Holly stretched out her bad leg and grimaced.
“Unless the uniforms turn up a witness, we’re back to square one.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Is this case that important to you?”
Scott laughed.
“Are you kidding?” He pushed back his hair with one hand. “Of course it is. I mean, not only there’s a killer loose in my hometown, I also get to work with an SIO with your reputation.” He spread his hands. “I don’t want to sound mercenary, but if we crack this, it could make my career.”
“Right now, that’s a big ‘if.’”
“Yeah.” He flicked a crumpled Post-it Note across the table. Upstairs, pipes groaned and clanked.
Surely, Holly thought, after the night she’d had, no one would blame her if she just went and pulled a blanket over her head? She stifled a yawn. She’d been in a serious car crash, for heaven’s sake; she needed time to gather her wits and recover.
But, a snide little voice whispered in her head, wouldn’t that just suit Srivastava down to the ground? Take to your bed and admit you’re not up to this, and she’ll kick you off this case—and probably back into uniform—without a second’s hesitation.
If Holly wanted to be the one to solve this case, she’d have to find a way to soldier on. And now that she thought about it, she really did want to solve it. The mystery had its hooks in her, because she was starting to accept that in order to unravel it, she’d also have to disentangle the circumstances of her mother’s death. Something that had started as a hit-and-run uncomfortably near her old stamping grounds had now taken on the aspect of a deeply personal crusade. She was the senior investigating officer on this case, and she wasn’t about to let injury, exhaustion or Srivastava prevent her from seeing it through. To do that, she was going to need allies. And, she realised, the only people in Pontyrhudd she really trusted were Scott and Lao.
She should probably make an effort to start being nicer to them.
She glanced at the clock.
“Give Amy Lao a call,” she said. “It’s nearly two o’clock. Let me buy you both some lunch.”
* * *
They ate in one of the few surviving cafés on the front. The mirrored walls made it look wider than it was. In the booths, black electrical tape had been used to patch the vinyl seat covers. Holly ordered fish and chips and a pot of tea from the laminated menu. Lao asked for a bacon sandwich with black coffee, and Scott opted for scrambled eggs on wholemeal toast.
Today, Lao wore olive cargo pants and a plaid work shirt. She had apparently spent the morning working on an obituary for Ieuan Davies.
“I can’t believe he’s dead,” she said through a mouthful of sandwich. “Don’t get me wrong, he was a corrupt bastard. But nothing ever seemed to stick to him. I thought he’d be around forever.”
Scott picked at his eggs, which were overdone and sweating grease. “And Davies was our only suspect,” he said.
Lao looked to Holly. “Is that right?”
Holly hadn’t touched her food at all. Perhaps it was a side effect of the codeine, but after one look at the soggy batter and limp chips, her stomach had decided it really wasn’t that hungry. She sat wrapped in her big coat with her injured leg out as straight as she could get it.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Damn.” Lao swallowed and put the rest of her food aside. “I was hoping you’d invited me here to give me a scoop on the identity of the murderer.”
“Unfortunately not.” Holly took a sip of her tea. It wasn’t a patch on the tea at the hotel, but it was warm and wet, and better than no tea at all. “I guess you could say we’re currently ‘between suspects.’”
“But somebody tried to kill you last night?”
Holly rubbed her thigh. “Yeah.”
“No leads from that?”
“Only that it was a black or dark grey pickup truck.”
Lao made a face. “Half the farmers around here drive trucks like that. Did you get a look at the driver?”
“It was dark. I didn’t see much more than headlights, to be honest.”
“And you’ve made no progress with your mother’s murder?”
Holly shook her head and her red hair danced. “It was thirty years ago. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
The reporter pulled a cigarette from behind her ear and tapped it on the cracked Formica tabletop. “I might be able to help you with that.” She leaned forward on her elbows. “The guy who was at the paper before me, the original journalist who covered your mother’s story, still lives here in Pontyrhudd. He’s a bit of an eccentric, but I’m sure he’d be happy to talk to you about it.”
14.
FOLLOWING LAO’S DIRECTIONS, SCOTT drove the three of them up to the old RAF base. Holly hadn’t been there since she was young, when her grandfather still worked as a mechanic. Although in those days the base had been winding down, planes had still come and gone; Jeeps had still patrolled the site, chasing flocks of seabirds from the runways; and in the summer, the yellow Sikorsky rescue helicopter occasionally battered overhead, on its way to retrieve tourists who’d ventured out of their depths at Aberystwyth or Fishguard.
Now most of the buildings had been demolished, and only a couple of the hangars remained; dandelions pushed their way through cracks in the tarmac, and a herd of Jersey cows grazed between the taxiways, their udders rosy and swollen.
“There.” Lao pointed to the far corner of the base, where a small caravan nestled up against the perimeter fence.
Holly peered dubiously through the fogged-up windscreen and twitching wipers. The caravan looked like something from a postapocalyptic society. A wind turbine clattered on its roof. Tin cans jangled on strings. A threadbare armchair sat under a tattered awning, and chickens fussed in the long grass.
“That’s where he lives?”
“I told you, he’s an eccentric.”
The car bumped across the pasture to the caravan. As it pulled up outside, the caravan’s door opened and a bearded old man emerged. He wore a frayed deerstalker and mirrored sunglasses and cradled a shotgun in the crook of his arm.
“That’s him?” Holly asked, pushing back in her seat.
“Oh yeah, that’s him all right.” Lao squeezed Holly’s shoulder. “And don’t worry, he hardly ever loads that thing.”
Lao opened the door and stepped out, shading her eyes from the drizzle.
“All right, our Steve?” she said.
The man gave a solemn nod. His beard was the speckled colour of a badger’s ass, and his voice had deep reverberation. “Hello there, Amy. And who’s this you’ve brought to see me, now?”
“This is the inspector leading up the murder investigation,” she said. She beckoned Holly to get out of the car. “DCI Craig, this is Stephen Woodrow.”
“Good morning, sir.” Holly eyed the gun. “I understand you might be able to help us.”
“Help you, is it?” The man looked amused. He propped the shotgun against the side of the caravan and removed his glasses. “Well, I guess you’d better come in, then.”
* * *
Scott and Lao waited outside as Holly followed the old man through the door. Inside, the caravan looked more like a ransacked study than any sort of habitable abode. Books and papers had been stacked on every flat surface. Dog-eared photos and yellowing articles had been pinned to the walls. Sagging piles of newspapers fanned across the floor, and the air smelled of mildew and pipe tobacco.
Holly guessed Woodrow to be somewhere in his early seventies. Deep creases fanned from the corners of his eyes, and when he removed the deerstalker, the top of his head was as bald and mottled as the surface of the moon.
A dim light, like the worn glow of an elderly paraffin lamp, shone in the depths of his skull.
Holly said, “I believe you covered the murder of Alice Craig.”
He squinted at her from beneath untamed brows. “You’re her daughter, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I heard you’d run away to London.”
“Well, I’m back now.”
“And you’re with the police?”
“We’re investigating a series of killings in Pontyrhudd. We think there might be a connection to my mother’s death.”
Woodrow reached up to scratch his beard. “It wouldn’t surprise me. A lot of dark stuff went on back then. Especially up here.”
“At the airbase?”
“Mm-hmm.” The old man pulled out a pipe and began filling it.
“What kind of stuff?”
“Experiments.” He tamped down the oily strands of tobacco with his thumb, clamped the pipe stem in his teeth, and pulled a lighter from the pocket of his tweed jacket.
“What sort of experiments?”
Woodrow puffed out his ruddy cheeks. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You’d think I was a daft old fool, same as the rest of them.”
Holly glanced at the blurry photos taped to the walls and windows. Black smudges against grey skies. Long-range shots of hangars and other buildings.
“My mother was killed down in the valley.”
Woodrow applied the lighter flame to the brown fibers sticking from the pipe’s bowl. He sucked and huffed the thing into life, producing clouds of smoke as he did so, and then pocketed the lighter.
“Yes,” he said. “I remember. I covered the case.”
“Amy Lao seems to think you had an idea who the killer might have been.”
“Does she now?”
“Do you?”
Woodrow champed at the pipe. He puffed smoke at the ceiling. “You might have got your green eyes and your red hair from your mother,” he said, “but your father was one of the airmen stationed here.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“But my father—”
“He died a couple of years after your mam, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“He knew the truth.”
Holly shoved a couple of paperbacks from the arm of a sofa and perched on the edge of it, taking the weight from her bad leg. She wasn’t sure what to say. Half a dozen responses battled for utterance. Finally, she settled on asking, “Are you sure?”
“Sure as I can be.”
“That’s . . . a lot to take onboard.”
Woodrow sucked his pipe. He scratched the backside of his threadbare trousers. “Of course,” he said, “I might be wrong. I was taking a lot of acid back then.”
* * *
Holly stepped back out into the drizzle. Lao and Scott were hunched beneath the caravan’s red-and-white striped awning while chickens gossiped around their feet.
“Are you all right, guv?”
“Yeah.”
“Any luck with identifying the killer?”
“Not so much.”
“Well, what did he say?”
Holly shook her flame-coloured hair. “He’s a fucking space cadet. Sorry, Lao, no offence intended.”
The journalist shrugged. “None taken. I know he’s not always as lucid as he could be.”
Scott took out his car keys and turned up his collar. “Where now?”
Holly looked out across the deserted aerodrome, remembering it as it had been back in the days when her grandfather was still alive and she still had a normal childhood, before her accident cursed her with the ability to peer behind a person’s eyes. “Home, I guess.”
“Back to the hotel?”
“Back to the drawing board.”
They were opening the car doors when a Land Rover came bouncing towards them from the direction of the hangars. A florid-cheeked man leant his head from the window.
“What are you lot doing by here? This is private property!” His eyes came to rest on Lao. “You’re the woman from the local paper, aren’t you? What’s occurring?”
Holly stepped up to the vehicle. “My name’s Detective Chief Inspector Craig. We came here to interview Mr. Woodrow.”
“That old nutter? What’s he gone and done now?”
“He hasn’t done anything. We thought he might be able to help us with our enquiries.”
“And did he?”
“Not so much.”
The man drummed his fingers on the Land Rover’s hard plastic steering wheel. “Well then. I don’t mean any disrespect, but you can pack up and bugger off. Like I said, this is private land.”
He watched them until their car turned onto the public road, and then he turned his Land Rover and drove back in the direction of the hangars.
“Who was that?” Holly asked.
“That’s Rees Thomas,” Scott said. “He’s a local builder. His firm built my mam’s extension.”
“He moved into property development a few years ago,” Lao said from the backseat. “He and Mayor Davies were pretty tight, by all accounts. That’s how he got planning permission to turn the airfield into a holiday village.”
Holly frowned. “A holiday village?”
“You know, caravans and chalets, a swimming pool, all that jazz.”
15.
IN A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT of pain, and with no leads to go on, Holly decided to take a break. Leaning awkwardly on her crutch, she struggled her way uphill through the rain to the old terraced street where her grandfather had lived. Here, she found the house in which she’d spent most of her childhood and teenage years. She hadn’t been back to it since the day she packed her case and left for London. Now, seeing it sandwiched between its neighbours, she couldn’t help thinking it looked smaller than she remembered.
Like the houses on either side, it had walls of grey stone and redbrick edging around its doors and windows. Unlike the houses on either side, it was empty, and had lain so since the death of her grandfather. In accordance with his wishes, Holly had received the keys and deeds in the mail. But she’d never felt the urge to come back here and clear the place. As far as she knew, it remained exactly as it had been left on the day he died.
Having been unsure what else to do with the house key when it arrived in an envelope from her grandfather’s solicitor, she’d simply clipped it onto the ring with the rest of her keys. Now she pulled the bunch from her pocket and opened the door.
The lock turned just the way she remembered.
She pushed the door open against a pile of accumulated papers and flyers. Damp air swirled into the stillness of the hallway, shivering the dry, brittle leaves of the dead spider plant on the windowsill at the bottom of the stairs, and she stifled the urge to call out a hello. This felt like a stranger’s house, and she felt very much like a trespasser. Without removing her coat, she hobbled through to the kitchen, which was just as her grandfather left it that morning. Used teabags lay piled in a saucer beside the kettle, a dirty frying pan lingered on the stove and a moldy dishcloth hung over one of the taps. A well-thumbed mystery novel sat on the dining table, next to a copy of the Racing Post. The clock ticked on the wall. The place had the flat, stale odour of a house that had been closed up and unoccupied for weeks, but it felt too late in the evening to be opening windows. Instead, she hobbled over to the cupboard where he used to keep the booze and helped herself to a bottle of supermarket own-brand whiskey. The glasses were in the next cupboard, but she was too tired to try pouring with one hand, so she eased herself down onto one of the dining chairs and took a drink straight from the bottle.
A pack of her grandfather’s cigarettes lay on the table. Without thinking about it, she drew one and lit it using the plastic lighter beside the pack. The tobacco was as stale as sawdust, but when the smoke hit her chest, it made her light-headed the way she remembered. The last of the rain dripped from her fringe and ran down her face, and her stomach closed up on itself like a fist. And suddenly she was crying, heaving out great wracking, smoky sobs.
She cried for her grandfather, and for the girl she had once been; for the dead bodies with their punctured eyes, and the mother she had never really known; for the pain in her leg and the fact s
omeone had tried to kill her; and finally, she cried for the dead children at Hawk Road School.
When the tears ran out, she sat for a while with her head in her hands, letting her hair hang over her face.
God, I must look a state, she thought, wiping her eyes on her cuff. Not that there’s anyone here to see.
She pulled her damp coat tight around her shoulders, fighting back a sudden craving for physical comfort. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been hugged, or the last time someone had lain beside her and held her all night while she slept. Right there and then, she would have given almost anything for the chance to doze off enfolded in another’s arms.
Unable to bear the emptiness and silence upstairs, she slept on the sofa with the TV for company, dozing fitfully in front of its flickering light until six a.m., when her grandfather’s cat—which must until now have been dependent on the kindness of neighbours—came in through the cat flap and woke her by pawing gently at her cheek and demanding to be stroked.
* * *
As the sky lightened, Holly sat by the front window with the cat on her lap and the curtains open and watched the clouds over the sea turn from mackerel grey to salmon pink. She heard the first bus of the day crunch its gears as it wheezed its way up the valley towards the main road. A few houses away, a dog barked.
She glowered at the slate rooftops of Pontyrhudd, not knowing which of them hid the killer she sought. Three people had fallen victim since the death of Lisa Hughes, and Holly herself had almost been the fourth. What was so important about Hughes that her demise had sparked such a trail of violence? And what, aside from the way the bodies had been mutilated, did any of it have to do with the murder of Alice Craig?
Hughes had been pregnant at the time of her death—either by her boyfriend or by the mayor. But both of them were dead now. Was the pregnancy the key to the riddle, or just an unfortunate coincidence? And then there was Owen, the butcher’s boy who’d been having an affair with Ieuan Davies. If this were a vendetta against Davies, Owen’s murder would be understandable—but in that case, why kill Daryl Allen? If anything, the kid had been wronged by Davies. Killing him served no purpose. Unless killing him somehow avenged Lisa Hughes. But then why kill Mike Owen?
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