Lao turned her attention to the waters of the bay. She didn’t know how to respond. Her grandmother often spoke of ghosts and spirits, but it had been a long time since Lao had subscribed to such beliefs.
Beside her, Mrs. Phillips turned to look up at the great glass lantern occupying most of the available space.
“The light keeps the town safe,” she said.
Lao didn’t look around. She’d been hoping to find a lead here. If she’d broken this case, or at least uncovered the clues that led DCI Craig to catch the culprit, it could have been her ticket out of here and into a proper newsroom in Birmingham or London. She might even have been able to write a book off the back of it. That was why she’d invested time in a theory that was, in the cold light of day, ridiculous, and why she now found herself standing here listening to an old lady talk about ghosts.
“I thought the light was there to warn ships,” she said, not bothering to keep the disappointment from her voice.
Mrs. Phillips sucked her yellow teeth. “Let me tell you a story.” She leant against the window, still looking up at the light.
“During the war,” she began, “the RAF used the airfield up there for training Hurricane pilots. They used to ship them here from all over the country to teach them how to fight. Anyway, one night they were practicing flying in the dark, and one of the pilots got into trouble. He tried to get back to the runway, but he was losing height, so he jumped out. His plane only just cleared the top of this tower and crashed into the dirt just the other side of the chapel.”
“Did he survive?”
Mrs. Phillips pursed her lips and shook her head. “No, love. I’m not going to lie to you. He was too low for his parachute to open, see? They found his body the next morning, floating in the water just near these rocks.”
“That’s horrible.”
“The whole town was very sad.” She held up a gnarled and crooked finger. “But the thing is, they still say that if you stand here when there’s no moon and it’s properly dark, you can sometimes hear that Hurricane pass over the tower, still trying to get home.
“Because you see, bach, this light isn’t here to keep ships away.” Mrs. Phillips brushed her painted fingernails against the smooth face of the gigantic lens. “It’s here to guide all the poor lost souls stranded out there in the dark.”
17.
AT LUNCHTIME, SYLVIA BROUGHT a plate of ham sandwiches to the incident room. As the rest of the team dug in, she drew Holly aside.
“I’ve seen something,” she said, polishing her half-moon spectacles on the hem of her apron. “I don’t know if it will be helpful or not.”
Holly tried to concentrate on the young woman’s good eye, rather than the false one. “What is it?”
“I was up by the mayor’s house night before last, and I saw someone coming out of the property.”
“What time was this?”
“About half midnight. I’d just been up to me mam’s house to tuck her in and walk her dog around the block.”
“Who did you see?”
Sylvia looked both ways and lowered her voice. “I don’t want to get anybody into trouble, mind.”
“Don’t worry about that. Just tell me who you saw.”
“It was one of your lot, in uniform.”
Holly leant in close. “One of the constables?” Nobody had mentioned any visits to her. “Did you see which one?”
“It was Neil Perkins. I recognised him but didn’t think anything of it. But then, when I heard poor Mr. Davies had been murdered, it struck me as funny, you know?”
“Perkins? You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Mam was at school with his dad. I’d know him anywhere.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Sylvia carried her empty tray back to the kitchen. Holly beckoned to Scott, and they stepped out into the corridor.
“We’ve got a witness who saw Perkins coming out of Davies’s house at half twelve yesterday night.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, I’m deadly fucking serious.”
“Who was it?”
Holly shifted on her crutch, trying to get her knee comfortable. “Sylvia from the kitchen.”
“And you believe her?”
“She’d rather die than drop anybody in the shit.” Holly glanced at her watch. “Where is Perkins, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll put in a call.”
“Tell him to come straight here. At the very least, I think he owes us an explanation.” Holly let her shoulder rest against the wall, taking some of her weight. “And when you’ve done that, run his fingerprints against those we got from the butcher’s shop.”
Scott raised his eyebrows. “Do you really think he might be a suspect?”
“Remember the blue fibres they found on Daryl Allen? Forensics said they might have come from a police uniform.”
“But when I asked him, Perkins said he tried to revive the boy.” Scott rubbed his ear. He frowned. “Couldn’t they have gotten onto the body that way?”
Holly shook her head. “Who tries to revive a body with its guts hanging out and twigs driven through its eyes?”
“Fair point. I guess I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“Neither had I until just now.” Holly took a breath, considering her next move. She’d have to be careful. She couldn’t accuse a fellow officer of murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence and speculation.
“Okay,” she said. “Our first priority is to find Perkins and bring him in for questioning. Until then, I don’t want you to say anything to any of the others. We keep this between ourselves until we’re sure.”
“Understood. Leave it to me, guv.” Scott straightened his tie. “I’ll ring him now.”
* * *
While Scott made his call, Holly hobbled outside and sat on the bench that leant against the hotel’s front wall. It felt good to be off her feet. She propped the crutch against the armrest and pulled her grandfather’s pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket. She hadn’t smoked at all in London. But now she was back in Pontyrhudd, it seemed old habits were resurfacing.
Next thing you know, I’ll be wearing too much eyeliner, hanging around the arcades, and mooning over My Chemical Romance.
The wind chopped spray from the swell. Sunlight came down in slants. She lit up and blew a line of grey smoke at the sea and clouds. She had forgotten her hometown could be so pretty. She’d spent so much time trying to distance herself from the painful memories of her adolescence, she’d neglected to keep hold of the ones that really mattered—the way the rolling surf glittered white in the low-slung midday sunlight; the personified, angry hunger of the gulls; and the way the fresh green bracken shoots clustered on the hillsides above the town like the camouflage of a sleeping army.
Was this how Dorothy had felt when she’d woken up to find herself back in Kansas?
Holly took another drag on the stale cigarette and imagined she could feel the smoke scouring every square nook and cranny of her endless, fractally branching lungs. But, to be honest, she doubted it was any more harmful than the toxic crud she’d inhaled every day on the streets of Holloway and Finsbury Park. It was, she decided, the voluntary nature of the act that made it feel so debauched. Instead of battling her way through London’s traffic fumes and industrial pollution, she was sitting out here in the crisp spring air, wantonly dragging pollutants into the delicate membranes of her chest. When Scott joined her, he wrinkled his nose at the smell.
“Perkins isn’t answering his radio or his phone,” he said.
“That’s not a good sign.”
“This might be a misunderstanding.”
“And it might not. But the only way we’ll know for sure is if we talk to him.”
“I’ve got the other constables out searching. I haven’t told them why we need him, but if he’s still in Pontyrhudd, they’ll find him.”
“And what do we do until then?”
Scott slipped his hands i
nto his pockets and smiled. “Well, it’s lunchtime. I thought maybe you’d let me buy you a drink.”
Holly took a final drag on her cigarette and flicked the stub into the gutter.
“Now that,” she said, “is the first sensible thing I’ve heard all day.”
* * *
The Red Dragon sat at the far end of the promenade. It was a traditional Welsh pub. You could tell by the linoleum floors and scuffed barstools and the jar of pickled eggs beside the cash register. The clientele were mostly old soaks, with rounded shoulders and souls smouldering with the same sepia hue as their nicotine-sallow complexions.
Scott went up to the counter and came back a couple of minutes later with a half pint of bitter for himself and a double Jack Daniel’s for her.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” They took a table by the window. “How’s the leg?”
“Hurts like fuck. Did you get hold of Lao?”
“She wasn’t answering her mobile. I left a message.”
Holly watched Scott as he sipped his beer like an old maid sipping tea. His light burned clear and bright, like that of a child. No great regrets burdened his soul. No sunspots of guilt to dim his inner fire. She’d never met anyone so apparently guileless. The fumes from her own drink reawakened the dormant leftovers of the whiskey she’d consumed the previous evening, triggering a queasy, seasick sensation behind her eyes. She could see he was waiting for her to speak, but she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. Around the bar, the low mutter of conversations returned. The dog went back to sleep. The clock over the optics struck one thirty.
Holly sipped her Jack Daniel’s. She really wanted to get drunk. It was the only way she knew to shift a whiskey hangover, and the only sure way to damp down her peculiar gift enough to be able to ignore the shadows in the heads of those around her. Only her commitment to finding the killer kept her from draining the glass in a single swallow.
After a few minutes of companionable silence, Scott cleared his throat. “Have you thought what you’ll do when this is over?”
“The case?”
“Are you going to stay in Pontyrhudd, like, or are you off back to Carmarthen?”
“I honestly hadn’t given it any thought.”
“Must be strange to be home, though?”
Holly shrugged. “I haven’t thought of this place as home in a very long time.”
“You’ve got your granddad’s house here, mind.”
“Yes.” She swirled her glass around, watching the amber liquid slosh like oil. She knew Scott was just being friendly, but his interest in her plans made her uncomfortable. Having been self-reliant and solitary for so long, she wasn’t used to sharing her private life with others.
“I might sell up,” she said. “I really haven’t decided.”
Scott sipped his beer. “Well, for what it’s worth,” he said, “you’ve got to be the most interesting DCI we’ve had around these parts in a fair while.”
Holly smiled despite herself. “Now that,” she said, “I can believe.”
Behind her, the pub door opened, letting in a shaft of daylight. Dust motes danced in and out of the sudden illumination. Fresh air swirled around her ankles.
“Don’t look now,” Scott said, “but here comes Woodrow.”
Holly turned to see the old kook framed against the sky as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom of the bar.
“Is DCI Craig by here?” he boomed. He had his deerstalker firmly jammed in place, and his beard looked like a windblown thicket.
Oh God, Holly thought. What fresh hell is this?
“I’m here,” she said, raising a hand. Stephen Woodrow turned his chin towards the sound of her voice.
“Ah, yes.” He strode over, seemingly unaware of the number of eyes watching him as his hiking boots knocked on the wooden floor. “I have something for you.” He dropped a plain brown A4-sized envelope onto the table. “I don’t know if it will be of any help, but I thought you’d better see it.”
Holly picked up the envelope from the table and opened the flap. Inside she found a black-and-white photograph.
“What is it?” Scott asked.
“I’m not sure.” She placed the photo on the table where they could both see it. The picture had been taken at night and showed the old Neolithic stones that stood where the twists of the River Rhudd formed a kind of promontory on the valley floor, surrounded on three sides by the rust-coloured water. Portable lamps illuminated the stones. Electrical wires had been strung between them. Various scientific instruments lay on the grass. To one side, a couple of white-coated technicians bent over a box covered in dials and valves. Both wore plastic safety goggles, and one of them was smoking a pipe. To the side, a pair of armed RAF officers stood guard. One was her grandfather. She didn’t know who the other one was, but there was something familiar about his eyes and the shape of his chin.
“That’s just down the hill from where Lisa Hughes died,” Scott said.
“It’s also about a hundred yards from where my mother was killed.”
“What are they doing?”
“Beats me.”
Woodrow leant forward and tapped the picture. His breath stank of vodka, pipe tobacco and onions. “There’s a time stamp at the bottom,” he said.
Holly’s throat went dry. “Holy crap.”
“What is it?” Scott looked concerned.
“This was taken about ten minutes before my mother was killed. She was out there in the woods that night, just yards away from whatever was going on here.”
“Do you think there’s a connection?”
“There has to be.”
Holly looked up at Woodrow. During their first meeting, the man had said something about experiments at the old base. But what kind of experiment was this? What were they measuring? Holly knew granite was radioactive. If the stones were made of granite, had the technicians in the picture been trying to measure the radiation coming off them? Perhaps they were trying to establish the age of the monument. But if that was all they were doing, why had they felt it necessary to have an armed guard accompany them? And why do it at night? And what possible connection could this have to her mother’s death? Holly’s grandfather would never have stood by while harm came to Alice. She remembered him as an uncompromising, fiercely moral man. He’d never have permitted anyone to commit such an act of cruelty and disfigurement on his daughter.
“There’s one more thing,” Woodrow said. He slid a second photograph from the envelope. This one showed a concrete bunker with the trefoil symbol for radiation stencilled on the door in black paint.
“What’s this?”
“The old fallout shelters up at the base. They were for the use of the base personnel in the event of a nuclear attack.”
Holly frowned at the picture. She recognised the position of the hangars in the background, which meant the photo had been taken from roughly the place where Woodrow’s caravan now stood.
“They’re not there now?”
Woodrow scratched his beard. “No, that’s the thing. When the base was decommissioned, they moved a lot of stuff down into the shelters and then backfilled the stairwells with concrete. They even bulldozed the aboveground entrance, to make it harder to find.”
Scott looked puzzled. “Why would they do that?”
The old man frowned at him and then laid the pictures side by side on the sticky pub table. His blackened fingernail touched the photograph of the stone circle. “My guess is they made contact with something.”
“Contact?”
“They found something at the circle. And whatever it was, they didn’t like it.”
“So.” Scott had the look of a man struggling to see the relevance of what he was being told. “What happened?”
Woodrow’s hand moved to the image of the old, now-demolished bunker. “They entombed it beneath several tonnes of concrete.”
“So whatever it was, they didn’t want anybody to find it?”
<
br /> Woodrow leant forward and lowered his voice. “Or maybe they didn’t want it getting out.”
He sat back and crossed his arms, letting the words hang between them. Holly and Scott looked at each other.
Scott’s phone rang.
“It’s Jensen,” he said. “They’ve found Perkins’s car.”
* * *
Scott pulled up behind the abandoned police car and helped Holly from her seat. Detective Constable Potts and a couple of uniforms were already present. When Potts saw her climb from the car, he turned away with a roll of his eyes.
“Any idea how long it’s been here?” she asked.
Potts turned back to her with an insincere smile and rapped his knuckles against the bonnet. “He left the headlights on.”
“Did you turn them off?”
“No, the battery’s flat.”
“So the car might have been here for anywhere between three and six hours?”
“Seems that way. He left the door open, too.” Potts tucked the front of his shirt into his straining belt. He was being condescending, as if all her questions were those of a slow child. “At least, it was open when we got here.”
They were standing among the sand dunes to the south of town. Tough grass shivered in the wind. Holly cast around. “Any footprints?”
“If there were, the wind’s covered them.”
“Or he intentionally covered his tracks.”
Potts scratched his cheek dubiously. “I suppose. Not very likely, though, is it? Silly sod probably just wandered off.”
Leaning heavily on her crutch, Holly glowered at him. “Can I remind you we’re in the middle of a murder investigation? Until we know for certain what we’re dealing with here, I think it would be best to consider all eventualities. Don’t you agree, Constable?”
The fat man sighed. “Yes, guv.”
“Now, I want this whole place treated as a crime scene. Wherever Constable Perkins is, I want him found.”
Potts rolled his eyes again. “Yes, guv.”
Not trusting herself to respond and worried she just might go ahead and punch the supercilious prick, Holly turned and instead hobbled through the dunes to the beach at the foot of the southern headland. The sea wind scoured some of the fumes from her head. A gull mewled. She couldn’t blame Potts for not taking things seriously. Pontyrhudd had never seen a spate of killings like this. The poor man was out of his depth and in denial. Being dismissive was just his way of protecting himself. Nevertheless, his attitude rankled. He reminded her too keenly of some of the Neanderthals she’d had to work with on the Met—old-school detectives who’d resented her rapid ascent through the ranks.
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