Good People (13 page)

‘That’s where I originally thought you were going.’

Something in his inflexion sparked a doubt. ‘What do you mean,
originally
?’ I asked.

‘You took a wrong turn a while back,’ he said, inclining his head behind us.

I let him direct me from there. It took some of the edge off of my power, but not as much as turning us into Hansel and fucking Gretel, lost in the woods, would have.

The darkness was near total at the hut, only a spooky half-light that gave the treetops, listing into the wind, an otherworldly dimension. No birds. Just that wind soughing through the gorse and the young birches.

He stood outside, his hands rammed into the pockets of his duffel coat. ‘Where is this supposed to lead us?’ he asked.

‘Down memory lane.’

He shrugged.

‘Do you know Monica Trent?’ I asked.

He dropped his eyes. ‘I hadn’t told them that I told you about Boon,’ he said, without looking up.

‘And that I knew that Monica Trent wasn’t their Miss Danielle?’

He nodded.

‘Why did they do it? Why have they backed up the lie?’

‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell me until after they’d done it. I couldn’t then say that I’d already told you what I had.’

‘I think it’s time to tell me a bit more, Trevor.’

His eyes shot at me, a flash glance crossed between startled and calculating.

‘Let’s start with the lights that were here. What can you tell me about that bit of prior preparation?’

‘Gordon organizes vermin shoots in the woods. It’s a sort of corporate hospitality thing, for some of the people who use Payne, Dyke and Thomas.’ I caught a note of disapproval. ‘They crash around up here, blasting at squirrels, crows and pigeons, and then they use the hut for boozing afterwards.’

So, it didn’t have to have been premeditated. They could have just met Magda at the filling station. They already had the infrastructure in place here. But someone had disappeared the lights.

‘What happened to the lights? Why weren’t they around in the morning?’

He shook his head. He hadn’t thought about it, and it still didn’t interest him. ‘I don’t know. Maybe Gordon has somewhere he stores them.’

I didn’t pursue it. ‘Talk me through it,’ I said. ‘You arrive here – then what?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Gordon went in first with a torch. We unloaded the beer, and then we went inside when he turned the gas lights on.’

‘Go on.’ I nodded towards the door.

He pushed it open. I followed him through with a big flashlight. Things had changed since I had last been here. Both doors leading off the vestibule were open at a different angle. It could have been forestry workers. It could have been another one of Gordon McGuire’s shooting parties. Or it could have been people looking to clear up something that they might have left behind. I thought of the crumpled tissue that I had found. Had there been something else that I’d missed?

‘The girl threw a fit when she saw the state of the place,’ Trevor commented over his shoulder as I followed him into the larger room, the torch beam providing him with a looming shadow. ‘It wasn’t really serious, she was still laughing, but I got the impression that things didn’t seem quite as much fun now as they had on the minibus.’

I squared the room. Looking for omissions. But nothing seemed to have been removed.

‘Gordon found a broom, and told her that if it offended her so much she could do something about it. It was a joke,’ he added quickly. ‘He wasn’t being mean. But she took him up on it and swept the floor. As best she could, anyway.’ He went thoughtful, turning slowly, trying to locate the memory. He pointed into a corner. I shone the light, illuminating nothing but dirt and the hut’s geometry. ‘Paul crashed out over there. That was when Gordon came up to me and said that it looked like I was the only unattached male still left standing.’

‘So you made your excuses and went to bed?’

‘More or less. I went exploring and found the other room.’

‘Did you take the bracken in?’

‘No, it was already there. A big pile of it. That was one of the attractions.’

I didn’t comment. I didn’t want to block his flow. But I did make a mental note to continue to wonder what Gordon’s clients, wired up for a drinking session after shooting squirrels, would want with a big bracken bed?

‘I said that I was too drunk and tired, and that I was going to try and get some sleep.’

‘And when you woke up in the morning, they told you that Boon and the girl had run off into the sunrise?’

‘More or less. But it wasn’t like they had run away. Everyone helped with it.’

I nodded. I walked round the room again slowly, raking the skirting board with the torch beam, conscious of him watching me.

‘Are you satisfied now?’ he asked, breaking the silence.

I pivoted and shone the torch at him. ‘No.’

‘What more can I say?’ he implored, squinting at the light.

‘Something went sour.’

He shook his head. Too fast. ‘No …’ He took a breath. ‘They would have told me.’

I spread my arms, taking in the room. ‘You have five drunk guys at the end of a long day. Okay, discount Paul Evans. Four guys in a highly charged and unpredictable state. You also have an attractive young female.’ I made a stirring motion with a big imaginary spoon. ‘This is not good chemistry. There is no natural law that says it has to go wrong. But oh so often it does.’ I looked hard at him. ‘And I think you saw or heard something, Trevor.’

He couldn’t hold my eyes. He shook his head and turned away, walking for the door. I let him go. He had a crisis of conscience to resolve.

Outside, in front of the hut, the transitional light had sucked the detail out of him. He was just a dark column. The wind now included a distinctly damp chill in its composition. I let him hear me approach behind him.

He turned slowly, his head down. ‘I wanted to believe them when they told me that everything was all right.’

‘What made you think it might not be, Trevor?’ I asked softly.

He looked at me directly, something going beyond sadness in his expression. ‘I am not a disloyal person.’

‘I know that.’

‘I woke up when I heard the arguing. It was louder than the music. A CD player of Paul’s that we’d taken with us,’ he explained.

‘Who was arguing?’ I prompted.

‘I couldn’t tell. Just raised voices. The girl was in there too. Sounding upset.’

‘As if she was being hurt?’ I asked, trying to keep my tone clinical.

‘No. More like she was trying to reason or restrain.’

‘Could you make out what they were arguing about?’

‘No. It was just noise.’

‘Did you go and see what it was about?’

He shook his head guiltily. ‘I wanted to pretend that it wasn’t happening.’ He looked at me sheepishly, his words struggling out hesitantly. ‘Did you ever do that? In bed at night as a child, when you heard your parents arguing?’

I nodded. ‘You just want to be able to fix whatever has gone wrong between them.’

He smiled, grateful for the empathy. ‘That’s right. It was like that. I just lay there and willed them to stop. And, eventually, they did. It all wound down, went below the level of the music again.’

‘You went back to sleep?’

He nodded. ‘I didn’t think I would. Then it was the absence of noise that woke me. Everything was quiet. I thought that everyone must have fallen asleep. I had to go outside to the toilet. After all that beer. It was so quiet that it felt safe again.’

I smiled at him. ‘The family restored?’

He nodded. ‘But it wasn’t. Paul was still crashed out in the same place. The girl was in another corner, fast asleep in her sleeping bag. But the others weren’t there.’

‘The minibus?’

‘Still parked where we’d left it. I saw it when I went outside. It was really cold now, starting to sleet, it wasn’t a night to be out walking in the woods.’

‘Is that what you thought they were doing?’

‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know where they were. Then, it was one of those flukes of sound: I heard them. It wasn’t voices, just a sense that …’ He searched for an explanation. ‘That there were some people filling a space out there. I followed the hunch, and eventually caught up with them.’

‘They were all together?’

He thought hard about that. ‘I don’t know. I keep going over that. And I still don’t know. They were always set against a darker background, just a cluster, a group. They never shifted into individuals. At no point was I able to count them off.’

‘You didn’t join them?’ I asked.

‘I was going to,’ he said, distress shifting into his voice. ‘But something made me hold back.’ He looked at me intently. ‘Something told me that I was not meant to be there. I was not meant to be a part of this.’

‘What were they doing?’ I asked, registering his despair.

I had to strain to catch his reply. ‘I think they were digging.’

Poor bastard … He had been torturing himself. On top of the lousy price of sheep, and his deep baseline sexual anxiety, he now had to contend with the possibility that he had been excluded and lied to by his very best friends. Who might also, either by accident or design, have done something terrible to Boon Paterson.

He had stood out there alone in the dark and passed beyond the moment when he could have called out to them and had his answer. Because he wasn’t entirely sure that he really wanted the answer. Just in case. So he had sneaked back to the hut and into his bracken burrow without anyone knowing he had been out. He had lain there, straining for sounds that would reassure him. He had heard them return from the woods, but no voices to let him count off the register.

And then he heard the minibus starting up. By the time he got outside it had gone. He could see the light wash from its headlights descending through the trees. Gordon had been left behind to give him the news that Ken and Les were helping Boon secure his new future.

‘Did I believe them?’ He phrased the question for me before I could ask it. ‘I willed myself to. Anything else was too awful to contemplate.’ He closed his eyes tight shut. I could picture the image that was gripping him. Those men, fused together in the dark, standing over a hole in the ground.

‘If it was that dark, how could you tell that they were digging?’ I asked. The question had been troubling me.

‘It was the sound of it. I’ve dug enough holes for fence posts in my time to know that sound.’

‘Could you find the place again?’

He looked at me with what could have been horror. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Don’t you want that doubt dispelled?’

‘I can live with it.’

‘It will get worse.’

‘It’s dark now.’

‘It was dark then,’ I reminded him.

He shivered visibly and pulled his coat tightly around him. He swivelled, and without a word he set off across the clearing to a disused logging trail with scrub grass growing in the central ridge. We passed through the stand of trees at the edge of the clearing and into an area that had been clear-felled on either side. The lack of trees gave us a lighter backdrop, and I followed a few paces behind his silhouette.

He stopped. We were on the lip of a ridge, the track dropping obliquely away in front of us, curving down into a dark stand of young spruce trees.

‘Are we here?’ I looked around the featureless spot, wondering what he had homed in on.

‘Down there. This is about as far as I came.’ He pointed down the track. ‘There’s a big indentation in the bank where they’ve dug stone out for the roadways. That’s where I saw them.’

It was even darker down there. My torch was useless for picking out detail. We couldn’t take this any further without more light. We went back for my car. I drove cautiously, conscious of the bottom scraping on the ridge of the track. I didn’t want to rip out the sump and end up on the receiving end of another rescue mission.

I left the engine running after I had the car’s headlights facing into the depression in the bank made by the small quarry. The lights put everything into ultra-high relief: the soupy lichen film on the puddles, individual boulders, last season’s foxglove stumps, and the roots and bracken tubers breaking through the dirt at the top of the bank.

But what was highlighted for us was the roughly circular area, about seventy-five centimetres in diameter, of recently disturbed ground.

‘That’s too small for anything big to be in there, isn’t it?’ Trevor asked hopefully.

By anything big, I knew that he meant a body. I had been thinking the same thing. But it would take a head comfortably. Or a head and a pair of hands if identity erasure had been the intention. I didn’t share these speculations with Trevor.

‘What do we do now?’ he asked in a hushed whisper, paying homage to the psychology of the setting. With our shadows cast starkly against the earth bank, we looked to be in a fulcrum scene from an early German Expressionist film.

I had already been juggling with the consequences behind the same question. I was aware that we could be tramping over a crime scene. But, in order to establish that, I was going to have to notch the disruption up to another level.

‘We dig it up.’

I heard him suck his breath in. ‘We can’t do that …’

‘Why not?’

‘What if you find something?’

‘That’s the intention, Trevor.’

The headlights had bleached the colour from his face, but it was the tone of his voice that made me realize that he had turned even paler. ‘Don’t these things have to be done officially? Don’t you need some sort of paperwork? Just in case … ?’ He left the possibilities hanging.

‘We can make it official. Believe me, Trevor, I would like nothing better. It just needs you to make a statement. Confirm everything that you’ve already told me.’

He looked at me sadly and shook his head. I went to the car and got the spade I kept in the boot for digging myself out of the Nanook of the North situation that I was still waiting to encounter.

It wasn’t so much a case of digging as flicking out an amalgam of loose stone and mud. It got more difficult to see as I got deeper, the light shooting over the top of the excavation, making the inside of the hole seem even darker. I had to progress gingerly, probing gently with the spade, trying to anticipate how the connection with soft tissue or bone would translate on the end of the blade. In the end the tension got too much and I dropped to my knees and used my Swiss Army knife to scoop the stony gunk out.