Good People (21 page)

‘Donna Gallagher, she was one of the girls from the children’s home in Manchester.’

‘Oh, Donna … That Donna …’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘That was a long time ago. I gave up taking those kids two years ago.’ She calculated. ‘We’re going back at least three, four years? How am I expected to know anything about her now?’

‘They thought that she might have kept in touch. Or you’d know where she went after she left here?’

‘She went back to Manchester. Back to the home.’

‘What about the second time?’

She frowned. ‘What second time?’ Her surprise sounded genuine.

‘The following summer. When she had to work at the Sychnant Nursing Home because you didn’t have any vacancies.’

She shook her head, another layer of annoyance showing. But she was also puzzled. ‘I don’t know who told you that. Donna never came back here looking for work. She would have known better.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because she was a lazy, deceitful little tart, and she knew exactly what I thought of her. So, if she’s what you’re wasting my time for, I want to get back to my clients.’

Was I hearing jealousy?

‘How did Donna get on with Mr Tucker?’

The question didn’t faze her. She smiled cattily. ‘Donna thought that we were all redneck hillbillies. She made no bones about demonstrating how backward she thought we all were. The only person she did get on with was Wendy Evans, but I wouldn’t get too excited about interrogating her, ’cos she’s hightailed it as well.’

‘How did she get to know Wendy Evans?’ I tried to keep it casual, shield the spark from her.

‘Wendy was helping out that summer too.’ She moved towards the door and held it open for me, activating the drone of conversations from the salon. ‘So, sorry I can’t be of any help, Sergeant, but I’ve got a business to run.’

‘What about Colette Fletcher?’

She partially closed the door. ‘What about her?’

‘You remember her?’

‘Vaguely. Now that you’ve brought Donna up. But she was even longer ago.’ Suspicion formed. ‘Are the Nottingham police meant to be looking for her as well?’

‘No, just curious. She came back to work at the Sychnant Nursing Home too. After you didn’t have a vacancy for her.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Her expression didn’t flicker. She opened the door again. ‘Will you please go now?’

I headed for the front door, a generic public servant’s smile fixed for all the ladies, aware of Sara’s eyes locked on my back.

‘Glyn …’

I spun just as I was reaching for the door handle. Sally was sitting looking up at me, a magazine on her lap. ‘You weren’t here … ?’ I stumbled, wondering whether I had walked past her without noticing on my way in.

‘No, I’ve only just arrived.’

She was such a fresh contrast from the farmers’ wives and the Townswomen’s Guild types that made up the rest of the clientele. ‘You come here?’ I blurted, tailing off before I put my foot in it.

She smiled, picking up my meaning, and lowered her voice: ‘Believe me, it’s the only place in town. Literally.’ She cocked her head and looked at me mock appraisingly. ‘You shouldn’t have bothered, though.’

‘Bothered?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Making yourself look beautiful for me.’ The ladies on either side of her chuckled.

Once again, Sally Paterson had caused me to redden. ‘I’ll see you later,’ I whispered. I caught a glimpse of Sara watching us. Registering that this was more than just casual. I had wanted her to report back on my interest in Donna and Colette to see if that raised any smoke in the hills.

But Sally I had wanted to keep private.

I went into The Fleece through the back yard. A few brace of pheasants were hanging by their necks, heads hunched, from a hook beside the back door. I sniffed instinctively as I went through. Sandra Williams hated the task of plucking these things so much that she often deliberately left them to slide past the point of no return.

She was where I had expected to find her. Sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, a paperback, and a cigarette stretched out towards the extractor fan over the range cooker. She looked up when she sensed my presence. She just nodded. Nothing looked like it could surprise Sandra any more. ‘David’s gone to the cash-and-carry.’

‘It’s you I wanted to see.’

She squinted up at me and frowned. ‘What have you done to your face?’

I touched my cheek reflexively. I had forgotten about Monica’s scratches. No wonder all the ladies in the salon had shown such an interest in me. Nothing to do with my natural charm after all, just that I looked like I was on the damaged end of a juicy tale of romantic entanglement.

‘I got on the wrong side of an angry woman. Professionally,’ I added.

Her eyebrows formed the essence of a shrug. ‘I thought the vigilantes might have caught up with you already.’ She used her forearm to clear a space at the table for me while I made some coffee. ‘If I were you, I would to stick to using the back door for a while.’

‘
Persona non grata
?’ I asked, sitting down opposite her.

‘I’m serious, Glyn, it’s getting ugly now. They’re really getting worked up about you and Trevor Vaughan.’

‘Who’s doing the stirring?’

‘Paul Evans. David’s had a few quiet words with Les Tucker and the McGuires, but they either can’t or won’t control him.’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘It’s a load of nonsense, but you know what people here are like.’

‘Specifically, Sandra.’

She flushed and turned away to flick her ash. ‘He’s saying that it’s you who’s really the homosexual. That you tried it on with Trevor Vaughan, and when he spurned you, you started spreading the stories against him.’

I raised my eyebrows sceptically. ‘Spurned?’

She smiled back weakly. ‘We’re old-fashioned people.’

‘I know only too well.’

‘It may be absurd and pathetic to you, but they take it seriously. You can’t just laugh it off, it could easily turn nasty.’

‘Dracula’s villagers?’

She frowned. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. I just had an image of a crowd in smocks, with pitchforks and flaming torches, getting ready to attack Dracula’s castle.’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘I know, and thanks for the warning.’

So they were using Paul Evans as the front man. The angry mouthpiece. Was that a piece of strategy that he was aware of? Were they setting up their fall guy in case the thing backfired and I ended up in hospital, or worse? Could anyone predict what sort of a bad momentum this might have? Sandra was right, it wasn’t funny.

‘Well?’ she asked.

I pulled a blank face, wondering if I had missed a question.

‘You wanted to see me?’ she prompted.

‘Right.’ I pulled my notebook out. ‘How well do you know Sara Harris?’

‘We’re not intimates. We’ll say hello in the street. She’ll come in here for a drink and a meal with Les Tucker. Occasionally, she’ll have a bit of a do with some of her girls.’

‘You don’t use her?’

‘No, I always go to the same girl in Newtown.’

‘So you didn’t know the girls from Manchester she used to have working for her over the summer holidays?’

‘I didn’t know them personally. I’d see them in the town.’ She smiled teasingly. ‘You wait; when you start to notice strangers you’ll know that you’ve really become one of us.’

I ignored that grim prognosis. ‘Anything distinguish them?’

She thought about it. ‘Not really. They were all young, some were a bit brash, some were a bit loud, but that was probably defensive, being away from what they knew.’

‘Did you know that at least two of them came back to Dinas the following year?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Neither did Sara,’ I said, reminding myself, underscoring it.

‘Is that significant?’

‘I don’t know. Why didn’t Sara have a girl last summer?’

‘Shouldn’t you be asking her that?’

‘Something tells me I’ve managed to blow myself out there.’

She smiled. ‘I don’t remember it ever coming up as an issue.’ She thought about it, a memory rising. ‘I tell a lie. There was some talk, actually. The last girl who came to work for her was black.’ She grinned. ‘Now, she really did stand out in Dinas. The rumour was that Sara didn’t want another coloured one, and that the home wouldn’t let her pick and choose.’

‘Do you remember the girl’s name? Or the one from the summer before?’

‘Pass.’

‘Zoë McGuire?’

She cocked her head at the change of subject. ‘What about her?’

‘Where would I find her during the day?’

‘The auctioneers.’

‘She works with Gordon?’

‘She’s on the accounts side.’

It was still the lion’s den. I swallowed my coffee and stood to leave. An afterthought arriving. ‘Where did they stay?’ I asked.

‘Where did who stay?’

‘The Manchester girls.’

She frowned, retrieving the memory. ‘That’s right … we used to talk about Sara being a bit mean where that was concerned. All that space she had at her place, and she got them to stay in a run-down old caravan of Les’s.’

The light was going when I left The Fleece. Street lights in their first half-hearted, sad-orange flare-up. Low cloud ceiling, the poison-tar smell from coal fires and fuel-oil boilers dropping to pavement level.

I caught a flash of the head behind my car just as it ducked down.

‘Hey …’ I yelled, starting to run. Caught in the moment, not thinking that this could be planted there to pull me into something less avoidable. That thought only arrived when the boy stood up and tore off down the street. I looked across and saw the two pre-teen girls that he had been hiding from.

Just to be on the safe side, I checked the car for damage. No tyres deflated, and no nails wedged, waiting for me to move off. Nothing rammed up the exhaust pipe.

I was going to have to remember to be careful where I parked in future.

In the car I lay back against the seat and waited for stillness to let my recently acquired history coalesce. Somewhere in the centrifuge that was spinning all that information a lump was forming. I worked at it with mental butter pats. Shaping it slowly.

Gordon and Les get the taste for sex from a prostitute.

Nothing too unusual in that. They are young when they start. Country kids. Monica is city, part of a whole strange Wonderland experience. They get to sow their wild oats with an experienced lady who doesn’t laugh at their clumsiness.

Somewhere down the line, Gordon marries Zoë, and Les takes up with Sara. But they keep up the visits to Monica. The bit of illicit on the side. More unusual now, but still within the broad spectrum of bozo male behaviour.

Enter Alexandrina.

Goodbye, Monica, who is not providing the level of variety and satisfaction that they now demand. Or need? Is it an addictive degeneration? To get your rocks off voiding yourself on a woman? Or are they just upping the ante for the entertainment value? Either way, they have now narrowed the behaviour band down into deviant.

They are now officially, in my book, sad sick fucks.

But this is where the shape starts to get really interesting.

Why did they eventually stop their visits to Alexandrina?

I had two answers to that. Actually, I had three, but the one in which they saw the error of their ways and renounced Sodom for eternity wasn’t worth the waste of mental activity.

The other two answers had one thing in common. They no longer needed Alexandrina.

Because Zoë and Sara had stepped in as substitutes?

Or because they had managed to find a replacement?

I tried to picture a scenario where I could get Zoë McGuire to tell me if she let her husband piss on her or sodomize her. But, short of a hospital bed, restraining straps and scopolamine, I could see no clever way into extracting that information. I had already realized that Sara Harris was not even a starter on that circuit.

So I concentrated on the other premise. Beginning with Colette Fletcher. Who had arrived in Dinas to work at A Cut Above six years ago. And had then returned, without Sara’s knowledge, the following summer.

So, what brought her back?

According to Monica, Gordon and Les had switched to Alexandrina six years ago. At roughly the same time Colette arrives in Dinas to work for Les’s girlfriend, and to stay in his caravan. With those connections and with a town this size, Colette and Les have to meet. And Gordon is Les’s best buddy. They share stuff. So here we have the boys starting out on the learning curve of the copro-deviant syllabus. Did they also start using Colette for the practical side of their homework?

There was a glitch built into that that I couldn’t resolve. If Colette was being used as a sexual toilet, why the fuck did she come back for more the next year?

This was where I needed Colette to still be around. Installed in a fuck-pad that the boys had provided. But she had run away from the Sychnant Nursing Home after that second summer. Had the boys tried to push her a bit too hard?

It was a question I couldn’t answer. But I had the pattern repeating itself with Donna Gallagher. The first summer in Dinas to work with Sara and stay in Les’s caravan. Meet the boys. And then return the following summer without telling Sara.

And then run away.

About two and a half years ago, according to Joan Harvey. How had the boys managed to contain their urges since then? Or hadn’t they? Was that the reason Sara wasn’t having girls to work the summer shift any more?

Meanwhile, our boys are getting more and more pent-up.

Until Magda drops like manna into their laps. An East European girl in transit. No one keeping tabs on her whereabouts or welfare.

A sudden terrible thought leapt in. Had Trevor Vaughan seen something so awful in the hut that night that it had caused him to take the third way out between his conscience and his loyalty to his friends?

I jumped in another direction. Les’s caravan: the original fuck-pad. Sandra had given me the location so I headed over there. When I got out of the car there was a chill in the damp air. It was light enough that I could see immediately this was a nonstarter.

Too much light, that was the problem. The caravan was sited alongside the one section of road improvements that had occurred in Dinas in the last ten years: a new roundabout, complete with a bank of high-intensity sodium lighting.