Good People

by Ewart Hutton

  We stopped at a spot that would have made a great backdrop for a postapocalyptic film. Any actors playing survivors would not have had to search too far to find the motivation to play their future grim and hopeless.

  It was a damp, spongy depression of mossy tumps and spiky reeds, fringed with burned heather. A flat, lifeless place. The sense of vertical was mocked by one bent, stunted and wind-whipped hawthorn. The breeze, as if it had read the script, wafted over a ruined cathedral smell from the charred heather.

  I walked away from the Land Rover with the thin file containing the case notes. Pretending to consult them, I lifted my head to study random points on the horizon. I was aware of Huw Davies watching me. He didn’t know it, but this show was for his benefit. After a while I called him over.

  ‘Two holidaymakers from Kent reported it?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right, hillwalkers.’

  ‘Busybodies?’

  He cocked his head slightly, but his expression didn’t shift out of neutral. ‘I don’t get your meaning, Sergeant.’

  I smiled pleasantly at him, tapped the file. ‘We both know that this wouldn’t have seen the light of day if a local had discovered it.’

  He bristled. ‘Do we?’

  ‘Yes, we do. The bird’s carcass would have ended up in an incinerator or a lime pit. The ornithologists would have eventually noticed its absence, but no story to tell. Just a disappearance. A mystery.’

  ‘You don’t think this is a mystery?’

  ‘No, I know who did it.’

  For the first time, he smiled. It made him younger. ‘That’s pretty impressive. Considering you haven’t been up here before.’

  I shook the file. ‘Someone on this list did it.’

  ‘List?’

  ‘The list of names you provided. People with a relevant interest that I asked you to question.’

  ‘Didn’t you read my summary? No one we talked to had any knowledge of this.’

  ‘We can probably discount the farmers.’

  ‘We can?’

  ‘Yes, they’d only have had a motive if it was lambing time. So, that narrows it down to the gamekeepers.’

  He looked at me searchingly for a moment before he nodded. ‘They’re not going to say anything.’

  ‘The toxin’s been analysed. Strychnine-based.’

  ‘You won’t find it.’

  ‘Private stock?’

  He shrugged. ‘Off the record?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I can’t name names because I don’t have one. This is what’s come down to me. Basically it was an accident. The bird wasn’t targeted. Someone had baited a rabbit to get a fox that was going for his birds. The harrier took the rabbit.’ He opened his hands indicating end of story.

  ‘How do you feel about that?’

  He looked at me appraisingly. ‘I feel pretty confident in telling you that it isn’t going to happen again. From now on, if someone’s worried about a fox taking his pheasants, he does it the hard way: he waits up and tries to shoot the bugger.’

  ‘Is that enforceable?’

  He smiled wryly. ‘Ever see a Montagu’s harrier?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I used to watch that bird. It gave me a lot of pleasure. Let’s just say that word of my distress has got around.’

  ‘Okay.’ I nodded, letting him know that it was understood. I was getting good at this frontier justice. He offered his hand, and I shook it. I realized that I had passed some test.

  ‘I’ve been asked to ask you something,’ he said.

  ‘Me?’ I was intrigued. I didn’t think that anyone over this way knew me.

  ‘Yes, when word got around that I was meeting the detective from Dinas.’

  ‘Go on,’ I prompted, no longer surprised at the extent of the bush telegraph in these parts.

  ‘The farmer who died there recently … Trevor Vaughan?’ He waited for a sign of recognition. I nodded, not giving anything away. ‘He wondered if you knew anything about the funeral arrangements.’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Bill Ferguson.’

  ‘Who’s Bill Ferguson?’

  He nodded down at the file in my hand. ‘He’s on the list.’

  I scanned the paper. ‘A gamekeeper?’ I asked, letting him hear significance.

  ‘An assistant keeper. For the Coyle Estate. He’s new this season. He’s not allowed to make the kind of decisions we’re talking about up here.’

  ‘How did he know Trevor Vaughan?’

  ‘I didn’t know he did until he asked me to ask you about the funeral.’

  I told myself not to read too much into it. The guy might just be some kind of freak who made a habit of attending the funerals of suicides. For all I knew it could be a common gamekeeper’s pastime. But why hadn’t he approached the obvious sources? Why come to me rather than Trevor’s family or close buddies?

  Did Bill Ferguson want to pay his last respects from a distance?

  Huw gave me directions to the Coyle Estate. I couldn’t pass up a chance to find out what linked Bill Ferguson and Trevor Vaughan. I calculated I could get there, and still be back in time to see Zoë McGuire with a safe margin, assuming that Gordon was cooperating by following his own manly pursuits.

  It was a big spread. The current owner was a fancy-price-tag London barrister. The house was a copy of a Palladian mansion with fucked-up proportions, set beside a river where they fished for salmon and trout. They shot pheasants, partridge and woodcock on the surrounding parkland and farms. Up on their moors they killed grouse. A veritable pleasure dome.

  The shooters were returning to lunch when I arrived. A bunch of prats seated on straw bales on a flat-bed trailer being drawn by a tractor towards a big marquee that had been set up near the house. To a man they scowled at me suspiciously as I drove past.

  I was headed off at the pass before I reached the heartland. A big man with a florid complexion in a waxed jacket and the sort of Wellington boots you need a mortgage to buy climbed out of a parked Range Rover and flagged me down.

  ‘I’m afraid this is a private shoot, old son,’ he announced with bluff, insincere, affability, standing above my open window.

  I flashed him my warrant card. ‘I’m investigating the poisoning of a Schedule 1 protected bird.’

  He wasn’t impressed. ‘Your people have already talked to our lads. Can’t help any more, I’m afraid. Nothing has changed.’ He gestured to the activity going on behind him. ‘And this is really bad timing. If you do have to talk to the boys again, call the estate office and make an appointment. Okay?’ he beamed at me dismissively.

  My phone rang. I glanced at the display. A Manchester code.

  His face clouded. ‘Turn that bloody thing off, will you? Show some consideration – we ask our guests not to bring mobile phones.’

  ‘Don’t want to spoil the sound of the guns, do you?’ I asked, turning away before he could answer. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Sergeant Capaldi?’ A young woman, Manchester accent, the tone tentative.

  ‘Flower?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hold on a moment …’ I covered the mouthpiece. The man was glaring at me now, his face even redder. I shouted, ‘Fuck off, this is a private conversation.’ He started to remonstrate, but I drove away on to the grass. Another complaint going out to Inspector Morgan.

  ‘Flower, thanks for calling me.’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘Your summer in Dinas.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘What stands out in your memory?’

  I sensed a hesitation down the line. But didn’t push.

  ‘I thought it was what I wanted to do,’ she said eventually, ‘to be a beauty therapist. I thought working in Sara’s would be good experience. I didn’t realize it would be washing old people’s crinkly hair, and fetching them cups of coffee. And staying in that cruddy caravan. And hearing things outside making noises all night.’

  �
�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.’