Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  That wasn’t the sort of mistake she usually made. She would have to go and pick it up later, not a prospect she relished. She still had her cigarettes and her phone, though. And the photo of Rhys, the one she’d printed from a still in the CCTV footage, in her breast pocket next to her heart.

  She checked her rearview, then looked up the road ahead. No one had followed her. She left the bike fastened to the railings, walked round the block in the opposite direction from where she was going, then doubled back to the entrance of Shift studios.

  She heard the chanting before she turned the corner. Three security guards stood close to the doors, a crush of teenage Goth girls jostling each other behind red velvet cords. They were chanting the names of the three surviving band members with one voice at the blind windows of the façade above.

  Catrin pushed through the crowd, made her way up the steps to the guard in front of the smoked-glass doors. She reached into her coat and brought out her warrant card, held it close in front of his face. He spoke into the two-way radio clipped to his jacket, then held the door open for her.

  He opened a second set of heavy doors in the hall just enough to let her pass. She smiled, and he led her over to the lifts. As they came out on an upper floor Catrin felt a vague sense of claustrophobia, and concentrated her gaze on the framed photos along the walls. At the end of the passage some heavily built men were pulling out large black cases from the mouth of the goods lift. All were dressed in black trousers and sweaters, their heads shaved, and on the back of their sweaters the crest of a London-based private security outfit.

  As the men stood aside, the guard ushered her into a larger space with long glass panes facing back along the passage. The windows had been blacked out.

  At the far end she could just make out the three surviving band members. Teifi appeared small and frail behind his drums, while Jonnie, almost as short, but stockier, was huddled in conversation with a petite blonde woman with a laptop on her knees. In the shadowy space behind them Leigh Nails was standing alone, seemingly in a world of his own, his Les Paul slung around his neck as he ran through chord progressions.

  As the guard led her closer and her eyes adjusted she was surprised to see how much older Jonnie and Teifi looked than in photographs. Jonnie’s hair was thinning, his brow creased with deep lines, while the shadows around Teifi’s eyes belonged to a man many years his senior. Of the three Nails appeared to have changed least, his eyes were still bright and alert, but his prettiness was almost gone, his cheeks hollow but without definition. His plain trousers and shirt betrayed none of the extrovert glamour she had seen in the earlier videos.

  The blonde woman’s puckish features were creased into what appeared to be a habitual expression of irritation, which she made little attempt to hide. ‘The boys are putting down tracks on the new album,’ she said. ‘They’re busy. You’ve only got a couple of minutes, okay?’

  Teifi put down his drumsticks, but did not step out from behind his kit. Jonnie had moved fractionally closer to him, their faces blank as children in a class too advanced for them. On the platform behind, Leigh slowly took his guitar from around his neck and rested it on the floor, not looking at Catrin.

  ‘I suppose that none of you have heard from Owen Face?’ she asked softly.

  Jonnie and Teifi did not look at each other as she spoke, then Leigh slowly raised his head.

  ‘Do you know how long we’ve known each other, Owen, Jonnie, Teifi and me?’ Catrin noticed at once the weary, impatient tone in his voice. ‘We used to play in the same sandpit when we were babies. Do you think we’d forget to pass on that we know he’s safe and well?’

  She held up a hand and nodded to show she understood. The expression on Leigh’s face was a mixture of incredulity and hostility, but Teifi and Jonnie were more difficult to read.

  ‘Any idea why Face might have been putting away money into several bank and building society accounts?’ Catrin asked.

  Teifi cleared his throat.

  ‘We never talked about money, financial arrangements, that kind of thing. But Owen was never much of a spender, he was most likely just putting by the money he didn’t spend.’

  ‘He didn’t spend, didn’t have girlfriends, didn’t like cars. Not exactly your typical rock star, was he?’

  She could hear a vague murmur of assent from the shadowy space above her, but no one spoke. She stepped closer to the platform.

  ‘He spent a lot of time alone, didn’t he, when he wasn’t with the band?’

  The only sound from the platform was the tapping of someone’s shoes.

  ‘And when he got depressed he’d spend a lot of time alone?’

  ‘So what? What are you getting at?’ It was Jonnie speaking now, in a weak, reedy voice that sounded both pained and impatient at the same time.

  ‘Can you remember which rehab clinics he went to?’ she asked.

  ‘He didn’t like people to know. He always kept that side of his life private.’

  ‘So much of the time none of you really knew where he was?’

  From the platform came another weary murmur of assent. Catrin continued. ‘His flat’s plain, not like a home, no pictures on the walls, not even a phone or a television. He spent a lot of time alone, but no one knew where he was. It sounds almost as if his real life was somewhere else, doesn’t it?’

  The three men were still looking down at their instruments. Nothing in their manner told her that they were the least surprised or interested in what she’d just said.

  She let her heel rest on the edge of the riser, tried to catch the attention of the hunched figure behind the drums. He was looking over her head at something behind her.

  ‘So you didn’t notice anything different in his behaviour in the days before he disappeared?’

  She could hear Leigh sucking in his breath.

  ‘Look, no offence, but we’ve been asked these questions many times before. No, we don’t know where Owen is, no, we don’t know why he left, no, he hasn’t been in touch. We’ve all of us shed tears for Owen but it’s no good. He’s not coming back.’

  Behind the drums, Teifi was shifting his weight from one foot to another. He peered at her.

  ‘We’ve just had to move on, as a band and as individuals.’ She had the sense he’d had to use these same lines more times than he could count. He’d spoken to her in that soft tone reserved for the very old or very young, people who can’t understand the obvious.

  ‘So none of you heard from him after his car was found at the bridge?’

  Leigh turned his back on her, picked up his Les Paul.

  ‘No, nothing. He obviously jumped, didn’t he,’ he said in the same weary voice.

  Teifi picked up his sticks again, and twiddled them in elaborate circles around his shoulders. Jonnie was looking down at some notes on his lap. Catrin knew that she’d have to be quick now.

  She took out the image of Rhys, the still she’d taken from the CCTV footage.

  ‘Any of you ever see this man?’ She held it out. Jonnie took it, passed it to the others. They all looked, shook their heads.

  ‘One final thing. Did Face have any connection with the far west, the national park area?’

  Leigh looked for a moment as if he was giving the subject some thought, but he might equally have been admiring his guitar.

  ‘When we were starting out we did a few gigs over in Narberth. That’s the nearest Owen ever went to that area, far as I know.’

  ‘He never went there on a break, even a short one?’

  ‘Not as far as I’m aware.’

  She picked up her bag, stepped down from the platform.

  ‘By the way, do any of your crew drive grey vans?’

  ‘No, ours are white.’

  Leigh had already turned away, his expression calm and far off. He walked slowly into the shadows, resuming his search for a lost chord.

  The back of her throat felt scratchy and raw, her head sore from last night’s drinking. The guard had disappea
red, so she made her way back down the corridor alone, stopping in the empty hall. She found a machine that offered a selection of soups and hot chocolate and dug in her pockets for change.

  ‘You should have used one of the others. Everything tastes the same from that machine.’

  A lone figure was standing in the doorway. Like the roadies she’d seen earlier, he was shaven-headed and wore black trousers and a turtleneck. But his jacket looked worn, his trousers as if they hadn’t been washed for a while.

  ‘Here, let me.’

  He fed money into another machine that offered only coffee. Catrin noticed that he did everything with his right hand, the lower part of his other sleeve hanging down in a knot, as if empty. When he spoke his mouth barely moved, his voice was a whisper. She removed the plastic cup from the dispenser.

  ‘Thanks. You must be a veteran.’ She eyed his jacket: ‘You been with the band a long time?’

  He said nothing, looked past her. The sound of footfalls further down the corridor had distracted him. He moved away abruptly, making for the door. Catrin caught up with him, put her free hand on his arm in the doorway. He looked back at her, his anxiety obvious.

  She managed to guide him back into the room. She stirred her coffee without taking her eyes off him.

  ‘You were there with the band in the early days, weren’t you?’

  He nodded, glancing down the passage. Catrin saw that an old wound that ran from the corner of his eye along his jaw-line had been stitched clumsily. The brief smile he gave her came out as a grimace.

  ‘You must have got to know Face then?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t someone you ever got that close to.’

  As he began to turn away she put her hand on his arm. He looked towards the door again, motioned to her to keep her voice down.

  ‘Nobody here knows anything,’ he said. His voice was a whisper that she had to strain to catch.

  ‘Who then?

  ‘If you’re serious about this Face business, there’s only one of them left now who knows anything.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  He glanced again at the doorway. The corridor outside seemed empty.

  ‘I don’t know what his real name is, he used to be a late-night pirate DJ. He’s used different names over the years. Nogood Boyo, Captain Cato, later he used the name Overseer.’

  ‘How would I contact him?’

  ‘He’s gone to ground out in the country north of Pontardawe.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘That’s all I’ve heard. There was a fire in the pirate station where he was working. He ended up badly burnt. No one’s heard from him for years.’

  The roadie didn’t say anything more. He walked quickly away through the doorway.

  The rush hour was over, the streets cold despite the bright sun, and quiet. Catrin parked further up by the station. Huw had left another text, telling her to meet him in half an hour, in the main concourse. There’d be lots of people about there, dozens of cameras. He obviously wasn’t taking any chances. He’d chosen a safe location to talk, not a wireless phone connection. He was using a different number to text her from each time. She wondered if this was another precaution.

  Less than a hundred yards along the street, she found an internet café. She walked past it a couple of times, in each direction, looking in the shop windows. No one was following her.

  The café seemed empty. The neon sign in the window was switched off, the windows dark. At the back there was a bar area, a Gaggia machine and a line of juicers on a shelf under which an Asian boy sat reading.

  Catrin ordered a coffee, sat at a computer away from the window. She found a site that contained Ordnance Survey maps of all the country north of Pontardawe. It allowed her to zoom into any area up to a scale of 1:25,000, and was detailed enough for her to see farm buildings. She panned the scale back, to see the area as a whole first, the lower peaks around the A4069 giving way to the wilder, sparsely inhabited regions of the Black Mountains and the Beacons to the north.

  Saving the map, she clicked onto the internal access page of the only Severe Burns Unit in the region, the West Glamorgan NHS Morriston Burns Unit. The patient waiting-time stats showed an adult intake of approximately one thousand patients each year, and of those only thirty were severe burns cases: the inpatient files were held behind the standard NHS double password system, a single password for the unit and another for each authorised user.

  She clicked straight over onto the initial patient admission files for the unit: these were low-security, the single password overridden by her last Tri-Service pass number. Searching by postcode, she brought up a young girl from Llandybie, the victim of a school arson attack who’d needed reconstructive surgery, and an elderly man caught in a house fire in the Ammanford area. But there were no other matches. After a few minutes she managed to access the National Burns Injuries Database and run the same postcodes, but there was nothing there either.

  Next she tried a keyword search on ‘Overseer’ and ‘Captain Cato’ on the National Criminal Intelligence System database, then on Google, but again found no useful matches. She panned back to broaden the area, including the lower reaches of the Cambrians to the west. She keyword-searched the names of every farm, peak and feature on the map in conjunction with ‘Nogood Boyo’ and the other handles. But still no links came up apart from references to Dylan Thomas.

  She noticed that one of the other characters in Thomas’s play was called Captain Cat, only one letter away from ‘Captain Cato’. Perhaps the old roadie had got the name slightly wrong. She tried a search on Captain Cat, and came up with links to a variety of fishing tackle shops and tourist souvenir shops to the west. She double-checked the addresses but all were in the coastal regions, with the exception of one. A fish restaurant called ‘Captain Cat’s in the rural Garnswllt area, north-west of Pontardawe.

  The photographs on the website showed a large building located next to a minor road. On the walls inside she could make out several framed fish hanging alongside sepia photographs of old fishing steamers. The section entitled ‘Who we are’ showed a picture of the elderly husband and wife team that ran the restaurant. Both, the section said, were originally from the South London area. But when she checked the names on the NCIS, neither flagged up any form, nor did the pair have any connections she could see to the name ‘Cato’.

  Going back to Google, she typed in ‘Captain Cat’s restaurant’ alongside the name of the nearest village ‘Garnswllt’, and was directed to a single link: the website of the South Wales Evening Argus. Their internal search facility revealed only one article on the place.

  It seemed the original establishment had had some connections to the art deco style. There had been a short local campaign to save the building. It was shot from a variety of angles, showing the neon signs, the rounded corners and clean lines of the original structure. These were contrasted with more recent pictures, which showed the changes under the new management. These later shots had a grainy quality, presumably because they served no architectural purpose. Some were of the interior with its nets and lobster pots, the rest of the building’s altered front. In the last two shots, the focal points were two signs, erected at each corner. Catrin looked from one to the other, but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The flowers blooming on the verges identified the time of year as late spring or summer, and the trees on the drive threw deep shadows over the walls behind the signs. One of the signs just read ‘Captain Cat’s’. The other was identical, but with an arrow that would have lit up at night, pointing towards the door. It took more than a minute for her to notice what should have been obvious from a quick glance. Her brain had fooled her, making her see what she had expected to see, not what appeared in the image. The darkness on the white wall behind the letters was not a shadow, but the stain of soot from a fire.

  The same blaze had warped the apostrophe and the ‘s’ at the end of the name into a single rough oval, so that from the road the sign now read ‘Captain Cato
’. Catrin thought about this for a moment. She looked under the arrow of the sign to where the soot was darkest, but saw only a small, blackened shape, perhaps once a small statue of the captain, now barely human in form. As she peered closer she could just make out the face and the stumps of the arms visible in outline against the damaged wall behind. The thing reminded her a little of a voodoo doll, of something burnt in sacrifice.

  She could imagine the place being referred to as Captain Cato’s. There was a possibility the restaurant was where Overseer had picked up the name. If this was the case it suggested some connection or familiarity with the area. It wasn’t that far from where the roadie said the man had moved. But she knew she was groping in the dark.

  She clicked back to the detailed map. The restaurant lay several miles north of the village of Garnswllt, just at the start of the A4069, which wound through the hills to the small town of Llangadog. After this lay the Black Mountains. On either side of the road were small hamlets and isolated farmsteads. By the time she had made a note of all the relevant information her coffee was cold. She left her cup by the computer, and picked up her jacket.

  Outside the sky had darkened. A thin, icy rain had begun to fall. Catrin fastened her collar, pulled it tight at the neck to keep out the cold. As she leant into the corner she noticed a tall figure in a suit walking between the rows of cars.

  He was followed a few paces behind by a younger man carrying two laptop cases: a male secretary type with a brush cut, a shiny suit. A car was waiting, its back doors already open. With a gallant opening of his palm, the taller man ushered the younger one in. Then the man paused, glanced back at her. It wasn’t Huw, though from a distance they looked a little similar.

  It was many years since she’d last seen him in the flesh, but he didn’t feel like a stranger. He’d appeared on all the late-night Newsnight shows, the ones she so often fell asleep to. His position as head of the Association of Gay Police Officers had made him a regular there. The chief was smiling but she wasn’t sure at what. There was no one else near him. His suit had a fashionable herringbone pattern. His hair was full still, dyed jet black. He looked every inch the media player and politician-in-waiting he’d become.