by Howard Marks
Downstairs, her mother barely glances at it, just sighs, ‘Can’t afford to send you on that.’
If you stopped drinking, you could, she thinks. ‘Won’t cost you nothing.’
‘It’s “anything”.’
‘School’s paying. From the gifted and talented budget.’
Of course her new fan had sent her the money, but her mother buys the line, seems pleased, in fact. Not pleased because her daughter is seen as gifted, but because she won’t have to fork out for the trip. Plus the little precious will be out of the house for the weekend and she can stay in bed all day with her new man.
But she doesn’t mind. She is going to see her new follower, and he believes in her.
He says he has a song in mind for her, that they can record it together.
He says he has his own studio.
She runs all the way to the train station, then dodges into the Ladies as soon as she arrives.
In the toilet cubicle she pulls out the long white dress he has sent her.
She follows his instructions. She paints her nails the colour he says, puts on purple eyeshadow, black mascara. She pulls the silver rings from her bag, slides them on her pale fingers, drops the outsized crucifix necklace over her head. She comes out of the cubicle, looks at herself in the mirror.
She looks, she thinks, like the most powerful witch in some secret coven. She isn’t like the other lot at school. They are so shallow, such children.
The dress gives her maturity. Gives her something deep, something stately.
Her train isn’t due yet, so she stays in the Ladies, adjusting her nails, checking her eyeshadow, but mostly gazing at herself in the greenish light of the overhead bulbs.
A graffiti behind her says, Vikki WLF Mikey ♥♥.
Such children.
She looks back at her reflection. The long hair. The flowing white dress. The red nails and dramatic eyes. She’s not just a pretty face. She’s in control. She’s in this to win.
Even so, under the greenish light, she shudders.
8
CAT KICKED HER bike into life. She was still weary as a dog, everything felt sore from the previous day, and she didn’t fancy the long trek back to the coast, in foul winds and on wet roads. In her mind, like something half-glimpsed, hung the shadows of a theory about what was happening. Parts were clicking into logical patterns, but some stubbornly were not. Plus, there was something strange and new in her relationship with Kyle. There was something floating there, something not yet fixed down.
Cat pointed the bike towards the A48 and Swansea. She drove slowly, took it easy, watched the bends and watched the winds.
When she reached town the rain was getting heavier and the traffic was at a crawl. Going around two roads blocked by roadworks she closed on the pathologist’s. It was housed in a former residential building with no parking for visitors without appointments, but she tucked her bike in among the vans at the back and walked around to the entrance.
A wooden desk separated visitors from the pathologist’s secretary who, owing to recent cutbacks, doubled as a receptionist. The woman looked closer to sixty than fifty, close-cropped hair, overweight body tented by a dress with a brown leaf pattern. Her bespectacled eyes were focused on her computer screen, not looking up as Cat entered.
Cat flashed her warrant card, and asked for the report on the two dead bodies from the mine.
The secretary carried on typing then leaned on the desk, tapping her fingers on the wood as if she had no idea what Cat was talking about.
Cat wasn’t in the mood for bullshit. ‘I’m working for DCI Kyle. Are there prelims on the cuts yet?’
The secretary called up a PDF, a form topped with the pathologist’s letterhead. ‘They weren’t done here, that’s why I hadn’t heard about them,’ she said.
‘Cardiff?’
‘Yes. They got passed up the chain.’
‘Any reason?’
‘They don’t need to file a reason.’ For the first time she looked directly at Cat, her face closed, not welcoming further questions. Behind the square, gold-rimmed frames, her eyes were bloodshot, weepy.
OK, fine. Cat would hoon back over to Cardiff. But first she had to make a call. Stepping out of earshot, she speed-dialled Thomas. He came on after a single ring and spoke before she did, anticipating what she wanted.
‘Nada. I had the uniforms take the photofit of pale face round town. Nothing.’
‘Your guys are sure, are they?’ Cat didn’t ask if the uniforms had spent all the time they were supposed to be door-to-dooring in the pubs of Tregaron, but the implication was clear from her question.
‘People do work up here, you know. If they didn’t I’d fuck them off the force. They’re sure. According to you, the bloke’s got a whacking great white stripe in his hair. A few people have seen him around – enough that we can confirm he’s been in town – but no one knows him. We don’t have a name, which means he won’t be local. The people we spoke to think he’s probably English.’
It was Thomas’s turn to leave an implication hanging and Cat knew what it was. Tregaron was so deeply Welsh that locals there probably thought Cardiff was another country, Birmingham as far away as the moon. An ‘English accent’ might just mean a boy from South Wales or the eastern side of Powys. In any case, Cat knew the CCTV was the more crucial avenue. You didn’t need to bang on its door to ask it questions, and there was nothing it ever forgot. ‘And the Rover?’
‘We’re running back on the footage now. Car was definitely there when you say it was there. We’re trying to build up a list of other dates.’
‘Check garages, yes?’
‘I’m not thick, you know, Price.’ Thomas sounded bored now. The kind of bored that lived next door to angry.
‘Yeah, I know. But Kyle may ask me. If you hold out on me, she’ll think I’m doing the same to her.’
‘I told her this was a Dyfed-Powys matter and she could fuck right off.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘And as it was on my pitch, you should have come to me, not her, about the hit-and-run.’ He didn’t say anything more, and Cat supposed that from his point of view, you could see it two ways. Maybe the guy with the white streak had tried to kill her. Maybe it was just one of those stupid motorbike things. More fool anyone who trusts themselves to two wheels on Tregaron mud. She didn’t push it.
She sensed something more was coming, and waited.
‘I had another chat with Nia Hopkins’s brother Moose,’ he said.
‘Oh, so you don’t trust our interviewing now?’
‘Not that. More I was curious to see what he’d say man to man.’
‘And?’
‘He said Nia went to the mine to meet someone. He visited her there occasionally when she was on her own. An older person. That was all he said.’
‘That it?’
No answer. Just breathing down the phone. Then Thomas spoke into the silence. ‘He clammed up, wouldn’t say any more. He had never met the person himself. It was just something he heard from Nia, so maybe she didn’t tell him anything more.’ He paused. ‘I got the sense he’s genuinely upset. He wanted to help, to know where we’d got to. He was giving it the full water works at the end.’
‘He’s her brother. That’s natural.’
On the coffee table in the reception area lay a copy of that morning’s Echo, which led with the story under the caption, Death at Tregaron. The young of Wales mourn their dead. It didn’t take long for these journos to get stuck in.
Cat read on. The piece confirmed the identities of the two suspected suicides as Nia Hopkins and the ‘seasonal worker’ Delyth Moses; no further details were given apart from their ages and educational accomplishments: decent in Nia’s case, almost non-existent in Delyth’s.
‘You still there, Cat? Just like to breathe at me, do you?’
‘I was reading.’
‘Very cultured. You off the case now? Kyle sent you home.’
Cat thought
about that. She hadn’t exactly been on the case and hadn’t exactly been pulled off. ‘Yes and no. She sent me home. But when I mentioned I might continue to liaise with you, she didn’t actually object.’
‘Ha. You’ll be lucky,’ said Thomas and signed off.
Again: not quite a no. She could get used to this way of working, maybe.
The journey east to Cardiff was slow, the traffic snarling up around Port Talbot. The rain was not letting up. Her withdrawal headache was back, drumming insistently. Around her the jammed drivers crouched over their dashboards, seemingly oblivious to each other. Five miles beyond the skeletal profile of the steelworks she turned off where she knew there was a transport café of the old school. To reach it she followed the A48 for a few minutes. The wording painted on the window read, We’re not posh – but we’re cheap.
A waitress goth with a nose ring brought her a plate heaped with sausages, baked beans and chips. At least Cat still had an appetite. Almost every table was full, truck drivers mostly, but a couple of teenagers sat by the window happily feeding each other chips dipped in ketchup. She felt she was being watched. She looked around. Nothing. Probably just an old trucker letching her.
She considered what the pathologist’s secretary had told her. She knew that there were many reasons why autopsies got passed up to Cardiff, ranging from staffing levels to resource management. But unnatural death cases – still a comparatively rare occurrence in Wales – were often handed direct to Cathays Park. She swilled the dregs of her tea in the mug. Leaving, she felt eyes on her again, and she hoped it was just an old road warrior imagining her topless in his cab.
She cruised for ten miles then pulled up at another hold-up, cars filtering into a single lane around a line of cones that snaked along the M4 for a while then disappeared, leaving no hint of their possible function. Once the traffic was in three lanes again she picked up speed, looked in her mirror, spotted a hulky blackness dart back into the lane she was in. She couldn’t see it now, covered as it was by the lorry behind her. Reason told her the car couldn’t really be white-streak’s Rover. The ANPR database would have picked the vehicle up by now, if it was on the move.
She took the exit onto the A470 then merged onto the ramp for Cardiff and followed the traffic along the North Road, turning left onto College Road. Again a flash of black in her rear-view.
She pulled into one of the spaces that led vertically off the pavement. She looked around, checking, seeing nothing. The rain pelted down and showed no sign of stopping. There was something consistent, almost unnatural about the rate it fell, as if someone had left a shower running.
Cat walked to the end of College Road, turned into Museum Avenue. She glanced back again. No cars were following. On either side were the elegant pale stone neo-Classical buildings, the largest of which was City Hall. Less than a hundred yards along was the building that housed the pathologist.
Its entrance was at street level, lacking the imposing sweep of steps that gave the larger buildings a sense of grandeur. Inside it was as if a campaign of determined uglification had taken place, from the chipped melamine and chipboard table in the cramped waiting area to the scuffed plastic chairs. There was no sign of the receptionist. Cat heard the slam of a drawer, then Pugh’s thin, ginger hair appeared as he rose up from behind the desk, puce bow tie slightly askew.
‘Cat.’
He came round and put a paternal hand on her shoulder. A soft, lopsided smile crept onto his face. He looked genuinely pleased to see her. It wasn’t a reaction she was used to, particularly among colleagues.
She felt guilty now for not responding to his emails asking after her. She hoped he hadn’t taken it badly. Cardiff was still a village socially, if geographically it was now a sprawl, and she’d known Emyr Pugh since she was a kid – he was an old boyfriend of her mother’s – and he seemed still to give her the latitude that emotionally developed adults give to children.
She followed him into a large, high-ceilinged room, tall windows offering a view of a flooded patch of garden. Most of the room was occupied at hip-height by glass cabinets that contained textbooks and bound periodicals. Displayed along the length of the polished surfaces there were objects made from twisted chicken wire. Some kind of sculpture collection. Two of the sculptures had been made into the shape of rudimentary vehicles, complete with a handle also made from wire. The others were human torsos, lacking heads or limbs, their stretched, elongated shapes reminiscent of Giacometti.
Pugh motioned at Cat to sit in one of the visitors’ chairs. She turned her head to look at the wire sculptures. Pugh made a low, amused-sounding noise that seemed to come from his throat.
‘My new hobby. I bought the two cars at a street market in Johannesburg on holiday. Thought, I can do that. Started me off. The rest I made myself.’
‘It’s nice.’ Cat realised that she sounded as though she was questioning his taste. She wasn’t. She was happy that Pugh was getting into something. After the death of his wife, he had gone into himself, picked up the drink again, which made Cat feel all the more guilty for having neglected him.
‘Do you sculpt people you know?’ She was trying too hard to be nice now. Pugh noticed the false note, and ignored the remark.
‘So what can I do for you, Cat?’
‘The bodies from the mine.’
Pugh sat up straight in his chair. ‘It’s not your case.’ His posture remained rigid. He held Cat’s gaze, raised an eyebrow.
She paused, gave him a look that she knew he would understand. He still didn’t move. Then slowly, ‘There’s interest in this from high up, from Kyle?’
Cat nodded. She wasn’t sure what Pugh really knew. In her head she counted the seconds. Ten passed before Pugh cocked a wry eyebrow, smiled and rose. Pugh motioned at her to follow. Behind his office, towards the back of the building, a door led off to the right. This was a more modest space, made smaller by the piles of folders that covered every surface. He locked the door behind them.
In the centre of the room there was a plain wooden table, on which a computer stood, a memory tower stored away underneath. He positioned the two chairs in front so that they could both see the screen, motioned to Cat to sit.
He waited for the computer to boot up then, with a few clicks, dragged three folders onto the desktop. He turned in his chair, looked hard at her, searched out her eyes.
‘I’m going to make some tea. I’m going to be five minutes. Not fifteen. Not ten. Five. And you are not allowed to look inside those three folders. Is that perfectly clear?’
‘Clearer than springwater.’
‘Milk, sugar?’
‘Milk no sugar.’
Pugh left the room, and Cat turned to the screen, clicking through to the folder with the first set of images of Nia Hopkins. One glance at the top photograph and she was back at the mine, the damp grass tearing under her feet, then inside, the clammy pull of the tunnel. A feeling she would happily never experience again. The first few shots were standard scene-of-crime pics of the body in situ, white markers pointing out the objects around it, the bottles, the deflated balloon.
Then, following these, came the pathology shots, close-ups of the body during the autopsy. She felt Pugh’s consoling hand on her arm. Pictured on her back, Nia was pale against the stainless steel. Small discoloured patches showed up clearly, broken skin exposing pink flesh beneath. Cat looked closely at these marks, forced herself to take time before turning to the next shot. Worse than the one before. Nia’s small breasts were damaged. Cat saw the variety of bruises; some were the bluish-purple of recent injuries, the others yellowish, older. Her flesh was also torn, small serrations defining the area around the nipples.
Cat made herself push on. She flicked through the list of jpegs until she came to the close-ups of Nia’s hands. Most of her nails were long, square cut, French varnished, the tips polished to a gleaming white. Cat looked closely at the right hand. Two of the nails, her middle and ring fingernails, had been removed. A close-up
of the index finger showed the nail broken neatly in half, framing raw flesh beneath.
She minimised Nia’s folder, clicked on the file that contained the pictures of the second girl’s body. Delyth Moses, the loner. Cat winced as she looked. This body was in a much worse state. The skin had darkened, it was difficult to see the exact nature of the injuries, even under the light of the autopsy table, which normally bleached all it illuminated. Cat zoomed in on a picture of the girl’s back, stopping when she gained the clearest view. She could see multiple abrasions, patches of discoloured skin.
The next photos showed the frontal sections of the girl’s body, exposing the damage done to her breasts. Cat noted the same serrations that she had seen on Nia’s body, the remains of bruises giving the flesh a jaundiced appearance. The left nipple had been almost entirely severed. Cat looked away, exhaled heavily.
She turned back to the screen, opened the photographs of Delyth’s hands. She noticed the same damage to the fingernails and that several were missing. At some point, Pugh had returned to the room. He put a cup of tea softly down by Cat. His face was closed, revealing nothing.
‘Not pretty, is it?’ he said.
She thought of the pictures published in the local papers, Nia Hopkins in school uniform. The shy smile to the camera. She shut that thought out, carried on. She used the mouse to flick through the autopsy shots again, ending on the final shot of the fingers stained with dried blood.
‘Did you do rape kits?’
‘Of course. Nothing. It looks like torture, pure and simple.’
He took hold of the radio mouse, paged back to the close-ups of both girls’ breasts. Pointed at the serrated scratches. ‘These are marks left by jump leads, so it seems the perpetrator used electricity on them. Look at the marks on the backs.’
He clicked the mouse again, dragged the pictures so they appeared side by side. He pointed his finger at the discoloured, broken patches of skin. ‘Those are burns, electrical.’
