Good People

by Ewart Hutton

  ‘They were all together?’

  He thought hard about that. ‘I don’t know. I keep going over that. And I still don’t know. They were always set against a darker background, just a cluster, a group. They never shifted into individuals. At no point was I able to count them off.’

  ‘You didn’t join them?’ I asked.

  ‘I was going to,’ he said, distress shifting into his voice. ‘But something made me hold back.’ He looked at me intently. ‘Something told me that I was not meant to be there. I was not meant to be a part of this.’

  ‘What were they doing?’ I asked, registering his despair.

  I had to strain to catch his reply. ‘I think they were digging.’

  Poor bastard … He had been torturing himself. On top of the lousy price of sheep, and his deep baseline sexual anxiety, he now had to contend with the possibility that he had been excluded and lied to by his very best friends. Who might also, either by accident or design, have done something terrible to Boon Paterson.

  He had stood out there alone in the dark and passed beyond the moment when he could have called out to them and had his answer. Because he wasn’t entirely sure that he really wanted the answer. Just in case. So he had sneaked back to the hut and into his bracken burrow without anyone knowing he had been out. He had lain there, straining for sounds that would reassure him. He had heard them return from the woods, but no voices to let him count off the register.

  And then he heard the minibus starting up. By the time he got outside it had gone. He could see the light wash from its headlights descending through the trees. Gordon had been left behind to give him the news that Ken and Les were helping Boon secure his new future.

  ‘Did I believe them?’ He phrased the question for me before I could ask it. ‘I willed myself to. Anything else was too awful to contemplate.’ He closed his eyes tight shut. I could picture the image that was gripping him. Those men, fused together in the dark, standing over a hole in the ground.

  ‘If it was that dark, how could you tell that they were digging?’ I asked. The question had been troubling me.

  ‘It was the sound of it. I’ve dug enough holes for fence posts in my time to know that sound.’

  ‘Could you find the place again?’

  He looked at me with what could have been horror. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Don’t you want that doubt dispelled?’

  ‘I can live with it.’

  ‘It will get worse.’

  ‘It’s dark now.’

  ‘It was dark then,’ I reminded him.

  He shivered visibly and pulled his coat tightly around him. He swivelled, and without a word he set off across the clearing to a disused logging trail with scrub grass growing in the central ridge. We passed through the stand of trees at the edge of the clearing and into an area that had been clear-felled on either side. The lack of trees gave us a lighter backdrop, and I followed a few paces behind his silhouette.

  He stopped. We were on the lip of a ridge, the track dropping obliquely away in front of us, curving down into a dark stand of young spruce trees.

  ‘Are we here?’ I looked around the featureless spot, wondering what he had homed in on.

  ‘Down there. This is about as far as I came.’ He pointed down the track. ‘There’s a big indentation in the bank where they’ve dug stone out for the roadways. That’s where I saw them.’

  It was even darker down there. My torch was useless for picking out detail. We couldn’t take this any further without more light. We went back for my car. I drove cautiously, conscious of the bottom scraping on the ridge of the track. I didn’t want to rip out the sump and end up on the receiving end of another rescue mission.

  I left the engine running after I had the car’s headlights facing into the depression in the bank made by the small quarry. The lights put everything into ultra-high relief: the soupy lichen film on the puddles, individual boulders, last season’s foxglove stumps, and the roots and bracken tubers breaking through the dirt at the top of the bank.

  But what was highlighted for us was the roughly circular area, about seventy-five centimetres in diameter, of recently disturbed ground.

  ‘That’s too small for anything big to be in there, isn’t it?’ Trevor asked hopefully.

  By anything big, I knew that he meant a body. I had been thinking the same thing. But it would take a head comfortably. Or a head and a pair of hands if identity erasure had been the intention. I didn’t share these speculations with Trevor.

  ‘What do we do now?’ he asked in a hushed whisper, paying homage to the psychology of the setting. With our shadows cast starkly against the earth bank, we looked to be in a fulcrum scene from an early German Expressionist film.

  I had already been juggling with the consequences behind the same question. I was aware that we could be tramping over a crime scene. But, in order to establish that, I was going to have to notch the disruption up to another level.

  ‘We dig it up.’

  I heard him suck his breath in. ‘We can’t do that …’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What if you find something?’

  ‘That’s the intention, Trevor.’

  The headlights had bleached the colour from his face, but it was the tone of his voice that made me realize that he had turned even paler. ‘Don’t these things have to be done officially? Don’t you need some sort of paperwork? Just in case … ?’ He left the possibilities hanging.

  ‘We can make it official. Believe me, Trevor, I would like nothing better. It just needs you to make a statement. Confirm everything that you’ve already told me.’

  He looked at me sadly and shook his head. I went to the car and got the spade I kept in the boot for digging myself out of the Nanook of the North situation that I was still waiting to encounter.

  It wasn’t so much a case of digging as flicking out an amalgam of loose stone and mud. It got more difficult to see as I got deeper, the light shooting over the top of the excavation, making the inside of the hole seem even darker. I had to progress gingerly, probing gently with the spade, trying to anticipate how the connection with soft tissue or bone would translate on the end of the blade. In the end the tension got too much and I dropped to my knees and used my Swiss Army knife to scoop the stony gunk out.

  ‘Stop!’ Trevor yelled excitedly.

  He was crouched down behind me, his hand in the pile of loose spoil from the hole. I swivelled round. ‘Look –’ He thrust a handful of the stuff that I had just excavated at me.

  It didn’t register. I shook my head at him.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he exclaimed happily. ‘This is new dirt. It’s not the same. This hasn’t been disturbed before. You’ve gone past the bottom of the hole.’

  I reached my arm down into the hole. He was right. The bottom was more compacted. ‘It’s empty.’ I said it out loud to clarify it for myself.

  ‘There’s nothing here!’ His relief was palpable.

  ‘What the fuck did they dig this for?’ It was another question for myself.

  Trevor wasn’t listening anyway. ‘Nothing happened here,’ he stated happily, getting up, wiping his hands on his jeans. ‘Do you believe me now? About Boon?’

  ‘Do you believe it yourself?’ I countered.

  ‘I do now.’

  ‘But you did doubt them?’

  His face scrunched up in contrition. ‘I should have known better, given them the benefit …’ He looked at me, hesitant, a question poised.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve told you everything I know. Will you stop bothering us all now?’

  I gave it a beat before I replied, to establish gravitas. ‘Yes, Trevor,’ I lied.

  I drove him down the hill, still wondering what the purpose of an empty hole was. Trevor didn’t seem to have a problem with this abstraction. He had had the proof that he hadn’t dared push for before, and now he seemed more at ease than at any previous time in our acquaintance.

  ‘Who supp
lied Monica Trent’s telephone number to Emrys Hughes?’ I asked when we cleared the forestry tracks and I was able to relax into normal driving.

  ‘They did that just to doubly make sure that Boon was covered.’

  ‘I’m sure they did. But who supplied the number?’

  He frowned. ‘I’m not sure. It might have been Gordon or it might have been Les.’

  He went quiet for a while, gazing out the side window. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’re from the city …’

  ‘That’s right, Cardiff.’

  ‘Can you recognize … I mean, is there a type? Without having to be flamboyant or showy or anything?’

  I glanced at him. He looked worried, concerned now about my reaction to the question that he had dared to ask. I flashed him a reassuring smile. ‘You should just be yourself. What does it really matter to anyone else? In this day and age?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not here. Not one of their own.’

  Find the Hooker. It was a bit like a treasure hunt. For clues, I had the Llantrisant road into Cardiff, and a walk-up flat over a bookie’s. I had to hope that it was enough information. Because no one was going to let me do it the easy way and give me Monica Trent’s telephone number. I had already tried Directory Enquiries, but, as I had suspected, the number was unlisted.

  I had got up early and revisited the hole in the forest. Nothing was very different in the daylight. It was still an empty hole. No blood spoor or rent garments in evidence. I knelt down beside it. It exuded the damp, coppery smell of recently dug dirt.

  Why an empty hole?

  Could it have had a spiritual meaning? Had they all ceremoniously pissed, spat, or jerked off into it to seal their friendship? Or to magically secure Boon’s future?

  Or had something been removed?

  The thought struck me suddenly. If someone had removed whatever had been buried, they had obviously felt that it was important to fill it back in again. To cover their tracks. I decided to let them keep their secret. I backfilled the hole, keeping it as close as I could to the semblance of the way that I had found it. It was a small piece of private knowledge, but possessing it meant that there was always the possibility that I might just find a fit for it.

  It was a long drive back to my beginnings. South down through Mid Wales to the Heads of the Valleys, feeling like a truant. At Merthyr, I picked up the expressway down the Taff Valley, past Abercynon, coming off at Pontypridd and heading for Llantrisant for the drive into Cardiff through steep-sided valleys belling out into the coastal plain, and the tendrils of the commuter suburbs snaking their way deeper into the countryside.

  I should have been excited. But this didn’t feel like coming home. This was more like sneaking in.

  I worked with a picture that I had fixed in my mind. The description of a walk-up flat over a shop read like sixties architecture. An unornamented block, two or three storeys with a flat roof, over a row of shopfronts on the ground floor.

  I had a couple of false starts. Streets off the main road with shabby blocks that fitted the template, but without a bookie’s shop. I found the one I was looking for as I drove deeper into the Cardiff suburbs, part of the later urban sprawl before it morphed into the older Victorian and Edwardian outskirts.

  This was a drab concrete block of two-storey maisonettes over a row of shops. A concrete stair tower at the end of the block led up to a walkway at first-floor level that ran along the rear, giving access to the flats.

  The stair tower was daubed with graffiti on the outside, but the inside was surprisingly clean and free of rubbish. As was the walkway. The bookie’s was the fourth in the row from the end. On the walkway I counted off four doors.

  The door was painted a contemporary shade of blue-grey. A professionally printed notice covered the small section that would normally have been glazed.

  THIS DOOR WILL NOT BE ANSWERED.

  THESE PREMISES ARE ALARMED.

  BE AWARE THAT YOUR PRESENCE IS BEING MONITORED.

  I looked up, just as I was supposed to. Just like everyone else would have done after they’d read that notice. And I joined them all on the CCTV camera that was bracketed off the wall and angled down on me.

  Monica Trent was not taking any chances.

  I knocked a couple of times, but, as the label on the door promised, no one answered. I was going to have to wait it out.

  It was about an hour before an Asian man appeared at the top of the walkway. I was out of the car and at the foot of the stairs before he was halfway down. He smiled at me shyly.

  ‘Excuse me …’ I started.

  ‘I am supposed to give you this,’ he interrupted, and handed me a small card. It had a telephone number hand-printed on it. I turned the card over. If you mention that you are a policeman I shall hang up, was written in a neat script that matched the printing.

  ‘How did you know to give this to me?’ I asked.

  He smiled cautiously, showing me two distinctly yellow dog-teeth. ‘I saw you on the television.’

  The CCTV camera. I let him sidestep past. He nodded his thanks and accelerated away from me.

  I went back to the car and called the number. An answering machine kicked in, one of those neutral professional recordings that came with the service. I heard the message out, preparing my spiel, remembering the admonition that I had been given. ‘Hello, my name is Glyn Capaldi, I would very much like the opportunity to speak to you. If you would like to call me back, my number is –’

  ‘What do you want to speak to me about?’ The voice was confident, cutting in over the machine, straight to the point without preamble.

  ‘I would like to talk to you face to face, if that’s possible.’

  ‘What would the nature of this conversation be?’

  ‘It would be about some mutual acquaintances.’

  ‘Who are … ?’

  ‘I would rather discuss that in private.’

  ‘Hold on.’ The line went quiet for a while. ‘Okay,’ she announced, some kind of a decision made. ‘I can offer you a consultation at three o’clock next Thursday afternoon. Or ten o’clock on the following Friday morning, if that’s preferable.’

  ‘I can’t wait ‘til next week,’ I blurted.

  ‘That’s the earliest I can offer you.’

  ‘I’ve travelled more than halfway down Wales especially to see you.’ I tried my best to keep the wail out of my voice.

  ‘That is not my problem.’ She went quiet for a moment – I could hear a page turned – her voice relenting when she came back on the line. ‘Okay, I should be able to do something for you in a couple of hours. Go away now, and come back then.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be quite happy sitting in the car.’

  ‘I’m not worried about you,’ she said firmly. ‘I just don’t want you out there disturbing my clients.’

  8

  I was back two hours later, standing in front of the door. The electronic latch opened before I could knock. I pushed the door open. Monica Trent was standing in the brightly lit hall waiting for me.

  Rushed to give an impression, I would have described her as small. But that would have been misleading. Petite is the word the guidebooks would have used. Petite, shapely, and perfectly groomed. Hard to tell which side of thirty she was orbiting.

  About one hundred and fifty-seven centimetres in a pencil-thin grey skirt, a crisp, white, short-sleeved blouse, and a string of fat pearls at the open neck. Her hair was shiny, bobbed and blonde, framing a clever maquillage that was toned to accentuate her green eyes, and all the possibilities that were mirrored in the curve of her cheeks.

  I tried a mental exercise. Pulling my focus way back, I put her into a red, down-filled jacket, mashed-up the pixels … She could have passed for the image of Magda that I had seen on the service station CCTV video. Mind you, given the quality of that image, I could have put Goofy into the same jacket and not been unconvinced.

  ‘Yes?’<
br />
  I realized that I had been staring. I felt like a crude hulk in front of her. She stared back at me unselfconsciously. ‘I know you,’ she said to herself, frowning, struggling to get a memory snap on me.

  I had never seen her before in my life.

  ‘You haven’t always been in the boondocks?’

  I shook my head.

  She shut the door behind me, staring at me as she circled. ‘Uniform or CID?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant.’

  She nodded, satisfied with her diagnosis, and led me through into the front room.

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked.

  ‘I watched you.’ She nodded up at a monitor on the wall, its screen showing the walkway.

  ‘You could tell that I was a policeman just by watching me on a CCTV screen?’

  ‘Not definitely, not until you knocked on the door.’ She clicked her fingers, finishing the gesture with a forefinger pointed at me. ‘Capaldi … I know you now.’

  I waited for it.

  ‘You were involved in that thing that got Nick Bessant killed. In Cardiff …’ She screwed her face up, trying to string timelines and detail together. ‘You were the hostage. They made you out to be some sort of hero at the end of it, didn’t they?’

  I nodded modestly. ‘It was a PR job,’ I said wryly, recalling Jack Galbraith’s assessment: ‘And you fucked up good there, didn’t you?’

  ‘You weren’t ever attached to Vice though, were you?’ she asked, frowning.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, how did you get involved with a toerag like Nick Bessant?’

  ‘It’s a complicated story.’

  She looked hard at me for a moment, trying to penetrate my reluctance. ‘Okay.’ She nodded, dropping it. ‘Take a seat.’

  I sank into the maw of a deep, expensive, cream leather sofa. She sat down at the far end and pulled her legs up, letting the cushion settle under her like a nest. She fitted herself into the corner and watched me with just a faintly enticing smile.

  I was expected to start something.

  ‘Why did you warn me not to say that I was a policeman?’

  ‘I recorded our telephone conversation.’