by Ewart Hutton
Had I been totally wrong about Bruno?
I tried to see him as a serial killer. But I couldn’t get past the problem of his timidity and his isolation. He seemed to be too scared of people to kill them. And how could a man like him have got close enough to someone like Evie Salmon?
I pictured that ghastly wax complexion on the bed, the long blonde hair. Was I about to be proven wrong?
And I had still not identified that odour.
I stopped outside the side shaft and let Fletcher come up beside me to get the sense of the thing. I heard him sniff the air experimentally. ‘What’s that smell?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s familiar, but I can’t figure it out.’
He tensed himself. ‘Okay, let’s do it.’
I shone my torch on the bed to light the way for him. The same blonde hair, but the complexion, in the light from the high intensity beam, was now an unnatural pink. The body was still pinned down tightly under the sheet and blanket.
Fletcher was using his own torch on the floor to make sure that he wasn’t compromising anything as he crossed to the bed.
And then it hit me. The smell. A recall. Unit 13. Mould growth on plastic shower curtains. Underscored with the scent of the kind of talcum powder that old ladies use.
It was too late to warn Fletcher.
As he reached down to pull the bedcovers away I saw that he wasn’t looking at the body. His squeamishness was his undoing. If he had looked he would have seen what it was before it leaped into action. But he didn’t, and jumped back in shocked reaction as the thing on the bed surged up, released from the confines of the covers.
He looked now. ‘You bastard, Capaldi!’ he shrieked. ‘You fucking set this up!’ The body’s arms had popped up, and its knees sprung into an arch. It was naked apart from a pair of pants and a loose-fitting bra, and was the pink of denture-plate acrylic. The expression of rage on Fletcher’s face was magnified and distorted by the torchlight. ‘You are fucking screwed!’
It wasn’t dead. It had never been alive. Bruno hadn’t killed anyone.
I came closer. Fletcher was trembling. The release from the sheets had skewed the blond wig. The odour was now explained. An inflatable plastic sex doll. Its arms and legs, held open in invitation, made it look like it had just fallen from a tree trunk that it had wrapped itself around.
‘I didn’t know,’ I told him softly.
Behind me the doctor and the SOCO guys were at the entrance of the chamber, their torches playing over the inflatable doll. The relief in the air was palpable. I suddenly realized that if they laughed, Fletcher was going to take it personally. I would be even more fucked.
‘Shine your torches over the walls,’ I instructed, to distract them from the absurdist comedy.
There was a dressing table against the far wall with a rococo gilt-edged mirror, unguents on the surface, a hairbrush. A padded stool in front of it. The talcum-powder smell explained. A woman’s short red dress on a hanger was suspended from the wall beside it. A window painted onto the wall. Blue curtains swagged back from a naively rendered trompe l’œil view out over a lawn to a white picket fence.
I turned my torch on the bedside table. A glass of water topped with a film of dust. A romantic novel folded open, which I knew would turn to papier-mâché if I tried to pick it up. On the far side of the bed there was a white WC bowl, and a pedestal washbasin with a mirror over it. There was no drainage system to connect either of them into. Like everything else in the place they were pretend.
‘What the fuck is this place?’ Fletcher asked.
‘Isn’t it obvious? It’s a boudoir.’
‘This is sick.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I said reflexively.
‘You’re not serious?’ Fletcher sneered.
‘It’s sad, but it’s not sick. It obviously gave him some sort of comfort.’
Both our eyes swung to the plastic doll. ‘Do you think he fucked it?’ Fletcher speculated incredulously.
I had a picture of Bruno sitting at the dressing table, the doll a reflection in the mirror. Was he recreating a lost domestic scene, or inventing one? ‘I don’t know.’ I winced at the prospect. ‘But I’m not putting my hand up its snatch to find out.’
*
We left the two SOCO guys in the chamber to start their process and retreated with the doctor, who wanted to get back to work on Bruno.
‘What are we going to find down those?’ Fletcher asked, indicating the other two tunnels, when we emerged into the relative freshness of the access shaft.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is that where he’s set up his Papa Bear and Baby Bear fuck-pads?’ he said meanly.
‘We should be glad it wasn’t a body.’
He watched the doctor reach the top of the shaft before he turned back to me. ‘You set that up deliberately to undermine me,’ he hissed accusingly. ‘You knew exactly what was lying under those covers.’
‘Honestly, Kevin, I didn’t—’
‘Boss!’ he snarled, cutting in over me.
‘Fuck that,’ I snapped back, ‘we’re on our own down here, and you’d better believe that I’m not going to revert to cadet-force japes in the middle of a murder investigation on my patch, just to put one over on you.’
He laughed nastily. ‘My patch! You’re fucking welcome to it, Capaldi. Throwbacks and failed weirdoes, just your sort of people.’
‘DCI Fletcher.’ Jack Galbraith’s voice boomed down at us from above.
Looking up, seeing him foreshortened and sky-lined, he really did look like an emissary from a dark power.
Fletcher scrambled up the metal rungs. I took my time. By the time I breasted the surface, Fletcher and Jack Galbraith were ensconced together. Fletcher’s right arm was semaphoring to accompany his explanations.
The conversation broke up, Fletcher making his way back to Bruno’s shack, Jack Galbraith approaching me. I stiffened expectantly. Behind him I saw Fletcher send me a look compounded of anxiety and malice. It was a warning. He was obviously sensitive to what his boss and I might be discussing behind his back.
‘You look like you’ve just lost the bog-snorkelling championship,’ Jack Galbraith observed.
‘It’s a bit damp down there, sir.’
He looked down into the shaft. ‘So this is a gold mine?’ He sounded disappointed.
‘Do you want to go down there and see what we found?’ I asked.
He looked at me incredulously. ‘No, Capaldi, that is what I employ people like you for. So just describe it for me, your take on it.’
He nodded when I had finished. ‘DCI Fletcher tells me that you don’t think that humping a piece of latex in an underground chamber can be construed as weird behaviour.’
‘I didn’t say it was normal, sir, just maybe not as deviant as DCI Fletcher obviously found it. Mr Gilbert had a hard time coping with people. So he invents a little corner of his ideal world.’
‘And tops people and chops their heads and hands off. Where does that particular sideline fit into this ideal world?’
‘I don’t know whether he would be capable of that, sir.’
He used his thumb to indicate Bruno’s shack over his shoulder. ‘So what drove him to the final act?’
‘We don’t know that it is suicide yet, sir.’
He winced and shook his head. ‘Capaldi, Capaldi. Sometimes I despair of you. You’ve heard of Occam’s razor?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right, so heed it. Stay rooted. Stick with the simplest solution. Don’t pull this away into fantasy land. We have a demonstrable warp here. Definite signs of maladjustment. You are too tolerant of strangeness, that’s what got you here in the first place.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Get more uniforms in and pull this place apart. This guy had set patterns.’
The observation surprised me. He had done his homework. ‘That’s right, sir.’
‘And it’s now looking like killing people might be one
of them. So get this place broken down for me, and deliver me Mr Gilbert’s sins.’
8
I delegated the search of Bruno’s place to Emrys Hughes, who arrived with the additional men. I didn’t want to waste my time looking for bodies that I was pretty certain wouldn’t exist. He didn’t try to hide his smirk. His stance had been vindicated by the example of another crazy incomer fucking up in the game of life.
I didn’t bother arguing with him. I wanted to check out the surrounding properties, just in case someone had heard the shot. They might not have identified it as one, but if someone had heard something it could give us a timeframe.
But first I had to get back to Unit 13 to change out of my impromptu speleological outfit and get cleaned up and into something that would make me presentable to the public again.
I stood under the thirteen-and-a-half slow drips of tepid water that constituted my shower and tried to make sense of Bruno’s apparent suicide. I corrected myself. His apparent suicide at this particular point in history. At any other time it would be tragic. Now, with its juxtaposition, it had the potential to change the focus and direction of our investigation.
I froze. The soap slipped from my hand. I ignored it.
Could that be the intention? Had this been manufactured? Had Bruno just been set up as the fall guy?
Was it possible for someone to be that evil and manipulative?
I slammed my eyes shut and shook my head to clear out the judgemental crap. That was only going to get in the way.
Take it back to the beginning.
Three people had been killed, their heads and hands had been removed, and they had been buried over a period of two years, approximately six to eight years ago. Which should have been the end of the story.
Until the wind farm is announced. Which posits a real danger of discovery. But this is a long-term procedure involving consultations and public enquiries, the slow grind of due process. It leaves plenty of time to remove the bodies.
So why leave them in place? And then compound it by adding a new one?
What does this act say about the status of the original bodies?
I ran into a mental blank wall and went back to Evie. She was the disruptor. She broke the pattern. Young and new. What was she meant to tell us?
I took it back chronologically and broke it down into sequence. The first body is uncovered. The diggers are sabotaged. I dig up Evie.
Oh fuck!
We had been manipulated. They had taken over the controls after we had discovered the first body. The whole business with the sabotaged diggers was to alert us to keep on digging. A way of picking up the reins and steering us in the direction they wanted us to take. We had found the first body, which meant that we were going to find the others, so they speeded up the process to make sure that we found Evie quickly. Complete with her distinctive and identifiable red shoes.
Why?
To stop us concentrating too much on the other three bodies? By ensuring that Evie was the second body unearthed, were they trying to distract us from the collective significance of the other three?
If I was right, Evie’s murder had just been a device, a counter-play in the game that the original murderer was controlling.
I closed my eyes at the cold horror of it. She had been murdered to provide the meat. The bastard had used her as a fucking chess piece. He had carved her up to suit his purposes, removing her head and hands to connect her to the other victims. Just in case the location wasn’t enough of a clue.
And then he had figuratively chopped Bruno into the mix.
It was a storyboard, designed to make us believe that Bruno Gilbert was a retired serial killer who had reactivated himself. That he had started killing again. But then we were meant to understand that he had felt the ineffable pressure as we closed in on him. No option left but to take his own life.
Oh Jesus! If I was right, this bastard had murdered two innocent people to provide a diversion. To shift us down an investigative path that was going to lead to nowhere. Evie had been used to draw us away from the initial focus and to point us down the line, but Bruno was the one that now switched the points. This part of the strategy was designed to swing us in the direction that he had chosen for us.
The warm water in the tiny tank had drained, the shower was turning cold. I shivered under it, but the discomfort suited my next grim realization. I had just worked out how he was going to manage to consolidate this. How he was going to complete the arc of the story. I flashed on the underground chamber. Bruno’s retreat from the world. The red dress! It was as good as a suicide note. Because I now knew as an absolute certainty that the dress was going to turn out to be Evie’s.
I bequeath you the total proof of my guilt.
As I towelled myself dry I realized that no one was going to buy a word of this. Because in the real world that even cops were a part of, the world of small pleasures and disappointments, boredom and television news and the belly laugh after the third beer, it still seemed incomprehensible that a person could take the life of two others, for no other reason than to send an investigative train down a branch line that was going to swallow it up.
Bruno may not have known his killer. But Evie must have. It had to be the person she had left home two years ago to be with. She must have trusted him. Been proud of him. She must have talked to someone about him.
And that’s how I was going to get the bastard.
As I had anticipated, the Joneses at Cogfryn Farm had been at full tilt in the lambing shed the previous night and had heard nothing that wasn’t associated with that process. The three of them, Mr and Mrs Jones and the labourer they employed, had all been in attendance at the pens.
Fron Heolog, the activity centre, adjoined the gold-mine site on the other side from Cogfryn Farm. I reread the small file I had prepared on it. A couple called Trevor and Valerie Horne and her brother, Greg Thomas, all from the West Midlands, lived there. It was a registered charity, which they ran as a residential centre as part of a rehabilitation regime for young male offenders, mainly street-gang members.
Greg, the brother, was the guy I had met a few days ago at Cogfryn Farm. The friend of Owen Jones who was driving him to the airport.
According to my notes the place had been semi-derelict when they first took it over, and it had taken about five years of working part-time to refurbish the farmhouse and convert the outbuildings to its current use. So, even though they had only been up and running for about four years, they had had a presence in the valley when the first of the bodies had been buried.
It turned out that the place was also one of Emrys Hughes’s bêtes noir. According to him it was a nursery of imported urban malevolence peopled with young marauders who were out to overrun Dinas if they could only free themselves from their electronic tags.
Their sign was a big shiny cartoon sun with a wide smile, dark glasses and a starburst of rays that turned to dreadlocks on the top. Any idea of freedom stopped at the graphics, however. The gates were automatic and locked. I got out and went to the intercom.
‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice, tinny behind the static.
‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi.’
‘Can you show the camera some identification, please,’ the voice asked wearily, not giving me time to state my business. The security camera was mounted on the trunk of a tree. I stretched my hand up to it with my warrant card. The gates gave a little shimmy, and started to open.
The drive was surfaced with fresh tarmac, and lined with new saplings protected by tree guards. I followed the signs for Reception and drove into a courtyard formed by a low, L-shaped, whitewashed stone building. A small group of youths, a mixture of races, watched me cross the yard. Their stares of practised defiance took me back to Cardiff. These kids recognized me as a cop. I went back and locked my car.
‘I’m Valerie Horne, I’m the voice on the intercom.’ She held the door open. I went in, shook her outstretched hand, and she closed the door behind her. ‘Please,
sit down.’
She was short, had overemphatic cherubic curves in her face, and unstyled, dense brown curly hair, all of which combined to make her appear chubbier than she was. She looked tired. The room was a converted cowshed, open to the roof, National Trust paintwork, newly bought contemporary office furniture, cheery prints, and a couple of computers banked against the rear wall.
I sat down opposite her at her desk. I did a double take on a framed photograph that was hanging on the wall above her head. I had met both the men in it. At Cogfryn Farm. Owen Jones and Greg Thomas again, but much younger versions, with a young woman sandwiched between them, the camera catching her with her eyes closed and a goofy grin that she must have regretted later. It was a buddy picture. The three of them packed tight together, the men with their arms around the girl’s shoulders, she with hers around each of their waists.
Both men in army uniform. A new dimension. Did it make any kind of a difference?
She cleared her throat to bring me back to earth. ‘Sorry.’ I smiled apologetically.
She scrutinized me for a moment. ‘We haven’t dealt with you before, have we?’
‘No,’ I confirmed.
‘Well, have you actually caught anyone doing anything, or is it just the usual, blame it on Fron Heulog?’ she asked, her smile weary and deliberately false.
‘Blame what on Fron Heulog, Mrs Horne?’
She blinked in surprise. ‘You’re not here . . .?’ She caught herself. Something relaxed. She allowed herself a short laugh. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so used to us getting the blame for anything that goes wrong out there.’
I understood. Emrys must have been a frequent visitor. Every vandalized bus shelter and unsolved crisp-packet theft. ‘You’re a convenient dark beacon?’ I suggested.
‘Tell me about it.’ She sighed. ‘So what can I do for you?’
‘I’m trying to find out whether anyone here might have heard anything unusual coming from the direction of Mr Gilbert’s place last night.’
