Dead People

by Ewart Hutton

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ I looked over at Fletcher and was happy to see that he was not sharing my joy.

  A reprieve. I was back in the saddle. Okay, I was only meant to be an outrider who had been left behind to try to round up stray facts in the dust of the main operation. But that didn’t worry me. As far as I was concerned, I was the one at the sharp end, it was the main operation that was drifting off into the tumbleweed.

  And the first thing I had to clear up was Evie’s employment record at the Barn Gallery. Because either her father had been mistaken, or someone had been lying. And the timeframe for that lie involved a crucial stage in her development: the period leading up to her decision to abandon home.

  I walked out through the bar. David was restocking the spirit-optics gantry. The sight of it brought me up short. I had made a fundamental oversight. The autopsy had reported that Bruno had a high volume of alcohol in his bloodstream. I hadn’t questioned it because I had seen the bottle under the table at the scene. And because it appears to be a well-documented fact that getting plastered smoothes out the path to self-destruction.

  But I had been forgetting my premise. If Bruno hadn’t committed suicide he wouldn’t have drunk that whisky voluntarily.

  Did he even drink? Had he been force-fed the stuff to reinforce the myth that was being created?

  I had found that tiny tooth fragment, but missed the significance of a huge bottle of Scotch. I scrolled through the photographs on my phone. The bottle was in the background in the photo I had taken of the tooth. I looked up and saw David looking at me strangely. I had been standing there frozen in the middle of the room with my phone in my hand like a texting-addled zombie youth.

  ‘You okay?’ He asked.

  I pressed the zoom control until I could read the label. ‘Bunnahabhain,’ I said, looking up at him. ‘It’s an Islay malt.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Does anyone in Dinas sell it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Too specialist. You’d have to go to a big supermarket or a wine merchant for something like that.’

  ‘Do you know if Bruno Gilbert was a drinker?’

  He looked at me with interest, waiting for me to expand.

  ‘Please, David, just answer the question.’

  ‘Not in the pubs in Dinas. Fuck it, Glyn, he would have had to be able to talk to people to do that.’

  I ducked back into the incident room. There was a definite sense of the caravan packing up and moving on. I got Alison to retrieve the relevant forensics file. Both the bottle and the glass had been badly smudged, the only clear prints they had lifted were Bruno’s. I already knew that this had been the same with the shotgun. And the shotgun had been registered in his name. And he had bought the cartridges. No mileage for me there.

  I thought about going back into Fletcher’s office to see Jack Galbraith and adding this to my shopping list of Bruno’s suicide irregularities. But I knew what he would say. It was never too late to start drinking. And facing up to the prospect that you were about to be the instrument of your own execution could seem like as good a time as any.

  But Bunnahabhain?

  Okay, the big supermarkets sold it. But round here it was a pretty exotic taste. I would now be making a point of looking at people’s drinks cabinets.

  Starting with the Salmons.

  Up until now I had just thought of them as victims. But no one could be excluded. And they had the closest connection to Evie. As I drove up the hill I tried to think of a scenario that could make it possible.

  Could the three bodies have been unwelcome suitors?

  But why kill the beloved daughter?

  And if she had disappeared two years ago, and had only just turned up dead, where had they been keeping her all this time? The cellar? The cow shed?

  It wasn’t totally improbable. Cases of families enslaving their children and forcing sex on them were not as unheard-of as they should be.

  I pulled up where I had parked previously, before the track up to the Salmons’ house got too rough. The dead Ford Sierra still wallowed sadly in the grass, but the Isuzu was missing. I only hoped that it was Mrs Salmon who was driving it.

  I was in luck. Mr Salmon came out of the front door. He watched me approach as if I was the guy they sent round to cart away the plague victims.

  He was gaunt. Even in this short time of grieving he had lost visible weight, the lines on his face accentuated, and his eyes looked like they had been sucked out with a stirrup pump, rolled in grit, and then rammed back in.

  ‘I hate to disturb you, Mr Salmon, at this time, but there are a couple of questions I have to ask.’

  ‘She’s gone. She says she can’t bear to be here any more,’ he announced, his voice hoarse with anguish.

  I felt for the guy. First, his daughter and now, his marriage. I gave him a short burst of sympathetic silence and tightened up my morose expression. ‘I really am sorry to hear that.’ In the light of all this misery, how could I now ask him what his favourite whisky was? ‘How long have you lived here?’

  For some reason the question seemed to soothe him slightly. ‘Eight years. We came here when Evie was fifteen.’

  Fuck. They were within the timeframe. They stayed on the list.

  ‘When Evie left, was there any build-up to it? A family argument or something else that triggered it off ?’

  He shook his head vacantly. ‘No, it came completely out of the blue.’

  ‘She just literally walked out?’

  ‘No. It was a Sunday. On Sundays she used to help Mrs Evans out with her horses.’

  Gerald Evans again. I felt the connection homing. I kept my voice neutral. ‘So she pretended that she was going there?’

  ‘No, I know she went, because I drove her over. But the strange thing is that she stayed and worked for the morning.’ He pulled a pained face. ‘You’d think if she was planning on getting away, she wouldn’t have stayed around there, would you?’

  ‘Maybe she was waiting for a bus?’ I suggested.

  ‘There aren’t any buses from Dinas on a Sunday. According to Mrs Evans, Evie came to tell her that she wasn’t feeling very well, and could she give her a lift down to Dinas. Just before lunch, this was. Mrs Evans offered to drive her home, but she said that she had already called me and I was going to pick her up in Dinas.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘That was a lie. She hadn’t called me. The Evanses dropped her off in Dinas, and that was the last anyone round here saw of her.’

  ‘Was that Mr or Mrs Evans?’ I tried to contain the excitement in my voice.

  He shook his head morosely. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about luggage?’ I knew that she had taken at least the red shoes and dress.

  ‘It must all have been in the big bag that she always carried. Her mother used to get onto her about it, but she said that she wanted to be prepared for something wonderful that was going to come her way one of these days.’

  That thought silenced both of us. ‘You told me when we last spoke that Evie had worked for the Fenwick ladies at the Barn Gallery?’ I asked eventually, changing the subject.

  He looked at me sorrowfully. ‘Is that important now?’

  ‘It may well be. Can you give me any more detail?’

  He shrugged, treating it as a distraction. ‘It was the year it opened. The year before she . . .’ He faltered. I nodded sympathetically. He continued, ‘I used to drive her over on Saturdays. She told us that she helped to keep the place tidy, and made drinks for the customers.’

  ‘You took her up to the Barn?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ He almost managed a smile at the recollection. ‘She didn’t want them to see my crappy old car. Those were the very words she used. I used to drop her off at the bottom of the drive, and then pick her up at the junction with the main road in the afternoon.’

  ‘You never saw the Fenwicks?’ I didn’t let him hear importance in the question.

  ‘I wasn’t allowed to.’ Another memory produced an even fonder smile
. ‘But they must have thought a lot of her, because they paid her really well. Sixty pounds cash was a good days’ wage for a youngster.’

  I smiled and nodded my agreement. Because I couldn’t tell him that the Fenwicks hadn’t been paying her.

  Or said that they hadn’t. And if not them, who had?

  And what had she been doing to earn it?

  *

  I went over it as I drove down the hill. It was time to stop thinking about Evie as a runaway kid. She was twenty-one when she left. And she was a liar. I didn’t like to malign the dead, but it had to go into the character sketch. For all her bluster and protestations about hating Dinas, she could have gone years ago, and her parents couldn’t have stopped her.

  Okay, she used to haul off from time to time. Those hitchhiking trips to Hereford and Newtown and Aberystwyth. But she always ended up getting in touch with her parents.

  If she hated the place so much, why did she keep coming back?

  Because she was scared of the big wide world? Had she been just an insecure little girl at heart? And if so, what had happened to change that? To prompt her decision to leave? And why in secret? She was an adult, why hadn’t she wanted her parents or anyone else to know?

  The answer I kept coming up with was that she had met someone she felt she could trust. Someone under whose wing she felt secure. A protector. But for some reason that person had to remain anonymous. Because they would have been deemed to be unsuitable?

  A married man? An older man? A married woman? A woman?

  An announcement on my phone that I had a missed call from Alison Weir interrupted these speculations. I pulled over and called her.

  ‘Hi, Sarge, I was getting back to you on those background checks you asked for.’

  I took out my notebook. ‘Okay.’

  ‘That flight you wanted me to check is a confirmation. Owen Jones took the Air France flight for Lagos on Monday.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I ran a line through that query to cross it out.

  ‘The people at Fron Heulog, Trevor and Valerie Horne and her brother Greg Thomas, all came up on the radar.’

  ‘Crime-syndicate bosses?’

  She chuckled. ‘Not quite. They all had to have CRB checks because of their work with youngsters.’

  ‘I assume, because they’re still running the place, that there were no problems there?’

  ‘No, totally clean. Trevor and Valerie Horne have a long history of fostering in Smethwick. The activity centre is a sort of by-product of that.’

  ‘Who funds it?’

  ‘Local authorities, mainly. A small Home Office grant, plus contributions from a variety of charitable organizations.’

  ‘Where does the brother fit in?’

  ‘The Hornes are the main movers; from what I can gather he comes and goes quite a bit. The house is actually in his name, so he’s got a big stake in the operation.’

  That reminded me about something his sister had said about it being through Owen and Rose Jones that Greg had got the opportunity to buy the place. I made a mental note to try to check out what she had meant by that.

  ‘No dirty sheets?’ I asked.

  ‘Just one minor smear. Which is pretty historic. Greg Thomas got pulled in on a drunk and disorderly, and got let off with a caution. You’ll be interested in the arresting officer.’

  ‘Kevin Fletcher?’

  She laughed. ‘He got off with a caution, remember. No, it was a PC Emrys Hughes. How’s that for a small world?’

  I made a mental note to talk to Emrys about it. Back when he was a plain constable. That sounded like a long time ago.

  ‘Anything on the Fenwicks?’

  ‘Clive and Derek. They’re brothers, they run an import–export business in Manchester.’

  So Gloria and Isabel weren’t blood-related, they had married brothers. That explained the big difference in looks.

  ‘Any form?’

  ‘No. But they are on the system.’ I could tell from her voice that she was teasing me out, leading up to something.

  ‘Cut the suspense, please, Alison.’

  ‘They’re in the TA. They’ve both got firearms certificates.’

  I felt it resonate in my kidneys. ‘Rifles?’

  ‘No, pistols. Target-shooting.’

  Was I twitching needlessly? Even if they were in the Territorial Army, to have been granted firearms certificates they would have had to demonstrate that they were solid and upright citizens. The type of people who tithe their salaries to the upkeep of widows and orphans, and bathe the feet of lepers. But guys who were into guns disturbed me.

  I also realized that it would be another good reason to remove a head from a body if the preferred method of execution was a bullet in the brain. They wouldn’t want the evidence left literally rattling around in the skull.

  ‘Sarge?’

  I hadn’t heard the question she had just asked me. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Do you want me to pass this on to DCI Fletcher?’

  ‘No. Stick it on the file, but don’t highlight it yet, or flag it up for his attention. I’ll take responsibility for the decision,’ I said before she could argue. I didn’t want to give Fletcher an excuse to extend his heavy-handed reach back over into my territory.

  Was that decision going to come back to haunt me?

  ‘We’re just about to break down the displays, Sarge.’

  Alison’s voice broke into my distraction again. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’re shutting down the incident room. Everything’s going to Newport or Carmarthen. I just wondered whether you wanted a last look at anything before it goes?’

  Shit. A dilemma. I was on my way to Gerald Evans’s place, but Alison had just pricked my conscience. I had been so obsessed with Evie and Bruno Gilbert that I had neglected the other bodies. They weren’t meant to be part of my business. But I wasn’t belief-restricted to the Newport–Cardiff victims scenario.

  I made up my mind. Gerald Evans had waited this long, he could mature on the hook for a bit longer. ‘Thanks, Alison, I’m on my way in. I’d really appreciate it if you could make up a file on what we have on the other bodies for me.’

  It wasn’t a very thick folder that she handed me when I got back to The Fleece. I wasn’t surprised. Not only had we still not established identities, but we also had not been able to determine the causes of death. With no organs or soft tissue remaining, and no stiletto left conveniently wedged between the third and fourth ribs, the pathologists were having a hard time of it. Tessa was probably closer to finding out about her 600-year-old guy than we were any of our victims.

  I looked over the summary again. Two males and a female, all minus heads and hands, and all skeletonized. All approximately middle-aged and apparently in reasonable health. They appear to have been buried over a two-year period, with the first one – coincidentally the first one we had found – the first to have been interred approximately eight years ago.

  And then there was Evie.

  What does her presence say about the status of the original bodies? I posed myself the question I had been unable to answer before. And I kept coming back to it. He would have had time, so why hadn’t he removed the original bodies? Why had he added an extra one instead?

  I looked up at the map.

  Evie was the outsider.

  The spoiler. Jesus! I had just remembered the word that Jack Galbraith had used. He had meant that she represented the break from any sort of pattern, made us think that the killer was diversifying. But what if it was manipulation again? The addition of her body changed the perception of the place. She turned it into what we were meant to think of it as. The place that Bruno had supposedly chosen for his dumping ground.

  Without Evie, it was . . .? What? It came to me slowly. It was special. Somewhere that was important enough for the perpetrator to have taken the risk of keeping the bodies in place. In the hope that, in the end, they might not be discovered. That they could continue resting in some sort of twisted kind o
f peace.

  The bodies were specific to that place. They had a reason for being there.

  Had the wind-farm excavations disturbed a shrine? Could they have been some kind of a sick memorial?

  To who or what?

  And how did the victims relate to it?

  My mind raced. Had they known each other? It was the first time this thought had struck me. We had assumed that, because of the time lapses between the burials, they had been random victims. Picked off when the urge to kill got hot and sticky, just unfortunates in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what if they had been connected? What if they had been specifically targeted because they constituted a group?

  Would it make a difference?

  Yes. Because it would mean that there had been a definite and specific campaign. And, unlike random hits, rational plans could be retraced.

  So should I call Kevin Fletcher in Newport to share this observation? No point, he would only treat it as coming from the wrong side of the wisdom tracks.

  I looked at the large-scale map of the wind-farm site that Alison had left up on the display board for me. The positions where the bodies had been discovered marked with colour-coded crosses. The originals in a cluster to the east of the site, with Evie way out on her own.

  But that was to be expected. She had been thrown into the pile to fuck us up.

  Were the others saying anything?

  Alison came up beside me. ‘I’ve just checked, Sarge. We’ve got spares, you can take that one with you, if you want.’

  ‘Thanks.’ This was going to look good on my caravan’s wall. And I already knew that I was going to lose sleep over it. Trying to trace a pattern. Get into the mind of the guy who had left those poor bastards up there.

  Because surely this had to be a guy. So much physicality involved. But I cursed inwardly for letting the doubt enter. Instead of containing this thing, I had just expanded the frontiers.

  This was turning into real Boys’ Own territory. Not only had I made my acquaintance with a gold mine, but now I had my very own treasure map to play with.