Sympathy for the Devil (19 page)

At the bottom of the steps she turned left. The sleet had stopped, the streets behind her were silent. She could hear no footsteps following.

Catrin glanced at the terraced houses on either side, some newly painted, others boarded up with faint lights behind the dark hoardings. Behind her now she could hear a light squelching sound. She recognised it immediately. The sound of high-soled trainers moving over damp pavements. She turned round. The street behind her was well-lit and appeared empty.

She moved on again, taking faster steps. Around one corner, then another. She stopped and listened. The sound was there again, nearer this time, just the other side of a row of high hoardings overgrown with ivy.

She waited, her eyes on the corner behind her. There, some way back from the road was a man in an anorak, his hood up. He looked very much like the man she’d seen at the service station, but in the half-light it was impossible to be sure.

Now she had her eyes on him, he paused, hesitated, neither moving towards her nor away towards the terrace of houses. She thought she glimpsed the flicker of something in his right hand, maybe a blade.

She turned, moved on to a gate that led through a small fenced area of public gardens. Once through the gate she began to run.

The ground beneath her feet was uneven, covered with broken paving and roots, and several times she lost her footing. She could hear nothing behind her, only the surge of her breathing and the blood singing in her ears.

On the other side of the gardens was another gate, beyond it an empty parking area. The gate was locked, there was no way through. She ducked down behind the wall and glanced back at the path.

At first it seemed nothing was moving there. But gradually she began to make out a thickening of the air between the trees. A man was walking very slowly towards the wall. His head was raised and moving from right to left, like a dog scenting the air. From his right hand came a momentary shimmer in the darkness.

She couldn’t make out his face, just long dark hair drooping down the front of the hood that covered his face completely like a mask. Catrin had the strange sense that behind it there was nothing at all, just a pair of yellow eyes, no face. She moved silently deeper into the shadows. She reached down, dialled Della’s number.

On the second ring the receiver was picked up with a dull clattering sound.

‘I think I’m being followed, Del.’ In the background she could hear music.

‘Where are you?’

Despite the late hour Della sounded wide awake.

‘At a car park. Round the back of the Hayes.’

‘Keep walking down towards Queen Street. Someone’ll be waiting for you there.’

Not looking back, she climbed the wall, pulling herself up on the squares of flint embedded in the bricks. On the top were shards of glass. She reached between them, hauling herself to a crouching position on the ridge. Behind her she heard a shuffling sound, then the wind hard on her neck. She dropped down on the other side. Her ankle hurt where she hit the pavement. She ran past the block-like façade of the Golden Cross, on towards the Hayes.

The clubs and pubs there had closed some hours before. The shopping precinct looked empty. Catrin leant down over the flower beds, catching her breath, then walked on towards Queen Street. A car flashed its headlights at her. It looked like a minicab, a small dark saloon. There were coloured beads hanging from the mirror, a silver plaque of holy verses on the console.

The driver’s window opened a crack as she came alongside.

‘For Ms Davies?’

She got in. The driver looked East African with a broad bodybuilder’s chest and a long sorrowful face. The seats were covered with throw cushions, like a sofa, and smelt of sugared almonds.

The driver turned and looked over his shoulder at the hooded figure moving fast towards them from between two parked lorries.

‘What are you waiting for,’ she said, ‘just fucking drive!’ With a muttered curse the driver sped off northwards. A couple of minutes later she felt the car slow again. Outside she recognised the tall Regency terraces of St Andrew’s Crescent, the polished brass plaques of city-centre solicitors and upmarket recruitment agencies.

The car had stopped at one end of the street outside what appeared to have once been a chapel, now converted, according to the developer’s sign, into office space. ‘Up there,’ the driver said. Above the black railings there were lights on behind the stained-glass windows.

Although the car had pulled over, the driver didn’t get out. Catrin walked up the steps, a camera in the fanlight swivelling towards her as the door clicked open.

Inside the large space was almost empty, a flooring of some greenish-streaked rock leading up to a mezzanine with desks around a seating area. At the top she saw Della bowed over a screen, her face lit by its pale glow.

‘I was being followed,’ Catrin said. ‘When we went up to the service station to see where Face’s car was found, we were tailed. Then when I left the club the same man followed me.’

Della was standing at the top of the staircase. The tapping of her heels echoed across the large empty space.

She didn’t stand back so Catrin had to brush against her as she went past. She smelt of vodka and some very expensive scent. Catrin paused, stared at her until she backed away.

‘You’ve been drinking. You’re probably seeing things,’ Della said.

‘Speak for yourself, Del.’

Della held out a cheek, air-kissed her, then turned back to a couch shaped like a giant baseball glove that stood against the wall. Della’s hair hung in limp trails over her face, and her eyes looked tired, bloodshot.

In the corner was a door, half-ajar, to another space, a large cupboard it seemed to be. Along the wall were packing cases filled with files and computer equipment. A framed spread from a magazine featuring a house with a large conservatory, Della’s weekender in the Mumbles Catrin presumed. Beside the cases a filing cabinet lay on its side. The drawers were open, the contents lying in untidy rows on the floor.

‘What’s this, Del? Moving out in the middle of the night?’

Della turned away, seeming to ignore the question, and reached down to a bottle of vodka by her side. What remained in the bottle she poured neat into two tall glasses, passing one across the table.

The suit Della was wearing looked just like the one she had worn in the picture above her column. As she took the glass her hand was noticeably unsteady.

‘What’s wrong, Del? You seem edgy.’

Della glanced over at the empty space below the mezzanine.

‘You think that man followed me here?’

Della had finished her glass in a single swig. She kept her eyes on the area downstairs. She didn’t reply.

‘Let me tell you what I think’s going on here, Del.’ She looked again at Della’s suit, smiling to herself, then straight into Della’s tired eyes. ‘You hear about Powell’s obsession with Face. You smell a big money opportunity.’

She saw Della wasn’t reacting yet, no tells. ‘You know people won’t connect you with Rhys because you put an injunction on him. So you hire him to hustle Powell, bait him with some phoney photos.’

‘Nice idea. And then?’

‘Then Rhys gets greedy, tries to shake you down. You get into a tussle with him that gets caught on CCTV. You’re wearing a slutty suit just like the one you’ve got on. Then later that night you get him offed down on the beach.’

‘How do I do that?’

‘Junkies are soft targets. They’re just one fix away from death. You set him up with some strong gear, roll him into the sea.’

Della was smiling, seemed genuinely amused.

‘Look, I did meet Rhys that night. I’d worked out from what Powell told me the photos must’ve come from Rhys.’

‘You’re lying.’ Catrin moved closer to the sofa.

‘But I only wanted to find out where Rhys had got them. He took some cash off me, told me nothing. Except that he’d got the photos from a good source. Rhys said it was someone who knew you.’

‘Knew me? The source knew
me
?’

‘That’s what Rhys said. He said it was someone who trusted you, Cat. Rhys said if anything happened to him, you would be the link to the source.’

Catrin looked hard at Della, tried to make sense of this, but couldn’t.

‘And you told Powell this, about the source knowing, trusting me?’

‘I had to give him something, after all the money he’d put up.’

‘
That
explains why Powell wanted to hire me, then.’

Catrin still couldn’t make any sense of what Della had just said.

‘Who the hell was Rhys talking about, who’s the source?’

‘If I knew that I’d already have sold it to Powell. That’s why I wanted to hire you myself. You’re the only link there is to the source.’

‘That was all Rhys said?’

‘Yes, and that was the last time I saw him alive.’

‘You’re lying.’ Catrin slapped Della hard across the face. She didn’t move, made no attempt to resist. Della was quivering, her mouth pursed open. Catrin slapped her again, saw she was bowing her head, her eyes glazing over slightly, her breathing fast. Della seemed to be waiting for more blows to fall. The bitch is actually getting off on this, Catrin thought.

She stood back. There was a slight smile playing over Della’s lips, her cheeks were glowing. ‘I shouldn’t have lied to you about meeting Rhys,’ she said. ‘But I had nothing to do with his death.’

Della’s dishevelled hair covered her eyes. ‘And if I was trying to set up Powell, why would I have dismissed the photos as fakes in my article?’

She knew Della had a point there. She let her go on. ‘Powell brought me those photos, told me to look into them, just like I told you,’ Della said. ‘I worked out they came from Rhys, so I contacted him and what he said led me to you.’

Catrin saw she’d made a mistake. Della had probably been telling the truth. The photos had come to Huw from Rhys exactly as Huw had described, and Della had known nothing about them until Huw had shown them to her.

She’d let her anger at the woman cloud her judgement.

Catrin felt bad at what she’d just done. She sat beside Della on the sofa. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Catrin held her drink without sipping. She could feel Della softly touch her hand. She wanted to pull away immediately, but something stopped her. The anger had gone for the moment, replaced by a sensation that was calmer, more accepting.

She felt Della’s lips brush hers, barely touching, just hovering there.

‘You’re drunk, Del,’ she said. She turned away.

Tentatively Della reached her head up and tried to kiss her very gently again. Catrin didn’t move her lips, but she didn’t pull away. She let it go on for a moment, wanted to know what Rhys had felt. Maybe some flicker of him still lingered in what he had once felt for this woman.

‘You want to know what we did, don’t you,’ Della was whispering.

Della was kneeling on the floor. She slipped the jacket off her shoulders, let it fall. She had pushed her trousers down to her ankles. It felt unreal, like some sort of bizarre joke, but Catrin could tell Della was serious.

She watched Della bowing her head, then crawling slowly across the floor, glancing back over her shoulder. Della suddenly lay still, like a puppet whose strings had all been cut. Her thighs were covered in thin, evenly spaced bruises.

Catrin crouched down beside her, but didn’t touch her. ‘And then, what did he do?’ she said.

Della said nothing, just pushed her hand up to her crotch, began lazily clicking her fingers, as if calling for a waiter in an old-fashioned film or keeping time to some slow, half-remembered beat. Catrin saw now Della was just trying to taunt her. She pulled one of her arms up hard behind her back. Della seemed to be enjoying it, but Catrin carried on until she didn’t any more.

‘Angel Jones, did you ever know him?’

Della said nothing, so she pulled her arm back tighter, and she whimpered slightly. ‘I met him a few times, that’s all.’

‘Why, Del? You got a death wish or something?’

‘I didn’t know what he’d done to those poor girls, I swear.’ Della was sweating, the make-up smudging on her face.

‘How did you know him then?’

‘It was via a girl I met off a BDSM site, just a bit of fun, that’s all.’

‘Nothing Jones did made you feel he was dangerous?’

‘No, he played strictly by the rules.’

‘And the other girl off the site was one of his victims later, was she? Bet you got off on that, didn’t you?’

‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ Della sounded on the verge of tears now, but there was a note of genuine outrage in her voice. ‘This girl had him eating out of her hand. She was dark, cloudy eyes, gorgeous, I fancied her rotten. I only went along because of her.’

This wasn’t what Catrin had expected to hear. Jones was a monster, but here was a glimpse of another, more vulnerable side to him. Catrin loosened her grip a little. ‘This other girl, what else can you remember about her?’

‘Not much. She seemed a bit spaced-out, into Seerland, played their stuff constantly.’

‘Like half the girls in the city at the time.’

‘Right. I wanted to see her more. But she always wanted Jones there, so I just gave up in the end.’

‘And Rhys knew you’d met Jones.’

‘No, I never said anything about it to Rhys.’

‘So how did DS Thomas know about it?’

‘Because Thomas makes it his business to know nasty things like that.’

Catrin let go of Della’s arm. She felt bad again for what she’d just done. Della was brazen and ruthless, but she probably wasn’t actively evil. She briefly stroked Della’s arm, and felt Della gently stroke her back. She sensed a calm again between them, an understanding of sorts.

Catrin noticed again the half-open door in the corner. She thought she could see something that looked odd inside, not right for an office.