Love Story, With Murders (38 page)

Watkins says, ‘Still or sparkling?’

I have no answer to that. Like I give a fuck. Like she does. Neither of us gives a fuck about the water and yet we’re supposed to have a conversation about it.

She says, ‘Sparkling then.’

The waitress nods and goes. Returns with water.
Asks if we’ve chosen. We say almost. Watkins says something about scallops. I nod. Then she says something about how to cook tuna. I nod
again. Think of Langton’s head. Khalifi’s lung. I try to concentrate on my breathing.

This isn’t going well.

Then Watkins says, ‘Look, Fiona, I did want to talk to you about your career. I mean, you have talent. You must know that.’

I probably say
something to that. I definitely blink.

‘But I also wanted . . . Look, I think it’s time we spoke about our feelings for each other. Not as police officers, but as . . .’ She doesn’t finish her sentence. Just
lunges across the table. Takes my unbandaged hand in hers. She’s bright with emotion and her eyes are full. Her lips move but nothing comes out.

I don’t know what to say. No idea.
Don’t know what to say, where to look, how to react.

Just keep hold of that image of Langton’s head rising up through the oil. The twilight lustre of her scalp. The sudden weight and the dripping hair and the pebble clacking against her
teeth.

Back in this world, I keep my feet on the floor. Count my breaths.

I don’t think I say anything, but maybe I do.

Watkins says, ‘Have I
got this wrong?’

I nod. Humble. Embarrassed.

I had no idea this was coming.

Watkins’s face is a mixture of everything in the world. There’s love and pain and anger and, I think, shame. It’s only the last bit which makes me uncomfortable.

I say, ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t . . . I’m not . . .’

‘Are you with someone?’

I nod. She doesn’t know about Brydon. We don’t make a big deal
of our relationship, but almost everyone knows about it. But Watkins isn’t almost everyone. Too scary. Too
senior. Too driven. She’s probably less connected to office gossip than anyone at Cathays.

‘I thought. I just thought . . .’ she says.

And I know what she thought. I messed around with her because she gave me a bollocking. Gave her a physical compliment, which probably no one had
done for twenty years. Then went on doing with
it, deliberately keeping her off balance, entering her space, giving her compliments, for no reason at all except that I was feeling scratchy.

‘In the hospital, when I held your hand . . . I assumed you’d pull it away, but you didn’t. You did the opposite.’

‘It was nice actually. I liked it.’

‘And that suit from Hobbs. Almost identical
to mine. I thought you were signalling something. And this morning, in the interview room, you seemed so . . . so . . .’

So happy. Which I was, because Khalifi was there with me. And because I realised something about how my crazy brain operates and because I felt comfortable, at last, with that knowledge.

‘I’m an idiot,’ I tell her. ‘You need to know that. Everyone else does. The safest
thing, honestly, is to ignore me completely. I’m good at detective work.
That’s about all. Actual life – it’s not my forte.’

She half-smiles at that. She’s the same. ‘Can I ask? Your current partner . . .?’

‘Is a man. David Brydon. I assumed you’d know.’

Watkins looks grim and she looks hurt, but more like the Watkins I used to know. I know that I am confusing to people. When I was
at Cambridge, I had a couple of brief lesbian encounters. Back
then, I wasn’t too sure which way I swayed – wasn’t sure about almost anything in those days – and somehow I gave off signals which alerted all those lesbian gay-dars. I
suppose I still do.

We spend some time analysing stuff. The stupid things I did. The inferences she drew. I tell her I’m a fuckwit and this time I don’t adjust
my vocabulary.

She cries. Briefly and with embarrassment, but it seems to me like a clean thing to do. Truthful.

I tell her I’m sorry and I mean it.

And after a while, something changes.

Things feel easier and lighter. The waitress comes with food, and messes around with cutlery, and asks us if we have everything we need, and goes away again, and soon everything suddenly starts
to move again.

Watkins says she’s not very good at the dating game. I say she can’t be worse than me. I tell her she should be more confident. I also tell her to throw away that horrible little
scarf. Forget the shiny aubergine shirts. Just be herself.

And somewhere, somehow, all the bollocks drops away. We don’t judge ourselves or each other. We’re just normal. Normal-weird, I mean.
She allows herself to be what she is: a fierce
old dyke who would welcome some companionship. I let myself be who I am: a half-crazy police officer who quite likes scary old dykes and who definitely enjoys the release from all those narrow
office conventions. I imagine she still fancies me, but it doesn’t bother me if she does.

Over pudding, Watkins does try to talk to me about becoming
a Detective Sergeant, but I shake my head. ‘Some other time?’

Watkins nods. She wants me to call her Rhiannon. I’m not sure about that, but I don’t call her ‘ma’am.’

She’s obviously been looking at my file, because she says, ‘I see you put your name down for the undercover course.’

I shrug. ‘Just a toe in the water, really.’ The same line as I gave to Buzz.

‘Is that all? Some officers
get addicted to danger, you know. The thrill of it. I wouldn’t want to see that happen to you.’

I say the right things. That I’m not addicted to danger. That I want to build my professional skillset. Yadda yadda.

Watkins accepts it, maybe, but I had to sit a psychometric test for that course recently. Sat down. Sixty questions to complete. An hour to do it. No right or wrong: they just
wanted to find out
what kind of person I was.

Five questions in, I realised that if I responded honestly, I wouldn’t have a prayer of getting onto the course. So I figured out what kind of personality they were looking for and adapted
my answers accordingly. It wasn’t hard to do. It was probably easier for me to invent a personality than figure out the one I have.

Watkins listens to
me for a while, then changes the subject. She says, ‘I got Kirby to speak to Strathclyde. We want them to make McCormack a priority target.’

‘Thanks.’

‘It might work, you know. If Strathclyde aren’t completely useless.’

‘Yes, but they’ve sort of had their chance, haven’t they? They’ve been looking for five years –’

‘He wasn’t wanted for the attempted murder of a police officer.
And they didn’t have a Detective Superintendent demanding regular progress updates.’

‘Right, but how much of our resources would we put into this if things were the other way round? No leads. No recent photos. No address. If the guy does something stupid, they’ll
pick him up. If not, they won’t. On the other hand . . . well, there are other ways to catch people.’

‘Meaning?’

Watkins
glares at me. She thinks I’m talking about my father and doesn’t like it. The ferocity of her look makes me laugh. She’s being herself.

‘I can find people to ask. Not policemen. Not criminals. Just there may be alternatives to waiting for Strathclyde.’

Watkins doesn’t understand what I mean, but she nods. She doesn’t approve. Doesn’t like it. But she doesn’t rip my head off.

‘If they’ve
been careful about DNA . . .’ she says.

‘If they’ve been careful, it may not do us any good even if we do locate them.’ I shrug. ‘But we can’t not look.’

‘Yes.’ Watkins’s face moves in a way I can’t interpret. ‘It’s a strange sort of justice, isn’t it? Khalifi kills Langton and does that to her corpse. I
hope it
was
to her corpse. And then, years later, he gets the exact same treatment
from McCormack.’

She’d expand on all this, except that I’m shaking my head. Big, wide, breezy shakes.

‘You don’t agree. Clearly.’ She’s laughing at me.

‘He loved her. Khalifi and Langton. He never stopped loving her. That’s what we’ve been investigating here. A love story.’

‘A love story with two murders.’

‘Well, yes.’ That doesn’t seem like an interesting objection to me.
The murders only make the love that bit more real, the flame that bit brighter. ‘In his apartment.
Khalifi’s. There was a sailing boat lit with fairy lights. It was the only really sentimental thing he had. If I had to guess, I’d say she was the love of his life.’

‘When did you go to his apartment?’ Watkins, typically, remembers I was never detailed to go there.

‘I wanted to see it,’
I say with a shrug, and she accepts the evasion. I add, ‘And, as it happens, I think he turned out to be the love of Langton’s life too. That
wasn’t how it was meant to be, not for her. She was moving on. She’d presumably have found someone else, settled down, lived the kind of life she was always meant to lead. But the way I
see it, he set her on the path to that new future. Took her from a
world that was destroying her. Given that she never reached her future, Khalifi was the best thing she ever had.’

I want to say that I’m pleased Khalifi was chopped to shreds and scattered on Llanishen’s empty mud. Him and her, united at last. But the happy atmosphere of our Weirdos United
love-in might buckle at that particular insight, so I keep it to myself.

Watkins, I know, doesn’t
necessarily agree with me. She sees this the way any police officer would. We have a link between Langton and Khalifi. We suspect that she moved on, he
didn’t. On Watkins’s reading of events, it’s quite possible that he hassled Langton. Demanded to see her. Wanted to restart things. She said no. A struggle. Then either a
deliberate killing or a gruesome accident. Either way, he killed her and
in some kind of weird, angry ritual scattered her parts across a part of the city they had once made their own.

The case began with two victims and a million suspects. To the police mind, Khalifi now looks like being the one in a million. The guy who did it.

Nothing I say will convince Watkins otherwise, and indeed I do realise that she might be correct: At this stage, we’re all still
speculating. But as she signals for the bill, I realise
that the truth feels suddenly closer, a golden apple glimmering in the darkness. I have the strange thought,
I know who killed Mary Langton
. And that’s not true. I don’t have a
name, don’t have a theory even. But it’s as though I know I have all the pieces I need. That I’ve seen the pattern, just haven’t seen that I’ve seen it.

‘There
is a cherry tree at Elsie Williams’s house,’ I announce. ‘Cherry-coloured poo.’

‘What?’

‘And those espaliered fruit trees, the ones trained to grow flat against a wall, they’re clipped in summer.’

‘What you are talking about?’

‘Mary Langton,’ I say. ‘If Khalifi
didn’t
kill her, then someone did. Probably one of our two-hundred-and-whatever people of interest. I’m just trying to
. .
.’ I have nothing, I realise. Nothing tangible. Nothing even that gets as far as a theory. So I end weakly, ‘. . . trying to think laterally.’

In the restaurant around me, I feel Khalifi’s spirit bubble with joy. I can’t help but smile with him.

Watkins smiles too. ‘It’s a shame you’re not a lesbian,’ she tells me. ‘You’d make some girl very happy.’

‘You too,’ I say. ‘You just
need to get out more.’

She nods. ‘I’ll try. I really will.’

‘A bit of confidence. That’s all you need.’

‘I’ll give it a go.’

‘There are websites, you know.’

She nods again. When we go outside, sunshine blazes over snow and ice. The streets are almost empty.

I say, ‘Rhiannon,’ and she stops. Looks at me with that twisted expression of hers. I tease the scarf from her neck
and drop it in a municipal rubbish bin. She smiles at me. Mouths,
‘Thank you.’

We walk back to the office as Khalifi whoops above us in the frozen air. I am going to find out who killed Mary Langton. I am going to find justice for Khalifi.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

The week ends.

Warmer weather returns. The polar bears leave Queen Street. Bute Park is empty of penguins. Except where the ploughs have left banks of coarse brown snow, the streets and pavements are mostly
clear again. Dirty water gurgles into a million drains and gutters. The gritty salt remains.

We don’t get sunshine. We just
get the pre-Christmas Cardiff we’ve always known. Cloudy. Chill. Threatening rain.

The sun sets at 4
PM
. We have a scant eight hours of daylight and those hours are seldom bright.

My body gradually recovers. My cuts are sore, but healing. My skin grafts are doing fine.

Buzz and I spend plenty of time together. I’m not up for any very energetic sex, but Buzz has an impressive variety
of gentler alternatives. We tell each other that we love each other. I
know I said that before, in hospital, but it’s different saying it now, without the drama of calamity.

And when I say it, I try to figure out what I feel. Is this love? Do I feel as a person ought to when they’re in love? And if I do, does that mean that Buzz and I are forever? That we need
to get married, have children,
buy a nice house in a pleasant district, and, in general, that I need to model myself on Gentle Jenny with bread on the sideboard and a bun in the oven?

Those thoughts make me dizzy. And some problems don’t need immediate solution. Buzz, I hope, knows me well enough not to force the issue.

I haven’t told him, or anyone, about my lunch with Watkins. Nor will I. I hope she finds someone.

Khalifi’s mother does come to Cardiff. I guess there are forms to sign and things to organise, but she speaks almost no English. I pick her up from Heathrow along with a police
interpreter. The mother, Fatima, is veiled and wears sandals over bare feet. I doubt she’s ever seen a northern winter. Her face is lined with the sort of wrinkles that go beyond age into
some kind of other state
altogether.