Good People (20 page)

‘No. I wouldn’t ask something like that. I just need to add to my own knowledge of these men. Try to understand what they might be capable of.’

She dropped the ingénue pose and looked at me carefully. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Because I would feel so much worse knowing about it and not doing something. I once didn’t, and a woman died.’ I decided to offer this woman real trust. ‘This hasn’t been easy.’ I turned my cheek towards her and gingerly touched Monica’s scratch marks. ‘This is one of my rewards. And part of the bride price I’ve had to pay to get this far is to let a creep take a photograph of me simulating sex with a dead cow.’

A small smile flickered. ‘Did you enjoy that experience?’

‘No. I felt totally and utterly humiliated by it.’

‘Some people long to achieve a state like that.’ It was a statement, no trace of bitterness or sadness in it. Just flat knowledge. Up close like this, I could make out the milky pale freckles under her eyes. Jesus, she looked so young, so innocent, so pure.

‘Can you help me?’

She had already decided before she nodded. ‘Come through here. Jason, Junior, back off!’ she yelled, opening the gate into the yard for me.

The dogs spiralled backwards, playfully leaping for each other’s throats. I watched them warily as I came through the gate. ‘They’ll stay back there?’ I asked.

‘As long as I tell them to.’ She didn’t try to persuade me that they were essentially soft and harmless.

She led me through the gate into a paved area at the rear of the barn. A path led through a small, formal knot garden with low, neatly clipped box borders, to a single-storey stone building that ran at right angles from the barn. I followed her to a wide, weathered oak door.

She turned in front of the door. ‘I’m trusting you with this. If you turn holy or judgemental on me, you walk.’ She smiled, but her look was penetrating. ‘Understood?’

‘Absolutely.’

The door opened grudgingly. She switched on some low-level lighting and closed the door behind us. The room had the damp, chalky smell of limewash. My eyes adjusted. It was a small lobby, a corridor to the barn conversion, and two closed doors led off the space. A pair of off-white cotton-covered sofas faced each other, framing an abstract tapestry on the wall.

‘Sit down,’ she said, pointing to one of the sofas while she took the other, the dogs flopping down at her feet.

I glanced at the tapestry again as I sat down. It wasn’t an abstract. It was a representation in graduated pinks of a huge, flared vulva. In both bottom corners, symmetrically placed, two penises were drooping out of tumescence under the weight of barbed crowns.

She saw my recognition. ‘It was a commission.’

‘Alexandrina’s?’

She bowed her head in acknowledgement. ‘Definitely Alexandrina’s.’

‘Are you a dominatrix?’

She shrugged. ‘If that’s what the occasion calls for. I can also be a Sweet Mistress.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I take shit.’ She grinned elfishly. ‘Sometimes literally.’

‘They hurt you?’

‘We agree on the level of pain allowed beforehand.’

‘Why?’

She raised her eyebrows warningly.

‘I’m not judging. I’m just curious. You look like you could have so much else going for you.’

She smiled sagaciously, spreading her hands, ‘Which would give me this place, my dogs, my horses? Working two days a week?’

‘What about your husband?’

‘I’m not married.’

‘I was told that you were Mrs Morris.’

‘I don’t discourage it. The title makes me safe in the locals’ eyes. I think the story has it that I’m a young widow in retreat up here to get over my grief.’ She laughed at the irony behind it.

I shook my head. I was still hearing neither regret nor rancour. ‘Doesn’t it get to you? The things you must have to do?’

‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to do in your job?’

I didn’t have to think about it. ‘I was there when we recovered the body of a child who had been raped, murdered and stuffed into a sewer pipe.’

She shook her head in sympathy. ‘Terrible … Terrible … But you’re still functioning. You compartmentalize. You learn to stuff it all in the jar called necessary evil and screw the lid down tight. Despite what you may think, I don’t have to deal with anything as bad as you must encounter. I’m playing a game. I can leave it behind.’ She grinned. ‘Honest. I’m very focused and selfish, I’m totally reward driven.’

I believed her. But I knew that it wasn’t going to stop me walking away from here and worrying about her in the future. I leaned forward to pat one of the dogs on its flank. It twisted its head to look round at me. I didn’t know whether I was communing with Jason or Junior.
Stay vigilant
, I willed the dog. Lisa looked amused, as if she had just read my mind. ‘Tell me the story.’

I explained about Magda. How the group had used a prostitute as an alibi, but I didn’t elaborate on Monica. I told her about Trevor Vaughan hanging himself, Boon disappearing, but not about the possibility of the escape to Ireland. I wanted to keep the tension in the air.

‘Which of these men should I know?’ she asked.

‘Gordon McGuire and Les Tucker.’

She shook her head apologetically. ‘For everyone’s protection, I don’t do real names.’

I described them.

She chewed on her bottom lip while she thought about it. Giving me a pained look. ‘No. It’s too wide. Fits too many people. Can you narrow it down?’

‘I think that they would have been together.’

She nodded encouragingly. ‘That helps.’

But it didn’t eliminate the competition. I stopped myself from speculating about the possible range of her group activity, and concentrated on trying to come up with an individual signature for Gordon or Les. ‘One of them works in the forest,’ I offered. Perhaps, in intimacy, he smelled of sap or resin, or chainsaw lubricant.

She nodded slowly. Something arriving. ‘I think I’ve got him. Most of my players are sedentary, business types. His face was red. His arms were tanned up to his biceps, and every time I saw him he would have fresh cuts and gashes on them. Describe the other one again,’ she instructed.

I described Gordon.

‘Yes. They used to always arrive together in one car.’

I picked up on her use of the past tense. ‘Used to?’

‘I don’t see them any more. I haven’t for a while now.’

‘What did they want from you? Dominatrix or Sweet Mistress?’

‘Neither. They wanted to humiliate me.’ She smiled at my expression. ‘It’s not uncommon.’

‘Can you explain please?’

‘Basically, they wanted me to be an inferior species. Very rarely did we ever have straight sex. If it was penetrative, they were always behind, and it was invariably anal. Usually, they preferred me to masturbate them and they’d aim to ejaculate into my face or hair. Then they would urinate and defecate on me.’ She saw me wince. ‘Are you okay with this?’

‘Is there more?’

‘The other one, not the lumberjack, was into coprophilia.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He had a thing about his own shit. He would try to manage a hard enough stool to penetrate me while it was still inside him.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake …’ I groaned.

‘I warned you.’

‘I’m sorry. I really am grateful for this.’

‘Is it helping you?’

‘I think so.’ I closed my eyes to clear the grime from my head, to try to return to analytical. ‘Why do you think they wanted to treat you like this?’

She shook her head. ‘I make a point of avoiding the psychology.’

‘When they came here … These sessions. Did they take part in them together or separately?’

‘Separately. To start with. One would wait out here while the other was with me.’ She inclined her head towards a door. ‘But they were both into the same things. I knew they would be discussing them, sharing notes. So I was eventually able to persuade them to join up and do the session together. They took a bit of convincing, but in the end they realized that they got bonus voyeur’s perks out of it.’

‘You were happy with that?’

‘Of course. It shortened the session. I’m not paid by the hour. And, if I’m going to be pissed on it makes sense to have only one set of sheets to wash.’ She thought about something. ‘I never did get them to touch each other though.’

‘You tried?’

She grinned. ‘Why not? I’m a crusader. If I could have given them the taste for screwing each other it would have eased my laundry bills.’

‘You would have lost the trade.’

‘I did anyway.’

‘How long ago was that?’

She thought about it. ‘They probably started tailing off about three, three and a half years ago.’

I thought about it. I would have to check, but I was pretty sure that Gordon had been married for longer than that, and Les’s relationship with Sara had been described as long term. ‘Do you think that their partners could have started substituting for you?’ I asked, voicing my thoughts.

She laughed. ‘Darling,’ she mimicked, ‘let’s do it differently tonight. Let me squat over your face and I’ll share my curry.’

It was an awful image, but I laughed as well. She was infectious. ‘Could they just have lost the taste for it?’ I ventured.

She shrugged. ‘It happens. Usually, it’s a partner finding out. Shaming them. But both of them … ?’ She trumpeted a note of scepticism.

Why had they left Alexandrina? They had moved on from Monica for something more extreme. What new line of momentum were they following here?

‘Can I ask you something?’

She smiled at me expectantly. ‘For the right price, I can always find a vacancy.’

I felt myself colouring. ‘Lisa’s more my type.’

She leaned across a recumbent dog and touched my knee gently. ‘That’s kind. But Lisa’s not available.’

I nodded. ‘Can you tell me what you called them?’

‘My players come up with their own pseudonyms. The lumberjack wanted to be called Shaft, and the other one was Sim. I didn’t understand the reference.’

I wouldn’t have either, before they turned me into Country Boy. ‘Simmental,’ I explained, ‘it’s a breed of bull.’

The hairdressing salon was closed for lunch when I got back to Dinas. It was small, a converted double shopfront with a central door, both windows taken up with product ads and display shots of the shiny heads of sultry models who had probably never breathed the air west of Chiswick, never mind Dinas. Over the front, a sign in purple cursive script against a white background read a cut above.

I parked diagonally opposite, where I could monitor the comings and goings without being obvious.

On my way from Lisa Morris’s, I had put a call in to the children’s home in Manchester to see if they had any information on the whereabouts of Donna and Colette. They stonewalled me. They informed me that they could do nothing over the telephone and that any request for information on any of their charges, past or present, should be sent in writing on official notepaper with a verifiable contact name, telephone number and a personal endorsement from God. Laudable, I suppose, given the present climate, but a bitch so far as sleuthing and spontaneity were concerned.

‘Do you still send kids to Dinas?’ I had asked after this exchange, pretending it was a jaunty afterthought.

‘We don’t send kids anywhere. We’re not a mail-order service.’

I chuckled, even though the guy had not meant it as a joke. I was trying to build bridges, show them that I was harmless. ‘They used to come here in the summer holidays. To train to be hairdressers.’

‘We don’t have placements there any more,’ he had said, putting the phone down. Forthcoming bastard.

So, what had happened to sour A Cut Above?

As a cop I already knew that Friday afternoons were high season for betting shops and pubs. I hadn’t realized the same went for hairdressing salons in the sticks. When the closed sign was removed at two o’clock, a procession of older ladies arrived from all corners, converging on the place.

I gave them time to settle before I walked over. The bell that the door was fitted with was totally redundant, as all eyes were on me even before I had turned the handle. Ladies on seats flicking through magazines, ladies under hair driers, even the lady with her head dripping over a basin managed to sneak a look in.

Three younger women in purple tabards were standing behind the cutting and styling chairs. Also staring at me. I nodded and smiled, zapping the room with charm. ‘Good afternoon, ladies. I’m Detective Sergeant Capaldi, and I’m looking for Sara Harris?’

‘I’m Sara Harris,’ the woman behind the middle chair announced, tone and expression making it plain that she was not pleased to see me. She was short, with slickly cut, dyed-red hair, and enough make-up to service the entire cast of a kabuki production.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, this is purely routine, but I do need to ask you some questions.’

‘Can’t you see how busy we are?’ she snapped crossly, flourishing a pair of scissors to demonstrate the point.

‘I know, I’m sorry, but it’s quotas …’ I shrugged and beamed at all the ladies. They at least were dying to hear my business.

Sara leaned forward. ‘Sorry, Mrs Good, I won’t be a minute.’ She turned, already moving, flinging the instruction at me: ‘This way.’

She took me into a back room that smelled of shampoo and sharp chemicals. It was stacked with boxes, and a younger girl in the same tabard was washing cups out in a sink. ‘Go out and see who wants coffee, Kylie – and don’t come back in here until I tell you.’

Kylie scurried out, giving me a look that made me feel like a guy who clubs baby seals for a living.

‘Les warned me that you might come round here to harass me,’ Sara said, her back to a barred window, the light giving her head a magenta-tinged penumbra.

‘This has nothing to do with Mr Tucker, and I promise I have no intention of harassing you. As I explained, this is just a routine inquiry. We have been asked by colleagues in Nottingham to see if we can help with information.’

‘Nottingham?’ she asked, bewildered.

‘Donna Gallagher used to work here, didn’t she?’

‘Donna … ?’ She turned the question back on me, apparently genuinely confused.