Love Story, With Murders (43 page)

I don’t have any leads, exactly, but I’m learning the territory.
I feel as I do at the start of a case. Eager. Alive.

Every now and again, alas, I’m expected to do my real work. Stirfry stuff.

We’ve investigated Idris Prothero’s stack of mobile phones. None of them have been used but – an interest tidbit, this – we do know that the whole lot were purchased as
part of a batch of fifteen from an Internet retailer. One of the phone numbers sold as part
of that transaction received a call from the Capel-y-ffin area on the day of my almost-murder.
That’s not remotely strong enough evidence to secure a conviction for anything, but as far as I and Watkins are concerned, it largely eliminates doubt that Idris Prothero issued the order to
kill me. Hamish and Olaf asked for instructions. Prothero told them to kill the copper. They drove back up
the hill and tried to do just that.

Fuck him. And fuck them.

I want to see them all in jail – Prothero, Hamish, Olaf – with a passion that takes me by surprise. Fuck them all.

My flame of anger burns brightly for Mary Langton too. I want her killer too. And now, at last, I think I’m getting closer. The officer, Dai Beynon, who cautioned Elsie Williams comes back
from his time away.
He tells me that he remembers the day concerned. He’d rung the front-door bell and got no answer. But the doors to the garage had been open. Both doors: the big one at the
front, the small one at the back. ‘So I walked straight through,’ he told me. ‘They were all there.’

I nod. The garden furniture was stored in the Williams’s garage. It would have been easier taking it in and out via the
large front opening, and it would have been natural to leave the
door up. Natural too for Beynon to stroll through the garage into the garden. See if he could find his quarry there.

‘And they were all there? Elsie Williams? Her daughter and son-in-law?’

‘That’s it,’ said Beynon.

‘Did you stop in the garage for any reason? Move things around? Make a noise?’

Beynon shrugs. There
are limits to memory. He doesn’t say that exactly, but he sort of does.

He stands at my desk answering my dippy questions, lifting up my stapler and tapping the surface of my desk with it.

And that too is an answer of a sort. The fidgety PC David Beynon. Moving through the garage, banging things around, because he’s the banging-around type.

I don’t have proof, or anything that resembles
it, but I do have a theory.

I get on the phone, trying to locate the firm that built Elsie Williams’s conservatory. It takes sixteen calls, but then I locate a builder in Llanishen who says that yes, he did the job.
Ewan Jenkins, his name is.

‘I need to know how you were paid. If you were paid in cash, if you fiddled your VAT, I don’t care. There will be no repercussions. Just tell me
how you were paid.’

‘Yes, well, I do sometimes take cash. I mean, I wouldn’t normally, but like I say . . .’

‘I really don’t care. I’m not a VAT person. You can do what you like as far as I’m concerned. I need to know who paid you, Owen. Who
physically
gave you the
cash?’

‘It would have been the old lady, Mrs Williams. But there was a young man there too. Her son-in-law maybe? I
think it was his money. I’m not sure. It felt like there was a bit of an
atmosphere. Like there had been a row or something. The job had been okay, actually. The conservatory went up pretty well, considering, and there wasn’t a problem in getting paid, exactly.
But I didn’t like it. There was something funny there. You know. Not just one thing. But other, little things.’

‘Go on.’

I’m holding the phone so hard I can feel the plastic handset creak in my grip.

‘Well, like I had to take tools and everything off-site all the time. I’ve got a lock-up, so that’s not a problem, like. But normally, I’d just use the garage. Keep it
tidy obviously, but . . .’

Jenkins goes on talking, but I’m only half-listening.

Gotcha
!

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

I tell Jenkins
that we’ll need him to come in and make a statement at some point. Reassure him again about the VAT. Hang up.

And then – because I want a conviction, not just a story – I start to research things. Always an illuminating process. SNAXPO, for example. An entire conference in Arizona, just to
discuss the humble snack. If you didn’t know those things existed, you’d never guess. Not just one
conference, dozens of them. Interpack 2011. Or who would believe that there is even
something called the International Cheese Technology Expo? That delightful event takes place in Wisconsin – you get good cheese technologists in Wisconsin, I bet – but the UK turns out
to have its own thriving equivalents.

Which is all good. I check some dates, make some calls. I can be smiley and nice
when I need to be. That, plus I offer a load of money which I’m never going to pay. While I’m working
on my laptop, Buzz looks over my shoulder and says, ‘What you are doing?’ I say, ‘I’ve decided to move into PR.’ He says, ‘No, really what?’ I say,
‘I’m catching murderers.’ He says, ‘No, really what?’ and I smack the laptop closed and give him a kiss long enough that he stops asking boring questions
to which I
have already given two perfectly accurate answers.

Other things go well too.

Stuart Brotherton submits his completed report on Barry Precision. It’s lethally comprehensive, utterly devastating. We hand it over to the Crown Prosecution Service along with six files
of additional evidence. Brotherton lists 188 counts of weapons export. Whether you judge it by the number of
offences or the value of the items shipped, this is the UK’s biggest-ever
arms-smuggling case. Watkins, Kirby, Dunwoody, Jones, and a couple of other senior officers go out for a celebratory lunch. Come back drunk.

I send Idris Prothero a homemade Christmas card with a picture of Cardiff Prison in the snow. Inside I write, ‘
10-year sentence. Home in 6
.’

I visit Brian Penry a couple of
times. He’s okay now. Head down, doing his time. He asks how I’ve been getting on with Mortimer. I tell him that I can’t say much now, but
things are going well. After I’ve seen Penry, I don’t run straight out of the prison. I linger. Feeling the walls, the cells, the bars, the keys. It’s not a comfortable sensation,
but it’s not insupportable either. I manage it OK.

I wonder – and this
is a thought I
do
run from – I wonder if I might be getting more normal.

I think the answer is probably no. But for the first time in my ridiculous life, I have a small but increasing pile of evidence to the contrary.

Item
: I have a stable relationship with a proper boyfriend.

Item
: I have a good job and am respected (if not always liked) by my colleagues.

Item
: I can sometimes
cook an edible meal in less than seven hours.

Item
: I have been known, if not often, to clean, dust and hoover.

Item
: I go clothes shopping with my sister and sometimes wear the clothes that I buy. I have even plucked my eyebrows.

It’s not, now that I think about it, the most impressive list of achievements, but you can’t measure impressive from the height of a wall alone. You have
to consider the depth of the
hole you started with.

I am sometimes scared by how much progress I’ve made.

And then I hear from Lev. Nothing much. Just an address and a name. The address is of a flat, in an area just outside Drumchapel. The name, I assume, is the one McCormack uses at the moment:
Callum Frasier.

I check the place on Google Maps. Then Street View.

The building
is five storeys high. Unpainted stucco. Flat roof. Either council housing or ex-council. Net curtains in most of the windows. Some washing on lines. Concrete balconies and plastic
garden chairs. Skies the colour of stucco.

No visible contract killers, but Lev doesn’t get these things wrong.

I’ve got what I wanted.

I’ve got what I wanted and I don’t know what to do next. My most obvious
option, the one any half-normal police officer would take without a moment’s thought, is to call
Strathclyde Police. Give them McCormack’s current location. Wait for them to do the rest. That’s what I ought to do. The correct option.

And yet, what would we do if we got a call like that? We’d send a couple of plainclothes detectives to the property, ready to make an arrest if McCormack entered
or left. We wouldn’t
be able to force entry, because we have no evidence to put in front of a magistrate that McCormack even lived there. If he was away for a few days, it’s unlikely that Strathclyde Police would
maintain surveillance. If he was alert enough to check his surroundings for two men waiting around in a car all day, he’d be sure to wait them out, or just move on under cover of
darkness.

And that would be that. He’d never come back.

Also, the Strathclyde Police do not have in their possession three body hairs taken from a corpse in Llanishen.

So, though I say I don’t know what I’m going to do next, the truth is that I’ve only got one option. I tell Buzz I’ll be away for the weekend. I haven’t yet
replaced my car, so buy one for three hundred pounds in
cash. It’s a VW Polo, a wreck really, but it works. I don’t tell anyone I’ve bought it. I park it a mile and a half from my
house. I don’t insure it.

There are a few other bits and pieces I need, but I have most of them already. A couple of things to practise, but I’m reasonably practiced already.

Oddly, I’m quite relaxed. I don’t have big anxieties over what I’m about to do. I do bits
and bobs at work without getting myself into trouble. I spend time with Buzz and my
family and it all feels pleasingly ordinary. The snow remains. Each night we look at the latest satellite picture.

An ice-bound island, waiting for something to break.

Glasgow feels appropriate in the cold. A northern city, chained in ice. There’s something industrial about the way they handle the cold up here. The gritters and
snowploughs have a dirty, used look to them. A clanking brutishness in nursery yellow.

I arrive after dark, which is to say after four in the afternoon. I haven’t had a good
drive up and I’m in a foul mood. The GPS on my phone guides me straight to the block of flats,
as awkward and graceless in real life as it was on Street View. Four apartments on each floor. My man, Frasier-McCormack, is in Flat 5B, so on the top storey.

I ring his bell, get an answer, mumble an apology for pressing the wrong button, then go back to my car.

Sit there and wait.

Three
hundred pounds doesn’t buy much of a car or much of a sound system. I try listening to Classic FM, but the radio picks up two signals simultaneously: Classic FM’s own tedious
repertoire and some strange Nordic station, all folk music and improbable, excessive laughter.

I switch off. Stay gazing at the front door of the building. On McCormack’s floor, there are two apartments with lights
on, two without. I’m parked as far as possible from any
streetlight.

Time goes by.

I have the engine off. Sit back, out of sight. I don’t know how alert McCormack is likely to be, but I don’t want to do anything that could attract attention. At least I’m
wrapped up warm.

Two kids pass my car. One of them raps on my window. I wind my window down and say, ‘Yes?’ The kid says something
in an accent so thick I don’t understand it. I reply in Welsh,
the same thing as I said to Sophie Hinton.
Twll dîn pob Sais
. Every Englishman an arsehole. He goes off muttering. He might as well be speaking Icelandic.

Someone leaves the apartment block, but it’s not McCormack. It gets past six o’clock. How long can a person take this freezing city, this darkness, before they’re driven to
the
boozer?

Another forty-three minutes, it turns out.

The lights go off on the remaining top floor apartment. A minute or so later, a shape enters the lobby. Then the door opens and McCormack is briefly visible under the outside light. He’s
wearing a woollen hat and a padded coat: the same ones, I think, as he was wearing when he tried to kill me. There’s not much of him to see. But
everything fits. The clothes. The way he
moves. The brief view I have of his face. It’s him.

I feel a cold spill of excitement. Capillaries opening up to adrenaline, fingertips awakening. A sense of life.

But it’s brief, the feeling. I’m here to do a job. I’m not looking for hassle and not expecting any. The adrenaline goes away. The fingertips close down.

McCormack walks off up
the street. I wait ten minutes, then leave the car. I’ve got some cigarettes with me – bought specially, because I hardly ever smoke tobacco – and hang
around outside the apartment smoking.

After a while, a couple of people approach the block. One of them is dredging keys out of her bag. I throw my ciggy away and follow her in.

There’s a lift and stairs. The two I’ve followed in take
the stairs. I take the lift. It carries me stutteringly to the top floor. A faint smell of piss travels with me.

The landing has a low-energy bulb restrained behind thickly frosted plastic. A single-paned glass window stares blankly over the city. A silent rectangle of lights, darkness, cold. The floor is
some kind of composite stone. Cheap and durable.

Metal railings lead downstairs
but I’m not heading down. There’s a bag of rubbish sitting outside one of the apartments, but not McCormack’s.

I put on an elasticated hair cover, the sort of thing they use in food preparation. Also latex gloves. Get tools out of my bag.

A set of lockpicks. I bought them off the Internet for about forty quid a couple of years back. No particular reason why. I just prefer to have that
sort of thing. I bought a few practice locks,
watched some YouTube videos on how to use the picks. Practised on my own locks and on any others that came my way. I became reasonably adept, reasonably swift, then shoved the tools away in a
bottom drawer. I didn’t forget about them exactly, but they weren’t top of my list of things to worry about.