Pugh played the last sequence again. She could see the man lying motionless on the floor of the hut.
‘But why does Rhys attack him? He’d already scored his shit.’
‘It often happens. Law of the street. The stronger junkie takes the weaker’s stash. Most of it was found on Rhys’s body when it was recovered from the water.’
‘And the twenties?’
‘Back on Rhys’s body.’
Pugh crossed his arms. His smile was there again, warm but subdued, like a hearth seen through thick glass. He was trying to reassure her, but about what she couldn’t imagine.
‘The sad truth is that’s what Rhys had become, I’m afraid. Just another mugger, just another street junkie.’
The final footage showed him heading down the beach, away from the hut. It was clear he’d had his fix now. Rhys was moving slowly, stumbling at times on the pebbles. He looked like a clown in an early silent movie. Then he lay down, on the strip of pale pebbles by the dark water.
The water was covering his shins. He didn’t seem to notice. He just lay there, motionless, his eyes closed. The last frame showed the waves breaking over empty pebbles.
‘It was painless, at least.’ Pugh was getting up, his eyes no longer on the screen. ‘There are many worse ways to go.’
She nodded. Rhys hadn’t looked in any condition to get up. It seemed the obvious explanation of what had happened.
Pugh went into the next room, she could hear an electric kettle begin to boil. She stood up in front of the monitor. Moving fast, she fed a customised memory-cuff into the side of the hard drive. In less than fifty seconds she’d got everything she’d just seen.
She sat down again, as Pugh brought through two City mugs. He passed one to her, his smile gently indulgent, as if at a child who was finally accepting the obvious.
She put the tea down without sipping it.
‘And the autopsy?’
He opened the file on the desk.
‘Just what you’d expect.’
‘In the tox report, no other incapacitants?’
‘No,’ said Pugh, the merest trace of impatience in his voice now. ‘It’s all straightforward enough. High levels of opiates consistent with long-term addiction. No surprises.’
‘The tests are clear on that?’
He glanced at the notes. ‘His urine was significantly positive for opiates, though that’s not the only measure used.’
She remained silent, waited for him to go on.
‘Heroin is metabolised to 6-monoacetylmorphine, then to morphine in the blood. It’s not like alcohol testing. You can’t get a definitive reading from the urine. But the level of morphine there shows he’d been heavily exposed to opiates prior to the test.’
‘You measured sweat levels?’
‘Positive again.’
‘Hair?’
‘Of course. Everything consistent with long-term use. No sudden spike at the end.’
‘Saliva?’
Pugh sighed, barely hiding his impatience now.
‘Positive.’ He looked back down at the notes. ‘The legal limit of plasma morphine from OTCs, codeine and the like is twenty nanos per mil, equivalent to ten nanos per mil in blood. Rhys’s levels were about five hundred nanos per mil. That’s exactly what you’d have expected of a long-term user.’
She waited, hoping there would be a ‘but’ somewhere, a catch that would open the situation to some new, healing light. But she already sensed there wasn’t going to be one coming. This was a case where things were as they seemed.
Pugh was smiling wryly, sympathetically.
‘There’s no mystery here, lovey. It’s obvious what happened to the poor bastard. He’d just fixed a gramme of seventy per cent pure Afghani brown into his groin. He then passed out, as you saw, and drifted out on the tide.’
He switched off the computer, and gathered his papers.
She picked up one of the pictures from the file. It was a shot of Rhys lying there in his black jacket and biker boots. His eye sockets were empty, just blank slits in the pearl-grey skin, but otherwise the body looked perfectly intact.
She didn’t ask about the eyes. She knew the fish ate them, it almost always happened, even if a body had only been under a few minutes. She glanced again at the picture, at the jacket and the boots.
‘His clothes look good quality,’ she said, ‘not charity shop stuff.’
‘They were traced to a new shop on the arcade, they’d had some lifted.’
She knew that was the likely explanation. Street junkies were all expert shoplifters. She guessed Rhys was barred from most shops so would’ve targeted anywhere new opening up.
Pugh closed the file.
‘Could Rhys have known I was back?’ she asked.
‘Doubt it.’
She saw Pugh was looking dismissive but in a kind way. She suspected he’d already guessed what she was thinking, that the place where they found Rhys was about half a mile from her motel. But it was a small town, this meant little in itself. It was the time factor that niggled with her a little. Not that it meant anything sinister had occurred, Rhys could have been intending to see her, just out of curiosity, then OD’d in the meantime. But the likelihood was he hadn’t known she was back. Out on the streets he’d hardly be plugged into the police grapevine.
Pugh turned and took down something from the wall. ‘If he knew you were back, which I doubt, he’d have wanted money off you.’ He was smiling to himself at the thing from the wall. ‘He’d not have wanted to upset you turning up unannounced. He’d have called first, but you never heard from him.’
He glanced at her. He was looking at her kindly but with detachment. She thought she could read that look. He wanted to help with her grief but he didn’t want to encourage her to believe anything insubstantial. He knew that would just cause her more hurt. She looked at him and nodded, as if to signal she accepted there was nothing more to it.
‘It’s common for the bereaved to feel connected to what happened, that they could’ve prevented it, you know that,’ he said. ‘But Rhys was a junkie. Junkies die young, you just have to try to accept it.’ He’d taken down a photograph from the board. It was of a cottage with rolling hills and fields in the background.
‘It’s my holiday place up Monmouth way,’ he said, a hint of pride in his voice.
She took it, without looking at it. ‘Must be nice to have something like that. Not one home, two,’ she said.
The picture had fallen through her fingers onto the floor. She crouched down, reaching for it. She realised she was sobbing, warm fat tears dripping down on the linoleum, staining the picture. She struck the ground, with a sudden simple force. He was trying to stop her, but she wouldn’t let him, she kept hitting the ground, then abruptly she stopped.
She didn’t like to show emotion like this, not in front of someone she hardly knew any more. She stood up quickly, composed, like an actress who’d just finished her scene. He took her arm, guiding her out into the fresh air of the stairwell.
She looked up to see the Chief Constable, Geraint Rix, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Some office clown had hung the poster there, almost life-size. Not Pugh, it wasn’t his style. A joke for the benefit of the coppers trooping through. All Rix’s time, she’d heard, was spent on the media circuit sharpening his image for a safe Liberal seat at the next election. Being head of the Gay Police Association had given him a national platform, but he was the straightest-looking gay man she’d ever seen. Being gay in the force did that, she guessed.
As she turned away from Rix’s blokey grin she felt Pugh press something into her hand. She looked down.
It was a bunch of keys, the ring a miniature silver copy of the cottage in the picture.
‘Stay as long as you like, you need a rest,’ he said gently.
Outside, she sat on her bike after he’d closed the door, not moving, staring out at the trees in the park. Then, after how long she didn’t know, she started the engine and pulled out into the t
raffic.
Catrin wasn’t paranoid. She knew dealers so wacked out they thought they were being followed by bendy-buses, the numbers on the buses sending them personal messages. Now that was paranoid, but working ten years in Drugs, most of it under, still does things to a mind.
Along City Hall Road, keeping a few cars behind her, she saw a dark van move out into the traffic. The same van had been there on her way in, parked up across the square. She noticed things like that. As she swung into North Road, it was still following four cars behind. She doubled back towards the public gardens. The van was keeping to the end of the dimly lit streets, not closing the space between them.
She checked her rearview: it looked like a woman at the wheel. Well-cut jacket, big bouffant hair, almost like a wig. But it wasn’t close enough, it was too dark for her to get the number.
She did a full circle, along Park Place down into City Hall Road. She waited but it didn’t reappear. She’d lost it, no chance to run the tag on the PNC. She waited to see if it would come round from the north. But nothing else passed. Through the trees she saw the lights of the empty offices.
She rode east for half a mile, then pulled over. She took out her phone, logged on to the South Wales Police network, went into Human Resources and filled out a compassionate leave form. She copied it to Occupational Health. Then she switched off her phone. She didn’t want to have a mast signal for the location of what she was about to do