Love Story, With Murders (49 page)

For a moment, she’s on the brink of more tears. But it’s been five years. Five heading toward
six. And even tears must have an end.

I sit on the bed. There’s a box of junk. Stuff that looks like it’s for throwing away, not keeping. There’s a small plastic model sailing boat. I reach out and pick it up.

‘Your husband mentioned that you’ll cremate Mary’s remains. Do you know what you’ll do with the ashes? Will you inter them or . . .?’

‘We think scatter them. She liked her freedom.
And she didn’t have long enough to explore the world. Maybe on the Gower somewhere, she liked her time there.’

‘Swansea Bay,’ I say, with too much speed and certainty. ‘She loved it there. You should scatter her ashes on the waters of the bay.’

‘Maybe . . . yes, maybe.’

She gives me a look. Probably one that questions my right to have any opinion on the subject, but for a moment, I
don’t see Rosemary Langton at all. I see her daughter. Like they’re
one and the same person. The hockey-playing girl merging with this Bath housewife. For a moment I can’t quite tell whose world I’m in. Rosemary’s or Mary’s. They seem
equally present. Equally real.

I find I can’t even quite distinguish myself. Can’t locate my own boundary. As though the pencil lines demarcating these things
have become partially erased. Where one person ends
and another one begins. Who’s alive and who’s dead. These things seem so clear to most people and they aren’t quite for me. But it’s a good unknowing, this. Truthful, not
crazy.

There’s some more conversation between us, but I’m a bit lost. I’m not sure what either of us is saying. When we get up to go back downstairs, I see I’m still
holding the
boat.

‘Were you going to throw this out?’

She was.

I ask if I can keep it. I can.

We go downstairs. Bev is telling John about the final processes with the coroner and the forensic people. Her tone is professional, sympathetic, competent.

She’s a good officer, is Bev. I see how bad I sometimes am. How impossible for a well-run service to manage. But I have my uses.

We drive back to Cardiff in silence and darkness and the windscreen wipers keep the beat with us all the way.

Oslo.

It feels as I expected. An enormous sky. Sun fixed low against a pale horizon. Darkness welling up at street level as lights come on. The buildings are solid, blocky, a northern twist on
classical. They could exist anywhere, almost, except for those muted Nordic tones. Lichen green. Rust brown. Ochre yellow. And, always, at
the ends of streets, a glimpse of sea and the scrape of
salt.

I’m due to meet Lev at a city hotel. A bland business-type place. Unremarkable. I book in under my own name. No reason why not, though I’ll pay in cash.

I hired a black Toyota Land Cruiser at the airport, boxy and basic. Lev asked me to get a car. He didn’t say what sort, but the Land Cruiser seemed about right.

I check
in, dump my bag, stay just long enough in my room to get annoyed with it, then go downstairs so I can start getting annoyed with the whole of downtown Oslo.

As I’m stepping out of the lift, I see Lev entering the hotel. He looks like he always does, but with a gym bag over his shoulder. He checks himself in. I don’t see what name he
uses, but I’d be surprised if he doesn’t have a few different
identities.

He tells me he’s got to go and see about some stuff. Takes my car keys and says he’ll find me later.

I don’t know what that means, so go out to explore. Walk down to the seafront. Watch the boats. The waves.

This could almost be Cardiff, except those extra few degrees of latitude creep in everywhere you look. We’re farther north than any part of mainland Britain. We’re
on a parallel with
Orkney, Saint Petersburg. The sea here has a grey-blue seriousness it lacks in Wales. This sea is fed by meltwater running off granite and calving glaciers. A sea that booms with the sound of
beluga whales foraging under ice.

The buildings lining the front are treble-glazed, thickly insulated.

Cold stones set by an icy sea.

The Barry Precision case is fucked.

The whole thing. Fucked.

If our battle was Stalingrad, it turned out that we were playing the part of the German Sixth Army. Watkins is our General Paulus. Surrounded, starved, frozen, tricked, destroyed.

We thought that the multiple waves of legal attacks launched by Barry Precision were there to bleed our resources. Slow our enquiry to the point of stalling. We were wrong. It was
a blind, a
diversion.

Prothero, it turns out, spent the winter chasing up his connections. A rich, well-connected businessman murmuring in his buddies’ rich and well-connected ears. Ivor Harris stood up in
Parliament, denouncing our pending case – though no charges had yet been brought – calling for ministers to intervene on behalf of ‘this fine local firm.’ Initially, his
speech appeared
no more than empty showmanship. He was speaking to an almost empty Chamber. Any response he got was evasive and placatory.

Except soon it wasn’t. A senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence issued a paper ‘clarifying’ the regulations on the licensing procedures for weapons export. The paper
referred obliquely to ‘persistent misunderstandings arising from inadequate MOD guidance.’ It
launched a consultation paper aiming at an intended regulatory reform.

The document was bullshit. The original regulations were crystal in their clarity and Barry was in breach. But following the ‘clarifications,’ the UK Trade and Investment Defence and
Security Organisation – a government body designed to promote the sale of arms and one that employs, at taxpayer expense, some 160 people
– called Barry Precision in for meetings, the
upshot of which was that Barry signed a Memorandum of Understanding which made certain representations as to its future conduct. A small contribution was made to charity by way of recognising
possible past infractions, without admission of liability. A junior minister issued an apology for poor communication.

Blah, blah, blah.

A junior
minister at the Ministry of Defence and a more senior one at the Foreign Office had lunch with the Director of Public Prosecutions. We don’t know what happened at that lunch
– what threats, what lies, what blandishments – but, after a DPP-ordered ‘review,’ the CPS told us that they could no longer be certain that any prosecution would be
successful or that any such prosecution would be in the
public interest. They wimped out, backed down, surrendered, gave up.

Me and Watkins. Alone in the ruins. No boots, no ammo, nothing to eat but the rats, and Soviet armies surrounding us on every side.

We couldn’t launch a prosecution on our own. So, like Paulus, we flew the white flag. Dropped the whole damn case.

Far from injuring Barry, we’ve helped it. The UKTI DSO has taken the
firm under its wing. Helped it secure new contracts. The firm now plans to sell openly at the IDEX arms fair. At SOFEX.
At others too. Farnborough in the UK. Defexpo in India. Defence Services Asia. The firm is expanding. Negotiating for new industrial space adjacent to its existing facility. Idris Prothero’s
only mistake was to have gone undercover in the first place. If he’d just had the wit
to ask the British government for its specialist Selling-Guns-to-Dictators marketing support, he’d
have got it. The whole nine yards. He wouldn’t even have had to frame Mark Mortimer. Ali el-Khalifi, silly sod, could have won himself a knighthood for export services, instead of getting
himself chopped to pieces and scattered throughout his favourite Cardiff beauty spot.

Watkins tries to
cheer me up. McCormack is certainly heading for a life sentence. Johnston too.

But I’m not cheered. Johnston was a nut. A sadistic dangerous nut, who deserves jail and will get it. It’s our job to put people like him away and we did our job. Nothing more. As
for Olaf and Hamish: they were trivial. Units moved around the battlefield by a distant field marshal. What those two did was wrong,
but you still want to hang the general, not shoot the
infantryman.

I’m starting to think I’m playing a game whose rules have been tampered with. The fuckwits are winning. Perhaps they always do.

Except that the game isn’t quite over. One part – Olaf – is still in play. Idris Prothero either directly ordered the Khalifi killing or was involved in it. I can’t prove
that, but we
do
know
that one of Prothero’s phones received a call from Capel-y-ffin the night I was almost murdered. We
do
have very strong evidence to suggest that
Prothero’s employee, Mark Mortimer, was framed for a drug deal as a way to silence him. It would seem remarkable, to say the least, if Prothero had not also authorised, or at least assented
to, the Khalifi murder.

And if so, Olaf is our one remaining
chance to prove it.

I hang around on the seafront long enough to get chilly, then buy sausage and mustard from a fast-food place. Eat it standing up.

I should drink a litre of beer and grow facial hair or long blonde plaits. I’d fit right in.

When I can’t think of anything else to do, I drift back to the hotel. No Lev. I lie on my back and read an airport paperback until it annoys
me, a process that takes all of seven
pages.

When I studied philosophy as a student, one of the first topics we examined was David Hume’s theory of personal identity. Hume didn’t believe in a fixed view of self. He wrote that
when we look inward, ‘
we are never intimately conscious of anything but a particular perception; man is a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed
one another with an
inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement
.’ Look as he might, Hume couldn’t find anything permanently fixed. When he searched for the pencil marks that
demarcated his own boundary, he found nothing. They weren’t there.

My fellow students – even my tutors – regarded Hume’s theories as a kind of intellectual con trick. A game of three-card monte where
the eye is always deceived into overturning
the wrong card. My colleagues thought,
Of course we exist, of course our selves are permanent and enduring, so how can we prove Hume wrong?
I thought the opposite. I was honestly surprised
that anyone thought Hume wasn’t simply expressing the obvious. My whole teenage experience had been about trying to construct a sense of self that didn’t collapse.
Like trying to build
a house on a raft of floating logs.

It’s better than that now. I don’t know why, but those logs jam together better than they used to. I can walk across my kitchen without finding myself falling waist-high into
freezing water. But still. David Hume, right or wrong? I go on thinking he was right.

At half past eight, I get hungry and eat a sandwich from the bar downstairs.

At half past nine, Lev comes to find me. He taps lightly at my door and walks straight on in. He has hash, rolling tobacco, and cigarette papers. We throw the window up, though there’s a
light frost outside, and smoke. There’s nothing much else to do, so we get properly stoned. I get hungry again, Lev too, and we go outside for a prowl. Find more sausages and mustard. We eat
ourselves stupid.

At midnight, Lev says, ‘Okay. We leave now.’

I stare at him. He’s serious?

He is.

I don’t argue. We drive out of the underground car park. Lev wants me to drive, so I do. Lev helps me navigate out of Oslo, but it’s hard to get lost. Once I pick up signs to
Trondheim, I just stick with them. It’s the E6 most of the way. Six and a half hours according to my telephone satnav. I could
probably cut the time if I was willing to speed, but I’m
not.

I drive. Lev sleeps.

The road’s not like any British motorway. One lane in each direction. Tarmac creasing where the land has moved.

Water and ice on the road.

Flashing stems of silver birches. Snow. Grey rock walls and a million whispering pines.

The roads are all but empty.

At three in the morning, I stop
and pee by the side of the road. There are stars overhead, more numerous than you ever see in Cardiff. A million stars. More stars than people. I spend a few
minutes stretching.

As I’m doing that, I’m surprised to find Lev beside me. He stretches too, but briefly. Rummages in the back of the car, pulls out a rifle and a couple of handguns.

I don’t think they were there before. They didn’t
come with the car.

I say, ‘We’re not here to shoot anyone.’

‘I know.’ Lev’s voice and gaze are level.

‘I just want a clean capture. Nothing messy. Nothing . . .’ I gesture at the guns.

‘I know.’ He gives me one of the handguns, the smaller one. ‘That’s why you need this. So no one want to be silly. Here, try this. Is for little hands.’

I fire a few rounds at a tree trunk. Lev
adjusts my grip and my stance. Then nods. ‘Okay.’ He wants me to go on firing, though, so I do. Fifty rounds. Concentrating. Waiting for the
weapon to stop feeling alien. I’ll have gunshot residue all over my wrists, but I’m rather hoping no one’s going to be swabbing them.

As I do that, Lev tinkers around with his rifle. He’s firing from behind the car at a tree trunk caught in its headlights.
Each time he fires, he checks the shot through the telescopic
sights, then adjusts the calibration. He checks the settings until he’s satisfied, then blazes off ten shots in rapid succession, checks the target again. He fires a few rounds with his
handgun, but doesn’t bother with any calibration.

He reloads all the guns and puts them back in the car.

‘Accuracy International,’ he says.
‘Arctic Warfare type.’

I don’t know what that means. I don’t ask. We’ve made a real mess of a couple of trees, and there’s a litter of cartridges on the ground. But who cares? Norway’s a
big place. It can afford a couple of messed-up trees.

I drive on. Lev sleeps. The din of our shooting is still echoing in my ears. For the first time, I’m wondering if I made the right call in coming
here. I feel afraid.