Love Story, With Murders (36 page)

I breathe through my mouth. I don’t move a muscle.

There is someone in the room with me
. Someone here now.

I don’t know where they are. I don’t know how they woke me. But there is someone here now and I am terrified.

I don’t sleep with a gun anymore. I’d like to,
of course, but part of Miss Griffiths’s Be-More-Normal Project involved hiding my gun in a Pembrokeshire sheepfold. The 460
bullets I have in a locked drawer of the ops room are as useless as tinsel.

Whoever is here isn’t moving. He’s being very silent.

Perhaps I made a sound when I woke up. Perhaps he’s waiting for me to move. And I’m not fond of waiting games.

Although I gave up
my gun, I didn’t leave myself defenceless. In a holster made of sellotape and kitchen towel behind the brass bars at the head of my bed, there is a knife. The knife was
originally an ordinary kitchen knife. A paring knife with a four-inch blade. Black-handled. Not particularly expensive.

But there are a couple of Gypsies who knock on doors round here from time to time. They have a grinding
wheel in the back of their van and sharpen stuff for cash. Pruning hooks. Lawn mower
blades. And knives.

I got them to sharpen my knife till it had the devil’s own edge, the devil’s own point.

I got, from a place online, a rubber finger loop that allows you to attach the knife to your finger, so even if you lose your grip on the handle in the course of a fight, you don’t drop
it. It
remains attached. Ready.

So I slide my bare arm through the bars of the bed to reach the knife. Find the handle. Find the finger loop. I come back with the knife in a fighting grip. Ready for whatever follows.

I remember Lev’s words.

Don’t trust the stab
. The blade isn’t long enough to do reliable damage, and in any case, the heart is trickier to reach than you think. Shielded. You
have to go in at the
right place and angle to stand a chance.

Rely on the slashing movement
. The face or neck ideally, but really it’s okay to land the stroke anywhere.
Draw blood
. Stay out of reach. Let the bleeding do your work. You
need a lot of blood. Much more than you think. A person contains four or five litres of blood and you might need a litre of that splattering your home furnishings
before your antagonist is
seriously weakened. So be patient, take your time, wait for the moment.

And I do.

I hold, as far as possible, my original sleeping position, my original posture. Keep my striking arm clear of the bedclothes. Listen and watch.

Listen to silence.

Watch emptiness.

Something’s strange about this silence. I’m still completely certain that there’s someone
here, but silence of this intensity is unnatural. No creak of a floorboard, no
suppressed breathing.

The energy in the room feels weird too. As though the space has acquired a chilly pressing quality. A solidification of the emptiness. A cold incandescence.

I don’t know how long passes like this.

Not long probably. When you watch with this intensity, each second seems to stretch
forever.

And then I realise.

Realise and laugh.

My laughter is silent and I don’t let go of my knife, but I understand what’s going on. Yes, there is someone present in my room. But the person in question is a dead one. Khalifi.
It’s his spirit that I’m feeling here.

If my first response is relief, my second is terror. It comes to me as sharp and fierce as I’ve ever known it.
Sharper and fiercer than anything I felt up on that snowy mountainside.

It’s not fear of the dead. Far from it. I
like
the dead. I’m comfortable in their presence.

Rather, it’s a fear of my own head. A fear of craziness.

Ghosts and dead presences don’t exist. What I have here isn’t a spirit from the other side, it’s psychosis. Madness. And that madness, the sort I had as a teenager,
killed me
– pretty literally killed me – for two years. I’m terrified that that illness is returning now. And that if it does, I’m not strong enough to stop it.

For a few minutes – five? ten? – I lie trapped in my own alarm.
Is my Cotard’s returning? Am I going mad again?

Then logic, the sweet cold stream of reason, starts to wash those fears away.

When I was a teenager, I lost all
bodily sensation. I couldn’t really feel hot or cold. I couldn’t really feel my heart beat except as some repetitive tapping from an adjoining room.
I never felt my feet. Never. They didn’t belong to me at all. Some sufferers with Cotard’s report ‘seeing’ their flesh crawl with maggots. I never had that, but I used to
turn my hand over again and again, scared I would find that seething crawl
of decomposition.

It’s not like that now. I feel like I always do. Maybe even a bit sharper, a bit clearer. That might not be very sharp or clear by the standards of others, but I am who I am. And as far as
I’m
concerned, things are okay. I feel my heart beat. Feel the knife in my hand. When I move my feet, I feel them too.

Khalifi, though, is still here. I feel that cold intensification.
His chuckling laugh, the pressure of his gaze.

Feel it too much, too intensely.

This isn’t real. It’s illusion.

This isn’t real. It’s psychosis.

In my bathroom cabinet, I have a bottle containing about a hundred and fifty 100-milligram tablets of amisulpride. A second-generation antipsychotic. During my time in hospital, I must have
taken pretty much every psychiatric medication
known to man, but amisulpride was the only one I ever had much time for. It didn’t conquer my illness, but perhaps it took the edge off it.
Introduced some flickering note of doubt. Perhaps that little advantage was what my body and mind needed.

In any case, long after my shrinks thought I was cured, long after they thought I had completed my course of medication, I kept those pills as a
safety precaution. Bought more from an Indian
pharmacy on the Internet when it first became possible to do things like that. I haven’t touched them in years, but I still know exactly where they are. I carry some in my bag. If I travel, I
take a bottle.

I could take a pill, maybe two, and watch Khalifi fade away. Drive away this flash of craziness. Let the world return to normal.

I
put my knife back, sit up in bed, breathe deeply.
In
-two-three,
out
-two-three. Reach down and massage my feet, until I’m sure I feel them properly. My cuts and burns and
bruises help.

I am who I am.

I am all that I am.

And in the process – the breathing, the massaging, the movement – I no longer feel afraid. At least for the moment, I won’t touch those pills. Perhaps if the psychosis
gets
worse – if Khalifi starts speaking? If I start to see him? – I’ll change my mind. I don’t have a stupid pride about these things. Survival is all that matters. But for now,
I’m okay. I’m just me. A kooky detective with an unreliable brain. If a corpse wants to come and visit me in the night, he’s welcome to do so.

I grin at Khalifi, welcoming him for the first time.

He grins back.

The room trembles with laughter. It reminds me of that lovely moment I had with Langton’s head. That lovely, spacious moment. That black and gaping mouth. The feel of bone.

Time passes. I feel comfortable. With Khalifi. With my crazy brain.

I realise too that this particular psychosis isn’t as new as I first thought it. In a way, I’ve
always
connected too much with the dead. Felt them
too much. Felt them in a way
that runs far beyond reality.

Strangely – but I
am
strange – that thought settles me. I feel myself welcoming them all. Mary Langton. Mark Mortimer. Ali el-Khalifi. And others too. Cases from my past:
Janet and April Mancini. Stacey Edwards. A night for all souls. The faithful departed.

Me and my crazy head in an empty room.

I get up and go to the bathroom.
I fashion another joint, lighting it from the burning candle. Then go back to bed. Plump up the pillows. Sit there smiling in the company of the dead.

Finish my joint.

The chuckling quality in the room has faded to something quieter and more peaceful. But it’s a good sort of peace. A special one. The sort you only get from the dead.

I wonder what Khalifi wants from me, but the truth
is I already know. He wants to be with me. He wants me to complete my acts of justice on the men who killed him. And he wants to see me do
right by Mary Langton. The only girl he ever truly loved.

I want those things too. We grin at each other, enjoying the communication. At some stage, I don’t know when, I must fall asleep. When my alarm goes off in the middle of a grisly December
dawn,
I am still sitting up. I ache like hell. And I am all alone in my room.

I don’t make it in by eight thirty. Some of my wounds need their dressings changed and it takes longer than I expected. So I text Watkins to tell her I’ll be late
and do the job properly. One of the cuts on my hand opens up any time I move it too much, so there’s fresh blood on the bandage by the time I’ve finished. I’m fairly sure that
even the Watkinsian Handbook of Personnel Management prohibits you from ripping someone’s head off when they are newly wounded in the line of duty.

I dress with more formality than normal. Skirt, shirt, jacket. Not quite Hobbs-posh, but still. All part of my gossip-suppression strategy. Put a handful of aspirin in my jacket pocket. A couple
of amisulpride tablets as well, just in case.

I’m with Watkins in the interview room by eight fifty. She glowers, but doesn’t give me a bollocking. The room is bare. There’s a video camera, a computer screen, a table, a
couple of chairs. The place ought to look like the movies, where everything is painted battleship grey and maverick cops beat crap out of the suspects, but mostly it just looks like the sort of
thing you have in local
government. Budget cuts and equipment compromises.

A technician whose name might be Michael hovers around until Watkins shoos him away.

‘When you’re ready,’ she says to me.

I nod.

Watkins turns the camera on. Gives place, time, names. She’s a little senior-officer awkward about these things. It would have been a routine part of her job once, but the rules and the
camera will
have changed since then. She’s only doing it now because violence against a police officer is treated more seriously than violence against anyone else.

I look at the photos on-screen. Sequentially, not simultaneously. The evidence you collect is stronger that way, less prone to challenge. If, for example, you identify photograph number three
from a group, where you haven’t seen the later
photos, it’s strong proof that you’re picking the right person, not merely the person who’s the best-fitting candidate from
the ones on offer.

I don’t react to the first three photos. Hamish was a gingery blond. The first three don’t even come close. I just say no decisively and move on.

The video camera makes a difference. You’re always aware of it. You act for it. Auditioning for the
courtroom drama which may one day follow.

Number four I need to look at twice. He’s bearded and there’s something about his face shape which is approximately correct. But the eyes are wrong. The face is wrong. I say,
‘No.’

Then number five.

It’s Hamish all right. Younger. Longer haired. But Hamish.

I say, ‘This is one of the two men who tried to kill me. When I saw him on November
27th, his hair was shorter than in this photograph. Additionally, since this photograph was taken, his
jaw appears to have been broken and badly reset. At any rate, there is some disturbance to the jawline not depicted in this photo. On that night of the twenty-seventh, I struck this man in the face
and I believe, but cannot be certain, that I broke his nose. I would expect his nose to retain
some sign of the injury, but cannot be confident of this. I am, however, completely certain of my
identification. I do not need to see any further photographs to confirm my opinion.’

Watkins shows me more photographs anyway. Ten more. I say no to them all. She shows me Hamish again, a different photo this time. I repeat my identification.

Watkins nods. ‘Good.’ Turns off the recording
equipment. Then, ‘I take it that you
are
sure, Constable?’

‘Yes. No question. His jaw has been injured since that picture. I’m not sure about the nose, but I thought it worth mentioning.’

I took care to do so that would bring us courtroom brownie points if I was right, but wouldn’t lose anything much if I was wrong.

Anyway. Watkins is satisfied. She tells me what I want to know. ‘His
real name is Callum McCormack. He’s got a conviction for armed robbery. He’s wanted for an assault on a
police officer in Aberdeen. But he’s been on the wanted list for five years now, so we have to assume a new identity.’

She passes a wodge of paper to me. McCormack’s record as it appears on our system. There are a couple more photos. Foster homes or institutions for much of his childhood.
Joined the Army
aged seventeen. Served three years. Then a drink-related assault-and-battery incident, for which he served time and was discharged from the Army. Then in and out of trouble, until the Aberdeen
assault, at which point he dropped off our radar completely. No mention of any Scandinavian partners in crime.

‘The car registration number,’ says Watkins. ‘The plates were stolen
from a car in Glasgow a week ago.’

She doesn’t spell out the rest because she doesn’t have to. McCormack and the man I still have to call Olaf will have stolen the plates off a car locally, but driven to South Wales
with their own legitimate registration plates showing – the stolen ones would instantly have been flagged by cameras and passing police cars. Once they were deep into the Llanthony
Valley,
beyond the reach of police surveillance, they’d have switched to the stolen plates. Then, if any local had noticed any abnormal activity, they’d have only the wrong plates to
report.