Dead People

by Ewart Hutton

  ‘It seemed like a good day to go out looking for bodies.’

  ‘More?’ She sounded concerned.

  ‘I personally think it’s a false alarm. I’ll tell you about it later.’

  ‘Right, but make sure you don’t send all those men in this direction, otherwise my girls might be tempted to stay at home tonight.’

  ‘What about you?’

  She laughed. ‘I’m not greedy. One reasonably athletic cop will do me.’

  I finished the call with an involuntary grin on my face. But before I could get even flakier, another thought was arriving to fuck with my head. A confusing and disturbing one, riding in on a cold neural channel, dousing every vestige of libido. Triggered partly by the apparent coincidence behind Tessa’s telephone calls. But mainly by the recall of the sign on the side of her Land Rover, and the spark of a hunch I had had when I had first visited the dig and had wondered whether there could be a Celtic connection. Queen’s University Belfast. And her Redshanks? They were mercenaries from the Western Isles of Scotland who hired themselves out into the service of Irish Chiefs.

  Northern Irish Chiefs?

  More coincidence?

  My head was still seething when I got back to the Fron Heulog barn.

  ‘Friel,’ I shouted over, ‘go outside and have a fag.’

  ‘That’s all right, thanks, Sarge, I don’t smoke,’ he called back cheerily.

  ‘Well go and look at the fucking birds then.’

  He took the hint.

  I took out the card Tessa had given me when I had first gone to her camp. Taking a deep breath to still the anticipatory fear, I dialled the number.

  ‘Archaeology Department, how can we help you?’ The voice was young, female and Ulster.

  ‘Is that Queen’s University Belfast?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I speak to Dr Tessa MacLean, please?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr MacLean’s on a field trip, she’s not contactable through the university switchboard at present.’

  ‘Can you tell me where she is?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t give out specific site addresses.’

  ‘I’m a police officer.’

  ‘I’m still sorry, but I hope you understand that the location of an archaeological dig is very sensitive.’

  ‘How about the wider geography?’

  She laughed. ‘I can probably manage that. She’s in Wales.’

  Then I called the real Queen’s University number. The one that I got through directory enquiries. And discovered that Dr Tessa MacLean had retired two years previously. Aged sixty-three.

  Why was she doing it? What was her relationship to Greg Thomas? And how the fuck were they funding this scam? All Tessa’s helpers on a day rate? The fake line to the fake Queen’s University staffer? I knew they were the wrong questions to be asking, but it kept me away from the personal side of things. The betrayal and the fear.

  Like having to speculate on how close Tessa, or whoever the fuck she was, had been to the actual events that had resulted in the burial of Evie Salmon and those nameless people on that cold stark hill. And the atrocity committed on Bruno Gilbert. Not to mention poor Mary Doyle and the shade of Anthea Joan Balmer.

  I also had to accept that she had only been getting close to me to keep tabs on the progress of my investigation. So that she could report back to keep up the flow of obstacles coming downstream at me.

  That report of the Peeping Tom at her caravan? Pure baloney. It had all been prepared to get me up there and out on a fruitless chase after Greg Thomas in the snow, so that he could get back and ream out all the available information in Unit 13. But she had allowed a sexual possibility to build. Only to have the discovery of the theft of Redshanks curtail it. The prospect of a grope had obviously been considered an acceptable sacrifice in the line of setting me up as the dupe.

  So what was the disappearance of Redshanks all about? Was that supposed to send us off on another safari? Another device to divert our attention?

  And what was expected from me tonight? Was I going to be stuffed, basted and roasted, with an apple stuck in my mouth?

  I got Friel to call the search squads back in when the mobile catering wagon arrived to dish out lunch. I had no appetite. I sat aloof in front of my laptop trying to make sense of this new Tessa discovery.

  Mackay’s call blew all that out of the water. ‘If I didn’t feel that I owed you something for all the shit I’ve put you through over all the years I’ve known you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. In fact, I’m still not sure that what I did was bad enough to warrant this sort of fucking dowry.’

  I sensed a genuine reluctance in him. ‘On top of everything else, you went off with my ex-wife,’ I reminded him, trying to clinch the deal.

  ‘I can’t talk about this over the telephone, or commit it to an email.’

  I looked over at the search teams, who all looked happier now that they were temporarily in out of the cold, with their coffee and burgers and doughnuts. I was supposed to be in charge of this operation, I reminded myself. I was meant to be their shepherd.

  I came to a decision. Emrys Hughes could take charge of the afternoon session. ‘Can you meet me halfway?’

  Mackay was already at the car park at the Elan Valley Visitors’ Centre when I arrived. Or rather his old Range Rover was there. I had been through enough of these meetings now to know to wait in my car until he appeared. It was an old habit he couldn’t kick, he had told me, making sure that the only people who turned up for appointments were the ones with genuine invitations.

  Eventually, he materialized from a direction I had not been expecting, and was already halfway across the car park before I saw him. He looked tense and preoccupied, like a man on his way to an oncologist for the results of a second round of tests. It was his way of warning me that something grim was arriving in the delivery van.

  ‘We’ll use my car,’ he instructed, when he got to my open window.

  ‘Don’t you want a coffee or anything?’ I asked, indicating the visitors’ centre.

  He shook his head brusquely. ‘I don’t want anyone’s walls or ceiling hearing this.’

  On the walk across the car park, I gestured at the huge canted face of the dam behind the visitors’ centre. ‘Italians did the stonework on the Claerwen Dam further up the valley,’ I informed him, punching a bit of pride into the statement, expecting some Wop banter from him in return.

  Instead, he just looked at it blankly. ‘This is bad fucking news, Capaldi.’

  I knew that he wasn’t talking about the Italians.

  ‘How’s Justin?’ I asked warily, after I had climbed into the Range Rover, hoping that his mood or the bad fucking news wasn’t anything to do with him.

  ‘He’s good,’ he replied in a tone that told me he didn’t want to talk about Justin. He turned in his seat to face me, his expression pained.

  He was worrying me. I was not used to him being so taciturn. ‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,’ I said, trying to draw him out.

  He was silent for a moment before he nodded, accepting my thanks. ‘I can’t give you any details.’

  ‘I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, Mac.’

  ‘So has the postman. It doesn’t work like that. There are levels of entitlement, and from where you’re standing you can’t even see up to this particular window ledge.’

  ‘Five people have been murdered.’

  He shrugged regretfully. ‘That’s chicken shit compared to the potential repercussions that surrounded this operation.’

  ‘You’re talking past tense?’

  ‘These things keep on resonating.’

  ‘You can’t tell me anything?’

  ‘All the information is already there. The art is in stitching it together.’

  What was he telling me? The official version was just a mask over the truth? A distortion? A shuffled pack? ‘Rose Thomas wasn’t the innocent bystander she seemed to be?’ I tried.

/>   ‘On the contrary.’

  ‘Her death was accidental?’

  He nodded. ‘You’re cold. Forget her. She wasn’t instrumental to anything, not even a catalyst; she was just collateral damage.’

  ‘What about Greg Thomas?’

  He shook his head. ‘Only as the reason she ended up in that wrong place. He doesn’t figure either.’

  Not to you maybe, I thought. But he was talking about a bigger picture, not a grim set of murders in Mid Wales. He was trying to lead me forward. I put Rose back into context. He had already told me that she had accidentally been caught up in some kind of a firefight. A bystander at a run-in with Loyalist or Republican paramilitaries? ‘It was an anti-terrorist operation?’ I postulated.

  ‘I can’t answer a question like that.’

  I spun my thought process. ‘How about a pub-quiz question?’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘When was the Northern Irish peace process ratified?’

  He smiled craftily, seeing the direction I was taking. ‘Good Friday, 1998.’

  So, when Rose was killed, all the major players, Protestant and Catholic, would have been involved behind the scenes in the negotiations for a peace settlement. By that time there was probably a general consensus for this thing to succeed. So if the army was involved in a counter-terrorist action it would probably have been against some kind of radical splinter group who were trying to fuck up the peace process.

  A realization was slowly dawning.

  If the terrorists had been killed in that firefight, the process that had led us here wouldn’t have started. The books would automatically have been balanced. So, Rose had died, but had her killers survived?

  I shivered involuntarily. The motive was staring to take shape. I forced myself to stay calm and work through the bigger picture. ‘Were some people imprisoned?’

  ‘Ask yourself why that doesn’t work.’

  But it did work. It would make sense of the time lag. They are put away for Rose’s killing, but, with different degrees of culpability, they received different sentences, which would account for the gaps between the revenge killings – if that’s what they were – after they had been released.

  Then I had to face Mac’s truth. It didn’t work because they would have been released into a supportive community. The killer might have been able to pick one of them off, but three would have been impossible. But he had managed to kill them, and cart the bodies to a remote cwm in Wales. So they must have been living in a background where they wouldn’t have been protected or missed.

  I nodded to myself as the next train arrived in the station.

  No one had gone to prison. A gunfight with terrorists, an innocent bystander is shot and killed, but no one pays a judicial price.

  ‘It wasn’t a military operation per se, it was an intelligence operation. Or it turned into one.’ I let him hear me thinking out loud. ‘No one got blamed for it. The army covered it up.’

  His expression remained open.

  ‘And it was successful.’

  His nod was virtually imperceptible.

  The victims had given something up in exchange for immunity from prosecution. They had opened up to Military Intelligence. They would no longer have been able to function within their own community. By talking to the enemy they had signed their own death warrants.

  Unless they were reinvented.

  I looked at him carefully. ‘Some bad people were given new lives?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I had to be satisfied with that. It was as far as he could direct me while remaining within the limits of disclosure he had set himself.

  17

  Mac had told me to forget about Rose Jones. But I had to come back to her now. This was her story. Her death was central to the smaller drama that had splintered off and left five people murdered in a tiny valley in Mid Wales.

  In a way it was a love story. Except it had turned ugly when the bereaved lover had refused to stay within the conventional orbit of grief and mourning. He had exchanged sackcloth and lilies for a blood curse.

  If I was correct, because the three people he held responsible for his fiancée’s death had been allowed to go free, Greg Thomas had undertaken a rite of vendetta. He had brought her killers back to her childhood home, and created a memorial of dead people for her. And had then spiralled off to kill two more in an attempt to stamp out the brush fires that our investigation had caused to flare up around him.

  But how had he unlocked the secret of his victims’ new identities?

  That was the problem that was preoccupying me as I drove back to Dinas. It was an academic exercise – the three graves told us that he had identified Rose’s killers – but it kept my mind off how I was going to deal with him when I got back to Fron Heulog. With nothing more than a non-attributable testimony.

  He had waited all that time before he had made his first move. Which was why Rose’s death hadn’t set up any bow waves when I first heard about it. It seemed to have happened too long before to have any relevance.

  That was the other thing that was niggling. The time frames. Why hadn’t the alarm sounded? Why, after disposing of the first victim, had he been able to come back for the other two? Either the authorities had not alerted them, or no one had realized that the first disappearance might have a wider significance.

  And then, about two years later, he went for the other two. A male and a female. Forensic and pathology evidence couldn’t be precise about the timing of the burials, but the more I thought about it the more certain I was that they had been killed at the same time, even though they had been found in separate graves.

  I pictured them as a married couple. Their joint killing was accounted for by the simple economics of effort. He couldn’t just top one and expect the other to wait patiently for him to return. Okay, he had the risk of transporting two bodies, but what real difference was it going to make? If he was hauled over they weren’t going to make things any worse for him on the grounds that he was carrying a bulk shipment.

  I was deliberately using these exercises to keep my excitement suppressed. I was on my way back to Fron Heulog. I could easily run into Greg Thomas. I didn’t want anything in my demeanour to betray my new knowledge, and possibly spook him.

  Because I still had to try to tie him to Evie. I was wondering whether it would be worthwhile bracing Clive Fenwick again, when that whole realm of speculation crashed as I turned into Fron Heulog and approached the reception building.

  Kevin Fletcher’s car was parked there.

  I reversed down the drive at speed, praying that he hadn’t seen me. I was thinking furiously to save myself. I had made a supposition. I knew that three people had been killed. But what if there had been more of them? It was a long shot, but I was aware that I had just run out of options.

  ‘Mac, its Glyn,’ I was parked in a lay-by near Fron Heulog, stooped down in the seat, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.

  He picked up the edge in my voice. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, concerned.

  ‘I know you can’t give me details, but it’s vital that I have one piece of information.’

  ‘What?’ His voice was harsh.

  ‘How many of them were there?’

  The silence stretched out.

  ‘Mac?’

  ‘Sorry, Glyn.’ He disconnected.

  I felt an immense wave of disappointment ride in to stretch the tension that was already wound up to the limit. I cut the connection.

  My phone beeped. I opened the text message: ‘4’.

  I closed my eyes in silent thanks.

  Because that was how I could bring this to the surface without jeopardising Mackay or his contacts. We had found three bodies, but four people had been given immunity. We had one unaccounted for. I could claim that he was my informant. That he had contacted me to tell me about the deal, but insisted on anonymity. I could imagine the suspicion on Jack Galbraith’s face. This guy coming forward now, out of the blue, was a
bit of a convenient coincidence, but who the fuck cares? It was the result I was interested in.

  I reminded myself that I didn’t know if he was still alive. But, apart from the murderer and Military Intelligence, no one else did either. And if Greg Thomas tried to contradict me he would be demonstrating a bit more inside knowledge than was healthy for him.

  A tap on my window brought me back to my uncertain present. Emrys Hughes was staring in at me with his mouth rammed open into a great big malicious grin. I smelled Schadenfreude. I also, at the very moment of seeing Emrys’s twisted joy, felt my newfound certainty about Greg Thomas collapse. Some instinct was screaming at me that things were not right. I lowered the window.

  ‘Your boss wants to see you,’ he announced with relish.

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  He cocked his head back in the direction of Fron Heulog. ‘We were all watching your stunt-driving performance.’

  And by ‘all’, I knew that he meant Kevin Fletcher especially.

  But at least I now had something else to give him. Trade-goods to barter for my perceived desertion. Because my sudden and perverse loss of faith meant that I would not be giving Greg Thomas up to him. The intimation was telling me that I had to keep him to myself for the moment. It was frustrating, but on a deep and currently impenetrable level I knew I had to run with it.

  I had my victims, and in Greg Thomas I had a guy with a motive to kill them. I even had the Saint Rose that they were dedicated to. So why, on a deep instinctual level, was I suddenly not sure any more? I had picked up a nagging doubt. Was there a flaw somewhere I couldn’t quite see? An inconsistency? Or was the problem that it all flowed forward so perfectly?

  Instead of clarity I now had more ink in the goldfish bowl. I recalled what Clive Fenwick had told me of Evie’s boast. And, when I took the Greg Thomas blinkers off, I had to accept that there was more than one soldier in this valley. If I offered Greg Thomas up to Fletcher it would set off an irrevocable chain of events. But that chain might just be another paper trail that had been laid out for us. Another baited trap. Just like Evie and Bruno.