Good People (24 page)

‘What about the people you worked with?’

‘There was no one really to get on with. To tell you the truth, I missed my friends and the life here.’ She thought about it, trying to answer my question. ‘Sara was the boss – we didn’t mix too much. The other girls in the salon were okay, but they had boyfriends. I kept pretty much to myself.’

‘You didn’t make friends with Wendy Evans?’

‘I didn’t meet anyone called that.’

‘What about Les Tucker, Sara’s boyfriend?’ I asked lightly, taking it there at last.

‘What do you think of him?’ she asked warily, after a pause.

‘He doesn’t like me.’

‘He was creepy.’ I waited for elaboration. ‘He really fancied himself. Used to wear his sleeves rolled right up his arms as if it was some kind of a turn-on. His shirt unbuttoned. Ugh …’ She made a gagging sound down the line.

‘Flower, this is in total confidence, but I need to know if Les Tucker ever propositioned you?’

‘Like in touched me up, do you mean?’

‘Not necessarily physical. Improper suggestions. Anything like that.’

‘He’d left some nasty stuff in the caravan when I got there.’

‘Nasty stuff?’

‘Porno shots. He came back to pick them up. You know, like pretending he was sorry that he’d left them there for me to see. Asking what I thought of them. Making like he was joking, but trying to see if they’d turned me on. As if I didn’t know the way guys play that silly shit.’

‘What kind of pictures, Flower?’

‘I don’t want to say.’

‘Did he keep coming round?’

‘Only once more. Not long after that. With a creepy friend. They were both a bit pissed. They asked me if I wanted to come to a party with them. A place they had up in the woods somewhere. Lots of booze, and music. Like a place in the woods is supposed to be some kind of temptation?’ she asked rhetorically, her voice rising incredulously.

‘He wasn’t any more specific? Just “a place in the woods”?’ I kept my excitement level down.

‘I didn’t ask for a description.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘I told them I wasn’t interested. I told them if they didn’t go away I was going to call Sara. They went. But I called her anyway. I didn’t want it getting twisted, her thinking that I might have encouraged them.’

‘And that worked?’

‘He kept away from me after that.’

I asked Flower for a description of the creepy friend, but the memory was too blurred by now. The one strong impression I got was that nothing would have dragged her back to Dinas the following summer.

So there it was again: what had made Donna and Colette’s experience so different?

The place in the woods?

I had assumed, when Flower mentioned it, that they had meant the hut they had gone to in the minibus. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the hut was too public. That was where they took outsiders to shoot vermin.

No, their place in the woods would be special. A private place. A venue that was solely for their own pleasure.

Zoë’s BMW was parked outside the house. David Williams had been right, Gordon McGuire had done well out of the inheritance deal. A desirable, early Victorian brick farmhouse, with a new, purpose-built stable block to the side.

I had been forced to abandon any hope of speaking to Bill Ferguson that afternoon. He was out there in the woods somewhere, in charge of a group of beaters, and the shoot wouldn’t be winding down until the light went. I had to compromise by dropping my card off at the cottage he rented, with a note on the back asking him to call me if he still wanted details of Trevor Vaughan’s funeral arrangements.

Zoë opened the door. She had toned down her make-up and outfit since our previous meeting in Ken McGuire’s kitchen, but she had still managed to fix herself so that she would make an impression on anyone she answered the door to. Watching her reaction, I could tell that I hadn’t quite managed to make an equivalent impression.

‘Sergeant Capaldi. This is a surprise,’ she observed coolly, without sounding surprised.

‘Hello, Mrs McGuire. Is your husband in?’

‘Gordon helps run the family shoot, Sergeant. Saturdays are a particularly busy day for him. Or didn’t you know that?’ Her tone was amused accusation.

‘It was you that I wanted to see.’

She nodded at that. ‘Let me see if I understand the procedures correctly. You’re standing there, looking kind of sheepish, so I’m assuming you don’t have a warrant of any sort. So, unless I actually invite you in, I can shut the door in your face and there’s not a thing you can do about it.’

‘Something like that,’ I agreed, trying to shift up from sheepish.

‘So, sell yourself.’

It was a difficult product to promote. Accusing her husband of degradation and grand depravity. Possible abduction. White slavery.

‘Want to buy a ticket to the Police Ball?’

She laughed. Zoë was no fool. Like all intelligent people she was curious, which is what I had been counting on. Also, she was confident enough to feel in charge of whatever situation she chose to subscribe to.

‘Come in …’ She led me through a hall with the original encaustic tiles on the floor, through to a kitchen that had a rear wall of glass, with black slate on the floor, a pink granite worktop and zinc-faced units.

‘Nice place,’ I observed, seeing nearly my annual salary in this one room.

‘We don’t have children,’ she replied, as if that answered a lot of questions.

‘Going to have any?’

Her look told me that it was none of my business. We were not here to be friends. She waved me to a seat at the oiled oak table and reinforced that message by not offering me a drink.

She sat down opposite me, propped her elbows on the table, laced her fingers, and faced me like an interrogator. ‘Things have gone weird around here, Sergeant. Boon goes missing. Trevor commits suicide. And it all seems to have happened since you turned up on Sheila’s doorstep. Our husbands get twitchy when the talk comes round to you. Which it seems to do more and more frequently. So, I see you as a catalyst. I don’t know what for, but now I’ve got you sitting down in front of me, perhaps we can find out. Whatever this is, how do we clear it up?’

‘Let’s take it back to another beginning,’ I suggested.

‘Wherever …’ She spread her hands, inviting me to continue.

‘The so-called prostitute that your husband and the others claimed to have procured last Saturday night.’

‘For Paul and Trevor’s benefit,’ she qualified.

‘You’re not picking up on what I’m telling you.’

‘What did I miss?’

‘I said “so-called” prostitute. I think that the woman they picked up was actually an East European hitchhiker.’

She shook her head dismissively. ‘Sorry, but that prostitute in Cardiff confirmed that she was there. With a black man as a bodyguard. I’m not trying to excuse my husband for that ridiculous episode, but her admission backs up what they told you.’

We were circling round Monica Trent now. I decided to pull back slightly. I didn’t want the welcome mat whipped away too prematurely. ‘Do the names Colette Fletcher and Donna Gallagher mean anything to you?’

She thought about it. Shook her head. ‘No. Should they?’

I believed her. ‘Not necessarily.’

‘You’re going mysterious on me, Sergeant.’

I braced myself. ‘Can I ask you a very personal question, Mrs McGuire?’

‘You can ask. I might not answer.’

‘How good is your sex life?’

She held back her immediate angry reaction, thinking about it. She frowned. ‘Is this pertinent?’

‘Very.’

She considered it some more. ‘Has this anything to do with me telling you that we didn’t have children?’

‘No.’

She frowned again, trying to analyse my motives. ‘This has something to do with Gordon?’

‘Yes.’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe that I’m even considering answering that question.’

‘You don’t have to tell me anything, Mrs McGuire.’

‘But my silence might incriminate me?’

I remained silent.

‘Oh shit, what can it matter? It’s good,’ she blurted. ‘Gordon and I have what I would consider a very normal and healthy sex life.’ She coloured, shrugging elaborately to cover her embarrassment. ‘So, what does that tell you?’

I rehearsed it.
Mrs McGuire, does your husband urinate or defecate on you as part of this normal and healthy sex life?
I crumpled. I couldn’t ask it.

She saw it in my face. ‘Sergeant Capaldi?’

I invoked Magda, Donna and Colette. Flower, for her near-miss. Regine Broussard, for the memory. ‘Mrs McGuire, did you know that your husband’s sexual preferences had become so extreme that even a seasoned prostitute had to refuse them?’

She stared at me blankly for a moment. ‘Who told you that?’ Her voice coming out as a hoarse whisper.

‘The prostitute that your husband and Les Tucker used to visit in Cardiff. The same prostitute that they paid to give them their alibi.’

‘Gordon and Les Tucker?’

‘Yes.’ Her reaction was surprising me. I had prepared myself for anger, shock or violence, or any combination of the three. Instead, she seemed to be in deep, almost amused reflection. ‘Mrs McGuire, I think that Gordon and Les have a place in the forest that they take women to. I desperately need to find that place.’

She looked up at me. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Sergeant. Gordon doesn’t use prostitutes. He never has done.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs McGuire. I know it’s painful, but I need to get to the truth.’

She shook her head. ‘That is the truth. Believe me.’ She reached across and grabbed my hand and squeezed it tightly, her nails tucked into the ball of my thumb. It wasn’t a demonstration of affection; pain was involved. ‘If you breathe a word of this to another living soul, I swear to you that I will rake your eyes out.’

I nodded, believing her, accepting the condition.

‘Gordon suffers from pseudohermaphroditism. Do you know what that is?’

I shook my head. But I was beginning to believe her certainty.

‘Look it up. Let’s just say that he is not going to be exposing himself to prostitutes.’

‘Your sex life … ?’

‘Has fuck-all to do with you.’ But she wasn’t angry. She actually smiled at me. ‘We have adapted, we have our procedures. I wasn’t lying, Sergeant.’

‘But Les is Gordon’s best friend.’

‘So?’

It dawned on us both at the same instant. I had the wrong brother. Zoë grinned, a new and malicious knowledge suddenly coming into her possession. I couldn’t share her Schadenfreude. I was too busy wondering what else I had got wrong.

Ken and Les …

I parked up to reflect on it. Dusk was already grading itself in, but the added gloom helped the meditative process. Ken and Les, not Gordon and Les. Did it change anything? Was it just a name substitution, or could this new knowledge lead me somewhere?

I went back over the territory. A suitably chastened-looking Ken had led the gang down off of the hill. It was Ken who ran the intercept when I first tried to interview Trevor Vaughan. It was Ken who changed the story midstream about where they had dropped off Boon.

Why hadn’t I seen it? It made sense this way. He had to be at the very root of this. Ken was in charge of this game.

What did I have? What was eluding me? What wasn’t I fitting into place properly?

What was I missing?

It wouldn’t come. I couldn’t make the cognitive leaps. I was too netted into the image of Ken and Les performing unspeakable acts. And I had a new problem. It was the wrong word to use, but I had been almost comfortable with Gordon as the other half of the duo. He came across as smug and predictable. Okay, he had a temper and an old-fashioned sense of outrage, but I couldn’t envisage him being too imaginative. Ken, on the other hand, was analytical and wary. His precision, in association with Les’s more prosaic mean streak, made for a more worrying combination.

I gave up and drove home to prepare for my night out with Sally. My night in with Sally, I corrected myself. Would I have to worry about contraception? Would it be presumptuous to secrete a toothbrush? I rumbled over the wooden bridge into the caravan park. The callous inner youth that I thought I had packed away and forgotten about managed to sneak out a salacious little smirk before I could suppress him.

I drove around to Unit 13 the long way again, keeping an eye out for sneakily parked cars. I raked the aisles down both sides of my caravan with my headlights before I stopped the car. I crouched down and shone my flashlight under it.

The blinking LED display on the answering machine in the dining nook caught my eye as I opened the door. I switched on the light in the living area, and caught myself reflected in the large rear window that overlooked the river. And, for a weird, absurdist moment, I used my reflection to look at the stranger’s reflection in the same window.

Holding fractional time between us before I had to acknowledge his existence. The stranger sitting comfortably and casually in my armchair. Who was not actually a stranger.

Graham Mackay had found me.

‘Hello, Glyn.’

‘Mac …’ I acknowledged him warily.

‘It’s been a while.’

‘Bruges.’

‘I’m still sorry about that.’

I shrugged. ‘I recovered.’ From a broken arm, and a near deportation, while he’d used a military channel to get whisked out of the country unblemished. And he’d been the one who started the fight in the first place. ‘Why are you here, Mac?’

‘Your wife has left me.’

‘Ex-wife,’ I reminded him. His tone had sounded accusatory. Was he labouring under some crazy notion that she might have run back to me? ‘I don’t know where she is,’ I offered placatingly.

‘I do.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes. She’s in Devon. Somewhere near Tavistock, shacked up with a child.’

‘A child?’ Repetition looked like it might be a good way to get through this.

‘Okay, not quite the school-cap-and-short-trousers version,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘But he has to be ten, fifteen years younger than her. An itinerant Australian wine maker she met in a vegetarian café in Hereford. That paints a picture, doesn’t it? You can just see that moment. Love over the tofu,’ he pronounced bitterly.