‘So how come you were still even in contact? You a successful media type, him a street junkie.’
‘Over the years he’d been getting by on scraps I fed him to pay for his habit.’ Catrin was pretending not to look too interested. She was good at that.
‘As he went downhill, he just got the shitty stuff, sitting in dives eavesdropping, going through people’s rubbish. Doorstepping, that kind of thing.’
‘So how did this lead to the Owen Face job?’
‘Six months back I got a call from a documentary maker, he was asking for leads on Owen Face. Like you, I thought it was a waste of time, nut job material.’
‘Why involve Rhys?’
‘This film-maker was spreading a lot of money about. And I mean a lot, all up-front, with big bonuses for any sort of result. So I put everyone I had on the case. It just happened Rhys was the one who came across the photos.’
‘Documentary makers don’t usually have a lot of money to spread around,’ Catrin said.
‘This one’s rich, a multimillionaire, made his money in commercial TV. The film is his personal hobby horse. The Owen Face mystery is something of a life’s obsession for him, apparently.’
Catrin drained her glass, took her bike keys out of her pocket. She’d got it all now, the whole thing had been a set-up from the start.
‘This doesn’t have anything to do with Rhys, does it?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You want me to work for you. Rhys was just a hook. He never even had anything to do with those photos, did he?’
Della picked up a book of matches and struck one, touching it to her menthol.
‘You’re a quality investigator, top two percentile nationally in all your exams. You’d be a real asset to me.’
‘So this whole thing has just been a play for getting me to work for you?’
‘Well, you were hardly going to if I’d asked you nicely.’
Della held up the envelope with the photos in it. She lifted the edge to show a fat wedge of fifties.
‘The cash is a cut of your up-front fee,’ she said softly.
Della was smiling. She took a deep drag on her cigarette, exhaling slowly through her nostrils. ‘Come on, lighten up. The pay is hardly much at your grade, you could do with the extra.’
Della crossed her legs and folded her hands across her lap, her right foot gently swinging, as if marking time. Catrin got up, reached over for her bag.
Della nodded towards the wedge of notes. ‘The client’s willing to splurge, has the funds to do so. He’s an obsessive millionaire, about the best sort of client you could wish for,’ she said. ‘You’d do well out of this, and there’d be plenty more work to follow.’
As Catrin picked up her bag, Della leant over, touched her arm just below the elbow, leaving her fingers there.
‘No hard feelings then, Cat.’ Her voice had softened to a whisper.
‘Del, you’re even lower than I thought.’
‘I’ve done my research, Cat. I know who you are. You want this.’
‘This was never even connected to Rhys.’
‘I still know things about him.’
‘Bullshit. You probably haven’t seen him for years.’
Catrin was backing away, but Della’s arm still gently rested on hers. Catrin could feel the heat from her fingers. As Della leant closer, her jacket rose to reveal a wide tan belt, a glimpse of starved abs. Her face was inches away now. Catrin could see the paleness under her tan and the fine, determined lines around her lips.
‘We can make a night of it, if you want, Cat.’
Della’s bag lay half open now. Above some papers was a baggie containing pills, a couple of glass phials. As Catrin looked up she saw that the pupils of Della’s eyes were dilated, the whites bloodshot and dark and there was something lonely and desolate there.
Catrin gently drew herself back, then Della glanced down at the face of her man’s watch, looked up and smiled demurely. She moved out from behind the table and, picking up her bag, began to walk towards the door. Catrin remained seated at the table.
‘You’ve left your pictures behind,’ she said.
Della turned to face her again, but didn’t pick them up. She dropped a business card on the table. Her company phone numbers were in steelpoint lettering in the centre, but no address. She walked back through the bar, and out to a black Range Rover on the drive.
Catrin heard the wheels spinning on the damp gravel as it reversed. The car barely slowed as it moved out of the blind turning and down the lane. She went though the bar to the door. The rain was heavier, the light fading. The lamp in the pub’s entrance behind her bled yellow onto the ground as she wrapped her arms around herself against the cold.
She looked at her watch. Nearly four o’clock. In less than an hour it would be dark again.
4
They are at the door.
The two men again.
The taller is kneeling over her, and from the cupboard in the corner where they leave the school books, he takes out her mask again.
She cannot move her hands to feel it. He pulls the straps to. In the close air behind her, she hears the swish of their clothes falling to the ground, a muted tinkle like distant wind chimes.
Over their eyes are mirrors. She tries to close her eyes, but she cannot.
She sees herself in their painted arms. Her bound, parted body painted like theirs. She tries to turn her head away, but she cannot.
All her limbs are aching. They feel hot with fever. Over them there’s a stale, clammy sweat.
It’s all she can smell, her fear quickening around her now.
She prays it will be the same as last time, no worse than that. She will not cry out. She does not want to give them that pleasure. She hears the squelching of the oil in their palms, she feels the rub of it between her limbs as she becomes all surface to their touch.
Catrin woke, shivering. It was the old dream again. The one she’d had ever since Rhys had found her in the woods all those years ago. She sat up and turned on the light.
She shook out two diazepam, crunched them in her teeth so the effect came on quicker. She lit a cigarette, stared at the carpet for what seemed an age.
This much she knew. When she was fifteen years old she had been walking home from the city centre, half-six on an ordinary autumn evening. As she passed through the car park, next to the football pitches on Llandaff Fields, a car had pulled up next to her. And then nothing. Nothing till four days later when she woke up in a hospital bed in Cardiff, her mother holding her hand and Rhys, a young handsome, clean Rhys, sitting there at the end of her bed, the first time she’d ever set eyes on him.
Over the next few days she found out a little more. Rhys, a detective searching for a drug lab way out in West Wales, had found her wandering in the woods, hypothermic, heavily drugged. She was wearing a skirt she’d never seen before and a man’s T-shirt. No underwear. She had been recently bathed. Her hair, and this had really terrified her, had been cut short and freshly washed. She had absolutely no memory of any of it. As to what she had been drugged with, the police lab said they had simply never seen anything like it before.
At first they believed she had been raped. She’d been examined while still unconscious, and there was no obvious sign of sexual assault. And that was it. No arrests were ever made, no suspects identified, even. Who had abducted her and why was an utter mystery. The police had given up after a few weeks, all except Rhys. Some of his colleagues, she suspected, believed the whole thing was a put-on, that she’d run off to West Wales with a boyfriend and her mother’s stash and freaked out and come up with this story about being abducted. She wished it was true. The not knowing had haunted her for years.
She suspected that Rhys knew more than he ever told her, that he was trying to protect her, but she never got any more out of him. In those weeks after she left hospital, she stayed alone in her room at home all day and night. Lying on her back, barely moving, staring at the ceiling. This was her only view. It was all she had trusted herself to see, all she felt safe looking at then.
She covered all the mirrors in the room. She couldn’t bear looking at herself, she was frightened of herself, of what she might remember. She kept the curtains closed and the lights on, not stirring from her bed unless she had to. She kept her door locked from the inside. She’d listen to her mam come up the stairs, leave the food out for her, wait till she was gone, and then open the door to get it.
The only sound that reached her was Rhys calling after his shifts, talking to her mam. She strained to hear his voice. Something in it soothed her, made her want to follow him, gave her a small glimpse of peace. She began to call him, just listening to the calm lilt in his voice, not hearing his words. Always in the background there was Hope Sandoval on the stereo. ‘Fade into You’. That’s who he said she reminded him of. She didn’t believe it but it was the first time a man had wanted to see the good in her.
Catrin carried on calling him for months, always her calling him. She called at the same time every three days; that way she knew if he wanted to avoid her he could. When she listened, his voice seemed to pass through her skin, massaging away her hurt. After eleven months of these calls she went round to his flat in that old block by the Arms Park and told him she was his. He had rescued her, given her life back, and now she was his. How afraid she’d been that he wouldn’t want her.
She stood in the corner, too shy to meet his eyes. She unhooked her dress and let it fall to the floor. ‘Do what you want with me,’ she’d said. And he led her to the bed, spread her legs, knelt in front of her until she became half senseless with the pleasure. No man had ever done that to her before.
After that, he gave her a key. She came and waited for him in his flat. Sometimes for hours and hours, and he wouldn’t come. He worked irregular shifts. Often it would be days before she saw him, before she’d feel whole again. Then that shrill rush through her body, as she watched him park. Inside her like a chemical. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Like looking down from the high battlements of the castle, her throat dry, that sudden emptiness in her stomach and a small voice inside goading her to jump.
It was the same feeling she had in the dojo she went to in the early mornings: that moment before she began to fight. It was judo she learnt first, then karate, then tae kwon do and aikido. Behind the tinted glass Rhys watched her sometimes. He didn’t think she could see him.
God, he’d been beautiful then, denim jacket slung over his shoulder, black Fred Perry tucked into his loose, frayed jeans. He wasn’t like any copper she’d ever seen before. Snake hips, flat stomach, and head always bowed. The whole street could have been on fire, and he didn’t look as if he would have noticed. That’s how lost in his own world he seemed, and she’d loved him for that.
When she opened the door for him, he looked round at the bare hall slowly, as if getting his bearings again. Then would come the sudden, unexpected smile, that boyish dreamer’s light in his eyes as he saw her face. How she’d loved him then. He could have done anything he’d wanted with her, she’d have let him, and sometimes he had, and she’d liked it. Through those first heady years her mind had held only one thought, that she’d never let anything take this away from her.
He was her first real love. He was the one that she’d thought would last. And when it hadn’t, all the rest were just consolations and ways of forgetting herself.
Catrin moved away from the memories to a new, anonymous life in London. She buried herself in her work. Any overtime, she always took it. Any long after-hours assignments, she always volunteered. Anything not to be alone, not to be alone with her thoughts of what might have been. She found herself drawn to working under cover. It was a chance not to be that self that was half of something that could never be whole again.
The work they gave her seemed routine at first. She acted as a ‘draw’, a buyer planted in clubs to lure in local dealers. And with her tight leathers and tatts, she looked the part. The dealers couldn’t resist her. Her MO was always textbook: once she’d scored a few times from one dealer, gained his trust, she’d float a bigger deal, get an in with his supplier. Then repeat the pattern, work her way up the supply chain to the bigger fish, the traffickers, the importers. Using surveillance work, she collected the evidence, built the case for the prosecutors.
The dealers communicated using public wireless connections, accounts with service providers in Russia and China, companies that wouldn’t share information in a hurry. Even if they were only setting up a meet in the next street. To track them she had to hack the providers’ firewalls, get in through the back doors of their security systems. She took the courses at Hendon, learnt how to play the RIPA laws. Like the Met’s data officers, like the other listeners and watchers on the force. Without really meaning to she’d learnt to be a white hat, an unauthorised reader of other people’s mail in the public interest.
After the courses she was assigned to the BDSM scene, fetish bars, bondage clubs. It was a sector no one else wanted, not even the officers who dabbled in it. She heard rumours of spiking and coercion on the scene, pain inflicted without consent, and tried to seek out their origin. She didn’t care about the gossip she attracted, she thought only of those she could save. As the months passed she noticed that her brief from her DI was becoming increasingly specific. Normally an under got a fix on anything passing through the clubs – Es, meth, ice, whatever was in circulation. But she was briefed only to target date-rape drugs: Rohypnol, Mandies, incapacitants – and to focus only on the end users. It didn’t take her long to understand why.
Her work was part of something much bigger, an op with far higher stakes than netting small-time drug rings. She thought her work would take her away from Rhys. But it didn’t. It led her right back to him.