Dead People (8 page)

‘And what label is that, sir?’ she came back crisply.

‘I am a wind-farm saboteur. I am an annoying, malicious and destructive bastard, but I am not a killer. I want you to keep that in the back of your minds. This may be a false trail.’ He scrutinized us all for a moment, and then nodded. ‘Okay, Kevin, back to you.’

A copy of the composite was passed along the line to me. I stopped listening to Fletcher’s pep talk and studied it. There was only one fact, which was the size of his boots. His weight, his size and his posture were all conjecture. How many of these variables would fit Gerald Evans?

I checked myself. I had never met Evans, so why was I getting so obsessed with him? Why did I want him to turn out to be a monster? I knew the answer. I wanted a local villain to give my life here some meaning. I didn’t want Jack Galbraith to be right. I didn’t want this place to be merely a dumping ground. I wanted us to have consequence. I didn’t want to be left as merely the caretaker of a charnel house.

I put my hand up tentatively.

‘Glyn?’ Fletcher gave me the stage.

‘We keep talking about “him”, but I think there could be a possibility that there’s more that one person involved.’ I saw Jack Galbraith glare at me, but I wanted this out in the open. Just in case there was anyone else in the audience who was having the same doubts. No hand shot up.

‘What evidence have you got to back that up, Glyn?’ Kevin asked in the pleasant voice of a patronizing bastard of an uncle.

I touched the dressing on the side of my head involuntarily, beginning to wonder if I was about to wedge myself into a big mistake. ‘It’s a hunch, Kevin.’

‘Serial killers don’t work in pairs, it screws up their agenda,’ Jack Galbraith announced gruffly.

‘Yes, sir.’ I didn’t think it was politic to point out that, with only two bodies, it was a bit presumptuous to be talking about a serial killer.

I saw Emrys Hughes’s hand go up in the uniform sector. It surprised me. Could it be possible that he was about to support me?

Fletcher nodded at him. ‘Yes, Emrys?’ He had done his team-recognition homework.

‘Hearth and home, sir,’ he bellowed, misjudging the room’s acoustic.

Fletcher and Jack Galbraith shared a quick glance. Reassuring each other in the company of hayseeds. ‘I don’t quite get you, Emrys,’ Fletcher said, smiling patiently.

‘I know the people around here, sir. They know me, they trust me.’

‘I’m sure they do, Sergeant.’

‘No disrespect to Sergeant Capaldi, but they’re not going to want an outsider coming into their houses to ask them delicate questions.’

The realization flashed. The bastard . . . Emrys was trying to hijack the case.

‘What are you suggesting, Emrys?’ Fletcher asked, Jack Galbraith glowering impatiently beside him.

‘That we work with the locals. Sergeant Capaldi can do the incomers. There’s plenty enough of them around, and he probably speaks their language better.’ He flashed a grin at his men.

Fletcher nodded sagely, digesting this. ‘Glyn?’ he asked.

What could I do? The bastard had sideswiped me. I could smell Inspector Morgan behind this. But the awkward thing was that he had a point. I had come across people here who wouldn’t give you the time of day unless you could prove that your forebears had served as retainers with Llewelyn the Last Prince of Wales. And he wasn’t down on record as having hired any Italians.

‘It’s a fair point,’ I said, stalling, thinking hard for some way to block him. Emrys was looking over at me, a triumphant gloat lurking underneath the open and honest smile. I wanted to ram something flat and heavy into his face. I didn’t give a shit for all the tosspot farmers whose company I was going to be deprived of, but I did not want to miss my chance at Gerald Evans. ‘But I’m not sure whether his men have got the requisite interviewing skills.’

‘You’re going to be using us anyway,’ Emrys whined. ‘Whichever way we work it, we’re still going to be knocking on doors for you. You set the questions if that’s what’s worrying you.’

Jack Galbraith’s mobile phone rang. The digitalized strains of ‘Scotland the Brave’ surprised us all. He answered it, turning his back to us. Kevin Fletcher looked suddenly abandoned. He shot us a discomfited smile, like an actor who had just lost touch with his prompter.

Jack Galbraith turned back round and held up his hand. He needn’t have bothered, he already had total silence. ‘That’s SOCO. They’ve just found another one. Skeletonized. Early stage investigations showing broad similarities with the first corpse. Although the forensic anthropologist reckons that this one is female.’ He passed his phone to Fletcher. ‘Take the details, Kevin.’

We were all stunned by the news. How many more were we going to find? It looked like Jack Galbraith was going to earn his serial-killer tagline.

He turned his attention back to Emrys Hughes. ‘Are there really that many people who have moved up here?’ he asked, sounding surprised and appalled.

‘Oh, yes, sir,’ Emrys replied.

He looked over at me. ‘You talk to them, Capaldi. There has to be some real weirdness among that bunch.’ He shook his head. I knew what he was thinking. The same thoughts still visited me from time to time. The fact that people would voluntarily leave a city to take up residence in the boondocks placed them in a seriously disturbed category.

‘Hold on . . .’ Fletcher’s muffled voice responded to the knock I had just given on his door in The Fleece. He opened it and looked surprised to see me. Behind him, on a faded green bedspread, I saw his suitcase and the small piles of clothes waiting to be allocated drawer space.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Kevin. I know you’re trying to settle in, but . . .’

He held up a hand to quiet me. ‘Boss or skip?’

‘Sorry?’ I wondered if I had missed a connection.

‘Boss or skip? What’s it to be?’

I smiled tentatively. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Fixing the demarcation lines, Glyn. It’ll be good coming from you. Set an example for the others.’

He was serious. And just when I’d begun to think that perhaps I’d been a bit too hard on him, here he was, turning into an even bigger arsehole than he’d been before. He watched me expectantly.

I held out the folder I had been carrying. ‘I thought you might want to see this.’ He waited. I forced it out. ‘Boss.’

He nodded, satisfied. ‘What is it?’

‘Some pre-investigation notes I’ve made.’

‘Give them to Alison in the morning.’

‘I thought you might want to be up to speed with them first.’

He thought about it, and gave me a clipped nod. ‘Okay, summarize them.’

I glanced up and down the corridor meaningfully. He took the hint and stood aside to let me into the room. The furnishings were heavy and mismatched pieces of French-polished walnut and mahogany, and the air was thick with a synthesized distillation of lavender or gardenia. The net curtains in the bay window had random specks of bluebottle and crane-fly legs caught in the weave. Sandra had given him the best room in the house. ‘Nice room,’ I observed, nodding appreciatively, trying to make him feel special.

‘No, it’s fucking not,’ he replied, closing the door behind me, ‘it’s a place where furniture comes to die, and it smells like an overworked hooker’s crotch.’

‘Is DCS Galbraith not staying?’

‘No, rank has its benefits.’ He clicked his fingers impatiently. ‘Come on, Glyn, I’m tired, I’ve got to attempt to get the suicide vibes out of this room, so just give me what you’ve got.’

‘It’s a very brief profile of the people who live in the valley. All the nearest neighbours to the crime scene.’

He looked unimpressed. ‘And surprise me. Not one Son of Satan among them.’

‘Not in the valley.’

He opened the door for me. ‘I know we go back, Glyn, but no special favours here, I’m afraid. In future let’s just process everything through the official channel.’

I didn’t move.

He stared me out for a moment, and then closed the door again. ‘I thought there had to be more.’ He groaned. ‘Spit it out,’ he commanded, sitting heavily on the bed.

‘Emrys Hughes.’

He winced, demonstrating the weary burden of leadership. ‘The man’s got a point. This is a close-knit community. They know him. But don’t worry about it, it’s not as if we’re going to get anywhere talking to the rednecks.’

‘What about a redneck with a penchant for pornography and criminal behaviour, and who’s a known associate of Evie Salmon?’

He frowned. ‘Why is this the first time I’m hearing about this?’

‘Because I haven’t talked to him yet. I want him, boss. I want first chance at him.’

‘You think Hughes will fuck up?’

‘I know he will. He has obsequious genes. The guy’s a serial forelock-tugger.’

He looked away for a moment, collecting his thoughts. ‘Feed me more,’ he instructed.

‘Gerald Evans is a farmer. He steals other people’s sheep, he shoots dogs,’ I pressed down on the exaggeration pedal, ‘and he imports heavy-duty porno from Holland. He also has direct cross-country access to the burial site from his land. He lives here, he knows the place. He’s the only one in the locality that fits under the umbrella.’

‘Motive?’ Fletcher snapped the question at me.

I shrugged. ‘I can’t say without talking to him.’

‘How does Evie Salmon fit into it?’

‘She helped his wife out. He had to know her. Maybe they got as far as blow jobs in the hayloft. Then she moves. But they keep in touch. Who knows, maybe he even set her up in a fuck-pad somewhere. Evie was living away, no one could connect them any more, and that’s when she became safe to be a victim.’

‘DCS Galbraith is convinced it’s an outside agency.’

‘This makes more sense, boss.’

He pondered. ‘If he’s such a bad bastard, why haven’t we had him already?’

‘Because he’s careful. He does what he does on his own land.’

‘Okay,’ he came to the decision, ‘tomorrow morning, you go and talk to him.’

‘Thanks, boss.’

‘And I go with you.’

My grateful face didn’t flutter.

I walked back down the corridor, trying to see the similarities between this pompous bastard and the Kevin Fletcher I had originally known. I had been a raw DC in Cardiff myself at the time, working the deadbeat stuff that the older guys tipped out of their ashtrays for me to pick up: the council-estate break-ins, the foreign-sailor muggings and the over-the-hill hookers who were reduced to knee-tremblers against lock-up garage walls.

He came in through the graduate-recruitment route and I was assigned to him as a minder. We got on well then. He was intelligent and we discovered that we both read books, and liked films and music that bypassed the mainstream. The sort of thing that could have fucked him if he’d ended up with the wrong partner. I hadn’t been quite so lucky, I had been landed with the derogatory nickname ‘Pablo’ after making the mistake of trying to turn one of my colleagues onto an album track called ‘Pablo Picasso’ by an American indie band called the Modern Lovers
.

I showed him the ropes as best I could. I drove him round the streets, pointing out the hot and the cold spots, introduced him to my small but developing team of snitches, and I put myself out there to watch his back. He learned the shortcuts and the cynicism quickly, how to spot and drop the no-hope cases, but, more importantly, how to nail the bad bastards who had either fallen out of grace with their protection, or had never had any to begin with.

I had thought we had the makings of a duo, a proper crime-fighting team. Until the day I walked into the pub that was our unofficial squad room and saw him nested there with the big boys. I knew it was over when he grinned at me and called out across the crowded bar, ‘What are you drinking,
Pablo
?’

Kevin Fletcher had started his ascendancy.

And me? I’d like to think that I retained most of my integrity. Which was probably why he was now able to treat me as his fucking slave.

There was an air of charged suspense in the incident room when I arrived the next morning. It had the quiet concentrated intensity of the control deck of a submarine during a depth-charge attack.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked Alison, a whisper seeming appropriate.

She inclined her head towards the room that Fletcher had commandeered. ‘Nothing’s been announced, but he’s been on the phone a lot. And DCS Galbraith is on his way back.’

‘So?’

‘He was meant to be staying in Carmarthen for a couple of days dealing with politics and getting the proper resources allocated. He’s just been on the phone and he’s not in a good mood.’

So, Galbraith descending in grumpy mode. That explained the studied sense of doom in here. I smiled cockily. ‘Shame I won’t be around to share the greetings.’ I nodded at Fletcher’s closed door. ‘The Young Pretender and I have got a prior appointment.’

She flipped me a finger. I knocked on Fletcher’s door, opened it and stuck my head round. ‘Ready, boss?’

He looked up at me from behind his desk, surprised and distracted. He had a shaving rash and shadows around his eyes. He looked like the victim of a sleep-deprivation curse that he had begun to believe in.

‘We’re supposed to be going out to interview Gerald Evans,’ I reminded him.

The memory came back. He frowned. Hesitated for a moment. And decided that misery preferred company. He waved me in. ‘Shut the door behind you,’ he instructed.

I sat down in front of him and waited him out.

‘We’ve found another one,’ he said eventually. ‘Under arc lights. I was summoned up that hill at three o’clock this morning.’

‘Number four?’

He nodded morosely. ‘DCS Galbraith wants to see it
in situ
before we make any kind of announcement.’

I took that as a warning that any leaks would be traced. ‘Fresh or skeleton?’

‘Skeleton. Similar condition to the previous two. No head, no hands. Looks like its been in the ground for at least as long as the others. And Evie Salmon’s been verified by DNA.’

We both went quiet. So Evie was official. And the toll of the anonymous ones was now three. And rising?

‘Have you ever come across one like this before?’ It was an unguarded moment. He was actually looking for solace.

‘We had that guy a few years back, who was killing schoolgirls up the Valleys,’ I reminded him. It had been a case that we had both worked on. Still equally ranked then, I remembered ruefully.

He shook his head. ‘That was different. We could identify the kids.’

‘We’ve got Evie now.’

‘She doesn’t help with the spread. The others are three big blanks. We can get a mitochondrial DNA profile on them, but where do we go from there?’ He groaned in frustration. ‘It’s a classic catch-22. To get a match we need to find a close relative. To find a close relative we need to know who the fuck the victim is.’

Boy did he have a big case of the morning blues. Or responsibility fugue. I didn’t care, I was excited about the forthcoming confrontation. ‘Or we discover Gerald Evans stirring up heads in his acid bath?’ I offered, reminding him of our current mission.

He shook his head. ‘We’re not going.’ He looked up at me. ‘How the fuck can I leave here with all this shit coming down on us? And DCS Galbraith arriving at any moment.’

I made a big show of disappointment. ‘So I’m going to have to do this myself then, boss?’ I asked, starting to get up.

‘No.’ He flagged me back down. ‘I had a talk with DCS Galbraith about it. He doesn’t want you disturbing the locals.’

The deflation felt like a kick in the stomach. ‘You told him what we had on the guy?’

He flashed me an irritated look. ‘I thought that over. There’s really nothing that solid there. We agreed that Emrys Hughes can handle the initial interview, and, if he picks up any bad waves, we’ll take over.’

The bastard had copped out. ‘But the guy’s ripe for it, boss,’ I pleaded.

He shook his head resolutely. ‘You’re not getting Evans. DCS Galbraith wants you to interview someone else. A man Inspector Morgan has been bending his ear about. Some incomer weirdo.’ He searched his desk and found the relevant piece of paper. ‘A crackpot called Bruno Gilbert.’

‘Gilbert’s harmless,’ I protested, wondering when Morgan had joined the anti-Bruno crusade. I dropped the frustration from my tone. ‘I’ve already spoken to him, boss. I’ve been out to see him. He’s a fruitcake, but he’s an inhabitant of Planet Docile.’

‘That may well be the case, but DCS Galbraith wants an official report to that effect. We don’t want the local plods usurping the game and finding the perp for us. Because that’s one we wouldn’t be able to live down.’

I got up. I now felt fucked over and narky. Kevin Fletcher had successfully managed to share his morning malaise. Now, instead of interviewing a hot suspect, I was on my way back to the ruined kingdom.

Bruno Gilbert was still not opening his gates. And he had re-attached the barbed wire. I got back up on the roof of the car, pushed it down again, feeling less charitable this time, and made my entry. I had almost considered faking it, basing my report on my previous visit and Bruno’s tale of UFO sightings last night. Nothing would have changed. But Jack Galbraith had an unfortunate knack for sniffing out shortcuts.

I had the same sense of suffusion this side of the gate as before, as if the air here operated at a different density, tamping down sound. Even the noise of a large bird I had disturbed, a wood pigeon or a crow, crashing up through a tree’s foliage, had a muted quality to it.

I called out as I walked down the drive, warning him of my arrival. There was no response from his previous niche, and he didn’t appear at the door of the shack. Perhaps he was working in his gold mine. That prospect lifted me slightly. Maybe this time I would get a glimpse of the operation.

‘Mr Gilbert, are you in there?’ I rapped on the shack’s rickety plank door, and cocked my head to listen for sounds off. Nothing came back to me. There was no lock. I clicked the old-fashioned thumb-latch and pushed the door open.

Even without the sight of him I would have recognized that particular combination of smells above all the others. Blood and shotgun-discharge. Over the mildew, excrement, whisky and bottled gas. It was probably only a trace odour by now, something that wouldn’t have registered on most people’s senses. But it was a smell that was imprinted on my psyche. I would probably even react to homeopathic levels. The smell of my Cardiff demise. The Farmer and the Pimp.

I stayed in the doorway, partly to calm myself down, partly for the overview. Trying to read the room, keeping my eyes darting, staying away from the body, before it loomed too large and obliterated all other perceptions.

Squalor. A one-room shack with a curtained-off cubicle containing the galvanized bucket that he had used for a toilet. The only window obscured by galaxies of cobwebs.

Generations of dust had mutated to take on the mass and heft of dirt on the floor. Wooden plank walls that had once been painted were streaked with rot, except in the tiny cooking area, where grease had acted as a preservative. A camp bed with stains on the covers that at first glance looked like a deliberate pattern. A matching wardrobe and chest of drawers, both with damp-blown veneer.

And the kitchen table.

He had used the surface to balance the double-barrelled shotgun. The force of the blast had blown his chair back, smashing it and him partly through the rotten rear wall, so that they had come to a rest propped back at an angle. It was through this gap in the wall that most of the light was now entering the room.

It was too early in the year for a major fly strike, but a large bird, probably a crow, had crapped on his chest from its perch on his shoulder, where it had been gorging on carpaccio of cerebellum. Both eyes were also gone. Probably the
amuse-bouche
. Had it been the bird I had disturbed?

I started back to the gate to get to the car’s radio and call in the cavalry. I stopped at the niche in the brambles where I had last seen Bruno Gilbert crouched, and looked back at the shack.

Nothing was going anywhere. Whenever this had happened the vermin had since had time to come calling. There were no hot clues cooling down.

I had the scene to myself until I decided it was time to sound the klaxon.

I returned to the shack and stood in the doorway, taking a couple of plastic supermarket bags out of my pockets, not taking my eyes off the scene as I stooped down to put them over my shoes.

I held myself there. It was time to stop being purely reactive.
Read what it says
, I instructed myself.

Bruno Gilbert had committed suicide.

It was so obvious. So why was I balking? Because it was so obvious? Because I had only recently met him? He was still fresh in my memory. Definitely a troubled man. But from our two meetings I had come away with a distinct sense that he had managed to come to some sort of accommodation with his demons. And he had his gold mine.

So why do this? And why now?

I went back into the shack, taking care to stay on the path that daily use had worn through the dirt. I scanned for footprints, but there were nothing but scuffed marks. I bent down to take in the soles of Bruno’s shoes, which were angled up due to the tilt of the body. The tread pattern didn’t match the cast that we had found at the wind-farm site. And his shoes were too small.

From my crouch I saw a bottle of whisky and a glass that had fallen from the table. Neither had broken. The whisky bottle had obviously been not quite empty, the spilled residue having cut a short, winding gulch through the dry caked dust.

I made a cursory analysis of the wound. From the damage, it looked like he had managed to fire both barrels simultaneously. There was massive trauma to the right and rear of the head extending from the neck to virtually the top of the cranium, and as far as the right ear, which was hanging by a small flap of tissue. It was also compounded by the post-mortem damage caused by rodents and birds.

How loud would it have been? The noise of a gun is principally down to the sudden and massive expansion of gasses. His mouth would effectively have acted as a crude silencer, and the shack itself would have had a baffle effect. Factor in the remoteness, the trees, and the chances were that no one would have heard it.

I backed away. A glimpse of something white on the floor, an alien colour in this midden. I bent down and shone my torch on it. At first I thought it was a small piece of bone. But it was too clean, no blood or gristle adhering. Then I realized that it was a tooth. More precisely a fragment of a tooth.

In front of where Bruno had last been sitting. Whereas every other piece of bio-debris had been propelled to the rear or the side by the blast. I took a photograph of it and left it
in situ
. I wasn’t about to tell the SOCO people how to do their jobs, but I was going to make sure that this was brought to their attention.

I found a pair of bolt cutters in a tool shed and used them to cut through the chain securing the front gate. The circumstances sanctioned it. This was shortly about to become a high-activity zone, and the assorted participants were not going to be too happy if they had to vault a barred gate to attend to their specialities. Especially the poor bastards who were going to have to carry Bruno out of there.

I got patched through to Fletcher on my car radio. He emitted a prolonged moan, like the sky had just caved in on him. When he’d finished swearing he told me that he’d get a scratch team together and be over as soon as possible. In the meantime he instructed me to secure the site and stay put.

I had no intention of going anywhere. Because I was a big kid who had just been left in charge of a gold mine.

Except I had to find it first.

And it wasn’t all whimsy. This was more than the Pig Wales version of
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. I was getting a distinctly bad feeling in my kidneys about this. Could the gold mine have anything to do with it? Could the poor loopy old bastard actually have discovered the wonder seam, the mother lode? And had someone else found out? Was this whole thing simply coincidence, and entirely unconnected to the other deaths?

To keep Fletcher happy I tied some crime-scene tape in front of the open gate before I went off exploring.

I followed a well-worn path behind the shack and found the sluice trays. But no sign of a classic timber-propped hole in the face of the hillside. No sign of anything resembling the entrance to a mine. The sluice trays were like big barbecue troughs, supported on trestle legs on a raised wooden deck. Bruno had connected a length of alkathene pipe higher up the adjacent brook, using the water to sieve the ore. But where was the ore coming from?

Bruno was an old guy. From what I understood about this process it involved washing crushed stone through graded sieves. Someone his age would not be able to carry buckets of rock too far. So it had to be close to here somewhere.

The tap on the end of the alkathene pipe dripped. It had formed its own miniature watercourse that ran down to the edge of the raised wooden deck. But no puddle? Why wasn’t the water ponding against the edge of the deck?

I knelt down to look closer and saw the hinges set into the top surface of the deck. Part of it obviously lifted. But how? I looked up and scanned the trees. It took me a while to see it. It was clever. The horizontal arm of a davit, folded back into the foliage, camouflaging it. I swung it out through the branches. There was a pulley at the top of the arm, and a block and tackle lashed against the raking spar.

I found the lifting bracket in the sluice tray. Disguised to look like a simple tool that would be used to rake the ore. It took me a couple of attempts but I managed to slot it into its housing on the deck, connected the block and tackle, and started hauling. The free part of the deck in front of the sluice trays started to lift smoothly, hinged with a counterweight like a bascule bridge.

It was impressive. It was elaborate. It was a lot of time and trouble to go to, to hide a hole in the ground. But then time was what Bruno had had lots of.