by Ewart Hutton
This time- and resource-wasting diversion bore shades of the McGuire and Tucker investigation. We had been led down some twisted routes and into some very dark places on that one, but at least the body count had been lower, and we had known the identities of most of the people involved.
And I still had the problem about where he had acquired his bone. Okay, there were cemeteries across the length and breadth of the country piled full of the things. But how would he know that he would get what he wanted? A middle-aged body that had been buried about six to eight years ago, and which had turned into a skeleton. He had probably nicked Redshanks, but this guy was too slick to try to pass his old bones off as a relatively recent skeleton.
The age of the deceased and the date of the interment were easy. There were burial records for those. The skeleton was the crucial part. How would he know, when he excavated whatever grave he had chosen to rob, that the coffin wouldn’t just be full of cold corpse stew? Because some of those containers were pretty damned solid, built like galleons to sail the main of eternity and repel all boarders. The body would do its best to decompose as nature intended, but most of the beasties, microbes and fungal activity that should have helped to strip it clean wouldn’t be able to gain entry.
And then Evie came back to help me. Or rather, her friend Justin had done so on her behalf, by telling me what she had said to him.
A cardboard coffin and a woodland burial.
I went on the Internet and found the email addresses for all the woodland and green-burial sites within a hundred-mile radius of a point between Dinas and Swansea. I sent an email posing them all one specific question. There would be no reply until tomorrow, unless business was so brisk in the nappy-knitting community that they had to run a night shift. Which I doubted.
I put a call in to Mackay. ‘Sorry if this looks like pushing you, Mac, but are you any further on with the Greg Thomas thing?’
‘Not yet. I told you this was a sensitive one. All I’ve got at the moment is that Greg Thomas was stationed over there at the time, and that Rose Jones had come over to visit.’
‘Who shot her?’
‘I don’t know yet. Although it does look accidental. She was a civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time when some kind of firefight took off.’
‘Between who?’
‘Us and some bad guys. And before you ask,’ he hurried on quickly, ‘I’m waiting to find out who they were.’
‘The bad guys shot Rose?’ I prodded.
‘That’s not actually definite.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It looks like there’s no ballistics report. No one found the bullet that killed her.’
‘Isn’t that unusual?’
‘Very.’ He laughed. ‘You didn’t ask for straightforward.’
‘Thanks, Mac. I’d appreciate it if you could get back to me as soon as you know anything else. In the meantime, can I have a quick word with Justin?’
‘How are you doing?’ I asked when he came on the line.
‘Cool,’ he enthused. ‘I thought hanging out with old soldier geezers would be a pain, but these dudes know some amazing stuff.’
‘Don’t let them corrupt you.’
He laughed. ‘They’re cool, but it’s not like I’m going to enlist or anything.’
‘I need you to think back to your talks with Evie.’
‘Okay.’
‘The man she met. Weren’t you curious? Didn’t you ever try to press for more information?’
‘All the time. It was like she was teasing me. But she wouldn’t give out. Said that she had had to make a solemn promise, and if she broke it she would be betraying his trust and she’d never be able to face him again.’
‘Did she ever talk about boats or sailing?’
He went quiet. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. Something dorky like that I’d have remembered. But I have remembered something about him she used to go on about. She used to keep saying how fit he was.’
‘Fit? As in attractive?’
‘No, she had other words for that, like awesome and gorgeous. No, this was like buff. You know, strong?’
‘Like he worked out?’ I had an image of Greg Thomas when I had seen him sorting the gym equipment. Remembering that I had thought then that he could have given Mackay a run for his money.
‘Yes.’
‘Thanks, Justin. Get back to me if you remember anything else, however small.’
‘Glyn?’
I sensed the arrival of a serious question. ‘What?’
‘Mackay and Boyce?’ He hesitated. ‘Do you think they’ve ever, like, really killed anyone?’
I laughed. ‘No, they’re full of bullshit.’ He was young. Certain dark truths deserved to be kept on the private side of the barrier.
16
We assembled at Fron Heulog in the morning. Two coaches arrived filled full of curious cops, in various hill-walking costumes, staring out the window, happy, for now, at the change to their routine. Given the terrain and the weather, I wondered how long that would last.
At the same time as our coaches arrived another one left, taking the boys back to Birmingham. Our investigation had curtailed their holiday, but none of them looked too upset about it. The two kids who had finked on TB gave me the finger as the coach drove past, and fanned out the banknotes I had given them against the window.
The Hornes let us use their barn as a briefing centre, and Valerie laid on coffee. Trevor Horne and Greg Thomas volunteered to help in the search, claiming that they knew the lie of the land.
Was Greg trying to get brownie points for helping us out? While in reality using it as an opportunity to keep close to my tactics, and observe how much we were floundering?
I tried to turn his game by getting them to act as guides to two of the teams. That way I could keep tabs on where they were and get a report from the loyal troops on any misdirection they might attempt. It also kept them separated. I still wasn’t quite ready to drop my hunch that there could be two perpetrators.
I kept Emrys Hughes’s sidekick, Friel, behind with me to act as my contact man. I was going to be working my own agenda, and didn’t want to be distracted by answering distress calls from lost or fed-up cops. Emrys wasn’t happy with that; not only was I poaching a member of his tribe, but an underling was going to be cosied-up, warm and dry, with the enemy, while he was out there getting cold, wet and muddy. It wasn’t personal, but Emrys was a bit too close to Inspector Morgan, and I didn’t want him getting nosy about what could be regarded as extracurricular activities.
It was one of those days when the clouds had elected to come down into the valley a-courting, bearing the gift of a cold hammam. I watched the search teams file off into an atmosphere that looked like it had been created by the steam and liquid-nitrogen leaks in the kitchen of a cutting-edge chef.
I instructed Friel to keep in regular contact with the groups and to mark their shifting locations on the large-scale map that had been set up. He armed himself with map pins, and went at it with gusto, having obviously seen too many old films that featured war rooms.
I shuffled myself off to a corner, out of his gaze, and opened my laptop. I had had two replies to the email I had sent off last night.
I called the first one, a green burial ground near Swindon in Wiltshire.
‘Are you conducting an investigation into satanic practices?’ the man who answered asked, after I had explained who I was.
‘No, just specific disturbances. As I said in my email, it’s fire I’m really interested in.’
‘Because we contacted the local police here, and they’ve been quite frankly lax in their pursuit of this.’
I tried again. ‘Have you had a fire?’
‘No, we’ve had a sacrificed rabbit.’
I cut him off and called the next number, a woodland burial site in the Forest of Dean.
‘You’ve had a fire?’ I asked, going straight for the jugular this time.
‘Yes, are yo
u following up on the visit the officer from Lydney made?’ the lady asked.
‘Yes,’ I bluffed it, ‘remind me again when the incident occurred?’
‘Sometime on Saturday night or the early hours of Sunday morning. It was spotted by one of our visitors. As you can imagine, we were all very distressed. This is meant to be a place of peace and repose.’
I went back through my mental calendar. Saturday night was when Justin’s flat had gone up. But, as Mackay and I had discussed, that operation was so specialized that he might have used a contractor. Even if he’d rigged it himself, the Forest of Dean wasn’t far from Hereford, and he would still have had most of the night to work in.
‘No one saw the flames?’
‘No, we’re quite remote. That’s what attracts most of our clients.’
‘Do you have security?’
‘We have a fence.’
‘No watchman or CCTV cameras?’
‘We’re a woodland burial ground, Sergeant, not Stalag Luft 13,’ she reminded me.
‘And it was definitely arson?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s been so damp here that there’s no way anything could have burst into flames like that. Petrol, your colleague thought, and a lot of it.’
‘The ground’s been scorched?’
‘The ground, the poor trees. All those markers and memorials. Why would vandals target us?’ She sounded distraught. ‘I’ve had to inform all the relatives that everything they left for their loved ones has been destroyed.’
‘Could you do me a great favour,’ I asked sympathetically, ‘and email me a list of the graves that were affected? The names and ages of the deceased.’
As I had suspected, he had targeted a green burial site because he knew that a degradable coffin would have ensured skeletonization. And he had used the same scorched-earth tactic to cover his tracks as he had done with Evie’s grave. As long as he had been reasonably careful in levelling the ground after he had exhumed his skeleton, the fire should have covered the disturbance.
And it had been put down to vandals, just as he had expected it would. Perceptual manipulation again. I was the only other person who knew that there was now an empty grave there. I had actually managed to outthink him. We had intersected at last. But how to move from here to an advantage? Even when I got the name of the body he had stolen, I knew that no one was going to put their reputation on the line to issue an exhumation order on the basis of the evidence I had.
I was on a roll, though. I was picking up answers. But not the one that I desperately needed to nail this bastard.
Where and when had he met Evie?
Anthea Joan Balmer. Aged fifty-three when she died and was buried in the Bluebell Sector of the Hornbeam Haven Natural Woodland Burial Ground. She was the only one who fitted the vectors in the list of names that came through on the email. The occupants of the other graves in the damaged area of the Bluebell Sector were either too old or too young.
I took one of the metal body probes with me. Visibility was improving, the wind had moved round to the north-east and was blowing cold, replacing the low cloud cover with a cheerless watery-blue sky.
I scrambled over the low stone wall that separated the rear lawn of Pen Twyn from the open pasture. From here I could see down to the front of the Barn Gallery. Gloria’s Audi TT was gone, but in its place was another piece of expensive-looking machinery, this one a bit more discreet than her yellow monster. A blue so dark that it was almost black, four stainless-steel exhausts and a badge with a trident.
A customer?
My adolescent interest in motor racing came back to help me. That car was a Maseratti. Jesus, that thing probably cost as much as a combine harvester. I winced. I was beginning to think like a redneck. Dinas was leaching into me.
I went to work on the lawn.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ It was Isabel, standing framed in the open French doors, in a clingy retro black outfit that paid homage to Theda Bara. Even her expression of outrage owed allegiance to the era of silent film.
And it was a stupid question. It was perfectly obvious that I was sticking a long metal pole into their grass. ‘I’m looking for a body,’ I replied cheerfully.
‘You can’t do that here.’
‘Why? Are you laying claim to the ones on your land?’
‘You can’t just walk onto someone else’s property and start damaging things. You need a warrant or something for that.’
She was probably right, but I was prepared to take the risk. I turned my back on her and went back to work with the probe.
‘Clive!’ It came out like a shriek. It had worked.
He was slightly flushed from running up the steps from the barn when he crossed the lawn towards me. I heard Isabel’s shrill laugh waft up from the Barn Gallery. They had swapped roles.
‘Stop that at once,’ he commanded, a vague tremolo in his voice from the exertion.
I jabbed the probe in again. ‘What we’re looking for are hollow pockets which may indicate where a body has decomposed and collapsed in on itself,’ I explained helpfully.
‘Do you think you’re funny?’ He was in control of his voice again.
‘Do you?’
‘You’re going to be very sorry for this.’
‘Clive, I’m not here for the fun of it. I know what you’ve been up to.’
‘I play golf with the Chief Constable, who I think might be able to use a little bit of his influence on my behalf.’ He leaned forward and smiled nastily. ‘Boss to boss, sort of thing, just enough to earn you at least a severe fucking reprimand.’
I ignored his threat. I lowered my voice to stop Isabel overhearing. ‘I know that you lied when you told me you didn’t know Evie Salmon.’
His eyes flickered, but he recovered control and tried to call my bluff. ‘Get off my land before you make things even worse for yourself.’ Instinctively, he had also dropped his voice level.
‘You Fenwicks are a worldly and sophisticated lot. Isabel probably wouldn’t give a toss about the gambling, or even the coke, but not mentioning that Evie Salmon was dancing attendance, that might raise some eyebrows. That might set her to wondering whether you weren’t trying to hide something.’
I saw his face crash at the realization of what Gerald Evans had done to him. His glance twitched involuntarily to see if there was anyone else in hearing distance.
He tried to stare me down, but the hauteur spluttered out. He dropped his eyes. ‘It was a hospitality thing. I was invited after a round of golf. It was totally innocuous,’ he said sulkily, not yet quite able to surrender the reins of power.
‘More than once.’
He shrugged morosely.
‘And not something you wanted Isabel to know about?’
He sensed the possibility of a deal arriving. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to know what really happened on the day Evie Salmon left Dinas.’
He looked off for a moment, weighing up his prospects. ‘She arranged for me to meet her.’
‘She contacted you?’ I asked. I was surprised. His phrasing had put Evie in the driving seat.
He nodded glumly. ‘That bastard Evans must have given her my phone number. She asked if I had told my wife about her.’ He looked at me, the mean flash in his eyes again. ‘I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but she was a malicious, scheming little bitch.’
‘What had you been up to?’
‘Nothing!’ he protested indignantly. Then he remembered that this was meant to be a game of absolute truth. ‘Okay, I drove her home once and we ended up having a necking session in a lay-by. Only once, and that was as far as it went. I think she must have been setting up her future options,’ he observed bitterly.
‘What did she want from you?’
‘She wanted me to meet her in Dinas that afternoon, and then to drive her to the station in Hereford.’
‘Why you, if there wasn’t any relationship?’ I asked.
‘I asked her t
hat,’ he said, aggrieved. ‘She laughed and said it was because I had the nicest car in Dinas. She told me she wanted to leave the place in style.’
‘Where was she taking the train?’
‘She was cagey about that. She wouldn’t tell me. And she said she didn’t want me hanging around the station after I’d dropped her off, trying to sneak a look. As if I fucking cared where she was going,’ he snorted angrily.
‘Did she say who she was going to see?’
He shook his head.
‘Think harder,’ I instructed.
‘She was flaky, it was all just puff about clothes and cars and bands and how she never wanted to set eyes on Dinas again.’ He paused. A memory surfacing. ‘There was one thing, though.’ He closed his eyes, concentrating. I didn’t press. ‘She said something like it was lucky that she hadn’t told her boyfriend what we had got up to in my car. I asked why, and she said it was because he knew how to kill people. I asked if he was a soldier.’ He paused.
‘And?’ I prompted.
‘She didn’t deny it. She just turned sideways in her seat and gave me that infuriating, simpering little grin that made you want to reach over and slap it off her face.’
The cog ratcheted round, bringing Greg Thomas another notch closer to Evie.
My phone rang when I was halfway back to Fron Heulog. It was Tessa’s number.
‘Hi,’ I answered, conscious of the fact that she so often seemed to call when I had been at the Barn Gallery. Then I thought about the geography again. Or close to Fron Heulog?
‘Hi.’ She sounded chirpy. ‘Are you free tonight?’
I thought about Greg Thomas. Nothing was likely to happen there in a hurry. ‘Potentially,’ I answered, curious.
‘How about coming up here and I’ll cook you a one-pot dinner on the camping hob to reinforce my apology.’
I felt my loins drop into soft focus. ‘What about the crew?’
‘They’re going to the cinema in Shrewsbury. They’ll be out till late.’
‘I’ll bring the wine.’
‘Great.’ She waited a beat. ‘What are you lot doing down there? Sharon’s just come back up the hill and said that the valley’s full of policemen.’
