Sympathy for the Devil (11 page)

Over the music she heard the door buzzer going. She ignored it at first, but it carried on. She went to the window, peered through the nets. There was a car parked in the lane, a black Range Rover.

In the glow from the headlights she saw that Della was wearing a long, dark coat. Her high boots caught the glare. Her face looked very pale, no make-up.

What does the witch really want with me, Catrin wondered. She waited, silent, still as a statue, hoping Della would go away.

The buzzer went again, the noise building like a drilling in her head.

Catrin opened the door. Della’s hair was soaked through, hanging down limply over her face.

‘I just wanted to apologise for last night,’ Della said. Her voice was weak, slightly tremulous.

Catrin watched Della reach into her pocket, but leave her hand there. Her coat was soaked through. Catrin blocked her way.

‘If this is another job offer, Del, you’re wasting your time.’

‘No, it’s not.’

Della was leaning back on the windowsill, looking slightly unsteady on her feet. Her eyes were bloodshot, tired-looking. There was a hint of fear there.

‘I shouldn’t have lied to you about Rhys,’ she said. ‘It was wrong.’

‘You hadn’t seen him for years, had you?’

‘No.’

Catrin moved forward to the door, held it open. The wind and rain were running down Della’s face. ‘Just keep away from now on.’
You sleazy crazy bitch
was what she really wanted to say, shout right into Della’s face, then knock her to the ground.

Della made no move away from the windowsill.

‘Look, what I told you about the photos,’ Della said slowly. ‘It’s possible Rhys did have something to do with them.’

Catrin waited, saying nothing, her hand still holding open the door. Della was staring out into the rain.

‘They came to me via that documentary maker, the one who’s obsessed with the Owen Face mystery.’

‘So what?’

‘He told me he’d got them from an ex-copper, someone down on his luck.’

‘That doesn’t narrow it down much.’

‘Someone who’d just died, he said.’

‘He wouldn’t say who.’

‘No.’

Catrin took this in. Even if it was true it offered no real indication Rhys had been involved.

‘That’s all,’ she said.

‘That’s all.’

Della was tapping her boots lightly on the floor. They came up above the knee, tucked into cashmere leggings that were a few shades lighter than the cashmere of her drenched Versace coat. All the rich tart’s gear, she’s sending me the same message as last night, Catrin thought. You come work for me, you can spend like I spend.

At last Della seemed about to leave. Catrin turned away, hoping the disgust showed on her face.

‘So why bother to tell me this?’ she said.

‘I thought you’d find it interesting.’ Della had begun to turn towards the door.

‘The film-maker,’ Catrin said. ‘What’s his name?’

Della just stood there with her back to her. Catrin waited, didn’t really expect Della to answer. More than likely this has all just been another nasty little power game, she thought, leading nowhere.

‘Huw Powell,’ Della said.

The name rang a vague bell, but Catrin couldn’t place it. Not at first, then it came to her. ‘He was a copper himself, wasn’t he?’

‘Once, long ago.’

‘In Drugs. Didn’t he leave under a cloud?’

Della didn’t answer, began walking back towards her car. Briefly through Catrin’s mind had flickered the ghost of an idea, it wasn’t more than that, just a ghost. She felt her pulse quicken, not with fear this time, but with something more like hope, and with it came an anger deeper than she had felt for many years.

‘It was before my time,’ Della called back.

‘Corruption, wasn’t it, something like that?’

Her words were lost in the wind. Della had started the engine. For a moment the air was filled with strains of some retro disco beat. Then the car was gone, and Catrin was left looking out at the rain and the night.

5

As Catrin reached the services on the road back to Cardiff, the weather was closing in again, visibility low, the rain turning to driving sleet. Her heavy bike was slipping in the slicks left by the trucks, her leathers soaked through by their spray. She decided to pull in, stay the night.

She parked and peered at her phone. She’d found Huw Powell’s number the old way, in the telephone directory. She’d left two messages already, but still no reply.

The café area at the back was brilliantly lit up, but there was no one in sight. Next to the door, a jukebox – a replica fifties model – was playing a medley of Tom Jones hits. She’d heard them so many times it was like walking into silence.

She helped herself to a coffee from the counter, sat by the window. The dimly lit car park was empty. Down at the pumps, a single figure was filling a heavy-goods truck. The only other sign of life came from a television, the screen covered with weather warnings. A notice showed that all ferry services out of Fishguard had been cancelled. On the ticker she saw the bad weather had closed many smaller roads along the coast in the far west.

The truck driver went over to a booth. She’d noticed the truck had come from the west, a Cardigan address on the side, its roof dripping with melting ice.

She caught the man’s eye. ‘How is it out in the far west?’

She could hear him chuckling under his breath, making the gurgling sound typical of a heavy smoker.

‘That area’s been cut off best part of a week already,’ he said.

Next to the shop the door led through to a motel section, a recently built, no-frills Travelodge. Beside the empty reception desk, a swipe machine took her card details, then spat out a key into a plastic receptacle.

The maroon theme that dominated the reception area had been continued in the rooms. The furnishings looked barely used, but old all the same.

The lights along the walkway outside were tripping off automatically, the night closing in. All that was visible outside was a lone figure in a parka at the pumps filling an old van.

Sitting on the bed she opened the bag she used to store her CDs, the top covered with stickers from Spillers Records in Cardiff, now faded and peeling.

Though she’d never cared much for Seerland and Owen Face, she knew she still had some of their early stuff. Rhys had given to her the compilation way back in the mid-Nineties, the second year they’d been together.

She switched on her Mac and settled back on the bed.

The first track was one of Seerland’s early numbers. She closed her eyes as she listened to the opening bars. First came the strumming of the balalaika, then the bass notes that drove the track forward. Then Face’s cracked voice gradually filling the room like an ancient scent seeping from a broken bottle.

It was a song to be listened to in the depths of the night when even the world’s insomniacs had drifted off to sleep. It’d been what Rhys liked to hear on night surveillance shifts, the trip-hop’s unearthliness drifting out of his car stereo. She’d gone with him sometimes, to allay the boredom, getting her first taste for police work.

It had been the same routine every night, the same faces, every hour or so a runner bringing through the stones bagged up for sale by the boys on the corners. There wasn’t much to do to pass the time except listen to music, or talk, or not talk.

She’d reach across and hold his hand, or lie with her face buried in his chest, nothing more than that, just lie there, forgetting herself in him, her shallow breathing merging with his until she could no longer hear her own breaths.

Sometimes she’d sense him shrinking away from her, the first sign that there were parts of him she’d never reach, bowing his head over the box where he stored his chocolate bars, the sheets of paper he used to make his origami birds. Acting as if she wasn’t there at all.

She went to the track which had made Seerland famous, one of the small collection they’d released after they had signed with their first label. Typical of their early sound, she knew it had been a favourite with that tight-knit group of fans who’d followed the band before Owen Face disappeared.

The sound did not strike her as particularly original, there was something familiar, almost comforting in its trance-like beat. Over a finale of wailing feedback, the track ended with Face reading a poem. She could make out only one line –
I want to walk in the snow and not leave a footprint
– the rest was inaudible, lost in the feedback.

She remembered the same words playing on the radio the night of Face’s disappearance. How she’d tried to shut them out of her mind by humming. Rhys had told her about Face’s state of mind towards the end, his fierce intelligence, his tendency to self-harm with knives and razor blades. She’d thought he presented with all the tells of the classic potential suicide. But she knew there were many people out there who still desperately wanted to believe Face was alive somewhere, that he’d just needed time out and would return one day like a lost Messiah.

To his hardcore fans the Face had been more than just a rock star. He’d been their representative on earth, his anxieties and anorexia the outward signs of their own tortured souls. But his presumed death had forced them to move on and grow up. And looking back she could see now that his disappearance had coincided with the end of something in herself and the people around her at the time. Until then they’d all still nursed illusions of a successful career, a halfway decent marriage, a house in one of Cardiff’s better suburbs, a couple of kids, a dog – a few pints before Sunday lunch with their mates at the rugby club. They’d still believed they could return to normal lives. But after he had gone these illusions had seemed quietly to slip away, and had gradually been replaced by silence.

Maybe a part of her still wanted to believe Face was out there too, that part of her that still remembered how to hope, that felt she owed something to all the missing ones. It was the oldest of human fantasies after all, healing time, bringing back the lost, the dead.

Her cigarette was almost burning her fingers. She let it drop into the mug at her feet. The CD segued on to Seerland’s biggest hit. Over a backdrop of sitars and synthesised guitars the lyrics spoke of astral travel, the mind and the senses leaving the body to experience a world beyond the restrictions of the mundane. The sound reminded her of the Beatles in their psychedelic period – of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. It had a looping, slightly dazed beat, though as she continued to listen she had the sense there was some other more ancient ingredient that she was missing.

Looking out she could see through the trees beyond the pumps the dim flicker of headlights. She stopped the track and took off the headphones. The wind was stronger now, the sleet almost horizontal.

In the front pocket of her jeans she felt the vibration of her mobile. She looked at the screen: there was no caller’s number visible. She raised the handset to her ear.

A crackle of interference was breaking up the voice. She didn’t recognise it.

‘
It’s me
.’ The voice sounded cracked, as if the man hadn’t spoken for some time. ‘
Huw Powell
.’

The static had gone, but the line was still poor. In the background she could hear what sounded like the crashing of waves.

The voice sounded weird, more mechanical than human. Like the voice of someone who didn’t get out much. That’s what these obsessives become like, she thought, they end up in their own worlds, cut off, barely able to communicate.

On the other end of the line there was a sharp intake of breath, as if the man was taking a drag on something stronger than a cigarette.

The voice still sounded croaky, barely human. There was a long rasping noise, then a series of clicks and the line went dead. She pressed the ‘logs’ section to check for the number, but there was nothing there.

Then a text came through, just an address and a time.

The sleet had almost stopped now. If she pressed her face to the window she thought she could just see, through the dark row of trees and the lamps that lined the road, the orange glow of the city in the distance.

As Catrin rode through what remained of the western docks, she kept losing her way among the new buildings overlooking the quays. The area had once been a seedy but friendly enough cluster of reggae clubs, cheap guest houses and massage parlours. Now all this had been replaced by high-rise hotels and apartment blocks that seemed to have risen like a giant formation of shimmering crystals whole from the sea.

The address she’d been texted turned out to be a gleaming steel and glass tower, a needle-shaped structure that dwarfed the blocks around it. The door was opened for her by a uniformed guard, her name was entered on a clipboard, and she was directed towards the lifts.

In the transparent, climate-controlled pod, hidden speakers played Andean pipe music as it climbed the outside of the building. On her way up to the penthouse she took in the view of the city. Beyond a cluster of bars she could just make out the shopping streets of The Hayes and Queen Street, the turrets of the castle and the dim expanse of Pontcanna and the suburbs.

As the lift opened, Catrin saw a man standing in a lobby panelled in light, rather beautiful wood. He looked like a classic executive type, was dressed in a dark tailored suit and tie. As though he’d left the office late and still hadn’t had time to change.

‘I’m here to see Huw Powell,’ she said.

He smiled warmly, confidently.

‘That’s me,’ he said.

Her first thought was that she’d just been the victim of some kind of practical joke. The voice on the phone had suggested a crazy, a bong-smoking recluse, a one-man party. But the man standing in front of her looked clean-cut, conventional even, every inch the CEO of a major media company. It was the same voice all right, but levelled out now, quietly commanding.