Sympathy for the Devil (6 page)

‘Any witnesses?’ she said.

‘We’ve got better than witnesses.’ Pugh turned again, to a monitor on the desk. ‘I shouldn’t show you this,’ he said. ‘But we have a record of his movements before he went under. And it isn’t pretty.’

She recognised the street immediately. It was the alley she had checked with DS Thomas earlier the same evening, and she was watching footage from the CCTV camera on the pole. The alley was empty, but there was light coming from one of the broken, lower windows. Two figures were standing there: a man and a woman.

The man was Rhys. The woman looked slim, attractive, was dressed in a dark, well-cut trouser suit. Catrin couldn’t see her face. There seemed to be some sort of struggle going on, the man pushing the woman back against the wall.

He was slapping her face, his other hand running over her thighs. There was no sound on the film, but the woman’s head was thrown violently back, her mouth open wide. As Rhys moved away the woman relaxed her stance, slumped back against the wall. Her face was still unclear.

‘It’s an area known for muggings.’ Pugh had picked up a Biro and was pointing at the screen. ‘Look at Rhys’s right hand as he leaves.’

She could see Rhys was holding some notes now, maybe a couple of twenties. He was hurrying away out of shot, down towards the water.

‘Has the woman come forward?’ she asked.

‘No, but that’s not so unusual. The muggers usually pick on women who’ve been drinking heavily. Seventy per cent of these type of incidents never get reported.’

She knew he was right, she’d seen CCTV of city-centre muggings enough times to know that’s probably what she’d just watched. Younger junkies usually shoplifted; the older ones who were too well known, barred from shops, tended to house-break and do muggings. After closing hour, with lone drinkers wandering about, that was when most of the incidents were caught on camera.

He flicked the control again. The next sequence showed the shelters on the beach. It had been filmed from some distance above, by the CCTV camera on the slope above the shingle.

Unlike the earlier footage, this was a series of stills, a couple of seconds between each, the movements of the figures jagged like a primitive cartoon.

This time Rhys was approaching a man standing by the door to the ruin of the beach hut. The man passed over something, a bag of drugs it looked like. Rhys gave him the twenties that were still clasped in his right hand.

Then Rhys was hesitating, backing away a few feet. He was holding something long and jagged. It seemed to be a broken bottle.

The second man was turning now, trying to enter the hut, Rhys moving in behind him. Rhys was pushing the bottle at his back, once, twice. The second figure was falling inward, face first, disappearing from view.

‘Who’s the second man?’ she asked.

‘Another local junkie, a dealer.’

She sat back, shuddering slightly. She was grasping for alternative explanations, anything to show Rhys in a better light, but the more she thought about it the worse it looked for him.

‘That was a serious assault. Why hasn’t this been investigated?’ she said at last.

‘No hospital admissions fitting the description of the victim. No body – no crime.’

Pugh played the last sequence again. She could see the man lying motionless on the floor of the hut.

‘But why does Rhys attack him? He’d already scored his shit.’

‘It often happens. Law of the street. The stronger junkie takes the weaker’s stash. Most of it was found on Rhys’s body when it was recovered from the water.’

‘And the twenties?’

‘Back on Rhys’s body.’

Pugh crossed his arms. His smile was there again, warm but subdued, like a hearth seen through thick glass. He was trying to reassure her, but about what she couldn’t imagine.

‘The sad truth is that’s what Rhys had become, I’m afraid. Just another mugger, just another street junkie.’

The final footage showed him heading down the beach, away from the hut. It was clear he’d had his fix now. Rhys was moving slowly, stumbling at times on the pebbles. He looked like a clown in an early silent movie. Then he lay down, on the strip of pale pebbles by the dark water.

The water was covering his shins. He didn’t seem to notice. He just lay there, motionless, his eyes closed. The last frame showed the waves breaking over empty pebbles.

‘It was painless, at least.’ Pugh was getting up, his eyes no longer on the screen. ‘There are many worse ways to go.’

She nodded. Rhys hadn’t looked in any condition to get up. It seemed the obvious explanation of what had happened.

Pugh went into the next room, she could hear an electric kettle begin to boil. She stood up in front of the monitor. Moving fast, she fed a customised memory-cuff into the side of the hard drive. In less than fifty seconds she’d got everything she’d just seen.

She sat down again, as Pugh brought through two City mugs. He passed one to her, his smile gently indulgent, as if at a child who was finally accepting the obvious.

She put the tea down without sipping it.

‘And the autopsy?’

He opened the file on the desk.

‘Just what you’d expect.’

‘In the tox report, no other incapacitants?’

‘No,’ said Pugh, the merest trace of impatience in his voice now. ‘It’s all straightforward enough. High levels of opiates consistent with long-term addiction. No surprises.’

‘The tests are clear on that?’

He glanced at the notes. ‘His urine was significantly positive for opiates, though that’s not the only measure used.’

She remained silent, waited for him to go on.

‘Heroin is metabolised to 6-monoacetylmorphine, then to morphine in the blood. It’s not like alcohol testing. You can’t get a definitive reading from the urine. But the level of morphine there shows he’d been heavily exposed to opiates prior to the test.’

‘You measured sweat levels?’

‘Positive again.’

‘Hair?’

‘Of course. Everything consistent with long-term use. No sudden spike at the end.’

‘Saliva?’

Pugh sighed, barely hiding his impatience now.

‘Positive.’ He looked back down at the notes. ‘The legal limit of plasma morphine from OTCs, codeine and the like is twenty nanos per mil, equivalent to ten nanos per mil in blood. Rhys’s levels were about five hundred nanos per mil. That’s exactly what you’d have expected of a long-term user.’

She waited, hoping there would be a ‘but’ somewhere, a catch that would open the situation to some new, healing light. But she already sensed there wasn’t going to be one coming. This was a case where things were as they seemed.

Pugh was smiling wryly, sympathetically.

‘There’s no mystery here, lovey. It’s obvious what happened to the poor bastard. He’d just fixed a gramme of seventy per cent pure Afghani brown into his groin. He then passed out, as you saw, and drifted out on the tide.’

He switched off the computer, and gathered his papers.

She picked up one of the pictures from the file. It was a shot of Rhys lying there in his black jacket and biker boots. His eye sockets were empty, just blank slits in the pearl-grey skin, but otherwise the body looked perfectly intact.

She didn’t ask about the eyes. She knew the fish ate them, it almost always happened, even if a body had only been under a few minutes. She glanced again at the picture, at the jacket and the boots.

‘His clothes look good quality,’ she said, ‘not charity shop stuff.’

‘They were traced to a new shop on the arcade, they’d had some lifted.’

She knew that was the likely explanation. Street junkies were all expert shoplifters. She guessed Rhys was barred from most shops so would’ve targeted anywhere new opening up.

Pugh closed the file.

‘Could Rhys have known I was back?’ she asked.

‘Doubt it.’

She saw Pugh was looking dismissive but in a kind way. She suspected he’d already guessed what she was thinking, that the place where they found Rhys was about half a mile from her motel. But it was a small town, this meant little in itself. It was the time factor that niggled with her a little. Not that it meant anything sinister had occurred, Rhys could have been intending to see her, just out of curiosity, then OD’d in the meantime. But the likelihood was he hadn’t known she was back. Out on the streets he’d hardly be plugged into the police grapevine.

Pugh turned and took down something from the wall. ‘If he knew you were back, which I doubt, he’d have wanted money off you.’ He was smiling to himself at the thing from the wall. ‘He’d not have wanted to upset you turning up unannounced. He’d have called first, but you never heard from him.’

He glanced at her. He was looking at her kindly but with detachment. She thought she could read that look. He wanted to help with her grief but he didn’t want to encourage her to believe anything insubstantial. He knew that would just cause her more hurt. She looked at him and nodded, as if to signal she accepted there was nothing more to it.

‘It’s common for the bereaved to feel connected to what happened, that they could’ve prevented it, you know that,’ he said. ‘But Rhys was a junkie. Junkies die young, you just have to try to accept it.’ He’d taken down a photograph from the board. It was of a cottage with rolling hills and fields in the background.

‘It’s my holiday place up Monmouth way,’ he said, a hint of pride in his voice.

She took it, without looking at it. ‘Must be nice to have something like that. Not one home, two,’ she said.

The picture had fallen through her fingers onto the floor. She crouched down, reaching for it. She realised she was sobbing, warm fat tears dripping down on the linoleum, staining the picture. She struck the ground, with a sudden simple force. He was trying to stop her, but she wouldn’t let him, she kept hitting the ground, then abruptly she stopped.

She didn’t like to show emotion like this, not in front of someone she hardly knew any more. She stood up quickly, composed, like an actress who’d just finished her scene. He took her arm, guiding her out into the fresh air of the stairwell.

She looked up to see the Chief Constable, Geraint Rix, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Some office clown had hung the poster there, almost life-size. Not Pugh, it wasn’t his style. A joke for the benefit of the coppers trooping through. All Rix’s time, she’d heard, was spent on the media circuit sharpening his image for a safe Liberal seat at the next election. Being head of the Gay Police Association had given him a national platform, but he was the straightest-looking gay man she’d ever seen. Being gay in the force did that, she guessed.

As she turned away from Rix’s blokey grin she felt Pugh press something into her hand. She looked down.

It was a bunch of keys, the ring a miniature silver copy of the cottage in the picture.

‘Stay as long as you like, you need a rest,’ he said gently.

Outside, she sat on her bike after he’d closed the door, not moving, staring out at the trees in the park. Then, after how long she didn’t know, she started the engine and pulled out into the traffic.

Catrin wasn’t paranoid. She knew dealers so wacked out they thought they were being followed by bendy-buses, the numbers on the buses sending them personal messages. Now that was paranoid, but working ten years in Drugs, most of it under, still does things to a mind.

Along City Hall Road, keeping a few cars behind her, she saw a dark van move out into the traffic. The same van had been there on her way in, parked up across the square. She noticed things like that. As she swung into North Road, it was still following four cars behind. She doubled back towards the public gardens. The van was keeping to the end of the dimly lit streets, not closing the space between them.

She checked her rearview: it looked like a woman at the wheel. Well-cut jacket, big bouffant hair, almost like a wig. But it wasn’t close enough, it was too dark for her to get the number.

She did a full circle, along Park Place down into City Hall Road. She waited but it didn’t reappear. She’d lost it, no chance to run the tag on the PNC. She waited to see if it would come round from the north. But nothing else passed. Through the trees she saw the lights of the empty offices.

She rode east for half a mile, then pulled over. She took out her phone, logged on to the South Wales Police network, went into Human Resources and filled out a compassionate leave form. She copied it to Occupational Health. Then she switched off her phone. She didn’t want to have a mast signal for the location of what she was about to do.

She rode on to the Newport Road and found an internet café in a side street. Unlike in the city centre, there were no cameras outside; none inside as far as she could see. The terminals were in booths for privacy. Keeping her helmet on, she took a booth at the back.

The thought that Rhys had been so close to her, it wouldn’t quite let go yet. In her heart she wanted it to, but even if there was one per cent of doubt she knew she’d have to keep turning the stones. It was selfish of course, she’d be doing it to put her own conscience at rest. Not for him at the end of it, that’s what made her feel sick at herself.

He’d been scoring, no doubt about that from the film, none at all. But junkies scored like a car takes on fuel. He’d have needed to score just to keep moving. There were places he could’ve scored nearer the alley where he’d snagged the twenties. But he hadn’t, he’d come down to the water. Was that his destination, or had he been on his way somewhere else, up to the streets around her motel? Or was he just going nowhere?

She booted the drive, waited for the monitor to come to life. The place she was going to find an answer, if there was an answer, was in the case notes. She had no authorised access; only the SIO and the other officers assigned to the case had. She’d have to improvise a little. All the time she’d put in moling at the Hendon Data Centre had taught her how to do that without leaving footprints. She didn’t find hacks interesting in themselves, not at all, they were just a tool. A digital picklock. She was good at hacks because she was curious, and she was curious because she was one of those people who needed to know the truth about things, and in her experience the truth tended to get hidden.