by Ewart Hutton
I imagined Lord Carnarvon entering the tomb of Tutankhamen as I drew the bolts and pushed the hatch open. How fast-acting would the curse be in this place?
The hatch swung into silence and blackness. I crawled in, fighting the reaction that I was extruding myself into somewhere terrible. The air smelt stale, with a trace overlay of something mildly perfumed, a vague memory of the vicinity of a spinster aunt’s dressing table.
I stood up out of my crouch, put a hand out behind me to steady myself, and recoiled. My fingers had just encountered a too busy geometry. I shone my torch. The inside of the wall was lined with egg boxes.
It took a moment for me to make sense of it. They were using the dimpled boxes as acoustic baffles. Sound insulation. Back-up for the thick blockwork wall, to help to keep inside noise from travelling.
The torch picked up an old Bakelite light switch, and, instinctively, I flicked it. I heard a mechanical clunk, and the lights stuttered on. It was a demand switch to activate the generator. The clunk had been the flywheel kicking in. The noise dropped down to a muted chugging off behind some panelling to my right.
I had found the Rumpus Room.
The space was dominated by a contraption. A crude amalgamation of a barber’s and a dentist’s chair. The worn brown leather padded seat and back were raked at an acute angle. A range of leather securing straps was attached to the grey steel frame. A magnifying shaving mirror on a pivoting arm was fixed to one of the arm rests, and a full-length mirror was screwed horizontally to the ceiling above it.
I moved in closer, wondering why the thing gave off such a sense of clumsiness. Then I realized it was the welds. All over the frame, looking like metal scar tissue. Whatever this thing had been in the outside world, they had had to deconstruct its component parts to get it through the hatch, and had put it together without any reference to craft or beauty.
What kind of creepy experiments had been concocted on that thing?
I dropped the thought. Before my imagination could kick Ken and Les into action, I dragged my attention away.
The place was grim. It had the feel of being not quite abandoned, as if despair had been distilled in here and allowed to seep into the fabric.
The other walls were plank-lined; the one to my right had been creosoted some time in the past. To damp-proof it, I supposed. Once I got my head around the shape I realized that the space was like a truncated wedge. The ceiling sloped down, and the walls appeared to taper in. It made sense. I was probably inside the quarry that the Den had been constructed in front of.
The floor was roughly tamped concrete. Two self-assembly single beds with air mattresses were placed on either side of a small, cheap, chest of drawers. I knew before I slid them open that the drawers would be empty.
The kitchen arrangement was basic. A two-ring gas burner on a wide plywood shelf supported on a pair of old kitchen cabinets. I opened them. Cans of beans and tomatoes mainly, dry pasta and rice in rusty biscuit tins to keep the mice and rats away.
The bathroom was a partition made from two old pine doors. Behind it there was a chemical toilet and a yellow plastic basin on another plywood shelf. The scum on the bar of soap was not quite dry. Two hairs on it. Too long to be either Ken or Les’s. I didn’t let myself get excited.
I went over to the two-drawer filing cabinet that I had been saving until last. I closed my eyes and unlocked it mentally before I tried the top drawer. It opened in real life too. A dish-drying cloth that was fooling no one covered a laptop computer with a mains lead coiled beside it. I cradled it out carefully on to the top of the cabinet, memorizing the position of everything that I was moving.
I checked the bottom drawer while I waited for the computer to load. I almost gagged on the smell of lubricant and semen-soiled leather that time and damp had played around with. The drawer was a jumble of straps, dildos, vibrators, a metal curry comb, pliers, and a small, locked, black, precision-made box that made me think of surgical instruments.
The computer sang out its opening riff. It was prompting me to enter a password. Magda was in there somewhere, I was certain of it. Did it go back far enough to include Wendy and Donna? Colette?
I winced in frustration. How smart were those two likely to be?
I typed in password and hit the enter key. Smarter than that, the computer informed me. And I was running out of time. My nerves were telling me that I was stretching my luck. If I fought the flight impulse I knew that I would start making mistakes. I had no option but to put everything back, to try to leave the place in the exact same condition that I had found it.
I backed up to the hatch, making one last visual sweep to make sure that I hadn’t left my mark behind before I switched off the light. The generator died and I fought down panic as the dark crushed in on me with the illusion that the room had just collapsed. I shuffled backwards into the greyness of the outer room feeling my world expand again. I bolted the inner hatch and turned round, flicking my torch on to see where I had left the outer hatch.
The torch beam picked up a patch of deeper darkness underneath the sofa bed. The thought that it could be a rat or a squirrel curtailed my reflex to reach under for it. I gingerly tilted the sofa bed up, and shone the torch again. The thing didn’t move. It was dusty and had been flattened by the sofa bed, a crumpled bundle of some kind of fabric.
I tilted the sofa bed over completely to free up the space. Professional instinct warned me not to move this. I used my gloved forefinger to carefully unravel the bundle, fold by random fold, until it started to take on a recognizable form. A sweatshirt. A couple more moves turned it into a hooded sweatshirt.
Belonging to Magda?
I was trembling. This operation was too delicate and precise for an interloper who could be caught in flagrante delicto at any moment. My nerves were shrieking at me to just grab the thing and get the fuck out of there pronto. It was tempting. But I reminded myself that I was already involved in an illegal entry. If this thing was evidence, it had to stay here to be found as evidence.
I continued unfolding the sweatshirt until I was able to make out the logo on the front: S.W.A.T. in big block letters. But it wasn’t that that was grabbing my attention. It was the rust-brown stain under the logo, roughly the shape of the continent of Australia.
I had been around enough victims to recognize the colour of dried blood under torchlight.
I was wired. I had to call Sally. I used the drive down out of the forest in search of a mobile-phone signal to try to analyse the event.
Had they simply been careless? It happened when people were in a panic. So often it was the way we got our breaks.
The body must have been wrapped somehow. There had been no sign of blood being scrubbed off that concrete floor. Probably naked, otherwise the clothes wouldn’t have been loose. They would have been scrabbling out through that hatch with a body and a bundle of clothes, working against fear and high anxiety. As a result, they’re not methodical. They don’t think it through, don’t consider that two trips might be required. They’re too intent on getting out of there and disposing of this thing as fast and as soon as possible. Appalled by the weight and the awkwardness of it, they just want to be safe again.
So, somehow, the sweatshirt comes adrift. Gets lodged underneath the sofa as they struggle to get out and lock the place up behind them. The clothes are just something else to get rid of. They don’t sort through them. They never realize, Oh fuck, there’s something missing.
I had left everything the way I had found it. I had even hammered the dislodged nails back into the bottom hinge of the door with the heel of my shoe. When I went back in there, with company, I wanted the place to look virginal. Unmolested. I wanted to be able to play it as surprised as anyone.
But first I had to set up a reason to get back in there. Which was making me jumpy. Ken and Les could return at any time and find what they had missed before.
I pulled over as soon as the signal bar on my phone twitched into life. Sally came on the
line at the Sychnant Nursing Home. ‘What’s this about, Glyn? Couldn’t you sleep?’ Her voice chirpy and curious.
I clenched my eyes shut for a moment, wishing that this could just be about flirting. ‘Sally, please don’t read anything into this, but I’d like you to try to remember what Boon was wearing the last time you saw him.’
Her voice dropped off the happy shelf. ‘What do you mean, don’t read anything into it?’
‘Believe me, this is just routine,’ I lied soothingly.
‘What’s happened, Glyn?’
‘Nothing’s happened. Someone answering Boon’s description was seen in Holyhead.’ I fed her the story I had prepared. For her own good, I told myself. ‘We just need to check it out.’
‘You mean someone saw a young black guy?’ I heard her relax.
‘It probably passes for excitement in Holyhead. What can you remember, Sally?’
She went quiet. Thinking back on it. ‘He was up early. He had the trip to London for the rugby. Which is why I saw him when I got in from work. Normally, we’re ships in the night. I made him a sandwich for the journey.’ She went quiet again. ‘Nike trainers and olive-drab cargo pants. Drooped, the way they wear them now, showing the top of his underpants. God, it used to drive me spare, that. He always wore Nikes.’ I could tell from her voice that she was thinking ahead, using the description to ride into the memory. ‘I remember telling him to dress warm. More than just a T-shirt and a sweatshirt. He said his parka would keep him plenty warm enough. I didn’t argue, it was a good one, he bought it in Germany. Beige coloured,’ she added, remembering I was trying to fit a description.
‘What about the sweatshirt?’ I asked casually.
‘It was grey. The dreaded hood,’ she added with a laugh, ‘with some sort of logo.’
I forced myself not to prompt her.
‘S.W.A.T., I think. Whatever that means.’
‘That’s pretty comprehensive, thanks, Sally.’
‘Is that a match?’
‘I’ll have to get back to our people in Holyhead.’
‘If they confirm it, can we assume that he did go to Ireland?’
‘It would look like it.’
‘Is Graham staying with you?’
It took me a moment to get her slant. To remember that she was still in the world of romance and possibility. ‘No, I can come out and play again.’
‘When’s that going to be?’
‘I’ll call you later, after we’ve both had our beauty sleep.’
Oh Jesus, I thought, after we had shut down the connection, what kind of news am I going to have for her then?
I was itching to go for Ken McGuire. But, as the Den was in Les Tucker’s demesne, the only route that could work went through him.
Sara answered the door in her dressing gown. She looked surprised to see me, but not sleepy.
‘Go away,’ she said, without preamble.
I had already been to Les’s home address. A ratty bungalow beside the family timber yard. A couple of dogs had barked in the house when I drew up, but the lights stayed off. I drove back into Dinas. Sara’s place was a neat little Victorian villa. The lights were out here too, but Les’s pickup was parked in the street.
‘I need to speak to Leslie Thomas Tucker,’ I announced, hoping that the sonorous formality would stop her shutting the door in my face.
‘He has nothing to say to you.’
‘Who is it, babe?’ Les’s voice called out from behind her.
‘Go away,’ she hissed again.
She started to close the door, but I put my hand on it, and crowded up on her. ‘Les Tucker,’ I called out over her head.
He came to the door. I moved back on to the top of the small flight of stone steps that led up from the street. He glowered when he saw me. He was wearing a vest over his trousers and no shoes. Even as young as he was he had a face that you would have described as craggy. Pocked and fissured from adolescent acne. Short, wiry brown hair above a receded hairline that gave him a huge expanse of forehead, and a nose that was waiting for ravage to give it its full glory.
But he looked powerful. The guy worked in the woods every day, I reminded myself.
‘You’re trespassing,’ he told me.
‘Paul Evans told me all about the Den.’
‘Paul told you fuck-all.’
‘Where do you think he’s been all day?’ I asked, and caught the tiny flicker of uncertainty.
‘What’s he talking about?’ Sara asked, also picking up on that small change in Les.
‘Fuck off,’ he spat out at me.
‘Does Sara know what you did to Wendy?’
The door slammed shut in my face. I counted it off mentally, trying to imagine what was happening on the other side of it. It opened again when I reached fifteen. I braced myself.
The advantage that I had always had here was that I knew that he was going to try to hit me. I just couldn’t be sure when. That uncertainty disappeared as soon as I saw him in the doorway again.
He was hampered by rage. He wanted to shut me up. He was assuming that we were both equally surprised at this development. He flung a right at me, and followed through with a body charge, aiming to take me down the steps.
I wasn’t quite quick enough to avoid the fist, which caught the top of my left shoulder as I was turning away from it. I sidestepped the body charge and tripped him as he went past, so that he launched into the air, executing a clumsy parabola, before hitting the paving slabs at the foot of the steps.
He landed on his side. The air went out of him with a gasp of shock and pain. I kicked him surreptitiously in the belly to drop him on to his face, and straddled his back, pulling out my handcuffs.
‘Leslie Thomas Tucker, I am arresting you for assaulting a police officer.’ I had the cuff snapped on to one of his wrists when Sara landed on my back. She wrapped a forearm round my throat, using it for balance and purchase, while she dug her other hand into my hair and wrenched my head back. She was drenching me with spittle as she screamed something so close to my ear as to make it unintelligible. At least with her mouth open, I remember thinking, she can’t bite me.
I blocked the pain long enough to snap the free end of the handcuffs on to the wrought-iron garden gate. I was sensing Les coming back to life under me and I didn’t want two of them free and seething. Sara had wrenched my head back as far as she could, but her grip on my throat was getting stronger. I summoned the gods and stood up, staggering under the burden like an overextended weightlifter. Sara clung to my back, her knees straddling my hips for better grip. To an onlooker this must have looked like weird rodeo.
I was being seriously throttled. Starting to get light-headed as the air supply shut down. I made a feint of grabbing for the hand that was wrapped into my hair to distract her. It worked. I felt the twist in her body as she moved her defences, and I let myself drop backwards.
She went down on to a small rosebush, with my deadweight following through on top. The breath went out of her before her synapses could relay the pain from the rose thorns. She loosened her grip on my throat as her body realized that this was doing nothing to help its cause. I squirmed round on top of her to keep her pinned down. Her dressing gown had come loose, and I realized that I was holding her down with one hand on a naked breast. Fuck the niceties, I thought, this lady is dangerous. ‘For Christ’s sake, Sara,’ I yelled down at her, ‘I’m not the problem – you’re protecting a fucking child molester.’
She spat up at me.
I turned away and caught the flashing light bar as Emrys Hughes’s car turned the corner. Pointing a warning finger at her, I climbed off warily. She glared at me balefully, pulled her dressing gown closed, and sat up slowly, arching her back against the pain, her eyes closed, wincing. Les hadn’t quite made it past the groaning stage yet.
‘What the hell’s happening here?’ Emrys yelled sternly.
‘I’m arresting these two for assault.’
Emrys looked around, desperatel
y hoping that I might be talking about someone else. He had caught the tail end of the melee, and knew that, despite his loyalties, he had to acknowledge that I was the good guy. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Sara.
She stared up at him, hurting and sulky. ‘He tried to feel me up,’ she said, nodding at me.
Emrys looked at me.
I shook my head. ‘I want these two in the holding cell at the police house. You’d better get a doctor in.’ I leaned in close so that I could whisper. ‘If I hear that Ken McGuire finds out about this tonight, I’m blaming you.’
‘What’s this all about?’ he pleaded.
‘You took your time getting here.’
He frowned. Only just thinking about it. ‘You said there was a disturbance.’
‘There was. You just witnessed it.’
‘But you said you were at the scene of a disturbance when you called it in. How could you have known?’
I grinned at him. ‘Psychic powers.’
15
‘I’m woken up in the middle of the night because you have arrested some village boho for apparently demonstrating profound good sense by taking a swing at you?’
I was speaking to Jack Galbraith from the small office in Emrys Hughes’s police house. Bryn Jones had set up a conference call between the three of us.
‘I need a search warrant, sir.’
‘So Bryn informed me. Now persuade me.’
‘Les Tucker has a hut in the forest. He uses it with Ken McGuire. We’re going to find evidence in there that has a direct bearing on the disappearance of Boon Paterson.’
‘Who is your informant?’
‘I don’t have a direct informant, sir. I do have access to Paul Evans, who I’m sure will turn friendly when the evidence becomes incontrovertible.’
‘I hope that there’s no element of coercion in this?’ Bryn asked warningly.