Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  Had someone seen the sisters going up there whenever they could? Lighting their candles and praying that someone would come and take them away from the misery and deprivation they were suffering? A cold shiver ran down his spine as he wondered whether there had been anything worse going on at that dreadful house. In his latter years, Thomas had undoubtedly been physically beyond any sexual assaults, but that didn’t mean that they hadn’t gone on in the girls’ pasts. And Bill knew from speaking to enough victims that without help, and, God help them, being forced to remain in close contact with their abuser, Thomas might have retained a shocking amount of control over them. Maybe even enough that if he withheld food, for instance, there would have come a point when the sisters would have caved in to even some pretty revolting demands. And had they then run up the hill to the shrine, and howled their grief and shame to what they thought was just the land and the spirits they believed walked there, but in reality overheard by someone who’d decided to do something about it?

  From the point of view of that rescuer, had it been that first liberation of the sisters, and their unexpected success at literally scaring Mulligrew to death, that had set them on the path of avenger for all of the other innocents? What had that person done? Worn some gruesome mask, which in the half light had drawn upon some old superstition of Mulligrew’s? Bill could believe that. Someone who’d probably never gone beyond Knighton in his whole life, could well have put a lot more belief into the old country legends and myths which his grandparents had told him. Mulligrew’s father might have gone away to war, but would more likely have been in a reserved occupation as a farmer, and Thomas himself was too young to have ever been called up. Yet even so, Bill found himself wondering what would have been sufficiently bizarre to have rattled someone like Mulligrew that badly? A cheap plastic mask wouldn’t have begun to be enough.

  And rather more pressingly, what was he himself going to do now? He had a feeling that it might be an idea to go back to Mulligrew’s farm tonight, and he was kicking himself for not having looked up whether the new moon actually came during the early hours of tomorrow morning – meaning it would effectively be tonight – or later on that following night. If it was barely past midnight, then whatever was going on might be starting up this evening. On the other hand, he still had several hours to go yet, and he certainly didn’t fancy hanging around that gloomy farmhouse on his own for that long – a thought provoked by more than merely the time he would be wasting.

  Taking himself outside to one of the bench tables while he finished a second cup of coffee, Bill sat in the fresh air and looked at the map again. Nothing was that far away in terms of distances, and now that he came to looking at the cases as a group, he realised he hadn’t looked hard into the disappearances of Vijay Bose and Tufty, a.k.a. Gaylord Harbottle. Fishing into his rucksack, he pulled out the tablet he used when a laptop would be too heavy to cart around, and plugged in the memory stick onto which he’d transferred his own notes. Before he’d left work he’d looked into Tufty, getting in touch with Ray’s friend, Likesh Setty, and asking him to send over what they had on the apparent hard man of the gang.

  Reading through the notes again now, Bill realised that Tufty would have had a pretty good knowledge of this area. The Territorial Army unit he’d belonged to – or to be more precise, the last one he’d been in, because a troublemaker like him seemed to have been kicked out more than once from other units – had come out to the Shropshire Hills on exercises. And although in many ways Tufty sounded as thick as two short planks, the one thing he could probably do passably competently was read a map. That had Bill reaching into the rucksack again for the more popularly used 1:50,000 scale Ordnance map, which was something Tufty could have picked up in any decent-sized bookshop, or even a second-hand copy, since the contours and hills wouldn’t alter over the years, only the roads and size of towns.

  What would have brought you out here? Bill pondered, and remembering that all of the other victims had been abusers, and with what he’d been told of Bose’s grooming gang, came to the conclusion that it had to be the disposal of bodies.

  Did you come out here with a girl to get rid of? he wondered. Did you charmers have your cunning dump site out this way? And did Bose himself come out here a month later, pissed off that he was going to have to do the dirty work himself this time, because you didn’t come back after the last one? Because if you vanished, Tufty, who was Bose going to tell? He wasn’t going to come to us, was he? An evil shite like him wasn’t ever going to walk into his nearest station and say, ‘oye, my henchman’s buggered off with one of my girls!’

  Did Bose think you’d fallen for one of them, perhaps? Or did he think you’d just gone off, got pissed or stoned somewhere after the job, and fallen and broken your neck? He certainly wasn’t screaming about it to anyone like the Costas, though, was he? So did he think you’d come crawling back with your tail between your legs, and begging to be taken back?

  I bet you’d have liked that thought, Bose. Getting your tough man to plead with you. Yes, that sounds more like you. If you thought about Tufty’s motivation at all, I bet you thought he’d had some cash stashed away, decided to clear off to the bright lights of Cardiff or somewhere on a bender, and was then coming back. Because otherwise it doesn’t make sense that you weren’t calling Tufty for all the traitorous scum under the sun to anyone who would listen to you. In fact the more I think about it, that very fact that you weren’t calling him every name to the rest of the gang has me wondering whether you hadn’t already told him to make himself scarce for a week or two? Did you send him off with more than one girl that time?

  If that was so, then Bill had the nasty suspicion that when they found Tufty, he wouldn’t be the only body there.

  Chapter 13

  WHERE WOULD YOU GO, Tufty? Bill wondered. You’d want it to be somewhere close enough to a road, because you’d either have to carry the bodies if the girls were already dead, or you’d have to get them walking. And while you yourself might have been just about fit enough for a yomp over the hills in your fake military persona, those girls were probably already weak and drugged up.

  And that was when he remembered Justin and his dumping ground in a quarry. This whole region was littered with the damned things, most so small they barely warranted being identified on any map, but then that would be just what would make them useful to the likes of Bose and his gang. On the smaller scale map he couldn’t see any, but then had that been what Tufty had been counting on? Without his larger, more detailed map, Bill wouldn’t have found Justin’s quarry, so was that what Tufty had relied on too?

  Where would you go? he asked himself again. You weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, were you? But I reckon you had enough animal cunning to stay well clear of things like the Offa’s Dyke Long Distance Path. You’d know that there’d be far too many hikers around there to risk dumping any bodies where someone nipping off for a pee in the bushes would get a nasty surprise.

  Then he looked at the sticky paper arrow he’d put on the map to mark where Sanay Costa had been found. But wherever it was, it was probably somewhere where you’d brought young Sanay out to. Was that what Sanay was planning on doing? Scaring this new, mysterious woman into giving in to him when she saw the bodies? Or was she someone who’d seen them doing the dumping and made contact with him when he and you or Bose went their separate ways? And Bose probably dinned it into you all that you couldn’t be seen all coming back from somewhere together, if only because he’d want a damned good alibi should any of this come to light. He probably went home first, telling you lot to kick your heels somewhere, and then come home a couple of hours apart.

  He looked again at the Teme Valley where Sanay had been found, which if you took it as the crow flew, rather than up hill and down dale, was not much over two miles from the Mulligrew farm, and by the same measure, not much over four miles from where Damien had been sliced open by that sword. When he looked at the sticky tag marking Justin’s body
’s dump site, and saw that as a straight line, it was under four miles between him and the hotel, he knew in his heart of hearts that this was far beyond any coincidence. And yet, of course, Justin had been found in another TPU’s patch, which had helped blur the lines far more. Had there been a shred of evidence that any of them, aside from Damien, had died from something other than natural causes, the police en mass would have been all over this long ago.

  Instead, it was just him and his gut instinct, and that instinct was telling him now that Tufty wouldn’t have gone to anywhere on the English side of the border. It was just too populated, if only by farms. No, he was either looking at the rough tumble of hills between the Rivers Teme and Lugg, or south of the Lugg in what was called the Radnor Forest, but which was, in fact, more open hillside than anything wooded. And then he saw it. Marked on the map to the north-west of New Radnor were rifle ranges, so what was the betting that at some point Tufty had come out here?

  You wouldn’t risk actual Ministry of Defence land, Bill thought with certainty, but I bet you didn’t wander too far away from what you were familiar with. And then he spotted the train line. A quick online search proved that it was still very much in use, being the line which ran between Shrewsbury and Swansea down on the South Wales coast.

  Quite aside from there being stations all along this route (which in terms of their relevance to the cases began with Knighton), at the next stop, Knucklas, there was a splendid Victorian viaduct, complete with a crenellated parapet and towers at each end – or so the website said – and for a brief moment Bill wondered whether the gang had been throwing the bodies out of train windows. It would take some doing, and would probably need two of them to do it in the short time the train would be in the right place, not to mention having to time it for when the trains would be low on passenger numbers, but it might just have been possible. However, a look at the online photographs told him that he was wasting his time. The land below the viaduct was far too close to houses and what looked like allotments. No, the gang wouldn’t have used that.

  But there were further stations at Llangunllo and Llanbister. Had Tufty at some point come to one of those, or even just taken the train down to Swansea for some completely disconnected reason? Neither were places to risk bringing their victims to of themselves, but if the train journey had somehow given him an idea of somewhere...?

  Bill pored over the map again. There were roads which ran close to the railway line, albeit very small and narrow ones, so if Tufty had spotted somewhere, then quite a lot of places were accessible by road. And another thought came to him. If Tufty and Bose had been really cunning, then they would have known when the trains were going to pass through these rural stations, and those would be the very times when the residents might not pick up on the sound of a car being driven to somewhere unexpected, maybe writing off the sounds as some day-tripper being picked up. It certainly didn’t give the gang a huge amount of choice, but Bill had the growing uneasy feeling that they had been sneaky enough to utilise something like the covering noise of a train.

  There was only one thing for it, he was going to have to drive those roads for himself. And so getting back into his car, he left Knighton and took the main road the mile or so up to Knucklas. From there he was on small rural roads, and as he wound his way along the valley floor of the little tributary which flowed into the Teme, for a brief stretch he thought he’d got it all wrong. Quite simply, this didn’t look like anywhere a city lad would think suitable to dispose of anything, much less a body.

  But then is that why your own colleagues have never come looking around here, he asked himself? Has someone asked a local uniform, who only vaguely knows these particular back roads, and his or her words have been taken as gospel that there’s nowhere to hide a damned thing anywhere up here?

  The road did a sudden kink right and then swept left to run right beside the railway embankment, and it was there that Bill suddenly got the telltale tingling again in his neck. He’d gone past the point before he could stop, but when he got to Llangunllo Station, he pulled in and looked at the map again. Yes, there was a tiny turn off underneath the railway just where he thought he’d had that odd sensation, and rather worryingly, on his big-scale map there were marked disused quarries. He could see that when he came out from under the railway bridge, he would immediately be forced left or right. Right seemed to be the slightly more defined track, but didn’t lead anywhere beyond fields at the top of the hill. The left track was even shorter, ending in a thin strip of trees clinging to another of the multitude of folds in the hillsides which barely warranted the name ‘valley’. And that was where all of Bill’s instincts were screaming at him to go to now.

  With a sigh of resignation, he turned the car around and headed back along the narrow road, taking the turn under the bridge with great care, not wanting to meet a farmer’s tractor head on in the confined space. As he turned left, the feeling of something impending increased, but also the worry of what he was going to do if he found what he suspected he was going to. If there were complications about being on-site when the gardener found a body in the rushes at Hawthorn Hall, that was nothing to what it might be here. How on earth could he ever explain why he felt compelled to come out here in a way that would be believed? He already had visions of Suzanne looking at him askance, and what Williams would say didn’t bear thinking about.

  That was enough to make him pull in after the track had done a steep uphill, and tuck his car into the shadow of the trees in the dip before the one he was heading for. The last thing he needed was for this to make headline news, and then some keen-eyed train passenger to ring in with the description of his Subaru parked up at the spot. He was glad he’d made a note of the train times too, and sat in the car until the next one had passed by heading for Swansea. After that, though, he got out and began the short hike up to the end dip.

  As soon as he got out onto it, he could tell that the road was a remnant from the days of the quarries. There was absolutely no other reason for it to be here, and unlike many tracks in the area, it was wide enough and substantial enough to easily cope with the big heavy dumper trucks which had ferried the stone away. When the open hillside climbed back up out of the fold, all he could see were sheep dotted about on the hills, and not so much as a footpath in sight. Not even the farmers would bother with this place much.

  And yet there were an usually large number of carrion birds about. Hardly a flock of them, and certainly not the numbers you’d see attacking a new corpse, but still more than Bill would have expected to see lurking around an open hillside normally. He took himself right to the edge of the track, as far as he could get without stepping off onto the soft grass, which would leave a trace of him that any halfway decent forensic scientist would spot. And within a yard or so, he saw the tyre tracks. Someone had been up here more than once in the past months, and in different vehicles. One set looked like one of the suburban truck types that city men liked to drive to make themselves look macho, and Bill guessed that this might well be Tufty’s. But another set looked more as though they belonged to a performance car, probably low profiles and costing an arm and a leg for each tyre, let alone a set. That could well be Bose’s car.

  So keeping well clear of this evidence, Bill edged his way around and into the quarry. The first thing he saw was that there were two vehicles left abandoned here. One a powerful Toyota Hilux in red, the other an Audi TT Coupé in black, neither of them the kind of vehicle you would just leave to rot. And that all by itself puzzled him. If the keys were still in them, why not drive them away from here to muddy the waters even more? He couldn’t be sure about the Hilux, but he was pretty sure that the Audi was high enough in the range to have a tracking device in it, and that at least gave him an idea of how he might get out of this mess with his reputation intact. Because why hadn’t Ray’s former colleagues thought to track the Audi? Even if Bose had stolen it, surely somewhere along the line of evidence the registration should be on record?

/>   Yes, Bill thought with relief, I can ring Likesh and ask him if he’s thought to trace Bose’s car. They probably have, but haven’t thought to extend the search wide enough to cover this area. At least that way, I can make the suggestion, and then leave them to make the ‘discoveries’ if I find what I fear I’m going to.

  Proceeding with greater caution now, Bill edged his way into the quarry. The entrance was somewhat at an angle to the track, so even if someone came up this way picking blackberries, for instance, the chances were that they wouldn’t see into the quarry itself. And as with the quarry Justin had used, this one had the remains of huge chunks of rock scattered about its floor, meaning there was no clear view across it. Even so, he picked up a small fallen branch with plenty of twigs still on it at the entrance, in case he needed to blur his own footsteps somewhere along the line, because he could already see the scatterings of chippings which had been churned up into ridges by the two powerful vehicles, and he’d have to be very lucky indeed not to have to cross any of the tracks at all.

  Taking a route around the outer perimeter of the quarry floor, Bill had to ease himself carefully over two large boulders which each stood over a meter high, and prayed that he wasn’t leaving any fibres behind. At least he was wearing tough jeans which were not frayed in any way, and years of Welsh rain had washed any loose bits off the rocks themselves. And his hiking boots were smooth leather rather than nubuck, which might have left some of its textured surface behind on the rougher bits. Please God, don’t let there be a body on the other side of this, he found himself praying as he clambered, because that would mean the immediate vicinity of said body would come in for closer scrutiny than he could hope to avoid.