Love Story, With Murders (27 page)

His employers
somehow found out. Or perhaps he told them. Either way, they decided, fuck you, we’ll destroy your life. And did. Framed him on a drug-smuggling charge. Something so clumsy,
so crass in design, that if he had wanted to fight it, he probably could have. But I bet they also threatened him. His wife, his kids. Told him that if he didn’t accept his time in jail, his
family would all be killed
or injured.

So he took it. Saint Mark took the drug charge. Lost his job, his wife, his means of making a living. Accepted that he couldn’t take the risk of divulging what he knew. A martyr to his own
purity of purpose. The suicide, I guess, was simply the outcome of all that. When your life is completely fucked, what’s the point of continuing?

Other parts of the puzzle start clicking
into place too. Some clearly. Others dimly. Like water trickling under ice or a weight of snow settling on a roof.

And that’s fine. I don’t need the whole thing now. I have what I need.

I’m still wearing Ayla’s little bracelet. I touch it and promise her and Theo, once again, that we’re going to drag this whole mess out into the open.

Their father: not a criminal, but a fighter for
justice.

How much difference will it make to the children to know that? I think it’ll make all the difference in the world. I imagine Theo’s serious dark-eyed little face when I tell him,
Yes, it was all a mistake
.

But back to me and back to now.

It’s past 7
AM
. It’s still dark. Nothing has moved on the lane. Nothing will until full daylight. The snow is above my boots now. Still
falling, still
beautiful.

I decide I’ll get two or three hours’ sleep, then get down the hill early enough that I can walk it if I really have to. I’ve enjoyed my night up here, but there’s almost
no food left and not much wood. I’m exhausted, I realise. Bone-tired.

Pull my nest closer to the stove. Add logs to the fire. I’m asleep within the minute.

Wake up. Achy and cold. It’s dark.

Dark and it shouldn’t be.

Cold and it shouldn’t be.

Check my watch: it’s half past two in the afternoon. I’ve slept almost eight hours, rare for me at any time, no matter now tired I am.

The room is dark because more snow has fallen and the window is occluded. A dim white light filters
in. The room’s not supposed to be cold. The stove is long gone out, but the storage
heaters should be burning the place up and they’re not.

A moment’s experiment shows that the electrics are all dead. None of the switches have tripped. It must be a full-scale power outage. Hardly surprising, I suppose, and up here there
won’t be engineers racing to restore power.

Oh crap. I need to
get out of here and my brain is feeling muddy after too much sleep. There’s half a packet of biscuits left. Otherwise only oil and sugar. I shove the biscuits in my
pocket and go carefully down the drive to see if my car will start. The poor lamb is completely buried in snow. At first the door is frozen shut, but when I yank it hard enough, it opens. Key into
the ignition. A quick prayer to whichever
god protects sporty little cabriolets of dubious mechanical reliability, then turn the key. The engine fires up on the second attempt. Quick thank you to
the god in question.

And there have been vehicles moving on the lane. There are tyre tracks already part filled in, but at least they point me in the right direction. I’m a little uncertain as to whether
I’ll be able to get my car out
of the drive and onto the lane, but I set to work with Buzz’s precious shovel. It is indeed ridiculously oversized, but what the hell. Needs must when the
devil rides.

I work hard until the car stands clear of its snowy curtains. Clear enough that there is, at least approximately, a way through onto the lane.

Then nothing for it but to try. Get in the car. Put it in gear and try to get
it out onto the road. It needs to clear a little ridge of snow and turn hard through ninety degrees, if I’m
not to ram the hedge opposite.

Buzz, I know, would have an instinctive feel for how to do this. ‘Back up a little, Fiona. Rock it, don’t let that wheel spin. Easy now. No, no, half-lock only. Don’t try to
force it.’ Buzz would ease that car out onto the road and make it look as easy
as pie.

Me, my technique is different. I try easing the car over the ridge, but nothing doing. Then I start panicking and start revving the engine and gritty snow flies in a gale of fury from my front
tyres. Then I stall. Then restart the car and leave the engine running as I hack away with the shovel again.

I wish Buzz was here.

Wish, but also don’t. When your head has been as muddled
as mine, for as long as mine, you see things in a different way. Right now, I’m alive. I don’t just know it with my
head. I feel it in my painfully cold fingers. Feel it in my sodden boots. Feel it in my racing heart. I even feel it in these intricate little computations of survival. A dead person wouldn’t
care, and I do. I really do.

Anyway. I’m done digging. Back into the car. Try again.
First nothing happens, then the car shoots forward out of its rut. I turn the wheel, skid, slide straight into the bank opposite,
bounce off and end up pointing downhill, the right way, square in the tyre tracks. I drive a few yards, just to check the car can do it. And it can. The clever beast. It can.

My thinking now is completely clear. I know what I’m doing. I go back up to the house
as quickly as I can. Unmake my nest. Put the duvets back on the bed. Wash anything I’ve used in
the kitchen. Dry it. Replace it. Watkins is a stickler for these things. Hinton gave me permission to enter the house, not to eat all the food in the kitchen and sleep there overnight. I
don’t want to provoke complaints. For the same reason, I take off my supersized Aran jumper and leave it back in
the drawer were I found it.

I do take the laptop, though. It’s evidence in relation to a major offence, and if I don’t take it, there’s a risk of data being lost. I’m operating well within police
powers here, so I don’t care if anyone complains or not.

Leave the house, lock up, return the key to its resting place. Back down to the car.

I wish I hadn’t left it so late – the light
is dimming behind thick cloud – but I’m not too concerned. I’ll follow the road down to Capel-y-ffin, then either stop
there for the night or, if the roads are okay, get out to Abergavenny or even back to Cardiff.

If for any reason the car gets stuck, and it might, I’ll simply follow the tyre tracks by foot. It’s no more than a few miles to Capel-y-ffin. Probably not even as far as that
to the
first inhabited house. It’s cold, but hardly murderous. I have a torch. I’ll walk fast. And if that really doesn’t work for any reason, I’ll spend the night in the car. I
have a sleeping bag, water and chocolate – my chocolate, that is, not the stuff Buzz gave me, which is already gone. My petrol tank is nearly full. I’ll run the engine through the night
if I have to.

You’ll get
through this, Griffiths. No worries.

And it’s true. I will get through this. I’m not worried.

I change my wet hiking boots for my dry office ones, which are in any case easier to drive in. Then, proceeding with extreme caution, headlights on full beam, I start to creep down the hill.

It goes okay. I’m not likely to win prizes for extreme-cold-weather driving, but I don’t have to. Admittedly I do get stuck early on. I’m going so slowly that
when I come to a slight rise in the road – it mostly curves steadily down – I don’t have the speed or the traction to ascend.

Silly girl.

What would Buzz do?

He’d ramp
it up. I reverse back up the road as far as I can. The snow is cold enough and hard enough that the existing tyre tracks nudge me back onto the road if I start to drift off. I
move forward with more speed. Get higher up the hill this time, before coming to a stop, wheels spinning purposelessly on ice. So reverse back again, farther than before. Move forward faster.
It’s exciting, actually.
This time, I sail up the hill no problems and am so pleased with myself that I have to stop the car to enjoy the moment. In the valley far below me, I see the first
lights twinkling through the twilight.

I feel a rush of something. I’m not always good at naming my feelings – it’s something I used to practise by rote with doctors – and pride isn’t something I feel
often enough for me to
feel very confident about spotting it when it comes. But this feeling – warm, happy, a bit excited – is pride, I think. I spend a few moments letting myself feel
it, what it’s like. It’s partly, of course, the computer I have on the back seat. The fact that I was right to explore Mortimer.

But it’s not mostly that. I know my detective work is good. It’s not something I worry about. But driving
a car in the snow? That’s something I’ve never done and would
expect myself to be plain useless at. This whole twenty-four hours, I’ve lit fires, cooked pasta, made tea, kept warm, shovelled my car out, got it out onto the road. That doesn’t make
me Buzz. Still less does it make me Lev. But a girl’s got to start somewhere and right now I feel pleased with myself.

Slipping back into gear,
I drive on.

Get to a fork in the road. I don’t remember this from before, but I was driving the other way, looking forwards. One way looks a bit more roadlike, but there are no tyre-tracks – or
no recent ones anyway – and the other route looks freshly driven. Peering cautiously down the slope, I see, joy of joys, a pair of red lights. Lights attached to that thing of beauty: a Land
Rover
four-by-four. Not caring now, I turn down the hill and drive up to the back of the Land Rover. As it sees me coming, it ploughs off into the snow to let me past.

I don’t especially want to pass it. I want to stick close and let the Land Rover watch me all the way down to Capel. So I pass the Land Rover, then stop.

Stop for two reasons.

One, to stay close to my saviours. Two, because
the track ends at a low barn, standing just above the rise of a stream.

This isn’t the road, it’s a field.

It’s not the way to Capel-y-ffin, it’s a dead end.

Sod it.

Not a big
sod it
, mind you. A small one. I’m pretty certain that my sporty little town car isn’t going to have the muscle to climb back up the hill I’ve just come down,
but I can either get the Land Rover to tow
me or I can just dump my car, come and get it when I can. The bright edge is taken from my pride, but not too badly.

I’m about to change back into my hiking boots, go and talk to the farmer, when I see that the farmer has swung his car round, pointing back up the hill. He probably knows he’s going
to need to tow me out of here.

The Land Rover cuts its lights. Two men tramp towards me
through the snow. I can’t see them. It’s not fully dark now, but almost.

One of the men comes to the passenger side of the car. One to the driver’s side. I’ve wound my window down to talk to them, letting the cold air in.

Only they’re not a farmer and his mate. And they’re not here to rescue me. They’re my friends from Marine Parade. Jaw Guy and Silent Guy.

The men who, I’ll bet, killed
Khalifi.

Fear has a colour. A taste and feel. Cold, mostly. That’s mostly what I notice. The chilly touch of adrenaline finding its way into those places I never normally feel. The very tips of my
fingers. The soles of my feet. A cold burning in my ears. The taste is like an absence. I’d say like a mouthful of cotton wool, except it’s emptier than that. My mouth feels both choked
and as
if it’s biting down on a vacuum. That same vacuum fills my stomach. I feel scooped out, empty. Like one of those corpses on the pathologist’s table that look vaguely normal but
whose cavities have been filled out with pipe insulation and Sealed Air plastic bags.

These people have come to kill me.

‘Evening, gents,’ I say.

Silent Guy gets into the cramped little back. Jaw Guy gets
into the passenger seat beside me. I let them because I can’t stop them. Because I don’t know what else to do.

I’m not sure how they knew I was at the cottage, but then I realise they
didn’t
know. I’m sure they – or their employers at Barry Precision – do have some
kind of hold over Sophie Hinton. They’ve either threatened her or paid her. In any case, Hinton must have felt worried enough
by my visit to contact them. To mention that I seemed to have an
interest in the cottage. That was likely enough the first they knew of the cottage, so they came here to clean up. When they arrived, they found me here too. Two birds, one stone.

When Hinton called whoever it was she called, she probably didn’t mean to kill me, but she also wouldn’t have bothered to think through the possible
consequences of her actions.

One loose word, one dead body. Not her concern. I can hear her voice in my head now. ‘I don’t want to sound awful. I’m very sorry and everything.’

Petulant cow.

I should have given her that slapping.

But Silent Guy and Jaw Guy don’t kill me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t even seem to want anything from me. Sure, they take the laptop. Just walk it over to their
Land Rover, drop it on
a back seat, then saunter back again. Mostly, though, they just sit in my car. I keep the engine running for warmth. I’ve got loads of petrol and I do remember to check. Headlights on,
because it would seem too weird sitting there in the dark.

On my left is Jaw Guy, Scottish guy. The broken jaw looks both normal and not quite. Like something’s askew, but in the poor
light it’s hard to see exactly where the problem
lies.

Behind Jaw Guy is the other man, who hasn’t yet said anything audible in my presence. My car is a three-door convertible and though there is space in the back, it’s not really the
sort of space designed to accommodate reasonably large, reasonably well-padded contract killers. But that’s not really my issue.