Love Story, With Murders Read online

  And that’s the operation.

  Find out who Rattigan’s fuck buddies were. Then destroy them.

  I log my latest sheaf of number plates. I can’t track everyone who knew Rattigan, so I’ve limited myself to his closest associates. Those connected to him in multiple ways: company directorships, racing syndicates, dining clubs, yachting holidays, weddings, investment partnerships, charitable boards, political donations. I’ve picked six names, local ones, from a much longer possible list, so I can give them the proper focus.

  Ivor Harris. Mostly seems to hang out with other wealthy, politically connected people. Spends more time in London than Wales. I haven’t been able to connect Harris to any obviously suspicious types: drug suspects, pimps, prostitutes. No obviously odd patterns to his movements.

  Galton Evans. Worth thirty million quid or so. A playboy, if you can still be a playboy at the age of fifty-two. According to the car registrations I’ve collected – easier in his case, as visitors park on his drive – Evans gets visited by plenty of younger women, a couple of whom have minor possession offences. Trivial stuff. Hard to detect any pattern to his movements, because playboys do whatever they want whenever they want to do it.

  And so on. Other names. Trevor Yergin. Huw Allsop. Ben Rossiter. David Marr-Phillips.

  I’ve got a B-list too. People who knew Rattigan fairly well, but whose links weren’t quite as close. I’d be willing to bet that a fair few of my B-list knew at least something about Rattigan’s proclivities, which makes them culpable too. Idris Prothero. Joe Johnson. Owain Owen. A dozen others.

  The latest batch of plates I’ve collected for Harris don’t yield anything new. I’ve got a new plate for Evans, which I’ll check when I get into the office. Check my Google alerts for the names. Check some of the databases that I have access to via the PNC, the ANPR one – automatic number plate recognition – particularly. Some data that seems worth recording, but nothing much. I log it anyway.

  I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly. Just that if there is anything to find, I hope I’ll notice it before anyone else does. Notice, and find a way to use it.

  On the back of the door, there is a small pink dress with a white bow. Next to it, on a shelf, some shiny black shoes, a hair grip, a camera. On the corkboard, held up by four neat red drawing pins, is a photo.

  The photo is of me.

  The dress is my dress.

  In August 1986, I was found by Tom and Kathleen Griffiths sitting peacefully in the back of their open-top Jag. Wearing this dress, those shoes. I was about two and a half – give or take – and nobody knew who I was or where I’d come from.

  Tom and Kathleen, my beloved new mam and dad, adopted me. They asked me every question you would naturally ask a little girl in these circumstances, and for eighteen months I said nothing. I was mute, unspeaking, silent. Then one day, I said, ‘Mam, can I have some more cheese, please?’ and my life began again. My puzzling, fractured life that has no beginning.

  I can’t look at that dress without feeling dizzy. It’s as though I find myself standing on the lip of a very deep well. No idea of how I came to be there, but weak at the knees and looking down.

  My dress. My life.

  Buzz doesn’t know it, but the ops room has two missions, not one. Find Rattigan’s fuck-buddies. Find out who I am.

  No progress on either front, but I can’t keep from looking.

  I’m tired, the ironing still refuses to do itself, and it’s raining. Before I know it, I’m in my car on the Ty-draw Road, heading for the muddy delights of Llanishen.

  I break the speed limit all the way. I’m there in six minutes.

  8

  I’m on garden duty. Out in the fields and woods by the reservoir – where I’d sooner be – a long line of coppers, in wellies and fluorescent jackets, inches forward. Shoulder to shoulder. The pace just five yards a minute, even less than that in the woods.

  Our haul of body parts is growing all the time. Nothing more of Mary Langton, but the male corpse has now yielded a harvest of both hands, both feet, a forearm, a liver, a calf, and a thigh. A Labrador retriever was spotted with the liver in its mouth half a mile away, toward the upper reservoir, the one with water still in it, so the search is now covering an area at least a mile square, and possibly much more than that if the search ends up reaching to the Saint Mellons Road.

  Nor is it just bits of corpse that we’re looking for. The forensics team want everything of possible interest marked. A straggle of fibre, a boot print, a single hair even. The whole area is now tagged with a small forest of bamboo wands, marked with luminous paint. The space-suited SOCOs are travelling from wand to wand, photographing, bagging, collecting.

  Even with all that, the public land is the easy bit. At least the access is easy, even when the ground itself is overgrown and difficult. The gardens that back onto the reservoir make for a far more difficult search. Flower beds, sheds, greenhouses, garages. Complicated spaces that come with complicated owners, fretting, watching, asking, needing.

  I’m assigned to a team with three officers, all uniformed constables, two from Swansea, one from Newport.

  We do five gardens. We’re asked seven times if we want tea, and are told six times to be careful of various tedious-looking plants, which I make a point of standing on when no one’s looking. The rain is intermittent now, but water still flashes from every hard surface, still fills every boot print with a curl of silver.

  I’m finding my temporary colleagues as annoying as the owners, and when we get to the next couple of properties – two newly built houses, with bland lawns and new brickwork – I tell them I’ll make a start on the next one and hop over the fence to do just that.

  Garden eight. A proper old-fashioned plot, framed by a lattice of espaliered fruit trees. Within, a patchwork of vegetable beds. Pegs, string, bean sticks. Marrows going over, the leeks just coming. Runner beans. Some unhappy-looking spinach, defeated by the turning weather. A tiny greenhouse, a wooden compost bin, a shed. Smells of sodden wood, wet leaves and creosote.

  The owner, an old man, comes out to introduce himself. Arthur Price. Soft grey suit and tie. The national service generation. He invites me to check everything, then shoots back into the house, keen to show how little he intends to interfere. ‘Shout if you want me,’ he calls.

  The light is starting to die. A violent orange sunset, tangled in trees. A flock of geese, V-shaped like a squadron of bombers, makes its noisy descent toward the reservoir mud. The helicopter is long gone.

  I do the shed first, because of the fading light. I have a torch with me, but don’t use it. Just push open the door, walk inside, and stand there, letting the space and silence settle.

  I realise I’ve been searching the wrong way. Systematic and disciplined. The police way, not mine. As though corpses had nothing to say to me.

  Balls of twine, two sorts, green and undyed. Forks and spades hanging from nails. A hoe. A lawn mower. Garden chemicals. Bags of compost and sharp sand. Those lovely old-fashioned things like griddles and curved pruning saws. A pair of shears, its wooden handles polished from use.

  And peace. Far too much peace for a tiny end-of-October shed.

  I lean up against the workbench. If I had a joint with me, I’d smoke it now. Melting into the moment, as the geese fly overhead and my colleagues march shoulder-to-shoulder outside.

  In the corner, there’s the bottom half of a plastic barrel, filled with dark liquid. I’d initially thought it was water, but realise it’s not. Do lawn mowers need their oil changed? Presumably they do. The barrel smells of old oil, collecting year after year, down there with the cobwebs and the dead wasps. How many summers have added their oil to that barrel?

  There’s laughter around me now. A shared and silent joke. I’m not exactly laughing, but I am smiling. It’s impossible not to. There’s a kind of joy in the air, vibrating over into mirth. A gift, really.

  I share the joke until the silence grows too strong, then kneel down
by the barrel and thrust both hands in. They come out with Mary Langton’s blonde and dripping head.

  9

  Monday ends a weekend of mayhem. More searching in weather which has turned windy as well as wet, an ever-increasing collection of body parts, and media interest which has turned so intense it seems like Cyncoed is sprouting a television camera at the end of every road.

  Bits of information pop up through the weekend. We, the searchers, only get to hear the news when we stop for a hot drink or gather something from a passing journalist or neighbour.

  The male corpse has been identified: it’s Ali el-Khalifi, a lecturer at the Cardiff School of Engineering.

  A lung has been discovered, bobbing like a clumsy grey balloon three-quarters filled with water on the leeward side of what remains of the larger reservoir.

  In Cyncoed, Mary Langton’s arms, bound together with duct tape and bagged up in polythene, have been found up amongst the loose timber and sheets of fibreboard that Ryan Humphrys, a plumbers’ merchant from Cyncoed, stored up in his garage roof.

  PC Jen Murray has been taken to hospital with possible hypothermia after getting too wet on Sunday morning.

  Watkins publicly shouted at DI Staunton for some bit of scheduling muddle on Sunday afternoon.

  We hear these things, but aren’t sure how much is true, how much only rumour.

  Meantime, the investigation accumulates ever more information, ever less direction. It turns out that Karen Johnston and her husband were both in Wales over the relevant period in 2005. Which would be an interesting fact except that neither has a police record and, so far, we have a whiteboard listing fourteen properties where body parts have been found. There are thirty-eight people living in those properties. Including the extended families of those thirty-eight, there are at least seventy-one people potentially implicated. Adding in close friends or colleagues takes the circle of ‘suspects’ to more than a hundred. And corpse pieces are still being found, so that total is growing all the time. No one we’ve looked at so far has had any meaningful brush with the police or any serious indicator of potential for sexual violence.

  We’ve also checked on anyone living locally who has any kind of record for sexual assault, violence, or child sex offences. There are a few such people, of course, and we’ve started to do the basics, but because the reservoir is a well-used beauty spot and dog-walking area, we need to consider that all of Cyncoed, Llanishen, Lisvane, Llanederyn, and Pontprennau are potentially relevant to the investigation – and, indeed, given that people come from all over Cardiff to the area, there’s really no part of the city we can rule out. We have two corpses and a million suspects.

  Buzz and I are both working, though on different teams, all day Sunday, but we spend the night together at his apartment. Bacon and eggs for dinner. We start off watching a Coen brothers film on the telly, only we end up talking through it and go to the bedroom to make love while George Clooney is still being a funny man in the living room. Afterward, I realise how tired I am, drag myself to the shower, then fall back into bed, while Buzz washes up and tells George Clooney to stand down. If I dream at all, it’s of Arthur Price’s garden and the geese flying overhead.

  On Monday morning, the weekend’s scattered fragments are welded together for us by Rhiannon Watkins. She’s introduced by Detective Superintendent Kirby, but this is Watkins’s show. The incident room is as full as I’ve ever seen it. Exhausted faces and strong coffee. A thick stew of conversation. Watkins has given the operation a properly formal code name – Operation Abacus, for some reason – but the office name is simpler and more memorable. Stirfry. Not a name anyone will use with the boss, but even DCI Jackson has been heard using it.

  There were still people coming in late when Kirby was speaking, but Watkins calls us to order with nothing more than a look. She stands up at the front, no podium, no notes. Low-heeled black shoes, grey suit, zero humour.

  Quickly, no wasted words, she summarises what we have.

  Ali el-Khalifi first. It’s been a week since he was last seen at work, at a seminar for grad students in materials science. Owing to the vagaries of the university timetable, Khalifi’s workload this last week was very light, so although his absence was noted, no one was particularly worried. He travelled fairly extensively anyway and it was assumed he’d simply turn up again when required. When an Arab-looking corpse was reported, the university called us with their concerns. We collected DNA from his office. A match was made.

  ‘From what we know,’ says Watkins, ‘Khalifi has no wife, no partner. We’ve spoken with his departmental head and one or two others, but we need much more. What connection did he have to Mary Langton? Who might have wanted him dead and why?’

  Next we turn to Langton. Needless to say, you can’t find large chunks of human remains in someone’s shed or garage without pulling those people in for questioning. So on Saturday night, Arthur Price had been driven down to Cathays. The interview plan had been to hang tough for an hour or so, not quite accusing the old man, but almost, and seeing if any cracks emerged. In fact, the old man was so open, so soldier-like, flirtatious and charming, that after twenty minutes the two DCs conducting the interview broke for a consultation with their team leaders, and decided to run the whole thing differently. Someone went out to get chips, and the rest of the interview was conducted over mugs of tea and plates of chips with brown sauce, with Price doing his gallant best to assist.

  I know all this only because one of the DCs involved, Susan Konchesky, told me about it all. Watkins says nothing except, ‘Interrogation of Price revealed no grounds for suspicion. His garden is easily accessed from the land to the rear of his property. He reports a minor squabble with Elsie Williams’ – according to Konchesky: she didn’t like him burning garden clippings, he called her an old harpie – ‘but no real contact.’ The Ice Queen doesn’t say it, but we all know by now that Elsie Williams could have picked a quarrel with an empty room, so Price is hardly unique in having had a run-in with her.

  And in any case, as Watkins goes on to say, there seems absolutely no connection between Elsie Williams or Arthur Price and Ryan Humphrys, the plumbers’ merchant. Nor between any of them and Mary Langton.

  ‘Price and Humphrys have supplied us with lists of friends, family, and tradesmen who have had access to their property. We are currently cross-checking those lists against address books and phone records, but so far we haven’t found any significant overlap.’

  Watkins grimaces at the lack of correlations. As though it’s someone’s fault. Then says, ‘Causes of death.’

  There’s laughter at that. It sounds stupid – because people tend not to live long and healthy lives when they’ve been divided into dozens of pieces and distributed around suburban Cardiff – but Watkins is right: we don’t actually know what killed either Langton or Khalifi. Were they cut up whilst still alive? If so, why? If not, then what?

  More questions than answers. The corpses seemed to have been butchered reasonably proficiently, ‘but a garden saw or kitchen knives could have done the job adequately. We’ve got no evidence so far of slashing, hacking, or even signs of struggle.’ So quite likely a clean death, with butchery taking place thereafter.

  Then some complex and uncertain forensic material, which Watkins summarises in her usual take-no-prisoners way.

  The biggest curiosity: the condition of Mary Langton’s corpse.

  The leg found in the freezer was, according to the guesstimates we have so far, in roughly the condition you’d expect from a leg that had been frozen for five years, then left to rot in a wet freezer with the power off. The arms and the head were in worse condition, but probably not five years worse. The fact is that forensic science doesn’t have a whole raft of statistical data on how rapidly a head decomposes when submerged in a barrel of old lawn mower oil. There are various tests currently being done to explore how far the oil has penetrated the bone and soft tissues. Those tests may or may not give us something more definite, but we
’re never likely to get a firm fix on the timing.

  ‘Best estimate,’ says Watkins, ‘the head was in that barrel for one to three years. Maybe more, maybe less.’

  A stone had been left in the mouth to keep the head below the surface. It had fallen out, with a little oily plop, when I lifted the head. In ancient Greece, corpses were buried with a coin in their mouths, so the newly dead had something with which to pay for their passage into the underworld. That falling pebble felt like Mary Langton finally making payment. Her spirit finally exiting this world.

  ‘With the arms, it’s a little clearer,’ Watkins continues. ‘If those arms have been consistently stored at ambient temperature, the extent of the decomposition is consistent with something between two and four years. I’m told that, in the opinion of our forensics team, it is highly unlikely that the arms were stored in Ryan Humphrys’s roof for the full five years.’

  She emphasises those words: highly unlikely. I realise that nearly everyone is writing notes in their notebook. I’m not. I look keen instead.

  Watkins has found a psychologist from somewhere to give a psych briefing. Those things are normally mind-numbingly stupid, amounting to little more than, ‘I think your killer may not be quite right in the head.’ A tedious message wrapped up in half-baked jargon and faux-scientific references. The tarot of modern criminal investigation.

  This time, however, the psychologist – a tired-looking guy from Swansea – has a little more to offer. He notes that the Langton killing is odd for at least three reasons. One, the dismemberment. Two, the very wide distribution of body parts. Three, the apparent efforts made to preserve the body parts (the freezer, the barrel of oil, the airtight wrapping of the arms) may suggest some novel type of disorder or obsession.