough that even Watkins couldn’t reprimand them for slacking. The ceiling lights are
off, so it’s just me and a desk light and the tiny rectangular LEDs of phones and printers, glimmering like fireflies in the dark.

I should tell someone about
Langton, but I flip rapidly through the file first. An MA in English literature. She was working on a dissertation on Dylan Thomas. A good Welsh choice for an English
girl. Parents lived in Bath. Him, a solicitor. Her, a charity worker. Two siblings, a brother and a sister.

Langton’s files showed nothing strange. A bit of dope found in her student room. An ordinary number of boyfriends.
Okay grades as a student. Not brilliant, but good enough. Thinking about
maybe a career in publishing, but nothing definite. Just a girl who liked shoes.

Except for one thing.

The press reports we have on file, and the notes from our own investigation, state that Langton supported herself as a student through ‘exotic’ dancing.

A stupid phrase, that. For one thing, you can hardly
get less exotic than a slightly plump English girl cavorting round a scaffolding pole. For another, it’s not about dancing. It’s
about flesh, men and money. The files includes photos of Langton as a dancer. A tiny spangled mini-skirt in one picture. A sequinned bikini in another. A grin on her face in both, cow-toothed, more
schoolgirlish than sexy.

Fuck.

This is the nightmare scenario,
the one thing I hoped would never happen in my policing career. Something I stupidly thought wouldn’t ever happen and consequently don’t know how to
handle now that it has.

Fuck.

I want to get up, leave, go for a drive, give myself room to think, but I don’t have the time. If I were at home, I’d go for a quick smoke in the garden to clear my head, but
that’s not an option here.

There probably isn’t a problem, I tell myself. And I’m right. There
probably
isn’t. Trouble is, there
possibly
is, and if so the problem is of a magnitude
that’s off-the-scale bad. So, even though I told myself I would never do this, I find myself picking up a phone and calling home.