Dead People

by Ewart Hutton

  I had been treated for superficial cuts and abrasions, and was under observation for possible concussion. They also found and treated a nasty contusion on my left ankle. Consistent, they reassured me, with having run into an exposed tree root in the dark. Fine, I didn’t argue, it kept them happy to keep cause and effect in cosmic balance. But I had no recollection of seeing any trees on that sector of the hill.

  Jeff came back into see me after they’d patched me up. ‘You can tell me what happened up there now,’ I said.

  ‘How much of it did you miss?’

  ‘Your puncture? Was it rigged?’

  ‘A piece of two by four on the track studded with nails. I thought one of the crew had got careless.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t thinking. That’s why I called Donnie over. Leaving the camp open. We were even taking the time to change the tyre, for Christ’s sake,’ he remonstrated against himself.

  ‘What did he get?’

  ‘The hydraulic lines on the other diggers.’

  The drugs they had given me kicked in. Jeff went into soft focus. I tried to blink him back, but I had forgotten what went where, gave up, and joined the undead.

  I came to in the muzzy, grey, artificial twilight that passed for darkness in the ward. Jeff had gone and my head hurt.

  I forced myself not to drift off again. I tried to concentrate on taking myself back to that moment before I had found myself launched off the hillside. Had someone turned up beside me? Or could it have been a tree? But my memory didn’t want to play.

  Because there was something else nagging.

  I shifted tack. I brought back the picture of Donnie rigging up his lights. What was wrong with that image? What jarred with the information that Jeff had given me?

  The hydraulic lines on the other diggers . . .

  That line of machinery had not been task dedicated. The diggers had been mixed in at random with bulldozers, self-propelled rollers and dumper trucks of assorted sizes. So why had he been selective? His time must have been scary and limited. If you were just trying to screw with the system why not go down the line taking stuff out as you come to it?

  Why complicate it by just targeting the diggers?

  Because the diggers were important.

  Get back to basics. What do mechanical diggers do?

  Diggers dig.

  I felt the tickle in my kidneys, and my stomach lurching southwards.

  They wanted to stop us digging up something else on that site.

  Six o’clock in the morning. I groped in the bedside drawer. Keys, coins and wallet, but no mobile phone. Then I had a vague memory now of Jeff taking it from me when we had driven here. Why had he taken it? Why hadn’t he given it back?

  I dressed quietly. It was a bit ironic, I reflected – I had bullied and wheedled to get to stay here, and now I was doing a runner. The porter on the front desk eyed me curiously as I approached down the corridor.

  ‘Have you been discharged?’ he asked.

  I flashed my warrant card. ‘I’m discharging myself.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ He shrugged and heaved himself up reluctantly to unlock the front door.

  ‘How do I get some transport around here?’

  He looked at me like I had just awakened from a coma. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Isn’t there an ambulance?’

  He grinned maliciously. ‘If you’re discharging yourself you must be better. You don’t need an ambulance.’

  ‘Ambulances take cured people home too,’ I countered.

  His grin widened, and he shook his head. ‘Not at this time in the morning.’

  It was frustrating. There was no one around to appreciate the urgency of the situation. There was no one around, period. I was a cop on a mission, but the place was dead, there wasn’t even a milk float to commandeer. And it was cold. It was that grey, miserable hour of the morning that you know you were never meant to belong in.

  And what was I going to do when I eventually got up there? All the diggers had been put out of commission. But that was the least of my worries. I was deliberately ignoring the fact that I was soon going to have to stare at a whole fucking hillside, with no idea where to begin searching.

  The hospital was way outside of town. A drear, dark-stone Victorian building that had once been a refuge for fallen women. I started walking. It was too early to wake David Williams up, but I had already figured that I could hot-wire the old Land Rover that he kept parked and unlocked in the rear yard of The Fleece.

  It kept churning over in my mind. What else were we going to find? Could the missing head and hands be buried elsewhere on the site? I was so wrapped up in speculation that I almost didn’t hear the approaching vehicle.

  And it was a big one. I stepped out into the road with my warrant card in my outstretched arm, waving him down.

  ‘Have you escaped?’ the driver asked, pulling up, a short cheery guy with red hair and a thick forearm perched on the open-window ledge.

  It took me a moment to realize that he’d made the link between the dressing on my head and the hospital. ‘No,’ I said reassuringly, ‘I’m a policeman, I desperately need to get somewhere where I can organize some transport.’

  He looked slightly disappointed that I wasn’t an injured loony on the lam. ‘So where to?’ he asked, shifting noisily into gear as I climbed up into the cab.

  I explained about the wind-farm site, but said that I would be happy to be dropped off in the centre of Dinas.

  ‘No worries, I’ll take you up there,’ he said chirpily, introducing himself as Jim. ‘We can pretend it’s a car chase,’ he added with a grin.

  He explained that he worked for the local animal-feed mill and delivered to all the farms in the area.

  ‘Anything unusual about the farms down the wind-farm valley?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re looking for someone for that body you’ve found up there, aren’t you?’ he conjectured happily, jumping slightly out of his seat to notch the truck into a recalcitrant gear.

  ‘Background only. My own interest.’

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘There’s not that many left that are still farms. Pen Tywn has been turned into some kind of fancy shop that’s hardly ever open. Then Fron Heulog Farm, which is now the activity centre.’

  ‘What kind of activity?’ I asked.

  ‘A bunch of Brummies bought the place. They take in gang members from the city. It’s supposed to help them see the error of their ways. They get to come out here on a break from thieving cars. Using our tax money to give them a holiday because the deprived bastards have never seen a sheep.’

  I made a mental note of Fron Heulog. It contained the elements of Jack Galbraith’s suggested city connection.

  ‘It’s Cae Rhedyn after that?’ I prompted.

  ‘That’s right. Crazy Bruno with his so-called gold mine.’

  ‘I’ve been there.’

  He glanced over to see if I was going to expand on Crazy Bruno before he continued. ‘Then there’s the Joneses at Cogfryn.’

  ‘I’ve been there too.’

  ‘Tidy farmers. Up from them there’s The Waen. Old Ivor Richards, who’s let most of his land out to the Joneses and the Pritchards, who farm Tan-yr-Allt at the head of the valley.’ He nodded to himself, working his way up an imaginary map.

  ‘Who around here, in your opinion, isn’t a tidy farmer?’

  ‘Ivor Richards, but it’s the poor old bugger’s age. He’s lost it.’

  ‘What about farmers outside the valley?’

  He glanced over at me, a shrewd look on his face. After a moment he nodded. ‘You want me to tell you about Gerald Evans, don’t you?’

  ‘Why would I want you to do that?’

  He smiled knowingly. ‘Because he’s the bastard that everyone around here would like to see toasted.’

  ‘Does he deserve it?’

  ‘They say he tried to buy in infected sheep during the foot-and-mouth. To get the compensation.’

  �
��I’ve heard that rumour about a lot of farmers.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s the sort of bastard who would have really done it.’

  Gerald Evans was getting more and more interesting.

  We turned off the main road into the valley. As we passed the Pen Tywn Barn Gallery I thought I caught a glimpse of a yellow car parked up by the house. ‘When does the gallery open?’ I asked Jim.

  ‘God knows. They’re not like a regular shop, its all posh and expensive, nothing in there for any local to buy. They seem to turn up when it suits them.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Two women. They say they’re from Cheshire. Somewhere posh anyway.’

  Cheshire worked as a generic location for people who were rich enough to escape from Manchester or Liverpool. I craned round to get a last look at the place. My quick reconnoitre yesterday had told me that they had spent money on it. But why the hell would anyone with any sort of business acumen open an up-market joint in a place like this? A dead-end valley from which even the glacier had packed up and left.

  I glanced down the drive to Cogfryn Farm as we went past. Fantasizing the sort of breakfast Mrs Jones could probably conjure up.

  ‘Stop here!’ I yelled to Jim, as the image I had just seen resolved itself onto my consciousness, erasing the vision of bacon.

  I walked up the driveway to the farm. The dogs started barking, bringing a man out of the lambing shed. He was tough-skinny, weathered, and wore an old flat cap at an angle that had probably never changed over the last thirty-five years.

  ‘Mr Jones?’ I called out as I approached.

  He nodded warily, taking in the dressing on my head, but making an adjustment in his expression for the fact that I knew his name.

  I held out my warrant card. ‘Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi, I met your wife yesterday.’

  He held up his forearms, showing me the uterine gloop and iodine on them to let me know that we wouldn’t be shaking hands. ‘She mentioned it. So what can we do for you this early in the morning?’

  ‘I’d like to borrow that, if I could,’ I said, nodding in its direction.

  He looked puzzled. ‘Borrow what?’

  ‘That.’ I pointed this time. ‘The tractor.’

  He flashed me an anxious look.

  ‘It’s for official business,’ I explained reassuringly.

  ‘That’s an old bugger, we just use it as a yard scraper. We can spare you a newer one if you need a tractor.’

  We walked up to the tractor. It was old and grey and had a metal seat covered with dusty sacking. But it was the hydraulic attachment with the wide bucket at the front that had caught my attention.

  ‘This is exactly what I need,’ I said, tapping the bucket with my foot.

  He looked at me dubiously. ‘Would you know how to use that?’

  ‘No.’ I smiled at him. ‘But I think I know a man who would.’

  Driving the tractor was like perching on top of a giant crab with a grudge. It buckled and scuttled and slewed up the track, while I bounced up and down on the metal seat that acted on my backside like a solid trampoline.

  And it made a big, unhappy noise. So much so, that by the time I rounded the last bend, Jeff and Donnie were outside the huts watching anxiously for whatever was coming their way. And their faces didn’t exactly break out into great big smiles of relief when they saw that it was only me.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ Donnie yelled.

  I killed the engine. It protested with smoke, and fluttered out. ‘It’s a digger,’ I informed him.

  Jeff shook his head sagely. ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘How far have you come on this?’ Donnie asked.

  ‘Only up from the valley.’

  They shared a glance, and then, in unison, turned to look up at me with overelaborate smiles. ‘You should have called,’ Jeff said soothingly, ‘I would have come and collected you.’

  ‘I didn’t have a phone, Jeff. You took it with you.’

  He looked at me, puzzled. ‘You asked me to. Said that you wouldn’t be able to use it in hospital and asked me to look after it for you. It’s up there in the office.’ He looked at me appraisingly. ‘Are you sure they said it was okay to leave?’

  The memory lapse was worrying. But now I understood Jeff and Donnie’s reaction. Imagining the picture I presented, with a big dressing stuck on one side of my head, and lurching up the hill on an old tractor that I evidently couldn’t control. They probably thought that my mental faculties were still back there in the hospital, sedated and resting in a locker.

  ‘Jeff, honestly, I’m okay, but I do need your help.’ I explained my theory. That the diggers had been sabotaged to prevent us from using them to uncover the missing skull and hands.

  It was Donnie who saw the obvious flaw. ‘The site’s been closed down, so why go to the bother?’

  ‘Because Jeff here might just take it on himself to sneak in a bit more work while we’re not looking.’

  Jeff flushed guiltily. ‘But what do they get out of the spoiling tactics? At best it’s only a temporary respite.’

  I had already thought this one through. ‘Desperate measures probably, but they might be hoping for an opportunity to get in here and recover them. Remember, they know where they’re buried, they just need a pickaxe and shovel.’

  Jeff looked up at the line of stationary plant. ‘We haven’t got a digger, and we don’t know where to look.’

  ‘I’ve just brought you one.’

  He laughed, but I noticed him looking at the tractor again. As I had hoped, the engineer in him was rolling up its sleeves, and nudging the sceptic out of the light.

  ‘I suppose . . .’ He walked round to the front of the tractor, dropped to his knees and squinted. ‘It’s a bit crude, but it could work in a fairly primitive way. As long as we didn’t encounter rock.’ He looked up at me, something new crossing his mind. ‘Is this official?’

  I looked back at him for a moment. Gauging. How stuck on rules was Jeff? ‘What else have you got to do?’

  He laughed. It was the answer I wanted. He faced the hill. ‘But where the hell do we start?’

  I followed his gaze. The hillside, still mostly in shade, rolled up massively in front of us. This was the nightmare I had avoided envisaging back at the hospital. But now I had had a little more time to think it through. ‘You start where you would have if you were carrying on with the job.’

  ‘The roadway?’

  ‘We have to be close. Something rattled them into action.’

  He shook his head. ‘The shale level’s rising that way.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘No, it’s good. Good for us,’ he corrected himself. ‘It means that we can get a firm base down without having to go too deep. But it’s bad for you.’

  By which he meant that it was not ripe grave-digging strata.

  ‘What about over there?’ I pointed to where a large rectangle had been pegged out where the ground sloped away from us. It was dotted with tussocks. The grass, reed and heather cover was charred. There had been a fire over this area. ‘Is that deeper soil?’

  He nodded cautiously. ‘Probably. That’s the next turbine base to be excavated. But it doesn’t fit in with your theory.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The roadway access to this turbine goes round the top.’ He described an arc in the air with his finger.

  His deflation was catching. I felt my energy levels sag. Then I looked down at the pegged-out area again without a civil-engineer’s hat on. ‘They wouldn’t know that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t know what?’

  ‘That you wouldn’t excavate until you had the roadway in above it.’

  I ran down to walk the perimeter of the base while Jeff brought the tractor over. I looked at it again, trying to see it the way a guy who was already pissed off with digging would see it. A guy with a bag over his shoulder, the hefted weight of a human head and a pair of hands in it.

  I looked behind me and got a fix on the tent
that covered the grave. Taking a straight-line bearing on it I walked slowly away. I stopped when the ground began to rise. I tried to get into the guy’s mind. You’ve already dug one big hole, you’re weary, so does your mind work some sort of psychological delusion on you? If you started going up a slope, does it tell you that the hole you’re going to dig would have to be deeper?

  I waved Jeff over. ‘Start here,’ I yelled.

  I watched the blade of the bucket slide in easily. The ground was soft. Jeff started to carefully peel the top layer off. I waved for him to stop.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he shouted.

  ‘We haven’t got the time for precision. We may have a lot of ground to cover. Just scoop the stuff up and dump it for me to go through with the spade. Hopefully, if there is something in there it’ll come up clean in the bucket.’

  ‘Aren’t you meant to do this systematically and scientifically?’ he asked, looking concerned.

  ‘I’ll take the risk.’ I said.

  After all, I thought, as I sifted through the second pile of spoil that Jeff had dumped beside me, if you accidentally break a couple of fingers off, or crack a skull, there’s bound to be systems in place for rectifying things. The vital thing was to locate them. Weld in another link.

  I had my back to the tractor. It took me a beat to realize that something had changed.

  Silence.

  I turned around. The front attachment of the tractor was raised. Poised in front of me. There, minus its head, minus its hands, minus its legs, perched upright in the tractor’s bucket, like it was sitting on a designer fucking sofa, was a rotting, naked torso.

  5

  The stink hit us with the olfactory equivalent of a water canon. Jeff vomited over the side of the tractor. I cupped my hand over my mouth and nose, checked my gagging reaction, and forced myself to look, distracting myself from the ghastliness by trying to remember the stages of decomposition a forensic scientist I had once dated had taught me.