Dead People (2 page)

‘Does it?’ I asked. ‘Can you tell whether this is medieval?’

She hunkered down close to the remains. I dropped down beside her, our splayed-out knees almost touching. She took out a pen and used it as a pointer. ‘Can you see that?’ she asked, directing my eyes down to a point close to the elbow of the one uncovered arm.

I caught it. A scrap of something with a dirty-brown sheen to it, damp, a surface-texture like kelp. ‘What is it?’

She turned her face to mine. ‘Whatever variation on polyethylene sheet it turns out to be, Sergeant, I don’t think they were making it six hundred years ago.’

‘Could it have got here independently?’

‘I’m not the detective, but the material does appear to be under the remains.’ She smiled again, sympathetically, I thought, but before I could confirm it, she stood up. I joined her and heard Emrys Hughes smother a snort of laughter. He wouldn’t have known polyethylene if it turned up on his breakfast plate, but he obviously thought that I had just had my nose caught in a hinge.

‘So the plastic could have been used as a wrapping?’ I asked.

She shrugged. It wasn’t her business. It didn’t matter. I was airing the questions for my own benefit. ‘Or as a carrier? Something to stop the fluids leaking?’ I turned to Jeff. ‘What was here before your started your operation?’

‘Nothing. Just open hill.’

‘No track?’

‘A pretty rudimentary one.’ He pointed out a track that was little more than twin wheel ruts that ran up to the shoulder of the hill. ‘That’s a continuation of it. It goes up to Tessa’s . . . Dr MacLean’s dig.’

‘So you could have got a vehicle up here?’

‘It would have to have been a four-wheel drive.’

The wind gusted. I felt it cold in my face. ‘It’s going to rain. Have you got a tarpaulin we can use to cover the body and the excavated material?’

‘Sure. Are we going to be able to carry on and work round you while you do what you have to do?’

So that’s why he was looking so worried. ‘Not immediately, I’m afraid,’ I said sympathetically, ‘and then it’s going to depend on what we find before we can release the site back to you.’

‘
Jeff . . .
’

We all looked round at the man at the open door of one of the site huts who had just shouted. ‘There’s a call come in for the cops.’

I looked at Jeff quizzically. ‘There’s no cellular reception up here,’ he explained, ‘we had to put our own landline in.’

‘Jeff . . .’ Tessa put a hand on his arm. ‘I’m going to go back up the hill now. I’ll catch you soon.’

‘I’ll come over.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It looks like I’m going to have time on my hands.’

She bobbed her head at me. ‘’Bye, Sergeant.’

‘Goodbye, doctor,’ I replied, feeling the formal distance. I felt an irrational twinge of loneliness and wished that I was playing in the same movie as she and Jeff.

They left me to take the call in a partitioned-off area of the hut, with topographical-survey plans on the walls. The long table was home to a cluster of tannin-lined mugs and a bottle of tomato ketchup with a crust around the top like a botched circumcision. On the wall above it, an ironical placement if there ever was one, a calendar promoting drill bits featured a heavy-breasted, naked woman with rosy nipples and a blue hard hat.

DCI Bryn Jones’s steady deep voice came down the line. ‘Glyn, can you tell us what you’ve got there?’

I described it, sticking purely to the observational facts. The line emitted soft static. He had put his hand over the receiver. I knew exactly who he was relaying my information to.

‘Glyn, take an educated guess,’ he said, coming back to me. ‘How historic is this?’

‘It’s gone to full skeleton,’ I said, and started laying out my reasoning path for his benefit. ‘The ground is pretty compacted, and looks like it hadn’t been disturbed for a long time before the excavators arrived. No sign of any clothing, so it’s either been in the ground for long enough for it to have decomposed, or it was buried naked. There’s what looks like plastic sheeting present, so I would say that we’re not talking ancient, but not too recent either.’

‘So it’s unlikely that, as we speak, we’ll have the villain’s footprints scorching the mountain dust as he makes his escape?’

‘Highly unlikely, sir.’ I smiled; that wasn’t Bryn Jones-speak, it had to be a Jack Galbraith line that he had just recited.

‘And the clues are not withering on the vine?’

‘This particular vine resembles an opencast mine, sir.’

‘Not exactly a productive evidence farm then?’

‘No, sir.’ I knew where he was trying to lead me, but that was going to have to be their decision.

‘Capaldi . . .’ DCS Jack Galbraith’s heavy Scottish brogue boomed in. ‘We’ve got a SOCO team, the forensic pathologist and the forensic anthropologist all lined up. And I want to keep them as a happy and productive bunch. So is anything going to be served by them having to work under arc lights through a shitty night at the arse end of the known universe?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘I do not have a young, ripe, virgin girl in a communion dress in that hole?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I do not have a vast array of female relatives rending their garments and keening over the body?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So, Capaldi?’

‘I don’t think I should make that decision, sir.’ I braced myself.

‘It’s your fucking corpse, Capaldi, you’re the finder. You’re supposed to be a professional, you make the call.’

‘I would think it could all wait until the morning, sir.’

‘Wise move, son.’ He chuckled, but even that managed to contain a threat in it.

Wise move indeed. I had just saved them from a night of rain and bleak wide-open spaces. I just hoped it would be remembered and appreciated. But, knowing Jack Galbraith, I doubted it.

By the time I came out of the hut, we were losing light, and the rain was sweeping in. Some strange vortex effect in the cwm bringing it up the hill at us. But Jeff’s men had managed to rig a tarpaulin over the crucial areas, the half-exposed skeleton and the mound of excavated material, and Hughes and Friel had taped off the rectangle I had prescribed for them.

Vehicles were leaving, a procession heading down the access road. Jeff had obviously released his men. Mine were attempting their own escape, Emrys keeping his head down to avoid eye contact as he got into the passenger’s side of the patrol car. Which had been turned around and was now facing downhill, I noticed.

‘
Sergeant!
’ I yelled.

He froze in his crouch, half inside the car. He wanted to ignore me, but a conditioned reflex had kicked in at my shout.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I asked, approaching, as he unravelled himself. Inside the car, I could see Friel in the driver’s seat, craning past him to watch me.

‘We’re going back down to take up our normal duties,’ Emrys stated challengingly.

‘You’re supposed to assist me here until I release you.’

His eyes narrowed meanly as he tried to remember when that one had popped up on the order book. ‘I thought your people were taking over.’

‘They are, but the SOCO team aren’t starting the investigation until tomorrow. Which means that we need to secure the site.’

‘It is secure. We’ve taped it off, the workmen have covered it.’

‘I need a watch kept.’

He looked at me disgustedly, realizing now where this thing was going. ‘Isn’t that your responsibility?’

I smiled at him. ‘That’s right, and that’s why I’m delegating it to you. I have other things to do to get this investigation started.’

He almost shook his head in defiance. Instead, he thought better of it and smiled slyly. ‘Sorry, no can do.’ He tapped on the roof of the car. ‘We’ve just taken an urgent call requesting assistance. Haven’t we, Constable?’

On cue, Friel leaned over. ‘That’s right. Extreme urgency, they said.’

I took Hughes’s elbow. He resisted for a moment, then let me steer him away from the car. ‘Do you want me to write this one up,’ I asked him softly, ‘or are you going to be a good plod and do what I’ve instructed you to do?’

He bristled. ‘Write what up?’ he asked, a sneaky streak of doubt cutting through the belligerence.

‘That you’ve spun me a fucking lie to evade your duty.’ I held my hand up in front of his face to hush his protest. ‘That landline I was on is the only communications tool available here. No radio, no phone signal.’ I made a show of gazing up at the heavens wonderingly. ‘And I don’t see any sign of Pegasus, or Mercury the Winged Fucking Messenger, having delivered your urgent summons.’

He glared at me. I wondered whether I had taken him just too far. He had a short fuse, and had laid into me once before. Was he balancing the prospect of a reprimand against the instant gratification of realigning the side of my face? He snorted, and turned back to the car. ‘Get out of there, Friel,’ he snapped.

I drove down the hill thinking that this was the investigative equivalent of the Phoney War. I hoped that the body we had uncovered didn’t mind – whoever and whatever they were – that the start for the search for justice was on hold for a brighter new morning.

But I could feel the buzz starting. Much as my sympathy went out to all those poor tup lambs I had been seeing in their pens, huddled, stiff and ball-busted, this was a real case. Jack Galbraith had to let me in on it. It was what he had exiled me out here for. Like it or not, this was my country now, and I was his man in it.

I stopped at the nearest farm entrance.
COGFRYN FARM
neatly inscribed on a slate panel
.
It looked tidy. I made a note of it. I would start there tomorrow. Then work outwards. Build up a picture of the neighbourhood. The people whose doors I would soon be knocking on. The difference around here, from what I had been used to in Cardiff, was that instead of shuffling onto the next doorstep or garden gate when you were making enquiries, the move could involve a couple of miles, a 500-foot climb, and a stretch of mud that required an embedded team of sappers.

I turned onto the main road. The headlights swept the direction sign:
DINAS
.
I smiled wryly to myself. Whoever would have thought that that would ever have meant going home?

If Dinas had been allowed to remain as an opportunistic collection of shacks on a dubious ford on a secondary river, it would never have known disappointment. But it hadn’t, it grew, and it got prosperity. Twice. Lead and sheep. And lost it both times.

And then it got me.

I didn’t have a choice about it. Dinas was prescribed for me. The day that Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Galbraith, obviously repaying my former superiors some deep Masonic favour, rescued me from disgrace in Cardiff, tucked me briefly under his wing, and then booted me out of the nest and into the boondocks. I was to be his piggy in the middle. His catch-all detective in the empty heartland. In which capacity, I was kept busy chasing down missing livestock, stalking stolen quad bikes and tractors, observing first-hand how the full moon fucked people up, and generally trying to avoid confrontations with the local cops.

Don’t get me wrong, Dinas is not a bad place; it can even be quite quaint in certain lights. It also helps if you have somewhere else to keep on going to when you get to the far end. I didn’t, so I headed for the next best thing, the Fleece Hotel.

I took a stool at the rear bar and nodded cursory greetings to the few men in the room. They were all regulars, so I was able to do that on automatic, a nod more to the zone than the person.

David Williams, my best buddy in Dinas, and not just because he owned the pub, was busy serving at the crowded front bar. He saw me and smiled happily when he turned to the cash register.

‘Quite a crowd,’ I commented.

He nodded contentedly. ‘They’ve all come down from the wind-farm site.’

Then I realized that this was where I had seen Jeff Talbot, the site engineer, before. In the front bar. A figure glimpsed occasionally, drinking with his men.

David finished up and came over and started pulling a pint for me.

‘So, what’s the verdict on the body?’ I asked, knowing that the Dinas rumour mill would already have digested, analysed and spat out its own theory.

He winced. It was a warning, but it arrived too late. I turned in the direction of his almost imperceptible nod. A middle-aged couple in rain-slicked coats were standing in the archway between the two bars, staring at me. Their smiles were clamped into a rictus. I didn’t recognize them, but I did recognize anxiety.

‘Mr and Mrs Salmon,’ David introduced them.

They flowed forward towards me like penitents released into a sanctuary. It was hard to put a precise age to them as the rain had smoothed and darkened their hair, and freshened their skin.

‘We heard about the discovery, Sergeant.’ Mrs Salmon spoke, her eyes glistening, scorching mine, already afraid of what they might find there. Her look was accusing, as if I was attempting to hide something from her.

‘Up at the wind-farm site,’ her husband clarified. He gestured his head towards the front bar. ‘We’ve been talking to the workmen, but they say they don’t know anything. They said that you were the one to talk to. That you’re in charge.’

Even stressed, they both had the lazy vowels of Estuary English. Essex or Kent.

‘Can we go up there?’ Her voice was pure raw entreaty. I glanced down at her hands, already knowing that they would be tightly clenched.

‘Helen . . .’ Her husband checked her, as if she had just broken an agreement they had made.

‘Please . . .?’ she implored, ignoring him.

‘There’s nothing to see up there, Mrs Salmon,’ I said soothingly, stalling, trying to fathom what strange event field she was trying to drag me into.

‘It’s our daughter, Sergeant,’ Mr Salmon explained. I waited for him to elaborate. ‘We need to know what you’ve found up there.’

‘Who!
Who
you’ve found up there,’ she corrected him in a hoarse whisper, the tension arcing between them.

‘Tell me about your daughter,’ I said quietly to Mrs Salmon.

‘Evie. She left home. This is Evie . . .’ Her voice a fast stutter. She thrust a photograph under my nose. It showed a young girl astride a fat pony, blonde hair in bunches under a riding hat, a cautious smile, bright-blue eyes, and a spatter of freckles on her upper cheeks. She lowered the photograph and looked up at me beseechingly. ‘We have to know if it’s her that’s been found up there.’

I placed another piece into the jigsaw. I turned to Mr Salmon, hoping that he was less sparked. ‘Your daughter’s gone missing?’

‘Why won’t you tell us?’ she wailed, riding close to her breaking point.

‘What age is she? When did she leave?’ I persisted, trying to gently ignore her, needing facts, not hysterics.

‘She’ll be twenty-three now,’ Mr Salmon explained, throwing his wife a worried look, ‘and she left close to two years ago.’

It was hard to put an age to the kid in that photograph. One thing I would be willing to bet on was that the 23-year-old version was no longer looking like that.

‘We need to know . . .’ She couldn’t contain it; the tears and the snot finally erupted. Her husband tried to comfort her, but she shrugged him off.

I pictured it again. The dirty carapace choked with grass and heather roots. Two years in that ground could have turned a body to a skeleton. But that one had been in there longer. Hunch and experience convinced me. That wasn’t their daughter.

I turned to face her. In the last few minutes, her face had puffed up and welled out, into a frantic mask that had abandoned any sense of caring about appearance. I spoke slowly and carefully. ‘It’s too early yet. We don’t know who we have up there, Mrs Salmon, but I think we can be fairly sure that it isn’t your daughter.’

Miraculously, she dried up. ‘How sure?’ she challenged me, turning, in that instant, from pure mush to interrogator.

‘Totally,’ I lied. But it didn’t worry me – I had inner certainty. Boy was I going to regret it.

David and I watched him lead her off. Back out into the rain. Turning themselves out of the inn. Their misery had rooted deep.

‘Another runaway kid?’ I asked.

David dried a glass absently, and nodded. ‘He’s an ex-fireman from Kent. Took early retirement. They bought a run-down smallholding up at the head of a crappy valley. They expected a teenage daughter to swap Bromley for the dream of the good life.’

I could empathize. ‘Mud and chicken shit.’

‘Broken generators and no phone signal.’

‘Still, she lasted it out until she was twenty-one,’ I observed.

‘On and off,’ he corrected me, ‘there was a time when they had to keep fetching her back. This time she must have found somewhere better to hide.’

‘Glyn, you
are
here . . .’

I turned round. Sandra Williams had come through from the kitchen. She looked tired and had wicked half-circles under her eyes. She was carrying a cordless phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. She proffered it. ‘I didn’t think you were, but I said I would look.’

I took the phone. ‘Hello?’ I said, hoping that I was not going to hear the sadly familiar sound of bleating lambs in the background.

‘DS Capaldi?’ The voice was brusque and authoritative, with a North Wales accent. And familiar.

‘Yes,’ I answered warily, desperately trying to recall the voice. ‘Who am I speaking to, please?’

‘Inspector Morgan.’

Oh, shit . . . Emrys Hughes’s boss. A scowling red-faced man with a widow’s peak. He considered Jack Galbraith the Antichrist. And, as his perceived little helper, I also qualified for the rite of exorcism. ‘How can I help you, sir?’ I asked, pitching for amicable.

‘Who gave you the right to commandeer my men, Sergeant?’

‘I required their assistance to help secure a probable crime scene, sir.’

‘And subject them to exposure?’

‘There is shelter available, sir.’ I had an image of Hughes and Friel safely ensconced in the site hut, drinking coffee and choosing their favourite nipples from the drill-bit calendar.

‘That’s beside the point. What you have asked my men to do is totally unnecessary. You don’t understand the terrain. We don’t have the same problems that you do in the city. We don’t have the ghouls and the vandals, and an intrusive, prurient press. Tell me –’ I could hear the scorn building in his voice – ‘who do you think is going to turn out on a filthy night like this, in that wilderness, to dig up a pile of old bones?’

‘The person who put them there?’ I suggested.

That silenced him for a moment. ‘Don’t be a smart alec, Sergeant. That site has its own security. Sergeant Hughes has informed me that there is a watchman.’

‘Yes, but with respect, sir, he is only responsible for the security of the construction site, not for a crime scene.’

He leaped over that one as well. ‘And, in the meantime, while my men are suffering the vagaries of the elements, I find you well-ensconced in a public house.’ The reprimand came from deep within his soul and his faith.

I looked over at David Williams. My local informant. ‘I am currently in active pursuit of the preliminary aspects of the investigation, sir.’

‘I am pulling my men out of there. And I am going to complain formally to Detective Chief Superintendent Galbraith.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied meekly.

‘You should have stayed in Cardiff where you belong, Sergeant Capaldi.’

‘I know, sir,’ I agreed wholeheartedly.

‘We don’t want or need your kind around here.’

‘No, sir.’

David looked at me speculatively as I went back to the bar. ‘Trouble?’

‘I’ve just upset the local mullah.’

I took a drink of my beer. Should I go back up to the site and make my own night vigil? No. Morgan had been right. Different rules applied here. And all I had ever really been doing was punishing Hughes and Friel.

And I didn’t regret it.

I did make a concession, though. I got myself up early in the morning, while it was still dark. There was no moon, the night was anvil black, the sound of the river kept up its own incessant dynamic, and an owl hooted, flitting from location to location like a trickster.

I drove over the wooden-plank bridge out of Hen Felin Caravan Park. Jack Galbraith had forced me to live in Dinas, and I had chosen to stay in a caravan. Unit 13, to be precise. I needed the sense of impermanence, putting up with the cold, the mould spores and the intermittent electrical and water supplies, the very discomfort comforting me with the knowledge that this surely couldn’t last.

This time, even in the dark, driving up the valley to the wind-farm site, I felt that I knew it better. Last night, when I had got home from The Fleece, I had studied the OS map and the electoral register. I had a loose fix on where people lived. There weren’t that many of them.

It had been cold at the caravan, but it was even colder at the construction site. Higher, and more exposed to the raw wind that was whipping in from the northwest, but keeping the clouds moving too fast to rain. For the moment.

The morning was showing itself as a weak aura against the ridge above the site. But the watchman was on the ball. He was out of his caravan with a torch before I had shut the car door behind me.

‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi,’ I introduced myself.

He checked my warrant card under his torch beam before he looked up. ‘Hi, I’m Donnie Raikes, I take care of security here.’ He shook my hand firmly. He was shorter than me, but built better, and the light from the hut’s open door caught the gleam of two ring piercings in his right eyebrow.

‘All quiet?’

‘Nothing’s fucking happened here since the glaciers melted,’ he replied with a yawn. A Northern accent, Yorkshire, I thought.

‘We’ve got a dead body,’ I reminded him.

‘I saw it. It looks like something the glacier dumped.’

‘It’s probably a bit more recent than that.’

He shrugged. ‘It’ll be a long-lost hiker, then. Nothing more dramatic. Take my word for it, mysterious shit doesn’t happen in places like this.’

I nodded, acknowledging his wisdom, and looked round. Objects were beginning to take form. Machines, huts and the folds of the hills. ‘Where’s Jeff Talbot?’ I asked.

‘Asleep in his caravan.’

‘Alone?’

Donnie grinned. ‘Don’t worry, we haven’t gone native yet, we haven’t resorted to the sheep.’

I smiled dutifully at the tired old stereotype. I knew it was irrational, but the information soothed me. That Jeff wasn’t with Tessa MacLean.

I waited it out in the site hut, drinking strong tea dotted with atolls of powdered milk, until the SOCO team arrived. The light was establishing itself now, but it was still early, and from the way they bitched about the cold as we backed ourselves into the wind to don our sterile suits I knew that they were letting me know that they had had an even earlier start than me.

They looked even more miserable when I showed them the site.

‘Is it any better preserved under there?’ the leader asked me, bobbing her head at the tarpaulin.

I shook my head.

‘Where are we supposed to start?’ she asked despairingly. ‘There’s no surface left.’

I sidled away from her anguish, leaving them to unroll the tarpaulin and start erecting the tented canopy, while I went to greet a new car that had just driven up.

Bill Atkins, the forensic pathologist, was a dour old guy in his late fifties, who I had worked with before in Cardiff. His eyes flickered in recognition, but he made no comment. The forensic anthropologist, who introduced herself as Sheila Goddard, was younger and carried herself around in a bubble of enthusiasm, which even encompassed the wildness of the countryside. I could see, as we walked up the hill, that Bill Atkins was not sharing this.

I hovered behind them while they crouched over the remains. Whispering to each other. Exchanging observations.

Bill was the first to turn round to me. ‘I hope you’re not expecting anything too dramatic from the
in-situ
inspection.’

‘What will you be able to tell us?’

‘Bugger all.’ He shook his head and turned back to the remains. ‘Nothing on cause, or duration of interment, until we get it dug up and back to the lab. Unless we get lucky and find a bullet, or a knife, or an obvious trauma event.’

‘What about age and gender?’ I prompted.

He looked at Sheila, who shrugged happily. ‘Maybe,’ he answered for both of them. ‘We wait to see what’s uncovered, but the age is only going to be broad-spectrum.’