Love Story, With Murders (40 page)

Perhaps he’s been a better father for that knowledge. More protective. More loving.
More strategic and more thoughtful.

I’m not angry with Dad. Whatever I find out, I think I won’t be angry. But his secrets are mine too. And I intend to find them.

Stirfry trundles on.

When I get back into the swing of the morning briefings, I find things have changed. Kirby is there every single time. Adding the senior officer gloss to Watkins’s parade-ground bark.

The ‘people of interest’ have been swept away into a single corner of the noticeboards – all 288 of them. The photos of Khalifi
and Langton still dominate. The red love-heart
too. But now there’s a whole slew of material being generated by the Barry investigation. More names, data files, lists of statements and interviews. The operation now has a third full-time
data officer.

Some key facts are pouring in.

The biggest: Stuart Brotherton has sent a preliminary report which confirms that Barry Precision was,
beyond doubt, manufacturing arms. Not entire weapons systems, but spare parts for other
people’s systems. Gun barrels for heavy artillery. Firing pins. The gears and calibration equipment needed for range adjustment. Laser-cut ballistic-grade steel of the sort used for tank
armour. Self-sealing fuel tanks. IED blast protection gear. Suspension and chassis systems built to the kind of specifications
you’d need for an armoured car. The hydraulic gear needed to
raise a multiple rocket launch system to its firing position. Anti-blast screens that just so happen to fit the multiple rocket launch systems in most widespread use across the Middle East.

There are still a handful of suspect items where Brotherton hasn’t been able to track down their likely use, but his investigations continue.
Equally, in some cases, it seems that the
items sold would have needed some modest reengineering to make them fully functional as weapons-parts, but the sophisticated work had already been done.

By Barry Precision.

Which has no export licence.

Watkins has also had a trio of DCs investigating the firm’s buyers, who existed all across North Africa and the Middle East. Its biggest customer
was Saadawi, whose eldest brother buys
weapons for the Egyptian military. And whose family owns a slew of construction and trading interests, primarily in Egypt, but operating across the entire Middle East.

Numerous other buyers also look as dodgy as hell. The Libyan buyer was an affiliate of the state-owned Libyan oil company. Its purchases were theoretically all drilling-equipment related,
but
Brotherton says that at least 50 percent of the items involved had clear military use.

The Lebanese buyer: a trading company with links to the Syrian regime.

The Saudi buyer: a probable intermediary for a putative Yemeni end buyer.

My hunch about Khalifi is also proving to be right. Watkins has had officers contact every firm on Khalifi’s sizeable Rolodex. We’ve sought information
about what he talked to them
about. In particular, any orders he helped arrange for them.

It’s slow work, but the indications are that Khalifi was indeed building a virtual arms-manufacturing network. We’ll know more once we have more data and once Brotherton has had a
chance to analyse it, but it’s already pretty clear what the answer will be.

And I regret that, in a way. I’ve got
on so well with the corpse of Khalifi, it’s sad to find how much I’d have detested him in real life. His little enterprise was no more
ethical than Idris Prothero’s. Some people are better as corpses. They’re easier to like.

It’s not just the Barry end of things where we’re making progress. We’re making progress on the Langton–Khalifi link too.

We know for certain now that they had a
relationship. It’s not just Swansea Bay Yacht Club that confirms it. The couple also went boating on the Llanishen Reservoir, before it was emptied.
A guy who used to work there, renting boats, was able to recognise the pair.

Re-interviews of Langton’s old friends and a new analysis of material generated by the original enquiry all tends to confirm our general suspicion. That Langton, for
whatever reason, got
herself into a bad place when she started pole dancing and waitressing. The dancing was both an effect of that bad head space, but also a perpetuating factor. Langton was spiraling down. Then, her
friends seem to agree, she got happier. Though she kept quiet about the details, it was assumed she had a man. She stopped dancing. Drank less. Got healthier.

As her old
life got back on track, she no longer needed that rescue relationship. Again, we can’t be sure, but it does seem like she was the one who ended it, not him.

Some of these things aren’t beyond doubt, but most things aren’t. We work in a world of competing uncertainties. But for the first time since the enquiry started, it feels like all
our effort is paying off. We’re moving towards arrests,
prosecutions, convictions.

My own role in the hubbub is nicely ambiguous for a change. Partly because of that lunch and partly because of my little adventure on the hill, Watkins gives me considerable discretion in what I
do.

And, as far as I’m concerned, it’s time that Mary Langton had more of my attention. It’s partly that I’m intrigued by the testimony of the boat guy at Llanishen.
Previously, it was assumed that any normal girl leaving a party early and wanting to return to town would simply walk direct from the party to the station and await her train. She’s have had
no reason, in failing light, to detour to a largely deserted reservoir.

Only, if you had recent romantic associations with that spot, mightn’t you do just that? Mightn’t, in fact, it be part of the
reason why you left the party early, so you could
commune with the spirit of your ex? Your past happiness?

I pile my desk with printouts and start to work. When Elsie Williams thrust her walking stick into a small boy’s bike, it was the August of 2007. I check against her daughter and
son-in-law’s travel dates. They were visiting that summer. They were there when Elsie did it.

I check
weather records too. When we sent an officer round to caution the old lady, it was a hot day. Sitting-outside weather. Bee-buzzingly, heat-shimmeringly, summer-lawn-beckoningly hot.

There was a door at the back of the garage, so if the front was open, you could simply walk straight from the street, through the garage, into the garden.

Or of course vice versa.

A hot day, a vicious widow.
The things we coppers deal with.

The officer who cautioned Elsie Williams is away on holiday. Which is frustrating. I want to talk to him now. But that’s not the main thing, not by any means. I can feel myself
convalescing, working more slowly than I normally would. And that’s okay. Slow is okay, it’s the outcome that matters. Mary Langton has waited so long, another week or two won’t
bother her.

Her leg was in a freezer, her head in motor oil, her thumb in vegetable oil, a bit of leg packed in salt. Her arms were packed in polythene, but didn’t deteriorate as much as they
should.

I click around on the Internet for a bit and discover that supermarket salads are bagged up in nitrogen. The exclusion of oxygen preserves the food that much longer. I poke around on the
Internet and find that I can buy a nitrogen cylinder on eBay for seventy-two quid. Or get helium for not much more than twenty.

But who would do a thing like that? I wonder.

Wonder – but other bits and bobs of work keep pulling me away.

Mervyn Rogers and I have been down to David Marr-Phillips’s glitzy waterfront office to interview him about his arrangement with Prothero. He had
a copy of the shareholder agreement
waiting for us: the one that gave him a slice of Barry Precision, Prothero a slice of some of Marr-Phillips’s property assets. Also a report from an accountant stating that the valuations had
been determined at fair market value. Some stuff on tax treatment. Accounts for the property companies. Financial data on Barry Precision. Blah, blah.

Marr-Phillips
was both completely open with us and visibly irritated at the time we were consuming. Neither Mervyn nor I really knew how to play things. Mervyn’s best at frightening the
tough-but-stupid criminals we spend most of our lives chasing, and we both felt out of our depth interviewing Marr-Phillips. We ended up asking repetitive, circular questions for twenty minutes,
then let ourselves be escorted
politely from the office.

We gave Watkins a full report of everything. Like us, she doesn’t know what to do with the Marr–Phillips–Prothero connection. We decide not to pursue it. If we can nail
Prothero, other things may start to emerge. But maybe not. It doesn’t look to me like Marr-Phillips has done anything much wrong.

And nailing Prothero seems well within our grasp. Dunbar too.
Watkins and I share a grim determination to see both men destroyed. Personally, I’d like to see how much they’d enjoy a
prison in Libya. Or taste the pleasure of Bashar Assad’s hospitality in an Aleppo jail. Smashed ankles and a scream that echoes forever.

That won’t happen, of course, but I’d be happy enough if they do a long stint in Cardiff Prison. We may or may not get Prothero on murder,
but there’s a maximum ten-year
offence for weapons export offences. That’s twenty years too short, in my unhumble opinion. But still, it’s enough to fuck up a life. It would fuck up Prothero’s very nicely. He
could try out his silvery indignation on his fellow prisoners, see how well it worked.

I think of Ayla and Theo. What does it do to children to learn that their father is a criminal
and a suicide? What kind of abandonment is that? The jailing of Prothero might seem like redemption
of the best sort.
Yes, Theo, it
was
a mistake. We’re putting it right. We’re sending the bad people to jail.

These things run slowly, however. Barry Precision’s lawyers are working to impede the investigation at every turn, claiming unreasonable interference with the operation of the business.
So
far the Chief Constable and the county court have swatted aside every objection. I don’t think Barry’s lawyers expected anything else. I think their strategy relies on pushing up the
cost of our investigation to a point at which we start having to scale back our effort. I’ve seen perfectly valid cases fail for purely budgetary reasons. But Watkins has the total support of
top management.
She thinks, and I do, that we’ll secure our conviction.

Slow is okay, it’s the outcome that matters
. What I tell myself and my injured body.

One week ends. Another one begins. It’s now two weeks before Christmas and even Cathays starts to feel a little Christmassy cheer. Secretaries wear tinsel earrings. Jon Breakell attends
the morning briefing in an elf hat. Jim Davis goes out to lunch
at twelve fifteen and returns four hours later, barely able to focus. A fake memo is circulated seeking the apprehension of a
well-known criminal, thought to operate an unlicensed flying vehicle, to be in breach of multiple immigration regulations, and to force nocturnal entry to millions of homes. Believed to operate out
of Lapland. Aliases include Saint Nick, Santa Claus, ‘Father’ Christmas,
etc.

Everyone circulates it to everyone. I receive five versions. Delete them all. Ho, ho, ho.

Tuesday night is usually my night. That means in theory an opportunity to clean and iron things. In practice it means an opportunity to smoke a joint without worrying that Buzz is going to find
me. An opportunity to moon around my own house, in my own way.

Most nights now that I spend on
my own, Khalifi comes to see me.

He’s not always chuckling. He has a sadder side, I see. There was something unsustainable in his earlier mood. Something skittish, excitable.

I like his visits. If this is the form my psychotic side takes now, I welcome it. Better the occasional visit from a corpse than feel myself to be one of their number.

I don’t take my amisulpride. The pills go
back to the bathroom cabinet.

And one night, I come home from the office. It’s six thirty. My night for being alone. Only, as I let myself in, I hear someone moving about upstairs. There is a black bag on the landing.
I shout up a greeting, but get nothing back.

Go to the kitchen, put the kettle on.

Go to the potting shed, get some weed.

Start rolling joints. I didn’t leave the
house unlocked but some people don’t need keys. There isn’t much in the fridge, but there’s probably enough. Lev is like me. He
eats randomly. And it’s not my job to feed him.

Make peppermint tea for me. Put black tea out ready. Look for jam. Put that out too.

Then Lev appears. The unremarkable Lev. Old jeans and a jumper. Brown hair worn longish. Brown eyes like a spaniel’s.

We
don’t kiss, hug, or shake hands. I don’t know why not. We do smile at each other, though. I make Lev’s tea. Push the jam jar and a teaspoon across the table at him. Light a
joint.

We talk.

I never ask Lev much about his life. I used to, but then I realised he either said nothing or made stuff up, so I stopped asking. When he wants to tell me things, he does.

I tell him my news. About
Buzz. About Langton and Khalifi. I tell him about Barry Precision: how a small Welsh engineering firm figured out it could make big money by exporting weapons parts on
the pretext that they had innocent industrial purposes.

‘This company is where?’

‘In Barry. Down on the coast, just beyond the city.’

Lev’s face is dark. He’s been in war zones. He knows what modern weaponry can do.

‘Okay,’ he says, meaning
Go on
.

I tell him about Hamish and Olaf. About being made to stand outside in the snow, wearing nothing more than trousers and a T-shirt. About how I escaped and how I almost didn’t.

Lev mutters something in what might be Russian but could be Lithuanian. Then he says, ‘You know this people?’

‘We’ve identified the Scottish guy.’ I give Lev his name, photo,
and the fact that he stole a numberplate in Drumchapel. ‘There’s money in the drawer,’ I
say.