by Ewart Hutton
‘We’ve got Evie now.’
‘She doesn’t help with the spread. The others are three big blanks. We can get a mitochondrial DNA profile on them, but where do we go from there?’ He groaned in frustration. ‘It’s a classic catch-22. To get a match we need to find a close relative. To find a close relative we need to know who the fuck the victim is.’
Boy did he have a big case of the morning blues. Or responsibility fugue. I didn’t care, I was excited about the forthcoming confrontation. ‘Or we discover Gerald Evans stirring up heads in his acid bath?’ I offered, reminding him of our current mission.
He shook his head. ‘We’re not going.’ He looked up at me. ‘How the fuck can I leave here with all this shit coming down on us? And DCS Galbraith arriving at any moment.’
I made a big show of disappointment. ‘So I’m going to have to do this myself then, boss?’ I asked, starting to get up.
‘No.’ He flagged me back down. ‘I had a talk with DCS Galbraith about it. He doesn’t want you disturbing the locals.’
The deflation felt like a kick in the stomach. ‘You told him what we had on the guy?’
He flashed me an irritated look. ‘I thought that over. There’s really nothing that solid there. We agreed that Emrys Hughes can handle the initial interview, and, if he picks up any bad waves, we’ll take over.’
The bastard had copped out. ‘But the guy’s ripe for it, boss,’ I pleaded.
He shook his head resolutely. ‘You’re not getting Evans. DCS Galbraith wants you to interview someone else. A man Inspector Morgan has been bending his ear about. Some incomer weirdo.’ He searched his desk and found the relevant piece of paper. ‘A crackpot called Bruno Gilbert.’
‘Gilbert’s harmless,’ I protested, wondering when Morgan had joined the anti-Bruno crusade. I dropped the frustration from my tone. ‘I’ve already spoken to him, boss. I’ve been out to see him. He’s a fruitcake, but he’s an inhabitant of Planet Docile.’
‘That may well be the case, but DCS Galbraith wants an official report to that effect. We don’t want the local plods usurping the game and finding the perp for us. Because that’s one we wouldn’t be able to live down.’
I got up. I now felt fucked over and narky. Kevin Fletcher had successfully managed to share his morning malaise. Now, instead of interviewing a hot suspect, I was on my way back to the ruined kingdom.
Bruno Gilbert was still not opening his gates. And he had re-attached the barbed wire. I got back up on the roof of the car, pushed it down again, feeling less charitable this time, and made my entry. I had almost considered faking it, basing my report on my previous visit and Bruno’s tale of UFO sightings last night. Nothing would have changed. But Jack Galbraith had an unfortunate knack for sniffing out shortcuts.
I had the same sense of suffusion this side of the gate as before, as if the air here operated at a different density, tamping down sound. Even the noise of a large bird I had disturbed, a wood pigeon or a crow, crashing up through a tree’s foliage, had a muted quality to it.
I called out as I walked down the drive, warning him of my arrival. There was no response from his previous niche, and he didn’t appear at the door of the shack. Perhaps he was working in his gold mine. That prospect lifted me slightly. Maybe this time I would get a glimpse of the operation.
‘Mr Gilbert, are you in there?’ I rapped on the shack’s rickety plank door, and cocked my head to listen for sounds off. Nothing came back to me. There was no lock. I clicked the old-fashioned thumb-latch and pushed the door open.
Even without the sight of him I would have recognized that particular combination of smells above all the others. Blood and shotgun-discharge. Over the mildew, excrement, whisky and bottled gas. It was probably only a trace odour by now, something that wouldn’t have registered on most people’s senses. But it was a smell that was imprinted on my psyche. I would probably even react to homeopathic levels. The smell of my Cardiff demise. The Farmer and the Pimp.
I stayed in the doorway, partly to calm myself down, partly for the overview. Trying to read the room, keeping my eyes darting, staying away from the body, before it loomed too large and obliterated all other perceptions.
Squalor. A one-room shack with a curtained-off cubicle containing the galvanized bucket that he had used for a toilet. The only window obscured by galaxies of cobwebs.
Generations of dust had mutated to take on the mass and heft of dirt on the floor. Wooden plank walls that had once been painted were streaked with rot, except in the tiny cooking area, where grease had acted as a preservative. A camp bed with stains on the covers that at first glance looked like a deliberate pattern. A matching wardrobe and chest of drawers, both with damp-blown veneer.
And the kitchen table.
He had used the surface to balance the double-barrelled shotgun. The force of the blast had blown his chair back, smashing it and him partly through the rotten rear wall, so that they had come to a rest propped back at an angle. It was through this gap in the wall that most of the light was now entering the room.
It was too early in the year for a major fly strike, but a large bird, probably a crow, had crapped on his chest from its perch on his shoulder, where it had been gorging on carpaccio of cerebellum. Both eyes were also gone. Probably the amuse-bouche. Had it been the bird I had disturbed?
I started back to the gate to get to the car’s radio and call in the cavalry. I stopped at the niche in the brambles where I had last seen Bruno Gilbert crouched, and looked back at the shack.
Nothing was going anywhere. Whenever this had happened the vermin had since had time to come calling. There were no hot clues cooling down.
I had the scene to myself until I decided it was time to sound the klaxon.
I returned to the shack and stood in the doorway, taking a couple of plastic supermarket bags out of my pockets, not taking my eyes off the scene as I stooped down to put them over my shoes.
I held myself there. It was time to stop being purely reactive. Read what it says, I instructed myself.
Bruno Gilbert had committed suicide.
It was so obvious. So why was I balking? Because it was so obvious? Because I had only recently met him? He was still fresh in my memory. Definitely a troubled man. But from our two meetings I had come away with a distinct sense that he had managed to come to some sort of accommodation with his demons. And he had his gold mine.
So why do this? And why now?
I went back into the shack, taking care to stay on the path that daily use had worn through the dirt. I scanned for footprints, but there were nothing but scuffed marks. I bent down to take in the soles of Bruno’s shoes, which were angled up due to the tilt of the body. The tread pattern didn’t match the cast that we had found at the wind-farm site. And his shoes were too small.
From my crouch I saw a bottle of whisky and a glass that had fallen from the table. Neither had broken. The whisky bottle had obviously been not quite empty, the spilled residue having cut a short, winding gulch through the dry caked dust.
I made a cursory analysis of the wound. From the damage, it looked like he had managed to fire both barrels simultaneously. There was massive trauma to the right and rear of the head extending from the neck to virtually the top of the cranium, and as far as the right ear, which was hanging by a small flap of tissue. It was also compounded by the post-mortem damage caused by rodents and birds.
How loud would it have been? The noise of a gun is principally down to the sudden and massive expansion of gasses. His mouth would effectively have acted as a crude silencer, and the shack itself would have had a baffle effect. Factor in the remoteness, the trees, and the chances were that no one would have heard it.
I backed away. A glimpse of something white on the floor, an alien colour in this midden. I bent down and shone my torch on it. At first I thought it was a small piece of bone. But it was too clean, no blood or gristle adhering. Then I realized that it was a tooth. More precisely a fragment of a tooth.
I found a pair of bolt cutters in a tool shed and used them to cut through the chain securing the front gate. The circumstances sanctioned it. This was shortly about to become a high-activity zone, and the assorted participants were not going to be too happy if they had to vault a barred gate to attend to their specialities. Especially the poor bastards who were going to have to carry Bruno out of there.
I got patched through to Fletcher on my car radio. He emitted a prolonged moan, like the sky had just caved in on him. When he’d finished swearing he told me that he’d get a scratch team together and be over as soon as possible. In the meantime he instructed me to secure the site and stay put.
I had no intention of going anywhere. Because I was a big kid who had just been left in charge of a gold mine.
Except I had to find it first.
And it wasn’t all whimsy. This was more than the Pig Wales version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I was getting a distinctly bad feeling in my kidneys about this. Could the gold mine have anything to do with it? Could the poor loopy old bastard actually have discovered the wonder seam, the mother lode? And had someone else found out? Was this whole thing simply coincidence, and entirely unconnected to the other deaths?
To keep Fletcher happy I tied some crime-scene tape in front of the open gate before I went off exploring.
I followed a well-worn path behind the shack and found the sluice trays. But no sign of a classic timber-propped hole in the face of the hillside. No sign of anything resembling the entrance to a mine. The sluice trays were like big barbecue troughs, supported on trestle legs on a raised wooden deck. Bruno had connected a length of alkathene pipe higher up the adjacent brook, using the water to sieve the ore. But where was the ore coming from?
Bruno was an old guy. From what I understood about this process it involved washing crushed stone through graded sieves. Someone his age would not be able to carry buckets of rock too far. So it had to be close to here somewhere.
The tap on the end of the alkathene pipe dripped. It had formed its own miniature watercourse that ran down to the edge of the raised wooden deck. But no puddle? Why wasn’t the water ponding against the edge of the deck?
I knelt down to look closer and saw the hinges set into the top surface of the deck. Part of it obviously lifted. But how? I looked up and scanned the trees. It took me a while to see it. It was clever. The horizontal arm of a davit, folded back into the foliage, camouflaging it. I swung it out through the branches. There was a pulley at the top of the arm, and a block and tackle lashed against the raking spar.
I found the lifting bracket in the sluice tray. Disguised to look like a simple tool that would be used to rake the ore. It took me a couple of attempts but I managed to slot it into its housing on the deck, connected the block and tackle, and started hauling. The free part of the deck in front of the sluice trays started to lift smoothly, hinged with a counterweight like a bascule bridge.
It was impressive. It was elaborate. It was a lot of time and trouble to go to, to hide a hole in the ground. But then time was what Bruno had had lots of.
I climbed down using the metal rungs that had been fixed to the side. It bottomed out about three metres down. There was a collection of buckets, a small sled with metal runners, and a stumpy but solid little hand-operated machine with a hopper on top, which I guessed was an ore crusher.
Three tunnels branched off from the bottom of the access shaft, slanting down. The tunnels were low, you would have to crouch to move along them, and they all smelled of damp rock and lichen growth. And rats? The romance was dropping out of the gold-mining world.
I shone my torch into each of them. No light was reflected back. Part of my funk was fear of the unknown. How far in did these shafts go? How safety-conscious had Bruno been?
I didn’t have to do this, I reminded myself. I could just wait until Fletcher arrived and slot meekly back into the command chain. That prospect galvanized me into action. I ducked down into the left-side tunnel. Everything was clammy, and the air smelled immediately fetid, my crouched body acting like a plug, keeping the fresh air behind me.
The tunnel was cut through a soft, shale-type rock, and it was propped with timbers whose dank, dead bark peeled back like old parchment. The shaft turned and dipped to avoid obstructions of harder, sedimentary rock embedded with reflective flakes of mica that caught the torch beam. Everywhere beads of water dripped.
It was hard work, even without the claustrophobia. Bruno had constructed the tunnels to accommodate his body, and I was bigger. I began to feel the pressure change. It was imaginary, I knew, but it didn’t help to ease the sense of the weight of the hill above me. I had also completely lost all judgement of distance.
Periodically there were side shafts. I worked out that these were where Bruno had been extracting his ore. They were usually shallow enough to dismiss by using the torch as a sounder.
Until I came to the one that absorbed light. Instead of a roughly gouged rock face I was registering black. Total black.
I scuttled closer, half intrigued, half terrified. If it was possible to have an optical illusion in a place where you couldn’t actually see anything, this was one. An illusion of absolute darkness that turned out to be wooden and painted black.
Up on the surface, Bruno’s shack was in a state of collapse. He didn’t paint things. So why had he taken such care with this? I ran the torch round the perimeter. It was a door of sorts, a plywood panel set into a frame. I felt my mouth go dry, and a light quiver of tension shivering the end of my fingers. What was in there that, even this far down, had to be sealed off?
His explosives store?
No one in their right mind would have given Bruno Gilbert access to a sparkler, let alone dynamite, but it was the only answer that explained what I was looking at; that went some way to diluting my fear. Something practical and sensible to do with mining, with no spooky overtones.
But the reassurance didn’t last, and I kept coming back to it. Why was it here and why paint it black?
I prised it open with the screwdriver blade of my Swiss Army knife. I imagined a slight hiss, a seal breaking, when it opened. When I shone my torch in I thought the batteries were dying. I couldn’t pick out the end or the sides of the shaft. It was only when I stepped inside that I realized that it was because this was such a large chamber. Bruno had scooped a room out of the heart of the hill.
And I couldn’t identify the half-familiar odour that was now mixed in with the damp mineral smell of the rock.
My torch beam was useless for an overview in this large space. It had just picked up another optical illusion. A bedside table. I steeled myself for the instant of total darkness and switched the torch off and on again quickly. The beam was still picking up a bedside table.
Bedside tables do not feature in mine shafts. Bedside tables live beside beds.
I moved the torch, and jumped back involuntarily, a stab of panic jolting me like an electric clamp. The bed was occupied. I forced myself to move the torch again. And pieced together long blonde hair and a waxy shine on a pale, pale face. And the sort of stillness you just know has not changed in a long time.
I had a sudden flashback to McGuire and Tucker. Oh, please, not again!
We needed more light. I forced myself not to touch anything. Disturb nothing, I chanted the mantra internally. Don’t vomit. Don’t piss yourself. Don’t corrupt the scene in any way.
I didn’t have to force myself to back away. It was time to slot meekly back into the command chain. Let someone else take this over.
‘Fucking hell, Capaldi, the state of you! Where have you been?’ Fletcher yelled at me as I approached. ‘And I thought I told you to
secure the fucking site?’
He was congregated with one of the DCs and a couple of uniforms outside the shack. I assumed the scratch SOCO team he had assembled was inside. With Jack Galbraith?
I pictured how I must look. Soaked through, scuffed and filthy, as if I had just crawled through an active sewer, against the flow.
‘I’ve found another one, boss.’
His authoritarian face cracked, just as I had hoped it would. He looked at me as if I was deliberately strewing dead bodies at his feet for him to trip over. ‘What kind of a fucking place is this, Capaldi?’ he exclaimed, aghast.
‘It’s normally pretty peaceful, boss.’ I told him what I had seen. A woman’s body in a bed.
‘Dead?’ he snapped.
‘She looked so pale she could have been embalmed.’
‘But you didn’t check?’
I held my temper. ‘I promise you, she was way past rescuing. I didn’t have enough light, and I didn’t want to compromise the scene by going in any farther with just a torch.’
He held me in a reproachful stare for a moment to let me know that he was not happy with today’s performance so far. He turned to one of the uniforms. ‘Go in and tell the doctor we need him,’ he snapped, indicating the door of the shack. ‘Get me some overalls from somewhere,’ he instructed the other one.
‘Is DCS Galbraith inside?’
He blanched. I had rubbed a sore spot. ‘He’s not here yet. Some idiot accidentally cut the landline to the wind-farm site. I’ve had to send a man up there to fetch him down.’
‘So he doesn’t know yet?’
‘That we apparently have two more dead fucking people? No, Capaldi, he doesn’t know yet.’
I knew from past experience not to push him further. Instead, I suppressed my smile and tucked it away in the little mental bank I reserved for such private rewards.
I led the way back down the shaft. The heavy-duty flashlight they had given me was like a searchlight in the confines of the tunnel. The one that Fletcher was carrying behind me projected a warped version of my shadow on the walls ahead. The doctor Fletcher had commandeered from Dinas, and a couple of members of the SOCO team, were behind him. Somehow everyone but me had managed to acquire protective clothing.
