Love Story, With Murders (3 page)

I get Mam. Sleepy-voiced, worried.

‘Mam, it’s me. Everything’s okay, so don’t worry. But is Dad there?’

He is. The phone is passed over.

‘Hello, Fi, love.’

‘Dad, something’s come up, it’s probably fine, but can you give me a call back from a private number?’

A moment’s hesitation, or not even. Half a moment. A nanosecond. Then, ‘Course I can, love, just give me a moment.’

Two minutes later my mobile bleats. Caller details withheld.

‘Dad.’

‘Fi, love?’

‘Look, I expect
this doesn’t matter, but I don’t know if you’ve heard the news about the discovery of human remains up by Llanishen.’

‘Up by the reservoir, love? No. Sounds horrible, though. You never really think of Cyncoed as being that sort of place.’

I digest that a moment, then say, ‘The dead girl was Mary Langton.’ I leave a pause in case Dad wants to say anything, then, before he can fill it with
his usual white noise,
continue. ‘Disappeared August 2005. She was a pole dancer. Well, a student really, but did some pole dancing to make a little extra cash. Mary Langton.’

Dad listens without interrupting, then says, ‘Poor girl. Awful, that sort of thing, isn’t it? At that age, I mean, her whole life in front of her. And then – bang, gone. Just
think of her poor parents. Lord, if anything
ever happened to you or the other girls, your mam and I –’

‘Dad, was she a–? Did she dance at one of your clubs?’

‘Gosh, love, you do ask questions. You know how it is, though. Middle of the night. Some poor lass that vanished five years ago now. And, you know, we’ve had so many dancers over the
years. I couldn’t possibly remember each one. Course, there’ll be records, we could look
at them. If it’s helpful, I could get Emrys to take a look. Me, I’m not really the
man for paper. But Emrys, he’ll find anything. Do you want me to call him? I mean, if it’s important, I can get him out of bed, no problem at all. And after all, if it’s a police
matter, he can afford to lose a little sleep. We’re both up, aren’t we, love?’

He’s all set to go wittering on, but I interrupt.
I tell him it’s fine. I just wanted to check. I tell him to go back to bed, sorry for waking him, sorry for worrying Mam. He tells
me to look after myself, tells me to come over tomorrow for dinner, ‘and bring your young man, we’d love to see more of him’.

We ring off.

Back to the silence. Desks stretching out into the darkness. Small rectangular fireflies. The hum of dormant electronics.
Four twenty-five.

He’s good, Dad is. Very good. That’s something I’ve only recently started to understand and the knowledge frightens me. Things you thought you know changing shape the more you
look at them.

Part of his trick is that torrent of patter. His readiness to talk, that total unstrategised openness. Anyone listening to the call would have sworn that my dad was the ultimate
WYSIWYG man:
what you see is what you get. Friendly, concerned, open, helpful.

Except then you start to look at the whole thing differently. Picking up on tiny clues. I said we’d discovered human remains up by Llanishen. That doesn’t necessarily mean the
reservoir, but even if that’s how you understand it, the reservoir has two sides. The Cyncoed side and the side which is Llanishen proper.

Dad changed my word ‘Llanishen’ to ‘Cyncoed’. That could just be an assumption. A middle-of-the-night thing, said by someone thinking blurrily. Or it could be a signal
that he knew everything already, that things were under control. And if he was signalling like that, is that because he had nothing to hide? Or because everything was already sufficiently hidden?
Or because, although something
dangerous had been exposed, he was already working to neutralise the threat?

I don’t know.

I don’t need to know, except that I am a serving police officer and I made a phone call which alerted, what, a possible informant? a possible suspect? I’d always told myself that I
wouldn’t use my position to shelter my father, and now the very first time there’s a possible collision between my
role as daughter and my role as detective, I choose the former with no
more than a few minutes’ hesitation. Does that mean that if push came to shove, I’d make the same choice? Or that the point of my phone call was to make as sure as dammit that push
never would come to shove?

I don’t know. Problems for another day. Fireflies and dead girls’ shoes.

I spend a moment tuning in to my
heartbeat, my breathing. Finding my body. Feeling myself. I press my knuckles down on the wooden desk until I feel the pain. I can’t quite feel my feet
fully, but that’s not unusual for me, and I have, after all, been awake for almost twenty-four hours. I realise I’m feeling tired. A good feeling. Appropriate, normal.

I take my boots off and bundle my papers together. Rhiannon Watkins’s
office is on the floor above me, and I take the lift in silence from my floor to hers. Swipe my card through the
security door. Find the right office. Open the door, ready to leave everything on her desk with a note.

I haven’t put any lights on, because at this stage of the night, I prefer the dark. But inside Watkins’s office there’s a pool of light from her desk lamp. A small, intense
pool because the lamp has been bent right down over the desk. And behind the desk, Watkins the badge, looking more like a grandmother than the ferocious Queen Bitch of the Cardiff CID, asleep in
her chair.

I’m wondering how best to wake her when she wakes up of her own accord. Focuses her gaze. Takes some time to remember where she is, who I am, why we’re here. Her short grey hair is
messed up and her suit is rumpled. Not really the kind of clothing item to look good after being worn all day and slept in half the night.

I hold up the file.

‘Mary Jane Langton,’ I say. ‘Our victim. I’ve matched the shoes.’

I give her the file, pulling out the shoe photo and showing her that first, matching it against my own photos of the murder scene.

Watkins looks carefully
at the photos, then very briefly at the file, then says, ‘Good. Look, just give me a moment.’

She rubs her face, and gropes around under her desk for her shoes, which aren’t there but set neatly beside each other to her right. She finds them, yawns, stands up, grimaces at me
– a kind of ‘good job, stick around’ face – then leaves the room.

I can’t help but contrast the slowness with
which she gathers herself with the speed of my father’s own process. I wonder whether Watkins and my father are on opposite sides of this
investigation or whether, as I hope, they have nothing at all to do with each other.

Some minutes go by. I practise my breathing.
In
-two-three-four-five.
Out
-two-three-four-five. A habit now. A good one. I can feel my toes, my heels. I feel one of those
moments of
gratitude. A moment of thankfulness for it all: a boyfriend who loves me, a family, a job. Bodily sensations that I can feel, emotions that often now approach me normally, leave me safe when they
leave. Thankfulness, with a thin splash of alarm at how precarious it still is. How easily I could lose it.

I hear Watkins outside and turn to the door with my office face on. She sticks
her head inside.

‘I need some coffee. You?’

Watkins the Badge in Junior Detective Coffee Offer Shock.

I nod in surprise, then hastily amend my acceptance. ‘Yes, please, only not coffee. Tea? If that’s okay. Milk, no sugar.’

Her head vanishes, leaving something grumpy in the air. Was I meant to have offered to go instead? I wonder about that for a moment, then stop. If someone offers
me a drink, they can bloody well
get it without grumping at me.

I sit down. Make myself at home. Shift the chairs around. Change the lighting. Massage my feet.

When Watkins comes back, she isn’t grumpy. Gives me my tea in a mug that I think belongs to DCI Jackson. I don’t usually trust myself with caffeine, but these days I sometimes go
crazy and risk life on the edge. Live fast, die
young.

Watkins studies the file silently for a few moments, then calls the lab.

The lab doesn’t normally work through the night, but it does when it has to. Most murders are solved within forty-eight hours or not solved at all, and that means we push the lab for very
quick results in cases like this. Watkins tells whoever she’s talking to that we think we’ve identified the murder victim,
and gives the necessary details. We have Langton’s DNA
on record from the previous investigation, so it’ll be a swift business making the match. Watkins ends the call with her normal curtness.

‘They’ll have something by eight this morning.’

I nod. Truth is, the lab would have got there anyway. My truffling through the night has saved us a few hours, nothing more. Probably irrelevant,
but Watkins has a lose-not-a-minute philosophy,
which I like. I’m the same.

Watkins: ‘When did you come on duty, Constable?’

‘Yesterday. In the morning.’

‘Right. You need to sleep. Get yourself home. I want you to –’

‘You’ll be seeing the parents?’ I interrupt.

A pause. I’m not sure if that’s because she’s angry at my interruption or because she hasn’t yet thought ahead to
the business of informing next of kin. Most DIs
don’t do the next-of-kin bit themselves, but some do.

Watkins nods and says, ‘Yes.’

‘If possible, I’d like to come.’

‘You’ve been working all week? Monday to Friday?’

I nod.

Another pause, then, ‘Okay. We’ll leave as soon as the lab comes back with confirmation.’ She digs around in a cupboard and comes out with something that
looks like a tartan
picnic blanket. ‘Dennis Jackson has a sofa in his office. You can use that.’ She scrutinises me a moment or two longer, then nods again.

I’m dismissed.

If I was a good little officer, I’d say something like ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ but if anyone should thank anyone, she should thank me, because she went to sleep without a
victim ID and woke up with one. So I just take
the blanket, the tea, and myself off to DCI Jackson’s sofa. It’s fake black leather. Sticky and synthetic.

Through the thin office walls, I can hear Watkins starting to make calls. Alerting people to come in early, starting to hand out assignments, checking back with the lab. Getting the machinery of
investigation ready for its next clanking advance.

It takes me twenty minutes or more,
but then sleep comes to me like night over the reservoir. Swift, silent, and total. A snake vanishing under rocks.

I dream of nothing.

Dream of nothing and wake with nice Bev Rowland bringing me a cup of peppermint tea and a look of anxiety.

I unstick myself from the sofa. My mouth feels like someone’s been using it to boil up connective tissue for glue.

I take the tea. ‘Thanks, Bev. You’re a gem.’

‘Were you here all night?’

Bev is awed, partly because I’ve
been asleep on a DCI’s sofa, but mostly because I’ve spent a night working with
la
Watkins and am still alive to tell the tale.

It’s seven thirty-five. The lab results are due at eight. Watkins will leave without me if I’m not ready. She sent Bev to tell me so.

I prevail on Bev to go and scavenge some food, while I go to the Ladies to see what warm water can do for me. I brush my teeth,
wash my face, change my underwear and do a sort-of cleanup job on
other parts by using handfuls of paper towels and that pink liquid soap that never really rinses off properly. By the end of my endeavours, I don’t feel properly clean but at least I’m
lightly fragranced with whatever icky scent they put into the soap. Bev comes to find me with a prepacked chicken salad sandwich, all she could
lay her hands on. We go to hunt down my boots, which
are still by my desk.

Seven fifty-two.

‘I wish I could get ready as fast as that.’

‘Ready-ish.’ I give her a lame grin.

I sit on the edge of my desk, getting my computer to print off whatever data has come in overnight. I tell Bev about finding Watkins asleep and her making me tea. Bev thinks my jumper and jeans
don’t look
smart enough for a next-of-kin visit, so she gets me her black jacket, the one she always wears when she has to be a bit formal. It’s a size too big but I take it anyway and
wear it over everything else.

Seven fifty-nine.

Eight minutes later, we’re in a car heading out of town. Watkins’s car, a BMW. Uniform police driver, because Watkins needs to make calls and she doesn’t trust me to
drive. The
lab has confirmed the Langton ID.

I eat my chicken sandwich and read the papers I’ve printed off.

The widow in Cyncoed was called Elsie Williams. Died following a stroke at the age of eighty-five. Five foot three. Medical records showed a succession of minor health problems: arthritis,
raised cholesterol, sleeping issues.

Husband died twenty years previously, lung cancer.
The best of alibis.

Daughter, Karen Johnston, now living permanently in Australia, married to an Aussie husband, job in food processing. The couple seem to have visited Elsie Williams for two or three weeks each
summer. Indeed, but for distance, the family seemed close and supportive. Regular phone calls. The Johnstons supplementing the old lady’s pension. Paying to upgrade her conservatory
when the
last one started to look tired.

No information yet on whether they were in the U.K. for the relevant dates in August 2005, but every chance.

Inventory of items found at the house is still incomplete, but it includes everything you might need to dismember a corpse: a small electric saw, a handsaw, knives. On the other hand, plenty of
houses would keep the same tools. Nothing
either suspicious or unsuspicious.

Numerous stains, including probable biological stains, have been found in the garage and to a lesser degree in the house. Analysis ongoing. No other body parts yet located.

Neighbours include no known criminals or sex offenders. A number had petty quarrels with Mrs Williams, who seems to have been anti-cat, anti-dog, also anti-music, shirtlessness and
children on
bicycles.