by Ewart Hutton
I looked at her blankly.
‘If you try to pull any police stuff now, I can claim entrapment.’
‘I promise you this is off the record.’
She smiled like we were sharing an intimate secret. ‘It usually is. So what is it that you want me to do for you?’ she asked soothingly, a woman used to dealing with nervous men.
‘I want to ask you some things.’
‘A consultation will be a hundred and fifty pounds.’
I tried not to gasp. ‘I only want to talk.’
‘That’s your choice, what we do with the time. It’s still a hundred and fifty pounds.’
‘I haven’t got that kind of cash.’
She smiled reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry, I take all major credit cards.’ She leaned across, opened a drawer in the low table in front of us, and produced the gizmo that processed them.
I passed her my credit card. ‘This is my own money,’ I moaned.
‘And this is my own time.’ She smiled back at me sweetly.
A hundred and fifty pounds … For a consultation … I felt the pain of it. So how much would those bastards have had to pay for a fucking alibi?
‘What do the names McGuire and Tucker mean to you?’ I asked when she passed my credit card back.
She nodded, fingering the string of pearls at her neck. ‘You tell me.’
‘You claimed that you were with them last Saturday night. Six of them. At a hut in the forest.’
‘Five of them,’ she corrected me without even a hint of calculation. ‘Ken and Gordon, Les, Trevor, and Paul. Five people, not six.’
‘You’ve got a good memory for names.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s a professional trait. It reassures people if you can call them by their first name. Just don’t ask me for their surnames.’
‘And you had a minder up there with you?’
‘That’s right. Winston.’
‘But he didn’t go to the police station with you to confirm the story?’
‘No, he’s not in town at the moment.’ She looked at me languidly. ‘Look, I don’t want to tell you how to spend your money, but you’re going over old ground. This is all out in the open.’
‘Humour me.’
She dropped the pearls on to her cleavage, and spread her hands invitingly.
‘A bit of a strange and uncomfortable gig, wasn’t it?’ I asked, spreading my own hands to take in the expensive cut of the room. ‘Compared to what you’re used to.’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve known a lot worse, and believe me, you really don’t want to ask about that.’ She grinned suddenly and bobbed her head forward, leading my eyes into her cleavage. ‘Or is this where you’re heading? Are you a man who gets off on the descriptive, Sergeant Capaldi?’
‘I thought first names were meant to be reassuring?’
She grinned. ‘You’re not a normal john.’
‘Tell me about what happened on Saturday night.’
‘If you want this dirty, I’m going to have to turn to invention.’
‘Just stick to the truth.’
‘The arrangement was for me to pair up with two of them: Trevor and Paul. But in the end nothing happened. Paul was too drunk, and Trevor …’ She shrugged. ‘Trevor preferred to keep his own company.’
‘Why do you think that was?’
She studied me for a moment to see whether there was an agenda behind the question. ‘Because he’s a closet gay. He didn’t want his friends to see that he couldn’t cope with the attention.’
‘So did the friends take over the gift vouchers?’
‘They could have done. But they all decided to remain faithful to their partners.’
I nodded understandingly. ‘You know, that’s almost exactly what the guys themselves told me.’
She smiled, picking up on my shift into ironic nuance. ‘Well, I hope you think it was worth it to have it corroborated. Although you could have saved the money and just read my statement.’
‘I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting you then.’
‘Thank you.’ She dipped her head coquettishly.
‘And telling you to your face that I know you’re a fucking liar, Monica.’
She didn’t flinch. Just smiled into the cold moment. ‘Tch!’ she clucked a reprimand. ‘Language please, Sergeant Capaldi.’
‘Those bastards paid you to spout that story. And now I’ve paid you good money to have the fabrication repeated. You score twice on this invention.’ She watched me impassively. ‘So tell me, how much would I have had to overbid for the truth?’
‘That was the truth,’ she said reproachfully, without attempting to hide her amusement.
‘Bullshit. I know it’s a lie.’
‘Why so certain?’
‘Because I know who really was there that night.’
She shook her head patiently, but I thought I caught the first flicker in her composure. ‘I’m sorry, but there are seven citizens backing up this truth.’
‘One of them, Winston, is a total figment,’ I protested. ‘And you, the only real one, weren’t there either.’
She smiled sympathetically. ‘Drop it, Sergeant. This is the story that’s out in the marketplace. This is the one that the money is on.’
‘What did they tell you? That the girl had gone on to Ireland along with the so-called friend that they’ve supposedly faked this up for? I assume that even you would want to know that you weren’t covering damage?’
‘Leave it,’ she said soothingly.
‘I’m here because I’m worried. I’m worried about the girl who really was there that night. I’m getting all this bullshit, but no one can convince me that she’s all right. So give me something for my money. Give me something real. Tell me something that I don’t know about those men. Reassure me that they’re harmless. Stop me worrying, Monica.’
She looked at me steadily. Balancing something. She was a businesswoman, she didn’t have to give me zilch. I just had to hope that she had some fair-trade genes in her make-up.
‘I work from referrals. And, before I start, the ground rule is that I am not going to do names.’ She adjusted her position on the cushions, the gesture letting me know that she was offering me the favour. ‘No one gets my number, no one gets to come here unless they have been recommended by someone I know and trust. It might be an uncle, business associate, dentist … A client tells me that they know someone who would like to meet me, and asks would it be all right for them to contact me.’
‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘These people are filtered. I trust them. It’s in my own interest – I will not deal with anyone that I think could have problems … could be unstable.’
‘How many of the men had you met before?’
‘Two of them.’
Trevor had mentioned Les and Gordon as the probable furnishers of Monica’s number. ‘Together?’ I asked. I had a picture of them here, slightly pissed, cash rich, and pretending to be worldly.
She nodded. ‘They were usually down in Cardiff together. After rugby games. But we did the business separately.’
I caught the sense of a past tense. ‘Do you still see them?’
She smiled. ‘I saw them last Saturday, Sergeant.’
I had forgotten that the lie was still bolted to the floor. We weren’t going to shift that. ‘Before then. When was the last time they came here?’
She thought about it. ‘Not recently.’ The reply was careful.
‘Why is that, Monica?’
She shrugged.
‘Did they get virtue?’
She smiled out of the corner of her mouth. Shook her head, hesitated a moment before she replied, thinking about it. ‘Let’s just say that their tastes shifted beyond what I was prepared to offer.’
‘Shifted?’
‘Sorry, Sergeant, your time is up.’
My face fell. ‘I’ve only just got here.’
‘I don’t go by time, I go by effort, and you’ve pro
ved to be hard work.’ She smiled to show that there were no hard feelings.
She walked me to the hall and clicked the door latch open. She touched my wrist on the threshold. ‘They’re not dangerous, Sergeant. We’re not talking bullwhips and sharps.’
‘But you dropped them? Is that because you saw that they had the makings of problems?’
‘They moved on. It happens.’
‘What’s your limit, Monica? Where do you draw the line?’
She reached her hand up and patted me playfully on the cheek. ‘You’re clean out of credit now, Sergeant.’
‘Monica, help me here,’ I pleaded. ‘That girl could be messed up, dead or dying. Do it for her.’
Her smile didn’t waver as she closed the door on me.
I thought about it, walking back to the car. What had Monica meant? How heavy or how weird did sex have to get before she declined the transaction? And she was a professional, she was supposed to be able to handle strangeness. What kind of twisted fucks were in that minibus that Magda had climbed into?
I turned my phone on to an announcement that I had four missed calls. All from Carmarthen headquarters. In ascending order of doom. Two from the dispatcher, one from Bryn Jones, and the final one from Jack Galbraith himself.
‘Fucking call us …’
I was in Cardiff. I was way off the Reservation. Had they found out that I hadn’t let this drop? That I was in dereliction of my proper duties? I went straight to the top; there was no point in stretching out the pain.
‘It’s Glyn Capaldi, sir. I’ve only just picked up your message.’
‘Where the fuck are you?’ he growled.
I watched a guy in the window of a coin-operated laundry trying to fold a sheet with two hands and his teeth. ‘I’m up a big hill, sir, I’ve only just found a signal.’ I kept my fingers crossed round the lie.
‘We’ve been trying your radio for the last half-hour.’
‘I’m not in the car. I had to leave it behind and walk up to …’
He cut in over me. ‘I don’t want to know. I just want you to turn round and get back to Dinas fucking pronto.’
‘Yes, sir.’ I heard the charged tension in his voice and felt an adrenalin surge kicking in. ‘What am I specifically going back for, sir?’
‘One of that group of idiots is dead. I want you to get up there and tell me that this is benign, that we are not witnessing the start of a slaughter season.’
‘Who’s died, sir?’
‘One of the farmers. Vaughan. Trevor Vaughan.’
From calls I put into Emrys Hughes and the police doctor, I sketched in as much detail as I could. His parents had found him hanging in a barn this afternoon. A neighbouring farmer had cut him down. The doctor who had been called out had pronounced him dead at the scene. The body had been taken to the local cottage hospital for preliminary investigation prior to the post-mortem. Emrys Hughes was waiting for me at the farm.
The news stunned me. I had decided that I liked Trevor Vaughan. He had been troubled and melancholic, but, at his core, he had been a decent man. And what made no sense was that last night he had actually seemed happy. Well, relieved was probably closer to the correct tuning. Discovering that the hole in the forest was empty seemed to have taken a great weight off his mind. Brought him back into conjunction with his buddies.
So what had gone wrong? What had happened between then and now to totally fuck him up? Had there always been something darker lurking?
Or was I driving towards a suicide composed of smoke and mirrors?
A uniform with a squad car was stationed at the bottom of the farm drive to deter the curious. He waved me past. Emrys Hughes came out of the barn as I drove up. He looked grim and drawn. It was the same barn where Trevor and I had had our first real conversation.
‘You took your time,’ Emrys said angrily as I got out of the car.
‘I got here as quickly as I could.’
‘Do you know what it’s like, waiting at a scene like this that involves someone you knew well, and having to be totally fucking inactive?’ I held my hand out to him. He looked at it in surprise. ‘What’s this for?’ he asked suspiciously, the bluster knocked out of him.
‘A truce. We need to be professional here, act in concord.’
He took my hand reluctantly. ‘Okay,’ he said, not quite able to relinquish suspicion.
‘Good.’ I smiled at him. ‘Now don’t say anything to me until I ask you to.’
I walked into the barn. It was timber-framed and crooked with a rammed-dirt floor, the rickety central doors of the threshing bay wide open and letting plenty of light in. My eyes went straight to the long ladder propped up against the bottom tie beam of an oak truss about three metres off the floor. Was it too obvious? I looked away and carefully scanned the interior before my perceptions could jump to conclusions.
I quartered the building carefully until I was satisfied that there was nowhere else to go but back to the ladder. This time I let myself look at the green plastic baler twine tied around the same tie beam, a length hanging down and drifting into a shallow parabola from the draught coming through the open doors. I stood under it. Three strands of twine twisted together to give it strength, unravelling now, the ends frayed.
‘They cut this?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Mick Jones from Pentre Nant, the nearest neighbour. Trevor’s parents couldn’t bring themselves to do it.’
‘The rest of it?’ I looked at him carefully. ‘Did you see the knot?’
‘His neck was swollen, the doctor couldn’t loosen it.’
The knot was important, but I didn’t push it, I didn’t want him thinking that I was macabre. ‘Did the twine come from here?’
‘Yes. There’s a big hank of it in the next building.’
I looked at the ladder. ‘Mr Jones went up this to cut him down?’
‘Yes, but he didn’t put it there, it was up when …’
‘I know.’ I interrupted him. There were no alternative ladder indentations on the floor. Trevor Vaughan had climbed up this. Or had he been forced to climb up? The floor’s surface was too disturbed now to isolate individual footprints.
He had climbed up the ladder, attached the baler twine to the beam, put his head into the pre-prepared noose, leaned over past the point of balance, and … goodbye cruel world. I pictured the swing. He hadn’t kicked over the ladder, either deliberately or inadvertently. He was probably rotating, definitely choking, but his initial momentum would have brought him back to the ladder. A last opportunity. He could have climbed back on board Mother Earth. He didn’t. So, he was either very determined, or someone had prevented his return.
‘How long before they found him?’ I asked, dipping my head imperceptibly, saying adieu to Trevor Vaughan.
‘No more than half an hour. His father came out and found him after the dogs started making a racket.’
‘He had the dogs with him?’ I asked, surprised.
‘No, they were shut up. They must have sensed something. Not quickly enough though. He was just hanging there when his father found him.’
‘Was there any sign of anyone else being here?’ I asked, wondering if the dogs could have picked up on something.
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Has he left a note?’
‘Not here. No one from the hospital has called to say they’ve found anything.’
I looked around again. Old stale hay in the loft, rusty sickles hung from nails, junk stored in the corners against the day they might find a use for it. It all looked mean and tawdry. I reminded myself that these people didn’t work with frills. ‘Did he have money problems?’
Emrys shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Things have been tight generally in farming, but I wouldn’t have thought that the Vaughans would have been hurt worse than anyone else. The word is that they would be able to manage better than most. Always been known as careful.’
‘How about personal life?’ I asked it lightly, wanting him to keep believin
g that we were still confidantes. I didn’t want him going constituent defensive on me.
‘He worked hard. He liked his sports, the odd night out with the boys. He didn’t have a drink problem.’ He grinned conspiratorially. ‘And he wasn’t married, so he didn’t have women problems.’
‘How about men problems?’
His smile wavered into a frown, not grasping it. He shook his head, puzzled.
Was he acting? Had shrine mentality kicked in? Had they already started to preserve Trevor’s memory? ‘Did Trevor have boyfriend trouble?’
His mouth opened in slow motion. ‘Fuck off …’ He said it half bluster, half shock. The incredulous smile on his face willing me to admit that I was joking. He wasn’t acting, I decided. He hadn’t seen it in Trevor. I was up against the denial of the Chapelheads.
‘I take it that this is news to you?’
‘That isn’t news, that’s slander.’ He shook his head again. ‘You can’t mean it. That’s some sick idea of a joke.’ He pointed out towards the house. ‘His parents are up there being comforted. They’ve lost their son, and you are standing on their property, under the very spot where he lost his life, spreading filthy lies. Trevor Vaughan was a good person.’
‘There’s nothing that says homosexuals can’t be good people,’ I suggested reasonably.
‘Show some respect …’ He choked. ‘The man’s dead, for God’s sake …’ He lost it then. The red mist descended, and I wasn’t quick enough to see it coming. He came at me, both outstretched arms slamming into my chest. Taken by surprise, I lost balance, and my back hit the wall of the barn. I felt a sharp stab of pain in my right shoulder, but my priority was to stay upright. I knew that if I fell he would come in close and kick the shit out of me.
Still standing though, I became his dilemma. He was stalled. Blood rage was tugging one way, reason and consequence the other. He was rigid in front of me, fists balled, breathing hard, head down into his neck like a paused bull, waiting for me to do something to trigger his next action.
I was almost tempted to lamp him. To turn surprise to my advantage and put a fist between his eyes. But he was much the heavier man, and charged with the anger that would stop him feeling pain. He would probably just surge over me. And I would end up with a broken hand before the next round of carnage even started.
