Love Story, With Murders Read Online Free PDF

ending in a macabre death. Watkins doesn’t say that lastbit, of course,
but it’s there, present in the room, as real as the rain.
    Finally, we’re through the tears. Mrs Langton says that they’d never really given up, that they’d always hoped, that her daughter’s room is still ready for her
upstairs.
    I ask to see it.
    My request is unexpected. Not what I’m meant to do, either from Watkins’s point of view or the Langtons’. But still. MrsLangton says all right, because that’s easier
than saying no. I go upstairs behind her. Beige carpets. A willow tree beyond the landing window. Then the room. Scrupulously tidy. Student books. A revision chart. A poster with a Dylan Thomas
poem on it.
    I sit on the bed, Mrs Langton on the desk chair.
    ‘I’m really sorry, Mrs Langton –’
    ‘Oh, call me Rosemary, dear.’
    ‘I’m Fiona.Fi. Whichever.’
    ‘Fiona. My niece is Fiona.’
    ‘This is how her room was? This tidy?’
    ‘Oh, she was always tidy.’
    I look in a wardrobe. Her clothes are still there. Not night-clubby, spangly miniskirt things either. Just normal student stuff. If anything, a bit tame, a bit dorky.
    ‘Sorry, is it okay to look around? I always like to get the feel of someone.’
    ‘I know it looksstrange. Keeping it like this. But we’re not . . . I mean, we use it as a spare room too. It’s just nice keeping her things around.’
    There are photos on the desk. No pole-dancing ones. A formal school one. A family shot. One of her on a pony. Another of her playing field hockey, red-faced, in pursuit of an invisible ball.
    We sit for a while. I try imagining myself as Mary Langton, Rosemaryas my mother. I’m about the right age. Hockey and Dylan Thomas. That isn’t me, but it could have been. Some
parallel life.
    ‘You’ll be okay, will you?’ I say.
    ‘You know, it never leaves you, but life has to go on. We have two others, a boy and a girl. Twenty-three and twenty-seven.’
    She wants to show me their rooms, their photos, but I’m not interested.
    I say, ‘Inspector Watkinsis very good, you know. She’s a bit scary, but she’s the best investigator we have.’
    ‘Oh, I’m sure. That’s nice to know, actually. Thank you.’
    We sit a bit longer, then go downstairs.
    Watkins is pissed off with me for going AWOL, but she can’t say anything with the Langtons there. We say goodbye. On our way to the car, I say, ‘She needed a hug. I thought she might
be better off doingthat one-on-one. She had a good cry, then felt better.’
    Watkins looks at me with one of her speciality looks, storm clouds over glaciers. But she doesn’t say anything and we simply drive off in silence.
    Back through the city centre, up the hill, through the rainy countryside, back to the motorway. Only once we’re there, and the driver is doing a hypnotically exact seventy miles an hour,wipers going like a metronome and the indicators blinking on and off each time we change lanes, does she wave her BlackBerry at me.
    ‘They’ve found a hand.’
    ‘Ah!’
    I wait further news.
    ‘A right hand. Three hundred yards from the house. On the banks of the reservoir.’
    I keep waiting. This should be good news. Important. A step forward. But something’s hanging out of sight, somethingwrong.
    I wait for her to tell me more and she does.
    ‘It’s a man’s hand. Dark-skinned. Arab, Mediterranean, something like that. And fresh. It’s completely fresh.’

 
     
     
     
7
     
     
     
     
    Home.
    I didn’t want to come, but Watkins ignored my protests and had the driver drop me at my door on our way back in to Cathays. When we arrived and I had the one door open ready to get out,
she said coldly, ‘If you want to investigate a bedroom, then do so. Don’t lie to me about hugging Rosemary Langton.’
    ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I say,wondering how she knew.
    ‘Does she still have that poster up?’
    ‘The Dylan Thomas one? “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”? That’s still