Dead People

by Ewart Hutton

  She thought about not answering, but then nodded slowly. ‘When the bodies started appearing down there I asked for background details on all the officers who might be crossing my path.’

  ‘So you knew about Kevin Fletcher and me?’

  ‘The gist of it.’

  ‘So why did you make a point of bringing it up the other night at The Fleece?’

  ‘I wanted to see how you would handle the pompous son of a bitch.’

  ‘And?’ I prompted.

  ‘Don’t you remember? I took pity on you and rescued you.’

  I swallowed and took a breath, and set hope into my face. ‘I don’t suppose we could take a memory pill, and start off with me knocking on your door again?’

  She looked at me carefully for a moment. A smile almost formed. ‘If it’s any consolation, my interest wasn’t totally confined to work.’

  But no memory pill.

  18

  Why couldn’t she have come up with some petrified Anglo Saxon axe warrior, rather than Redshanks, I grumbled to myself as I slunk down the hill following Emrys’s Land Rover. Then she could have pretended to have been employed by the University of East Anglia, or some equally neutral institution. That way I would probably now be arriving at her caravan door with a bottle of wine, a new shave, and my label as Quaintly Attractive Welsh Detective Sergeant still intact.

  A missed-call message beeped when I got back into the valley. It took me a moment to recognize the number. Alison Weir. I put out a silent prayer of thanks that she had responded to the urgency of the request.

  After I’d heard what she had to tell me, I sat there silently contemplating my next moves, trying to work my way through the foreseeable variables, and hoping that the unforeseeable ones would fall kindly.

  It was now fully dark. Time to go calling.

  ‘It’s late, Sergeant.’ Valerie Horne’s voice was tetchy over the intercom.

  ‘It’s very important, Mrs Horne. Can you tell your brother that I urgently need to talk to him.’

  ‘Is he in any kind of trouble?’ her voice lowered protectively.

  ‘Not if he’s prepared to be totally straight with me.’

  She buzzed the gates open. As I went down the drive I was aware that she would be reporting what I had just said to Greg Thomas. I had now shown my hand. I had to hope that it was the right one. Because I was also aware that there could still be two of them involved. But, if there were, I was at least now fairly confident that it wasn’t Trevor Horne that I had to worry about any more.

  The security lights were on outside the reception building, but without the search parties or the gang youths hanging about, the yard had an air of desertion, like a shut-down film set.

  Greg came out of the house and crossed the yard. ‘We’ll use the office,’ he announced gruffly as he passed without stopping. I followed him up the steps to the door. He unlocked it and threw a half-eaten apple out into the night.

  He formalized the encounter by sitting behind the desk. I sat down opposite him. ‘What’s this all about?’ he asked, his expression and tone hostile. I looked up at the buddy photograph above his head and silently rebuked myself for not having foreseen this possibility before now.

  ‘By our best estimates, Evie Salmon was murdered, butchered and buried approximately six weeks ago. Can you tell me where you were then?’

  He scowled. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I’m very serious, Mr Thomas.’

  ‘And I’ve already told you that I never knew her. Are you making me out to be a liar?’ he asked truculently.

  ‘No, I’m just trying to find out what your movements were about six weeks ago.’

  He considered protesting again, but thought better of it. ‘Here, I suppose. Around here. I haven’t been anywhere for a while.’

  ‘So you haven’t got any particular alibi?’

  ‘What would I need an alibi for?’ The question had genuinely surprised him.

  ‘We think we know the identity of the bodies we’ve found up at the wind-farm site.’

  ‘What has that got to do with me?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘They were the paramilitaries who were involved in the incident when your fiancée, Rose Jones, was accidentally shot and killed.’

  He just stared at me uncomprehendingly for a long moment, his mouth open. ‘Oh, Jesus!’ His hands came together as if in prayer, and his head drooped over the desk. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake . . . Oh, Christ . . .’ His head started shaking rhythmically.

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’

  He turned the head-shake into a negative.

  I waited him out.

  Eventually, he looked up. His expression was still etched with shock and his eyes were ghastly. ‘You can’t think that I had anything to do with this?’ Shock had gone deep into his voice as well.

  ‘At first, I thought it was you. Just the way I was meant to.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s set you up, Greg. He knew that once we’d started down this line we would discover that you’re the one with the motive.’

  He looked suddenly frightened. He shook his head in a sharp denial. But he had made the same connection. He knew exactly who I was talking about.

  ‘What was puzzling me was how you could possibly have obtained the information about where to find the victims,’ I continued. ‘You were a civilian by then. And then I remembered that I’d been told that Owen Jones had transferred to Military Intelligence. It slotted together. You had the motive, but he had the same motive, and an advantage. He had the means of access to the information.’

  He shook his head weakly, still trying to make sense of it. ‘He’s my best friend.’

  ‘I don’t think Owen has friends. Not in the way that you or I would think of them. I don’t know him like you do, so perhaps I can see it better, but I think that he treats people as utilities that can be brought into play whenever a particular occasion calls for it.’

  But he still wasn’t ready to accept it. ‘If he wasn’t my friend, why did he introduce me to his sister?’

  ‘Because he needed to be in control of who she was going to marry.’

  ‘But he didn’t know I was going to marry her,’ he protested.

  ‘Then he would just have continued to bring carefully selected buddies home until, finally, she did. But, crucially, they would have been his choice. He would have done the initial screening. You may not have realized it, but you would have been vetted for suitability before you were invited to Cogfryn. That’s what he was doing for his sister. As far as he was concerned, he was in charge of her life. Always had been. Those three people took that away from him, and for that they had to die.’

  ‘He let me buy Fron Heulog,’ he argued, shifting to another tack.

  ‘Not because you were his great good friend, but because you were a part of Rose. He had already decreed that the two of you were going to live there. It was just continuity. But now that the Bruno Gilbert ruse looks like it might be about to run aground, he needs another fall guy. I’m afraid you became expendable, Greg.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, at the end of the day, he could apportion some of the blame to you. If you hadn’t done that tour in Northern Ireland, Rose wouldn’t have come over to see you, and she wouldn’t have been killed.’

  Another cog creaked round. ‘Do you drink whisky?’ I asked, while he was still digesting that.

  He frowned at the randomness of the question. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bunnahabhain?’

  ‘Amongst others; I’ve got a thing for Islay malts.’

  ‘Can you show me?’

  He got up. By now he knew better than to question me. I followed him across the yard to a single-storey extension on the side of the main farmhouse.

  ‘This is my apartment,’ he informed me as he unlocked the door. ‘Val and Trev use the main house.’

  He led me into an open-plan living room and kitchen with a vaulted ceiling. It was b
achelor red-and-cream, with a wood-laminate floor, black leather three-piece suite, and blond-wood furniture. The room was clean and tidy apart from the remains of his dinner, which were still sitting on a glass coffee table opposite the television set.

  He opened a cabinet. I saw bottles stacked in rows, more than I could count at a glance. I made out Ardbeg, Bowmore and Lagavulin before his back blocked the view.

  He turned round frowning. ‘I was sure I had a bottle.’

  ‘It’s gone?’

  He nodded, puzzled by the absence.

  ‘And Owen was round here recently?’

  ‘Yes.’ He frowned again. ‘What’s the significance?’

  ‘Bruno Gilbert was forced to drink most of it.’

  He took that in and his expression blanched. ‘That couldn’t come back to me?’ It was more plea than question.

  ‘On its own it’s only circumstantial. But it’s all part of the Gestalt.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The bigger picture adds up to more than all the little parts taken individually.’

  ‘Is there more?’ he asked anxiously.

  I looked round the room. I felt a twinge. It was almost spectral, as if I was picking up a trace of the same intruder who had been in Unit 13. I just knew then that the place had been seeded. Probably the bedroom. If I hadn’t stalled in my original purpose and had taken Greg Thomas to Fletcher after all, I was convinced that a search warrant would uncover at least trace evidence of Evie and Bruno here. Enough to keep the finger pointed.

  ‘Where does Owen stay in the UK when he’s not at Cogfryn?’

  ‘He’s got a cottage in Port Eynon on the Gower Peninsula.’

  The gears whirred, meshed, and locked home.

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘Yes. It’s an annual event. A long weekend. Sea fishing and surfing.’

  ‘Did you ever make any impromptu visits? Just turn up?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, you don’t do that to Owen. He likes everything organized.’

  ‘When you were there, were there any signs of a woman living there?’

  ‘There were always girls’ things around, wherever Owen lived.’

  ‘But you never met any of them?’

  ‘Not there.’

  Where would he have shipped Evie off to, I wondered. I was distracted from this speculation by the sight of Greg frowning and shaking his head.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘This doesn’t work.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Owen’s in Nigeria. I drove him to Birmingham Airport myself.’

  ‘That’s right, you saw him onto one plane. And I’d already checked that he’d got on the flight in London. He was out of the picture. Africa makes great cover. Or so I thought. That’s why you eventually became my target. But I’ve had one of my colleagues check again. He left that flight in Paris. Which gave him plenty of time to get back.’

  ‘He came back here?’ He knew it was a pointless question, but it gave him time to adjust. He shook his head, still confused. ‘Where’s he been staying?’

  ‘That’s been bothering me too. But he was brought up here, he knows the area like the back of his hand. So where could he find total concealment?’

  ‘One of the Cogfryn barns?’

  ‘Too close to home. The farm dogs would sense him. No, I think that he might have literally gone to ground.’

  *

  I drove up the approach track to the gold mine with my headlights full on. If Owen was watching, I wanted him to realize that this was the only car, and that I wasn’t sneaking up.

  I stopped in front of the gates and put the call in.

  ‘Where the fuck are you, Capaldi?’ Fletcher demanded.

  ‘I can’t say, boss. I’m calling to tell you that the man we’re after is Owen Jones, the brother of Rose Jones, who was killed in Northern Ireland. He’s got a house on the Gower Peninsula. You’ll get the address from Greg Thomas at Fron Heulog. I think we’ll find that that’s where Evie was living.’

  ‘Are we going to find him there too?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s going to be going on the run. We need to get a bulletin out to airports, stations, ports and all mobile units.’

  ‘Going to be . . .? Are you adding fortune-telling to your fucking skill set?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘This is more than a hunch.’

  ‘I want you back at The Fleece.’

  ‘Later, boss.’

  I disconnected, cutting him off in mid-protest. I had a bloodbath to try to avert.

  I had to climb over the gates, which had been secured with a new padlock. I walked down the line of the static cortege of ruined and bramble-choked cars and past Bruno’s shack, which seemed to have taken on even more of a list. That same sense of attenuation was in the air, as if we were working to different natural rules on this side of the fence.

  At the sluices the cover of the mineshaft was closed. But I had already decided that he had to have a way of opening it from the inside.

  Because I had figured out that Owen had set the mine up as home base. An intuition that I desperately wished I had never received. Because now, in all conscience, I was going to have to act on it.

  After he had murdered and buried Evie, when the situation with the burial site was still in flux, he could have remained at a safe remove, monitoring things from a distance. But once the bodies had been discovered he had to move back in. First, to kill and set up Bruno. Then, when I looked like fucking up his diversionary plan, to keep close to what I was getting up to.

  But everyone had to believe that he had returned to Nigeria. He had to stay hidden. Once we had cleared it of its crime-scene status, what better place to go to earth than a creepy mine tunnel?

  This was his old stomping ground. He was probably using a motorbike or a quad bike to get around. With his intimate knowledge of the country he didn’t even have to stick to the roads. This was where he and Rose used to play as children. He had demonstrated that he knew his way around the mine when he had sneaked Evie’s dress into Bruno’s substitute-mother’s boudoir.

  He was either already in there, or he was soon going to return. Either way I had to set the meeting in motion. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I owed this to a lot of dead people. And to people who were alive at the moment who I didn’t want to see dead.

  I had prepared Fletcher for the possibility of Owen going on the run. I could be prescient about it because I was going to grant him that option. Not as any kind of favour, but because the vital thing was to get him out into the open. He would be armed and he could take people out as they approached down the tunnel. He could do too much damage in that confined space.

  How much of a surprise would my arrival be to him? I wondered. Did he still think that he was in control? Or was desperation starting to set in?

  The important thing was not to surprise him.

  I stood at the top of the shaft. ‘This is DS Capaldi. I am alone and unarmed, and I am coming in,’ I declaimed into the evening air, hearing my voice drift onto the hillside, sounding like a prat.

  I opened the hatch and climbed down to the bottom and repeated the announcement. I felt the terror close in as I got down on my hands and knees and started to crawl along the first tunnel. Even with the beam of my torch filling the space ahead, the light seemed to have a sinister quality, an absence of anything warm or spiritual, the tunnel walls striated and facetted, as if they had been gouged-out by a huge and desperate burrowing thing. Claustrophobia manifested itself in a sense that the tunnel was actually contracting behind me. Collapsing like a rotten artery, cutting off my escape route.

  I was hyperventilating and sweating. I had to convince myself that these were all sneaky tricks created by my mind in an attempt to make me abandon what it considered to be a fucking crazy notion and not conducive to the survival of the body that it was conditioned to preserve.

  I stopped and forced myself to repeat my arriv
al announcement. ‘This is DS Capaldi. I am alone and unarmed.’

  It was strangely comforting to hear my voice rolling on down the tunnel. It broke the isolation. Even the torchlight took on a new vibrancy. I was my own good company. I felt the tension ease slightly.

  I continued to repeat the announcement until I reached the chamber Bruno had dedicated to his mother.

  Inside, all the former smells of spinsterhood and latex had disappeared and been replaced by the same mineral dampness that pervaded the rest of the mine. I swung the torch beam round slowly. The furniture had been removed by Forensics. I played the light over the trompe l’œil painting of the window, which seemed even more sad and primitive now that it had lost the context of the pretend room.

  I shifted the beam to the next quadrant, and illuminated the sleeping bag and inflatable mattress on the ground. But it wasn’t those that made me catch my breath. It was the shapes behind them that seemed to have no logic in this place. And then all too much of logic, as their form and intent combined.

  Gas cylinders.

  So had Owen prepared a treat for our arrival?

  I moved the torch beam again and a terror archetype overwhelmed me. The two dead things had been arranged on the floor in a simulation of sodomy. I forced myself to do a double take. Only one dead thing, I reminded myself, the realization diluting some of my fear. Redshanks was synthetic. And so, by elimination, the skeleton that he appeared to be humping, his sightless eye sockets and rictus grin adding demonic intensity to the performance, had to be the mortal remains of poor Anthea Joan Balmer.

  I invoked a silent imprecation on the sick bastard, and then I was visited by blindness.

  I had instinctively shut my eyes against the sudden incandescent flare of light that seemed to explode right in front of my face, but I still held the afterimage on my retina like a popped flashbulb.

  I felt a tug on my torch. I resisted the reflexive instinct to clutch harder, and loosened my grip and let him remove it. I told myself to stay absolutely still.

  ‘There’s a shotgun pointed at you,’ he warned.

  I nodded carefully, acknowledging it.

  ‘Turn away from me slowly, sit down and put your head between your knees, and put your hands out behind your back.’