Good People

by Ewart Hutton

‘You killed Trevor Vaughan.’

  ‘Whoa … Whoa … Whoa …’ He held up a hand and shook his head slowly and firmly, wanting to impress his words on to me before he spoke them. ‘Trevor Vaughan killed himself.’

  ‘He may have tied the rope, climbed that ladder, and launched himself off into the great by and by, but you were the motor that powered him.’

  He shook his head contemptuously.

  ‘All the way over here tonight, I’ve been trying to figure it out. Why you took the chance? Why you made contact with me, pretending you wanted to know about the funeral arrangements. My first thought was that it was because you were a risk junkie. You were getting off on the danger. It worked with your arrogance, your sense that you were in control of this thing.’

  He smiled patronizingly. ‘Whatever you think, Sergeant.’

  ‘There was probably an element of that. But essentially you wanted to feed me. You wanted to make sure that I was on the right track. What was it you told me? Something about his inner conflicts, the line between betrayal and duty? You just wanted to make sure that I was pointed in the right direction.’

  He flashed Boon a supercilious smile.

  ‘Because I was always part of this, wasn’t I?’

  He shook his head, not understanding.

  ‘You built me in. When it was just Emrys Hughes and Inspector Morgan, you didn’t have a hope in hell of anyone taking this seriously. But when you heard that I was in place, a new rogue kid on the block, suddenly it all became possible. Someone prepared to spit in the old guards’ faces.’ Another tumbler connected. ‘You impersonated the dispatcher. You told me where to find the minibus.’

  He grinned. ‘I was actually calling as a concerned citizen. It was you who mistook me for the dispatcher. I didn’t correct you. And we did get you there in the end,’ he observed with a smirk.

  ‘Did you flirt with him, Malcolm?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not going to dignify that with a reply.’

  ‘Trevor Vaughan was terrified of his sexuality. Is that the wire you played him out on?’

  ‘He knew I was Boon’s father.’

  ‘But, as you said, he also knew you as an interesting older man with an understanding of the finer things in life. Did you charm him with your urbanity? Did you weave the spell of a possibility, Malcolm? Knowing that Trevor couldn’t allow himself to fall for a man. Wouldn’t dare to; there was too much turmoil and self-loathing in that direction.’

  ‘We never intended that Trevor take his own life,’ Boon said, a note in his voice that sounded almost close to regret.

  ‘No, it may not have been your intention – but it still worked for you, didn’t it?’

  ‘And what was our intention?’ Malcolm challenged.

  ‘You already told me. You wanted to get him to turn informant, tell the world what Ken and Les were really like. He was good people, a cast-iron, solid citizen. He would be listened to. If he were to point the finger at them as sex fiends after Marta and Boon disappear, then it’s not too much of a connective leap for the world to make …’ I paused, looking at each of them in turn. ‘But he couldn’t do it, could he?’

  Malcolm shook his head. ‘He came very close.’

  ‘But he couldn’t take it as far as direct betrayal. Even with you threatening to expose him as a homosexual.’

  Boon shook his head angrily. ‘We wouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘I know. You couldn’t have – it would have meant revealing yourselves in order to do it. But he didn’t know that. He was a gentle, tortured bastard, who believed what people told him. That threat, and with it the betrayal of his first real sexual possibility, was enough to destroy him.’

  ‘I never let him believe that I was a sexual possibility,’ Malcolm protested.

  ‘You don’t know what you built him up to believe.’ I stared at him for a moment, wondering. ‘Or do you?’ I let that hang there. ‘You gave him Wendy’s panties. What was he supposed to tell us? That he had found these years ago, along with other evidence of Ken and Les’s behaviour? He had only kept quiet about it up until now to protect them?’

  I saw from the look that they exchanged that I was close to the mark.

  ‘You bastards drove him into that awful corner.’

  ‘You’re not entirely blameless yourself,’ Malcolm sneered. ‘You were hounding him too.’

  ‘Right, but I was floundering. I was after answers.’ I turned to Boon. ‘I thought that I was trying to save you and your fucking girlfriend. You were cold-bloodedly directing him, leaving him with no options.’ I shook my head disconsolately. ‘I can’t forgive you for that.’

  ‘Is that meant to be a threat?’ Malcolm asked.

  I suppressed my anger. I flashed them both one bitter last look before I walked out the door.

  I had to leave. I didn’t dare betray the fact that I was about to attempt to cut them off at the knees.

  Bryn called me to tell me that Sally had been found near Dinas, and that the search had been called off. I heard it in his voice that he was pleased to be passing this news on to me. I had been expecting it, but I managed to play it surprised and relieved. I still had an empty feeling, knowing that I was the only one among the good guys with the understanding that we were being directed. Sally was going to save us, but I had to wonder dismally how far she had been pulled into their game?

  I drove past her empty house, parked a little way down the street, and waited in the dark. I watched the complicated physics of amalgamating raindrops on the windscreen, and kept attempting to tuck Malcolm’s parting smile of triumph away for ever.

  She arrived in a squad car. A uniformed cop got out and opened the rear door for her, and I watched the mime as she declined an escort. They waited until she was inside. I waited until they had driven off.

  I didn’t use my key. I rang the doorbell. She opened the door with a half-prepared smile, expecting to find one of the cops who had driven her home. ‘Glyn …’ Her face collapsed with the complication of having to deal with my being there. She clutched me, and I felt her head on my cheek, straddling my shoulder. ‘Oh God, Glyn … I’m so sorry to have caused all this fuss.’ I returned the embrace. But I couldn’t hold back the uncharitable thought that she didn’t want me to see the mechanics at work as she struggled to find a place to pitch her control.

  We walked through to the kitchen, a silent double bundle of nervous smiles. I watched her take her coat off. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  She managed a chastened smile. ‘I feel very foolish.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, sitting down at the table.

  She shook her head, grimacing self-reproachfully. ‘I couldn’t get the car started. I know I should have stayed put, like you told me, but I was getting a bit scared. I felt I had to move. To do something. And you had told me not to drive. So I walked. It was only when a car stopped to see if I was all right that I realized that I had been going in completely the wrong direction.’ She experimented on taking her smile slightly out of chastened.

  She had rehearsed the story. And Bryn would have bought it. He probably didn’t believe it, but he would only have assumed that she was trying to cover up her lapse into fugue.

  I nodded understandingly. ‘It was Boon wasn’t it?’

  The smile that had started to grow slipped, and her mouth fell open. For a moment she thought seriously and hard about protesting, continuing the lie. Instead, she slumped. ‘Who saw me?’ It came out as a hard-drawn whisper.

  ‘No one. I worked it out. Although at first I thought it was Malcolm you saw up there.’

  ‘You know?’ She brought the knuckles of her right hand to her mouth.

  ‘I’ve seen them both.’

  She shook her head, her eyes wide. I felt so sorry for her. She had been through so much turmoil already tonight. But I couldn’t let up.

  ‘Was Soph with Boon when you saw him?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice as gentle as possible.

  ‘No.’ It came out a
s a choked whisper.

  ‘Did he say anything about her?’

  ‘Only that she’s okay. Waiting for him in a safe place.’

  ‘He didn’t say where that place was?’

  ‘No.’ She seemed close to tears. ‘I didn’t want to lie to you Glyn. But I didn’t think you knew. DCI Jones didn’t say anything.’

  ‘No one else knows, Sally.’

  She looked gaunt. ‘I only cared that Boon was all right.’

  ‘I know.’ I reached across and took her hand away from her mouth and held it. Stroking the back with my thumb. ‘You know that this is all about Wendy Evans getting her revenge.’

  ‘They did terrible things to her.’

  ‘I know, but that doesn’t excuse what they’ve done here. Or what they’ve done to you. What they’ve put you through, the way they’re using you.’

  She shook her head weakly. ‘They’re not using me for anything.’

  I let that ride for the moment. ‘Did Boon ever tell you that he and Soph had hooked up with Malcolm and Wendy in Cyprus?’

  ‘No.’ She screwed her eyes closed. She had already been through this pain once tonight.

  ‘Who is Boon doing it for, Sally? Who rates all this love and sacrifice? Malcolm or Wendy?’

  She closed her eyes again. ‘Please, Glyn – don’t.’

  She tried to pull her hand away, but I held on. ‘I’m not being deliberately cruel. I just want you to be aware how callous and calculating these people are. Where they’ve positioned you. Keeping you out of the loop until you were needed.’

  ‘Boon didn’t have to come back here to let me know that he was safe.’

  ‘Yes he did.’ I stood up, held her shoulders across the table, and made her face me to emphasize how seriously I wanted her to take this. ‘Sally, they knew that I was going to tell you. They had to get in there first. They didn’t know how much I knew, only that sooner or later I was going to be able to tell you that Boon was not in a hole in the ground somewhere in the forest. They were buying your silence so that this can go on playing itself out. This hunt for bodies that don’t exist, just to mire Ken and Les deeper in it. But it’s not a game, Sally. I don’t give a shit about Ken or Les, but I do care about what happened to Trevor Vaughan. And I care about our people wasting time, resources and worry on a bullshit investigation.’

  She looked away and shook her head hopelessly. ‘You could tell them.’

  ‘With what? I have no concrete evidence to back me up. Even if I go public about seeing Boon and Malcolm, that won’t count – I’m not an impartial witness. They’re relying on that, and now they’re relying on you to keep this vicious farce rolling. They’re playing you for a patsy. Don’t you see the awful irony of it? You are the one who is propping up Wendy’s sweet revenge.’

  ‘She deserves something for what they did to her,’ she said stubbornly.

  ‘She got your husband Sally. They got their life in the sun. You got Mid Wales and the night shift at the Sychnant Nursing Home. She now has the satisfaction of seeing Ken and Les going down for Colette Fletcher. That’s enough. She doesn’t need or deserve any more than that.’

  She dropped her head and sobbed. I felt my heart wrench. I walked round the table and pulled her close and wrapped myself around her, feeling the spasms of anguish racking her like physical jolts. ‘Oh God, Glyn, what am I going to do?’ She pulled her breathing together, shook her head, searching for the words. ‘My first reaction was total relief … Knowing that Boon was okay … Then he told me that I wouldn’t be able to see or contact him again until this was all forgotten. That could be years. Boon can never come back here.’

  I kissed the top of her head. ‘Bring him back to life, Sally.’ I gave it time for the worm of the thought to wriggle in before I whispered again. ‘If he isn’t dead, he doesn’t have to stay hidden.’

  She shook her head. ‘I promised,’ she blurted, not looking up.

  ‘Wendy and Malcolm have got enough out of this. You don’t need to bleed too.’

  ‘I don’t think I would ever want to be with Malcolm again,’ she announced quietly, as if she had only just surprised herself with the realization.

  I felt a small plug of latent anxiety vanish. ‘I’ll be here with you. I’ll help you. All you have to do is call DCI Jones and tell him that you’ve seen Boon. That he and the girl are okay.’

  She twisted her head round to look up at me. ‘It would be betraying a trust.’

  Yes, to a cheating bastard of an ex-husband, and a dumbfuck adopted son who cannot work within the normal extremes of loyalty and friendship. But I didn’t say it. ‘You’ll be freeing-up Boon’s life,’ I said instead. ‘He’ll thank you for it later, when whatever kind of a mission he feels he’s on has worked its way through his system.’

  I could see that she was tempted.

  ‘Do you want to go to bed?’ I whispered, trying to pitch the prospect of comfort rather than lust.

  ‘Yes please,’ she whispered back with a long sigh. ‘I would like nothing more than to close my eyes and curl up with you holding me, and forget all about this …’

  I sensed the ‘but’ poised, ready to intrude.

  ‘But I can’t forget about it. I’m sorry, Glyn, but I need the time alone to think things through. Try to think about what’s best for Boon –’

  ‘And what’s best for you,’ I interrupted.

  She smiled weakly. ‘And that too.’

  ‘If it helps with your thought process and decision making, I am unfettered and unencumbered. As a cop, I have to stay here. They’ll make sure that no one else will have me. But I don’t have to stay as a cop.’

  ‘Thanks, Glyn. That helps me.’ She reached down, took my hand and squeezed it, lifted it and kissed the back of my fingers. I knew that it was the signal to release her.

  I left happy.

  Shame that it wasn’t going to last.

  I went to sleep alone that night in my own bed with the conviction that Sally was going to come through. She would see sense and make that call to Bryn, and the bullshit investigation would be called off. And we could all, barring Ken and Les, live happily ever after.

  The morning brought a joyless film of wet snow that was already morphing to slush. The sky was the grey of weathered zinc, and the birds seemed to have abandoned the planet. When the phone rang, I got out of bed with the duvet wrapped round me to postpone the shock of the cold.

  ‘Glyn …’ Her voice was shaky.

  ‘How are you this morning?’ I asked solicitously.

  ‘We need to talk.’ I could hear the fatigue in her voice.

  I saw it in her eyes too when she opened her front door. And something more. Something hard and set below the pillow-mussed hair that she hadn’t bothered to brush.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, concerned, following her through to the kitchen.

  She spoke without turning. ‘There was an envelope in the hall when I came down early this morning. Someone must have put it through the letterbox.’ She wheeled round to look at me, no smile, her eyes deep-set and dark-rimmed from lack of sleep.

  ‘And … ?’ I felt something hard and heavy drop into my stomach.

  ‘Someone has sent me a photograph of you.’

  The bastards …

  I winced inwardly. I should have realized what they were capable of and prepared for this. They must have made copies of the images on the memory card before they had given it to me.

  ‘It’s a fake, Sally.’

  ‘It looked real enough to me.’

  ‘It was a simulation. Malcolm and Boon set it up.’

  ‘Stop blaming my son for everything,’ she snapped angrily, simultaneously lifting a magazine off the table to reveal the photograph that was lying there, face-up.

  Oh fuck …

  I closed my eyes and prayed that when I opened them again the world would have been reinvented as a kinder place.

  It didn’t work. The photograph was still there. It was a bad shot. It was a terr
ible shot. Dark and fuzzy, taken from outside without a flash, reliant on the low level of ambient light in the kitchen. But the grainy image only served to make the scene more intimate.

  There I was, leaning over Sheila McGuire, head bent coming down into a kiss. No caption saying that this was a pure act of consolation. No way of telling that the trajectory was only aimed at her cheek. And, more damning than that, in the lost shadows it would have been easy to make the mistake of thinking that I had one hand down cupping her breast.

  ‘This wasn’t the picture I meant …’ I stammered without thinking.

  She shuddered. ‘I don’t want to know about any more.’

  ‘Sally, I can explain …’ I pleaded.

  And then, just at the high point of the very worst time it could ever happen, my phone rang. Sally stared at me impassively. I checked caller ID: Bryn Jones. I knew instinctively that I had to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, turning my back on her.

  ‘Glyn, something’s come up, we need you to get up into the forest.’

  I cupped the phone in my hand and turned to Sally. ‘It’s DCI Jones, will you speak to him?’ I entreated.

  She shook her head. And all the despair and the finality of it hit me then. They were going to win.

  ‘Glyn, are you there?’ Bryn was shouting.

  ‘Sorry, sir …’ I stared at Sally, letting her see my anguish under the semblance of the normal tone that I was keeping up for Bryn, ‘What’s so important up in the forest?’

  ‘We’ve had a call. A male, wouldn’t give his name, but he thinks that he might have witnessed something suspicious that night near the hut.’

  ‘Probably a crank, sir.’ I felt my stomach tighten even more as I realized that they had just ratcheted the game to another level.

  ‘He said he saw a group of men digging. We can’t ignore it, Glyn. You know your way around that place; get up there and wait for us to arrive with the search team and the dogs.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I shut down the phone. I looked at Sally across the room. She looked back at me. ‘I was trying to give Sheila McGuire some comfort, Sally.’

  ‘Good for you, Glyn,’ she said, deadpan.

  I pointed to the table. ‘Think who benefits from that picture.’ I looked at her despairingly. ‘Please, Sally …’