Ragged Alice

by Gareth L. Powell

  “I knew your grandfather,” she said. “He was a sweet man.”

  Holly blinked in surprise. “You did?” Her grandfather had died a year or so back. She remembered most of his friends but had no memory of this woman.

  “Oh yes, I knew him very well.” The old woman’s smile revealed false teeth the colour of sun-cracked piano keys. “He always looked very smart in his uniform. In fact, I still see him about the place now and again.”

  Holly shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but he’s dead.”

  “Oh, I know that, love. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still see him from time to time.”

  Her gown rustled as she turned to Scott. “Lovely to see you, Scotty lad. Are you keeping out of trouble?”

  Scott smiled. “I’m doing my best, Mrs. Phillips.”

  “Good boy.” She squeezed his hand. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be going. I have a lunch date, and I’d like to get there before the rain comes or the young man involved changes his mind.”

  As she tottered onto the pavement, Holly called after her. “Hey, I thought you said you were going to help me?”

  Mrs. Phillips paused. She looked back with rheumy eyes the colour of her teeth. “Yes, love. I have a message for you.”

  “Well?”

  “Your grandfather says maybe you should leave this one alone.” Her fingertips flicked at the wilting red carnation on the tuxedo’s lapel. “And maybe some things are better left buried.”

  7.

  RAIN FELL ACROSS THE bracken-brown hills like a biblical punishment. It dripped from the town’s slick slate roofs, overflowed the gutters and ran in gurgling torrents down the steep-sided streets.

  DCI Holly Craig stood at the hotel window and looked out at the lifeless grey sea, which this afternoon seemed as beatendown and dejected as everything else in Pontyrhudd. She wondered if Mrs. Phillips had made it to her rendezvous before the onset of the deluge. Despite the crazy old dear’s ramblings, she hated to think of that ball gown hanging limp and drenched and that rumpled old face running with washed-out hair oil and mascara. If Ralph Potts’s solid build and blunt manner represented the traditional stone and brick terraces of the valley’s sides, Mrs. Phillips had to be the living personification of the Victorian buildings on the seafront—their facades once proud and enthusiastic but now washed out, half-forgotten and clinging to past glories, their lungs ravaged by years of smoke, black mould and neglect.

  The whiteboard at the far end of the business suite–cum–incident room had become a tangle of names and arrows. Lisa Hughes, Daryl Allen and Mike Owen. The first two were obviously connected. But who had killed Daryl, and why was Mike dead? And what possible connection could any of it have to a killing that had happened thirty-two years ago?

  Offshore, gulls plunged into the somber waters. They dropped like missiles, pitching gouts of white spray into the air where they fell. From this distance, Holly couldn’t tell which of them made successful catches. She simply watched as they bobbed up and hauled themselves back into the lowering sky, ready for another dive.

  Pontyrhudd wasn’t a large place. Somebody in this town must know why Daryl and Mike had been slain in such a grisly fashion. And whoever that person was, they would most likely be the murderer.

  The door of the suite opened. Holly turned to see Scott’s artfully slicked-back head appear around it.

  “Guv, I’ve got someone who wants to meet you.”

  Holly rolled her eyes. “Who is it?”

  “The reporter from the local rag.”

  “Tell her I’m busy.”

  Scott grimaced. “That’s going to be kind of hard.”

  Holly sighed. “She’s there with you, isn’t she?”

  Scott let the door swing fully open. “Yes, guv.”

  The woman standing behind him only came up to his shoulder. She wore a thick parka and a woollen hat. Scott waved her into the room and then left with a barely concealed smirk.

  “Pleased to meet you, Detective Chief Inspector. My name’s Amy Lao.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Oh, you know.” Lao shrugged with one shoulder. “Access, comment. That sort of thing.” From her accent, Holly guessed she’d been raised in Birmingham.

  “I don’t have time to be talking to the press.”

  “Of course not,” Lao said. “And for the record, I don’t want to talk to you either. I just want to follow you around and get first dibs on any information you might turn up.”

  The light behind the woman’s eyes seemed to dance like a hopeful birthday candle. Holly smiled. She couldn’t help it.

  “Please explain why you think I’d benefit from having a reporter underfoot?”

  “I won’t be underfoot,” Lao said. “In fact, I might even be useful. After all, I was the one who turned up the connection between these killings and the death of your mother.”

  Cold fingers closed on Holly’s stomach. The smile dropped from her face and she said, “So you know who I am, then?”

  Lao smiled. “I’m a reporter. Finding shit out is literally my job description.”

  “I don’t want to be taken off this case.”

  “And you won’t be. I won’t tell anyone who you are.” Lao pantomimed sewing her lips closed. “As long as I get what I need.”

  “Are you trying to blackmail me?”

  “Is it working?”

  “Not really.”

  Lao huffed. “Can we speak honestly?” she asked.

  Holly raised an eyebrow. “Please do.”

  Lao grew serious. “I’ve done my homework,” she said. “I have a contact in the Met and know what your colleagues thought of you. The names they used to call you behind your back. And I know all about your special ‘talent.’”

  Holly stiffened. “Oh you do, do you?”

  The reporter took a step forward. “I’m not here to mock. Honestly. My grandmother in Hong Kong had the exact same thing. She could judge a person just by looking into their eyes. And she was never wrong.”

  Holly had never heard of anyone else with a disorder like hers. And nobody had ever spoken to her as if they believed her hallucinations might be real. Most people thought she was crazy. Fascinated despite herself, she unfolded her arms.

  “Is that true?”

  “I swear on my life.”

  “Did she know what caused it?”

  Lao shrugged. “She said it was a trick played on her by the fox spirit.”

  “I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any.”

  “So, do we have a deal?”

  “What kind of deal?” Against her better judgment, Holly found herself warming to the plain-speaking Brummie.

  “You let me tag along, and I’ll help you solve your mother’s murder.”

  “That’s not what I’m investigating.”

  “But it’s clearly linked.”

  “Fine.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you can stick around. Just don’t get in the way, and don’t print anything without my say-so.”

  Amy Lao grinned and thrust out her hand. “Deal!”

  Holly hesitated for a second, and then reached out and shook. “I’d better not regret this.”

  * * *

  Holly’s next visitor was the mayor. Ieuan Davies was fifty-four years old and had been chair of the local council for as long as anybody could remember. It was mostly a ceremonial position, but she got the impression he took it seriously. He wore a brown suit, a black tie and a double handful of gold rings. His hair was the colour of dirty sand and slicked back at the sides.

  “Pleased to meet you, Detective.” He was struggling to conceal his surprise at her appearance.

  Holly looked down at the thick chain of office draped around his neck and tried to ignore the eye-watering miasma of cheap cologne. “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  “Can I inquire as to how your investigations are progressing? Do you have a suspect in mind?”

  �
��Not as yet.”

  The light inside him smouldered like a bonfire of wet leaves in a flaking metal trash can.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” he said. “You see, it’s almost tourist season, and we don’t want this awful business scaring off the few visitors we do get, now, do we?”

  “Tourism’s hardly my concern.”

  “Of course it isn’t, of course it isn’t.” The mayor clasped his meaty hands together. “I am merely suggesting that the whole of Pontyrhudd might benefit from a swift resolution to this most regrettable of tragedies.” The r sounds rolled like honey from his tongue.

  “We’re doing all we can,” Holly assured him. “And I’m certain we can count on your full support?”

  Davies smiled like a crocodile, revealing a gold tooth.

  “Fair play.” He looked her up and down with barely concealed speculation. “It goes without saying, Detective. If there’s anything you need.” He raised an eyebrow. “Anything at all, please feel at liberty to call me, whether it be day or night.”

  “Thank you.” Holly inclined her head. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  Davies cupped her hand in his brawny palms and leered into her eyes. “Tidy. See that you do.”

  8.

  AFTER THE MAYOR’S DEPARTURE, Holly decided she needed a walk. She needed to clear the smell of his aftershave from her nostrils, and she needed some time away from the hotel’s musty rooms and corridors. And if she didn’t burn off some irritation, she was worried she might end up smacking somebody in the mouth.

  When Lao asked to tag along, she didn’t object. Together, they stepped out of the hotel. Holly paused on the steps to turn up the collar of her coat and raise the hood of her hoodie. The rain still fell, visible only where it passed through the cone of light beneath each streetlamp. Across the road, sea and sky had merged into a single blackness, so that the orange-lit promenade resembled a walkway at the lip of the world, with nothing beyond but the lighthouse at the tip of the northern headland pulsing out its warning.

  She turned left, and then left again, heading inland. Lao walked beside her in companionable silence. It was around eight o’clock. Few cars were around, and fewer people. Holly could see the blue light of television screens playing against the curtains of the houses she passed. With a killer on the loose, people were staying home. Even the pubs looked quiet—although that might have been due as much to the rain as anything else.

  Following the main road, she kept walking until she’d left the town behind. In the night, it resembled the small, temporary encampment it had once been. Above it, fir trees whispered on the ridgeline. Small, furry creatures stirred in the bracken. Sheep muttered in their sleep. The air smelled of damp, rotten leaves, pine needles, short-cropped grass and sheep shit.

  While the hills around Pontyrhudd had been tamed and coaxed into a patchwork quilt of fields and forestry, the damp valley floor remained in its natural state. It was a place of reeds and tufts, too boggy for farming, where the occasional scrap of dirty white sheep’s wool waved from a barbwire curl, where an ancient dolmen stood sentinel on the banks of the shallow, rocky river, and low, clammy mists lingered, seemingly impervious to the breezes blowing in off the sea.

  She had come out without a destination in mind, but her objective was inevitable.

  Half a mile beyond the town’s outermost cottage, a stile led to a path, which in turn led down to the woodland flanking the river as it stretched towards the sea. Even now, fifteen years later and in total darkness, she could pick her way with confidence. She’d been here so many times. Although the last time she had been here, she’d almost died.

  This was it: the clearing on the riverbank where her mother’s body had been found, the muddy slope where, years later and wobbly on most of a bottle of strawberry wine, her teenage self had slipped and fallen into the water. Now she stood, breathless and listening, her senses heightened by the night. She could hear the river water running, the rain tapping through the leaves. And there, barely visible, the pale flank of the tree against which her mother’s head had been resting when they found her. Its bark had long been peeled away, and initials were scratched into its hide. She ran her fingers over them, feeling the familiar, half-healed gashes. Somewhere here were her own initials, carved on the night she’d almost drowned. Carved with an old penknife she’d lost when she fell, and which she’d have given almost anything to have in her hand again at that moment. Where were its rusty blades now? Enfolded in the silt at the bottom of the river, or already washed out to sea to cohabit with the bones of dead whales and murdered pirates? Water dripped on her from the overhead branches. An indifferent wind shushed its way through the canopy.

  Eyes straining against the lack of light, she tried to imagine the scene as it might have been thirty-two years ago, when her mother lay sprawled on this patch of earth, her arms outstretched and her stomach gaping, her eyes pinned by twigs snapped from nearby branches. Holly pictured the steam rising from the exposed entrails, the vitreous humour seeping from the punctured sockets. But the horror of it was lost. She’d seen too many dead bodies in her career to be disturbed by the imagined details of a murder she was too young to remember.

  Her most vivid recollection of this place was as the backdrop to her final night of normality. The night she’d come up here after celebrating her exam results and put her foot wrong on the edge of the river. After that night, everything had changed. She’d gone from reasonably normal student to haunted teen, confronted at every turn by the imperfections of humanity.

  An owl hooted somewhere deep in the trees.

  Lao said, “It must be weird to be back here.”

  Even in the dark, Holly could see the hearth light flickering inside the woman’s skull.

  “You have no idea.”

  She wished she’d thought to bring a bottle with her. She needed something to take the edge off. But maybe getting drunk in front of a journalist right now wouldn’t be the wisest of career moves.

  Instead, she said, “What do you make of the mayor?”

  “Ieuan Davies?” Lao gave a snort. “He’s full of shit.”

  Holly smiled in the dark. “I kind of got that impression. But is there anything about him I should know?”

  “Like what?”

  Holly leant against a tree. “Do you have any dirt on him?”

  Lao laughed out loud. The sound was as bright as it was unexpected. “The man’s been mayor of this town for more than thirty years. Of course I’ve got dirt on him.” She flicked open an antique petrol lighter and the dancing flame illuminated her face. Holly watched her suck her cigarette to life and click the Zippo closed.

  “What sort of dirt?”

  Lao blew smoke at the overhanging branches. “What does your ‘intuition’ tell you?”

  Holly shrugged. Her nose wrinkled at the bonfire scent of wet leaves and burning tobacco.

  “I got the impression he was guilty of something, but it was all buried beneath a general patina of bastardy.”

  Lao laughed again. The end of her cigarette flared red as she inhaled.

  “I don’t have any proof.” She looked around and leant in, lowering her voice. Smoke curled from her lips. “But I have a source who swears Davies was screwing the girl who got run over.”

  “Lisa Hughes?”

  “She temped in his office up until last month, then she left rather abruptly for the job at the hair salon.”

  “So Davies had a personal connection with her?”

  Lao rocked back on her heels. “That’s what I hear. And she wasn’t the first, either. Word is the old letch has been knocking up temps and interns for decades.”

  The river babbled in the darkness. The Rhudd had been named for the reddish tinge of its water. Tradition had it the colour came from the blood of a wounded dragon. The more prosaic truth was that the hue probably came from the sedimentary sand and mudstone through which the water passed. At least, that’s what Holly had been taught in school. On a night like thi
s, she could almost have believed the dragon story.

  “I still don’t get it,” she said. “Even if Davies is our killer, and I’m not saying he is, why kill Daryl Allen in that particular way? Why not just hit him over the head with a rock or stab him through the heart instead of slicing him open and letting his guts fall out?” She rubbed at her forehead. “And why kill Owen the meat’s boy the same way?”

  A bat jinked through the clearing. The rain dripped and pattered into the undergrowth.

  Lao sucked her teeth. “The only thing I can think is that he wanted to muddy the waters.”

  “By sticking skewers through a kid’s eyes?” Holly shook her head. “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t ring true. I can understand Daryl being killed. Lord knows the little shit seems to have deserved it. But that doesn’t explain the mutilation, or the death of Mike Owen.” She glanced around the clearing. Faintly, she could hear the intermittent hum of traffic on the main road at the top of the valley. “No, I have the feeling it’s something way more sinister than that.”

  “But you’re still going to check out Mayor Davies’s alibi?”

  Holly’s lips twitched. She reached out, plucked the half-smoked cigarette from Lao’s fingers, and took a deep, luxuriant drag. Held it in. Rolled it out. Flicked the butt into the river.

  Said, “Hell, yeah.”

  9.

  THE NEXT MORNING, when Holly came down for breakfast, Sylvia, the receptionist - cum - bartender - cum - waitress, showed her to a table by the window. Overnight, the rain had eased itself into nothingness, but the sky remained bruised and resentful. Holly ordered scrambled eggs and a pot of tea, and while she waited, watched a discarded crisp packet dance and jerk its way across the promenade.

  A folded copy of The Times lay on the white tablecloth. The national news headlines were full of political jostling and foreign conflict. A couple of gruesome Welsh slayings rated little more than a six-line summary on page four. Not even a mention of the connection to her mother’s death. If this had happened inside the golden halo of the M25, it would have been splashed all over the front pages.