by Howard Marks
‘This is one of them,’ she said, ‘Rhys dropped it the last night I was with him.’
Huw was barely looking at it. ‘Shadows, Cat. Shadows of shadows.’
She felt embarrassed, began to put it away. Then she felt his hand on hers, its heaviness, its warmth, reassuring her, but of what? She raised her head and he was looking straight into her eyes. Briefly she felt he could see into her innermost thoughts.
‘Cat,’ he said quietly. ‘I heard about how Rhys found you in the woods. You probably think Jones had something to do with that. And maybe you’re right.’ He paused, lowered his eyes, as if aware of their intensity. ‘But you mustn’t let your thing with Jones haunt this case. You mustn’t follow lines that just aren’t there.’
She nodded. She knew if she kept this up she’d confirm one of those doubts about female investigators that never seemed to go away: that however much they used logic and science, at some level they worked irrationally, followed fears and superstitions, not reason. ‘Pryce suggested we find Face’s family, but as far as I remember he never had much to do with them. You think there could be anything that was missed there?’
Huw seemed doubtful.
‘Face was always a bit evasive in interviews about his family, but probably only because they were so normal. His father did a stint in the merchant navy, died of lung cancer a few years back. His mother used to be a nurse at Glangwili hospital. She died more recently. They sound like regular pillars of the community. Face didn’t have much contact with them, but he didn’t avoid them. There’s no sign he had any strong feelings about them. Once he’d left for the city he didn’t go back home much.’
Huw took out a road map from his case, pointed to the Glangwili area north of Carmarthen. The roads looked narrow, the area primarily agricultural.
‘We could stop there tomorrow.’
He folded up the map and nodded at the buffet table. Catrin shook her head.
‘I’m not hungry.’
Huw walked over to the buffet table. She was able to watch him for a moment unobserved, study how his body moved, the solid torso tapering into a pair of long, athletic legs. She had to admit, she liked what she saw. Despite the dope, he’d kept in shape, there was discipline there still.
As Huw worked through his mixed grill, his eyes were half on the champions league match between Liverpool and PSV. ‘You a football fan?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ she said. She was beginning to feel quite drunk. ‘Man U, as it happens.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘Me too.’
‘Yeah, well,’ she said smiling at him, ‘it’s not exactly an unusual choice, is it?’
‘When I was a kid though, that was a hell of a team, Bobby Charlton, Georgie Best. You just had to support them, specially if you grew up miles from anywhere like I did. How about you, how come you’re not a Cardiff City fan?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘my dad was a Man U fan.’
‘Right,’ said Huw, ‘you two bond over a match, did you?’
‘No,’ said Catrin, ‘not exactly, he’s not, well, he wasn’t really around.’
‘Oh,’ said Huw, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need. It’s not like I ever knew him or anything. He was just a fling my mother had. Then I came along and he left. That’s what men do, isn’t it?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Leave,’ she said, ‘they fucking leave.’ She was really starting to feel the drink now and failing to keep the emotion from her voice, struggling not to think of Rhys, the one who’d really left her, not the father she’d never known, the bass player for a band she’d never heard of, the father of whom she knew nothing other than he’d been another drifter through her mother’s hippie scene.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and Huw just smiled and said something about it being a hell of a day.
As the players left the field she moved the conversation back to the Owen Face search, the quest for yet another man who, one way or another, had ducked out on his responsibilities.
‘That inscription on the bust of Cato in Pryce’s study, any idea what it meant?’ she asked.
Huw made a search on his iPhone. ‘It means something along the lines of – In this land where each man’s face is a mask, the true face wears a mask. Originally it referred to Rome perhaps, or Carthage.’
‘Couldn’t it also be a pun on Face’s name?’
‘In what sense?’
‘As in – where each man’s “Face” is a mask. It’s saying that Face wasn’t what he appeared to be. Face’s austere, reclusive lifestyle might have been some sort of mask – a front, that allowed him to pursue a double life. Maybe his real life was elsewhere.’
‘It’s possible I suppose.’
‘That would also explain Pryce’s own identification with the figure of Cato.’
‘I wouldn’t read too much into it. Someone in that condition and on that level of medication could be identifying with a lot of unusual things, no?’
The barman switched over to the local news. There was a short item on the fire, with an old picture of Della. Then the shot cut to DS Thomas standing outside the charred remains. He’d put on a new suit for the interview, but there was no mention of arson, no mention of any other persons being sought in connection with the incident. He stared with a glazed look into the camera and seemed to run out of things to say. Catrin smiled again but inwardly this time. He was making an ass of himself. But then he was the sort who didn’t really care what people thought of him.
She picked up a couple of rolls and some cheese and went to her room. The passage upstairs was lit by dim energy-saving bulbs. There was chipped paint on the dressing table, cigarette burns on the covers. Through the open curtains she could see the snow falling outside, swirling, grey and formless.
She moved closer to the pane, her nose almost up against the glass. Down in the whirl of flakes Huw’s parked car was just visible. Standing beside it she saw a figure in an anorak. He seemed almost motionless, only his hands moving out ahead of him, as if in a silent act of supplication.
Instinctively she drew back from the window, reached down for her phone to call Huw but it was too late. Huw had seen the man and was already running from the bar. Through the snow Catrin saw that the man still had his hands outstretched. He backed away from the car towards the road. Huw went after him through the falling flakes, almost slipping, but the man disappeared behind the trees.
As Huw reached the place where the man had gone the branches shook violently, the snow rushing down in a thick sheet. Then he too disappeared. Catrin heard a loud cry then Huw staggered back into sight, his hands clasped to his face, his knees buckling under him. From the side of the building the barman rushed forward, put his arms around Huw’s shoulders and guided him back towards the lights.
As she ran out Catrin could see Huw slumped at the bottom of the stairs. The barman held a bottle of water.
‘What just happened out there?’ She took the bottle and some tissues, then dabbed them over the end of the bottle.
‘I’m not sure. The bastard hit me from behind.’
‘Get a look at him?’
‘Not properly. It was too dark.’
Gently she began to wipe away the sludge and leaves from Huw’s face. His thick hair was matted with blood from a cut above his temple, but it wasn’t deep.
‘Did you see what he was wearing?’
‘The usual. Hoodie, trackies, those air-sole trainers.’
‘Get a look at his face?’
‘No. He had long hair, almost covered his face.’
‘It’s got to be the man who followed me from the club. He’s disguising himself as Jones used to. The hoodie, the hair over his face.’
Huw didn’t seem to be listening. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘it felt strange. Like if I’d pulled away the hair there would’ve been nothing underneath.’
‘What do you mean, nothing?’
‘Nothing, no face, just eyes.’
Catrin hesita
ted. It was what she’d felt too for a moment in the park. She took a deep breath. The barman had left the room, closed the door.
She walked with Huw to his door and waited outside until she heard the lock turn, then went down to check the windows. The bar was empty. She checked all the lower windows were locked, then went up to her room and turned the key.
Three hours later she was awake again. Her shoulders felt cold, numb. It was silent apart from the soft hum of the ventilation system.
She checked her phone. There were several calls from DS Thomas’s private number, but he’d left no message. She tried his number but it was switched off, no answerphone.
She picked up her tobacco pouch from the bedside table. It was almost empty. Not enough left to roll a cigarette. Beside the pouch were her sleeping pills. She took two, crunching them in her teeth to quicken the effect.
Outside the snow was falling like feathers.
She stared at the window. Nothing else was moving there. She closed her eyes and let the rhythm carry her off to a dreamless sleep.
2
Catrin stood at the window and peered out into the feeble dawn light. During the night she’d got up twice, checked the locks on all the ground-floor windows. Nothing had been disturbed, and looking out over the layer of snow that had fallen overnight, she could see no prints.
She felt for her handset, punched in the number of Emyr Pugh the pathologist. It was his home number, the one he’d left on his card at the office, she’d memorised it. His voice was still groggy with sleep.
‘Emyr?’
‘Cat?’ He still recognised her voice, she noted, after all these years. She heard him sniffing, some water running.
‘Thomas is looking for you, wants to speak to you about something,’ he said after a pause.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Last night his phone was off.’ She heard the click of a lighter, a shallow intake of breath. She didn’t remember Emyr smoking. She wondered if it was something he’d gone back to since his wife had died.
‘Also, Della left a message for you on my work line. She must have left it the morning of the fire.’
‘What was it?’
‘Nothing, just that she was looking for you, couldn’t get you on your mobile.’ Catrin remembered she’d been interviewing the band that morning, her phone would have been switched off. She wondered why Della hadn’t left a message as she had on previous occasions. Maybe because she’d never answered any of them. Maybe because she hadn’t felt safe leaving one. Now she’d probably never know what Della had wanted.
‘How is Della?’ she asked quickly.
‘In a coma still.’
She took a deep breath. ‘Emyr, can you get into the force intranet, the archive section, from your home drive?’ Under his breath Pugh muttered something about not being able to pass material without clearance.
She fumbled for her pack of Drum, remembered it was empty. ‘The woodland loci where the Angel Jones victims were found. They’d all have been photographed by scene of crime officers, right?’
There was a low whirr as Pugh booted his system, ‘They’d have swept for fibres and DNA within a fifty-metre radius of each body, so it’s a fair bet.’ A few moments of silence then, just a muted tapping in the background.
‘The last six sites, from the late 1990s, are on computer,’ he said.
‘The woodland there, any trees visible in the shots?’
‘The shots are of the ground cover.’
‘What about leaves, foliage? Rowan? Silver birch, goat willow? Sessile oaks? Any of those?’
‘Not that I can see, it’s mostly mulch and mud. Looks like Jones used clearings, not tree cover, to dump his vics in.’
‘And the locations of the woods he used?’
There was the soft tapping again, longer this time.
‘No real cluster. They’re spread at the edges of the national maritime park. St Dogmaels in the north, Mynyddog-ddu in the east. Pontfaen in the north, several in the woods around the Preseli hills.’
‘Any symbolism, any patterning to the placement of the bodies?’
‘None noted here. The SIO superimposed a number of geometrical shapes, hexagons, pentangles and so on. Nothing, it looks random.’
‘So how was Jones accessing the park?’ She cracked the window, still left the curtain closed, felt the cool air over her face. Outside everything sounded still, silent, no traffic moving yet beyond the trees.
‘Seems he just drove up the B4313, the B4329, turned off when he saw dense woodland.’
‘So he took his van up narrow tracks into the woods.’
‘Unlikely. The assumption was he parked then carried the bodies on foot.’
She knew this was reasonable, it would have been an effort, but possible.
‘His victims didn’t weigh much by the time he’d finished with them,’ she said, ‘so Jones could’ve carried them in a mile or more, but further and he’d have needed help.’
‘Right, the bodies weren’t further in than a mile or so. No evidence of Jones using accomplices was ever found, as you know. In his cellars there was no DNA except his and his vics’. The vics’ tox reports matched to the exact chemical footprint of the drugs found in his cellars. His vics said Jones was always alone with them. In the CCTVs he’s alone in his hoodies and other disguises. They did biometrics on all the footage from the clubs, it was never anyone else but Jones in that gear.’
‘You’re right, nothing indicates he did use accomplices.’ She looked down at the carpet, how dark the patterning was so as to hide stains. Something he’d said earlier had snagged in her mind.
‘You said they searched for fibres at the scenes.’
She heard him tapping again. ‘Within fifty metres, but as we’re talking deep woods, there’s not much here. The girls’ clothes, his clothes, that’s it.’
‘And the fibres, they include hairs from that black wig he wore?’
She thought she could hear a door closing somewhere in the background. There was a longer pause this time before he came back on.
‘Two samples here,’ he said: ‘both matched those found at his cellar. He used the wig to cover his face.’
‘But the wig wasn’t among the evidence taken from his cellars, right.’
‘No, but then nor were some of his other disguises.’
She stared at a patch of damp on the wallpaper, thought about this for a few moments. The detail about the missing wig had not been released to the press. There had been the usual anxieties about fakes by pranksters contaminating the evidence chain if it had been revealed that some disguises were missing. But the photos taken by security cameras did show Jones with long, mask-like hair, so many people could have guessed it was a wig, or anyone imitating that particular disguise of Jones’s might have chosen to wear a wig. It was another aspect of the hair disguise that interested her.
‘Those hairs from the wig,’ she said, ‘they’re jet black, or tinted in some way?’
There was a low snorting sound. It sounded as if Pugh was blowing his nose. This time the pause was so long she thought maybe the details weren’t fully on file.
‘They are tinted, some kind of yellow,’ he said.
She thought back to the man who’d followed her in the park, the strange sense she’d had that behind the hair there was nothing at all, just a pair of yellow eyes, no face. She wondered how that thought had formed in her mind. The truth was it had been too dark to tell, she couldn’t have seen anything under the hair. The harder she thought about it the more the face seemed to recede as it had before like an image in a dream.
‘Any match to other wigs from shops or theatrical outlets?’ she asked.
She apologised then to Pugh for taking up his time. He said he didn’t mind, but she sensed his impatience mounting; she wondered what she was keeping him from. The tapping continued, quicker this time.
‘No, they searched all known outlets, online, even internationally. They were hoping for proof he’d personally pu
rchased the items. But they never got it.’
‘And the hairs, what were they?’
He laughed briefly. ‘Goat, it says here.’
‘Goat?’ She moved her feet under the radiator.
‘Painted with a vegetable dye, they never traced that either. Sounds like a home-made job, that’s why they never found a retail match.’ He cleared his throat then coughed. ‘He probably thought it was safer to make his own gear.’
She heard a click, the line had gone dead. It’s the weather, she thought, these old country lines go down all the time in winter. She called back, just got a continuous beep. She left it a couple of minutes, staring out at the glare of the whiteness in the dark, tried again. The line was still dead.
Catrin sat in the gloom, listening for sounds from Huw’s room. There was silence. She thought back to what Pugh had said. The security camera pictures of the wig in the press had been black and white. It was unlikely members of the public would have known about the yellow tint. She was almost certain that was what had made the yellow shimmer she had seen. Beyond that, all seemed darkness.
They drove west towards Pembrokeshire. The snow had thinned to an icy drizzle, the winds whisking the drifts against the hedgerows into blinding eddies across the road.
Huw was un-talkative, seemed lost in his own thoughts. Catrin browsed the in-car audio memory. She had expected some vast archive, but found only a small playlist. Some obscure medieval religious chants she’d never heard of. Then Allegri’s Miserere and several other settings of the same psalm from the seventeenth century. The rest was all relatively modern. The Shangri-La’s ‘Walkin’ in the Sand’, ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’. From the Sixties, Marty Wilde. Quicksilver Messenger Service ‘Just for Love’. The Dells’ ‘Love is Blue’.
From the Seventies, Terry Reid’s ‘Stay with Me Baby’. The Motels. John Martyn, Little Feat, Gram Parsons. From the Eighties, only some early Seerland, and Amanda Lear. It was all melancholic, nostalgic music, felt like the music of someone in mourning for something, irrevocably lost.
