Dead People (21 page)

Nature had waited until the day of Evie’s funeral to pour its grace down on her.

I had time before Mackay delivered Justin to me. I drove over to the police house where I found Emrys Hughes watching Friel wash their car.

‘We’re busy, Capaldi,’ Emrys greeted me fondly.

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘You’re disturbing our concentration.’

‘Emrys, Emrys . . .’ I declaimed expansively. ‘You should know better by now. I’m just going to hang around and pester you until you break.’

He gave up. ‘Okay, whatever it takes to get rid of you,’ he said crossly.

‘Rose Jones, Owen’s sister, Greg Thomas’s fiancée.’

‘She’s dead and buried, Capaldi. Leave the poor girl in peace.’

‘Humour me.’

‘I told you before, we’re going back about fifteen years there.’

‘How did she die?’

‘It was a tragic accident.’

‘Most of them are. Can you be more specific?’

‘She went to visit Greg, while he was still in the army. Where he was stationed. There was some kind of an incident. I can’t remember the details. I told you, it was a long time ago.’

‘Just give me the broad-brush outline.’

‘She was accidentally shot.’

An internal alarm went off. ‘Did he take her onto a firing range?’

‘No, I told you, it was where he was stationed,’ he repeated impatiently, ‘Northern Ireland. During the Troubles. It was a bullet ricochet or something like that. A chance happening, wrong place, wrong time. She was a real sweet girl, and they made a wonderful couple. Greg was devastated. So was Owen, but he was the rock who helped him and the rest of the family pull through.’

I turned away from him. I needed to be totally still for a moment.

I turned back. ‘Where did Greg go? After he left the army? Before he and the Hornes opened the activity centre?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. He came back on occasions, to check up on Fron Heulog. He and Rose were going to live there. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist after that. You know, unapproachable.’

How did this change things? I asked myself as I drove back to Unit 13. It gave me Greg Thomas as a suspect and revenge as a motive. But revenge on whom?

Who had paid the bride price?

*

Justin had insisted on coming to Evie’s funeral. I didn’t try too hard to dissuade him. Funerals are strange and emotional things, and close observance can sometimes pick up useful underlying ripples of disturbance. I wanted to gauge reactions there when people saw Justin.

But I also wanted him returned to safety. So I had arranged for Mackay to bring him to Unit 13.

When they arrived I pulled Mackay to the side. ‘Thanks for bringing him.’

‘That’s okay. He’s a nice kid. Boyce and I are enjoying his company.’

‘Greg Thomas.’

‘What about him?’

‘His fiancée Rose was shot in Northern Ireland. There was some sort of incident and she got caught in the crossfire. I need to know what happened, Mac, I need the details.’ He turned away from me. When he turned back I saw it in his eyes. ‘You already knew?’

He shook his head, but it wasn’t a denial. ‘Only the bare bones, there’s no real substance to it yet.’

‘What do you mean?’ His reticence was scaring me.

‘I’ve been warned off.’

‘Officially?’

‘No, informally. It turns out that I know some guys who were involved, and they’re advising me to back off.’

‘Is that it? Is that as far as we can go?’

He smiled. ‘No. I’m just warning you, I’m going to have to make some promises. There’s going to have to be total deniability.’

‘Whatever you have to do.’

I got Justin into the car. I tried to suppress what Mackay had just told me. There was no point in speculating until I had more details.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Justin as we drove to St Peter’s in Dinas. We were early. I wanted to be there to see everyone arrive.

‘A bit creeped out,’ he admitted, ‘I don’t know what to do at something like this.’

‘Just keep looking glum,’ I advised.

‘Evie and I used to talk about having a green burial. They do them in the woods now in some places. Plant a tree over you. She wanted a cardboard coffin.’

Typical, I thought, she wouldn’t tell him about her boyfriend, the guy who had probably killed her, but she’d chatter on about how she wanted to be packaged after she’s dead. Because they were too young to believe that it could ever happen to them.

‘Do you think I should tell them?’

‘Pardon?’ I’d missed the gist of what he’d just said.

‘Her parents. Do you think I should tell them what her wishes were?’

I turned to park in front of the church. The empty hearse was stationed outside. I pictured the coffin in the nave, the flowers, the printed order of service, the rented vicar. I turned to him with as gentle a smile as I could manage. ‘I wouldn’t. I think the ball’s rolled on a bit too far now.’

The Salmons turned up separately, each with their own contingent. They both looked gaunt and broken, and their formal outfits made them look like they had been dressed in donated clothes by institutions that had only just released them. Mr Salmon made a move towards his wife, but she turned her back on him and rested her head on a friend’s shoulder. While her fate remained unknown, the absent Evie had been the tenuous glue of their marriage; now that they knew she was never coming home, the entire DNA of the thing had collapsed irretrievably.

Kevin Fletcher arrived, immaculate in a black overcoat and holding leather gloves that looked like de-boned puppies. He would have made a good undertaker. If he hadn’t been secure in his conviction that we already had our guy, I would have suspected him of being there for the same reasons as me. So this must have been pure PR. He had brought a couple of uniforms along with him to dance attendance and identify him as the head honcho.

He called me over. I told Justin to stay in full view of everyone and not to talk to strangers.

‘Who’s the strange-looking kid?’ Fletcher asked.

‘That’s Justin Revel, Evie’s friend.’

He scowled. ‘I thought we told you to take him home?’

‘No,’ I corrected him with a smile, ‘DCS Galbraith told me to take him where he wanted to go. Justin told me he wanted to attend his friend’s funeral.’

He scrutinized me warily. ‘I hope you’re not trying to work something here?’

‘Like what, boss?’

He nodded towards the Salmons. ‘This is all about the fucking family, Capaldi,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth, while flashing one of his trademark brown-nosing smiles at a smart-looking elderly woman. ‘I don’t want you hijacking the occasion for your own private agenda. It makes us look like we haven’t got any feelings.’

‘No one could accuse you of that, boss.’

I slipped back to Justin before he could work out whether I was being disrespectful.

A lot of townspeople came to pay their respects. A few farmers I recognized, including the Joneses from Cogfryn. Jeff and Tessa turned up with Tessa’s helpers, all dressed up as best they could, given that they were living in the equivalent of a shanty town. Tessa managed to signal a small private greeting. Gloria and Isabel arrived, but no Clive. Gloria’s private greeting wasn’t so private. And no one from Fron Heulog.

‘Recognize many people here?’ I asked Justin. I was disappointed. I was only getting the usual reactions of open curiosity and mild reproach I would have expected from a rural community to a slightly weird urban youth in their midst. No expressions laden with obvious guilt or anguish.

He shrugged. ‘A few faces I remember. No one stands out.’

‘No one that Evie ever pointed out to you?’

He shook his head.

I grabbed his arm. ‘What about them?’ I had just caught sight of Gerald Evans and his wife crossing the square towards the lych gate.

‘I saw her a couple of times when I biked over to see Evie. And he’s the one I told you about, the dude who offered her the hostess gig.’

They had to walk past us to get inside the church. Evans started to stare me out. It was pure macho bullshit, I had expected it. I raised a finger and moved it in slow-motion to close one nostril, and then gave a loud and exaggerated sniff. His face went quizzical, he hadn’t understood my gesticulations. But his wife had noticed. I saw him incline his head to listen to her. He shook his head. He half turned and shot me a filthy look.

He still hadn’t connected.

I air-snorted a line of coke again.

All I can think is that this was the moment when his wife told him who Justin was. Because when he turned round again his face had blanched.

The connection had hit home hard.

He knew that I was staring at the back of his head throughout the service. It was probably one of the rare occasions that he wished that he wasn’t such a big bastard. I was making him anxious. But he didn’t dare turn round. It was all there in the nervous gestures, scratching his ears, the finger down the back of the collar or researching the incipient bald spot.

I got Justin out of the church fast. Most of the crowd would be dispersing, only the hard core of relatives taking the long drive to the crematorium. I wanted to get away before Evans emerged. I wanted to keep him squirming.

Because I now realized that that was the only punishment that I was going to be able to inflict on him. Because I had just had my confirmation that it couldn’t have been him.

He hadn’t recognized Justin.

Which meant that he couldn’t have been the one who had been trying to eliminate him. Because he would have to have known what the guy he wanted vaporised looked like.

I took the call on hands-free on the way back to Unit 13 to deliver Justin to Mackay. I had been expecting it.

‘Sergeant Capaldi, it’s Gerald Evans.’

‘How did you get this number?’

‘From Emrys Hughes.’

‘Have you been complaining again?’

‘No,’ he protested contritely. It was almost as if I had accused him of being a very naughty boy. ‘I think we need to talk.’

‘Which you’d rather not do in front of your wife?’ I suggested.

In front of anything remotely sentient, as it turned out. He asked me to meet him at a defunct out-of-town Baptist chapel. I was deliberately ten minutes late. His Land Rover Discovery was parked on the grass verge. He was waiting for me in the small walled graveyard that was bisected by the path to the chapel’s front door. He looked like he had been pacing.

That restless energy was still in evidence. He was not used to dealing with anxiety. It was fucking up his normal power-and-anger response to situations. I would have to be careful with this guy. Constraint and containment were not among his more-developed social skills.

But I was determined to get in at least one figurative punch to the nose before I had to dance off. ‘Grass Vegas.’

He tried out a coy smile. ‘What about it?’

‘You fucked up, Gerald.’

He flared, savoured the anger for a moment, before having to deflate. ‘It wasn’t just me,’ he whined.

‘You led me down the garden path with Evie.’

‘What did she tell that weird kid?’

I winged it. ‘All about the drugs and the illegal gambling.’

‘The gambling wasn’t illegal,’ he protested righteously. ‘It was a private house.’

‘What about the coke?’

He smiled warily. ‘You can’t prove anything.’

I smiled back. ‘I don’t have to. I just have to turn up at your house to question you about it in front of your wife. Then I leave you to do the explaining.’

‘You bastard.’

‘You should have used bald dwarves.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘If you were aiming for elegant decadence. You should have had dwarves walking around with the lines of coke on the top of their heads. A young woman in a padded-out bustier and fishnet tights is really passé.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Who was involved?’

It was him and three golf-club and shooting cronies, he told me. I took down the names. The venue was the safe male sanctum of a basement play-room in the house of a recently divorced founder member.

‘Why did you hire Evie Salmon?’

‘Just to brighten the place up. You know, give it a touch of sparkle.’

‘What happened to her?’

He pulled a face. ‘She stopped coming. She just gave up.’

‘Did she give you a reason?’

‘She said that she’d met someone who wasn’t happy about what she was doing.’

‘Did she say who it was?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Could it have been one of the members?’

‘Not one of the regulars. We would all have known.’

‘When did she stop?’

He thought about it. ‘Roughly six months before she went away.’

But according to her father she had never given up her Saturday work. So, if he was telling the truth, whoever she had met had being paying her to keep up the pretence. Once again I had come up against that wall. What was it about this relationship that it had to be kept so secret? She hadn’t even been able to tell her best friend. Hell, I reminded myself, Justin was her only friend.

The significance of something else he had just mentioned clicked into place. ‘You said “regulars”. Were there more than the four of you?’

‘Occasionally we’d invite selected guests along.’

It didn’t take much imagination to envisage the hypocritical self-important pricks that made up their social circle. I had a sudden spark on someone who fitted that definition.

‘Was Clive Fenwick one?’

‘And his brother, Derek.’

‘I want a list of the names. All the ones you invited while Evie was working there.’

‘This
is
going to come out like an anonymous tip-off, isn’t it? You’re not going to drop me in it?’ The bastard was grinning at me. He thought we had fucking bonded.

I made a noncommittal grunt and pretended to be deep in thought. I was no further down the road with the identity of Evie’s lover, but I was a happier man. I now had the means of putting Clive Fenwick’s balls into the vice.

I let Evans drive away and leave me at the chapel.

I needed to force myself to reflect, and communing with a load of dead Baptists seemed as good a way as any of chopping my seething thought processes into more manageable bits.

It also kept me in check. I had had one bruising encounter with Clive Fenwick, and I needed to make sure that I was in the driving seat next time we met. Which meant not going in half cocked and riding on pure emotion, because he was the sort of tricky bastard to come out of left field and unseat me.

But first of all I needed to let Kevin Fletcher know about Grass Vegas. He would be dismissive – it was located in Dinas, therefore it didn’t connect with his agenda, but if I didn’t raise it I could be in real trouble if it came back to haunt us later.

As well as the four founding members, Evans had given me the names of the guests who had been invited while Evie was still in attendance. These included the Fenwick brothers, a couple of big land agents, three auctioneers, a solicitor from Shrewsbury, an accountant from Chester, and a big-time local chicken farmer. There were some pretty powerful people in there, and I needed clearance to go after them.

He heard me out. ‘He definitely didn’t say anything about Bruno Gilbert being a member of this club?’ he asked.

‘Definitely, boss.’ I didn’t like to tell him that the only invitation Evans and his ilk would have extended to Bruno was as a stand-in for a rugby ball.

‘It is historical.’ He was musing. ‘And there’s no way we could tie them in to dope without a live raid, and that is not going to be any kind of priority given the budget situation, and the type of citizen involved.’

‘What do you want me to do, boss? We have established a relationship between Evie and these men.’

‘Historical, though, as I said. And their geography’s all wrong. But I suppose we could tackle them, see if there’s any way we can connect Gilbert to Evie through them. They may have said something about her in front of him that set his juices running.’

He seemed to have an idea of Bruno as some kind of social gadfly, flitting around garden parties overhearing conversations. I didn’t contradict him. I didn’t want him to rescind my license to go forth and harry Clive Fenwick.

It may sound hokey, but there is a phantom within certain ringtones that lets you know that bad news is arriving, even before you’ve answered it. This was one of them. My first thought was Justin.

‘Sergeant Capaldi, something terrible has happened. You’ve got to get over here immediately.’ Her voice was anguished, bordering on hysteria, and I only just made out that it was Valerie Horne.

‘Can you slow down, please, Mrs Horne?’ But she was gone.

With no explanation I just had my imagination to work with as I drove fast to Fron Heulog.

Was it some sort of admission from Greg Thomas? Could he finally have realized that he was running out of twists and turns and hung himself from the new climbing frame?

I drove reluctantly past the entrance to the Barn Gallery. But Clive Fenwick’s reprieve was only going to be short-lived, I hoped.

The security gate was open at the activity centre so I drove straight in. There was an air of desertion about the place as I went up the entrance drive. No clusters of sulky kids suffering cold turkey due to shop-window and diesel-particulate deprivation.

Was that it? The cause of her panic? Had Emrys Hughes’s ultimate nightmare come to pass? Had there been a mass breakout? Were Dinas and the surrounding countryside about to be ravaged by packs of wild gangsta youths trawling for fun and mayhem?

The place wasn’t quite deserted. A young Asian boy, about thirteen years old, was standing outside the office. He looked like he had fallen into an alien space and was waiting apprehensively for something to bite him.

‘You the policeman?’ he asked as I got out of the car.

‘Yes.’

‘She told me to bring you.’ He was already walking away.

I followed him down between the house and the barn. We turned a corner at the end, past an old sheep-gathering fold, and I saw the activity. Valerie Horne was surrounded by a semicircle of the younger kids.

She saw me and waved me forward. It wasn’t a welcome, it was all urgency.

The kids parted to let me through. They were standing at the head of an old track that led down to the river, by the side of a steep, earth-faced bank. The top of the bank was lined by stunted hawthorns, the vestigial remains of a former hedge, and there was a run of old holes and spoil slips along its length, under the lip, probably a redundant badger sett.

Valerie pointed.

And the shock shortened my life by a measurable factor.

The bone, grey-green, was lying on the inclined surface of the bank. The soil around it was damp enough to still have a metallic, freshly dug smell.

At the same time that I was trying to adjust to this, I realized that we were inhabiting an unnatural silence. Everyone was staring at me. The kids rapt, Valerie tense. All were expectant. I was supposed to do something to explain this, and bring their lives back to normal again.

‘No one has touched this?’ I asked.

Valerie shook her head. ‘I can’t promise. The boys who found it say they didn’t, but . . .’ She inclined her head and tailed-off.

‘Is it from a real dead person, mister?’ one of the braver boys called out. A voiced ripple of disgust combined with a frisson of horror went through the group.

‘It’s probably from a cow, isn’t it, Sergeant? Or a sheep?’ Valerie suggested hopefully.

I went as close as I could without disturbing anything. The loose earth was covered by kids’ footprints and indentations that I realized had been made by their knees. Why had they been digging here?

And where was everyone else?

‘Where are your husband and brother?’ I asked Valerie.

‘They’re out on a trek on the moors with the older ones.’

‘Can you take the children away from here, please?’

‘You didn’t answer the question,’ she reminded me softly.

‘I think it’s an ulna,’ I replied equally quietly.

She looked at me questioningly.

‘One of the forearm bones.’ Before this case started I would have had a problem identifying it, but I had had cause to get reacquainted with the sharp end of skeletons.

I put in the call to Fletcher, and left it to him to call Jack Galbraith and organize a SOCO team. I put in another call to DEFRA. I drove back down to the head of the track and set up a makeshift perimeter with incident tape.

WHY?!

Why move the action from the wind-farm site to Fron Heulog? Why bring it here when he had gone to such trouble to fit up Bruno and get the investigation shifted to Newport? I took a slow look around, and felt the chill as it dawned on me. Because it didn’t change anything. We were still in Bruno’s immediate neighbourhood. No one but me suspected that this was the home ground.

But why bring the investigation back?

I didn’t think for a minute that this was an accidental discovery. We had been meant to find that bone. The bastard had just thrown in another cryptic shift.

I used my digital camera on the bone. When I zoomed in I realized that there was something wrong with it. From the bottom of the bank it looked like the wrist-end of the bone was still partially buried. It wasn’t. It just wasn’t there. It looked like it had been snapped off.

Was it a coincidence that the part of the bone that should demonstrate the severance markings where the hand had been removed was missing? Was it fuck. But I knew that I was going to be the only person who would be asking that question.

Because all this was going to do was make poor old Bruno look like an even more rampant serial killer than previously believed.

WHY?!

Emrys Hughes and a team of uniforms turned up to spell me.

He looked at the bone and turned to me with a significant set to his face. ‘Your Mr Gilbert was a busy chap, wasn’t he?’

I had been right. Emrys Hughes was as good a representation of the public cross-section as you get around here. And he had jumped to the immediate conclusion that this was down to Bruno Gilbert. Oh, the powers of perceptual manipulation. This fucker should be in advertising.

‘It’s just one bone.’

He sucked in a big noisy, dramatic breath. ‘There will be more.’

‘Well, you’d better get ready to roll your sleeves up, because you and your guys are going to be fucking digging for them,’ I observed nastily.

I found Valerie and the younger boys in the canteen area. She had calmed them down to a degree with fizzy drinks, crisps and chocolate biscuits.

‘Emergency measures,’ she explained guiltily.

‘Who found the bone?’

She searched the group with her forefinger raised. ‘Darren, Dewayne and Rocky.’ She used her finger to point them out.

‘Can I talk to them?’

She looked at me doubtfully. ‘What’s the legal position?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s not an interrogation. It’s just something I need to know now, while it’s still fresh in their memory.’ She still looked concerned. ‘You can ask it for me.’

I wrote it down. She sat the three boys down at one of the refectory benches. I squatted beside her. The remainder of the kids started to gather round, sensing drama. ‘Right, no one is going to get into any trouble over this. In fact, the sergeant is very pleased with you for finding it.’ She looked my way. I nodded enthusiastically on my haunches. ‘But what I’d like to know is why you chose to dig there?’

The three boys looked at each other, hesitant and nervous now that the focus of attention was on them.

‘Rocky?’ Valerie prompted gently.

Please tell me ‘a man told us to dig there’
, I willed them silently. A man answering the description of Clive Fenwick. Or Greg Thomas. I didn’t really care which, I just wanted to end it.

‘The dog was digging. We thought there might be something good underneath,’ Rocky explained tremulously.

‘What dog was that?’ Valerie anticipated my next question.

He looked at the other two. They both shook their heads, he joined in. ‘Dunno, a black-and-white one. It run away before we got close.’

A black-and-white one. In these parts that was the generic description for dog.

‘You don’t have a dog?’ I asked Valerie when we had moved away from the kids. I hadn’t bothered to infuse the question with hope, I already knew the answer.

‘No. We get our fair share of farm dogs passing through, though. Especially if there’s a bitch in season in the neighbourhood.’ She smiled wanly, she looked exhausted. ‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘A lot of people are going to be getting very busy,’ I warned her. She was a kind person. She worked too hard. And she probably loved her brother.

She was probably going to end up hating me.

So now the bastard had recruited fucking Lassie. The scruffy black-and-white Welsh version at least.

I pondered it while I drank my tea. Trying to figure out the modus operandi. He had probably planted the bone, scented the earth around it with some kind of
allure de chien
, found a dog from somewhere, waited until he saw that the boys were heading that way, and then released it. There had been so much scrabbling activity around that bank that the bait scent would have been dispersed. Even if I could have persuaded forensics to look for it.

Clever bastard. It was a complicated and risky operation, but at least, if my hunch was correct, he was working on his own territory. But it still brought me back to the question: why change the status quo at this juncture?

Because it widens the geography?

It doesn’t shift the blame from Bruno, it just extends the zone of the operation. So why does he want to disseminate?

Because he wants to shift the focus!

He wanted to lift our attention away from the original site. He wanted it to lose its importance. He wanted it to be seen as just one of a series of multiple sites. It reinforced my hunch that it could be acting as a memorial. The place had a specific personal significance, and he didn’t want us trampling all over its sanctity. He wanted to shift us onto unhallowed ground.

But why wait this long? That was the question that now stabbed at me. If the spirit of the place was so important, why hadn’t he diverted us away from it before now?

I instructed myself to go back to first principles. This was not the work of a classic serial killer. These bodies had been put there over time to serve as a specific memorial. A memorial to Rose? From her former fiancée?

And what did these bodies have to do with her? As far as we could tell, after the third body had been buried, the monument had been completed, because the killing had stopped.

Until Evie.

But she had been cold-bloodedly murdered to serve a purpose. To divert us. She had never been a part of the original plan.

Oh, fuck!

If he hadn’t killed anyone else during his active period he wouldn’t have had any more body parts at his disposal. That’s what had caused the time lapse. He had had to wait until he had found some other source of suitable skeletal material. Because there was no ulna superstore.

Or was there?

The only reassuring thing was that he wouldn’t have gone out there and killed a fresh victim to source the parts he needed. Not because he would have had any qualms about it, but because it wouldn’t serve the purpose. It would be too fresh. He needed to find a skeleton that would match the profile of the others, both in terms of age and length of burial.

This new bone was going to fit the original pattern. I was certain of it.

And then, because he couldn’t match the marks of the hands being detached, as on the originals, because he was working with something that was already a skeleton, he had snapped the bone off above the joint. And because we had swallowed his line so completely, we would find something to account for the damage. Animal dispersal, agricultural machinery, some rational explanation that would keep us on track.

What were Jack Galbraith and Kevin Fletcher’s reactions going to be when I laid out this theory? It was a purely academic conjecture. Because I wasn’t going to tell them. Not without something stronger than merely speculative reasoning. I didn’t want to be back on the hunt for a lamb castrator.