by Ewart Hutton
A young, naked girl was on her stomach straddling the contraption in the Rumpus Room. She was plump, and I didn’t recognize her from the photographs of Donna and Colette that Joan Harvey had shown me at the Sychnant Nursing Home. But in those, neither girl had been wearing that faraway fish look people take on when they are concentrating on working their mouth around an erect penis. This one belonged to Les Tucker. Ken, skinny and naked, behind her, had inserted himself into an orifice. The camera had been set on an automatic trip, and both men were grinning at it, cheekily triumphant, anticipating the countdown. But what, irrationally, infuriated me the most, was the fact that they both still had their shoes and socks on. They had not even had the sliver of grace to share the poor girl’s nudity.
‘Donna or Colette?’ I asked. We knew from the chronology that it couldn’t be Magda. And Emrys Hughes, who had had to be ordered to continue looking at the images, had eliminated Wendy Evans by identifying her in other shots. Interestingly, we had also found images of Kylie, one of Sara’s current employees.
‘She was a consenting adult.’
‘Who?’ I insisted.
‘Donna Gallagher.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘I have no idea. She wasn’t around here for very long. She moved away, and that was the end of the story. There is nothing illegal in what we did.’ He gave his solicitor a challenging look.
‘Wendy Evans was fifteen,’ I corrected him.
‘Not when she volunteered to play with us,’ he shot back. ‘She was over the age of consent then.’
‘It’s not exactly normal behaviour is it though, Mr McGuire?’ Bryn cut in, trying to sound like a sympathetic but slightly concerned uncle.
Ken gave a small, deprecatory shrug. ‘It is what it is. I admit, seeing it laid out on the table like that, out of context, makes it look a bit disturbing. But, essentially, it was just a piece of fun. It didn’t hurt anyone. And I’m fairly sure that the ladies enjoyed it.’
Bryn signalled me to keep control. He pulled a curious face. ‘But why?’ he asked gently. ‘By all accounts, you’re a happily married man.’
Ken responded to the softness with a conspiratorial smile. ‘Because you’re not going to do those sorts of things to your wife, are you, Inspector?’
I could have hit him. I felt Bryn’s shoe straddle my toes, amplifying his previous signal to stay backed-off.
Ken sensed my fury and helplessness. He cocked his head and gave me a look of concern that we both knew was pure twisted irony.
Bryn pulled out another photograph. Magda. Sitting on one of the twin beds in the Rumpus Room, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, smiling into the camera. I read bravery built into the smile. A tourist with her new friends.
He tapped the photograph and fixed Ken with a penetrating stare that moved the game up another level from his previous polite friendliness. ‘This is the young woman who was captured on the filling station’s CCTV camera getting into your minibus.’
Ken pretended to study the picture. He had to have known that this was coming. He had already had time to rehearse this. They must have realized that we had the resources to unlock the laptop’s secrets.
‘This isn’t Ireland, Ken,’ I pointed out, clawing back a little bit of self-satisfaction.
‘That’s very observant of you,’ he snapped, and then let his voice relax. ‘In fact, I’m sure you know that this was taken in the back room of the Den.’
‘So, you don’t deny that she was there?’ Bryn prompted.
‘Can we give her a name?’ I asked. We already knew, Gordon had told us. I just wanted to hear what Ken did to the sound of it.
‘Marta,’ Ken said, no emotion. ‘Her surname was unpronounceable. We took that photograph when we all went back to the Den to pick up the quad bike. This was after we’d been to Dinas to get Boon’s things.’
Something was wrong. We should have been smelling fear coming off him. He was too confident.
‘Of course –’ He didn’t quite snap his fingers, but he used his eyes and raised his inflexion to let us share his eureka moment. ‘That’s what I had forgotten … That’s where the blood came from!’ He smiled at us. It was meant to be apologetic, but he couldn’t quite hide the tip of a small cone of triumph. ‘I’d had a bit too much to drink that night. We all had. But it’s coming back to me now. Boon had a nosebleed. It dripped on to his sweatshirt. I think I even remember him taking it off. Somehow it must have got crumpled under the sofa. It was lucky that we’d already picked up his things, so he had another sweatshirt to wear.’
‘What caused the nosebleed?’ Bryn asked.
‘A violent sneeze, I think.’
‘And Mr Tucker can verify this?’
Ken smiled helpfully. ‘He will when he’s reminded. He was even further gone than me.’ He raised his hands playfully, enjoying himself now, shooting his solicitor a look of mock shame. ‘Not that either of us can remember who drove the minibus that night.’
‘And Marta was there when this happened?’ Bryn asked.
‘Sure. She’ll confirm it. If you can track her down in Ireland.’
I leaned forward across the desk to get closer to Ken. ‘I don’t think that Marta ever got to the Den that night.’
He laughed into my face. ‘You’ve just shown us the photograph, Sergeant. It’s your own evidence, for God’s sake.’
‘Your computer gives that photograph a later date,’ Bryn pointed out.
‘That was the date that it went on the computer. Not the date it was taken.’
‘I’m not saying that Marta wasn’t ever at the Den …’ I expanded cheerily.
He frowned momentarily, wondering where I was going with this. ‘That was the only night she could have been there. She went on to Ireland with Boon,’ he elaborated patiently.
I shook my head. Held his stare for a beat. ‘The minibus was never driven there. You took her somewhere else that night.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He looked to Bryn for an explanation.
I tracked two fingers along the desktop. ‘The only vehicles that were ever driven down to the Den were quad bikes. The minibus would have left tyre tracks. There were no such tracks. I think you dropped her off somewhere else. Perhaps you risked using Les’s bungalow for that first night. Before you brought her to the Den.’
‘Rubbish …’ he exploded, shaking his head vehemently.
‘But Boon went back to the Den with you. That’s why his sweatshirt was there.’
He shook his head. You get used to seeing people’s thought processes in interview rooms. His were quick. ‘We all went to the Den. We parked the minibus and walked.’
‘You seem to be packing a lot of activity into this night, Mr McGuire,’ Bryn observed dubiously.
‘Ken, it was a filthy night,’ I all but shrieked, ‘no one would have chosen to be out there in that weather.’
He nodded. ‘That’s right, the track was muddy, we didn’t want the minibus to get stuck.’
‘And I suppose Boon lugged a suitcase with him, in the freezing rain, wading through the mud, just in case he got a nosebleed and would have to change his sweatshirt?’
He flashed me scorn. ‘He changed when we got back to the minibus.’
‘I think you’re full of bullshit, Ken.’
‘It’s Mr McGuire to you. And I believe you have to prove that …’ He started to smile at his solicitor, and then I watched his eyes move to the small tape recorder that Bryn had just produced.
‘You see, it wasn’t Boon that she wanted to protect her, it was Ken and Les. She wanted Ken and Les to get her safely over to Ireland. She wanted to travel in a crowd. Boon was too distinctive to go with. Boon went on his own. She was happy to stay behind and wait.’
Bryn switched Gordon McGuire’s voice off. We both watched Ken. He just stared at the tape recorder.
‘What really happed with Boon, Mr McGuire?’ Bryn asked gently.
‘Where did you move Marta to?’ I asked, trying t
o match his tone. ‘Where are you keeping her now?’
‘Was there an accident?’ Bryn soothed. ‘Is that what you’re trying to cover up? We appreciate that accidents can happen. We are aware of panic reactions. I promise you, we are capable of understanding.’
Ken’s head snapped up to face us. He smiled. We had hoped that he would crumble before he realized our fatal flaw. But he had seen it. ‘Why don’t you ask Gordon?’ He threw it at us as a challenge. It was up and bobbing on top of the fountain now. The knowledge that Gordon had not been a party to the events that rolled out after they had left the hut in the minibus that night.
The interview was over.
We strengthened the SOCO team and split it into two. Jack Galbraith took one half to trawl Les Tucker’s timber yard, and Bryn took the other to do the same with his house. We had Ken McGuire’s farmhouse and outbuildings already secured to perform the same exercise.
Neither of them invited me along.
Jack Galbraith was angry and frustrated. Despite his Nobel Prize-winning skills in intimidation, he had not managed to get Les Tucker to veer from their story. He denied any knowledge of the sweatshirt in the Den, swore blind that he couldn’t remember any of the girls in the photographs, despite the fact that his erect penis featured in the mouth of one of them. When Gordon’s tape was played, he listened intently, looked up, and asked, ‘Who was that?’ Jack Galbraith’s fury was compounded by the fact that the stand-off had occurred in front of his current acolyte.
Les would have been acting under instructions. To play dumb and deny everything. Ken would look for the loopholes. We couldn’t keep them apart for ever; sooner or later he would be able to smuggle the new strategies out to Les.
I drove back up to the Den. I should have been catching up with the backlog on the day job, which would be piling up like faggots around a martyr’s pyre, but it was too mundane. I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate. I was hyped up, back in the land of sex and death that I had once inhabited, and I was hanging on to that territory.
Had we missed anything here?
I stood in the middle of the Rumpus Room, shutting the Contraption out of my imagination, trying to concentrate on anomalies. There was no evidence of any excavations or replaced boards. The blue-light scanner had revealed no concealed bloodstains, apart from some old residues of menstrual fluids on the Contraption’s leather and one of the mattresses. Plenty of hair and fibre samples. A cornucopia of them. But, even if we found a match to Marta or Boon, it wouldn’t help: Ken’s new line of defence was the admission that they had both been here before they were driven to their rendezvous with Ireland.
Marta had been here. I closed my eyes. Tried to smell her. But all I was picking up were mould spores and concrete dust.
I was looking for anomalies. I pictured the space in my head, and shifted my stance before I opened my eyes. So that I was looking at the creosoted wall.
An anomaly?
Why would they creosote an internal wall?
Because it was getting damp? The walls were built to square off the inside of a cave or quarry. Caves are damp. Creosote preserves the timber.
But why just the one wall? If the place was suffering from damp, why hadn’t they treated the other walls and the ceiling?
What else does creosote do?
I placed my palms flat against the planking. The creosote was streaked and faded, long-dried and soaked into the timber. This had been applied years ago. I asked myself again, feeling the dread-tinged excitement rising: what else does creosote do?
It smells. It smells fucking terrible. It smells of tar distillation and poison. It covers other smells. Those other smells would have to be so bad that the smell of creosote was preferable.
I grazed my spine in my hurry to get under the hatch and out to my car. By the time I got back to the Rumpus Room with the crowbar it was hurting, and I could feel a slow trickle of warm blood making its way down to my waist. I blocked it out.
I could be wrong, I warned myself. This could turn into the wilful damage of private property.
I wedged the flat end of the crowbar into a seam in the planking. I levered the bar forward, and almost fell flat on my face from my own momentum as a section of timber broke away with neither resistance nor sound, just a big puff of dead wood dust. I worked more wood free until I had a hole big enough to shine my torch into. I peered in but could see only blackness.
Gingerly, I put my hand in. There is nothing in there, I told myself. Nothing is going to grab my hand. There is nothing that has been lurking in there, waiting for this moment to slither up and sink teeth or mandibles into my fingers.
I was so psyched up that even if I had encountered cotton wool I would have jerked my hand out. What I touched momentarily was cold, smooth and clammy.
Reptilian skin?
Black plastic sheet, I discovered when I enlarged the hole. Nailed to the top rails of the frame that supported the planking, and hanging like a curtain behind it. A damp-proof membrane. So why had they needed the creosote?
The plastic sheet bulged away from the wall when I pushed at it. There was a void behind. I used my Swiss Army knife to make a slit in the sheet. Plenty of bad smells lived back there. Damp, mineral and foetid, and that tight clot that takes you in the back of the throat and has as much to do with the imagination as it has with the olfactory system.
I shone the torch in through the hole in the sheet. The beam picked up the haphazard planes of a rock face. Fissured and erratically vertical, the depth of the gap fluctuating between thirty centimetres and a metre. I tilted the beam down. The floor of the void was strewn with a haphazard collection of green-brown rocks that must have fallen off the face. There was something about the shape of them though that didn’t quite seem to work with the strata that they had been dislodged from.
I focused the beam on a rounded boulder. To make sense of it my mind tried to tell me that it was sprouting a tangle of mycelium. A harmless but relentless fungal operation working silently in the dark. I wasn’t fooled for long. The realization made my stomach heave, and I had to draw back into the Rumpus Room for a charge of relatively fresh air.
It wasn’t mycelium. It was hair. Hair still attached to a skull. The stones on the floor were bones. But nothing was whole, the skeleton had been broken and scattered haphazardly. A documentary about Tibetan sky burials came back to me. Bodies laid out on flat slabs of rock being hacked into small pieces and fed to vultures that circled and hobbled in to catch the thrown offerings.
I made myself shine the torch carefully over the bone debris, trying to assess the volume. It was a difficult calculation, but I didn’t think that there was more than one body here.
And it had probably been rats. Rats and the other small mammals that make their way into caves and regard a dead human body as a bonanza. Once the soft tissue had been consumed, they would have gnawed through the bones to get at the marrow, severing and scattering them.
I forced myself to look at the skull again. The facial sockets were turned away from the beam. Algae, damp and oxidation had turned the surface of the bone green-brown. I could have been looking at a prehistoric find. But I wasn’t. I knew enough to call her she.
But which she?
‘Donna Gallagher or Colette Fletcher? Or someone we don’t yet know?’ Bryn asked the questions. The photographs of the remains as we found them after the wall was dismantled were fanned out on the desk in front of him.
Ken McGuire focused on a point above our heads. His solicitor looked distinctly nervous. First pornography and now a corpse. This was running into savage territories, a far remove from his usual pastoral frolics in title and tenure.
‘We can get DNA samples from the bones and the hair,’ I explained.
Ken dropped his head and looked at us both stonily. ‘It was an accident.’
‘Who was she?’ I asked quietly.
‘Colette Fletcher.’
‘What happened, Mr McGuire?’ Bryn prompted.
He rolled it around, looking for the words. I took some solace from the fact that, at last, he was uncomfortable with this. ‘She liked to be stimulated. This one time she took it too far.’ He looked at us hopefully, but Bryn nodded for him to continue. He lowered his head; we had to strain to catch his voice. ‘Sometimes she liked things to be tightened round her throat while we did … Things … She said that it heightened her pleasure.’
‘What were you doing on this occasion?’
‘This is awkward to describe, Inspector.’
‘Please try, Mr McGuire. It’s important that we understand what happened.’
‘She was on the chair. One of us was … One of us was behind her. She had a scarf round her neck, tied to the light bracket. She wanted us to push against her, to keep the scarf tight. We were worried we might hurt her, but she told us that it made the experience more intense for her. Only this time …’ He looked up at us. ‘This time she didn’t tell us when to stop.’
‘She was asphyxiated?’ Bryn asked.
He nodded.
‘Who was fucking her, Ken?’ I asked.
He looked at me sharply, as if I had just ruined the poetic delicacy of the moment. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘I’m just curious to know why the one doing the watching didn’t notice that Colette was choking to death.’
Ken flashed a look at Bryn to see whether I was allowed to be this intrusive.
‘It’s going to be asked at some stage, Mr McGuire,’ Bryn advised him.
Ken closed his eyes. ‘I was underneath her,’ he whispered. ‘Neither of us could see her face.’
Two in the saddle. Both of them claiming to be too engrossed in giving Colette pleasure to realize that her grunts had passed way beyond ecstasy.
Which was exactly Jack Galbraith’s take on it.
‘Do you know what this adds up to?’ He flapped the pages of Ken McGuire’s statement in the air when we met later for the war council. ‘Do you know what this fucker’s defence is? The poor girl dies because the sensitive bastards were trying to gratify her needs. Un-fucking-believable!’ He threw the transcript down. ‘I want them charged with murder, Bryn.’