Love Story, With Murders (16 page)

Dammit.

‘Lucky you,’ I say, trying not to let my feelings show. ‘A Saturday love-in with Watkins. Every girl’s dream.’

‘What have you got on today?’

Buzz, the sweet foolish man,
has this delusional belief that if he speaks to me evenly and chirpily, I’m suddenly going to turn normal on him. That one day, I’ll suddenly want to
fill my life with trips to the shops, visits to friends, and a little light home decoration. I honestly think that his joy will only be complete when one day he returns from a hockey match to find
that I’ve baked a new kind of pudding and have bought
an Interesting China Ornament for the flat.

I blink at him, instead of answering. I don’t know what to say.

He does a thing with his face which is hard to interpret exactly, but is his way of nudging me to give an answer that’s more complete than just blinking.

So I say, ‘I’m over to my family for a late brunch, then probably go shopping with Kay.’

He says, ‘Brilliant. That sounds
really nice.’

Most men saying that would sound sarcastic, but Buzz just sounds like Buzz. First he waits for me to get out of bed, so I can kiss him off at the door, then he realises that I’m not
getting out of bed, so he kisses me where I am.

‘Have a good day,’ I say. ‘Don’t let Watkins pinch your bum.’

He goes.

The flat is empty.
His
flat.

I do get out of bed now and fidget
around, getting dressed slowly. I swing open the fridge door. It’s full of lovely food, very little of which I had any hand in acquiring and almost none
of which is covered in interesting colours of mould. I don’t eat anything, just poke the packet of bacon, then swing the door shut.

We don’t have a mantelpiece, because the flat is too modern to have a fireplace, but there is a cupboard-cum-display-unit
which could probably bear the weight of an Interesting China
Ornament. Buzz has some photos there. Framed. A couple of us. Some of his family. One of him in his paratrooper’s uniform. He looks the same, but younger. I shift the photos around a bit,
then move them back again.

When I’m dressed, I leave the flat and drive over to my mam and dad’s. No reason to, except I said to Buzz that
that’s what I would do, so doing it seems easier than anything
else.

I get there not long after nine. Mam is already up, dressed, hair done, fussing. My younger sister, Ant-short-for-Antonia, is hanging over the kitchen counter protesting against some familial
injustice or another. Dad’s still sleeping. Kay’s not downstairs yet, but I can hear her padding around upstairs and she yells
down a greeting.

I arbitrate the Ant–Mam dispute, by telling Mam it’s a special occasion because I’m there, so Ant should be allowed to have her way. Ant accepts that gleefully and I get a
special hug. Mam accepts it with a sigh and a headshake.

She asks me if I’ve eaten and I say yes and so she only gives me orange juice and a croissant, taken from a packet and heated in a microwave.

Ant tells me about school.

Mam says have I heard, it’s going to get cold, and I tell her yes, I’ve heard.

Kay comes downstairs, gets breakfast. She’s tall and skinny and has a way of dressing that looks completely casual but hopelessly sexy. Today, a chunky jumper over leggings and boots,
which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the way she wears it.

She asks me what I’m up to.
I say we could go shopping if she likes. She says yes. Ant asks to come too and we say no, but say it nicely.

There’s a bit more hubbub. Clamorous, intimate family stuff. Somewhere along the way, Dad gets woken up and he comes downstairs in his dressing gown, looking like a bear with its hair
fluffed up. I give him a kiss and fluff his hair up some more.

Tea, coffee, more juice, more
croissants. Bacon and egg for Dad. Everyone talks and everyone at least half-listens.

Dad says, ‘Was it all okay yesterday?’

I say, ‘Yes, there’ll be more interviewing today, but no one’s worried about a few cash payments here and there.’

Dad nods, changes the subject.

Then Kay and I really do go shopping.

We drive. Kay likes it when I drive fast, but there’s too much traffic
for any real speed. It’s too cold for us to have the top down, which she also likes. We leave the car in a car
park on Dumfries Place.

‘Where do you want to go?’ says Kay.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe Gap.’

That’s what I always say. Sometimes Gap. Sometimes Next. Sometimes if I’m feeling really unsure of myself I say M&S.

She makes a face at me, but that’s okay. We go to Gap,
the one in Saint David’s. I stand in the middle of the shopping floor, surrounded by beige things.

I think of Mary Langton’s head. The feel of it in my hands. The look of it, as it rose grinning from the oil barrel. The large round pebble in its mouth. The sound of that pebble as it
moved against Langton’s teeth: an oily clacking.

‘What do you want?’ asks Kay. I wouldn’t say that she’s
patient with me, exactly, but she’s tolerant. Good enough.

‘I don’t know. Not this anyway.’

‘What kind of things? Office wear? Casual? Or you know it’s going to be Christmas soon. Do you even have any party dresses?’

I think of Khalifi’s grey lung bobbing on the last puddles of the Llanishen Reservoir. A Labrador retriever running over the grass with Khalifi’s liver slopping from its
mouth.

The prickling I felt yesterday is back, but clearer, better than before.

‘Um, maybe I’ll just browse. Is there anything you want?’

This is our deal. Half the reason why Kay comes shopping with me. She puts up with me. I buy her stuff.

We leave Gap and go to Howells, the department store. The streets are November streets, not yet Christmas ones. Everyone’s bundled in jeans,
boots, and warm anoraks. The coffee shops are
standing room only.

In Howells, I hang back and watch Kay go at it. This is her territory. She understands shops the way I understand mortuaries. As I trail round after her, I see that Hobbs has an in-store
concession – I hadn’t known – and I say, ‘Oh, look, Hobbs.’

She fastens onto that. ‘Hobbs? Okay then.’

That’s the other reason
Kay shops with me. She likes the creativity of it. The challenge of turning me into someone who doesn’t just buy beige things from Gap. And she’s good.
Mostly people want to turn you into someone who looks like them, only worse. Kay isn’t like that. I rely on her.

She shuffles through racks, holds clothes up against me, discards most, retains some. I try to play my part. Really try. Give
it steady, focused thought. But I never know what I’m doing.
After a while, Kay has found three things she wants me to try on. I’ve found one, a blue dress that I picked more or less at random.

She looks at my offering, says, ‘Mmm,’ but takes the plus-size item I’ve got in my hand and replaces it with the same thing, but in my size. ‘It’s a bit
safe,’ she admonishes.

I try things on
and each time walk out of the changing room, arms stuck out like a ten-year-old boy being good for his mam.

‘God’s sake!’ she mutters, plucking and tweaking me into shape. ‘What do you think?’ Before I can say, ‘I don’t know,’ she says something which
is, in my view, an insight of staggering genius. ‘Don’t think about what you look like,’ she tells me. ‘Just imagine the person in the mirror
is someone completely
different. Someone you’re watching on a stakeout or whatever.’

We don’t have so many stakeouts in Cardiff. No guys with guns, pint bottles of bourbon, and dubious attitudes to police violence. But I know what Kay means. And she’s right. If I try
to figure out whether I like something for me, I have no idea at all. I just see a woman with her arms stuck out like a
ten-year-old. If I switch the question, detach myself completely from the
person in the mirror, it becomes instantly simpler. I still don’t have a like-it/don’t-like-it response, but I can at least figure out what I’m looking at. For a wonderful five
minutes, I feel something close to normal: a girl going shopping with her sister.

I try everything on. The star of the bunch is a dark grey
suit. Woollen. Knee-length skirt. Jacket. It sounds super-safe – the sort of refuge clothing I usually buy – but working on
the someone-completely-different principle, I see beyond that. The suit is sharp. Stylish.

‘It’s really good,’ says Kay. ‘Half sexy secretary, half woman of mystery.’

I don’t know that I want to be either of those things, but it feels like an excitingly bold idea
that buying new clothes can make me into something that I wasn’t before. I wonder if
that’s why other people shop.

The suit is screamingly expensive. A hundred quid for the skirt and almost two hundred for the jacket, but I buy them anyway. Dazed, but in a good way, I end up spending another £135 on
stuff for Kay. She does a little skip of excitement as we leave the shop and says, emphatically,
‘Fab.’

She’s meeting friends in a coffee shop, so we part company there and I go back to the car. Put the Hobbs bag on the passenger seat. I doubt I’ll ever wear the clothes inside, but
that’s not the point.

Buzz sometimes thinks I’m extravagant, but I’m not really. I hardly ever buy clothes, take vacations, or go out. I’m not even very good at buying the basics: food, cleaning
stuff,
anything at all. But when I do spend money, I’m rubbish at calibrating my purchases. I don’t have any sense of value. I just pick something up and pay for it. Mostly
that’ll be some awful budget item from Lidl. Sometimes it’ll be something ridiculous from Hobbs. I don’t often run out of money and when I do I just eat muesli until my pay cheque
comes in. I stay alive.

Meantime, Buzz and
Watkins and Susan Konchesky are hunting for a connection between Khalifi and Mary Langton. A connection that I brought them.

But what’s their theory?

Khalifi could have met Mary Langton at the Unicorn and they could have had some sex thing that went wrong. But then what? He decides to chop her into pieces (but why?), deposits her in various
freezers and outbuildings around Cyncoed (but
why?), then lives happily for five years until someone decides to take revenge by chopping him into a thousand pieces and leaving his lung bobbing on a
grey and empty lake surrounded by toads, slowworms, and waxcap fungi.

The story makes a wearisome sort of sense, but falls apart at the seams. Khalifi seems to me too sane to be a person-chopper-upper. I mean, no one is too sane to be a murderer,
we could all be
that, but you’ve got to be a fairly committed nutter to slice-’n’-dice with such happy abandon. That’s not the worst part of the story, though. The bit that makes no sense
is the revenge killing. Who took the revenge? Rosemary Langton, Mary’s mam? Her solicitor husband with the collapsing face? The Langtons have a twenty-three-year-old son who has been more
keenly investigated
now than would have been the case seven years ago, but still. I remember the beige carpets and the willow tree in the garden. Some families just give off a choppy-uppy odour.
Others don’t. This one didn’t.

Which leaves me back with Ali el-Khalifi. He of the mobile face and the glide-rail know-how. I’ve had my head too full of Langton and Mortimer to give Khalifi proper attention, and
it’s
time to put that right. I want to know him better. There’s a way in which police work stops you doing that, but I’ve got all weekend now.

I slip the car into gear and leave the car-park.

Sexy secretary. Woman of mystery.

First stop: Llanishen. I’m not looking for clues. It’s atmosphere I want.

Because of the way this enquiry started – because I found her leg, her lovely, lovely head – Mary Langton feels vibrant and alive. She sings to me. Yet the blunt, objective truth is
that Langton, poor girl, was really too boring to end her life distributed across
a number of suburban outbuildings. The cow teeth and the hockey should have won out over the pole dancing. She
isn’t, on the face of it, the sort of victim that most attracts me.

Khalifi’s different. In a way, that displaced, clever, well-connected womaniser should have piqued my interest from the very first. I should have attached to him at least as much as I did
to Langton, yet he’s
still nothing more to me than a couple of photos and a pathologist’s report.

It’s time to get to know him, and I’m starting here. With the reservoir. Vacant and almost hostile. Empty of water. Empty of purpose. Clouds racing fast overhead and enough cold in
the wind to feel like a threat.

I drift around, just getting a feel for the place. The fenced-off, empty lake. The rough ground
around it. The dog walkers.

A good place to die, this. To lie spread out, under the wind.

The prickle I felt yesterday has settled in now. It has a feel of permanence.

When I get too cold to stay longer, I go back to my car and drive to the dead man’s flat. A two-bedroom penthouse on Ferry Road down by the bay. Value, around half a million pounds. Half a
million is a lot more than
a lecturer could afford, but Khalifi bought early, when prices were lower, and he did plenty of consultancy work for private-sector firms. Overall, there doesn’t
seem to be any huge discrepancy between his incomings and his outgoings.

It’s easy enough getting into the building: there are people coming out as I enter. The flat itself is locked.

I try knocking at the door in case there’s
still any SOCO activity there. Try neighbours in case any of them has a key. End up having to rouse up someone from building maintenance. Produce
my warrant, sign a book, get the key. I’d prefer not to have done that, because Watkins will be angry if she learns. But she probably won’t learn.

Back to the flat.

The apartment is all about the emptiness. There’s a huge east-facing balcony
opening onto the bay. The same grey light that Adams had. The same changeless change. Except that Khalifi has
the city version of this view: the marina, the Assembly building, the patches of muddy green. Cardiff’s version of an esplanade.