Love Story, With Murders (24 page)

‘You’ll be all right, won’t you? You can have my scarf too if you want.’

Bev looks puzzled, then anxious, then decides I’m joking and laughs. I would go with her, except that I’ve spied the lovely internal-mail cart tootling past my desk and want to sup
of its bounty. Bev
leaves but, instead of going to my desk right away, I spend some time studying Khalifi’s spending habits. Not just the historical data which Bev is interested in, but the
more recent stuff too. Dates. Places. Figures. Orderly columns that might offer a peep into murder.

They certainly offer a peep into his personality. Whenever his spending was essentially invisible, he held the purse strings
tight. We know, for example, that he used price comparison websites
for his utility supplies, his broadband service, his home and car insurance. He had no private health care. He wasn’t mean, but he was careful. And yet, when it came to spending money that
people might see, that flashy edge was always there. A spring break in Dubai last year. A week spent in Jordan this year. Paul Smith
suits. City-breaks to Lausanne, Doha, Vienna, Cairo.

That prickling feeling I’ve had off and on recently intensifies again. It’s a good feeling. A sense of being in the presence of the dead.

I print off all the data that Bev has compiled, then fiddle around on the system until I find his tax returns too. Print those.

The way I saw things once, Mary Langton had nothing to do with Khalifi.
Khalifi had, as I saw it, plenty to do with the violent death of Mark Mortimer. I still think the latter, but I’m
less sure about the former. The fact that Langton once danced in a bar where Khalifi drank is, as far as I’m concerned, the weakest of weak evidence. There must be literally thousands of
people in South Wales who saw Langton in her itsy-bitsy little bikini. That Khalifi was
one of them is hardly more remarkable than any other big-city coincidence you could think of: sharing a bus
route, having the same postman. But still, it’s the angle that Watkins is bombarding with her massed artillery. It’s the angle that is sending the much-bescarved Bev out to do battle
with sour-voiced librarians. Is it maybe the angle that is making me prickle now?

In the incident
room, we still have the 275 ‘persons of interest,’ but all the papers in the centre of the board have been moved aside, to be replaced by a photo of Langton, a photo
of Khalifi, and a thick black line running between them. Someone has adorned that black line with a little red cutout heart. Mark Mortimer’s name isn’t on the board anywhere.

Paper pours from the printer until the output tray
overflows. I grab the pile and take it to my desk, where on the top of my regular mess and clutter is a plain manila envelope with a small
bulge at one end and a postmark from Barry. I open the envelope, remove the memory stick, bring up the documents it contains. I can’t conceal a grin. The joy of investigating.

I call Watkins and tell her about my treasure.

She comes down to my desk
and stands beside me, looking at the documents on the screen.

‘Someone wants us to know something,’ she says.

‘Yes. Someone does.’

I’m not lying. Ayla and Theo. Maybe Khalifi. And then there’s Mary Langton. Her, her parents, her brother and sister. I feel the pressure of these people, the living and the dead,
clustering round my desk. I feel crowded by them, and Watkins’s bad-tempered
presence doesn’t make it easier.

We stare at the list of file names on screen.

An incomprehensible amount of data. A mountain of secrets.

Police work always moves in circles. The witnesses stay the same, but each time round you drive a little closer to the target.

In one way, the archive from Barry Precision has been disappointing. In another way, it’s been a game changer. It’s been disappointing because it’s hard to see anything awry.
Neither I, nor Susan Konchesky,
who has been assigned to help me, is an engineer or an accountant, but the material we’ve looked through so far seems exactly what you’d expect from a
midsize engineering company. Tedious, orderly, baffling.

On the other hand, any real secrets aren’t going to be blazingly obvious. If, for example, the company has been running drugs from Gibraltar, they’d presumably ensure that any
related
documents were encoded in some way. So for all I know, Susan and I have been looking at a mountain of highly incriminating data that we don’t yet know how to interpret.

One thing we
have
found is that El Saadawi, the Egyptian businessman whose car was on Marine Parade that time, is one of Barry Precision’s buyers. That’s an interesting fact
to me – because I know about the Marine Parade
incident and no one else does – but even so, it’s elusive. Saadawi was, presumably, visiting Prothero. But why shouldn’t he?
There’s nothing wrong or even underhand about a major buyer visiting a company’s owner. I know nothing about business, but presumably those sort of contacts are part of how stuff gets
done.

In any case, the main thing is that Watkins is now certain that there’s something
here worth investigating. From her point of view, she has three pieces of evidence all pointing in the
same direction. In mounting order of importance: that weirdly unproductive interview with Dunbar, the memory stick, the assault on Penry. I know the memory stick doesn’t quite mean what she
thinks it means – but still: Penry
was
assaulted and my little altercation of Marine Parade
did
take
place. There’s something here, and Watkins knows it.

So committed is she to this new line of enquiry that it was she who ordered the reinterview with Sophie Hinton. Susan Konchesky and I are to conduct it, and tape it. We discussed taking Hinton
down to a police station for a formal video interview, but instead settle on requisitioning a patrol car so that Hinton’s neighbours will see the
police presence. It’s the sort of
non-intimidatory intimidation that can work very well. That can sometimes force disclosures from people who are reluctant talkers, not hardened criminals.

We arrive at the appointed time.

Same kitchen. Same sulky, pretty Sophie Hinton. She’s in a grey pinstripe skirt, boots and a camel-coloured polo-neck. The police car is visible through the kitchen
windows. The kids are
not back from school yet, but I’m wearing Ayla’s shell bracelet just in case.

She makes coffee, which neither Susan nor I wanted or asked for, and bangs things around to show how petulant she can be. Which is fairly petulant.

‘I’ve put milk in. There isn’t any sugar,’ she says.

I don’t respond directly. Just turn the tape recorder on, give names, place, and
date. Because I’ve interviewed Hinton before, I’ll lead this one. Konchesky is here so that we
can confer if anything unexpected arises.

‘Ms Hinton, are you happy for us to call you that? Or should we call you “Sophie”?’

‘Yes. Either.’

‘We’re here in connection with the suicide of your former husband. With his conviction on drug charges. And with the murder of Ali el-Khalifi.’

She doesn’t answer, just pulls her sleeves down over her hands, tucks her chin into her polo-neck and gives eyes that smoulder. If I were a guy, I’d probably roll over onto my back
and drool with desire. As it is, I want to slap her.

I continue with the basics. When she met Mark Mortimer. When they married. When he joined Barry Precision. She gives her answers resentfully and briefly. After
a while, she says, ‘I should
probably have a lawyer here. Aren’t I supposed to have a lawyer?’

‘Why? We’re not charging you with anything. Do you think you need a lawyer?’

‘No.’

‘Was your former husband threatened at any time by anyone for any reason?’

‘No.’

‘And you would be prepared if necessary to swear on oath to that effect?’

‘Yes.’ Mumbled.

‘Your former husband.
Prior to his arrest on drug charges, were you aware that he had any involvement with the drug trade?’

‘No.’

‘Did he seem like the sort of person to be involved with drugs?’

‘Well, obviously.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, he was arrested, wasn’t he? He pleaded guilty.’

I’m not getting the sulky kitten eyes anymore. I’m getting a woman’s eyes with tears in them.

Better.
I feel Susan glancing my way, and I give her a little micro-nod to let her know that I’ve observed the same things as she has.

‘That’s not what I asked. I asked about your impressions of him prior to his arrest.’

‘He didn’t seem like that sort, no.’

‘Then he was arrested and . . .’

‘And everything went to shit.
Everything
.’ The tears are spilling now. Hinton’s self-absorption is
exposed. She’s not crying for her husband, but for herself. The
girl she was, the woman she’s become.

And it explains something too, this reaction of hers. She must know her husband was an improbable drug dealer, yet she seems oddly ready to see him as guilty nevertheless. But in her world, he
was
guilty. Of hurting her. Of spoiling her cocooned little life. Of getting into some dark and
dangerous little corner with no regard for the possible consequences. Hinton is still angry at
that betrayal. Angry enough that she’ll treat him as a drug smuggler, though part of her knows he wasn’t that. Angry enough that she’ll airbrush him from his children’s
lives.

‘Did he have any concerns regarding his employment at Barry Precision? Concerns about the legitimacy of any aspect of
its business?’

I get a shrug, not an answer.

‘Sophie, we need a “Yes” or a “No”.’

‘Look, Mark didn’t talk to me about any of that. There’s a cottage he used to go to. He shared it with his brother and sister. We used to go as a family, in summer mostly.
It’s a bit . . .’

She makes a face. A face which says, ‘I’m too precious to deal with anything muddy, or wet, or rustic, or
basic.’ It’s a face the English have used about the Welsh for
fifteen centuries. Fifteen centuries, during which they stole our farmland, murdered our princes, and scattered castles, a giant Saxon
screw you
across the country.

Wales is the world capital of medieval castles, the world’s most conquered nation. Either that, or the most belligerent.

‘
Twll dîn pob Sais
,’ I say.

‘Pardon?’

‘Doesn’t matter. The address of the cottage, please.’

She gives it to me. A place in the Black Mountains, only just inside the border.

‘He used to work in this cottage?’

‘Yes.’

‘On a project that he kept secret from you but which, to the best of your knowledge, was connected with Barry Precision?’

‘Yes.’ Her answer is so mumbled, I make her repeat it. Not so much for the
tape recorder’s benefit as to remind her that she’s in the presence of two police officers, who
can mess her life up if we choose to do it.

‘That project. Are there papers or computer files connected with it? Yes or no?’

‘I don’t know. Not here.’

‘In your former home in Barry? In the cottage?’

‘Not in Barry. In the cottage, maybe. I
said
I don’t know.’

‘We may need access
to the cottage.’

She shrugs, says nothing.

My voice hardens.

‘Sophie, we’re asking for permission to enter that cottage. If you say yes, we will go there discreetly and investigate discreetly. If you say no, we apply for a search warrant, in
which case we will force entry and we won’t attempt to be discreet. It’s your call.’

‘You can look around, I don’t care. I don’t
go
there.’

We talk about access. There’s a key left there somewhere. In an outbuilding, Sophie thinks. She’s either being obstructive or genuinely doesn’t know.

Outside, I see the kids arrive back from school with their grandmother. They’re shepherded into the living room, away from us.

I ask a few more questions. Go back to the issue of whether she, her husband, or her children have been threatened.
But she’s got the hang of this interview now. Her answers get ever
sulkier and briefer and the line of her polo-neck is now level with her lips.

But we’ve got what we need. I snap the tape recorder off. Confer briefly with Susan, then say, ‘Thank you, Ms Hinton. You’ve been remarkably helpful.’

And I think, despite herself, she has been.

We don’t leave at once, though. I go through
to the living room. Theo and Ayla want to see me, I can tell. They want news. They want an answer to Theo’s question:
Was it a
mistake
? They know their father is dead, of course – whatever way a child can know that. But they want him rescued. They want a hero dad, not a suicide-criminal one.

I don’t know if I can deliver the former, but I’ve stopped believing in the latter.

I show Ayla
the shell bracelet. ‘We’re still trying,’ I say. ‘We haven’t stopped trying.’

We say our goodbyes and Konchesky drives us back to Cardiff. As we pass the Gloucester junction on the M5, I say, ‘It’s probably worth taking a look at that cottage in the Black
Mountains.’

Konchesky shrugs and says, ‘I suppose.’

Buzz has been as good as his word. The back of my car now boasts a snow shovel with a giant red plastic scoop, a torch, a tow rope, a sleeping bag, bottled water, chocolate,
biscuits, and a spare can of petrol. Also some snow chains, which I promise him I will practise putting on before I drive off anywhere, but which I can’t see myself
using under any
circumstances. I have also promised again to buy a proper coat. Also to take gloves and so on, but most of my clothes, including all my cold-weather gear, are at home, not Buzz’s flat.

My promises aren’t always worth much.

I pick up the shovel and wonder what it would be like to use it. It looks like an object designed by men for men. And in any case, I am standing in
a car park by Cardiff Bay with no snow visible
anywhere. The temperature is chilly but hardly arctic.