Love Story, With Murders (10 page)

I leave her with that thought, and go back upstairs with the mugs, entering Watkins’s room without knocking. She doesn’t say thank you, just, ‘The Mortimer suicide seems
straightforward. And we haven’t found drug traces in Khalifi’s flat or anywhere
else.’

‘He’s a plastics man.’

Watkins isn’t as interested in the various uses of industrial plastics as I am and just glares at me, which I take as an invitation to educate her.

‘One of his areas of expertise was high-modulus polyethylenes. That’s like the stuff you use to make plastic shopping bags, only far tougher. The super-high-density stuff,
Khalifi’s speciality, can be used
as glide rails in industrial equipment, docking gear, that kind of thing. The high, but not super-high, density plastics are what you make buckets out of,
water pipes, plastic milk bottles, stuff like that.’

‘Packaging. You think he created packaging systems for drugs shipments? No smell. No leakage. Shockproof. Completely sealed.’

‘It’s possible. Mortimer and Khalifi probably knew each
other. Khalifi worked with Mortimer’s company, which has only ninety people on its payroll, and Mortimer was one of only
six mechanical engineers there.

‘Mortimer was busted because his packaging was amateurish. He had the stuff put in a steel tube and had the ends welded up. Khalifi is probably the go-to guy in Cardiff – maybe in
Britain – for plastics expertise. The university doesn’t
have manufacturing facilities as such, but Khalifi would have known precisely where to go for that. He’s the
department’s champion networker.’

Watkins ponders all this. Nothing that I’ve said is evidence. It’s mere possibility. But then again, we don’t have any evidence of any sexual link to Langton, so that’s
all speculative too.

‘Why didn’t you tell me all this earlier?’

‘It’s
in my notes.’

‘It’s not in your notes. I’ve just looked. Not properly.’

‘I wanted to look further before bothering you. I wanted something tangible.’

‘What does that mean?
Look further?
You’re a police officer. You don’t conduct private investigations.’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘You carry out your designated tasks, Constable. You report when they’re completed. Then you’re assigned further
tasks.’

‘I
have
carried out my designated tasks.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘I know one of the inmates in Cardiff Prison. I’m seeing him on Saturday.’

Watkins shakes her head. ‘You won’t get anything –’

‘Brian Penry. He’s a former police officer. A good one. Good apart from being an embezzler, I mean.’

‘And you’ll do what?’

‘Ask him for gossip about the Mortimer
suicide. See what he can find out.’

Watkins thinks for a bit. Her jaw moves like she’s masticating something chewy or cartilaginous. If she was a man, she’d probably be clamping her jaw muscles or doing something
testosteroney like that.

‘Jim Davis is an idiot,’ she says eventually. ‘You are not an idiot. But Jim is part of a team and you are no use to me if you can’t play with the team.’

I trained as a philosopher at Cambridge, and the thing about a discipline like that is you can’t help but be offended by lapses of logic. In actual fact, the most useful things I’ve
done so far have had nothing to do with team play, and all the most boring things have been because some idiot like Jim Davis asked me to do them. It seems to me the evidence strongly suggests that
I’m vastly
more useful to Watkins working the way I like to work and, in any case, I’ve hardly been working off-piste at all. Not by my standards.

But she’s still doing that thing with her jaw, so I say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and look at my hands and go on saying it till she stops lecturing me.

Then she stops.

I say, ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ and get up to go. She says, ‘Okay,’ and then for no reason at all,
except maybe to annoy her, I say, ‘Sorry, do you mind? Can I ask
where you got your suit? I just think it really works on you.’

An expression crosses her face which I can’t read. Maybe it’s anger – her default setting – but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s something else. But anyway, she
says, ‘Hobbs,’ and I say, ‘Oh, Hobbs?’ and she nods, then looks down at herself, straightens out the fabric,
and says, ‘Thank you.’ If it weren’t against
the laws of physics, I’d think she reddened.

I give her a lovely big smile and walk out of her office.

Penry again. Same room. Same lighting. Same guards. Same paintwork.

He’s in a better mood this time. Too good. Buzzy and over-energetic, the way a four-year-old is before a sugar crash.

‘Bloody hell, Fi, you spend a lifetime in the police force, but it’s only when you get in here you understand what’s really going on. Some of the
stories I’ve heard . .
.’

He starts to tell me some of them, waving his hands and laughing too loud. The tales he tells mostly sound like bullshit to me. I expect when he comes down off his high, they’ll sound the
same way to him. I’m not judgemental though. Penry’s got to do two years inside. If this is part of his adjustment process, so be it.

I let him talk a while, then interrupt.

‘Brian, can I ask a favour?’

I tell him the picture as I see it. Two murders, one suicide. ‘Everyone thinks that Khalifi must somehow be linked to the Langton death, but it seems to me we ought to be looking hard at
the Mortimer death too.’

Penry asks a few questions in quick succession, getting himself up to speed. His assessment of the case is rapid, decisive. I realise I’m seeing
him in police mode, the way he was before
his career went off the rails.

‘This is real, Fi, is it? You’re not just . . .?’

‘Trying to cheer you up? No. It’s real. I mean, it is from my point of view. Watkins thinks it might be worth looking at. Everyone else thinks I’m barking mad.’

‘Good enough.’ He rubs his face with both hands. When he removes them, he looks older. More like himself
actually, minus the sugar high. ‘What’s your
hypothesis?’

‘Don’t have one. But here are the pieces. Mortimer was involved in drugs, but an idiot when it came to bringing them into the country. Khalifi has expertise in materials and access
to an enormous amount of manufacturing knowhow. Plastics certainly, but general engineering too. The two men very likely knew each other. If Khalifi
did something that pissed off some big-league
drug dealer, then maybe Mortimer was in the firing line as well. Obviously no one snuck into Mortimer’s cell to bump him off, but maybe he gets a message saying that unless he kills himself
his family will be murdered. Or whatever.’

I stop. It all sounds ropey to me when I say it, but there
are
three corpses kicking around. They’re real.

‘Got it,’ says Penry. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

We talk rubbish for another ten minutes. Uncomfortable minutes. I’m always aware of the guards, of the other prisoners, the atmosphere of poverty and limits. I’m aware of the
walls.

As soon as I can, I leave.

Outside the jail, I realise I’m not coping so well. My head is worse than I’d realised. As a teenager, I was ill for two years.
Mental illness, as bad as it gets. For much of that
time, I was kept in a secure unit. There was a courtyard garden and various common areas where we were allowed to come and go freely, but that was it. Outside access to the unit was via a
porters’ lodge. Staff and visitors needed to show ID to enter and leave. Patients were prohibited from leaving without written discharge papers from one of
the shrinks, so we were imprisoned
every bit as much as Penry is now. More so, in some ways. The courtyard garden had two wooden benches, an ornamental maple tree, a couple of cypresses, and some bedding plants which were constantly
being trashed by the crazier patients. There was a metal bin for cigarettes, but we all just scattered ciggy stubs on the ground and let the nurses clear them up.
We weren’t allowed matches,
of course – someone would have tried to burn the place down – but there was an electric lighter gadget on the side of the bin and a cigarette machine inside the building. We all smoked
twenty or thirty a day, the nurses too.

Inside, some architect had designed the place to be cheerful. The common room was clad in varnished pine so it looked like some Nordic
sauna. The seating was built-in with heavy leatherette
cushions. The only movable items were either completely soft – beanbags and foam cushions – or too heavy to lift. The TV was screwed to the wall. The knives and forks in the canteen
were plastic. Even so, never a day went by without someone trying to do something stupid. One guy, I remember, normally one of our tamer schizos, scavenged dry
leaves from the garden and built a
pile of them inside one of the chair seats. He didn’t set fire to them straight away, because the smoke alarms would have sounded instantly, so he waited till the one day each month when fire
drills were held anyway. As soon as the alarms started ringing for their regular test, he used a cigarette butt to get his leaves alight. Instead of shutting off after
their test sequence was
completed, the sirens just went on sounding. For a good few minutes, the staff just ignored the noise, clustering in the corridors with their coffee mugs and tutting. Not until someone noticed that
the common room was filling with smoke did anyone take action. One of the seating bays was properly ablaze before the fire was brought under control. When they rebuilt everything,
they drenched the
place in some flame-retardant chemical that made two of the self-harmers sick for weeks. That was us: smart enough to cause destruction, crazy enough to want to.

In those two years, I spent more time in that facility than I did at home.

Cardiff jail is more like that place than anywhere else I’ve ever been, and I can feel some of my old self-destructive patterns starting
to gather themselves, like fog patches forming in
the beam of car headlights. Self-harm was never particularly one of my things – I was a little too crazy for that and the self-harmers stood well below me in the private hierarchies of the
insane – but I used to like pressing kitchen knives against my forearms to see how much I could feel. The usual answer was almost nothing. I drew blood
a few times. By accident mostly.

Now, standing on the road outside Cardiff Prison, I feel that old impulse again. To press some cold steel against my exposed arm. To study the blade as it whitens my skin. Hoping to feel
something, terrified I won’t.

I want to roll up my sleeve so I can look at my white skin and blue veins.

But those are bad thoughts. Addictive. A flight of stone
stairs, leading down.

I have a plastic bag of ready-rolled joints in the boot of my car, concealed under the tyre irons, along with a cigarette lighter and a bar of chocolate. I’ve an impulse to stand and smoke
a joint, right here outside the jail.

That’s not a good idea, though. I can feel my brain send a chatter of alarmed telexes to my impulse control centres. All in capitals:
DO
NOT DO WHAT YOU ARE THINKING OF
DOING. REPEAT. DO NOT DO WHAT YOU ARE THINKING OF DOING
. The telexes are followed by lists of reasons.
Think about where you are. Remember that you’re trying to cut down. Remember
that you want to be a supergreat and perfect girlfriend to Buzz
– your phrase, Griffiths –
and Buzz really, really wouldn’t like you being hauled in on some possession
charge, now
would he?

The chatter and the lists continue, but already the impulse is waning. Buzz is tediously traditional on issues like whether it’s okay for coppers to smoke weed, so I haven’t told him
that I do. He doesn’t know that I grow it in my garden shed and would go nuts with me if he found out. He’d probably report me.

But in the end, it’s not those reasons that make the difference.
These days, I’m trying to do things right. To avoid escape routes. To do things in the right way for the right
reasons at the right time. Sometimes, the right thing is for me to smoke dope. A comfort blanket I can’t yet give up. But it’s not the right thing for me now.

I stamp feeling into my legs. Jump up and down. Pump my arms. Run just far enough to feel out of breath and for one of my
feet to start blistering.

I start to feel more normal. The prison feeling hasn’t quite left, but it’s not dangerous any more, just unpleasant, like last night’s cigarette smoke in the hair. I need to
wash the feeling away.

I limp back to my car, wondering how long it takes to get to Droitwich.

Two and a half hours is the answer. Some accident just south of Worcester blocks two lanes and I end up spending an hour in almost stationary traffic, watching long curtains of
rain sweep across from the Malvern Hills. I keep switching stations on the radio, trying and failing to find music that doesn’t annoy me, then end up settling
for exhaust fumes and silence. I
power the windows down and let the rain come in. I think about lowering the soft top, but don’t.

I text Buzz to let him know I’ll be late.

The farther I get from Cardiff jail, the less sure I am of what I’m doing. I mean: I think it needs to be done. I’m just not sure it’ll be worth another bollocking from
Watkins. When I get into Droitwich proper,
I stop the car and call Watkins’s mobile. She answers it in her normal snappish way. I tell her what I want to do and where I am.

‘Droitwich?’

‘Mortimer’s wife and kids moved back here when he went to prison.’

‘And you’re there why?’

‘I’ve been visiting a friend,’ I say. ‘So I’m in the area.’

There’s a pause down the end of the line. I can’t hear anything, but I bet she’s doing
that thing with her jaw. Then, ‘Okay.’

‘Okay as in, “Yes, please, go ahead and interview Sophie Mortimer”? I don’t have to.’

‘It’s fine, Constable. You might as well, since you’re there.’