Love Story, With Murders (42 page)

And after Buzz leaves, and the house is empty, and when silence returns to the kitchen and creeps like moonlight over the garden and steals upstairs like the last breath leaving a body, I become
aware of my mind finding its peace.

I don’t smoke more
– I’ve already had more than enough – but take a shower, darken the house, and drink peppermint tea. I’m sitting upright in bed. Castled in
pillows.

I’ve been expecting Khalifi to come, but all I sense of him is a prickle of energy. The same sensation I first felt that night in Cathays with me, Buzz, Watkins, and Konchesky. I
hadn’t known what it was then, but it was Khalifi making contact.

I think this dimmed presence is him fading out.

I’ll miss him, of course, but you can’t hang on.

They grow up so fast.

I wish I’d got closer to Mary Langton. I would have, but chasing after two murders limits the time you can give to either. I regret that, but I’m sure she forgives me. The dead are
always forgiving. And I will give her what she needs.

I don’t know whether
I sleep or not. All I do know is that I am still sitting up when dawn arrives to reclaim the streets. My peppermint tea sits empty beside me. And my paring knife is in
my hand. Finger through the finger loop. Blade pointing upward and outward at the lightening sky.

Later that same morning, Watkins comes by my desk.

She’s in a severe dark suit. Rumpled white shirt. Iron-grey hair that’s been recently cut. I like her this way. I want to smile at her, but don’t. She looks tired. I probably
do too.

‘Fiona.’

‘Ma’am.’

‘I wanted to update you. The investigation into – your attempted murder.
We’re not getting very far.’

She updates me, brusquely. Number plate recognition: nothing helpful. Forensics: nothing at all. Eyewitnesses: less than nothing.

‘As you thought, it’s going to be all but impossible to bring this to court, even if we find the perpetrators.’

‘I know.’

‘And we haven’t found them.’

I don’t know what to say to that. Unless today is the day where we
go up to people and tell them stuff they already know. I move my face and hands, just so it looks like I’m doing my
bit.

‘The team I’ve had looking into things. They’re on standby. They’re available if anything comes up. But otherwise . . .’

Kirby has had his way. The troops are being redeployed. And quite right too. I’d do the same if I were him.

But Watkins isn’t finished. ‘The
other day. You mentioned there might be ways of finding McCormack.’

‘There might be. Yes.’ I stop, because I’m not sure where she’s going with this. Then add carefully, ‘I’m making enquiries. I don’t yet have anything
concrete.’

‘Yes. I see.’ She raps down on my desk with her knuckles. Moves a yellow notepad which wasn’t in anyone’s way. Glares over my shoulder at the sombre grey stones
of the
Crown Court across the street.

Then she comes to a decision. Pulls something from her pocket. A small clear polythene evidence bag. ‘This is material attaching to the Khalifi enquiry. Would you please return it to the
forensics lab? It shouldn’t have been removed.’

She hands it over. There are three dark hairs in the bag. Body hairs, I guess. From a hand or arm or leg or chest.
Specks of skin at the root.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She’s about to say something else, but thinks better of it and says nothing. Turns abruptly and stalks away. She is swallowed by the glass doors that lead to the lifts. A swinging
monochrome reflection is all that remains.

That, and these three hairs. Perversion of the course of justice, if you look at it one way. Justice itself, if you look
at it another.

I put the bag in my pocket.

No one needs to know about this.

When I looked this morning, there was only two grand left in my kitchen drawer.

Nothing happens.

The cold weather returns. First the cold, then the snow. There are satellite photos shown on the news. Britain re-created in ice. A white island floating on a sea that’s dark teal close
into shore, a deep, inky aquamarine farther out.

There are close-ups of South Wales too, shown on local news, reproduced in local
papers. The Bristol Channel is its usual dirty brown. The forests south of Ystradgynlais are white, but pricked
through with evergreen. Holly and ice.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Nor has anyone. Temperature records tumble again. Night after night I revisit that field above Capel-y-ffin in my dreams. Trousers and a T-shirt, worn
under starlight.

My dad doesn’t quite accept that
I’m well on the road to healing and keeps putting pressure on me to go back and live with him and Mam, ‘at least until after Christmas, love.
You don’t want to worry about cooking and that.’ I tell him, truthfully, that I don’t spend much of my time worrying about cooking, but compromise by spending more time at home
than usual. Mam spoils us with huge meals. Kay has boyfriend troubles and wafts
around, wearing black, an iPhone always glowing at her palm. Ant is on the verge of being a proper teenager, but her
natural sweetness keeps popping out to overwhelm any incipient moodiness. Her Christmas list is already two pages long.

Dad’s not always around, of course. His work often claims his evenings. But he’s around enough. Enough that, one evening after we’ve eaten, as the family
starts to scatter
– Mam and Ant to watch TV, Kay to nurse her woes upstairs – Dad scoops me up and takes me through to his lair, his giant, cluttered studio. He clinks around with glasses, because he
likes the whole palaver of the lead crystal tumblers and the heavy decanters, but neither of us drink much, me almost not at all. When I have something peaty and expensive in my glass, he shows me
his latest toy. A chunk of rock, a meteorite supposedly. ‘Three and a half kilos,’ Dad says with awe. ‘Just imagine where that’s come from, how many miles it travelled to
get here.’ He whirls the lump of rock through the air to show me how a meteorite travels. I’ve no idea whether the item is genuine or not, or how much you have to pay to get a
three-and-a-half-kilo space rock sitting lumpenly
on your coffee table, but I make the noises I’m meant to make. And if the meteorite is for real, then Dad’s right: It is an
extraordinary thing.

Then Dad turns serious. Worried, even. I don’t know how to read Dad these days. Whether any expression can be taken at face value. I can’t tell the difference between him acting and
not acting.

‘Listen, love, I should probably tell you.’

He composes his features, but I interrupt. I think I know what he’s going to say.

‘About Capel-y-ffin?’

He nods.

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I say. I explain briefly what happened. ‘They were professionals. I was unlucky to get caught. None of us had any reason to suppose there was a
risk. But I was lucky to get away, so it all evened out.’

Dad is sitting by a heavily shaded
lamp. His face intersects the angle of the light, so his face is a jigsaw of shadows. It’s not surprising to me that he’s already heard the story.
He’ll still have contacts in the police. He’ll still hear the talk.

‘You shouldn’t have been there alone,’ is all he says.

‘No, I shouldn’t really. There’s an internal enquiry into whether we judged the risks appropriately. Someone was supposed
to come with me. At the last minute, she
couldn’t come. I chose to go anyway. No one made me go.’

I shrug. And if Susan Konchesky had been there with me? Olaf and Hamish might well have gone ahead anyway.

In any case, I don’t think we did judge the risks inappropriately. The police service was under massive pressure because of the weather. In the end, I was just going to an empty house
where there might or might not have been useful evidence, relating to a line of enquiry which was still highly exploratory. I’ve said all that to the in-house review team, who, I think,
accepted it.

But Dad isn’t an in-house review team.

‘Love –’ he begins.

‘Really, Dad? Really? You’re going to say I should have told you that first day in the hospital. When you were most worried
about me. Most likely to act on impulse. Let’s say I
had
told you. That day. Or the next. The first time we were alone together. If I’d said, “Hey, Dad, two professional killers did this to me and I’m lucky to be
alive,” you tell me: what would you have done?’

‘I’m not . . . I’m not a young man anymore. I don’t just do the first thing that comes into my head.’

‘I know you’re not.’

‘And my business activities these days . . .’

‘Are one hundred percent legitimate. Yes, I know. But you haven’t answered my question.
What would you have done?
’

Dad moves his face out of the light. It darkens, but simplifies. He hasn’t touched his drink.

‘I don’t know. I’d have made some calls. Have you located the people?’

I shake my head.

‘I could still make the calls.’

‘Dad, I’m a police officer. We’ll find the people, arrest them, and jail them. It’s what we do.’

Dad’s face flickers with a smile. ‘It’s what you do if you manage to catch them.’ He likes this: his unblemished record of having escaped our clutches.

I smile right back. ‘But back when you were doing your stuff, I wasn’t a police officer, was I?’

For a moment, our smiles hang in the
air together, pushing at each other. A flickering contest, then a truce.

‘Tell you what, love. I
will
make some calls. If I find out anything, you’ll be the first to know. I won’t take any other action. And if they’re local, I’ll
definitely –’

‘They’re not local. One of them is Scottish, one of them Scandinavian.’

I give him a bit of further information: height and build, that sort
of thing. I don’t mention Drumchapel. I don’t give him McCormack’s name. I don’t want Dad to be the
one who locates them first.

He nods. Dad never had national reach. His contacts and buddies are, as far as I know, mostly Welsh or West Country. He doesn’t make any promises.

We talk a bit more, then the conversation switches to other things, then I yawn and Dad drives me home in his big
silver car. We say good night at my door.

It was a nice evening and I’m pleased that Dad raised the subject with me. I’d been worried he might act without talking to me first. But though I came away feeling reassured about
his immediate intentions, I realise he said almost nothing to reassure me about his current activities.
I’m not a young man anymore. I don’t just do the first thing that
comes into
my head
. Read it one way, and it’s a statement of current innocence. Read it another, and it’s a fancy way of saying that he no longer commits criminal or violent acts without
careful advance planning. And it wasn’t him but me that stated his current business activities were all legitimate. And when I asked him what he’d have done, he said
I’d have
made some calls
, without saying
what he’d have done with the information received.

I still think I was right not to have told him straight out. Still want to pursue this my way, not his way.

I don’t hear back from Lev.

I wear my woman-of-mystery suit into the office and get loads of compliments.

Aside from the frostbitten spots on my toes, which will be there for some time, my skin is returning to normal. I hardly
ever need aspirin now.

I am getting on okay with Buzz. We still live in a world where Buzz’s current and actual girlfriend and the mother of Buzz’s possible-future children might be one and the same
person. That first person isn’t sure if she wants to be the second one – isn’t sure if that second thing is even achievable – but she’s very sure that she wants to
carrying on being the first
of those things. And so far, Buzz seems to be okay with that. One time, I cook him a meal and get all the ingredients right and the cooking just right and the candles
just right and everything just right and we even sit down to eat on the right side of nine o’clock.

Whenever I have free time, which is quite often, I work on investigating my father. I don’t know what to explore first, so
I start by simply trying to make a map of his connections. Try to
figure out who he knew in 1986. Who he was close to. Who owed him something. Who might be afraid of him.

I make lists and write notes, but the centrepiece of my work is a mind-map-style diagram, with my father’s name in the middle, everyone else radiating out from there. People like Emrys
Thomas are there, of course. Others
too, all those who formed Dad’s inner circle back in my early childhood. Family connections. Friends.

Also criminals, major and minor, convicted and merely suspected. Not just ones in the same line of business as Dad, but anyone really. Anyone who was a pro criminal, who was a player.

Businessmen too. Dad had a golf-playing phase, which came to an end in the early nineties according to
Mam. I doubt if he ever really liked the game – it would have been too slow for him
– but it would have given him an excuse to spend money and rub shoulders with business types. Money always attracted him, and the moneyed have always had a fascinated attraction to
Dad’s supposed glamour.

And cops, I don’t exclude them. Cardiff has never had a terrible problem with police corruption, but
we weren’t as clean in the 1980s as we are now, and in any case you never really
know these things for sure. So I list Yorath too. Jack and his colleagues.

It’s slow work. These days, you can Google around and find connections quite easily. But both online and public sources have far less dating back a quarter of a century. I use microfiches
from local papers. Photo archives. Land Registry
records. Business registries. Police files. Family photo albums. I’ve spent a couple of lazy evenings with Emrys, and towards the end of the
second one, flipped through his photo album, reminiscing. Emrys was relaxed and chatty. I took care not to appear too interested, but noted every name down as soon as I was out of his house.