Good People

by Ewart Hutton

  I smiled at him. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone.’

  ‘And my last drop was eleven o’clock Saturday morning. Bachdre Kennels, half an hour away from my place.’

  ‘You were seen, Tony. Seven, half past seven, Saturday night.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve got a motorbike. A trials bike, it doesn’t take passengers.’

  He was lying. But why? He didn’t look like a man who would give a toss for company rules.

  ‘My only concern is for the woman.’

  He held my gaze and shook his head.

  ‘You were seen with her.’

  He just shrugged; he knew that he didn’t have to give me any more. But he didn’t smile. That was important. He wasn’t cocky about it. I looked for the natural line of leverage.

  ‘I’m worried about her, Tony. She got into a minibus with six drunk guys, and she hasn’t been seen since.’

  He shook his head and dropped eye contact. ‘I’ve nothing more to say.’

  He wasn’t going to tell me. What had he been doing on Saturday that he did not want me to know about?

  I spat on my palm and laid it flat on the seat between us. An old Ligurian trick of my father’s. Sometimes it worked, impressing strangers with the deep scope and breadth of my ouvrier honesty. ‘This goes no further, I promise you. Anything you tell me stays here. Stays strictly between us.’

  He glanced down at my hand, and then up at me with a look that told me he had been around too many gypsies in his time to fall for that one. ‘You’re a cop,’ he stated simply.

  ‘I can be trusted,’ I replied earnestly.

  A knowing smile split his lips.

  ‘What can I do to prove that?’ I asked, still hoping that rhetoric and persuasion were going to carry me. Not quite catching the shift in his concentration. Not realizing that the bastard had actually started to think about it.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Of course I’m serious. I promise – you can trust me.’

  ‘No. About proving it?’

  ‘Does that mean you did give the woman a lift?’

  He grinned. ‘You haven’t earned my trust yet.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  He held up a mobile phone. ‘You know what this is?’

  ‘It’s a mobile phone.’

  ‘It’s also a camera.’ He smiled as my expression turned puzzled, and inclined his head towards the rear of the truck. ‘Do you know what I carry in the back there?’

  He lowered the tailgate. I understood then why the sides of the truck were so high. To stop people seeing the dead meat.

  ‘Farm casualties,’ he explained. ‘We get paid to pick them up and dispose of them.’

  The components of the pile in the back of the truck were small in number, but they made a big gruesome bundle. Two dead sheep tangled on top of a black-and-white cow, which lay on its side, legs splayed out, as stiff as driftwood. The harness and wire cables from a winch curled over the grouping. The smell was noxious. An ammoniacal reek from stale urine, combined with lanolin, and the start of decomposition. The sawdust that had been used to cover the truck bed had absorbed unimaginable fluids and turned to gelatinous slurry.

  ‘Jesus …’ I gagged involuntarily.

  He laughed. ‘You get used to it. These ones are fresh.’

  I had no intention of getting used to it. ‘Why are you showing me this?’

  ‘This is the deal.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘You’ve got to shag the cow.’

  I waited for the punchline. It took me a minute to realize that it had already arrived. He was serious. ‘You can’t really expect me to …’ The line was too absurd to finish.

  ‘I don’t expect you to do anything. You want something from me. You need to pay a price.’ He pointed at the rear end of the cow with his mobile phone. ‘I want a shot on this which makes it look like you’re fucking that thing.’

  ‘Are you some kind of pervert?’

  ‘No, I just want to be safe. I need a cast-iron guarantee that if I tell you things you have a real good reason not to spread them. I can’t think of a better reason than a picture like that.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘That’s your choice. It’s all voluntary, Sergeant Capaldi.’

  Oh fuck … We had stopped pretending. We now both knew that he had a story to tell me. ‘Why are you making me this offer?’

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘I want to help the girl.’

  ‘Do it for her then,’ I entreated.

  ‘No. I need to keep myself covered.’

  ‘You want win–win?’

  ‘Fucking right I do.’

  I shook my head slowly. It had to stop here. She was a stranger. She would have moved on, totally oblivious of my search for her. She didn’t need any kind of sacrifice. Bryn Jones was right, no crime had been reported, no one was missing. She would be back in Cardiff by now. Where I should really be, instead of discussing necrophilic bestiality with a twisted hayseed under a too big sky. It was time to let go.

  He lifted the tailgate tentatively. ‘Okay?’ he asked. ‘I drive off now and you leave me alone?’

  I started to nod. ‘Tell me,’ I blurted. ‘One thing …’

  He stared at me.

  ‘Was she a prostitute?’

  I thought that he wasn’t going to answer.

  ‘No.’

  Another flash on Regine Broussard.

  Oh fuck …

  I drew the line at dropping my trousers. We had a brief, heated, artistic disagreement over that, until I persuaded him that it could all be done by inference. By posture, camera angle, and the loose ends of my belt drooping free.

  He had the grace to lend me a pair of heavy-soled rubber boots. The kind that abattoir workers wear when they hose the crud off the floor. Crouched there, arms splayed, trying to get into position while he shouted directions, I must have looked like some monumental fool.

  Fool … ? I was kidding myself. Substituting vanity for the bigger picture. Which had me flying way off the outer scale of foolishness by simulating penetrative sex on the rear end of a dead sideways cow.

  Back in the truck cab, trying to warm up, he wanted to show me the images.

  I shook my head. ‘If those pictures ever see the light of anyone else’s day, I will arrange it so you have your balls cut off. And believe me, I can do it. I have the contacts. I’m a cop, and I’m half Italian.’

  ‘Don’t worry, they’re just my insurance.’

  I held a Bad Cop stare on him for a moment to underscore the threat. ‘So, what were you doing wrong on Saturday afternoon?’

  He braced himself for it, still not comfortable with confessing to me, despite the huge security deposit he had just obtained. ‘I was using the truck to run some deer carcasses for a couple of mates.’

  ‘Poached?’

  He shrugged. ‘I was just doing the delivering.’

  ‘You bastard!’ I exploded. ‘You put me through that depraved fucking charade to cover up a bit of poaching.’

  He shot me an aggrieved pout. ‘My mates take trust very seriously. The man whose land the deer came from is a vindictive bastard. And I was using the company’s truck.’

  ‘Poaching.’ I snorted dismissively.

  ‘You seemed to think it was worth it at the time.’

  He was right. I had accepted the price. I calmed myself down. ‘Where to?’

  ‘A butcher down on the Radnor, Herefordshire border.’

  ‘Where did you pick the woman up?’

  He looked at me, surprised that I didn’t want more detail on the butcher. ‘On my way home. Near Painscastle. I was sticking to the back roads.’

  ‘Show me.’ I flicked through his road atlas to get to the right page. He pointed. It was a minor road that strung a line of nondescript villages together. ‘Is this where she had started from?’

  ‘No, she’d come from somewhere outside Hereford. She
’d got sidetracked, a lift from a farmer who’d left her there. The road was quiet, she was lucky that I came along.’

  Hereford again. I tucked the reference away.

  ‘Where did she want to go?’

  He grinned. ‘Would you believe Ireland?’

  I contained my surprise. ‘Was she Irish?’

  ‘No, she was foreign.’

  ‘What kind of foreign?’

  He pulled a face. ‘She told me, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to keep asking in case she thought I was thick. It wasn’t a common foreign country though. I would have got something like France, or Germany, or Poland.’

  ‘How well did she speak English?’

  ‘A bit of an accent and a few words the wrong way round, but pretty good really.’

  ‘Did she tell you her name?’

  He pulled his contrite face again. ‘She told me, but I didn’t really get that either. It was something foreign, beginning with an “M”.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’

  He nodded. ‘She was a real smiler. Big high cheeks that puffed out when she grinned. Her face was small but kind of chubby. Not fat or anything. Just …’ He searched for the description. ‘Just nice.’

  She sounded Slavic. Or Scandinavian with the blonde hair? ‘Did she say why she was going to Ireland?’

  ‘To meet up with her boyfriend. I don’t know whether she was talking about an Irish lad, or a boy from her own country who was working over there. She knew that she had to get a ferry to Dublin, and she would be met there.’

  A boyfriend. The fit went in. The carrier bag from Hereford with the aftershave and the underpants. Presents for the beloved. The worry was that she would not have left those behind lightly.

  ‘Not quite the straight-arrow run to Holyhead where you dropped her, was it, Tony?’ I said, smiling to soften the accusation.

  He looked hurt. ‘That wasn’t my fault. I even suggested taking her into Newtown to catch a train. It was already dark by then. But she didn’t like that idea.’

  ‘Too expensive?’

  ‘I don’t think that was it. She had already asked me if I knew how strict the Immigration people were at the ferry port. I got the impression that she thought there might be too many people asking questions on a train.’

  ‘The service station was her choice?’ I asked, letting him hear my doubt.

  ‘Yes. We checked the map. She wanted to stick to the country roads, she said.’

  ‘You liked her?’ I asked.

  The question puzzled him. He looked at me warily, wondering where I was going with this. ‘I liked what I saw of her,’ he answered guardedly.

  ‘Weren’t you concerned for her? It’s night now. The dead of winter. She’s a stranger, and you’ve left her in the middle of nowhere.’

  He bristled. ‘It wasn’t the middle of nowhere. I left her where it was light, and where she could buy stuff if she needed it. I even bought her chocolate. And water. I’ve never bought a bottle of fucking water in my life before. And I went back.’

  ‘You went back?’

  ‘Everyone was coming into town at that time of night. I reckoned she wouldn’t be able to get a lift. So I gave her about half an hour to get fed up, and then I went back to see if she wanted somewhere to stay for the night.’ He held up his hands as if anticipating a protest. ‘Just a bed, mind you. I didn’t have any other intentions.’

  ‘But she turned you down?’

  ‘No. She wasn’t there. She’d already gone.’

  This rocked me. ‘Tell me, Tony, what time would this be?’ I asked very carefully.

  He thought about it. His head moving slightly with the enumeration process. ‘About eight o’clock. No later than quarter past. I hung around for a while to make sure that she hadn’t just gone for a bit of a wander.’

  It made no sense. Her destiny lay with that minibus one and a half hours later. So where had she disappeared to?

  ‘Sure you don’t want to have a look?’

  I turned round. He was holding the phone up tauntingly, a big grin on his face. I had counted on him not being able to resist it.

  I snatched the phone out of his hand.

  A split second of jaw-dropped surprise, and then he wailed, ‘You bastard –’ Making a lunge for it.

  I held him back with my forearm, the other hand holding the phone up out of his reach.

  ‘Give that back to me, you fucker!’ He was snarling now, pushing hard, trying to snatch at the phone in my hand. He was straining, twisted out of balance. I dipped the forearm I was using to restrain him, and used my elbow to chop him hard in the groin.

  A huge gasp of air fused into a groan and he went slack. For a moment all he could do was stare at me reproachfully, mouth wide open like a betrayed carp.

  He shook his head. ‘I should have known better than to trust a fucking cop.’

  ‘You didn’t trust me,’ I corrected him. ‘You tried using extortion. I gave you my word, and that’s all you need.’ I opened the door and backed out of the cab holding up the phone. ‘I’m impounding this on suspicion that it’s been used to take pornographic images.’

  4

  I christened her Magda. I was getting closer. Most likely East European. A student or a migrant worker, probably running in the wrong direction from an expired work permit.

  Not a prostitute from Cardiff.

  I had been vindicated. I had my own proof that the group had been lying. Now I had to face the scary edge of that triumph. What had really happened in the hut on Saturday night? Where was the girl now?

  I spent the next two and a half hours back at the service station watching the CCTV footage in real time. I saw Tony Griffiths walk across the forecourt to buy the chocolate and water. He had been careful, he’d kept his truck out of surveillance range. But I didn’t see Magda. Not until the minibus.

  I called Bryn Jones in Carmarthen.

  ‘Sir, I have uncorroborated evidence that the woman might have been an East European student.’

  ‘How uncorroborated?’

  ‘No one is going to speak up.’

  ‘Can you be any more specific than East European?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir, sorry.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll spread the word informally. See if we have any reports of missing persons that match out there in migrant-worker land.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  I sat in my car and put in enough calls about the other cases I was working on to log that I was still on the planet. Just. I even called the guy in Caernarfon about the Kawasaki quad bike. Now that Tony Griffiths had told me that Magda had been making for the ferry in Holyhead, I wanted to keep an excuse to visit North Wales active.

  I leaned back, closed my eyes, and tried to recall the image of the group coming down the hill on that cold Sunday morning. The two brothers in front, the other three staggering behind them.

  Who to brace?

  I could probably forget the three with partners. The McGuire brothers and Les Tucker. They would now have backtracked with enough explanations and excuses to make them as virtuous as Mother Teresa. Paul Evans, the big one, would either be dumb or belligerent. I didn’t relish tackling either persona.

  I called David Williams at The Fleece.

  ‘Trevor Vaughan, the hill farmer. How do I find him?’ I asked.

  I wrote down the directions. As usual I marvelled at how complicated it was trying to find anywhere in the countryside.

  ‘Anything else you can give me on him?’

  ‘Quiet. Nice man. Inoffensive.’ He went silent.

  ‘Am I hearing hesitation?’

  ‘I don’t like spreading unsubstantiated rumours.’

  ‘Yes, you do – so give.’

  ‘There’s talk that he’s done this before. Visited prostitutes.’

  ‘Am I missing something in Dinas? Is there a local knocking shop?’

  He laughed. ‘No, Sandra wouldn’t let me set it up. I’m not talking about Dinas; it’s trips away, to
London or Cardiff, rugby games, agricultural shows, stuff like that.’

  I thanked him and hung up. So the talk was that Trevor Vaughan wasn’t a virgin. So why did the rest of the group use him and Paul as an excuse for the presence of the girl? Probably to wrap themselves in sanctity, and preserve them from the wrath of their partners. Or was it their intention to test the truth of the rumours?

  Some friends.

  The road to Trevor Vaughan’s farm followed a small river, which had receded to an alder-lined brook by the time it arrived. The hills were steeper here, the land poorer; sessile oaks, birch, and hazel clumps in the tight dingles, monoculture green pasture on the slopes where the bracken had been defeated, and glimpses of the wilder heather topknot on the open hill above.

  A rough, potholed drive led off the road past an empty bungalow and a large new lambing shed to the farmhouse. No dogs barked. An old timber-framed barn formed a courtyard with an unloved, two-storey, whitewashed stone house, raised above the yard. Its slate roof was covered with lichen, and the old-fashioned metal windows were in need of painting.

  I’d been around these parts long enough to know not to let the air of neglect fool me. These people could probably have bought a small suburban street in Cardiff outright. They just didn’t waste it on front, or what they regarded as frippery. They saved it for the important things in life: livestock and land.

  I parked in the courtyard and got out of the car. Still no dogs. Just the sound of cattle lowing in one of the outbuildings. A woman appeared from around the side of the house wiping her hands on an apron. Small-framed, short grey hair, spectacles, and an expression that didn’t qualify as welcoming.

  ‘We don’t see representatives without an appointment,’ she announced in a surprisingly firm voice.

  ‘I’m not a rep,’ I said, opening my warrant card. ‘I’m a policeman – Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi. Are you Mrs Vaughan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is Trevor around?’

  She scowled. ‘I thought we were finished with that business. Emrys Hughes told Trevor that it was over.’

  I smiled. ‘I just need to ask a couple more questions.’

  ‘You’ll have to come back another time.’ She inclined her head at the hill behind the house. ‘He’s busy up there with the sheep.’