by Ewart Hutton
‘That’s right. The girl who was injured in the explosion.’
That was all the news I needed. I thanked her and headed back to the waiting room, trying, out of respect for poor Mary Doyle’s condition, not to be too joyful. I flashed on the art students. There had been no boy with yellow hair among them. But there had been one with a dyed-red thatch.
I opened one leaf of the double doors to the waiting room, but stayed back in the corridor.
‘Justin!’ I shouted.
I scored on two counts. The red-haired boy reacted with a jump, and gave a startled look in the direction my voice had come from. And the other kids had all looked at him.
I went into the room with my warrant card out, and what I hoped was my Good Cop façade in place.
‘Justin Revel?’ I asked, stopping in front of him.
He nodded, his expression a combination of confusion and embarrassment at being singled out. He looked to his friends for support, but they were caught up in the fascination of a new tale unfolding.
‘I need to ask you some questions about the accident.’
‘I’ve already talked to some policemen about it,’ Justin protested meekly.
‘Don’t say anything without a lawyer, dude,’ advised a gangly guy with a tuft of blond hair under his lower lip, and enough rings in his right ear to make it look like a machine.
‘Too much television,’ I told him, flashing him a poisoned look, before turning back to Justin. ‘I really need to talk to you,’ I said, trying to project strength and trust.
Justin got up reluctantly and followed me out into the corridor.
He was nervous. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. His hair was dyed emergency red and had been contrived to stick up and out, as if styled to freeze the moment of jabbing his fingers into an electrical socket. His complexion was pale, the skin fine and freckled, his features still marching towards adulthood. He was wearing a green-plaid heavy flannel shirt over a lemon-yellow T-shirt, both of which clashed with his hair and complexion, which was probably the desired effect.
‘Did Mary Doyle live in your house?’ I asked.
He looked at me uncomprehendingly.
‘How come she’s the one in intensive care?’
‘She borrowed my keys.’ He gestured back towards the crowd in the waiting room. ‘We were all out at a bar. We were going to move on to Steve’s place to . . .’ He cut himself off, deciding that that information was best edited out of the story. ‘We weren’t far from my place. Mary has a thing about going to the toilet in bars. So she went to mine. She’s done it before.’ He looked up at me for the first time. ‘I hadn’t smelled any gas,’ he said plaintively.
No, you wouldn’t, I thought, because there was nothing wrong with your system until someone deliberately fucked it up. ‘How long had you been out?’ I asked.
He thought about it. ‘Probably from about eleven o’clock that morning. It was getting on for about 1 a.m. when Mary went back to pee.’ He’d answered my next question before I’d asked it.
He hadn’t been in the flat for over twelve hours. Plenty of time for someone to establish and consolidate the mechanics of the operation.
‘Where are Mary’s parents?’ I asked, suddenly realizing the absence.
‘On their way back from Florida. They were on holiday.’ The poor guy was sick with worry and guilt.
Sadly, I wasn’t going to be able to reassure him.
‘It was meant for you.’
He nodded listlessly. ‘I know. I should feel lucky. But I just keep thinking about Mary.’
He hadn’t got it. ‘No, Justin–’ I accentuated the words very slowly, I needed him to climb on board now, to want to get in under my wing and let me take over the controls–‘it was deliberate. It really was for you.’
But first, he had to adjust to the craziness. That awful things like this really did happen in this world. Even in Hereford. His look went wild. He stared at me wide-eyed. Trying to take this in. He shook his head. ‘Who would . . .?’
‘That’s what I’m hoping you might be able to tell me.’
Panic and concern were combining to form fear in his face. For probably the first time ever his hairstyle matched his expression.
‘I think this has to do with Evie Salmon’s death.’
‘Evie?’
‘Yes, and by now, whoever did it knows he’s screwed up, that he got the wrong person.’ I touched him gently on the shoulder. It was important now to make physical contact, let him know he had a prop. ‘I need you to trust me. He probably knows you’re in here.’ I saw the jolt as this news hit him.
He looked instinctively back to where his friends were sitting in the waiting room.
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘The less anyone else knows the better.’
We used the ambulance bay at the rear, beyond the public glare, where the damaged ones went in, and the dead ones left. I instructed Justin to wait with a porter I had commandeered to show me the way, while I went back to fetch my car. I used a circuitous route as a precaution. But I reckoned if he was watching anything, it would be the main entrance to the hospital.
Unless there were two of them.
I bundled Justin into the rear seat-well and ordered him to stay down and not move from there until I gave him the all-clear. I had considered putting him in the boot for the additional security, but reckoned that there was a risk of him flipping. His emotional state was precarious. All this new information, followed by the grave-like darkness of the boot, and I could have ended up driving through Hereford with him screaming and kicking the shit out of my boot lid, which would not have made for an unobtrusive exit.
The porter watched me organize all this with a look of mystification.
‘I’ve been watching too much television,’ I explained as I drove off.
I took the Abergavenny road south-west out of Hereford. It was going to be a long detour, but if I had a tail I wanted them to settle in and get comfortable behind me before I slipped in the sneaky move.
The weather was holding. The sky was still blue, a sense of spring in the clarity of the light, a wonderful day to be out for a drive in the country. The traffic was light, the cars behind me were spread out and holding their positions, all bar one, who was coming up the line, overtaking at every opportunity. I let him come past me. A young guy in a hurry in an oldish Audi A3. If he was trying some fancy footwork and attempting to follow me from in front that was fine with me.
I came to the big roundabout at the end of the Abergavenny bypass, drove around it at speed, and doubled back on myself.
‘Remember these,’ I shouted back to Justin, and started listing the make and colour of the cars in the opposite stream of traffic. The cars that had been lined up behind me not so long ago. I carried on until I reached the entrance to the lane I had earmarked on the way down, and pulled into it. It was screened from the main road, and, when I turned the car around, I could watch the traffic going past.
I called out the description of the cars that went past for Justin to tell me if they were on the list I had asked him to memorize. I could remember them all myself, but I didn’t want to spoil his sense of involvement. I also wanted him to start to feel that we were working as a team. I waited for half an hour. None of the cars that had been behind me drove past us.
I took to the country roads after that, up the Golden Valley, sidling over towards Kington. I was pretty certain that we weren’t being followed, but as insurance I made Justin stay down.
I pulled into a lay-by on the top of the ridge near Arthur’s Seat, with a spectacular view over the Wye Valley and the Radnor hills to the north. I told Justin that it was now clear for him to get out.
I stayed in the car while he walked around outside, trying to stretch the kinks out of his muscles. I wanted him to have this time to himself to let him get the sense that he wasn’t a captive, and that I was a good guy. I also wanted to give him as much time as possible to clear the clog of panic and dread from his syste
m. The sort of thing that we would have done in the old days with a quiet cigarette and manly chugs at the hip flask.
He came back over and started to open the rear door. I gestured for him to sit in the front.
‘Okay?’ I asked.
‘Sort of.’ He gave me a try-out smile.
‘There’s lots and lots of stuff you’re going to want to ask me,’ I warned him, ‘but I don’t have time to answer it all at the moment. Let’s just start by saying that I’m taking you to a place of safety, and then please let me ask the questions.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘A good friend’s.’ I held my hands up at him, palms out. ‘Now, remember the deal?’
‘You want to talk about Evie?’
‘About you and Evie.’ I looked at him for a moment. ‘What age are you?’
The question surprised him. ‘Twenty.’
I nodded, my hunch confirmed. ‘Evie was three years older than you. How come you came to be friends?’
‘My sister, Camilla. She was Evie’s friend at school. They let me hang around with them. When Camilla left home after sixth form, Evie and I sort of stuck together.’ He saw my next question forming. ‘Just as mates,’ he clarified with a small laugh.
‘You didn’t have your own friends?’
He smiled unselfconsciously. ‘Most of the kids I went to school with thought I was a bit weird. A bit too out-there for Dinas. Evie was sort of in the same boat, so, by default, we hung out.’
‘Your sister left, why didn’t Evie?’
He shrugged. ‘Evie and I shared a problem. We both felt we were better than the place our parents had dumped us in, which was another thing that kept us together, but . . .’ He searched for the words.
I took a guess. ‘You weren’t sure you could hack it in the bigger world?’
He nodded and grinned ruefully. ‘We kept trying.’
I remembered Evie’s father telling me of her hitchhiking exploits. ‘You persuaded Evie?’
‘It was mutual support. We’d get somewhere, try to hang out where the other kids were, but we never seemed to fit in. We felt uncomfortable. We thought that we had the attitude, that we knew the jargon, the right music, but it was untried and untested. At the end of the day, we felt we were walking around with big Day-Glo hick signs on our backs.’
‘But you didn’t stay in Dinas, you went to art college.’
‘I guess I grew up a little bit more. I realized you couldn’t learn everything off the Internet, you had to get out and put your toes in the water, and keep them there. That was our problem before. We ran back to Dinas as soon as things got scary.’
‘And Evie left too?’
‘It was after I’d gone to Hereford.’
‘Do you know where she went?’
He pulled an apologetic face. ‘No, I’m sorry. Not if you’re looking for an address. I only know where she used to talk about while we were still in contact.’
‘Which was where?’
‘Swansea, the Gower Peninsula.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a big area.’
‘Why there?’
‘It’s where the guy she’d met had a place.’
I felt the focus sliding into place. ‘Tell me about him.’
‘She wasn’t allowed to talk about him. That’s exactly what she said to me. She wasn’t allowed. Like he’d laid down rules. Oh, she talked about how fantastic and wonderful he was, and how well he treated her, and how confident he made her feel, but she wouldn’t tell me anything real.’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘And I think she got a buzz out of that. Teasing me with her strong, silent lover. Like I had got my life in Hereford by that time, and she was telling me that she had found her way out too.’
‘Do you know how they met?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’ But he was frowning.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know whether it was actually some new guy she met. I got the impression that it could have been someone she already knew, but something had happened to change the basis of the relationship.’
‘What did Evie do on her Saturdays?’
He looked at me quizzically. ‘Pardon?’
‘She told her father that she was working at the Barn Gallery for the Fenwicks. They deny it, but she was still coming home with a wad of cash.’
He thought about it. ‘You know Gerald Evans?’
I felt a rewarding flutter in my stomach. I nodded.
‘Evie used to help out with his wife’s horses. She told me that he came up to her once and said not to mention this to his wife, but he and some friends had a little private gambling club they ran on the side. Just for the fun of it. They called it Grass Vegas, which they seemed to think was a real hoot, which tells you what kind of losers they were. Anyway, he asked Evie if she fancied doing a bit of hostess stuff for them. Had to dress-up in a skimpy costume, pad out her tits and wear fishnet tights, while she spun the little roulette wheel, or walked around with a silver tray offering lines of coke. She hated it, but the money was good.’
‘Did they come on to her?’
‘A few of them tried it, but she let them know that she wasn’t going to do any kind of deed with guys with turkey necks or nose hairs. None of them pushed it, she said, because they were all terrified of their wives finding out about the club.’
Gerald Evans again. Justin had just provided me with the equivalent of a big pipe wrench to dent that smug bastard’s boiler-plated self-assurance.
‘What about Clive Fenwick, did she ever talk about him?’
‘She said the women at the Barn Gallery were total bitches. She thought one of the husband’s was nice, though, but I don’t remember which one.’
‘What about Greg Thomas or Trevor Horne?’
He pulled a blank face. ‘I don’t remember those names.’
I looked out of the windscreen at the Wye Valley spread out below me. At one point I had thought that we were honing in on something, tightening the focus, but now we were back out here on panoramic view, with a whole new geographic area thrown in.
Poor Mary Doyle. What Justin had given me couldn’t come close to compensating her for being virtually flash-fried. Okay, I had Grass Vegas, and the existence of Evie’s lover confirmed, and living around Swansea or the Gower two years ago. But without anything more specific, I wasn’t going to allow myself to get too excited about it. And, much as I hated to admit it, Gerald Evans was looking less and less likely to be the prime mover here.
The only comforting thing was that the opposition probably weren’t aware of how little Justin knew. They hadn’t realized how rigidly Evie had stuck to the rules of disclosure they had laid down for her. And now that I had disappeared Justin, I was hoping that they were going to start getting twitchy.
But the spread had got too big for me. Driving around Swansea and the Gower with a photograph of Evie was not an option. Kevin Fletcher had to be told that he was going to have to widen his operations base. He wasn’t going to like it. Especially coming from me.
My call caught him on a late lunch. That old familiar ripple of conversations and the steady tinkle of glass in the background. I kept the story simple – no point in mentioning gas explosions whose cause I couldn’t prove at this stage.
‘Swansea, he said?’
‘Swansea area. Nothing ever got pinpointed.’
‘And this was all before she left home? Nothing to prove that she actually went there?’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘And what am I supposed to do with this? Move my operation out of Newport? Dip into the coffers and set up a new team in Swansea?’
‘I don’t know, boss.’
‘Hold on.’
That was the short phrase of doom. It meant he was about to consult with someone. And if he was deferring to that person’s opinion, I didn’t need more than one attempt at guessing who he was at lunch with.
‘Capaldi!’ I winced as Jack Galbraith’s voice boomed out. ‘I instructed you to i
nvestigate Evie Salmon’s background, not to fucking abduct her boyfriends.’
‘Sir?’
‘We’ve had a complaint through our compadres in Hereford. I quote, “A scary-looking cop took our mate away.”’
Scary? My Good Cop façade obviously hadn’t had time to set properly.
‘He’s with me, sir. I needed to question him.’
‘Why remove him?’
I closed my eyes, counted a beat, and went for it. ‘I think he needs protection. There was a gas explosion at his flat. I think he might have been the target.’ I kept my eyes closed.
‘And who would target him?’ he asked very slowly.
I saw the minefield opening up ahead of me. ‘Someone who’s trying to confuse the investigation, sir?’ I suggested humbly.
‘Did Bruno Gilbert look like a man who would inspire a following?’
‘No, sir.’
‘And Bruno Gilbert is dead. Right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So drop this fucking nonsense. We’ll do a fine trawl through Gilbert’s background and see if there’s any connection with Swansea. But if I hear another peep about you still chasing after a live perp, you are off this fucking case. And one more thing.’
‘Yes, sir?’ It was time to open my eyes again.
‘Take that kid back to where he wants to go.’
I closed the connection and looked over at Justin. He smiled sympathetically. Jack Galbraith’s voice carries. ‘Where do you want to go?’ I asked.
‘I thought you were taking me somewhere safe?’
‘Right answer.’
I drove on to Mackay’s, an old farmhouse called Hen Dolmen on the English side of the Radnorshire border. It was an oak-framed house with a Victorian extension in mellow brick, which hunkered down under a moss-covered stone-tiled roof. It was a clutter of gables, dormer windows and massive stone chimneys, a collection of wonderfully restless elevations.
This, I had decided after my first visit, was the house that I wished I had been born in. Two hundred years ago. Life might have been harsher, but it would have been a hell of a sight less complicated.
I had called ahead. Mackay had been expecting me. He made me tea in the big-beamed kitchen, while Boyce, the scary ex-army buddy who helped him run his corporate-initiative-training enterprise, showed Justin to his room.
