Free Love Story, With Murders by Harry Bingham Page A

everything, and we stopped coming. Still saw Em at familyevents and the like, but far less than we used to. No big bust-up or anything like
that. Just life moving on.
    ‘I saw the light on,’ I explain for the second time.
    ‘Oh, that’s all right, dear. I don’t sleep as much as I used to.’
    ‘You know – well, you know that I’m a detective now.’
    Stupid question. Of course he does. Emrys and my dad go way back. Right to the beginning. You couldn’thave that kind of background and not know when someone in your circle joined the
CID.
    Emrys waits.
    I don’t know quite why I’m here, except that it seems to make sense.
    ‘There was this girl, Mary Langton. You’ll have heard about her. The girl whose body keeps popping up all over Cyncoed.’
    Emrys nods, but says nothing.
    ‘She was a lap dancer. Pole dancer. According to our records,police records, she worked for the other two clubs in Cardiff, but never for Dad. Never for the Unicorn.’ The Unicorn:
strictly speaking the Virgin & Unicorn, but I never call it that. Dad’s first club. Source of his first fortune, or his first legitimate one anyway.
    ‘I don’t know,’ murmured Emrys. ‘We must have checked at the time, but . . .’
    ‘Oh, I’m sure she was never on the payrollor we’d have known about it. But presumably these girls dance for cash. If you’d needed emergency cover one night and you found
a girl willing to do it for tips alone, someone might have agreed to it. I’m not saying that’s how you normally operate, or would want to operate, just that if the need arose, the
manager might have made his own decision.’
    There’s no way Dad would ever admit anythingto a police officer and nor would Emrys, because he’s stamped from the same mould, cut from the same cloth, hacked from the same block.
Still, he tilts his head in a way that doesn’t outright deny what I just said.
    ‘And maybe if some of those managers were asked again about Langton, on the strict understanding that there’d be no comeback, they might remember things differently from the firsttime around. Especially if, let’s say, it wasn’t me asking, if there wasn’t any police interest at all, if it was just you asking people what they could remember.’
    Emrys doesn’t say anything to that at all, but nor is he moving me onto neutral conversational territory.
    ‘And then there’s this other guy, Ali el-Khalifi. His is the other body that’s keeping us busy. My colleagues are verykeen to connect him to Mary Langton. Trying to see if he
knew her when she was still alive. And let’s just say that Mary Langton did dance a few nights at Dad’s club. And let’s just say that you’ve got credit card receipts or CCTV
footage that places Khalifi in the club on one of those nights – well, wouldn’t that be interesting?’
    Emrys has gone very still and now, as I finish, he shakeshimself alert.
    ‘No CCTV,’ he says. ‘We wouldn’t have that. Not that far back.’
    ‘I haven’t come here. I haven’t asked you anything. I won’t push for any answer at all. I don’t need to know anything. Just if certain things turned out to be true,
they might be interesting.’
    Emrys nods. Doesn’t say yes. Doesn’t say no. Doesn’t acknowledge anything I’ve said. Which is fine. I let theconversation shift off to other places. It’s nice
being with Emrys. I always liked him.
    Then he yawns or I do, and he gets up, back to the living room to readjust the heating.
    I follow.
    This living room. Unchanged, pretty much. The Cluedo set is still there. Also Monopoly. A photo of Emrys and my dad, both looking younger, Emrys in a black shirt with the top three buttons
undoneand a spark of gold from a large signet ring. He always had this little bit of flash to him, a whiff of the gangster. He and Dad are standing proudly in front of that open-top Jag. The one
where I was found.
    I pick up the photo and stare at it closely. Because it’s the same kind of angle,