Love Story, With Murders (33 page)

She’s good at these things. Certain and in command. There are six vehicles now, and more than two dozen cops.

We leave Cathays before dawn. Drive
back down to Cardiff Docks, then across the bay. I’m in a Transit van with Watkins and two uniforms whom I know by sight and by name, but no more.

There’s not much conversation.

When we hit the end of the bay, our own vehicle and a patrol car make the turn down into Penarth. The other four vehicles continue on. We creep down the frozen roads into the sleeping town.
Headlights shining
office. An occasional breeze sends a scurry of ice crystals across the road. Between the tyre tracks, there’s a hard ramp of snow and ice.

Penarth. Marine Parade. You can’t see the sea from here, but you feel it. Cold waves nagging at cold sand, cold rocks.

Six fifteen. Prothero’s house. Pulled back from the road, a gravelled driveway in front.

We sweep straight in. Headlights shining
full-beam on the front door. Partly for lighting. Mostly to disconcert and frighten the occupants. There are six of us all told. Four in uniform. Myself
and Watkins not.

The knocker is a big heavy cast-iron thing. Lion’s head, or something like it. One of the uniforms smashes down on it. Not once but repeatedly. A din that, briefly, becomes the centre of
the world. The only thing that
matters.

Watkins stands back. She’s on the phone to the leader of the other team. They’ve gained entry to Barry Precision. Bolt cutters will have been used to cut the chain guarding the
property, then a steel ram used to gain access to Barry Precision itself. ‘The Enforcer’. That’s what those rams are called. The boys love ’em.

The uniforms are having another go with the knocker and
beginning to yell ‘Police’ and flash torchbeams around, when the hall lights go on. The front door opens.

Idris Prothero stands there – I recognise him from the photos I’ve studied. In a dressing gown and half asleep, but also composed. A kind of silvery indignation.

The uniforms don’t put cuffs on him. We will if we have to, but for now we’re not making arrests. If Prothero comes with
us voluntarily, that’s good enough. We have a search
warrant too, however. We’ll enforce that all right.

Watkins flashes her warrant card. Prothero takes it. Steps inside, puts the porch light on, studies the card, returns it.

He didn’t care about the card, though. He’s just staging a little show for us. The Idris Prothero I’m-not-flustered show. He’s about five foot eleven. Lean. Tanned.
Handsome too, I suppose, though I don’t see him that way.

He’s a wanker and I want him in jail.

He agrees to come with us.

A uniformed officer escorts him upstairs, where he’ll be allowed to dress. He won’t be left alone for a minute, not even to pee. Prothero’s wife – Millie – appears
briefly on an upstairs landing. Frightened. Pretty. Wifely. That’s what money buys you. The kind
of woman who plays the part of loving wife so fully, she’s forgotten it’s all a
part. Above her, one floor up, two moon shapes appear, peering over the banisters. Prothero’s kids, I assume. He’s twice married. This is his second brood.

There’s an odour of fear in the house. One we sought to generate.

Watkins doesn’t notice any of this, or if she does, she doesn’t care. The remaining
officers are ordered to search the house top to bottom, including attic and outbuildings. Almost
immediately, they locate two mobile phones, an iPad, a couple of laptops, a desktop, some boxfiles, a games console, but all those things were left hanging around in plain sight, in the sort of
places you’d expect them. Prothero might be stupid enough to leave incriminating materials there, but he
might not.

Watkins snappishly supervises the operation. I’m left out of things. Possibly because Watkins knows I’m still in a fairly delicate state. More likely because she thinks I
wouldn’t be much use anyway.

Prothero is dressed by now and downstairs again. Grey suit. Pale blue shirt. No tie.

Watkins has a search warrant and orders the removal of the electronics and the papers.
The standard play for someone in Prothero’s position is to argue with the warrant, demand a lawyer,
start negotiating over precisely what is being removed and what not. He does none of those things. Just says, with a half smile, ‘I suppose I can use the coffee machine?’

He can. Goes into his gleaming kitchen. Polished wooden boards, hand-fired cream tiles. Coffee for six. Him, his wife,
the four of us. Tiny white espresso cups with a blue pattern on the lip.
Millie Prothero wears a bathrobe over a long cotton nightdress and keeps flitting in and out of the room. I’m not sure if that’s to look after the kids or to stress over whether the
uniforms are grinding dirty snow into the pure wool carpets on her living room floor.

Watkins downs her coffee in a single blast. Woman
has a throat made of fireboard. She leaves to supervise the removal of Prothero’s effects. I’m left in the kitchen guarding him. He
looks at me with as much interest as he’d look at a new secretary at work. A vague sexual curiosity. Nothing else.

I look at him like he’s an arms dealer who murdered Ali el-Khalifi, caused the suicide of Mark Mortimer, and who almost murdered me. A cold sense
of anger. Nothing else.

He looks at his watch and sighs.

But my anger is tempered with uncertainty. I strongly doubt that Prothero is innocent of arms smuggling, but what about what happened to me? I try asking,
Did this man order my death?
It
seems highly probable that his firm, his arms dealing, sent Hamish and Olaf up into the hills to find that laptop. Given his choice of messenger,
the murder of any police officer they happened to
encounter probably lay well within their rules of engagement. But my question is more specific than that. What precisely took place? Was there an explicit instruction, a phone call, from this man
to Hamish and Olaf, saying ‘Kill the copper’? And if so, did he make that call with this same calm demeanour, wearing this same elegant suit, this
same air of slight impatience? Is
that, in fact, how arms dealers conduct their business?

I don’t know, but in a way, it’s a side issue. His arms dealing has created plenty of corpses already. Not in the U.K., but abroad. Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran. How much blood is there
in this impeccable kitchen? How many bones beneath these polished floors?

He says, ‘Will this take very much longer?’

I don’t answer. It takes as long as it takes.

There’s a minor commotion out in the hallway. I stand where I can see and listen better. One of the uniforms has just found a stack of boxed-up mobile phones in the wardrobe of an upstairs
bedroom. Eight boxes. All unopened. Eight cheapie phones.

Watkins marches from the living room to view the haul. She reaches for her phone, summons
another six officers. Then she does a thing which I’ve seen her do, but no one else. A kind of
180-degree rotation of the head, stare fixed outward, like a steel spoke aimed at anything in her path. The steel gaze stops when it reaches me. She jabs her chin in my direction, her hand at
Prothero.

‘Cathays,’ she says.

And I nod.

‘
Eight
mobile telephones.’

Mervyn Rogers has one of the boxes in front of him. He’s broken the seal, opened it up, is playing with the little gadget in front of him. It looks small in Rogers’s hands. Like the
buttons would be too small for his big fingers to operate.

‘You like phones? My daughter has two.’

We’re forty minutes
into the interview. So far our interview tapes have recorded Rogers mostly, and me occasionally, asking questions. Prothero answered questions about name, address, and
so forth with swift, clipped accuracy, and that’s about as much progress as we’ve made.

He phoned for a lawyer from the car on the way into Cathays. A London man, from a big firm of solicitors. The lawyer promised to come
immediately, but that’s still three hours’
driving, even if the roads were okay, which they’re not.

And in the meantime, when we ask a question, Prothero mostly just smiles at us or waves a hand, as if languidly batting the issue away. It’s a gesture he probably uses a lot.

The formula we’re required to use by the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act is intended to give us a little
leeway. Right at the outset of the interview, Rogers said, speaking
directly into the microphone, ‘You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do
say may be given in evidence. Is that clear?’

Prothero gave us one of his I’m-richer-than-you-are smiles, then leaned forward and
said, also speaking directly into the microphone, ‘I’m perfectly happy to answer every one
of your questions, but given that I’m suspected of what sounds like a very serious offence, I’d prefer to have a lawyer present throughout. You’ll understand that, I’m
sure.’

Then leaned back and asked for coffee.

Rogers slams away at his current line of enquiry.

There is no innocent reason
for Prothero to have these phones. Gangs, drug dealers, and serious-fraud-type criminals have modernised their communications. None of them would consider saying
anything incriminating on a landline, and most are exceptionally careful about texts and emails. The gold-standard form of criminal communication is disposable mobile phones. You use them for a day
or two – perhaps only a call or two
– then ditch them. There’s a kind of organisational complexity in making sure that people have the numbers they need to reach you, but
that’s it. Manage that, and you have an untraceable, untappable communications network.

I decide it’s highly improbable that Hamish and Olaf chose to kill me without getting instructions first. Apart from anything else, they’d have wanted to confirm a fee.
So they
rolled up the hill to get the laptop, found they were too late, and drove far enough down again to get a phone signal. Called Prothero on whichever phone number he’d given them. Got their
orders. Drove back to do the deed.

Quite likely, these phones almost killed me.

Quite likely, the man sitting opposite me ordered me dead. I think of myself standing in the snow and the starlight.
My feet in a basin of white fire as I froze, slowly, almost to death.

Rogers beats away at the phones. Gets nothing. Literally nothing for the most part: Prothero remains largely silent.

This is the third major tack that Rogers has tried. The first had to do with Barry’s products. The second with Mark Mortimer’s history at the firm.

And then, Rogers steps back and asks a straightforward
question which, with hindsight, is where we should probably have started.

‘Okay. Let’s go back to some basics. You are the owner of Barry Precision, correct?’

‘Yes.’ But there was a hesitation there, which Rogers picked up on.

‘Yes, but . . .?’

‘But nothing. I own a hundred percent of the shares in Barry Precision. I do, however, have a cross-ownership arrangement with a partner
of mine, David Marr-Phillips.’

Marr-Phillips: another one of Rattigan’s buddies. Another name on my A-list of people to investigate. A guy who inherited twelve hundred acres of Glamorgan land from his father. Used his
business savvy to trade up to a property empire worth seventy million or more.

I’m semi-surprised to hear the name in this context, but only semi. South Wales isn’t London.
All our rich guys know each other. Most of them have probably done business together.
But neither Rogers or I know what a cross-ownership arrangement is. Rogers asks. Prothero explains.

‘The company is legally mine, one hundred percent mine. But I have a contractual arrangement with David whereby he picks up twenty percent of the risks and rewards from the company. In
exchange, I have
an equivalent interest in some of his properties. It’s an arrangement which simplifies certain tax issues and which diversifies risk. It’s common enough and perfectly
legal.’

His tone adds the words
you pig-ignorant, piss-poor, provincial cretins
.

My look sticks a seven-inch steel dagger between his eyes and twists it around. Mervyn Rogers is probably wondering how fast he could beat
this guy to a pulp.

We all enjoy a little moment of silence.

Rogers and I don’t immediately know how to respond. The ownership structure creates a weird little wrinkle. Unanticipated. Maybe a so-what thing, but one that needs investigation.

‘Risks and rewards,’ says Rogers. ‘Would that include the risk of prosecution for illegal arms export?’

Prothero gives a smile so thin it was
probably manufactured in an Apple design lab. ‘
Financial
risks and rewards. David has no vote on operational matters. He trusts me to do my
job.’

‘We’ll need to see the agreement.’

Prothero shrugs.

‘And,’ I add, ‘we’ll need to understand what you got in return. The “equivalent interest” you mentioned.’

If Prothero was disconcerted by having revealed more than he’s intended, that
moment is over. His glossy, disdainful confidence is back. Prothero’s figured out that I’m the
junior cop in pretty much any gathering. I’m so unimportant, he doesn’t even deign to sneer at me properly. Just raises a hand in a ‘fine, who cares?’ sort of way. His look
doesn’t get within two feet of my face.

Fuckwit.

Rogers starts again with his questions, but Prothero has pushed his
chair back. A gesture which indicates, I think, that he’s irritated with himself for having made the Marr-Phillips
disclosure. If Prothero stays like this, which he most likely will, we’ll get nothing until the lawyer comes, at which point we’ll get a glossier, shinier version of nothing. Reading
the interview the same way, Rogers shoots me a glance and says, ‘Take over a moment, would you?’
He steps out. He’ll want to get on the phone to Watkins, see if she has any bright
ideas.

The door clangs shut. My arse hurts where the skin was taken for the graft. I take out some painkillers and swallow them without water.