Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  ‘Was once, a long time ago.’ She thought she saw a kind of reverie in his eyes, as if the man was running some old movie in his head that was infinitely more seductive than the world he saw around him.

  ‘So what brings you back?’

  ‘Just doing up a few ruined cottages, hoping to rent them in the summer.’

  ‘You’re a developer then?’

  ‘A developer, you could say that.’ He seemed to find this amusing, let out a brief, sonorous laugh. ‘A late developer you might say.’

  She showed him her picture of Rhys, pointed out his earring. ‘Seen him about?’ she asked.

  He looked, shook his head. She wondered how old the man was, it was difficult to tell. Late fifties perhaps, though there was the vitality about him of a much younger man.

  ‘You were here in the early Seventies?’

  ‘Off and on,’ he said.

  ‘Remember a commune, up where the clinic is now?’

  ‘Yes but they kept themselves to themselves, weren’t here long.’ These were the exact same phrases she’d heard before from Tudor and the woman in the village. They felt to her now almost like lines from a play, rehearsed, learned by rote.

  ‘Any idea where they went?’

  He was shaking his head again, blowing elaborate smoke rings out to the side of Catrin’s head. He stepped forward and shook her hand. His grip was firm, lingering, almost painful for a moment

  ‘Fransis,’ he said. She waited, but he didn’t give her a second name.

  ‘Catrin.’ Looking at his expression, she sensed she’d just given away more than those six letters.

  He passed her his card, which looked cheap, the sort printed by a machine. There was a Cardiff address on it, and something scribbled on the back. The writing was slanted, very old-fashioned. She couldn’t read a word of it.

  She felt his gaze on her. She expected to feel uncomfortable with him looking at her like that, but she didn’t. Her eyes were drawn to his wetsuit, the outlines of his muscles. The expression was still there on his face, one of knowing recognition.

  ‘Do you think you know me?’ She gave him her most direct stare.

  He returned it, said nothing. She began moving closer to the door. He didn’t try to stop her, but he didn’t get out of her way.

  ‘You’ve been trying to get my attention. Beckoning me?’ she said.

  Still he said nothing, didn’t move.

  ‘Up on the road, then from the cottages. What did you want?’

  ‘I thought it was you,’ he said.

  ‘But we’ve never met before.’ She glanced at him, half smiled at him this time. ‘I’d definitely have remembered.’

  ‘Oh but we have,’ he said. ‘It was a few years back. London, a club.’

  She got it now. She should have known from the rubber and the macho posturing. He was the classic dom, their paths must have crossed back when she was under on the BDSM scene. Many of the doms wore masks, they could have chatted and she would never have seen his face.

  Most of the doms she’d met were nothing like Jones or Trainer. They were professional men, sensitive, tender-hearted. They’d often started out as subs, that way they understood the sub’s needs most intimately. It was like the best tango dancers, they’d train for several years first in the woman’s role. She remembered how the subs she’d met told her how they only very occasionally submitted themselves to a man. They’d feel ashamed afterwards, barely able to look at themselves in the mirror. But something had always drawn them back. It had been the closest they had let themselves come to entrusting their soul to a man, and usually that trust had been repaid, for an hour or two in some hotel room at least.

  ‘Isn’t it a small world,’ she said, almost to herself.

  ‘Meet me tonight, a quiet drink,’ he said.

  Catrin saw him glance towards the window. A silver Audi was pulling up fast. DS Thomas got out, swaggering in his usual way, chest first, towards the door as if he owned the place.

  She felt the surfer’s firm grip on her hand again, then he was gone.

  Thomas was standing in the doorway. He looked a little out of breath. On the floor at his feet lay a holdall and a padded Barbour.

  He had dark pouches beneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept. She wondered why he’d bothered to track her down when he could have been home with a few cold ones, it wasn’t his style. He never left Cardiff and even there he did as little moving about as he could get away with

  ‘How the fuck did you find me?’ she said.

  ‘Making unauthorised NCIS checks in a remote location, not exactly clever.’ It had been a risk, she knew that, but one she’d had to take. He was grinning at her, a look of quiet triumph on his face. ‘You’re meant to be on sick leave, compassionate leave, whatever bullshit term Occupational Health call it now. But all the time you’ve been running round cowboying it.’ She recognised his look now, it was the same look you gave a possession.

  He pushed the holdall to one side, sniggered to himself. ‘All your hacking, well, this won’t look good for you if it gets to Rix.’

  His eyes hardly moved as he gave her his lazy, lopsided smile.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You got me, so what do you want?’

  He sat down opposite her. He wasn’t looking half as pleased with himself as she’d expected. His eyes were wide, anxious-looking, his legs jerking with an edgy energy.

  ‘This is how it works,’ he said. ‘You tell me what you know. If it stacks up, I’ll tell you what I know. If it doesn’t, I’ll bury you.’ She’d expected him to tell her she’d have to go back to town but it seemed his focus was on the case. She never thought he’d care, but looking at him now she saw she’d been wrong. He had enough to bury her already, what did she have to lose.

  ‘I found the cottage where Rhys was staying,’ she said. ‘The place had been turned over.’

  Thomas brought out his packet of Embassy, smiled his lazy smile again. ‘Typical junkie, probably hid his stash and forgot where it was.’

  Catrin moved the ashtray to a mid-point on the table between them, tried to smile, found she couldn’t. She took out her tobacco, her mind still filled with images of the beach, the surfer, the grey light there.

  ‘At the cottage I also found details of an old misper case from ’98, the name of the misper Iolo Stephens. There was also a coroner’s report from last month on an unidentified body washed up on Strumble Sands.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Accidental, but hospital records showed an admission for liver failure five years before the boy was reported missing, at the age of sixteen. But curiously there was no evidence he had ever had hepatitis, suicidal tendencies or had been an intravenous user.’

  Thomas sat forward and rested his arms on the table.

  ‘Any connection to Face in any of this?’

  So Thomas knew Rhys had been working on Face. He might have guessed that from knowing she was working for Huw. Catrin paused, trying to gauge what part of her suspicions she should disclose.

  ‘There were other fans around Face into a hardcore tripping scene who’d also gone missing. A photograph identifies this misper as part of that same scene. He looks like one of the group who abducted me when I was a teenager. I can’t be sure of course, it’s just a sense I have. We know that Face’s mother was involved with some strange cult here at the time Face was conceived. Stephens was about the same age as Face, his family from the same area.’

  ‘So this tripping scene around Face, this cult. They are the same group?’

  ‘Looks that way. A man who looked a bit like Charlie Manson seems to have been in control of both scenes. My sense is this figure’s behind what’s been going on out here.’

  Thomas was watching her closely. She noticed he didn’t seem particularly surprised by anything she’d just said.

  ‘And this figure is?’ He asked this very slowly, his eyes narrowed at her.

  ‘I think it could be Angel Jones.’ She paused. ‘Or i
f not Jones himself, someone close to Jones.’

  He laughed, a rasping, hollow sound. ‘But Jones is like the bogeyman,’ he said. ‘He gets blamed for everything. One minute he’s abducting, the next torturing in dungeons. The next he’s leading some cult. He can’t have been everywhere.’

  She wondered if she’d told him too much already, but then, she didn’t know what he already knew. With the records of her hacking he was holding enough to end her career, maybe put her inside. She knew she was playing a dangerous game if she kept too much back from him.

  ‘Any other cross-matches to this Stephens case?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘There’s a higher proportion of mispers of similar age during that period for the maritime park area against comparable coastal population segments. Of those, nineteen were later found dead, all their bodies found in water. Apart from that, no obvious connections between any of those nineteen cases.’

  ‘You’re thinking some were down to Jones?’

  ‘The disappearances begin about the same date Jones began operating.’

  Thomas looked hard at her. ‘But?’

  Her throat felt dry. ‘But some of the bodies appeared after Jones’s imprisonment. So if Jones was involved and these youngsters were being held somewhere, someone else has been the captor, and for many years.’

  Thomas said nothing at first, just stared at her.

  ‘Maybe Jones’s city dungeon was no more than a sideshow, a satellite, the main event was a much larger country operation.’ Catrin wanted to mention the strange figure who’d been following them, the one who dressed like Jones but couldn’t be, but something held her back.

  ‘People have been disappearing,’ he said, ‘I give you that. There could always be more innocent explanations of course.’ His cheeks were cracking into a humourless grin. ‘Yet you seem to determined to choose the blackest one.’

  She looked out of the window. The wind had picked up again. A piece of polythene was blowing across the car park, cracking as the wind caught it.

  ‘But nineteen young people missing in the same rural area within a few years of each other,’ she said hesitantly. ‘And no one comments, no one starts an inquiry, no one seems to notice. It doesn’t feel right somehow, does it?’

  Thomas looked deep into her eyes, his expression unreadable. ‘Who says no one noticed?’

  He took out a carefully folded piece of paper, which was almost coming apart in his hands. It looked like an old newspaper article, slightly yellowed at the edges; it smelt musty. The top of the page confirmed this, the date was from the late 1990s.

  ‘When I picked up your unauthorised searches on NCIS, I saw you were going into all the missing person cases in this area.’ Thomas spoke more quietly this time as he passed her the paper, keeping his palm under it so it didn’t fall apart. ‘So I did some digging of my own.’

  Taking the paper from his slightly clammy hand, she had a sense of déjà vu. That night in the club, how she had come to ask Thomas questions about Huw, but Thomas already had the article about Huw’s lab sting with him. It had felt unsettling, as if Thomas was always several steps ahead of her, as if he’d been reading her mind. Or the next best thing, hacking her.

  It was an old article from the local paper, the Western Telegraph, dated just after Face’s disappearance at the bridge. PARK RESIDENT MOURNS DAUGHTER’S DISAPPEARANCE read the headline. Catrin recognised the photo of the resident in question immediately. It was old Tudor from the shop. Next to it was the picture she’d seen over his counter framed by fairy-lights and candles, a picture of a tanned, smiling girl with deep brown eyes. Catrin saw she was right: the girl was the old man’s daughter.

  The article spoke of other residents of the area mourning their missing children. The first paragraph dealt with anxieties about Jones, who was referred to only as the Abductor or the Man in the Mask. But the main body of the piece focused on a discussion of the phenomenon of suicide clusters in rural areas. Many of the names she recognised from the other misper files. The farmer from Martlewy whose boy had been found on the rocks at Cat Head, the family of the sixteen-year-old discovered under the ferry crossing, the parents of the girl whose body had been found floating off Crincoed Point. The assumption among the community was that all the young people had thrown themselves off cliffs and high places along the coast; though none of these suicides had actually been witnessed.

  Some of the same pictures from the missing person files, she saw, had been duplicated in a row at the bottom. She wondered if these were the only images that survived of these young people. In the files some had appeared only as black silhouettes denoting male or female, like shy members of a dating site. How soon a life is diminished into a few small unremarkable signs, she thought, how soon it can fade from view. She looked again at the images of the young faces, at the dates under the pictures, trying to see if there was anything she had missed before.

  ‘But these nineteen young people were missing for long periods,’ she said, ‘sometimes many years, before their bodies were found. They all disappeared somewhere first. This doesn’t fit a suicide cluster.’

  ‘I know.’ Thomas sounded unusually nervous, tentative. ‘That’s because there’s another possible explanation of why these young people disappeared.’ His lazy smile had vanished now. He looked as tense as she’d ever seen him.

  ‘There’s something you need to know,’ he said quietly.

  His knuckles whitened as he squeezed her hands together.

  ‘When I was new to the force, I worked with Rhys on a case. We were both still in uniform then.’ She saw a thin sweat appearing above Thomas’s upper lip.

  ‘This case was?’

  His eyes glanced at the door, as he lowered his voice. ‘Three suspected ODs, otherwise healthy young men, all had died of liver failure. All three bodies had been found on beaches up here.’

  ‘Just like the Stephens case?’

  Thomas was nodding slowly.

  ‘No one looked at this from a profiling angle?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course, but no profiles fitted.’

  She paused. ‘But Jones? He was into abduction, spiking, torture.’

  ‘It looks like Jones at first, I agree. But Jones was never a known killer.’

  ‘What he did was worse than killing. His victims emerged like the dead, barely recognisable. When they returned it only spread more fear. He left them in the same area these other bodies were found.’

  Thomas was moving his hand impatiently. ‘Yes, there are parallels. But when you look closely there are also differences. The liver damage, none of Jones’s known victims had it. All these bodies were left in water – water destroys evidence. But Jones used woods, dumped his victims alive.’

  ‘There were those old rumours that Jones killed, hid the bodies. Maybe he had a different MO out here. Used his victims as accomplices in group activities, rituals, then disposed of them.’

  Thomas held up his hand, cut her short.

  ‘No. This case didn’t fit any existing serial matches or patterns, not a single one. They sent the data to Europol, Interpol – no matches, not even any precedents. So a special task force was set up in-house by Drugs to investigate the deaths.’ He paused, took a deep breath. ‘Then a couple of months later traces of synthesised tryptamines on two of the bodies led Drugs to a lab near the university medical faculty at Heath Park.’

  ‘That same lab which triggered the big sting op you told me Powell was involved in, the one that needed Home Office approval?’ Catrin felt her chest tighten. Everything was beginning to connect now but in a way she had not expected.

  Thomas nodded. ‘It was a highly professional set-up, as I told you, everything state-of-the-art. They had twenty-kilo Rotorvaps, the latest freeze dryers, self-cleaning vac-pumps, the works.’

  ‘No connection to the university?’

  ‘The university denied any knowledge of it, though they said that it was as sophisticated as anything they had. All the equipment was top-end, research
grade, but there was no evidence any original research was being done there. It was a drugs lab, pure and simple. All the chemical precursors were set up for the production of exotic tryptamines, Belladonna alkaloids and 5-MeO-DMT. These were some of the strongest hallucinogens on the scale at the time. But the strange thing was that these drug types were too exotic to have much market value. So whoever was responsible for funding the lab would never have recouped their capital investment.’

  ‘If there was no market, then why go to the trouble of setting up such a lab?’

  ‘That’s what everyone was asking themselves at the time. On the face of it the enterprise didn’t have any obvious commercial rationale. Yet this was the most high-end drug lab anyone had come across.’

  ‘Couldn’t traces be put on the orders for the chemical precursors and hardware?’

  She heard a noise in Thomas’s throat that sounded something like wry amusement.

  ‘We tried. For a while it looked as though a San Diego biotech company was in the frame, but this proved a dead end. The paper trail led through a maze of offshore shell companies and blinds. Then that big sting op was launched, the team posing as synthetic drug manufacturers in competition with the Ukrainian and Thai labs. By acting in the same way as the target, as the competition, they tried to draw in the same buyers to get a fix on the distribution chain, on who the end users were.’

  ‘How close to a result did they get?’

  ‘Not even a whisper: after two years the op hadn’t even netted a single potential buyer. By then the whole situation was getting a bad smell. Rumours began to circulate that some of the officers were taking kickbacks from the hardware suppliers, stringing out something that was going nowhere to build up retirement funds.’

  ‘Any substance to these rumours?’ she asked.

  ‘None. That was the thing. It felt like a deliberate whispering campaign. No one knew where the rumours were coming from, but the longer the op went on the worse they got. The word was the new chief Rix wanted heads on plates, the whole business wound up as quickly and cleanly as possible before Complaints got wind of it.’

  ‘Was anything ever proved?’