Dead People

by Ewart Hutton

  ‘What sort of unusual?’

  ‘Something that might have sounded like a gunshot?’

  She glanced out the window. ‘So that explains all the activity over there.’ She looked back at me. ‘Am I allowed to ask what happened? And has this got anything to do with the bodies they’ve found at the wind-farm site?’

  I smiled apologetically. ‘I’d rather keep to what you might have heard, at the moment.’

  ‘The kids keep pestering us about it. It’s almost made this place cool for them.’ She waited me out for a moment, and then shrugged. ‘Well, I personally heard nothing, over and above the normal racket that goes on round here until they all decide to settle down.’

  ‘Could you ask the kids?’ I pushed a card with my contact numbers across the table.

  ‘Of course, but they’re the ones who are usually making the racket.’

  ‘What about your husband and your brother?’

  She shook her head vaguely. ‘We were all together until bedtime.’ Then she realized my question had been more specific. ‘They’re not here, I’m afraid. It’s a Tuesday. They’re down at the river doing things with rope bridges.’ She saw me glance at the group of youths out in the courtyard. ‘There are always some who claim to be allergic to cold water. But I will ask them when they get back.’

  ‘How do you get on with your neighbour, Mr Gilbert?’ I deliberately kept him in the land of the living.

  She thought about it for a moment. ‘He keeps to himself. We see him walking on the moors above here, but that’s about as far as contact goes.’

  ‘He doesn’t bother the kids?’

  ‘Not intentionally.’ She laughed at my puzzled expression. ‘They think he’s strange. The way he dresses and scuttles around. Although anyone who would chose to walk in the hills when they could be watching television is weird in their book.’

  I produced the new photograph of Evie we had got from her parents. This was more recent. No sweet kid on a pony this time. That had been the memory they wanted to hold on to. This was more real. She was scowling, caught turning away from the camera, not wanting them to take possession of any part of her. Her hair was still blonde, but streaked with pink highlights, and cut to hang straight, with a spiky fringe. Her complexion was blotchy, but there was raw energy in her expression, and she was attractive, in a disconcerting way. ‘Did you know her?’ I asked. ‘Evie Salmon?’

  ‘No.’ She replied without hesitating, a glum look crossing her face, realizing who she was seeing.

  ‘Ever heard of her?’

  ‘Only from the rumours that are going around town. That she’s one of the victims.’

  ‘She was young, Mrs Horne. She might have been drawn to the boys here.’

  She shook her head. ‘It may sound harsh, but we don’t let them fraternize with the locals. We tried it once and it didn’t work. We ended up receiving a torrent of abuse from the so-called good people of Dinas.’ She smiled. ‘They didn’t appreciate their children’s newly discovered language skills.’

  I made a point of letting her see me looking at the photograph behind her desk. ‘Your brother looks much younger there.’

  She looked surprised. ‘You know him?’

  ‘And Owen Jones. I met them both briefly at Cogfryn Farm.’

  She turned her head round to look up at the photograph. Her expression clouded. ‘That was poor Rose, Owen’s sister.’ I hadn’t recognized her from the photograph of the child in Mrs Jones’s kitchen. This time I was forewarned and let my mouth bunch up into a tight little mark of respect. ‘That photograph’s up there to keep her in our memory.’

  I nodded.

  ‘It was through Owen and Rose that Greg got the opportunity for us all to buy this place,’ she explained.

  I waited for her to expand on that, but she got up instead, making it clear that she was moving on to more important business. ‘Could you ask your husband or your brother to contact me if they have any recollection of her?’ I asked as I left.

  The group of youths were still outside. They eyed me suspiciously as I approached them. I took out the photograph of Evie and went up to them. ‘Have any of you seen this woman around?’

  They didn’t have a chance to answer. Valerie Horne came out of the office behind me. ‘There’s no point in showing them that. This lot have only been here for six days.’

  I drove off, musing on the photograph of Greg Thomas and Owen and Rose Jones.

  Either one of those men, on a dark night, could have been the figure I had seen flitting down the line of earthmoving machines. Could the other one have shape-shifted into a tree root?

  Then I remembered that Owen Jones was in Africa helping the oil industry fuck up the planet. I bounced back immediately, with the possibility that Trevor Horne, the brother-in-law, was present, correct and available.

  I drove on down to Pen Tywn Barn Gallery. I had checked the council-tax records. The place was registered as a holiday home and a business. Two ladies named Fenwick paid the bills. They lived at separate addresses in Alderley Edge in Cheshire. Sisters, I assumed. I knew just enough about those parts south of Manchester to appreciate that the location was extremely chichi. And probably full of rarefied Barn Gallerys. So why export one to Pig Wales? It was like trying to make a killing in haute couture in the land of the loincloth.

  Pen Tywn was too far down the valley from Bruno’s place to have heard anything short of a sonic boom. But, according to her father, Evie had worked here part-time.

  My mobile phone rang. I glanced down at the caller display, intending to ignore it. It was Mackay. Perhaps he was coming back to me with an update on how the army disposed of its surplus bodies.

  ‘Hi, Mac, just hold on a moment until I get off the road.’ I pulled onto the verge and cut the engine. ‘Okay, I can talk now.’

  ‘I’ve been delegated to remind you that your Aunt Doreen’s silver-wedding bash is coming up.’

  I groaned inwardly. ‘My mother’s been pestering you.’

  ‘I don’t call it pestering. I like her. And she’s invited me too.’

  ‘It’ll be grim.’

  ‘She wants you there.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything, Mac, I’m working a big case at the moment.’

  ‘You tell her that. I’m only the messenger.’

  ‘I took her out recently,’ I protested.

  ‘A cream tea in Monmouth,’ he snorted derisively, ‘she wants to see you in Cardiff. She wants to show off her big handsome son.’

  ‘I can’t go to Cardiff, Mac. I told you before, it’s part of the arrangement.’

  ‘That’s professionally. They don’t want you acting the superhero and arresting all their hoodlums. But they can’t stop you visiting your family, for fuck’s sake.’

  Superhero. Mackay had unintentionally hit the nail on the head. My former bosses had used the PR device of turning me into the heroic survivor of a hostage event, in an attempt to salvage the situation when the farmer I had been minding had gunned down the pimp who had fucked over his son and daughter.

  The problem was that my mother had bought into it. She was unaware that she was showcasing a fraud when she paraded me around the relatives.

  The Vaughans, my mother’s side of the family, were staunch Methodists and solid railway-and-heavy-engineering people. Foreman class, with a deep-rooted sense of their place on the social ladder. There had been general alarm when she had announced that she was going to marry my father. Not so much because he was a foreigner – as a port, Cardiff had always been a tolerant city – but because, being an Italian, he was assumed to be a Catholic. What ended up really screwing their heads was the discovery that he had turned his back on the Church of Rome, and was an avowed atheist with communist tendencies.

  My sister and I grew up sandwiched between the Methodist Prayer Book and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up as a convicted parricide, or at least a practising Buddhist.

  And some of t
he mean-spirited old fuckers in the Vaughan family still held a grudge. One of these days, at one of these gatherings, the pretence that I was a knight in shining armour was going to blow. One or more of them was going to raise the point that, if I was such a big heroic deal, how come I hadn’t been promoted, and why had I been moved out to where the street lights don’t shine? For my mother’s sake I didn’t want to be the cause of a schism in her family.

  ‘I’ll call her, Mac, I promise,’ I said guiltily.

  ‘As I said, she’s your mother.’

  ‘And while you’re on . . .’

  ‘What now?’ he asked guardedly.

  ‘A couple of guys, Greg Thomas and Owen Jones, I think they were in the army together. Any chance of asking around and seeing if anything turns up on them?’

  ‘You’re an opportunistic bastard, Capaldi.’

  ‘Thanks, Mac.’ I hung up before he could get more inventive with his epithets.

  I had glimpsed a yellow car in the drive when I had been driven past the Barn Gallery on my way (unknowingly) to exhume Evie. It was still here, and turned out to be a wild shade of egg yolk, parked out in front like a beacon. An Audi TT roadster, 3.0-litre late model, so at least I didn’t have to revise my earlier opinion. There was money here, and it was being flaunted.

  The vertical blinds had been pulled aside in the glazed threshing bay, and the double doors stood open. Because of the way the sun was reflecting on the glass, all I could make out was the patch of black slate floor at the threshold.

  ‘Do we have a customer?’ The voice was raised, and there was a cheerful trill to it.

  She was coming down from the house. A beige coat open over a short grey–black wool dress, tied to accentuate her waist. A pair of sunglasses was wedged into her ash-blonde hair, which had been expensively cut to look wind-ruffled. The make-up was subtle and minimal and worked to soften her sharp features. Her expansive smile didn’t match the careful brown eyes. Her shoes had heels, and threw a twist into her walk, as she took the gravel and stone flags on the path carefully.

  ‘Ms Fenwick?’

  Surprise flickered on her face. ‘Yes, I’m Gloria Fenwick. And you are . . .?’

  ‘Capaldi. Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi.’ I showed her my warrant card.

  ‘Ahh, right . . .’ She made a big play of enlightenment. ‘The mystery up the valley? We’ve been wondering if we would get a visit. But we aren’t going to be able to help you much, I’m afraid. We’re not here that often.’

  ‘We would appreciate any help you can give us.’

  She tilted her head and regarded me with interest. ‘Capaldi . . .’ She rolled the syllables. ‘Unusual for round here, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m from Cardiff. My father was Italian.’

  ‘No offence to Cardiff, but if I was Italian I think I know where I’d want to be retaining my roots.’

  ‘He came over to work for his uncle. He met my mother and stayed on.’

  She took the sunglasses out of her hair and nodded. ‘Now that’s romantic.’ She smiled and tapped her teeth with the end of the glasses. They were very white. ‘I think you’d better come and meet Isabel.’

  I followed her into the barn. It took me a moment to adjust to the dimmer light. Everything was shrouded with dust covers. There were no recognizable shapes under them.

  ‘The birds get in and shit on everything,’ Gloria explained cheerily. She raised her voice. ‘Isabel, the police are here to talk to us about the stuff that’s happened up the valley.’

  Isabel rose up into view from behind a large packing case at the far end of the barn. She approached carrying a clipboard. She was smaller than Gloria in every way. Thin, her hair dyed grey and styled short; dark, deep-set eyes, the skin tight on her face as if there was a clip on the back of her head keeping up the tension. She wore a grey cashmere polo-neck over loose camel-coloured trousers, and an African tribe-load of thin silver bands tinkled at both wrists.

  ‘This is Detective Sergeant Capaldi,’ Gloria said.

  Isabel’s smile, which had been flagging impatience, took on a twitch of interest. ‘Italian?’

  ‘His father came all the way over from Italy to find a Welsh bride,’ Gloria answered for me.

  ‘We buy a lot of our stuff from Italy,’ Isabel informed me, striding into a sales pitch before I could warn her she was wasting her time, ‘from Milan mainly. This is a piece by Ricardo Spinetti.’ She heaved the dust cover off. It was something that was covered in vinyl the green of irradiated pondweed, and it looked as if it was collapsing. Nothing gave a clue to its function.

  ‘I like that,’ I grunted sagely.

  ‘This is from Studio Abolition,’ she said, pulling another cover off. It was tall, a listing bundle of stainless-steel and wood rods tied precariously together with pink, plastic-coated wire. She looked at me expectantly.

  I nodded at the piece. Gloria smiled encouragingly and reached in somewhere and flicked a hidden switch. A tiny glow of intense blue light sparked in the heart of the rods.

  ‘Ah, a lamp,’ I declaimed, showing off my style cool.

  ‘An installation,’ Isabel corrected me coldly, dismissing me as an Infidel. She turned to Gloria. ‘The Max Rocks have arrived from New York at last.’

  ‘I think the sergeant needs to ask us some questions,’ Gloria said, telegraphing me a conspiratorial smile.

  Isabel turned back to me reluctantly. ‘There’s nothing we can tell you,’ she said, looking at Gloria for confirmation of this.

  ‘She’s right, I’m afraid,’ Gloria agreed. ‘We came down a couple of days ago to find that the valley had apparently turned into a slaughterhouse. Which is why we haven’t officially opened up yet,’ she explained. ‘Out of respect.’

  ‘Evie Salmon used to work for you?’

  The two women looked at each other. ‘The name’s sort of familiar,’ Gloria admitted hesitantly.

  ‘You haven’t heard?’ I asked.

  ‘Heard what?’ Isabel retorted.

  ‘Evie Salmon’s was one of the bodies we found.’

  They winced at each other. They were both genuinely surprised. Gloria shook her head. ‘People round here don’t talk to us. We didn’t know.’

  I showed them Evie’s picture.

  Gloria clicked her fingers, a memory returning. ‘The little floosie who used to hang around . . .’ She checked herself. ‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry.’ She pulled a contrite face and gave a loose-shouldered, apologetic shrug.

  ‘That’s right, I remember her,’ Isabel said in surprise, as her own memory refreshed, ‘about three years ago, just after we’d opened the gallery.’

  ‘Poor little cow,’ Gloria intoned her in memoriam.

  ‘She used to work for you?’ I asked.

  The two women looked at each other. Isabel shook her head. ‘No, if she’d worked for us we would have remembered her when you asked,’ Gloria said.

  ‘As Gloria said, she tried to hang around, as if association was going to conjure up style sense and taste,’ Isabel explained. ‘Although I think she did ask once if there was anything she could do to help out.’ She looked at me challengingly, as if responding to a criticism I hadn’t voiced. ‘As you can see, we’re not exactly catering to the mass-retail market. More low-volume, high-value, and I’m afraid she definitely did not fit that profile.’

  ‘We had to gently steer her away and tell her to go and play somewhere else,’ Gloria added.

  ‘Thank you for all your help.’ I gave them a big, disarming, cuddly cop smile, and then turned to look admiringly at the gallery. ‘So you’ve only been here for three years?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Gloria gushed, ‘we’ve only been running the Barn for that time. We’ve had this place for holidays for at least thirteen years.’ She looked at Isabel for corroboration.

  Isabel nodded her head slowly. ‘Fourteen in August.’ Her smile was clipped, and she gave me an assessing look, trying to work out my angle.

  I thanked them for their time. They bo
th made a point of watching me leave.

  I watched them in the rear-view mirror. Only Gloria waved. Thirteen years. That installed them firmly in the timeframe. But that wasn’t at the forefront of my concerns.

  Evie’s father had definitely told me that she had worked at the Barn Gallery.

  Who was lying?

  The incident room was end-of-shift crowded. The buzz from the discoveries at Bruno’s place still resonating. Uniform cops at the terminals writing up their reports. Emrys Hughes walked amongst them with a phantom whip, like the overseer on a tobacco farm. He saw me across the room and gave me a cocky wave. He was obviously feeling happy. Incomers were dropping like flies.

  I finished writing up my own report and filed it with Alison Weir, who was routing the dailies back to HQ in Carmarthen for processing and assessing. I nodded at Fletcher’s closed door. ‘What’s happening in the War Room?’

  ‘They’ve called a briefing for tomorrow morning.’

  I gave her my best charm-school smile. ‘Can you run a couple of background checks for me, please?’

  She smiled back, unimpressed. ‘Put them in your report.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Then they will be done. If DCI Fletcher authorizes them.’

  ‘What if you ran them for me before they actually got to him?’

  ‘It’s not procedural.’

  ‘What if someone screwed with the procedure by pulling rank?’

  She sighed and raised her hands in mock surrender. I leaned in close. ‘Whatever you can get on the people at Fron Heulog Activity Centre.’ She tapped the information in. ‘And the two women called Fenwick at Pen Twyn and addresses in Alderley Edge, Cheshire.’

  She finished typing. ‘Okay, I’ll get back to you when this stuff comes through.’

  I clicked my fingers. An afterthought. ‘Can you check out the flights from London to Lagos on Monday? See if a guy called Owen Jones was on any of them.’

  She mock-salaamed. ‘Your wish is my command.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I nodded towards the door that led into The Fleece proper. ‘Fancy coming through and having a drink when you’re finished here?’

  ‘Thanks for the offer, but I’ll be heading for home.’