Good People

by Ewart Hutton

  ‘And lights?’

  ‘Yes.’ He thought about it. ‘Gas lanterns. They were already there.’

  ‘And then suddenly you weren’t so happy?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not when it was suggested that Paul or I should team up with the girl.’

  ‘What did she think of that idea?’

  ‘I don’t know, it wasn’t said in front of her.’

  ‘What about Paul?’

  ‘You saw what he looked like in the morning? He was even worse then. He was completely out of it, totally wrecked.’

  ‘And you went and hid in the other room?’

  ‘I did need to sleep. I told you: I was tired.’

  ‘And when you wake up, the party is over. Magda, Miss Danielle, whatever she’s called has gone safely on her way. The minibus has been returned. And, apart from your hangovers, everything is all right with the world?’

  He nodded, eager to confirm my summation. ‘Something like that. I don’t know how they managed to organize it, though. And it wasn’t quite as straightforward as you suggest. We had to face our families. They’d been worried stiff about us.’

  ‘Well, that’s a real fucking shame, Trevor,’ I hissed, letting him hear real venom.

  His head jerked, taken aback by my new tone. ‘It’s the truth,’ he protested.

  ‘No, it’s not. You’re covering for them. Something bad happened up there, and you know it.’

  He shook his head frantically.

  ‘What was it, Trevor? Dancing, bit of light smooching, everyone having a good time … until one of the guys tries to take it just a bit too far?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘The girl doesn’t like it. This is not fun any more. The guys try to persuade her to loosen up.’ I spread my arms, jiggling, looming towards him, playing the drunk. ‘But this is just scary. The girl is frightened now. Only the boys can’t smell that fear. Or if they can, they mistake it for sex. They want to continue to party. She’s being unreasonable. Fucking slag, after all. A foreigner. She wants this really. What else did she think was going to happen?’

  ‘Nothing like that happened.’

  ‘Was she raped, Trevor? Was she slapped around? Was she held down? Or was she just so terrified by that time that she acquiesced and you bastards put the conquest down to your fucking charm and social skills?’

  ‘No one was hurt!’ he yelled. ‘No one was abused or assaulted. Why won’t you believe me?’

  I went up into his face and yelled back, ‘Because you weren’t fucking there – you said that you were asleep.’

  He dropped his face into his hands. ‘You don’t understand,’ he shrieked. ‘This has nothing to do with that woman, this has to do with Boon.’

  He shook his head frantically, retracting even before I had had a chance to ask him for confirmation.

  ‘Boon Paterson was there?’ I asked, not concealing my surprise.

  He backtracked fast, stammering, ‘No … No … We dropped him off … I just told you that …’

  ‘You’re lying, Trevor. What did you mean when you said that this had to do with Boon?’

  ‘Nothing. You confused me. It was a slip of the tongue.’

  I tried to run some sense into it. If Boon had been there, why had the group decided to cover it up? And why hadn’t he turned up with the others the following morning? I had thought that I had two separate instances of missing people. Was it possible that they might both be in the same basket? Magda and Boon?

  Jesus, had my apartheid crack been closer to the mark than I could have realized?

  ‘Was Boon hurt?’

  ‘No.’ He replied sharply. But there was another tiny time-lag here that I picked up on. The response and some kind of a memory association ever so slightly out of synch. ‘Boon wasn’t there. How could he have been hurt?’

  ‘You said no one was hurt up there. You used the plural.’

  He shook his head sharply. ‘You got me confused. I meant her. The woman wasn’t hurt.’

  ‘Trevor, no one knows I’m here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He shrank away from me, and his eyebrows rose as he sensed the beginnings of a threat.

  And it had crossed my mind. To shock it out of him. A short right jab to the nose to let blood, pain and ratcheted sinew unlock the vault. But could I take the risk that, in his current state, pain wasn’t what he wanted? The catharsis of punishment?

  ‘Everyone thinks I’m in North Wales. No one would ever know that you told me anything.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell you.’

  ‘You can stop it here, Trevor. You can get me off all of your backs. And it stays just between us, I promise. No one else ever knows.’

  He stared at me. ‘How?’ he said it more as a breath than a word.

  ‘I trust you. If you can tell me that Magda is safe and well, I will believe you. I’ll accept it, and that will be the end of it.’

  He searched for the catch. ‘All I have to do is tell you that?’

  I smiled. ‘Not quite. You need to convince me.’

  He was getting close. But guilt and fear were still rippling like humps in a rug, threatening to trip him. ‘They’re my best friends,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘So do them a favour. Get me out of their lives.’

  ‘You promise?’ His look was gaunt. He was telling me that his entire faith in the future of the human race was relying on my answer.

  I nodded. ‘I promise.’

  He stared at me for a moment, still teetering. He closed his eyes, the decision made. ‘Ken and Les drove the minibus over to Ponterwyd to pick up the first bus through to Aberystwyth in the morning. From there they were going to make their way to Holyhead. For the ferry to Dublin.’

  ‘That was very kind of Ken and Les.’

  ‘It wasn’t a rash decision, they all talked about it through the night.’

  ‘I thought you were asleep?’

  ‘They told me about it in the morning.’

  ‘And you believe them?’

  He looked hurt. ‘They’re my friends. Why would they lie to me?’

  ‘You used the plural again, Trevor. You said they were going to Holyhead.’

  He looked at me, surprised that I hadn’t got it.

  ‘Boon went with her.’

  It made a certain crooked kind of sense. If the explanation had been flawless I wouldn’t have believed it. But I was halfway there to giving this a chance.

  I drove the back roads slowly, thinking about what Trevor had told me. Everything he told me, he had been told. Second-hand news, I reminded myself.

  The girl was a hitchhiker. It had all started when she was offered a lift, and told them that she was on the way to Ireland. Except, of course, for Boon Paterson it had started long before that. A nagging and escalating dissatisfaction with his life in the Army. The prospect of a posting to Afghanistan looming. Nevertheless, until that point, he had managed to resign himself to seeing his term out.

  But in that minibus, Boon had had a eureka moment. Ireland … Ireland, and then on to Amsterdam, to pick up with some people in the music scene there. People that he had got close to when he had been stationed in Germany. He kept it to himself at first. The suggestion to Gordon that he help him ditch the minibus driver was, ostensibly, just to keep the party going and to keep it private. Keep his last day with them running. Boon drove. This was his trip now, and he was staying in charge of it. He kept them singing, while Les guided him up into the forest.

  He dropped it on them in the hut. The possibility that had been sparked by the arrival of the girl, the state of his mind, and all of them being together at the catalytic moment. Because none of it would work without them being prepared to stretch their friendship. To lie for him. He missed out the other element. Booze. How it might never have crossed his mind, and how the others would never have agreed to it, if it hadn’t happened at the tail end of a long day’s drinking.

  But they did. After arguments, reasonin
g and pleas, when they realized that he was serious, they agreed to lie for him. Not just that, but to face up to a degree of shame and humiliation. To concoct a story of a Cardiff prostitute to give him time to get clear. Les and Ken drove the minibus to his house to pick up his belongings, and then to Ponterwyd for the bus to Aberystwyth. They then drove back, stopping so Les could get one of his quad bikes, which they used to return to the hut after they had dropped off the minibus.

  True friendship.

  It tied in with Tony Griffiths’s version. The truck driver had said that Magda was on her way to Ireland, but she didn’t want to use public transport. Maybe that had changed when an escort became available. Perhaps with Boon she felt less exposed. Travelling with a native.

  A bird, an owl probably, flew in a low, swooping glide through my headlight beams. I swerved instinctively, and almost put myself into a ditch. I stopped, turned the lights and the engine off, and let the dark and the silence blanket me.

  What was I really doing, driving around in the dead hours of the night?

  I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to go to sleep and wake up knowing that Magda had passed out of my life and I was back in a realm of stolen quad bikes and rustled sheep. I didn’t want to rumble over the bridge into Hen Felin Caravan Park with an instinct lifting the hairs on the back of my neck, telling me that Mackay might be staking out my home.

  Or was it really because I wanted to stay out so late that only people working a night shift were eligible to visit?

  The Sychnant Nursing Home was a large mock-gothic pile, which, in the dark, looked like it should have had a crooked-back lunatic dancing on the rooftop in monumental rain, backlit by forked lightening.

  Instead it was just dark. Which was disturbing. The excuse I was using for visiting wasn’t strong enough to warrant waking the place up. I drove towards the front of the house, conscious of the sound of my wheels on the gravel drive. The closer I got, the quieter the place looked.

  I made a wide turn in front of the house, preparing to roll back out to the road, when I caught sight of a lighted window. It was in a single-storey wing that ran back from the main house. I parked. An ultra-bright security light popped on as I approached the door nearest the lighted window.

  The door opened on a security chain after I knocked. The glare from the light was too bright for me to make out who was standing in the gap watching me.

  I held up my warrant card like a talisman. ‘Sergeant Capaldi – I’m sorry about the time, but I’d like to speak to Mrs Paterson, if she’s available.’

  The silence and the watching held for a few more beats.

  ‘It’s all right, Latifa …’ Sally Paterson’s voice approached. The security chain clattered and the door opened. Sally Paterson stood there backlit. ‘Sergeant Capaldi.’ She didn’t sound surprised to see me. I felt a little twinge at the formality of the greeting, and wondered whether I wasn’t being a bit foolish. ‘Please, come in.’

  I entered a large, commercially equipped kitchen, banks of huge pans, ranges of stainless-steel equipment, and the smell of heavy-duty cleaning products, grease, and over-boiled green vegetables.

  ‘We’ll stay in here, if that’s all right with you.’ She turned to the other woman, a short, dark-skinned Asian of indeterminate age, wearing the same pink polyester housecoat as Sally. ‘Are you okay keeping an eye on things, Latifa, while I speak to the sergeant?’

  ‘Okay.’ Latifa nodded and left the room, giving me a look that could have been baleful or sympathetic.

  I sat down at a long refectory table while Sally made tea. ‘You don’t seem very surprised to see me.’

  ‘I’ve had time to adjust. We watched your arrival on the CCTV monitors.’ She turned her head and smiled. ‘You made a change from the foxes and the deer.’

  ‘You didn’t answer the door?’

  ‘I’m teaching Latifa the social niceties.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s picking them up.’

  ‘She might have been a bit intimidated by your policeman’s stance.’

  ‘You saw that?’

  ‘At this time of night, we watch everything that’s going.’

  The kettle boiled, breaking the flow. She turned away to make the tea. It was one of those awkward silences when you both realize that you have been prancing ahead of yourselves.

  ‘So, what brings you here at this hour?’ she asked, bringing our tea over and sitting down opposite me. I got the feeling that she had been rehearsing building confidence into the expression that went with the question.

  ‘I’ve got some nonattributable news about Boon.’

  ‘Which is good news.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘You’ve heard already?’ I asked, surprised.

  She laughed softly at my expression. ‘No, it’s just that I don’t see you as the kind of cruel bastard who would turn up at …’ she glanced up at the wall clock ‘. . . ten past two in the morning to deliver bad news to a lady.’

  ‘It’s also unverifiable.’

  ‘Enough with the riders. The news, please?’

  ‘He may be on his way to Amsterdam, via Ireland.’

  She frowned, taking a few moments to think about it. ‘He’s okay?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware.’

  ‘Has he deserted?’

  I shrugged. ‘I can’t answer that. I don’t know any of the background.’

  ‘The daft bugger!’ she exclaimed crossly, but I caught a waft of relief under it.

  ‘Would Amsterdam fit?’ I asked.

  She nodded. ‘He spent a lot of time there when he was stationed in Germany.’ Then another thought struck her. ‘Does the Army know this?’

  ‘I haven’t told them. And I won’t be telling them, either. I’ve had to take a vow of silence.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ she pointed out.

  ‘I’m allowing myself a dispensation in your case.’

  She smiled, acknowledging the favour. She shook her head exasperatedly. ‘Via Ireland? Why on earth didn’t he just get on a train or a plane and go there directly? If he had made up his mind, why faff about going the long way round?’

  ‘It happens sometimes. People running away, they need the subterfuge. They have a false idea of how visible they are.’

  She went silent. I winced inwardly, wishing that I hadn’t used the words running away. She pulled a philosophical smile. ‘Ah well … At least I now know that he’s not in a car wreck. Which is something. Which is a lot.’ She underscored the relief of it with a sharp nod of her head. ‘I suppose all I can do now is wait until he decides to grace me with contact.’ She smiled wistfully, and screwed up her face at me. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about you …’

  The change in direction took me unawares. ‘You have?’ I blurted, feeling my face reddening.

  ‘Yes. I got to thinking about missing girls.’

  I realized my mistake and notched my expression down from the boudoir and back into the hallway. Curiosity cushioned the let-down. ‘I thought we had agreed that it didn’t happen here.’

  ‘That’s just it. I thought about it again. And then realized that it might have happened.’

  ‘Might?’

  ‘Yes. Two that I know of. They used to work here. Not at the same time. But they both walked out without any warning. Packed their bags and were gone in the morning.’

  ‘Were they reported?’

  ‘I think so. You’d have to ask Joan Harvey about that. She runs the place. It’s terrible though, isn’t it?’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘Because of who they were, we never actually worried that anything might have happened to them. That’s why I never put this together when you asked that time.’

  ‘Because of who they were?’ I turned it into a question.

  She hunched her shoulders apologetically. ‘How to put it nicely? Townies? Roll-throughs?

  ‘Roll-throughs?’

  She laughed. ‘It’s one of the names locals use for incomers. They expect us to move on.’
>
  ‘So these girls weren’t locals?’

  ‘No, that’s my point. They came from Manchester, I think. They were tough. We assumed that they could look after themselves. That’s why we never considered them as “missing” per se. We just thought that they’d got fed up. Had enough of the quiet life and the dark nights, and moved on.’

  ‘Can you remember their names?’ I asked, taking my notebook out.

  ‘Colette something, and Donna … Gallagher, I think. You’d have to check with Joan Harvey.’

  ‘What sort of age were they?’

  She didn’t answer. She stood up, a resigned and practised smile forming that wasn’t meant for me. I turned round on the bench. A tiny old woman in a pale green flannel nightgown stood in the doorway. A sparse puff of white hair over a face and neck creviced with wrinkles.

  Sally moved towards her. ‘You need to go, do you, Mary?’

  It was too late. She had already been. I noticed the damp-dark hem of her nightgown and the trail of urine that was now pooling on the vinyl floor below her. I stood up. ‘I think it’s time I got out of your way.’

  She smiled at me resignedly. ‘Duty calls.’ She put her hands gently on Mary’s shoulders, feeling for the steering mechanism.

  ‘Glyn …’ I was at the door when she called out. I turned. She was smiling. ‘You know, someday I’d really like you to see me in something a bit more flattering than an old dressing gown and this.’ She dropped her chin to indicate the polyester housecoat.

  There was a devastatingly urbane and romantic response to that somewhere. I didn’t find it. Instead I blushed for the second time that night. ‘Sure …’ I stammered.

  ‘Call me,’ she instructed, rescuing me. ‘I don’t work every night.’

  I crossed the gravel to the car, shaking off my ineptitude and beginning to feel jaunty. I had a date to arrange. It was then that the irony hit me. Sally had laid the possibility of two new missing girls on me just when I had almost reached the point of waving Magda off into her Irish sunset.

  I was still meant to be in Caernarfon, so I stayed in Unit 13 the next day, kept my head down, and caught up with a backlog of paperwork. My telephone rang a few times but I just monitored the answerphone. No more calls from Mackay; Emrys Hughes rang twice, and Bryn Jones once. Both left messages asking me to call them back. Being in pretend North Wales, a land where the mountains screwed communications even more than here, I ignored them.