This Thing of Darkness (7 page)

9

The next morning. Ten o’clock.

DI Watkins comes down to the exhibit rooms to get me. Knocks, because the entry system doesn’t allow her to walk straight in.

I open the door. She looks around. Says, ‘Christ!’

I look around too, sharing her joy.

‘I made some changes.’

Turned off the overhead lights.

Got rid of Ifor’s horrible waterfall poster. His loathsome pot plant.

Put up the picture of Kirsty Emmett. Also the one of Derek Moon’s mashed skull. And also, because all inquiries are, for me, merely rivers that flow into the one great sea of investigation, other pictures too. A photo of Janet and April Mancini, the corpses that launched my CID career. Of Stacey Edwards, who was kind to Janet and who died the same way. Of Mary Langton: a photo of her head, the one I found, blackly dripping, in a barrel of old motor oil. Of Ali Al-Khalifi, a naughty boy who found himself chopped up and scattered across suburban Cardiff for his sins. Of Mark Mortimer, a man who would have had ethical issues with a roomful of bishops and died a suicide. Of Hayley Morgan, who died of starvation and rat poison, with plaster dust in her gums. Of Saj Kureishi, who died with his hands detached from his wrists, and a look of perplexity on his ash-grey face. Of Nia Lewis. A girl who died, tangled in nettles on a wet field margin, for almost no reason at all, except that I caused a scene and she was unlucky enough to witness it.

My photo gallery, my friends.

Watkins gapes and looks wonderingly at the space where Ifor’s desk used to be.

‘I got rid of it. It was annoying me.’

In its place now, a nest of cushions. Some borrowed from home. Others bought for the purpose. I’ve got two laptops. Also Ifor’s old desktop, which I use mostly as a lampstand. A gizmo duct-taped to the ceiling that looks for the faint trace of a mobile phone signal and amplifies it, so I can use my own phone, even down here in the basement. The gizmo is an unlicensed transmitter and isn’t actually legal, but I can hardly arrest myself and I don’t think anyone else is about to do so. A catering size box of those oaty energy bars, a small kettle and a box of peppermint tea bags completes my domesticities.

The only regular furniture is the bare wooden table on which the HOLMES terminal toadily crouches.

I say, ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’

Watkins chooses not to respond, but I’m genuinely proud of what I’ve accomplished. It’s the first room I’ve ever really furnished. I mean, yes, I own a house and there is stuff in there which I purchased, but I only bought a sofa and put it in my living room because I know that’s what people usually do with sofas and living rooms. Almost every choice I made, I made in order to bring myself closer to average. The whole place is beige and white and magnolia and chrome and so blandly inoffensive it’s like a museum of my opposite.

Ifor’s dungeon now pleases me in almost every detail. I even like the exhibit shelving stretching into darkness. The knowledge that amongst those hairs and drink cans and casts of footprints there might lurk the clue that clinches a prosecution. I like the intimacy of it all. The secrecy and excitement.

I stand there next to Watkins, almost absurdly house-proud. Bobbing up and down, awaiting compliments.

Watkins isn’t the complimentary type, however. Her mouth moves, says nothing. A grim ‘Let’s go,’ is all she manages.

So we do. Down to the Bay. Havannah Street. The sort of address that’s meant to have us drooling with desire and envy.

No drool on me. None on Watkins.

We sign in, take a lift. A reception desk, then a corporate meeting room. Views out over the Bay.

We’ve not been here a minute before Watkins is smouldering with impatience.

‘We could go and kick the door down,’ I say.

‘Fiona, the charge is wasting police time.’

‘So we kick a door down. Waste a bit less.’

She unlooses a scowl at me, but it misses its target and goes through a couple of walls before burying itself in a secretary somewhere. What my eminent superior means is that wasting police time is a summary offence only. Triable in a magistrate’s court, and then only with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP is most unlikely to think that prosecuting basically law-abiding citizens for minor charges is a sensible use of resources. So whatever it is we’re doing here will not lead to a conviction.

That’s her logic, but I think it’s flawed.

‘Fossicking,’ I say. ‘We’re fossicking.’

I’d like to tell her all about fossicking, but I can tell she’s not interested, so I shut up and watch the boats.

A young secretary arrives shortly before Watkins detonates. She leads us down a hallway, taps at a door, steps back. We are admitted into The Presence.

The Presence, aka Galton Evans, is a somewhat portly fifty-two-year-old. Greying beard, round the mouth and chin only. Short, slightly messy hair. Suede jacket, white open-necked shirt, desert boots. It’s a look – the clothes, the hair, the sleekly furnished office – which is trying to say, as loudly and clearly as possible, ‘I’ve got money and I don’t for a second want that to go unnoticed, but I’m cool too. Uninhibited and spontaneous.’

There’s an appraising way in which he runs his eye over me that adds, ‘And sexually available too, by the way.’ The sort of man who might touch his lower lip with his tongue and inadvertently call me ‘babe’.

He spreads his hands and says, ‘Ladies.’

Watkins – mid-fifties and no heterosexual man’s idea of a good night out – says, ‘Mr Evans, you know why we’re here.’

‘The amazing reappearing etchings.’

‘Please tell us the whole story, starting with when you heard the pictures were gone.’

Evans shrugs a little. He’s maintaining the pose, but he’s not a stupid man and he thinks carefully before answering. ‘I got a call from Marianna, my ex-wife, saying the pictures were gone. Those candlesticks too. Mustn’t forget those.’ He glances at me as he says the last bit. Wrinkles his eyes and offers a half-smile.

‘You were still living with Mrs Lockwood?’

‘No. Joint assets and all that, but the divorce hadn’t yet come through.’

‘And the pictures were insured with . . .?’

‘With my own company. We were primarily agricultural – protecting barns and crops and that sort of thing – but we had a majority stake in a small household insurance operation. The pictures were insured through that.’

‘So although Mrs Lockwood recovered money from the insurers, she was effectively recovering money from you?’

Evans’s answer was sort of yes, but essentially no. I don’t quite understand the intricacies, but various reinsurance arrangements moved most of the risk on elsewhere. I don’t know why these things always have to be so complex.

Watkins summarises. ‘OK. So you’ve lost the pictures. Your insurance company has paid up, but most of those costs are borne by third parties. Did you send a claims investigator to the scene?’

Evans laughs. ‘No. This was my wife.’

‘From whom you were separated.’

‘Marianna wouldn’t . . . She
liked
those pictures. She
bought
them. Why contrive a theft for . . .’ He doesn’t finish his sentence, just waves his hands, but his meaning was, ‘for such a small sum of money?’

‘She could have pretended to lose the pictures, claim the money, then rehang the pictures once it had all blown over.’

‘Why? To get at me, you mean? She
did
get at me. Through the divorce courts. You think she’d have been happy to nick a couple of Picassos and leave it at that?’ He likes that line and it relaxes him. He sits further back in his chair and his appraisal of my figure is now very frank. I’m reasonably smart today. Navy trousers, matching jacket, ivory top. Shoes with a bit of a heel. But it’s hardly pulling-wear.

I keep my expression steady, stay professional.

Watkins says, ‘Did you suspect your staff?’

‘Marianna’s staff, not mine. I did wonder, yes. But she said there was a break-in, so . . .’

‘So you just paid up.’

‘Following a police report, of course. The normal procedures.’

‘But no claims investigation.’

‘No.’

‘And then . . .?’

‘Look, I’m an insurance guy. We work with the police, of course. Pride ourselves on good relationships with our friends in law enforcement.’ Smile. ‘But our job is different from yours. We’re here to make money.’

‘Please just tell us what happened.’

‘One of my colleagues in the claims department got a call. The caller said the pictures could be made available at a price. With larger claims, we have a procedure for handling these things. The matter goes to an independent security consultancy. They do whatever they need to do.’

He shrugs. Not an embarrassed one, just a practical one. I’ve not come across this sort of thing in the past, but the resale of high value goods to their original owners does go on. The owners get their goods back, and at much less than their true value. The thieves manage to unload their takings at prices much higher than they could get on the black market proper. These grey-market dealings aren’t exactly lawful, but assuming that they’re handled via vaguely respectable intermediaries, we tend to let any minor irregularities go.

‘So you repurchased the pictures.’

‘Not me. The company.’

‘Your company repurchased the pictures.’

‘A company in which I held a majority share, yes.’

We wander off into technicalities. Basically, having previously paid out £400,000 to Marianna Lockwood, the company now recovered the money from Lockwood, and paid a total of about £100,000 to the security company, some of which was presumably passed on to the thief.

‘You can document all this?’

‘
I
can’t, no. But the company could.’

A company which has since been sold.

We take names, phone numbers. Start a small administrative avalanche, which will hurtle down the slope of this little investigation and land on my desk, a papery explosion.

Watkins’s limited patience is fast expiring. ‘Why were we not informed of all this at the time?’

Evans spreads a pudgy hand on his chest. ‘
Mea culpa
. Not quite
mea maxima culpa
’ – he reminds us that he was in the process of a divorce and that any actions were taken by the company, not him directly – ‘but we should have informed you. That would have been our standard practice. I’ll write to John Gill, the current CEO, to investigate the matter. Find out what went on.’

Watkins stands. A battle tank dressed by Hobbs.

‘In your view, was Mrs Lockwood behind the theft?’

‘No, certainly not.’

‘Any member of her staff?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘And your business interests now? Are you still in insurance?’

A longer answer there, but one that still amounts, essentially, to no. A couple of city-centre property developments. A private investment fund, run by ‘a small group of us, quite active.’

‘That fund. It invests in insurance companies?’

‘Maybe. I mean, some small fraction of its portfolio maybe. But it’s not a particular interest of ours, no.’

Watkins stands and does a thing with her jaw that I’ve seen few people do. She just champs, in an odd, almost rotary motion, rather like a sheep with grass. There’s a kind of squat immobility to her as well, something that doesn’t give a damn about how others see her. I like that in her. I like her directness, her ready aggression.

Because she stands, I do too. Evans follows suit.

Watkins tells Evans that he’ll need to make a statement. That’s my job: to record the statement and get it signed. Watkins calls for a car to take her back to Cathays. The secretary appears again, bringing Watkins’s coat.

I’m standing by the window, for no reason except that I have to stand somewhere. Evans approaches. Stands next to and behind me, his hand warm on my back. He leans in close enough that the swell of his chest presses against my upper arm. With his free hand, he points out the sights.

Sights which, since I’m a Cardiff girl through and through, I know every bit as well as him.

I step backwards, but manage only to tread on his foot. One of those clumsy stumbles, where all my weight comes down on the point of my heel, and the heel itself catches him just where the metatarsals fan out into toes. His boots are soft suede, offering no protection.

He howls in pain.

Watkins whirls round, glaring.

‘Gosh, sorry,’ I say. ‘Did I get your foot?’ I make one of those ouchy expressions, which conveys a ‘Yikes, that must have been painful’ message with just a thin sifting of apology.

The secretary jumps into activity – paper tissues, an offer of skin cream – but before all that, I’m fairly sure I saw something else. One of those fleeting micro-expressions which spoke of something other than upset. She catches my eye and looks away, but with a movement at the corner of her mouth that could be like the first stirrings of a smile.

Watkins watches impassive. Then leaves.

I take Evans’s statement, writing longhand. Eight pages. He initials each sheet and signs the final page. He still nurses his damaged foot and there is blood dotting his sock. The skin cream was not required.

I think:
What we have written is all true, and all lies
. And in the lies lurk corpses.

I stand up to leave. Say, ‘Your investment club.’

‘Fund. Investment fund.’

‘I should probably just take its name, sir. I know DI Watkins will ask.’

He stares at me. Plucks his lower lip. Not with lechery any more, but dislike. He’s angry not because I hurt him, but because I rejected him, his damp advances.

‘Idris Gawr Investments LP,’ he tells me.

‘LP?’

‘Limited Partnership, a Cayman Islands vehicle. Very, very naughty of me, I know, keeping my money away from the taxman, but very, very legal.’

‘It’s a good name,’ I say. ‘Well chosen.’

He stares at me with that look of dislike. There’s a tuft of grey hair under his jaw, a patch which the razor missed. The patch makes him look goaty, old, disreputable.