Sympathy for the Devil (3 page)

It was the watching unseen that had first turned Catrin on to police work, that and seeing patterns where there didn’t seem to be any at first. But now there wasn’t much for them to look at, just the fading posters on the wall, the view across the bay shut out by the fog. She reached her hand across in the darkness, held Rhys’s, letting her face rest against his chest. He opened the glove compartment and took out a tube of Fruit Pastilles.

‘Want one?’

She took a lime one, slipped it in her mouth without chewing.

‘You knew there’d be nothing here tonight,’ she said. She held the pastille against her cheek with her tongue. ‘Why come down? What were you expecting to see?’

Rhys lowered the binoculars.

‘I don’t know. I’ll only know when I see it.’

A few insubstantial flakes landed on the car window, melting almost immediately. Catrin shivered, hunkered down inside her parka. Only ten minutes had passed, but her feet already felt cold.

‘This is all just bullshit.’ She pointed at the empty street. ‘You came down because you knew
she
would be here.’

‘Who’s she?’ he said casually.

‘Oh please.’ Catrin put her hand in Rhys’s pocket, and felt his hand on her wrist. She thought he was going to stop her, but he didn’t. At first her fingers found only the little folded papers he used to make his origami birds. Immediately she began to feel ashamed for doing this, for doubting him. She laid the papers out on her palm. A swan, an owl, a raven. Then she felt something else, wrapped in cellophane. She knew what it was before she even took it out.

‘What the fuck’s this? Why isn’t it in an evidence bag?’

He shrugged, said nothing. It would have been so easy for him to lie, but he just said nothing. She held it closer to the light. It was a wrap, just as she’d thought, the cellophane transparent, burnt at the corner to seal in the brown heroin powder.

‘Della gave this to you, didn’t she?’

Rhys was looking away down the street, avoiding her eyes. She felt a pain now in her temple as at the onset of a fever, a sudden emptiness in her stomach, that feeling she had whenever she looked down from heights and there was nothing dividing her from the fatal emptiness beneath.

She touched his cheek, tried to make him look at her. ‘What’s so bad,’ she said softly, ‘that you have to do this to yourself? Is it a case? I thought we shared everything.’

He remained still as a stone, staring out into the night. She tried to force herself to think positively.
He’s never lied to me. He could have, but he didn’t. Maybe he wanted me to know, maybe he was just waiting for this to happen. Maybe he couldn’t bear to hide it from me any more
.

‘Whatever’s hurting you, I can handle it,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to protect me, not any more.’ He still said nothing. She heard her own voice trailing off. Sometimes the truth couldn’t be sugar-coated. He’d been using and she hadn’t even seen the signs. She’d been trained to read those signs, but so had he, he’d known how to cover up. He’d committed original sin for a drugs officer, and what was worse he hadn’t turned to her for help, he’d kept it hidden.

She tried to swallow her anger but couldn’t stop herself. She heard her heels on the pavement, the slam of the car door behind her before she was even aware she was moving.

She walked fast through streets she had known all her life. She could have kept her eyes closed and still found her way home. On the other side of the street she saw a solitary figure, a young girl. A stray from the crowds at the docks maybe. It was late for her to be out. The child was doing everything to avoid drawing attention to herself, head down, taking fast, small steps. Catrin wanted to follow the girl to make sure she was safe, but already she was losing sight of her. The girl broke into a run, weaving between the pillars of the low-rise flats then disappearing into the blackness.

Around one corner, then another and Catrin passed a barber’s pole above a charred hole in the brickwork, then under the shop sign over another boarded-up front. Most of the houses beyond were covered with metal sheets to keep squatters out, awaiting demolition. These streets would disappear soon to make way for the new waterfront developments, and for a moment her mind was filled with a vision of all the lost souls who would continue to pace them in their dreams until their dying days.

The curtains were pulled across the windows of her mother’s house, no lights visible from the street. The fairy lights still not taken down from previous Christmases, now a permanent feature, gave out not even a flicker. Catrin went down the path to the back door. She moved quietly up the steps between the troughs that had once held pink flowers she’d never known the name of. She was aware her mother might already be sleeping, and didn’t want to wake her.

Catrin was trying hard not to think about what had just happened, but the harder she tried not to picture it, the more it ran through her mind. Maybe it hadn’t even been Della in the car behind. She had to hang on to that possibility. Maybe Rhys had just forgotten to slip the wrap into an evidence bag. There could always be innocent explanations for things. If you looked at them in a certain way, didn’t look at them too long. The trick of making life bearable, a life like hers where she was paid to think the worst of people.

Through the hallway she went into the kitchen. She could hear the sound of a television from the next room, and out over the water the sound of the choppers just a distant thrumming. She stood at the door, but the room was empty. The light flickered over a tracksuit hung over the back of a chair. It was one of the wooden dining suite her mother never used. Her mother didn’t come downstairs often now, and when she did she always ate her meals on her lap on the threadbare sofa that faced the television.

Catrin stood at the sink and ran the water until it was so cold it seemed to burn her fingers, then she went upstairs. When she flicked the switch the hallway remained dark. The bulbs hadn’t been replaced. In the street light she could just make out the patch on the wall where the Salem picture had hung, the proud old woman at chapel with the devil’s face showing in the folds of her shawl. Dust-sheets covered the furniture waiting for the council to take it to the sheltered housing where her mother was being rehoused.

The door to her mother’s room was closed. She stood with her ear to the peeling paintwork, could hear nothing within. ‘Mam,’ she whispered. But there was no reply. Through the crack came the flicker of the gas fire. She opened the door silently and peered in. Her mother lay unmoving on the bed, her chest slowly rising and falling. Her face in the glow of the fire looked hollowed out, pale from all the medication and so many months indoors.

Catrin went over, drew the blanket gently up to her mother’s neck. When she bent and kissed her forehead it felt cool, dry, as if it had been buried in parched earth. She wondered how long her mother had left now. She’d asked the doctors enough times and always they’d said the same thing. They didn’t own crystal balls, they couldn’t see into the future. It sounded as if they were trained to say it.

Even in the dimness she could make out the marks where the cupboard and armchair had stood, and where the rug had lain for so many years. Beside the bed the packing case was covered with her mother’s cigarettes, her blister packs of pills, her many lighters and dog-eared Mills & Boons. Catrin tried the lighters one by one, but they were all dead.

Beside her she heard the shallow rasp of her mother’s breathing, her eyes half open but seeing nothing. In her sleep her mother was rolling over, her arms reaching around the pillow, cradling it close to her. Catrin drew back the tie-dye cloth hung over the dusty window and looked out into the night.

In the moonlight the frozen grass glistened. The clothes hanging on the makeshift line should have been brought in hours ago. When she goes to bring them in in the morning they will be stiff as cardboard, Catrin thought.

At the bottom of the yard a cat moved among the bins. In the window opposite an Asian family were eating their dinner together, they could not see her watching them. Like everything that night they felt like something glimpsed on a distant screen.

SEPTEMBER 1998

‘Catrin.’

She opened her eyes. It was dark still, but she could make out a vague movement near the door.

What time was it? Morning? She turned and looked at her alarm clock. Two a.m. No wonder she felt strange, she’d only been asleep an hour.

She could make out a man crouching by the door.

There was something in his hand, something long and dark. He was wearing a loose tracksuit, the hood pulled up. He was still, absolutely still, and he was watching her.

‘Catrin.’

Her heart leapt. That’s what had woken her, the sound of Rhys’s voice. He’d come back to her. She waited for him to hit the switch, then opened her eyes again slowly.

‘Oh Rhys,’ she said, ‘you look terrible.’

He hadn’t come home for two weeks and now she noticed all the things she’d got used to when she saw him every day. The state of his clothes and the way they hung off his body, the state of his skin, the pallor, the dullness of his eyes. The drugs and the not eating: his life was destroying him from the inside out. He’s come back because he knows I’m the only one who can save him, she thought.

He was only thirty-five after all, there was plenty of time for him to change. She wasn’t the innocent kid she’d been when they first got together. She was twenty-two years old now, a serving Drugs officer, just like him. She was going to save him.

Then she noticed the suitcase, lying on the floor at his feet.

‘What’s that?’ Her voice was small and scared. ‘What are you doing, Rhys?’

It was obvious what he was doing. He was taking his clothes from the cupboard and he was putting them in the suitcase.

‘I’m sorry, Cat,’ he said.

She got out of bed, hoping that the sight of her fit young body would be enough to give him second thoughts. Fat chance. He didn’t even look at her. He just kept stuffing his things into the case, and all at once she felt self-conscious in her nakedness, and aware that he was no longer hers. She quickly pulled on her joggers and T-shirt.

‘Where are you going, Rhys?’

His eyes gave him away, flickering towards the window. She crossed the room and opened the curtains a crack, just enough to see the street outside. There was a car parked there, a long, dark, expensive-looking coupé. A woman stood next to it, smoking and looking straight up at her.

She’s standing there so I can see her. The bitch, she’s relishing this. Even in the half-light Catrin saw how slim, how lithe she was. She was dressed in a tight shiny dress with a snakeskin pattern, and heels, as if she’d just left a glamorous club or party. Catrin shivered, closed the curtains again.

‘It’s that bitch. Della Davies,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ Rhys was closing the suitcase, moving away towards the door. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know.’

Had she known? Of course she had, but increasingly she’d hidden it from herself. When the gossip in the station had stopped, a part of her had so much wanted to believe it was over. All at once it hit home, how terribly young and naïve she’d been. What could she offer him now that would make him change his mind? She felt a rising panic.

‘Please,’ she said. She needed urgently to get away from the flat, from the place they’d shared. ‘Let’s take a walk, talk for a minute.’

Catrin moved her hand to touch his cheek. Rhys didn’t look at her but nodded. She sighed with relief. He still cared enough to do that for her. She left her fingers there, drew them softly down to his neck. She slapped him hard where she had just stroked him. He didn’t move. His eyes were still, expressionless.

‘Hey,’ he said, a tiny smile playing around his chapped lips, ‘that’s no way to say goodbye.’

She couldn’t help smiling back. They both loved Leonard Cohen. Did Della Davies love Leonard Cohen? She couldn’t imagine it. She put her trainers on, and they walked out of the house together into the mild night.

She kept her eyes straight ahead, looking away from where Della was standing. She caught a brief flash of stretched halter-top, big gold jewellery, deep fake tan. The light from the street lamps glimmered over the car behind her. It was a late-model Mercedes, looked as if it had just come from the showroom.

That’s an expensive car to run on a press officer’s salary, she thought. But then she’d heard the rumours around the station, that Della had some line on the side. What this line was, no one really knew. Some said she worked as an escort for wealthy businessmen, and that she offered unusual, very specialised services. Others that she ran an agency for officers moonlighting in the shadier end of the private-security game. There were other rumours, even more bizarre. But no one had ever backed up a single rumour with a single fact.

She’s the sort of woman who knows about everyone else’s business, but nobody knows about hers, Catrin thought. And she’s too smooth an operator to let that change.

Rhys was leading Catrin down the street now. He was heading towards the park, the stretch of empty lawns behind the trees. He walked to where the ruins of a small bandstand were circled by railings overgrown with ivy. The floor of the shelter was littered with cardboard where rough sleepers had been; tall beeches hid the place from the lane.

She saw the glow of Della’s cigarette behind the trees, and Rhys glancing back towards her as if at a view of something indistinct and far away. Catrin nodded towards the trees. ‘She’s just a user, she wants you for something. After that, she’ll treat you like you never existed.’

‘This isn’t about her,’ he said slowly.

They stood there, six foot apart. Catrin wanted to close the gap but knew she couldn’t. For the moment they were like opposing magnets. She waited, watched Rhys make the effort to start saying what he had to say. Finally, he was ready.