Love Story, With Murders Read Free Page A

anyway.
    Then back to my car. Then up to Whitchurch. Same thing again. The object of my interest: Galton Evans, an agricultural insurance guy, who made a packet of money ten years ago when he sold his
business to a private equity buyer, then decided to devote the rest of his life to becoming a major-league arsehole.
    That’s my theory anyway. Maybe Evans is a nice guy. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never met him.
    I don’t think I’ve got anything useful from the trip, but that’s why you have to do these things as often as you can. Fishing takes patience. One of my fortes.
    I wonder about hitting some of my other targets, but my mood has changed and Cathays is calling me now. I send a text to DS David Brydon, David‘Buzz’ Brydon, my official-as-anything
boyfriend, to let him know where I am and what I’m up to. Truth is, he’ll already have heard about the case and will know that I’ve probably been sucked into it, but I’m
working hard to be Girlfriend of the Year and good girlfriends text their boyfriends to tell them about changes of plan, so that’s what I do too. It’s how we behave on Planet
Normal.

    I zoom back into Cathays, ready for a long night hunting corpses.

 
     
     
     
5
     
     
     
     
    At four in the morning, I get my corpse.
    Mary Jane Langton. Disappeared August 2005. A student at Swansea University, twenty-two years old. Reported missing. Media hoohah. Investigated as well as these things can be. No leads of
consequence. The case never closed. Rhiannon Watkins the officer in charge of that one too.
    I know Langton’sour girl because one of the photos we have of her shows her at some kind of party. Slightly plump, short dress, reasonably good looks, blonde hair. And the shoes. Pink
suede things with round toes and narrow wedge heels. She probably bought them two or three years before her death. Liked them so much, she wore them through the passing fashions. Is wearing them
still, in death and beyond.In a stinking freezer by an empty reservoir.
    I’m the last person in the office. The other people researching went home around midnight. Late enough that even Watkins couldn’t reprimand them for slacking. The ceiling lights are
off, so it’s just me and a desk light and the tiny rectangular LEDs of phones and printers, glimmering like fireflies in the dark.
    I should tell someone aboutLangton, but I flip rapidly through the file first. An MA in English literature. She was working on a dissertation on Dylan Thomas. A good Welsh choice for an English
girl. Parents lived in Bath. Him, a solicitor. Her, a charity worker. Two siblings, a brother and a sister.
    Langton’s files showed nothing strange. A bit of dope found in her student room. An ordinary number of boyfriends.Okay grades as a student. Not brilliant, but good enough. Thinking about
maybe a career in publishing, but nothing definite. Just a girl who liked shoes.
    Except for one thing.
    The press reports we have on file, and the notes from our own investigation, state that Langton supported herself as a student through ‘exotic’ dancing.
    A stupid phrase, that. For one thing, you can hardlyget less exotic than a slightly plump English girl cavorting round a scaffolding pole. For another, it’s not about dancing. It’s
about flesh, men and money. The files includes photos of Langton as a dancer. A tiny spangled mini-skirt in one picture. A sequinned bikini in another. A grin on her face in both, cow-toothed, more
schoolgirlish than sexy.
    Fuck.
    This is the nightmare scenario,the one thing I hoped would never happen in my policing career. Something I stupidly thought wouldn’t ever happen and consequently don’t know how to
handle now that it has.
    Fuck.
    I want to get up, leave, go for a drive, give myself room to think, but I don’t have the time. If I were at home, I’d go for a quick smoke in the garden to clear my head, but
that’s not an option here.
    There probably isn’t a problem, I tell myself. And