Love Story, With Murders Page 3

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.

  Nothing obvious to link anyone in the area to Mary Langton. Langton’s own excursion into exotic dancing seemed a fairly temporary thing. As far as we can tell, her first encounter with the industry was Easter 2004 and had more or less ended up by early 2005 – that is to say, several months before her death. So maybe the lap dancing had nothing to do with it.

  Remarkably, Mrs Williams had an official caution on her record: she had jammed her walking stick into the spokes of a child’s bicycle, while a boy was riding it. The boy had fallen and started crying. An altercation ensued, which led to the boy’s mother being warned for using abusive language to a police officer. The officer in question subsequently also issued Mrs Williams with an official caution. The incident took place in 2007 and wouldn’t appear to have any direct link to Mary Langton’s leg, except insofar as the episode shed some light as to Mrs Williams’s general character and outlook. Which does not seem to have been sunny.

  I think of saying something to Watkins, but she’s busy, so I don’t.

  I finish my reading and let the countryside slide by. It’s wet and the wipers are going all the time. The police driver keeps the car at a precise seventy miles an hour, moving out from the slow lane when he needs to overtake, moving back again as soon as he can. Indicators on and off every time.

  Watkins is on her BlackBerry. Making calls, checking and sending emails. Handling media, forensics, neighbourhood inquiries, public information appeals. Progress reports to Robert Kirby, the Detective Superintendent who has overall supervision of this investigation and is, in effect, Watkins’s boss for the duration. There’s also Interpol liaison, because of the Aussie angle. Getting updates on anyone whose names cropped up in the first, 2005, phase of the Langton investigation.

  A communications blizzard. The nature of command.

  But eventually she’s done. She hasn’t had any more sleep than I have, and she has that pink soap smell about her too. She looks at my jeans with taut disapproval but doesn’t say anything. She’s wearing a grey woollen dress that she must have had ready in her office.

  ‘The leg was at the back of the freezer,’ I say, because it’s weird not saying anything.

  She looks at me, waiting, so I continue.

  ‘Mrs Williams was only an inch or so taller than me and arthritic. The freezer was almost a metre high and two feet deep. If I had to bundle a leg in there, I could probably manage it, but I don’t think I could have laid it neatly along the bottom of the back wall unless I virtually climbed into the thing.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the polythene didn’t match any of the other packages.’

  ‘I don’t think Elsie Williams is our killer.’

  ‘Do we know if she left her garage unlocked? Or if any of the neighbours had a key?’

  Watkins raises a chin to acknowledge the questions. Those things might have been on her to-do list anyway.

  We’re off the motorway now, in the hills above Bath. Farmhouses and villages glimmering through the rain, then the long plunge downhill into the city.

  The driver lets the satnav guide him to an address just west of Victoria Park. Ordinary, pleasant streets. Watkins puts her BlackBerry away, braces herself for the brutal moment.

  She says nothing about how she wants to conduct the interview, but when she gets out of the car, I follow. She rings the doorbell. Lights on inside. Noise. A shape moves behind the door, then it opens. A woman. Langton’s mother, dark hair, jeans, rugby top. Her face is composed in a ‘how can I help’ look, which collapses completely the moment she recognises Watkins.

  ‘Oh.’

  Nothing else. Just ‘Oh’. She takes us on wordlessly through to the kitchen. Same thing with her husband. The collapsing face, the wordlessness. A telly on in the background, which he mutes.

  We sit down and Watkins says what she has to say.

  ‘I’m sorry. Yesterday evening, DC Griffiths here was called to a house in Cardiff. We found some human remains, your daughter. We’ve been able to identify her from clothing and DNA. I’m very sorry.’

  The husband has that numbed look. That thing where you’re only partly present in the room, where feelings and sounds and sensations all feel deadened, as if glimpsed through a glass wall. That’s the place where I’ve spent so much of my life: behind that wall, watching it thicken and cloud till I could hardly see through it at all.

  The wife, Mrs Langton, isn’t like that. She’s crying without sound, tears falling like sand. She has some instinct toward hospitality, and keeps starting to offer us a drink, but never quite gets there. In the end, I get up, power off the TV and put the kettle on, then just stand behind her with my hands resting on her shoulders.

  I’m good in these situations because I don’t have normal feelings. I operate the way I usually do, relying on my brain more than my heart or instinct. Mrs Langton is sobbing now. Noisy, juddering sobs.
The sort you’re supposed to have at this kind of moment. I don’t intervene, just stand there and let her cry. Watkins and the husband make tea.

  When things are calmer, Watkins continues. Tells the truth. That we have a leg, not a daughter. That we can’t say how she died. That we can’t offer any comfort or close off any awful possibility. That the worst of those possibilities are all too likely. Some sexual, sadistic, long-drawn-out weirdness ending in a macabre death. Watkins doesn’t say that last bit, of course, but it’s there, present in the room, as real as the rain.

  Finally, we’re through the tears. Mrs Langton says that they’d never really given up, that they’d always hoped, that her daughter’s room is still ready for her upstairs.

  I ask to see it.

  My request is unexpected. Not what I’m meant to do, either from Watkins’s point of view or the Langtons’. But still. Mrs Langton says all right, because that’s easier than saying no. I go upstairs behind her. Beige carpets. A willow tree beyond the landing window. Then the room. Scrupulously tidy. Student books. A revision chart. A poster with a Dylan Thomas poem on it.

  I sit on the bed, Mrs Langton on the desk chair.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Mrs Langton –’

  ‘Oh, call me Rosemary, dear.’

  ‘I’m Fiona. Fi. Whichever.’

  ‘Fiona. My niece is Fiona.’

  ‘This is how her room was? This tidy?’

  ‘Oh, she was always tidy.’

  I look in a wardrobe. Her clothes are still there. Not night-clubby, spangly miniskirt things either. Just normal student stuff. If anything, a bit tame, a bit dorky.

  ‘Sorry, is it okay to look around? I always like to get the feel of someone.’

  ‘I know it looks strange. Keeping it like this. But we’re not . . . I mean, we use it as a spare room too. It’s just nice keeping her things around.’

  There are photos on the desk. No pole-dancing ones. A formal school one. A family shot. One of her on a pony. Another of her playing field hockey, red-faced, in pursuit of an invisible ball.

  We sit for a while. I try imagining myself as Mary Langton, Rosemary as my mother. I’m about the right age. Hockey and Dylan Thomas. That isn’t me, but it could have been. Some parallel life.

  ‘You’ll be okay, will you?’ I say.

  ‘You know, it never leaves you, but life has to go on. We have two others, a boy and a girl. Twenty-three and twenty-seven.’

  She wants to show me their rooms, their photos, but I’m not interested.

  I say, ‘Inspector Watkins is very good, you know. She’s a bit scary, but she’s the best investigator we have.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure. That’s nice to know, actually. Thank you.’

  We sit a bit longer, then go downstairs.

  Watkins is pissed off with me for going AWOL, but she can’t say anything with the Langtons there. We say goodbye. On our way to the car, I say, ‘She needed a hug. I thought she might be better off doing that one-on-one. She had a good cry, then felt better.’

  Watkins looks at me with one of her speciality looks, storm clouds over glaciers. But she doesn’t say anything and we simply drive off in silence.

  Back through the city centre, up the hill, through the rainy countryside, back to the motorway. Only once we’re there, and the driver is doing a hypnotically exact seventy miles an hour, wipers going like a metronome and the indicators blinking on and off each time we change lanes, does she wave her BlackBerry at me.

  ‘They’ve found a hand.’

  ‘Ah!’

  I wait further news.

  ‘A right hand. Three hundred yards from the house. On the banks of the reservoir.’

  I keep waiting. This should be good news. Important. A step forward. But something’s hanging out of sight, something wrong.

  I wait for her to tell me more and she does.

  ‘It’s a man’s hand. Dark-skinned. Arab, Mediterranean, something like that. And fresh. It’s completely fresh.’

  7

  Home.

  I didn’t want to come, but Watkins ignored my protests and had the driver drop me at my door on our way back in to Cathays. When we arrived and I had the one door open ready to get out, she said coldly, ‘If you want to investigate a bedroom, then do so. Don’t lie to me about hugging Rosemary Langton.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I say, wondering how she knew.

  ‘Does she still have that poster up?’

  ‘The Dylan Thomas one? “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”? That’s still there.’

  ‘Weird poem.’

  I shrug. I don’t know if the poem is weird or not. But I don’t care. Nor, all of a sudden, does Watkins. She slams the door, has the driver drive off. I go inside.

  I’m feeling tired, but I find it hard to sleep when it’s daylight outside. I run a bath, but don’t get into it straightaway. Think about rolling a joint, but can’t be bothered to do even that.

  Instead I make peppermint tea and drink it slowly, watching the rain fall. I like the rain. When I was ill, I always felt less ill when it was raining. I used to go outside to get wet. It was one of the things I could almost always feel: the cold, the wet, that sense of falling.

  Eventually I finish my tea, have a bath, wash that icky pink soap smell away, and sleep for a couple of hours. Not good sleep, though. It feels like it’s raining body parts. A hand. A leg. An ear or two. A drizzle of humanity.

  Eventually I wake up, feeling worse than I did when I went to bed. Make more tea, look out at the rain, think about a smoke.

  I call Buzz.

  He takes the call with his voice set to formal, then walks away from wherever he is and says, in his intimate voice, ‘Hey, babe, have a nice time with Watkins?’

  I tell him about my night, except not the bit about going down to Pontcanna or up to Whitchurch, or the bit about calling my dad, or the bit about going into the dead girl’s room, or the drizzle of body parts, or the joint which I thought about twice but didn’t have. Apart from that, I’m as open as sunshine.

  Buzz fills me in on the investigation, because he knows I won’t let it go until he tells me.

  They’ve found another hand, a foot, and a forearm, all apparently belonging to the same dark-skinned male body as the original hand. ‘Better fresh than frozen, eh?’ he says. The inevitable policeish joke.

  ‘On public land, or in gardens, or where?’

  ‘One of the hands and the foot in that little bit of wood just down from the Williams house. Public access land. The other hand and the forearm in back gardens no more than three hundred yards from the Williams house. The hand maybe could have been lobbed in there from the open land behind the garden. The forearm looked placed, not thrown.’

  ‘No ideas who yet?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a clue. Too early for DNA, but we might have something by this evening. No one on the MisPer register who looks likely. No one local, anyway.’

  I know what he means. At a national level, the missing persons register is always well stocked, not least with Londoners of every possible ethnic background. That doesn’t mean we’d be smart to go chasing after every missing Arab-Londoner, Mediterranean-Londoner, or whatever. The DNA may reveal more once it’s analysed.

  ‘You’re up at Llanishen now?’ I ask.

  ‘Me and every other officer in South Wales. A fingertip search.’ More policeish humour, a thing I dearly love.

  We chat a bit more, or try to. Any room we might have found for personal chitchat feels drowned out by what we’ve just talked about. My fault. Buzz is better at switching his police mode on and off. Me, if I’m on the hunt for something, I can never really let it drop. In my mind, I’m already up there in Llanishen, walking across the sodden slopes, examining every tussock of grass, hoping always to find something – a foot, an ear, a pair of fingers – shining in the mud like an autumn mushroom. So though we try having a personal moment, and sort of do, it’s not great. It’ll be better when we can spend an evening togeth
er.

  We ring off.

  I wish I was better at those little intimacies. I’m lucky Buzz is patient.

  There’s been a thumping noise in my head for some time and I now realise I’m hearing the beat of a chopper overhead. I live only a couple of miles from Llanishen – eight minutes by road, five if no one’s watching – and the helicopter, presumably, is part of the operation.

  Partly that’ll be for aerial observation. Looking for a change in the vegetation, discolouration in the soil. But shallow graves are the hardest to find. They don’t disturb the earth enough. In a drought, maybe, a corpse will be revealed by the moisture it holds, but not in Wales, not in Llanishen, and certainly not at the dead end of a wet October. So the chopper is also there as a warning to nutcases. We’re watching you. Stay away. Hunker down. Be good.

  I try to think of some positive ways to spend time – ironing, food shopping, hoovering, gym – but I already know what I’m going to do.

  I go upstairs. The spare room, as I used to call it. Then Buzz took to calling it, disapprovingly, the operations room, so it’s been that, or just the ops room, ever since. A good name. Military. One that handles like a gun, serviceable and clean.

  I swing the door open. There’s a desk, a table, and a cupboard, all from IKEA. Also a bed, covered by a sheet of plywood, and a felt-covered corkboard on the wall.

  Papers. Photos. Files. Lists.

  Also a laptop, a PC, a printer, wireless router, automatic data storage backup. Not me who connected all that lot. One of Dad’s friends. A Tony somebody. From here I can access the PNC, the Police National Computer, and most of its databases, the ones you don’t have to be a PNC analyst to get into. This is also where my Google alerts come into. Also where I keep my subscriptions to things like LexisNexis, the news and business service.

  I keep the curtains drawn, because it’s hard to reach them across all papers on the bed. But I prefer the room dark anyway. It smells of toner cartridges and warm electronics. In a locked desk drawer, I have 460 bullets and no gun.

  The ops room.

  When we broke the Rattigan case – located Fletcher, the trafficked girls, those charming boys from Kaliningrad – my major concern was that the principal bad guy, Brendan Rattigan himself, was already dead, his bones rattling under two hundred feet of seawater. But Rattigan had friends. And some of those friends liked what Rattigan liked, fucked what he fucked, took advantage of his whole deluxe fuck-an-Albanian conveyor belt. As far as I’m concerned, they were just as guilty as he was, just as deserving of punishment.