Читать книгу Dead People - Ewart Hutton - Страница 7

The big, dark Ford saloon, with new mud on the polished bodywork, was parked at the construction site when I got back. Jack Galbraith was here. I got out of my car, checked my reflection in the window for rectifiable flaws, prepared my psyche for tension, and started off up the hill to the small canvas pavilion that they had erected over the grave site.

‘Glyn …’

DCI Bryn Jones was leaning out of the door of one of the site huts, beckoning me over. I forgot to take a deep breath of good clean air before I entered. They were both heavy smokers. They had already created the effect of a full-blown chip-pan fire.

‘Preening yourself, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith asked with a sardonic grin. I glanced out the window. My car was in full view. He looked pointedly at his watch. ‘Is this dereliction of duty?’

‘I was here earlier, sir. I left the experts to it. I’ve been out getting the feel of the locality.’

He picked up a sheet of paper and flapped it in front of me. It had the effect of diverting the smoke from both their cigarettes into my face. ‘Inspector Morgan has been bitching about you.’

‘Inspector Morgan doesn’t think I should be here, sir.’

‘Inspector Morgan doesn’t like the competition? Wants all the prettiest sheep for himself, does he?’

I tried not to smile. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir.’

He chuckled, pleased with himself, screwed the paper into a ball and aimed it in the general direction of a waste-paper basket, not caring where it landed. ‘Sit yourself down, Capaldi.’

Bryn had already taken the seat next to him, forcing me to sit opposite them, like the suspect under interrogation. They had an open laptop in front of them, connected to the SOCO camera.

They were both big men, but the spread of their bodies moved in different directions. Bryn Jones dark, squat and powerful, Jack Galbraith taller, his face more angular, the big head of swept-back hair betraying his underlying vanity.

‘Have the forensics people been able to tell us anything more, sir?’ I asked Bryn.

‘They think its male, and they think it’s middle-aged, and they’re not even going to attempt to tell us how long it’s been up here until they get it back to the lab.’

I nodded, keeping my pleasure at Evie Salmon’s continued existence to myself. I made a mental note to call her parents to confirm it for them.

‘And we’re the poor bastards who have to attempt to identify him,’ Jack Galbraith stated cheerfully.

‘The other hand was missing?’ I asked.

Bryn nodded. ‘And no trace or residue of any clothing. Every possible identifier has been removed. Only that plastic sheeting, which, after all this time, is next to useless.’

‘But at least we can discount suicide.’ Jack Galbraith chuckled facetiously.

‘Ritual killing?’ I offered.

Jack Galbraith snorted and shook his head contemptuously. ‘It’s a fucking hit. This place is just a dumping ground.’

I wasn’t quite sure whether he was referring to the actual grave or the entire locality he had assigned to me. ‘Will you be setting up an incident room, sir?’

Jack Galbraith grinned at Bryn. ‘I think Capaldi’s looking for some action.’

‘It’s going to be desktop to start with,’ Bryn explained. ‘Marry up all the stuff SOCO and forensics can give us and try to come up with an identity. Work the missing-persons route at the same time.’

‘You look crestfallen, Capaldi,’ Jack Galbraith commented.

‘It’s a crime scene, sir.’

Bryn leaned forward, but kept his tone sympathetic. ‘I know, but there’s nothing left here to investigate. Too much time has elapsed and the site has been devastated.’ He shrugged. ‘A place like this, if there were locals unaccounted for, we’d have known about it long ago.’

‘It’s a hit, Capaldi. As I’ve already said, this is just the rubbish dump.’ Jack Galbraith made a pistol using his thumb and forefinger and pointed it at me. ‘Dope? Gang related? Someone got caught fucking the wrong man’s wife? Who knows? I just know there’s nothing here.’ He clicked his thumb, mimicking a firing pin striking. ‘Kerpow … It’s a vanished legend. All those years ago someone drove out of somewhere, dumped a body in the boondocks, and then drove back to that place where things happen. The only thing that happens here is the fucking weather.’

‘You put me here, sir.’

He shot a smile at Bryn. ‘Is this a complaint?’ he asked me.

‘You put me here for this eventuality. To be in place when bad things happened.’ He was wrong. The tingle was telling me that there was a local connection here.

He gave me a wise, mock-patient look. ‘But I’ve just explained, the bad things didn’t happen here.’ He scrunched his eyes shut and took in a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ he said, resigned to it, ‘play my devil’s advocate. And don’t sir me every time. It gets tedious.’

I took in my own deep breath and almost choked on the smoke. ‘Why here?’

‘It’s remote, hard to get to,’ he came back at me quickly. ‘A fucking good place to hide a body. Until the Save the Planet Brigade decide to construct a wind farm.’

‘As you said, it’s hard to get to.’

‘Meaning?’

‘You would have to know it. And we’re talking about what was only a rough hill track in those days. I can’t see a hard man from Salford or wherever driving up it with a naked, dismembered corpse in the boot, just in the hope that he might arrive at somewhere convenient to dispose of a body. And he would have needed to be in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. And why travel so far out of the place where things happen?’

He glanced at Bryn. ‘Underline your point,’ he commanded.

‘They knew about this location. They had researched this. Or they were living here.’

‘Which makes them still around, does it?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

He looked over at Bryn again, who shrugged. He thought hard for a moment. ‘I suppose it works on a PR level. We’re seen to be doing something tangible. Okay, Capaldi, go and ask your questions. But I still say you’re wrong.’ He grinned. ‘And don’t step too hard on Inspector Morgan’s toes,’ he added.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said gratefully. Mentally I had already hit the ground running.

PRIVATE – GOLDMINE – KEEP OUT

The sign had been daubed on the sheet-metal gate with red paint that had dripped and run below the letters like fake theatrical blood. It was written in English only, which seemed to me to be a bit imperialistic. It was also a bit daft if you valued your security and privacy, to advertise the fact that you were sitting on top of a goldmine. Literally.

Mrs Jones at Cogfryn had intrigued me. Nice Welsh farmers’ wives don’t generally finger their neighbours as potential killers. So what had these two done that had placed them beyond the pale?

Gerald Evans was in another valley, so I decided to start with Bruno Gilbert, the Gold Mine Man. And it was a goldmine. Deep boyhood mythologies kicking in from a time of innocence, before big holes in the ground, putatively awash with treasure, had accumulated sexual baggage.

I had remembered more of what Sandra Williams had told me about him that day in Dinas. He was a recluse. No one was quite sure whether he had been a schoolteacher or a civil servant, or whether he had taken early retirement or suffered a breakdown. He came into town for his shopping, scurried about with his head down, and ordered his goods by pointing.

He may have been pretty inept socially, but he had managed to construct a solid pair of gates. Which, despite repeated hammering and calling out, he wasn’t opening. Perhaps he just couldn’t hear me. Maybe he was mining a vein, or crushing ore, doing whatever it was that made the place qualify as a goldmine in his book.

I was conscious of time passing. Jack Galbraith could change his mind and haul me off this at any moment.

I studied the gate again. Three obstacles to progress: the gate, the barbed wire on top of it and the fact that I hadn’t been invited.

I got over the height issue by standing on the roof of the car. The coiled barbed wire on top was old, rusting and laced with cobwebs that had trapped leaves and thistledown. One good push would send it down like an uncoiling slinky.

On the other side of the gate, the track, flanked by a pair of rusted Morris 1000 Travellers, turned round a sharp bend out of sight. The hidden side of a sharp bend was always tantalizing.

This was where an invitation would have been useful. Technically what I was contemplating was illegal entry seasoned with criminal damage. But fuck it, I reasoned, a man who wasn’t even capable of asking a shopkeeper for his favourite cheese was hardly likely to have me dragged up in front of the High Sheriff.

I dislodged the barbed wire and jumped down, landing heavily, my heels kicking up two little geysers of dust. Everything about this side of the gate – the air, the vegetation – felt more desiccated. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bird sporting fluff instead of feathers.

I called out Gilbert’s name again. No reply. No sounds of any activity. I walked round the bend in the track. Ahead of me, across a yard of massed junk, was a green timber shack, with a rusted corrugated-iron roof, which was in the process of deconstructing itself. The paint was peeling down to rotting boards, the roof was slumping, and a couple of the windows were falling out.

‘Go away!’

The voice made me jump. I hadn’t seen him. I turned to find him squatting in a niche in a bramble cluster that I discovered later had overwhelmed an old tractor. He had his head down and his fingers pressed to the sides of his brow.

‘Mr Gilbert?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

I bent my knees to lower myself to his level, my warrant card out. ‘Mr Gilbert, my name is Glyn Capaldi, I’m a police officer, I’d like to ask you some questions.’

He shook his head again.

He was an old man. Dressed in his usual shorts and a faded khaki shirt, both tattered, his arms and legs deeply tanned, but knucklebone thin. I couldn’t see his face, but his hair was grey and closely cropped in irregular patches as if it was growing out after a scalp infection. Then I realized that it was probably because he cut it himself, the angle of the mirror, and the way he had to crank the scissors, distorting things.

By not looking at me he was holding on to the pretence that I wasn’t really there.

I stood up briskly. ‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll have a look around. A setup like this must be fascinating,’ I declared chirpily.

‘No!’ He leaped up with almost alacrity. A definite crackle. A creaky old elf unfurling. His eyes were blue and scared. His face was lean and fissured, with a sparse dirty-white billy-goat beard accentuating the length of his chin. His expression was a definition of anguish. ‘You can’t! No one’s allowed in here.’

I took a couple of steps back to reassure him. ‘It’s all right, Mr Gilbert. I promise, I’ll stay back here, I won’t go any farther. But I do need to talk to you.’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘I know, it’s just a routine enquiry, I’m talking to everyone in the valley.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t have anything to do with the rest of the valley. I can’t tell you anything.’

‘Have you heard that we’ve discovered a body at the site of the new wind farm?’ I watched him carefully.

‘I don’t care. That has got nothing to do with me.’

He wasn’t even curious. As far as he was concerned it was news from a dead planet. He just wanted to be left alone to live the life internal that he had constructed around his tumbledown Shangri-La.

He looked at me defiantly. ‘She sent you here, didn’t she?’

‘She?’

He nodded in the direction of Cogfryn. ‘The one at the farm.’

‘Why would she do that?’

A smile almost broke through. ‘I used to have to chase her children off my land. They came trespassing, poking their noses into things.’

‘That must have been a long time ago.’

He nodded sagely. ‘It was, but none of them have ever forgotten.’

I thought about it as I drove back. Okay, no butchered and trimmed cadavers strung up on meat hooks, but the visit had been useful in a couple of respects. Now, having met him and seen his reaction, I was fairly certain that Bruno Gilbert had had nothing to do with the body we had found. And I now knew that Mrs Jones’s finking had been personal.

So what, I was now even more interested to know, was the grudge that she held against Gerald Evans, a man who was not even a neighbour?

I was twitching to brace Gerald Evans, but had to spend the next day frustratingly back up at the construction site to babysit the SOCO team, and oversee the removal of the body, which was now ready to be trucked back to the lab. I did manage to call the Salmons to give them the good news.

When I eventually got to The Fleece that evening I found that David Williams was no longer a happy man. His bounty had decamped. The wind-farm construction workers had been discharged and sent home or relocated until they were required again.

‘How long is this going to take your people to sort out?’ he grumbled as he pulled my beer.

‘No idea,’ I replied, slightly irked that I didn’t seem to be included among the people who were capable of sorting it out. I waved reflexively to the group of regulars at the far end of the bar.

Seeing them gave me an idea. ‘Who among that lot would know about the wind-farm site?’ I asked David.

He looked at them appraisingly. ‘Blackie Collins might. He used to work at Pentre Isaf. It’s way over on the other side of the hill, though.’

I had heard the story. Blackie had worked man and boy as a labourer and shepherd for the Haymer family at Pentre Isaf farm. The sons who had inherited the place had decided that life had to be about more than sheep ticks, deflated livestock prices and splashing around in organophosphate dips, and had sold it off as a riding school. Not surprisingly the new owners hadn’t seen Blackie as an asset that would work in harmony with prepubescent girls fixated on horses. So Blackie was now living with his sister in Dinas.

I walked down to the far end of the bar. ‘Blackie, can I buy you a beer? Can I buy all you boys a beer?’ I offered expansively. There were only three of them, so it wasn’t going to break the bank.

They looked startled. I had obviously crossed a line. It was okay to throw a greeting over, but intruding into home space was something different.

I moved Blackie off to the side. He had lank grey hair, watery brown eyes, and hadn’t shaved for days. There was a light brown staining on the whiskers at the corners of his mouth. He didn’t smoke, so I hoped that it was only tea.

He looked at me mutely. He knew I was a cop. He was wondering if a new and incomprehensible change in the rules of life had caught up with him.

‘You’ve heard about the body that was found over at the place where they’re building the new wind farm?’

He nodded cagily. ‘Cwm Cesty Nant. But I don’t know anything about a body.’ It came out as a croaked whisper.

‘I know you don’t. I just want the benefit of your local knowledge.’

He digested that warily. ‘We were only over there when we were taking the sheep off the hill.’

‘There was nothing unusual about that place? Nothing that makes it stick in your mind? Nothing to do with it that you’ve ever heard people talking about?’

He shook his head. He was staring at me, his eyes round, more confident now that I hadn’t arrested him, or turned him into a frog. ‘You don’t know who it is?’ he asked tremulously.

‘It would have been a while ago. You don’t remember hearing anything about anyone disappearing?’

‘I wouldn’t be the person to ask.’

‘Who would?’

He looked around furtively. His voice dropped. ‘Gerald Evans.’

I smiled inwardly. It was always a good feeling to sense the spheres sliding into conjunction. A couple of them anyway. ‘What makes you mention him?’

He leaned forward. ‘He used to steal our ewes,’ he whispered, ‘take them off the hill and change the marks to his own.’

A rustler? Is that why the Joneses at Cogfryn had it in for him?

‘And he’s filthy,’ he added quickly, picking up on the downshift in my interest.

‘Can you explain what you mean by filthy?’

‘There was a bit of snow on the ground a few years back. The postman couldn’t get up to Pentre Fawr, so he left a parcel for him with us. This was before he got married. From Holland, it said on the front. I don’t know how it managed to get opened, but …’ He shook his head. ‘It was terrible stuff, Sergeant. And poor Mrs Haymer seeing it and all.’

I suppressed my smile. Dutch pornography. Nosiness rewarded. I had an image of the huddled bunch of them, sheepdogs included, all agog and aghast, the world of dildos, butt plugs and bondage gear having just been revealed to them.

He took a deep breath. ‘But that’s not the worst.’

‘Go on,’ I prompted

‘He shot my dog.’

I pulled an appropriate face, grunted sympathetic noises and retreated to my end of the bar. ‘What do you know about Gerald Evans from Pentre Fawr?’ I asked David as I climbed onto a stool.

‘I’ve barred him from here.’

I looked at him with surprise. ‘Why?’

‘He shot Blackie’s dog.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve got to show solidarity with my regulars.’

I was almost taken in. ‘Come on, David,’ I protested, ‘that’s too altruistic for you.’

‘The bastard cheated me once. He sold me a Land Rover that had sawdust in the sump to stop it knocking.’

‘Couldn’t you take it back?’

‘I couldn’t afford the stress of the ensuing vendetta.’

‘He’s like that?’

‘He’s a mean fucker, Glyn, amoral and totally ruthless.’

‘Sergeant …’

We both looked round. Jeff Talbot was standing in the archway between the two bars with Tessa MacLean.

How long had they been in here? An irrational surge of social panic gripped me. Had they seen me hunkered over there with Blackie? Thinking that he was my buddy? Maybe even my only buddy?

Jeff held up his mobile phone. He looked wearily grim. ‘Sergeant, I don’t know whether this is going to involve you, but I’ve just had a call from Donnie at the site. He’s scared someone off who was messing around with our machinery.’

‘Any damage?’ I asked.

‘He’s still checking, but it looks like they’ve managed to screw-up the hydraulics on one of the diggers.’

I thought quickly. It could be saboteurs. The wind-farm protestors that Mrs Jones had mentioned. Or it could be something richer. I pushed my beer away virtually untouched. ‘I’ll follow you up there.’

I caught David smiling at me as I got into my coat. ‘My hero,’ he pouted mockingly.

I shot him the finger, and followed Jeff and Tessa to the door. Then I realized why them thinking that I might be associated with Blackie had stung so much. I was jealous. And it was only partially sexual. The rest of it was to do with the company they had found with one another. They were outsiders in Dinas, they had bonded together to share a common experience. But I was an outsider here too, and it rankled that they hadn’t thought to include me in the party.

They hadn’t recognized my kindred spark. It was more than depressing, it was a shock to my system. Was I now beginning to be mistaken for a local in the eyes of the outside world?

It was going to be a cold night. The light cloud cover was fragmenting, there was already a light dusting of stars, Venus low and bright in the west, and the fluorescent promise, behind a far ridge, of a rising moon.

The construction site was lit up. As we drove closer I saw that it was one of the company pickups, its headlights full-on, illuminating a parked row of assorted earth-moving machinery.

I parked behind Jeff. Tessa didn’t get out. I followed Jeff to the pickup. Donnie Raikes got out as we approached.

‘What happened?’ Jeff asked.

‘Someone’s had a go at one of the diggers.’ Donnie led us towards the line of machinery.

‘What kind of a go?’ I asked.

‘Watch your feet there,’ Donnie said, taking my arm as we stopped beside a mechanical digger, nodding at the ground. A thick, viscous liquid that, in the dark, looked like treacle, was pooling in a rut in the mud. ‘Hydraulic fluid. Someone’s cut the hoses,’ he explained.

Jeff bent down to inspect the damage.

‘Did you see anyone?’ I asked Donnie.

‘I heard him, that’s what brought me out of the hut. I think he must have accidentally banged the side of the machine. By the time I was outside he was storming off down the gully.’

‘Him?’ I asked.

He smiled indulgently. ‘It’s usually blokes.’

‘You’ve checked the rest of the plant?’ Jeff asked.

‘Yes. It looked like he was starting with this one, but got careless.’

‘Has it happened before?’ I asked them.

‘Not here,’ Jeff said.

‘And it’s not usually damage,’ Donnie explained, ‘its usually shunted onto a low-loader and then off on a long haul to Romania or other such points.’

‘Could this be the work of protestors?’ I asked.

They exchanged glances. Donnie shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ Jeff said, ‘but why bother, the site’s already shut down.’

‘Is the damage fixable?’ I asked.

‘New hydraulic hoses. It’s a question of waiting for parts and a fitter. Which will not be a company priority up here at the moment,’ Jeff said, smiling wryly.

I turned to Donnie. ‘Can you show me which way he ran off ?’

He looked surprised. ‘It’s night, Sergeant.’

‘Humour me.’

We walked to the edge of the light-spill and Donnie pointed out the direction the figure had taken. He had kept off the track, knowing that a vehicle could have outrun him, and instead used the gully that the stream ran down.

I walked forward slowly, shining my torch ahead. It was rough, shelving terrain with irregular banks and terraces.

‘You looking for footprints?’ Donnie shouted after me.

‘No, the shape of the ground. You say he just kept on running?’

‘Yes, as much as I could see.’

The guy had known what he was doing. Keeping up a pace in the dark over rough terrain like this. He knew this place, exactly where he was, and how to get out.

I felt it then. A prickle at the back of my neck. Someone watching?

I turned around and quartered the side of the hill slowly. But it was useless. Too many vast patches of dense shadow. He went down the hill, I reminded myself. No one could be watching me from up there.

Unless there was more than one of them?

Jeff banged on the side of the pickup to catch our attention. ‘I’m going to take Tessa back up the hill now,’ he shouted.

‘Wait for me, I’m coming with you,’ I called up. I saw him flash a look at Tessa, still inside the car.

‘I’m just taking Dr MacLean back to her camp,’ he explained as I approached, not doing too much to disguise his annoyance. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

‘Good, I’ll tag along for the ride.’ I grabbed my binoculars from my car, and got into the back seat of the crew cab before he could launch another objection.

‘It’s dark, Sergeant, you won’t be able to see anything.’ Tessa spoke from the front seat without turning round. I wondered if I had just imagined a touch of intentional ambiguity in her voice.

‘It’s the company I crave, Dr MacLean,’ I announced cheerfully.

I was conscious of her eyes on me in the rear-view mirror. I was probably not making the best impression. The rumpled creep on the back seat. Outside, by contrast, we heard Jeff, manly and incisive, instructing Donnie to jury-rig a set of lights over the earth-moving machinery.

He got into the pickup, and we set off. Lurching and swaying on the rough track. No one speaking. One of those ramrod silences. I watched the track unrolling in the headlights, waiting for the moment to break it.

I saw the ground rise ahead and leaned forward into the gap between the front seats. ‘After we go over that rise we’ll be out of sight of your camp.’

‘So?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘When you’ve gone over the top, slow right down, as if you’re negotiating a deep puddle or something, but don’t stop.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want them to know that I’m getting out.’

‘What the hell do you want to get out for?’ Jeff protested.

‘Who’s “them”, Sergeant?’ Tessa asked, picking up on the important question.

‘I don’t know, Doctor, it’s just a hunch that I want to run with.’

‘This is crazy.’ Jeff shook his head despairingly.

‘Be careful,’ Tessa said, turning round. This time, as she looked at me, I hoped that she was seeing a little bit of the Apache in my soul.