Dead People (24 page)

Was Tessa making a break for it?

I turned the wheel sharply and skidded to a slanting stop to present the widest barrier I could, and jumped out and held up my warrant card. The Land Rover stopped in turn. With the setting sun in my face I couldn’t see who was driving. But it soon became apparent that the Land Rover had only stopped to change down into low-ratio four-wheel drive, as it slowly heaved itself off the track and started to make the wide, lurching curve that would take it round and past my blockade.

I ran to intersect it, my feet splashing and slipping on the sheep-shit sludge at the bottom of the puddles between the grass and heather tussocks. How was I going to stop this thing? Jumping in front of it would be great pantomime, but short on results, and potentially lethal. It was at moments like this that I regretted that they didn’t issue us with huge .45 Magnum handguns.

The window slid open. ‘I don’t want to stop or we’ll bog down.’ It was one of Tessa’s helpers behind the wheel, smiling at me nervously, not quite in control of the big vehicle. The other three of them were also smiling.

‘She’s waiting for you,’ she informed me as she went past.

Was that a threat or a promise?

*

The Redshanks camp had an empty feel to it. It had the air of a place that had run out of its purpose for being there. Had I been duped? Could Tessa have been smuggled out in the Land Rover? I berated myself for not having stopped it when I had had the opportunity.

The sun was dropping and lighting up the underside of the clouds above the western horizon with a vibrant burned-orange wash. From this elevation it was a beautiful sunset, the deep shade rolling across the valleys like something tangible. Of all the fucking evenings for the sky to get romantic, I reflected bitterly.

I knocked on the caravan door and stood back so that I could keep the rear window covered as well. I was in a turmoil. She was taking too long to answer. If she was in there she must have heard my arrival.

I was about to give up when the door opened. Tessa was in a baggy grey sweatshirt and black jeans, with a large towel on her head and an evolving look of surprise on her face. ‘Glyn . . . you’re early . . .’ She let the surprise morph into a welcoming smile. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘What’s not fair?’

‘You caught me washing my hair. You weren’t meant to see the build-up. I was meant to be all primped, poised and perfect by the time you turned up.’ She stepped back from the door. ‘Come on in.’

I walked in to the smell of water vapour and shampoo. She closed the door behind me. ‘Why the long face?’ she asked chirpily. ‘And where’s the wine you promised?’

I turned to face her. ‘It’s over, Tessa.’

She frowned. ‘That’s a bit presumptuous, isn’t it? When nothing’s actually begun.’

She was good. Her expression read amusement over controlled irritation. She was also very lovely, I thought, as she unwound the towel from her head and let the damp hair drop. She rubbed it absently with the towel as she watched me. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her breasts oscillated with the movement. I wasn’t sure whether she was deliberately building that distraction into the picture.

‘You’re not Dr Tessa MacLean.’

She raised her eyebrows and contemplated that statement for a moment. ‘So who am I?’

‘I don’t know. I think that you were planted here to keep an eye on the gravesite. That’s why you became buddies with Jeff in the beginning. Because there was always the possibility that the construction works wouldn’t disturb the bodies and everything could just return to normal. But when they were uncovered, you attached yourself to me, so that you could follow my progress and report back.’ She continued to watch me, deadpan. ‘You got me up here the other night with that story of the intruder.’ I stopped myself mid-flow. I had been about to say that the pointless pursuit in the snow had given him time to search my caravan, but that would have been achieved anyway, just by her calling me up here. So what had been the point of that?

‘And I suppose I engineered the theft of my Redshanks?’ she asked, her voice flat.

I nodded, trying not to let her see that this was another thing that was puzzling me.

‘Am I being arrested?’

‘That depends on the extent of your involvement. It’s not too late to start helping us. You could begin by telling me who you’re working with?’

She nodded reflectively. ‘Okay, where did we go wrong?’ She laced the question with an unexpected tint of mockery.

‘You should have lost the Northern Ireland connection.’

She turned away and took an anorak down off a peg. It surprised me. And it disappointed me. I had been expecting more of a reaction.

‘You can dry your hair first. Change into something warmer.’ I was trying to be a nice guy.

She gave me a withering look. At that moment I saw an intrinsic change in her. Something hardened. ‘Follow me,’ she commanded.

She went out the door. I took a couple of quick steps to catch up, and then slowed down when I saw that she wasn’t trying to run. She was striding over towards the enclosure that had housed Redshanks.

She held the flap open and fixed me with her eyes as I passed through. ‘I had hoped for more from you,’ she said regretfully, ‘but when you come out to the arse-end of the universe, what else can you expect but arses?’

I was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

The light inside the tent was brighter than outside, and it was strangely quiet without the background noise from the small generator that had been keeping Redshanks’ temperature and humidity controlled inside his plastic bubble.

Tessa opened a large box, took out some kind of an instrument, and whipped the cover off. It didn’t look archaeological. It looked like something that should be sitting on the bridge of a new-generation warship.

She raised a flap at the rear of the tent and located the instrument on a peg on a small metal tripod. ‘Look through that,’ she ordered, her voice hard and cold.

It was essentially a pair of high-intensity binoculars incorporating night-vision lenses. I adjusted the focus ring, and the door of the Barn Gallery at Pen Twyn leaped out at me. There was an eerie green tinge to the image. I turned to her for an explanation.

She nodded at the binoculars. ‘That’s why I’ve been keeping tabs on you. You keep barging into my fucking investigation.’ She gestured with her head down towards the Barn Gallery. ‘Continually messing around with the Fenwicks.’

I read the warrant card she handed me. She outranked me. Christine Stewart, an inspector with the Metropolitan Police Art Theft and Forgery Division. The bad feeling was now here to stay.

‘You kept giving us heart attacks every time you turned up down there. Were you going to give them the willies? Scare them off ? Make them wonder if this place wasn’t as safe as they thought it was?’

I nodded at the binoculars. ‘That’s how you knew I had been there? Why you kept wanting to know what I’d been doing?’

She nodded.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t you warn me off ?’

‘Because you’re not meant to know about this, even now. Local law enforcement is never informed of an operation in their area because it could change the dynamic of their dealings with the people under surveillance. I’m only showing you now to get you off my back. For good,’ she added portentously.

‘What have they done?’

She thought about it, and then realized that the damage was already done. ‘They’re smuggling looted archaeological treasures out of Iraq. Sending them back in the containers that they ship their meat pies out in. They’re using this place for distribution.’ She gestured towards the wind-farm site. ‘Until your little lot erupted down there they thought that this out-of-the-way corner was as safe as it gets.’

‘If you know all this, why haven’t you rounded them up? Why haven’t you seized the shipments?’

Her smile was pained. ‘We have, all the stuff has been intercepted and electronically tagged. Now we want to know who’s doing the buying.’

I spread my hands out in front of Redshanks’s empty bubble.

She understood the question. ‘He was our cover. It makes for great surveillance. An archaeological dig. How much more non-threatening and geeky can you get? A bunch of scatty bluestockings. We even exchange waves with them when we drive past the Barn Gallery.’

‘Is he real?’

‘It depends what you mean by real. As an object, yes. He’s a kit of parts that gets trotted around surveillance gigs. We invent a different background story to suit the particular situation.’ She chuckled mirthlessly. ‘I obviously chose the wrong one in this case.’

I was even more confused. ‘But I was here when the forensic anthropologist inspected him. She verified his provenance.’

She nodded, with more than a hint of superiority in the gesture. ‘Because she was shown a high-level Home Office directive when she was in here, instructing her to confirm that the lump of carbon fibre and nylon we were calling Redshanks was the genuine article.’

I shook my head. ‘You’ve no idea what an awful coincidence this has been. Starting with your choice of dig site and the university you used for a front.’

‘Reflect hard and verify before you jump to conclusions in future, Sergeant.’

I coloured at the rebuke. ‘I’m very sorry, and I promise you this won’t go any further.’

‘I know it won’t.’

We heard the sound of the engines at the same time. Tessa’s team’s Land Rover crested the rise first, closely followed by Emrys and Friel’s. I winced inwardly. The girls had obviously been stopped and shepherded back up the hill. And I knew that if Tessa asked Emrys he would just look sulky and tell her that he had been following my orders.

She groaned theatrically. ‘And now it gets even more fucking heavy-handed.’

‘I’ll get rid of them.’

She gestured down towards the Barn Gallery. ‘And while you’re at it, why don’t you all jump up and down and wave before you go?’

‘Do you want me to go and see Gloria Fenwick and make up some sort of reason for us to be up here,’ I suggested helpfully, but already knowing that this attempt to rehabilitate myself was hopeless.

She shook her head. ‘No, Sergeant Capaldi, I just want you gone.’

I looked at her for a moment, a thought surfacing. ‘Did you know my history?’

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.

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 bachelor 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.