by Conrad Jones
‘Nothing to report yet,’ Bob said. ‘Do you want a brew and I’ll show you where we think he went into the water.’
‘A tea and a coffee, please,’ Kim said. ‘No sugar.’
‘Coming up,’ Jim said.
‘What are the chances of finding him?’ Alan asked.
‘It all depends when he went into the water. If the tide took him through the inlet to the Inland Sea, we’ll find him, eventually. But if he went out into the bay, there’s probably no chance.’
‘Let’s hope he’s inland. On a different subject, I’ve had a call about Ronny Green’s death,’ Alan said.
‘That was quick. What killed him?’
‘A perforated peptic ulcer. He probably didn’t know he had an ulcer until it burst. The doctor said he would have gone down quickly and gone down hard, banging his face on the floor. It explains the blood around his nose and mouth.’
‘So, he wasn’t attacked.’
‘No. Somebody must have called around and found him dead and chanced their arm at finding a stash in the house. They gave up when they couldn’t find it, then locked the door when they left.’
‘You’re assuming he had a stash,’ Bob said, sarcastically.
‘They weren’t looking for his coin collection,’ Alan said. ‘I’m guessing he was hiding gear for Jamie Hollins but it’s all conjecture now. It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s gone too soon and it’s very sad.’
‘Poor bugger,’ Bob said, passing them their drinks. ‘When your number is up, it’s up.’
‘Isn’t that the truth,’ Alan agreed.
‘Come on, I’ll show you where we found the blood. This way.’
‘Is that guy in the burger van Jimmy Fish?’ Alan asked, looking back at the burger van as they walked away.
‘It is. You’ve got a good memory.’
‘That’s not his real name,’ Alan said to Kim.
‘I gathered that.’
‘He used to sell fresh fish on the market when he was younger. The name stuck.’
‘As they do around here,’ she said, watching the coast guard in the distance. ‘What do we know about Brian Hindley?’
‘He’s a retired postman with nothing remarkable to note.’
‘What’s the family background?’ she asked.
‘They’re all local. No one with any form,’ Bob said.
‘Anyone with an axe to grind with him?’ she asked.
‘Nothing obvious so far.’
‘Have the ponds been searched?’ Alan asked.
‘Once the divers have checked the inlet, they’ll check the ponds. They’re silted up and very shallow. If he was in there, we’d have seen a body but we might get a murder weapon if there is one.’
They took the right-hand path and stopped near the pet cemetery. Alan hadn’t been there for many years. He tried to remember the last time he’d walked around the nature reserve. Probably when he was first dating Kath. They took the dogs there in the early days of their relationship before kids and the job got in the way. It was a world away. The dogs they walked that day were dead, Kath was gone, and life had carried on regardless. It carried on regardless, full-stop.
They reached the shingle beach and ducked beneath the crime scene tape. The area was deserted. Uniformed officers and the CSI had finished their investigations.
‘The blood is there; spatter on the tree trunk and the roots. A trail runs across the shingle towards the sea.’
‘You think he was stabbed here and then dragged into the water?’
‘Yes. The drag marks are clear. Unfortunately, the tide has taken everything beyond the mudflats,’ Bob said. ‘It drops away quickly there. The killer didn’t have to drag the body far. You can see the marks clearly here.’
‘I agree. The drag marks can’t be explained away,’ Alan said. ‘It’s feasible someone committing suicide could cut their wrists and walk into the sea but the drag marks say someone was attacked here and taken to the sea to be disposed of.’ He turned to Bob. ‘I agree we’re looking for a victim and a killer.’ He looked at the footprints again. ‘Kim, put Alice’s team on this. Put an appeal on Mon Radio and we need a sign and some posters next to the burger van. We need to talk to witnesses who were here yesterday afternoon after four o’clock.’
‘What about the Chronicle?’
‘It came out today,’ Alan said. ‘Let’s call them later. Call the radio first.’
‘What do you think is going on?’ Bob asked.
‘I think there’s something in the tap water,’ Alan said. ‘The world has gone mad and I need some more detectives.’
CHAPTER 30
The sun was fading when he arrived home and he unlocked the front door and switched the lights on. It was warm inside—the heating was on permanently. It cost him a fortune but she couldn’t tolerate the cold. She could sense the slightest drop in temperature. Her tongue was as sharp as his knife and one day, he wished the two would meet. He could slice her nasty tongue from her fat head and that would make her think twice about criticising him. Criticism was her art. She could slay him with a sentence. From being a boy, he remembered her negative comments. He wasn’t clever enough; tall enough; handsome enough; fast enough; helpful or polite enough. She seemed to resent him being there at all. She was suffering now and he could end her suffering without blinking but then why should he? He enjoyed watching her suffer. It would become too much and one day he would put her out of her misery but not today. He would plod on as usual and play the dutiful son.
The situation at home suited him. It had all the trappings of normality and was like camouflage. No one could see the monster in their midst. On the face of it, he was the mild-mannered bachelor who worked hard and cared for his ailing mother. She was bedbound most of the time. It was rare she moved from her bedroom and when she did, it was only as far as the bathroom. He got help from the local authorities. The council were brilliant with the elderly on the island. Carers came in to bathe her and manage her toilet needs. He couldn’t do that. Not ever. The thought of seeing her naked or wiping her backside made him sick. If they ever took her support workers away, they would have to put her in a home. The problem was, homes were ridiculously expensive and his wages wouldn’t touch the cost of fulltime care. The care she received now was expensive. They had to contribute to the cost. She had some money put away but he’d watched it dwindle from a decent sized nest egg to a pittance. If she took a turn for the worse, it wouldn’t cover six months care. Then it would be time to slip something in her tea or smother her with a cushion. That might be fun.
He crept into the hallway and took his boots off, quietly. Her television was blaring. It was always blaring as her hearing was poor but she wouldn’t wear her hearing aids. They gave her a headache, she said. It was all right for everyone around her to have a headache as long as she was all right, nothing else mattered. On the bright side, her deafness covered a multitude of sins. She never knew when he was in or out unless he popped his head around the door. He told her work kept asking him to do overtime, which lately, was true. Every couple of days, he would sit with her for a few hours. They would drink tea, eat eclairs, and watch a film together although she rarely saw them to halfway through. Her medication made her drift in and out of consciousness and her concept of time was warped. She told the carers and the odd visitor that he was the most caring son in the world and that he sat with her every night after work. The days blurred into one for her. She was deteriorating fast and her lifeforce was almost exhausted. He wondered if she knew. He wondered if she’d ever really known what she was doing. Her ability to point out his mistakes was unquestionable yet she seemed to be clueless about her own. Becoming friends with Peter Moore had been a classic.
The serial killer, Peter Moore was twenty years her senior when they met in the early nineties. She’d worked for him at the cinema in Holyhead, selling choc ices and sweets during the intervals and clearing up the litter and cleaning the toilets when the public had gone home. They became
friendly and he offered her some vodka in his office one night. That’s when he’d raped her. Right there, on the desk. At least, that was what she’d told everyone when it eventually came out. She would never have told a soul if it hadn’t come out the way it did. When he was growing up, he had no idea who his father was. His mother told him she’d met his dad on a night out in Blackpool and remembered his name was John something and he might have been in the RAF. She couldn’t remember anything else. Of course, he wondered who his father was and what he did for a living in the airforce. He dreamed his father was a fighter pilot and he would come and find him some time in the future, any child would.
It was purely by chance he’d found out the truth. A local girl of eleven had been raped. It was a particularly brutal attack and the case went viral. The police made an appeal for local men to come forward and have their DNA tested to eliminate hundreds from the enquiry. Obviously, he was one of the first to volunteer. His DNA was a hit on the database but not in that particular case. It was another case. A historic case. The DNA match identified him as a close relation to someone in the system linked to a different crime but they didn’t say who. He was interviewed by local detectives, one of whom lived on the island. When they interviewed him, the questions were confusing and ambiguous. The officers appeared to be as baffled as he was by the line of questioning and even at the end of the interview, he didn’t have a clue what it had been about. Months later, one of the detectives had a drunken discussion with some of his friends in a pub. It was overheard by some of the locals and repeated. It spread like wildfire and eventually reached Holyhead. He remembered the day he found out like it was yesterday.
‘I heard about you being interviewed after we had that DNA test. That must have been a massive shock,’ a workmate said. They were having a pint after their shift. ‘What did your mum say about it?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Finding out your dad was a nutter serial killer. Wales’ only serial killer.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I heard your dad is Peter Moore…’
He’d swallowed his pint and left without a word. He was the only one who hadn’t heard the rumours. It all clicked into place. The DNA test and the odd questions when he was interviewed. He knew his DNA matched a possible relation but he had no idea who or what the relationship was. The police daren’t divulge that. It was a drunken faux pas that opened Pandora’s box but the information answered a lot of questions. The secrets, the silence, the shadows around his conception. The night out in Blackpool and the one-night stand with the mysterious John-something, was bullshit. He drove home in a rage and confronted his mother. She didn’t deny it. When she told him, his father had raped her in the cinema and that his father was a serial killer, he couldn’t have been any happier. It was a joyful epiphany. He knew there was something inside him, something different, something evil. Finding out who his father was, answered a myriad of questions. Now he understood what he was.
CHAPTER 31
Simon and Kerry called ahead and were given the code for the police station car park. They were greeted at the front desk by a ruddy faced sergeant, who looked like he was way past his retirement date. He gestured to a side room, and they went in and sat down. The room smelled of disinfectant and air-freshener. Someone had scratched ‘PIG STY’ into the wall. It had been painted over but was still visible. They were offered tea by a civilian officer and they chatted quietly until the uniformed sergeant entered. He brought a waft of Old Spice aftershave with him. It reminded Kerry of her dad.
‘I’m Eddie,’ the sergeant said, introducing himself.
‘Simon and Kerry,’ Kerry said. They all shook hands.
‘So, you’re from Anglesey?’ the sergeant asked.
‘We are,’ Simon said.
‘Come to the big city for a day out?’
‘Something like that.’
‘We’ve got a caravan in Benllech.’
‘Nice part of the island,’ Kerry said.
‘I gather you have some questions about an incident down the road at Fords,’ he said.
‘Jaguar, Land Rover,’ Kerry said.
‘Sorry. It was Fords for so long, that’s what us old timers call the place. The place is better now than it was. We used to have a lot of problems with that place. Theft was rife for years. We were there every day. Anyway, I digress. How can I help?’
‘We wanted to know about an incident which resulted in a man called Derek Kio being sent down with another man. About six years ago.’
‘Ah, Degsy Kio,’ Eddie said with a wry smile. ‘Now there’s a man who couldn’t stay out of trouble if he was locked in an empty room and chained to the floor.’ Eddie chuckled to himself. ‘He would steal the shirt off your back and come back the next day for your vest. I don’t know who checked the references on his application form. How he got a job there, I’ll never know. Someone turned a blind eye, if you ask me. In those days, it wasn’t what you know but who you know that counted. Everyone in this city wanted to work there. It was a good job and well paid and the perks were good. Do you remember when every job had its perks?’
Simon laughed. Kerry looked confused.
‘So, you do remember him,’ Kerry said.
‘You couldn’t forget a man like Degsy Kio. He was one in a million.’
‘Can you remember what happened?’ Simon asked.
‘I remember bits and pieces although the chronology might be askew.’ Eddie thought for a moment. ‘The factory used to be much bigger back then and the production line ran twenty-four hours a day. It only shut down on one Sunday a month for maintenance. There were three, eight-hour shifts; mornings, afternoons, and nights but then the company made cuts and redundancies and it was taken to two, twelve-hour shifts. Day shifts and night shifts. Twelve-hour night shifts are hard graft and they mess with your sleep pattern. A lot of the workforce used certain drugs to get them through the week.’
‘Cocaine?’
‘Got it in one. There were thousands employed there back then, a lot of them had worked for Ford before they started building Jaguars and Land Rovers. Selling cocaine on the nightshift was rife. You can imagine it was a lucrative trade to be in. Thousands of customers and no police force as such. Some of the dealers made thousands of pounds a month.’
‘Didn’t they have security?’
‘Of course, they did, but most of them were on the dealers’ payrolls. They turned a blind eye and pulled the odd employee who was stealing tyres and the like.’
‘That would have been a lucrative business to be in,’ Simon said.
‘There were frequent turf wars over the factory. People were paid to recruit certain other people. People like Degsy Kio. The management tried a crackdown and one of the directors was run off the road. He crashed into a motorway stanchion and never walked again. They never caught anyone. About the same time, another man was assaulted in the stores. They fractured his skull with a wrench. He was lucky to survive. Of course, no one saw anything or heard anything. There was a wall of silence. No one liked a grass. Eventually, the management asked us for help and we descended on the place with sniffer dogs. You’ve never seen so many men running for the toilets in your life. The dustbins were literally full of little white packets of powder. I’ll never forget it. Degsy Kio was found with a substantial amount of coke in his locker. He claimed he’d been set up by some of his customers from the offices upstairs but the management closed ranks and his accusations didn’t fly.’
‘He said the drugs had been planted in his locker?’ Simon asked.
‘That was the gist of it from what I can remember. I did think it was odd leaving his stash in an unlocked locker,’ Eddie said. ‘But then, Degsy was an arrogant man and arrogant men make mistakes. I wouldn’t put it past him to think no one would dare go into his locker. At the end of the day, the drugs were in his locker and he was arrested. He was bound to deny they were his. Degsy and his sidekick were sent down for p
ossession with intent to supply.’
‘How much did he have?’ Kerry asked.
‘Two kilos sealed and wrapped ready to sell,’ Eddie said. Simon made a whistling sound. ‘After that raid, the company employed a security company that had drug dogs and introduced random drug tests and it all settled down.’
‘Can you remember the names of the other men involved?’ Kerry asked.
‘I might be able to if I could dig out the investigation files to jog my memory but they’ll have been archived on the system. I can ask if they can be recovered.’
‘Does the name Kelvin Adams ring a bell?’
‘No, can’t say it does. Should it?’
‘He worked here at the time. He was the man who was murdered.’
‘I see.’
‘What about Glen Price?’ Kerry asked.
‘No. I don’t remember him but I do remember one name who was interviewed. It made me laugh because it rhymed with David Brent from The Office and he was an arse like him. Barry Trent. He was interviewed by the drug squad a few times.’
‘Can you remember what his involvement was?’ Simon asked.
‘Kio said Trent was high up the food chain and, financed the product coming into the factory but it was never proven. He managed the engineering department, if I remember rightly.’
‘He still does.’
‘If he’s still in the same position six years on, it must have affected his career.’
‘He does have a certain paranoia about him.’ Kerry said.
‘That’s been really helpful, thank you,’ Simon said. ‘Thanks for the tea.’
‘You’re very welcome. Leave me a number and if I can locate the interview list, I’ll give you a call.’
CHAPTER 32
Alan decided to call in to the farm where Will Pinter lived. Kim had tried calling the number on the website and she’d asked for Will by name. The woman on the other end said he wasn’t available. When Kim pressed, she said Will was taking a sabbatical. Alan said Will didn’t know how to spell sabbatical never mind know what one was. He’d been a farmer all his life and only dabbled with property letting when he’d built some holiday lodges on his farm. That was years ago. Something about it rankled with him. Kim had gone to Cemaes Bay to find the laundry company that serviced the Caernarvon Castle motel as they weren’t answering the phone. They decided to split up and catch up on the telephone later before the evening debriefing.
