Good People

by Ewart Hutton

  I tackled Emrys about it before he joined the convoy driving back down the hill.

  ‘Don’t fret, Capaldi. It’s over.’

  ‘You don’t know what’s happened.’

  ‘Not the detail. But I trust these people. If there were any kind of a problem they would tell me. I know that they wouldn’t go calmly into those ambulances if there was anyone still in trouble up here.’

  I couldn’t share in his faith. I kept it to myself, but another thing rankled. Even scrubbed up and alert, I couldn’t picture any of these guys in Calvin Klein underpants, or wearing Paco Rabanne aftershave.

  So it looked as though I was the only one who had not been sprinkled with happy dust. Was the Italian side of me not seeing something that the Welsh side could embrace? Okay, I could run with it. I didn’t know these men, I had been excluded from the enchanted circle, so I was allowed to be mean-spirited.

  I could dig for dirt.

  But first I had to find it. The groups that had made up the search party were dispersing. I homed in on a Land Rover with Forestry Commission on the side and two bushy-haired occupants rolling cigarettes. They looked out at me as if I was a swish who had just dropped in from a piano bar through a hole in the space-time continuum.

  I buttonholed the driver. ‘They said that they stayed at a shooting hut up there. Near an old dam.’

  ‘Right.’ He nodded, staring at me, waiting for something strange to happen.

  ‘Do you know where it is?’

  They shared a silent geographer communion. Then the passenger leaned forward, his finger starting to point, his visible thought process chewing through the directions he was about to give me.

  ‘Great, I’ll follow you,’ I exclaimed, slapping the side of the Land Rover with macho gusto, like I was a roustabout jefe getting the crew rolling. I ran to my car hoping that they would assume we had just made some kind of a deal.

  It worked. They blazed a convoluted trail, which may have been intended to shake me off. But I hung on behind them until the passenger flashed me a hand sign to let me know that we had arrived. I realized very quickly that it also indicated they were not stopping.

  The hut was a long, low, timber-boarded affair, like a barrack, with a sagging mineral-felt roof, and plywood squares replacing some of the missing window panes. Well on its way to dereliction. It looked like the kind of place construction workers would have used. The only reason it had lasted this long was because no vandal could be bothered to take the kind of exercise required to reach it. The area in front had been cleared and levelled, but it was rutted and potholed now, and self-seeded birch and spruce saplings were collaborating with gorse in an effort to take over.

  They had called it a shooting hut. On the drive up here, I had imagined something with rustic pine supports and trophy antlers nailed to the walls. This was more like a stalag way past its sell-by date.

  I stood outside trying to get a feel for the place. Imagining it was night. Why would they come here?

  Because it was so far off the edge of the world that anything could happen, and no one would ever be any the wiser?

  I buried the thought. I went back to the facts. The minibus driver had said that the men didn’t seem to know the girl. So she wasn’t local. This location had to be the choice of one or all of the six men. It’s night, it’s cold, it’s late, and it’s a long way into a labyrinth. Why here? And why walk? Why not use the minibus? Why park it way the hell over where we found it? Because you were all so fucked-up that it seemed like fun at the time?

  Because your party was still flowing?

  I opened the door and met the party. Beer bottles and cans mainly, some wine, one bottle of vodka. All empty. But all stacked neatly. Tidied up. With empty crisp and snack packets crumpled and stuffed into a supermarket carrier bag.

  The place had the damp, earthy smell of fern roots. I was standing in a vestibule. To my left was a small room that would have functioned as an office or foreman’s room, to the right a larger room, door hanging open: the mess quarters. In front of me, opposite the entrance, was a toilet cubicle with no door, and a cracked WC pan.

  I went through the open door into the mess room. The floor had been swept. Not thoroughly; scrappy piles of old pine needles, twigs and other debris that had blown in through the broken windows had been pushed back against the wall. The other homely touch was six – I counted them – sawn log rounds arranged as seating. It all implied organization.

  But when? Had this been set up before they arrived? Premeditated? Or had they all piled out of the minibus and set to making an impromptu den? And why only six pixie stools for seven people?

  None of the log rounds had been recently cut. I touched the nearest one. It was still damp. But in this atmosphere so was everything else. I looked out of the windows. There were no other log rounds in sight. No imprints of any in the soft ground around the hut. It was possible that they could have ranged out with torches and collected these in the dark. Or they could have had them here already. But only six? Almost but not quite knowing how many were coming to dinner.

  I nearly missed it. Running a last check before I backed out of the room I caught a glimpse of white behind the door. White and clean – alien matter in this place. I picked it up carefully. It was a crumpled paper tissue, slightly damp from absorption of the moisture in the atmosphere. I took a deep sniff. A complex background of unidentifiable fragrances. Opening it out I saw black smudges. The lessons from a fractured marriage informed me that these were smears of ruined mascara. Tears of fun or tears of terror? Another thought to bury.

  I had made contact. My first meeting with the woman. I sniffed the tissue again to fix the esters in my olfactory library, and then fitted it carefully into an evidence bag.

  I went back to the vestibule. The door to the small office was stuck. A clean section of arc in front of it showed where someone had tried to push it open and given up. Or had they? I put my shoulder to it and leaned in hard. It screeched horribly against the floor and opened with difficulty. The space was dark and even mustier than the mess room. Some damp Hessian sacks had been nailed over the windows. I pulled one away, grimacing at the slimy feel of it in my hand.

  There was so much crud piled on the floor that I looked up reflexively, wondering whether this section had lost its roof. It hadn’t. But, even if it had, dead bracken did not usually tumble out of the sky in quantities like this. This had been imported. It had been heaped against the far wall, and it looked as though it had been compacted. To make some kind of a nest?

  Another thought struck me.

  To make a rudimentary bed?

  DCI Bryn Jones was smoking outside the Methodist Church Hall in Dinas when I drove up. In the absence of a police station the hall had been commandeered for the occasion.

  I ran up to him. ‘I’m sorry I took so long, sir. I got lost trying to find my way out of the forest.’ It wasn’t a lie. It was late afternoon now, almost dusk.

  He just nodded, slowly exhaling smoke through his nostrils, a slightly ambivalent smile forming. ‘Thanks for your contribution to my Sunday, Sergeant Capaldi.’

  Bryn Jones was short, but big in breadth. With tight black curly hair, happy green eyes, and a massive face that looked like it had been formed by pounding putty into place. He had a neck that seemed reluctant to narrow, and in the dark blue suit he appeared more constrained than dressed.

  I gestured inside with my head. ‘Is DCS Galbraith in there working on them?’

  ‘Notice an absence?’

  I looked around, puzzled. Not getting it at first. And then it hit. There was no one here.

  ‘Wives and girlfriends, concerned family …’ Bryn confirmed, seeing it dawn on me.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Have you taken them in?’ I asked, surprised, wondering whether to start feeling vindicated. ‘Is it turning out to be more serious than we thought?’

  ‘They’ve gone home. All of them.’


  I stared at him for a moment, perplexed. ‘Even the men?’

  He nodded. ‘Even the men.’

  I shook my head, trying to clear a path to my next question. Then the inner voice of self-preservation sideswiped me. ‘DCS Galbraith – has he gone home too?’ I asked, trying to conceal the hope in the question.

  Bryn dropped his cigarette end, crushed it underfoot, and then shook his head. Not unkindly. ‘No. I’m on lookout duty.’

  I didn’t have to ask who the smoke on the horizon was.

  Jack Galbraith was sitting at a stacking table at the end of the hall, an empty plastic chair beside him, and an identical one opposite. He was having a cigarette under a sign that read Please refrain from smoking under the eyes of the Lord.

  He looked up when I entered, closed his eyes, and steepled his fingers. I hoped that he was looking for guidance. Trying to find the strength to stop him swearing under the eyes of the Lord.

  ‘Fuck you, Capaldi.’ His eyes flicked open. ‘Where do I fucking start?’

  Bryn Jones slipped into the empty chair beside him.

  Even seated, you could tell that Jack Galbraith was tall. He had light brown hair swept back in a swagger behind his ears, a strangely effeminate frame for the firm, square-boned face with its deep-set, incisive, brown eyes. He looked as though he had been built for stamina, for distance and endurance, and you could tell from his bearing that he thought that he still had it, just hadn’t tried it out in a long time.

  ‘My wife thinks this is a put-up job to stop me taking her to an amateur choral rendition of fucking Elijah …’ All his years in Wales had hardly touched the gruff Scottish accent. He ticked the points off on his fingers: ‘That supreme fucking tosser Inspector Unctuous Morgan has witnessed my ritual humiliation. And you called out a fucking helicopter.’

  ‘No disrespect, sir, but we are in a church here,’ Bryn said quietly, out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘No we’re not,’ Jack Galbraith corrected him. ‘We’re in a church fucking hall – there’s a difference. In here, I’m allowed a few transgressions.’ He paused to dump his cigarette into the residue of a mug of tea before fixing his gaze back on me. ‘What have you got to say for yourself, Capaldi?’

  ‘I thought we had a situation, sir. I had seven people missing, one of them a woman, in extreme weather conditions. I made a decision that seemed to be appropriate for the circumstances as I saw them at the time.

  ‘I was especially worried about the woman – a hitchhiker, picked up by the men. She didn’t know them. And the men were drunk. In my opinion she was vulnerable. And I’m still concerned for her. Do you remember the Broussard case, sir? In Cardiff? About six years ago? A Haitian illegal immigrant?’

  ‘There’s no parallel.’ Jack Galbraith shook his head and smirked. ‘Tell him, Bryn,’ he instructed. ‘Give him the low-down on the little flower he’s so concerned about.’

  ‘She was a hooker, Sergeant.’

  ‘A Cardiff tart,’ Jack Galbraith amplified. ‘Called herself Miss Danielle.’

  I tried to absorb my surprise. ‘They picked her up in a rural petrol station. The minibus driver said she was hitching.’

  ‘That was the cover story,’ Bryn explained.

  ‘It was organized, Capaldi.’

  ‘It was meant to be a stag event,’ Bryn clarified. ‘They were setting up a surprise for the two bachelors in the group. They were meant to believe that the girl was just an innocent hitchhiker.’

  ‘Then, surprise, surprise, the girl drops the Young Rambler guise’ – Jack Galbraith clapped his hands together – ‘and at least one of our two virgins gets his rocks off, courtesy of his buddies.’

  I tried to get my head round it. They waited me out. ‘But they took her up to a hut in a forest. That’s where I’ve come from.’

  Jack Galbraith nodded. ‘We gathered that. And we also notice that you haven’t returned clutching a dripping axe in the evidence bag.’

  ‘Did you see anything up there that we should be concerned about?’ Bryn asked.

  I thought about the crumpled tissue, the log rounds, the bracken bed. ‘No, sir.’ I shook my head and frowned. ‘But I don’t get it.’

  ‘Where have we lost you, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith asked.

  ‘Why did they stay up there for the night? The men, I mean. It was cold and damp. Uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to describe it. And they must have realized the furore it would cause.’

  ‘That’s where it went wrong for them,’ Jack Galbraith said. ‘According to the master plan they were supposed to have their party, get the virgins’ cherries popped, and be back in their beds, tucked up with their loved ones, before they were missed.’ He eyed me carefully. ‘Tell Capaldi the story we were told, Bryn.’

  I picked up on his use of the word ‘story’. Jack Galbraith was very precise with his words. And instead of the savaging I’d been expecting, he was being relatively gentle with me. Was I about to discover the reason?

  ‘They claim that they were very drunk. That, despite the conditions up there, they slept through until the morning.’

  I remembered the sight of them coming down the hill. ‘They did look pretty rough,’ I conceded. ‘One of them, the big one, was totally out of it.’

  Jack Galbraith grinned. ‘Paul Evans, one of the virgin bachelors. That must have been some kind of a fuck, eh?’

  ‘It didn’t look like rapture to me, sir,’ I observed.

  ‘But it wasn’t just the demon drink that was their undoing.’

  ‘No?’ I answered cautiously. He looked amused. I wondered if he had found some way to fold me into the blame for this.

  He grinned. ‘No, it was the Big Bad Pimp.’

  ‘Sir?’

  Jack Galbraith gestured, and Bryn took over. ‘They’re claiming that it was the girl’s pimp who drove the minibus away.’

  ‘A pimp … ?’ I didn’t try to hide my astonishment.

  He nodded. ‘According to the men, he had never been part of the arrangement. They had assumed that they could persuade the minibus driver to take them up to the hut, then just give him a good bung for his waiting-around time.’

  ‘The driver never mentioned that.’

  ‘They never got round to negotiating it. When the girl was picked up at the service station she announced that the deal had changed. She wanted her pimp with her. Told them that she felt vulnerable out here in the boondocks without protection.’

  I pondered it, seeing how the fit started to work for them. ‘So the girl has it arranged that this Cardiff pimp is waiting in a lay-by in the middle of nowhere, all set to cut the minibus driver adrift, jump into the driving seat and carry them away?’

  ‘That’s more or less how the authorized version goes,’ Jack Galbraith confirmed.

  ‘Which means that there’s no drinking and driving involved?’

  He nodded. ‘Correct. Our heroes remain unblemished.’

  ‘And then they’re abandoned by the pimp and his girl.’

  ‘Like some kind of fairy story, isn’t it? Our bunch of poor foundlings left to their cruel fate in a woodsman’s hut in the middle of the dark fucking forest.’

  I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t work, sir.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘The place where we found the empty minibus this morning – if that was the rendezvous, the place where the pimp and the girl had arranged to be picked up and taken back to Cardiff – they would never have found it. Not in the dark, not in that warren of forestry tracks. Chances are, this guy’s never driven in a night situation that didn’t involve street lights.’

  Jack Galbraith and Bryn exchanged a glance. ‘It does work, Sergeant,’ Bryn said.

  ‘Why?’

  Jack Galbraith pulled a face. ‘Because we have five solid, upright and honest citizens who all say that that was the way it happened. And we’re all so dreadfully sorry to have inconvenienced everyone.’

  ‘They even had a whip-round while they were here to pay for the dam
age to the minibus,’ Bryn added.

  ‘Damage caused by the pimp, mind you. These guys are nothing if not magnanimous,’ Jack Galbraith observed with an ironic chuckle. ‘And it also works because I don’t have any relevant reports of a missing person, or a woman claiming that she has been abducted and abused.’

  ‘Has anyone in Cardiff been able to talk to the girl?’

  They both shook their heads. Jack Galbraith frowned. ‘No. And do you know why? Because the sanctimonious fucks claim that they found the number in a telephone booth. And now they’ve lost it.’

  ‘Do Vice know this Miss Danielle?’

  ‘Nothing matching the description we’ve been given,’ Bryn replied. ‘Either the girl was using a false name, or the men don’t want us to trace her.’

  ‘So they just walk? It’s over?’

  Jack Galbraith nodded. ‘There’s nowhere to take it. These bastards are too respectable for us to resort to the rubber hose, never mind the thumbscrews.’

  I didn’t know whether that was a coded invitation for me to opt out of their enforced inaction. I accepted it as such anyway. And then I remembered that we had another missing person. ‘There were supposed to be six men. Only five came down the hill.’

  ‘They dropped off one of their number on the way. He never went into the forest.’ He looked over at Bryn for amplification.

  Bryn checked his notes. ‘Boon Paterson. He was on leave from the Army, going home today. He asked to be let out in Dinas.’

  That fitted in with the six pixie stools that I had counted in the hut. ‘What kind of a name is Boon?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know, Sergeant Capaldi,’ Jack Galbraith replied with a mean chuckle, making a drawn-out meal of my surname.

  It was already dark when they left, the afternoon colder now and winter-killed. I felt oddly lonely watching them go, like I was the patsy who had somehow been tricked into staying behind to man the empty gulag.

  The Fleece didn’t exactly lift my heart with gladness. It was virtually empty. Locked into a race memory of not being able to drink on a Sunday, the old men who usually occupied the back bar stayed away.