The Score (14 page)

Her head ached. ‘Small’s all we’ve got.’

She closed down the projectors and the screen went dark.

She went through it all once more in her mind. The only Mandrax seized in the last five years had been identical to Morgan’s pills from the bust. The dead girl from Tower Hamlets had some in her flat. The two dead girls in the mine had a tox report heavy with Mandrax, most likely the same pills, as no other recent type was known. And then there was graffiti at the cottage near the mine identifying Morgan as the killer. It made no sense, but sometimes, Cat knew, the truth didn’t.

10

OUTSIDE, THOMAS LED
the way through the wet down Fitzalan Place, Windsor Road. ‘My turn to show you something,’ he said. He walked almost wordlessly, grim-faced, over the railway line, left into the heart of Splott, and down Inchmarnock Street.

‘There it is,’ he growled. His face was stretched, tense. She could see he was still itching for the fight he’d almost had. He was pointing to a house in the run-down terrace.

She noticed the tell-tale signs – the semi-jammed door, the furtive glance and quick steps past of a nervous potential visitor. Outside were a couple of unshaven lookouts with sunken eyes, scarcely capable of seeing a double-decker bus, should one ever pull up.

It was a well-known crack house. The front door swung slowly open, and an attractive black lady wearing grey clothes and flowers walked out laughing. ‘Wake up, Bra. Mi soon come back wi’ me VIP frens,’ she called to one of the lookouts, in the Tiger Bay Jamaican accent.

Cat held back, intrigued, watched Thomas approach the woman who smiled at him. She clearly knew him and Cat feared for a moment that Thomas had got himself a habit. But she dismissed the thought, Thomas was a drink man, through and through. He talked to the black woman, who nodded, beckoned Cat towards them. The woman turned around and began walking back into the house.

‘Irene will get us in,’ he said.

‘What have you told her?’ she whispered.

‘You’ve been locked out by your boyfriend and need somewhere to get your head together.’

‘Jesus! Couldn’t you have done better than that?’

He smiled. ‘Fits perfect.’

‘Fuck off,’ she said.

The lookouts stood aside so they could pass. Cat knew in Splott, Grangetown and Ely, a crack house was not merely a marketplace: it was a home. Cocaine was invariably used, but not always sold by the occupiers, typically an ex-cocaine dealer and his girlfriend who had progressed from occasional use to heavy abuse. The fashionable sniffing culture that had first made a home for itself in after-hours clubs was dying out, and cocaine addiction had moved from the glamour professions to the lives of the mentally ill, the undomiciled and other cast-offs from the over-ground economy. It was the same old story.

Once inside, Cat recognised the familiar stench. Human odours mixed with garbage, crack freebase and unwashed floors. The empty entry hall retained signs of its former elegance: the marble floors were braided with yellow and red designs woven down the long passage. From the ceiling, gargoyles looked down with their mouths wide open. Only two sculpted faces remained; the others had been replaced by cheap lightshades. In the corner were old appliances, partially stripped and shedding peels of lead paint. Remnants of alpine wallpaper hung from the walls.

To the right was a front room. A big colour TV auto-surfed its way through channels picked up by a coat-hanger antenna. Latex gloves, an empty container of cornstarch, water bottles, a half-full Pepto Bismol and tourniquets covered the floor. A lost-looking girl smiled up at them.

To the left of the hall was another room. Mattresses and a ramshackle armchair sat on the bare linoleum. An old heating
grate,
removed from the wall, was waiting for someone to have the energy and motivation to sell it for scrap. A poster and broken clock adorned one wall, gazing Dali-like over a slough of candles, lighters, tin foil and empty Stella cans. A couple of wooden crates served as extra chairs.

‘All right?’ Thomas addressed a smartly dressed, balding, middle-aged man lounging on the armchair. White pills, some powdered, lay beside him in an ashtray

‘Fine. I’ve seen you around, haven’t I? Please.’

He gestured at the mattresses. His accent was an unnerving mix of Manhattan and South Africa.

The man was jamming a blunt pencil against the base of copper gauze at the bottom of a glass tube. Satisfied, he took a smattering of the crack cocaine in his pocket, some ground powder from the ashtray and evenly distributed the mixture against the top part of gauze wire. Then, he methodically brought a lighter to it before once again commencing his approach to heaven and hell. A wild look took root in his eyes, as he delayed the exhalation of white smoke. The stench momentarily hung in the air.

Cat glanced at the window. For a moment she thought she’d seen a sharp, pale face peering in through the rain-spattered pane. It was gone now. All was dark. She shivered, looked back to the user in the armchair. He slouched catatonically backwards.

‘This has to be the best smoke on God’s earth – crack and good old-fashioned ludes.’

‘You selling?’ asked Thomas.

The man looked at them blankly.

‘Anyone selling ludes?’ Thomas asked more softly. ‘We’re gagging, man.’

Thomas shot Cat a fierce, concealed glance. Her turn.

‘They get you going,’ she added, pushing back her shoulders.

‘These come from London,’ the man said.

‘Is the bloke here now?’ Thomas asked, leering.

The guy looked up, heavy-lidded, from Thomas to Cat, imagining things, no doubt. He loosened his mouth. ‘Nah. He only drops them once a week. Just a few.’

‘You’ve got a number?’ asked Thomas, pushing it.

The man shook his head, went back to banging out the copper gauze. Thomas tried again. He clicked his fingers and murmured as if he knew the dealer in question and his name was on the tip of his tongue.

‘He’s a biker.’ The man glanced at Cat. He ran a hand down his face. She understood. It was a gesture common among bikers. The delivery man had kept his visor down.

They thanked the man, left him to his stupor, picked their way back through the detritus onto the rainy street. Cat glanced around, half-expecting to see the black Rover, the white face. There was nothing. She was tired, couldn’t tell if they were getting closer or further away. She felt agitated, began to hurry down the dark street. Thomas caught up with her, put an arm on hers, showing her she was going too quickly, drawing attention. He was right, she’d forgotten herself. She slowed up, turned to look at Thomas. ‘Well?’

‘Guy from Swansea I busted a few weeks ago had a Mandrax pill, said he’d got it here.’

‘But we don’t have time to wait another week and begin tracing the distribution chain. That could take weeks, months even.’

Thomas’s phone was flashing. He looked at it, then passed it over so she could read the reports from the screen. A second search of the mine had turned up no signs of Esyllt. Nothing else of hers had been found at the abandoned pit house the girls had used as a den. But the lab test had confirmed the blood type on the T-shirt as matching Esyllt’s.

Checks of phone records for Esyllt and Nia had turned up
nothing
useful. Neither phone had been switched on again since the girls had originally gone missing.

Cat clapped a wet palm to her aching head, thought of Martin, of the sort of wound that might never heal. She felt so old suddenly, like Methuselah.

‘There’s more,’ said Thomas gently.

Cat looked back at the screen, forced herself to focus on the next page. Matches had been run on their own initiative by the techies between the Mandrax traces on the two girls’ bodies, traces at the cottage and those found at the dead girl’s flat in Tower Hamlets. They had no other types to run against except the marina Mandrax, so it had been a one-stop cross-reference job. All were chemically identical to those from the marina bust.

Cat looked at Thomas. Her anguish must have been visible. ‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I know.’

With all the recent developments, the case had blurred and complicated. Cat’s legs jellied, wanted to fold. She’d had enough. Nearly. Before she gave in, though, she raised herself for one more task. She called Martin, mercifully he did not answer. She left a message, hoping her voice did not sound as ragged as her hope felt.

‘They’ve searched again and not found her body,’ she said. ‘We won’t give up Martin, we won’t. This house believes that.’ She omitted the details she had learned. Martin didn’t need to know. He was probably getting no sleep as it was.

Cat hung up and she went with Thomas back to her Penarth flat. They ordered a take-away, which Cat only picked at. She watched Thomas glug the best part of two bottles of wine as she smoked canna in silence, John Martyn trying to soothe from the iPod dock. Thomas talked about the case. The pictures of the girls were there when she closed her eyes. She felt weak, felt she might give in to anything. It was the sort of mood that made people throw themselves off trains.

11

JUST AFTER DAWN,
Cat looked at Thomas’s sleeping face: soft and almost childish without the bolshy carapace of the day.

She thought back to the night before. He had asked her and she had reached out, almost touched his hand. Loneliness and its antidote had clung to her but the thought of Rob had given her strength, she would stay clean of men for a while now. Certainly of this one.

She had got some bedding out, chucked it down on the sofa for Thomas then retreated to her bedroom. Now, this morning, she looked at him asleep on the sofa that was too short for him. Before she woke him, she decided to contact Rob.

Cat went to the kitchen and booted her Mac. She messaged Rob, knowing he was an early riser. He got straight back, and they opened up a Skype connection. Rob looked sleep-creased and wan. Next to him on the desk was a pot of tea. Cat didn’t think about how to position herself for the camera, did not think about how she looked. She felt close enough to Rob that morning to show herself as she was.

‘Thank you,’ said Cat.

‘For what?’ asked Rob, smiling anyway at the praise.

‘You saved my arse last night.’

‘Huh? I was asleep.’

‘I was going to do something, then I thought of you and didn’t do it.’

‘Benzies?’

‘No, another type of drug.’ She guessed Rob would understand. ‘Just as bad, when taken at the wrong time.’

‘Want to tell me ’bout it?’

‘Maybe. I’m coming to London. I’ll look you up.’

It was her turn to move the relationship forward. But before Rob could reply, she heard a grunt from the lounge, a morning belch. ‘Got to go, Rob,’ Cat said, ending the connection.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ she heard Thomas say from the sofa. ‘My back’s killing me. Price? You there?’

‘Coffee and aspirin?’ she asked from the kitchen.

‘That’ll do.’

They chatted. Thomas didn’t seem annoyed about the rejection of the night before, probably expected it, or else couldn’t remember. He was affable, in his way, seemed keen to get going.

As he pieced himself together, Cat ate and moved through an edited kata, some jabs and kicks, then they drove through the terraced streets parallel to the river. It was the route she had taken as a girl on her bicycle. After a while the terraces gave way to warehouses and out-of-town shops. She followed a road between disused lots to a house with blackened windows.

Cat told Thomas to wait in the car. Thomas’s police-issue Mondeo would attract the wrong sort of attention where they were going, as would any of the unmarked cars she could have taken from the Cathays pound. A hire car was easily traceable. They needed something more discreet.

The lower part of the house was taken up with a workshop. She stepped inside. The close air was filled with the scents of oil and old leather. Along the walls were the carcasses of many bikes. In one corner she recognised Norton featherbed frames and Triumph engines waiting to be frankensteined into collectables.
In
the other there were trail bikes, Montessas and Puchs, their forks bent out where they had fallen hard from jumps.

She passed through the workshop and up the stairs into a small martial arts dojo, with an office in the corner. The man she had come to see, sensei Walter, was middle-aged with a gut on him, but he was taking on two hard-case teenage boys simultaneously. He wore the striped belt of a sandan, the colours faded. She suspected he could have reached the level of sayhun, but lack of outward ambition prevented him acquiring tokens that would mean nothing in his current surroundings. Walter saw her and his bearish face ignited with a smile. There were no words of greeting because one of his pupils flew at Walter then with a leg outstretched, and Walter stepped aside so the boy’s own force flung him against the padded wall. When the second boy came forward with a chopping action, Walter grasped his wrist and flicked him down onto the mat. Cat walked around the edge of the dojo’s matting towards the office. Walter shot Cat an ‘in a minute’ smile.

Cat waited in the office. On the walls were pictures taken in the city of Kyoto, with Walter as a younger man in a dojo. Others were of the Sony plant in Bridgend and Walter as part of the cultural exchange programme which had traded rugby skills for martial arts. She sat on the desk and leafed through the local
Echo
. The lead story was still the release of Morgan on compassionate grounds. The picture showed a painfully thin man struggling up the steps of a large North London house. The docudrama at the marina would no doubt be released to coincide with his imminent death.

Walter had now dismissed his pupils and he entered, a towel around his neck and another as a turban. He was clearly pleased to see Cat. As a girl, the dojo had been her refuge and for a while he had tried to play a paternal role with her. He had taught her everything he knew.

‘I can’t stay long,’ she said, and she explained what she needed on the vehicle front.

Walter looked a little deflated. Maybe he was hoping it was a social visit. But his expression told her what she was asking would not be a problem. For a few minutes they talked about the past until the talk ran out on them.

Then Cat asked a question. ‘Remember Martin who came with me in the old days.’ Walter nodded. ‘He kept up at all?’

‘He came in now and again, like you all do, when you want something, or when you’re in trouble.’

Cat nodded and smiled. Half of the screw-up kids in Cardiff had passed through Walter’s dojo at one time or another. Walter could remember them all, their habits, bad and good, their birthdays even. ‘He was some big-shot games designer. Then his wife died. He came here to tell me that.’

‘He wanted your sympathy.’

‘Course. He was worrying about his daughter, he got all precious about her when his wife died. Said he was taking her out of the city, out to the sticks where she’d be safer.’

‘He lost it then, after his wife died?’

‘A bit, maybe. Got stuck in his gloom,’ said Walter.

She couldn’t picture someone as delicate as Martin looking after a young girl alone. She imagined it must have been a strain for him.

‘Then he called a few days ago,’ Walter said. ‘He sounded in a right state. Said he needed your numbers. Something about his daughter going missing.’

‘You gave them to him?’

‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘Knew you two used to be close.’

She had told him never to give them out, but she wasn’t going to call him on it. He had done the right thing. Cat said nothing, waited.

‘She used to come by here when they lived in Cardiff, so he was just checking for her. I phoned around. Nobody had seen her.’ He paused. ‘Fancy a pot?’

Walter eyed his antique stoneware tea service, sitting delicately among the filth of his office like a nun in a flea market.

‘Genmaicha. Always was your favourite,’ he said.

She told him she didn’t have time, and left with keys to a Passat on EU plates. He told her it was on dealer’s insurance, everything kosher, and the papers were in the glovebox. She’d take him for sushi as a thank-you when she got back.

‘You must know him quite well, then,’ said Thomas as she pointed over the road at the Passat.

‘Yes.’ Cat didn’t answer further. What was Walter to her? A martial arts instructor, for sure. He had been that once, and still was in some way. But he was more than that. Had been from the first. A wise presence whenever her life seemed most certain to go off the rails. He had been that once too. The obvious thing would be to call him a father figure, only paternal relationships are messier than that.

They left the Mondeo at Walter’s and she drove the first leg to Swindon fast while Thomas slept some more of it off beside her. She tracked Chill FM then slotted quiet tracks from Koop and Ghostland.

‘What the fuck is this?’ was the first thing Thomas said when he woke.

She didn’t bother telling him. ‘Prefer MOR AOR, would you?’

‘What?’

‘Middle of the road, adult-orientated rock. Huey Lewis. REO Speedwagon. Nickleback. Classic
Top Gear
sounds.’

‘Better than this shit,’ he said, wafting a hand towards the stereo. ‘Sounds like a load of depressed aliens.’

‘That’s not a bad description,’ Cat said, smiling.

When Thomas took his turn at the wheel he rifled her bag and put in Neil Young. That was probably the only thing she had that they both could handle. ‘Needle and the Damage Done’.

At the end of the motorway they hit the tail of the rushhour, and at the Chiswick roundabout Cat took the wheel again. She had been biting her nails. She was going into the past again, this time not her friendship with Martin, but back to London, where she had run when Rhys, her first big love, had left her. She had not been so different to a lot of people who flee there to dissolve and remake themselves in its carnival of chances. And she
had
remade herself in London, enough to keep living, enough so that her heart had only walked with a limp.

She took the exit before Brentford. They had reached the mixed area of suburban streets and warehousing where the only connection to Evans and the Mandrax they had, Hywel Small, had his last known address. She knew they were pissing up a dark alley, but it was the only alley they had.

They pulled up a street short of Small’s close. Thomas’s anti-perspirant and the smell of his service-station coffee were getting to her, so she walked down to an open car park below the houses and did some breathing exercises from the Hatha. Thomas watched her from the car, wound down the window, called out, ‘Fucking Gandhi.’

The breathing exercise helped a bit, but the air felt metallic and stale. What did she expect, it was London air. She waved Thomas out of the car, and he walked, chest first, straight over. She’d noticed that the end of the car park gave a clearer view up to Small’s house. Thomas came alongside her, pointed at the two stone dragons either side of the entrance to Small’s driveway. ‘At least he’s still a patriot,’ he said.

Cat made no comment, looked at the two late-model SUVs outside the garage. ‘The door’s been reinforced, Thomas.’

‘And the windows.’

A delivery moped with a square carry box behind the seat was pulling in to Small’s drive as another moped was just leaving.

‘Busy, busy,’ said Thomas.

The arriving rider pushed a temperature-controlled pack through the letterbox then hurriedly rode off. Cat saw a dart of light as an upper window opened, probably a bedroom, saw a man lean out, survey the driveway as he smoked a large joint. He was in boxers and his hair was dishevelled, as if he had just got up. Behind him Cat glimpsed a poster of a Welsh dragon puffing smoke.

The whole set-up looked two-bit and this pissed Cat off. She knew the mopeds were not a good sign. They were suitable for local drops within a radius of a few miles. A dealer running a national Mandrax roll-out wouldn’t use them. Cat felt a wave of depression trying to push its way through her headache.

Thomas moved back towards the car and Cat followed. They snugged in, watched another moped followed by a larger Parcelforce bike arrive in convoy. Both riders waited by the letterbox, their intercoms crackling. They waited with their hands by the aperture of the letter box. Someone inside was pushing packets out to them without opening the door.

‘Doubt he’s our man,’ Thomas said, grimacing.

Cat pursed her lips, frowned. She knew this amount of traffic spelled a slack approach. Small probably wouldn’t be taking these kinds of risks if he was holding real inventory.

‘You can never tell with dealers, though, Thomas, some are born fuckwits. He could be sitting on a hundred kilos in there and still dealing like a child.’

‘
Could
be, Price, but I doubt it.’

Heavy reggae leaked from the front of the house as the bikes pulled away. She could see from Thomas’s expression that he
regretted
coming. Small might as well have stuck an ad in the Yellow Pages saying he was a dealer the way he was carrying on. Thomas was checking the other houses in the close for signs of a Met stake-out. He was sweating, his collar crumpled and stain-ringed. A few minutes later a larger Parcelforce bike returned and the courier went through the same routine at the letter box.

The previous packets had all been about A3 size and bulky, grass she reckoned. But this time, it looked smaller. That didn’t mean much but she knew they were wasting their time staring at the door. Likely the same routine would continue all day and night. If they wanted any kind of progress they had to see where the packets were going.

She woke the car, followed the Parcelforce bike, staying a couple of cars behind. ‘The size of the pack he took,’ she said, ‘it’s smaller. Samples maybe.’

Thomas didn’t look convinced. The bike continued along the North Circular and took the Golders Green exit. As they took the hill up to Hampstead, Cat glimpsed a chunky darkness in her rear-view, glanced again to see it was gone. Just another car on a busy road, she told herself, but this did not lessen the sense she had of being followed. Her head muzzed up to an ache. ‘Make me a roll-up,’ she asked Thomas, but he ignored her. His rapid blinking said he thought they were on a fool’s errand.

At the top of Hampstead Hill, the Parcelforce bike made a circuit of the ponds. The biker was either lost or checking for tails. Cat carried on over to upper Heath Street. She listened for the drone of the bike and lost it momentarily, then it was back. She cut down the side of the heath after it. The bike drone began to falter. She saw it right-hook into a pleasant chestnut-tree-lined lane. She followed. The bike was moving slowly, then it stopped. Cat pulled up five cars short, tucked in out of sight.

For the first time they got a clear look at the man. The box on the back of his bike bore the characteristic red and white logo of Parcelforce. It looked genuine. His helmet with its air-filter gave him the appearance of an insect. He moved quickly across the road, bounced on the balls of his feet like an athlete preparing for the starting block.

Cat leaned across to take a closer look, shading her eyes and covering her face at the same time. ‘That bike looks a bit tasty for Parcelforce?’