Dead People

by Ewart Hutton

  ‘We don’t want or need your kind around here.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  David looked at me speculatively as I went back to the bar. ‘Trouble?’

  ‘I’ve just upset the local mullah.’

  I took a drink of my beer. Should I go back up to the site and make my own night vigil? No. Morgan had been right. Different rules applied here. And all I had ever really been doing was punishing Hughes and Friel.

  And I didn’t regret it.

  I did make a concession, though. I got myself up early in the morning, while it was still dark. There was no moon, the night was anvil black, the sound of the river kept up its own incessant dynamic, and an owl hooted, flitting from location to location like a trickster.

  I drove over the wooden-plank bridge out of Hen Felin Caravan Park. Jack Galbraith had forced me to live in Dinas, and I had chosen to stay in a caravan. Unit 13, to be precise. I needed the sense of impermanence, putting up with the cold, the mould spores and the intermittent electrical and water supplies, the very discomfort comforting me with the knowledge that this surely couldn’t last.

  This time, even in the dark, driving up the valley to the wind-farm site, I felt that I knew it better. Last night, when I had got home from The Fleece, I had studied the OS map and the electoral register. I had a loose fix on where people lived. There weren’t that many of them.

  It had been cold at the caravan, but it was even colder at the construction site. Higher, and more exposed to the raw wind that was whipping in from the northwest, but keeping the clouds moving too fast to rain. For the moment.

  The morning was showing itself as a weak aura against the ridge above the site. But the watchman was on the ball. He was out of his caravan with a torch before I had shut the car door behind me.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi,’ I introduced myself.

  He checked my warrant card under his torch beam before he looked up. ‘Hi, I’m Donnie Raikes, I take care of security here.’ He shook my hand firmly. He was shorter than me, but built better, and the light from the hut’s open door caught the gleam of two ring piercings in his right eyebrow.

  ‘All quiet?’

  ‘Nothing’s fucking happened here since the glaciers melted,’ he replied with a yawn. A Northern accent, Yorkshire, I thought.

  ‘We’ve got a dead body,’ I reminded him.

  ‘I saw it. It looks like something the glacier dumped.’

  ‘It’s probably a bit more recent than that.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’ll be a long-lost hiker, then. Nothing more dramatic. Take my word for it, mysterious shit doesn’t happen in places like this.’

  I nodded, acknowledging his wisdom, and looked round. Objects were beginning to take form. Machines, huts and the folds of the hills. ‘Where’s Jeff Talbot?’ I asked.

  ‘Asleep in his caravan.’

  ‘Alone?’

  Donnie grinned. ‘Don’t worry, we haven’t gone native yet, we haven’t resorted to the sheep.’

  I smiled dutifully at the tired old stereotype. I knew it was irrational, but the information soothed me. That Jeff wasn’t with Tessa MacLean.

  I waited it out in the site hut, drinking strong tea dotted with atolls of powdered milk, until the SOCO team arrived. The light was establishing itself now, but it was still early, and from the way they bitched about the cold as we backed ourselves into the wind to don our sterile suits I knew that they were letting me know that they had had an even earlier start than me.

  They looked even more miserable when I showed them the site.

  ‘Is it any better preserved under there?’ the leader asked me, bobbing her head at the tarpaulin.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Where are we supposed to start?’ she asked despairingly. ‘There’s no surface left.’

  I sidled away from her anguish, leaving them to unroll the tarpaulin and start erecting the tented canopy, while I went to greet a new car that had just driven up.

  Bill Atkins, the forensic pathologist, was a dour old guy in his late fifties, who I had worked with before in Cardiff. His eyes flickered in recognition, but he made no comment. The forensic anthropologist, who introduced herself as Sheila Goddard, was younger and carried herself around in a bubble of enthusiasm, which even encompassed the wildness of the countryside. I could see, as we walked up the hill, that Bill Atkins was not sharing this.

  I hovered behind them while they crouched over the remains. Whispering to each other. Exchanging observations.

  Bill was the first to turn round to me. ‘I hope you’re not expecting anything too dramatic from the in-situ inspection.’

  ‘What will you be able to tell us?’

  ‘Bugger all.’ He shook his head and turned back to the remains. ‘Nothing on cause, or duration of interment, until we get it dug up and back to the lab. Unless we get lucky and find a bullet, or a knife, or an obvious trauma event.’

  ‘What about age and gender?’ I prompted.

  He looked at Sheila, who shrugged happily. ‘Maybe,’ he answered for both of them. ‘We wait to see what’s uncovered, but the age is only going to be broad-spectrum.’

  I thought of Evie. ‘Could this be a young woman? Buried two years ago?’

  ‘I think the pelvic structure’s male,’ Sheila offered.

  Bill pursed his lips. ‘This soil could prove to be extremely corrosive, advance the deterioration. But . . .’ He tapped the ribcage with a stainless-steel spatula. ‘The patina and the pitting would make me think it has been in the ground for a lot longer.’

  I wafted off a silent thanks to the angel who looked after my hunch skills. ‘It’s a possibility that the skull and the missing hand were accidentally dislodged by the excavator,’ I offered.

  Sheila shook her head. ‘No,’ she said cheerfully, beckoning me down beside her, ‘not possible. See here . . .?’ She used her own spatula to indicate the points where the skull and the hand were missing. ‘There are definite indications of mechanical severance in both cases. And notice that the wounds have exactly the same surface encrustation and patination as the surrounding bone. If the separation had been recent I would expect to see a cleaner bone surface at the junction.’

  I should have noticed that. The rocks that had been touched by the digger had shown brighter scores where they had been scraped. The same thing would have happened to bone, the surface crud would have been removed.

  ‘So their removal was contemporary with the interment?’ I asked.

  ‘Or before.’

  Which meant that we were probably not going to find a hand on the end of the other arm that was currently under the skeleton.

  So why remove them? The obvious answer was to eliminate the means of identification. The skull, if the teeth were intact, could yield dental records, or even facial reconstruction. But skeletal hands? Whoever had buried the body had not wanted to take the risk that it wouldn’t be discovered before decomposition had taken the fingerprints.

  I stood up slowly. Black magic? There was also a possible ritual explanation that couldn’t be discounted.

  I looked around me, screwing my eyes against the wind. Trying to see it. A featureless spot on an empty hill. What gave this place its significance?

  Back down in the valley I chose Cogfryn Farm as my first port of call, on the scientific principle that it looked neat, cosy, and the dogs were shut away. It was also not in the Badger Face Welsh Mountain sheep-flock book.

  I left the professionals up on the hill painstakingly excavating the skeleton. I had no authorization to start an official investigation, but I reckoned no harm could come from putting out preliminary feelers. Get the taste of local reaction.

  Cogfryn was a low, two-storey stone farmhouse, with an attached stone barn, both recently whitewashed.

  ‘Mrs Jones?’

  The woman who answered the door didn’t seem surprised that I knew her name. She was small, with her hair tied back in a bun, wearing an apron, and was as neat as her house. I showed her my
warrant card and introduced myself.

  ‘You’ll be here about that body they’ve found up Cwm Cesty Nant, I expect?’

  ‘You’ve heard?’

  She looked at me incredulously.

  I laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I forget how quickly news travels around here.’

  ‘My husband’s busy with the lambing, but you’re welcome to come in.’

  ‘I’d be grateful.’

  She opened the door and stepped back to let me through. ‘Watch you don’t trip over the suitcase,’ she warned as I followed her down the hall and skirted a red and well-travelled case, which looked cosmopolitan and incongruous in this rustic setting. ‘It’s my son’s,’ she explained, as if reading my thoughts.

  ‘This is Owen, my son, and his friend Greg Thomas.’ She introduced me to the two men who were sitting at the scrubbed pine table in the kitchen with mugs of tea and a depleted plate of chocolate digestive biscuits in front of them.

  Owen Jones had a stocky build, close-cropped hair and a bright smile, but what immediately struck me was his deep suntan, which looked so out of place in these parts, especially at this time of the year, when the rest of us had complexions that made us look like we had just crawled out from the under the boulder where we had spent our winter.

  I put Greg Thomas in his forties, the same sort of age as Owen. Lean and fit in a sweatshirt and sweatpants. His brown hair was also shorn, and his face was weathered and tight. As I nodded at him I saw how alert and attentive his brown eyes were.

  ‘That’s quite a shock for Dinas,’ Owen commented when his mother announced the purpose of my visit.

  ‘It’s a dreadful thing.’ Mrs Jones tutted in concurrence.

  ‘Any idea who you’ve found?’ Owen asked. I was aware of Greg watching me closely.

  ‘Not yet, we’re working on it.’

  ‘Owen, it’s time to make a move,’ Greg announced.

  Owen laughed. ‘Just when things are getting interesting around here for the first time ever.’

  ‘Owen!’ his mother rebuked, but there was proud amusement in her tone. I watched the sadness cross her face as her son and Greg got up.

  He nodded at me apologetically. ‘Don’t mean to be rude, Sergeant, but we’ve got to go. Greg’s driving me to Birmingham airport.’

  ‘Going anywhere nice?’

  He smiled. ‘Not really. Not unless you’re into heat, mosquitoes and oil-rig spotting. I’m catching a plane to Lagos from Heathrow. I work in oil-field security,’ he elaborated.

  I was left in the kitchen on my own as his mother went to see him off. So that explained the suntan. I also realized that his friend Greg Thomas had not said a word to me.

  The wait gave me the opportunity to take in the room. It was shabbily immaculate, a space that retained the memory of baked scones and jam-making and damp socks drying. It was an art director’s dream of a certain rural package, from the faded Royal Worcester plates on the dresser and the vintage Rayburn cooker, down to the framed photograph of a couple of gawky-looking kids on a crocheted runner on top of a sideboard.

  Mrs Jones returned, wiping the tears from her eyes with the bunched-up corner of her apron. It was such a private and homely gesture that it brought a lump to my throat.

  ‘He doesn’t talk about it, but I know that he has to protect all those people from some very bad things that can happen out there,’ she said, explaining her lapse, and sitting down.

  ‘I’m sure he can take care of himself.’

  She nodded absently, her mind still far off in siege and hostage situations.

  ‘Does your daughter live away as well?’ I asked, nodding at the photograph, to divert her from her immediate melancholy.

  She surfaced again and looked at the photograph, a dim, wry smile forming and crinkling the lines in the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m afraid poor Rose is no longer with us.’ I winced internally at my gaffe, but she was already moving on. ‘It was a long time ago now. Things heal.’ And I saw in her expression that gleam that I had seen so often in people caught up in the excitement of terrible events that they had never expected to experience, even on the edge of their quiet lives. She shook her head wonderingly. ‘It’s a terrible thing that’s happened up there, finding that murdered body.’ She gave me a piercing look. ‘If that’s what it really is.’

  ‘What do you mean by that Mrs Jones?’

  She lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘I’ve heard talk that it could have been the work of the wind-farm protestors. You know, if they could make it look like an ancient burial place, like the other one they’ve found farther up the hill, they wouldn’t be allowed to carry on with the construction.’

  I nodded, ‘Interesting,’ and wrote it down in my notebook. But it was an unlikely scenario. Wind-farm protestors were, on the whole, middle class, and the closest they got to civil disobedience was shaking their walking poles in the air. And even if Jeff Talbot, a civil engineer by training, had been mistaken about the ground being undisturbed, where would a bunch like that have got hold of an appropriate corpse?

  But, for the moment, without anything more concrete to work on, I was happy to entertain crackpot theories.

  ‘You must know everyone in these parts?’ I asked.

  A slyly humorous smile spread across her face. She was astute. By my reaction to the protesters theory she had concluded that the body we had found was the real thing. ‘You want me to tell you who I think might be bad enough to do something like this?’

  ‘I’m always interested in local knowledge.’

  ‘And this is private?’ she asked warily, but I could hear the thrill in her voice.

  ‘Strictly between you and me.’

  ‘Gerald Evans, Pentre Fawr. I’ll say no more than that.’ She sat upright, looking quickly around to make sure that the walls weren’t going to betray her. But she wasn’t finished. She leaned forward. ‘And Mr Gilbert at Cae Rhedyn. The man who messes up the river with his so-called gold mine.’

  The Gold Mine Man. I remembered him. That’s what Sandra Williams had called him when she pointed him out to me one day in Dinas. On the other side of the road, head down, scurrying, carrying a ragged canvas shopping bag. And dressed in what looked like a grey school blazer with a scorch mark on the left sleeve. It was a cold day, but he was wearing shorts, fat grey socks collapsed around the ankles of his stick legs, his knees protruding like the knob on the end of a shillelagh.

  She saw me to the door. I sensed a reluctance to release me. ‘Is there anything more?’

  ‘It’s what my husband said about it, but I think it’s a bit silly.’

  ‘Go on,’ I prompted.

  ‘It’s about the planes that fly over, the big slow ones, not the small ones that fly too fast and make such an awful noise.’

  ‘The Hercules?’

  ‘Maybe–’ she shook her head dismissively, the ability to name planes was boys’ stuff – ‘but they used to say that sometimes they dropped bodies.’

  ‘Why did they say that?’

  ‘They said that they dropped dead bodies to see what happened to them. They were trying to see if there was any safe way that soldiers could jump from planes without parachutes.’

  ‘I’ll look into that, Mrs Jones.’ I was only partially humouring her. It sounded like one of the half-crazed ideas that Special Forces might actually contemplate. I put ‘M’ in brackets beside the note. Something Mackay could help me out with later.

  Mackay and I went back a long way. We were tenuously related, his family having a connection with the Scottish branch of the Capaldi family. We had shared a reckless adolescence before he joined the army and ended up in the SAS. Our relationship had been troubled after that, and had hit a real low when he took up with my ex-wife, Gina. Since then he too had been dumped by her, and we had now returned to our old close conjunction, but with the former wildness hopefully burned-out.

  I left Cogfryn and drove down towards the main road instead of turning back to the wind-farm site. It would
be useful to get a feel for the valley in daylight.

  Just before the junction I pulled in beside a sign I had missed when I had driven the road in the dark: PEN TWYN BARN GALLERY. The driveway had been newly surfaced in tarmac, and led to a large circular parking area in front of a refurbished and freshly limewashed stone barn. Just up the rise from the barn was the house, also restored, and with a tasteful, contemporary, glazed rear extension. Money had been spent on both the buildings. They were also both equally shut up. I made a note of them. Pen Tywn had not featured in the electoral roll.

  On the way back I turned off the road at the signpost for the by-way, an old drove track that wound up to the ridgeway. I had checked it out on the OS map, and was pretty sure that it would lead to Tessa MacLean’s dig site.

  And discovered a bonus. This particular spot possessed a mobile-phone signal, a rare attribute in these parts. I decided to put that call through to Mackay.

  ‘Glyn, how are you?’ The reception was fuzzy. But that was par for the course when calling Mackay. He had retired from the SAS, but the background chatter on his line made you think of wind in a high desert and an old truck’s engine being nurtured with an oil can to keep the mobile phone’s batteries charged. Perhaps the regiment gave them a filter to put on their phone when they retired, just so they would be forever reminded of the good old days.

  ‘Mac, here’s a bizarre one for you.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Did you ever come across talk of an experiment that had the military dropping dead bodies from planes at low altitudes to assess if there was a possibility that live soldiers would be able to handle the jump?’

  He was silent.

  ‘Mac?’

  ‘Sorry, Glyn, I can’t say.’

  Can’t or won’t? I had learned over the years not to press him on these things. ‘Okay, let’s try another tack. Hypothetically, could such a thing ever have happened in this country?’

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘A body on a remote hillside. It looks like there’s been identity erasure.’

  ‘It’s not the military. All detritus would have been cleared up. Mislaid body parts are not good PR.’