‘Find the killer of my daughter.’ Beauleigh Williams’ breath came in more pants than a filly at the Derby. ‘Where you gonna start?’
‘Motive,’ I replied. ‘Did she have any enemies?’
‘She had a boyfriend. He was my enemy. The rat wasn’t good
enough for her. He’s not good enough for a female rodent, come to that.’
The boyfriend lived in a dive on the Lower East. A dive on the East side of Swansea is about as low as you can get. It’s pretty much in the bay. I checked him out. He had a twitch like a misfiring engine. The nervous kind. What was on his mind?
‘I don’t know nothing,’ he said. ‘And if I did, I wouldn’t tell ya.’
The twitch had turned into a shake, and was in danger of becoming a dance.
‘Why doesn’t her father like you?’ I asked.
‘Guy’s oedipal,’ came the reply. Or did he say, ‘edible’? I asked him the question again. ‘Search me.’
So I did. Jacket to shoes. Nothing. I had to get the sap talking.
‘You’re a self-employed gardener, I believe?’
‘Spare me the jokes about raking in the money, or digging for gold.’
‘Well, were you dating Donna Williams for her father’s millions?’
‘I was dating her because she was a nice babe. It was never gonna work out. She’s got brains.’
‘And you haven’t?’
‘When we talked about music or marigolds, we clicked. When she got onto Bertrand Russell’s mathematical set paradox, I felt like a worm brought to the surface when a gardener turns over the sod. Lost and confused. The babe was doing a doctorate in maths. I didn’t even get a GCSE in the subject, man.’
I went left field, mainly because I wasn’t in the right field with this dimwit.
‘How’d she get on with her supervisor at the university?’
‘Ynysforgan Morgan? She hated the creep. Kept trying it on with her. Things were so bad, she wanted to pack in her studies. But she didn’t want to let her father down. She wasn’t a happy bunny.’
Next morning I was in Morgan’s study. His hair had more grease than a gross of ball-bearings. His jacket and trousers would have fled at the sight of an iron. His face wasn’t worn, it was condemned.
‘Lloyd Morgan,’ I said. ‘Do you know the sum of the letters in your names, A being 1, B being 2, etc?’ He stared blankly. ‘Lloyd makes 68, Morgan the same’.
‘What are you imputing?’
‘Her PhD was an algebraic formula, proving that the number 68 didn’t exist. I believe you took that personally. Felt existentially threatened.’
‘You know nothing about numbers!’
‘I know your car registration is LM68Y. Those your car keys?’
I went down to the car park, opened up the boot. She was still breathing. A crime of mathematical jealousy had been stopped. Morgan was looking at six years. Maybe eight.
