Good People

by Ewart Hutton

  One is not at home, please leave your name and number and one will return your call when one has dispensed with the affairs of state.

  I cut the connection.

  My phone rang. It startled me. I stared at it for a moment, unable to answer it. I was overcome with a sense of dread, a feeling that if I took the call I would be talking to a dead man.

  ‘Glyn?’

  ‘Mac …’ It was only when I released my breath that I realized how long I had been holding it for.

  ‘Paul says that there is no one he knows that Ken and Les would trust.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mac.’

  And it didn’t. Not now. I knew where I was going.

  It was a strange sensation, standing deep in the night shadow, intensified by the wellingtonia tree, watching the front of the house. A perverse kind of high. An exhilaration composed of tension, dread and anticipation. But I forced myself to be patient, trying to get the feel and pattern of the place. A light shone in the hall and the sitting room. On a couple of occasions a light had gone on in one of the upstairs bedrooms, where the curtains had already been closed. This was where I needed Mackay. So that I could stand back here for the overview, and watch what happened to the pattern when the doorbell was rung. But I was on my own and stuck with it.

  I called the number again and let Her Majesty cut in on the answering machine before hanging up. I wanted him to know that I was trying to reach him. He would wonder why I was calling, but he would also assume that a telephone call implied distance and separation.

  I psyched myself up for it and set off down the front path under the low rumble cover of a big plane high up in the North Atlantic corridor. I used slow, deliberate strides, planting each footfall with the delicacy required to avoid the gravel turning into an auditory land mine. I wanted him to stay surprised. I stood dead still when I reached the porch, adjusting to the closeness. My heart was thrumming like a rogue piece of biology.

  I used the door knocker rather than the bell to re-connect myself to the world of solid things. Nothing exploded. It seemed to take longer than it should for a blurred figure to frame itself in the door’s obscure glass. The porch light came on.

  ‘Who is it?’ The voice on the other side of the door was guarded.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi.’

  The front door opened with the shocking squeal of a piece of trapped gravel on the quarry tile floor.

  I nodded at him. ‘Mr Ferguson.’

  He looked down at me from the top step, his face showing that the surprise was not a happy one. He recovered his composure. ‘It’s very late.’

  ‘Can I come inside, Mr Ferguson?’ I asked, ignoring his observation.

  He couldn’t help the reflex. The momentary glance behind, before he caught himself. ‘What do you need to talk to me about?’

  ‘Coincidences.’

  ‘What coincidences?’

  I held up the photograph that I had brought from Boon’s room. He came down off of the step and peered at it under the weak porch light. He looked at me quizzically. ‘Am I meant to know something about this?’

  ‘Rose Marie Ferguson.’

  He nodded slowly, aware that something was changing. ‘Ferguson is a fairly common name.’

  I smiled at him. ‘Tell me, is there any deep-veined psychological significance in re-naming yourself after your son’s birth mother? Or was it just laziness?’

  ‘Have you got a warrant?’

  I slipped past him and in through the open door, turning on the threshold to look back at him still standing in the porch. ‘I don’t need a warrant, you invited me in.’ I took a step into the hall, listening for sounds of occupancy. Just a radio from the living room. I was aware of him moving into the space behind me.

  ‘I could call Constable Davies and tell him that you’re trespassing.’

  I turned round, shaking my head. ‘Huw Davies is a friend of mine. We protect rare birds together.’

  He waited. He wanted to know where I was driving this.

  ‘Where is she, Malcolm?’

  He drew in a slow breath, wondering whether to issue a formal denial. He closed the door behind him. ‘Back in Jamaica. We didn’t keep in touch. We left that up to Boon. When we thought that he was old enough we gave him that photograph and explained about his mother.’

  I nodded, acknowledging that we had managed to punch through one layer of bullshit. ‘I meant Marta. Or should I say Soph?’

  He used a blank smile as a screen while he ran through the permutations. Was this a bluff ? How much did I really know?

  ‘Sophia – Boon’s ex-girlfriend,’ I amplified. ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘In Germany. I was on the phone to her yesterday, trying to reassure her as best I could about Boon. As far as the other girl is concerned …’ He stopped, frowning, when he saw me pick up the hall phone.

  ‘Call her,’ I instructed, holding out the receiver.

  He shook his head and backed away from me.

  I gave him the rueful smile of a disappointed headmaster. ‘Malcolm Paterson, it’s time to tell me what the fuck you have set in motion here.’

  He closed his eyes, his head drooped and he shook it. ‘It’s all gone sour. It’s all gone terribly wrong.’ He dropped down to sit on the stairs, head still shaking. I waited him out. He looked up at me.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Nothing bad was meant to happen to Boon or Sophia.’

  ‘Sophia was Marta?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Who you just called in Germany?’

  He shook his head. ‘I was just trying to put you off. I didn’t want you to know that this had been organized.’

  ‘Start from the beginning, Malcolm.’

  His head dropped again. ‘Wendy …’ he said the name so softly that I almost didn’t catch it. ‘Wendy tried to commit suicide for the third time.’ His voice strengthened. ‘I had learned to keep the sharp stuff away from her. This time she broke my razor apart. Tried to use those thin strips of blades on her wrists. She cut her fingers to shreds in the process.’ He looked up at me, a blaze of rage crossing his face. ‘All because of those bastards. She still has to suffer. I’ve had to have her committed to a psychiatric unit in Cyprus.’

  ‘So this is all about revenge?’ I asked quietly.

  He nodded. ‘I wanted to take something back to Wendy. I wanted her to know that they were now suffering. That they hadn’t got away with it.’ He looked at me, a pained expression on his face, as if I was working on a misunderstanding that hadn’t been aired. ‘Boon wasn’t involved. Not in the beginning. This was my fight. Mine and Wendy’s.’

  He burst into tears. ‘Why did it go so wrong? She was the victim. We should have had right on our side.’

  I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. It gave me the opportunity to survey the ground floor. There was no evidence of anyone else living here. One single mug with tea dregs by the sink, any other dishes and cutlery washed and stacked away. No signs of any excess foodstuffs in the cupboards.

  He drank the water gratefully, slowing down as he composed himself. ‘I got the job here. Just far enough from Dinas. Then I had to think of a way to make contact with Trevor Vaughan. I got lucky: he brought his mother to that concert I told you about. I thought luck was with me then. That was the plan you see: to use Trevor to get at them.’

  I shook my head, not getting it. ‘Surely he recognized you? You’re his friend’s father, for God’s sake, a teacher at the local school. You went off with another friend’s sister. Didn’t he run a mile?’

  ‘He didn’t know me. Not at first.’ He allowed himself the ghost of a smile. ‘I’ve inverted myself. From the neck up. I used to have longish hair and sideburns, now I’ve got more hair on my chin than my head. And I wear contact lenses instead of Clark Kent glasses. And I had a Cyprus sun tan. He may have thought that there was a resemblance, but what you have to remember is that he wasn’t looking to find Malcolm Paterson. What he thought h
e’d found was an interesting older man who understood music.’

  ‘But he did find out who you really were?’

  ‘I told him. It was the whole point in me coming here.’

  ‘And he didn’t run a mile?’

  ‘Not when I told him about Wendy’s condition. What those bastards had done to her.’

  ‘He didn’t know?’

  ‘He said he didn’t. Maybe he just wanted to be able to pretend that he didn’t.’

  I nodded, letting him know that I was keeping up with the train so far. ‘What did you expect from him?’

  ‘It was more about hope. That he would back me up. Go to the police and corroborate the systematic abuse that McGuire and Tucker had inflicted on Wendy. And the other girls they messed up.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not that far. He sympathized, he was genuinely morally torn, but in the end his loyalty to his warped friends won out.’

  ‘So you activated Plan B?’

  ‘Plan B?’

  ‘Boon and Marta, aka Sophia.’

  His expression shifted back to doleful. ‘It backfired. We only intended to persuade Trevor that they were still capable of terrible things. Not that terrible things could really happen.’ He looked up at me. ‘Remember, we didn’t know then that they had actually killed that poor girl.’

  ‘What was meant to happen?’

  ‘Boon was meant to convince them that he was going to quit the Army that night. Sophia was the bait. She was going to offer to stay with McGuire and Tucker after they’d helped Boon on his way. I was going to pick up Boon in Aberystwyth, and then work on Trevor to persuade him that McGuire and Tucker were up to their old tricks again.’

  ‘You deliberately let Sophia go off alone into the night with them? Christ, man, you of all people should know what they’re capable of.’

  ‘Sophia’s tough. And Boon was going to be monitoring her.’ He looked up at me plaintively, a rasp in his voice. ‘But Boon never showed up in Aberystwyth. I don’t know what’s happened to either of them. I don’t know what they’ve done to them, and I don’t know what to do.’

  I let the silence expand for dramatic purpose before I shouted, ‘Bullshit!’

  It had the desired effect. He was so startled his bum almost lifted off the stairs.

  I leaned in close to his face. ‘There never was a Plan B.’

  He squirmed away from me, shaking his head, working on puzzled and injured.

  ‘Wendy was over sixteen. She was legal. They did terrible things, but there was no offence committed that could be proven, so there was nothing for Trevor to go to the police about. Not until you tried to con him into thinking that Boon had been disposed of, and that Marta had been abducted. Boon and Sophia were part of Plan A right from the start.’

  He shook his head more vigorously. ‘I told you … It’s all gone wrong … I don’t know what’s happened to them.’

  ‘Then why haven’t you come to us to report them missing?’ I answered for him: ‘Because you’re quite happy with the way things are panning out. You’ve hit the bonus with the discovery of poor old Colette. That was unexpected. But it serves to concentrate the mind even more on the still unaccounted for Boon and Marta.’

  He stared up at me. ‘God, you are a cold and unfeeling bastard, aren’t you?’

  I grinned. ‘Nice try, Malcolm. But I was there the night that Ken and Les came to get Sophia out of the Den. I saw their reaction when they realized that she wasn’t there. And who, I wonder, let her out? Because it wasn’t the Good Fucking Fairy, was it?’

  He studied me warily, trying to calculate where I was going with this.

  ‘Ken and Les will be put away for what they did to Colette. You’ve got your revenge to take back to Wendy. It’s time to call Boon and Sophia back into the fold.’

  He shook his head so slowly that I wasn’t sure whether he was refusing or still calculating.

  ‘And why did you need to bring Sally into this?’ I let him hear my real anger. ‘I couldn’t figure it out. She was frightened, she was in a cold and wild place. What would make her get out and leave her car?’ I held up the photograph of Rose Marie Ferguson again. ‘And then I made the connection. God, what would have gone through her mind when she saw you walking up out of the gloom? She probably thought she was hallucinating. What did it take to make you solid to her? A rap on the window? An old, familiar, cracked smile? Because you knew that she would have to respond. No matter how bitter, betrayed and damaged she felt, you still had Boon linking you. And Boon was in danger.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’ He said it quietly, head down, not looking at me.

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  Something in the air changed. I sensed the movement at the top of the stairs. Before I heard the voice.

  ‘What about her son?’

  19

  Boon Paterson looked down at me, smiling, amused by my surprise. He looked healthy. Dressed in tight black jeans and a grey, baggy sweatshirt.

  ‘Is Sophia up there?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s time for you both to come in. It’s time to stop this.’

  He came down the stairs, taking them slowly, rolling a sway into his steps. Even with the loose-fitting sweatshirt, I could tell that he was powerfully built. I hoped that this wasn’t going to turn into something that I was going to regret.

  ‘Soph isn’t here.’ The same studied swagger in his voice as in his gait.

  Malcolm got up to let him join us at the foot of the stairs. I had the height, but he was stacked with youth and energy. And no fear.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘That’s what you people are trying to find out in the woods.’ He laughed. ‘Along with poor busted-up old me. Isn’t that where everyone thinks we are? Chopped up and buried by those two sick fucks?’

  ‘We’ve got them for Colette, you don’t need to take this any further.’

  He shook his head. ‘It isn’t enough.’

  I realized then that he had brought his own agenda into this. He had embraced new histories and cultural possibilities and was now looking back on his past with venom. He was possessed of a confused rage that Malcolm had been able to channel.

  ‘They’ll deal it down to manslaughter,’ Malcolm protested.

  ‘We can’t charge them if we don’t find the bodies,’ I reasoned.

  ‘But you can fuck up the rest of their lives with the insinuation,’ Malcolm said gleefully.

  ‘If we’re never found, they’ll carry the blame around with them for ever.’

  I turned to Boon. ‘You can’t just disappear for ever.’

  He grinned. ‘Wanna bet? Believe me, people disappear all the time. I’ve taken advice from enough of them before I started this.’

  ‘I’ve seen you.’

  He scowled. ‘So?’

  ‘I now have a responsibility to take you in.’

  ‘The fuck you will,’ he growled. I saw the muscle cords in his neck tense.

  Malcolm eased in to keep us separated. ‘It’s okay, Boon, let him.’

  Boon and I looked at him, equally surprised.

  He smiled snidely. ‘If Boon goes in with you, he’s going to testify that he went to Ireland. He’s only just managed to make it back after he heard about poor Marta’s disappearance.’

  It took me a moment to see the path his game had taken. The bastard had just used Boon to check me. If I took Boon in as a live one, he would swear on oath that the last time he saw Marta she was going off in the company of Ken and Les. Off into the sunrise with demonstrable sexual deviants and killers. And she had never been seen since. We would have to redouble our efforts to find her. And I would know, but could not prove, that there was nothing to find.

  I realized then that there was another way out.

  ‘Okay,’ I played up my reluctance, defeat in my tone, ‘I’m going to walk away. I’m going to leave the doubt diluted.’

  Malcolm nodded. ‘Either
way, it works for us, Sergeant.’ He dug into a pocket and produced a small plastic case, and proffered it, trying not to grin too hugely. ‘There’s something on this that you might want to keep private.’

  It was a digital memory card. Far enough … It ratcheted into place. ‘Tony Griffiths’s truck? You took those photographs?’

  He nodded smugly.

  I pocketed the case. ‘Why me?’

  ‘You were the only one who took an interest.’

  ‘Where does Tony Griffiths fit into this?’

  ‘I used to score weed off of him in the old days,’ Boon answered. ‘He’s a useful, minor local outlaw.’

  I turned to Malcolm. ‘You paid him to deliver Marta. The rendezvous was a set-up. Boon was the only one in on it. He was the one who persuaded Ken and Les to come up with the fable of the Cardiff hooker. It had nothing to do with loyalty or friendship, he was trading in his girlfriend. He pimped Soph to them.’

  Malcolm put up a hand to quiet Boon’s angry reaction.

  I shook my head angrily. ‘She was the tethered goat. Jesus, you were playing it close to the wire. What if it had gone wrong?’

  ‘It didn’t go wrong. Boon was watching over her the whole time.’

  ‘You think we didn’t have safety checks in place?’ Boon snorted angrily. ‘We knew from Wendy exactly how the Den worked. How to get in and out. And Soph had a short-range pager, just in case she needed a panic button.’

  ‘But we knew that wasn’t ever going to be necessary,’ Malcolm expanded, ‘because Ken and Les were still in the soft, nurturing, gift-bearing stage of the grooming process. And they had to stay high-profile model citizens following their escapade.’ He grinned. ‘And now it’s going to haunt them for the rest of their lives.’

  I stared at him coldly for a moment, and then did my wondering right out loud. ‘How far would you have gone?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Reassure me, Malcolm.’

  He smiled at Boon before he replied. ‘We’ve killed no one, Sergeant Capaldi.’

  I let his self-satisfaction roll around us for a moment.

  ‘Yes you have.’

  Surprise kicked the smugness off his face.