Dead People

by Ewart Hutton

  Valerie Horne was waiting at the door of the office when I got out of the car. She had registered surprise over the intercom when I had buzzed at the security gates. Groups of youths mooched around looking studiously bored or genuinely disturbed by this stuff called fresh air and wide open spaces.

  ‘Morning, Mrs Horne. I’m sorry to disturb you on a Sunday.’

  She gave me the sort of shrug that didn’t quite excuse the intrusion. ‘I didn’t get back to you because no one here knew anything more about the girl.’

  ‘Something else has come up I need to ask you about.’

  ‘Okay.’ Despite the drizzle she made no move to lead me into the office.

  ‘You may not have known Evie personally, and I have to admit that we’re going back more than a couple of years here, but have you any memory of ever seeing anyone matching her description over at Pen Twyn on Saturday mornings? Or leaving there in the afternoon?’ I gestured towards the house and the Barn Gallery that were visible on their rise. ‘Or a boy with yellow hair?’ I added.

  She held up her hand. ‘I’ve got to stop you there. I’m never here on a Saturday. I go on the minibus that takes the boys back to Birmingham, and come back in the evening with the new batch. I spend the day in Smethwick, making sure that my parents are getting on okay. I’ve done that ever since we moved here.’

  ‘What about your husband and your brother? Could I ask them?’

  She shook her head. ‘My husband’s busy with a group.’ She heard herself and relented. She was essentially a nice woman, and not in the business of obstructing people. She sighed. ‘I’ll take you over to Greg. He’s in the barn.’

  The barn had been fitted out as a gymnasium. The floor was sprung-boarded, and marked out for various court games. There were bars on one wall, a rope gantry that swung out, and a climbing wall at the far end. Greg Thomas was at a bench, inspecting climbing equipment. I reminded myself that Emrys Hughes had once had a run-in with this guy.

  I saw the look of recognition cross his face as we approached. I don’t know whether he was conscious of it, but he straightened up and moved away from the bench in a way that made you aware of the power he was holding in reserve. He looked like he could give even Mackay and his former SAS buddies a run for their money.

  ‘Hello again, Mr Thomas,’ I said, shaking his hand. I felt his grip testing mine.

  He nodded. ‘Anything we can do to help. It’s a terrible business, it’s shocked everyone in the valley. We’re not used to things like this.’ Like his sister, he hadn’t lost the Birmingham accent.

  And his proprietorship of the valley surprised me. ‘I know, and I’m afraid it means that you’ve got to put up with the likes of me asking all these questions.’ I smiled jovially. It wouldn’t hurt for him to think that I was simpler than I was.

  ‘I thought the word was that it was all down to Mr Gilbert next door?’

  ‘We have to make a case for everything,’ I said, non-committal. He didn’t press, and I asked him the same questions I had asked Valerie.

  He thought about it and shook his head. ‘If I had seen her it didn’t register. But definitely no yellow-haired boy, that one would have done.’

  ‘I’ll ask Trev when I see him,’ Valerie offered.

  ‘But don’t count on anything,’ Greg said. He smiled at his sister. ‘When Val goes off on a Saturday its mayhem here for Trev and me. Getting the place tidied up and organized for the next bunch,’ he elaborated.

  ‘Go on . . .’ She nudged him affectionately. ‘You’re welcome to take over mum-and-dad duty any day.’

  He raised his arms in mock horror. ‘Give me the gang boys any day.’

  I had a sudden illumination. Gang Boys! An image of Evie and her yellow-haired boy flaunting the rustic mores of Dinas. Rebels! Had they both thought of themselves as bandits?

  ‘What do you do about dope?’ I asked.

  They looked at each other, surprised by the sudden topic-shift.

  ‘You deal with gang members here,’ I clarified, ‘street kids. A lot of them are going to be users.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ Valerie retorted briskly, her tone hostile now.

  ‘Do you let them bring it in here with them?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she snorted.

  ‘We’re trying to let them see that there’s a possibility of enjoying themselves without using drugs,’ Greg explained. ‘It’s one of the conditions of coming here, they have to be clean. They’re searched thoroughly before they leave, and when they get here, they know they’re not going to get anything past us.’

  I nodded. ‘I see, thanks.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ Valerie demanded again, angrily. ‘Are you looking to fit up some of these kids?’

  ‘Not at all, Mrs Horne. The opposite, in fact. I just want to be able to help you.’

  ‘And how is that supposed to work?’ Greg asked.

  ‘So that when irate, upstanding local parents find their children’s stash and try to blame it on Fron Heulog, I’ll be able to tell them, hand on heart, to look again.’

  If they didn’t buy my motive, they didn’t pursue it. They just wanted rid of me now. I was the enemy, I unsettled the kids, I was not good for business.

  But I’d got the answer I wanted. The kids had to come in here clean. But a lot of them weren’t going to want to stay that way. They were going to need at least a bit of weed, just to tolerate the rural weirdness. I knew these kinds of kids. As well as being tough they were resourceful. And this place had been operating for long enough for them to have set up a system.

  Now I was looking for a mark.

  I drove out slowly and saw him, positioned in exactly the right place, just where the track started to bend away out of sight of the house. A white youth in an olive-drab army-surplus jacket, with long hair under a crew cap with a red Maoist star, and with him a young black guy in a shiny white sports two-piece with a pale-blue stripe down the arms and legs.

  They turned to watch me as I passed. Cool smiles of amused hostility. I palmed a five-pound note and held it up to the window as I cruised by. I stopped down the track, out of sight of the house, and hopefully out of Valerie’s security-camera range.

  They sauntered up irritatingly slowly. The black youth stopped at the rear of the car and took up the watchman’s stance. Experience brought the white kid up to the passenger’s side, where the best things to snatch were generally found. It also kept the car between us if, for some reason, negotiations broke down and I decided to come running for him.

  He leaned down to the open window and nodded down at the five-pound note I had laid on the passenger’s seat. ‘If you’re looking to suck me off, mister, you’re going to have to come up with a lot more than that.’ He gave me a grin and stuck his tongue into the side of his cheek.

  ‘Are you soliciting?’

  He knew the word. His expression didn’t change. ‘You’re the one doing the buying.’

  ‘I’m looking for information.’

  ‘What kind of information?’

  ‘What’s the local weed like?’

  He cocked his head back, playing it mock-affronted. ‘Whoa! How would I be likely to know that?’

  ‘They stop you bringing your own in.’

  ‘Some gets through.’

  ‘Not enough.’

  He looked at me carefully now. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’m not after your supplier, I’m just trying to trace a contact of his. I promise you I won’t fuck up the score.’

  He thought about it. I hoped he was thinking that he didn’t have to care too much as he’d be back on home turf in less than a week’s time, and any future scarcity wouldn’t be his problem. ‘It works,’ he said eventually.

  ‘What works?’

  ‘The hillbilly skunk.’

  ‘Who do you buy from?’

  He sucked air in through his teeth and shook his head. ‘That is a difficult question, mister.’

  I added a ten-pound note to t
he five. He continued to shake his head until I had added two more tens to the pile. This was getting painful. I wasn’t going to be able to put this down on my expenses sheet. But his head-shaking had hesitated. We had reached the point of balance. It was now my turn to show reluctance and move as if to retrieve the money.

  He grinned and reached an arm into the car and scooped the notes up like a practised dice player. ‘All we know is that he’s called TB. The deal is we leave the money on the shithouse windowsill on a Monday night, the weed is there on the Tuesday.’

  I drove away before Valerie caught up with me. I had just spent £35 on what? A pair of initials. But at least it was a confirmation that there was a local dealer.

  Now I only had to find him, and hope that amongst his clients, past or present, was a yellow-haired boy.

  11

  But first I had a church to attend.

  I had a choice of Methodist, two Baptist chapels – the Zion and the Ebenezer – and the Church in Wales. Having met La Evans, I realized that, out of that lot, only the Anglican community would fit her demographic. And, assuming she was a churchgoer, would her husband accompany her to give thanks to his Maker for His munificence?

  I was back in Dinas, it was Sunday morning, I had nothing to lose.

  St Peter’s, a tidy, simple church in dark local stone, was in the old leafy quarter of Dinas that qualified as pretty. A large and ancient yew tree flanked the path from the lychgate to the entrance porch. The small line of cars parked outside were fairly representative of the overseer class, but I was flying blind as I didn’t know what either of the Evanses drove.

  I parked in the lee of the wind and rolled my window down. A straggle of hesitant voices, mainly out of tune and trying to keep up with an ambitiously creaky organ, wafted lightly from the building. The hymn was unrecognizable.

  I caught the patrol car in my rear-view mirror just as it rounded the corner into the small square in front of the church. It pulled up behind me. I smiled to myself. Was I witnessing a pincer movement?

  Hughes’s sidekick, Friel, was driving. Emrys got out of the passenger’s side and adjusted his cap with a businesslike snap as he stood up. I watched him approach in the wing mirror. He couldn’t quite cover the smugness under the grim expression he was preparing. I had seen this one before. It looked like Inspector Morgan had given him permission to kick my balls into touch.

  ‘Capaldi, what do you think you’re doing here?’ he growled, spreading his bulk in front of my open window.

  I inclined my head towards the church and beamed up at him. ‘Basking in Grace, Sergeant Hughes.’

  ‘We’ve had a complaint about you.’

  ‘Have you been told to head me off at the pass?’

  He scowled. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  I gestured towards the church again. ‘Is Gerald Evans in there? Or am I wasting my time sitting out here?’

  ‘You were told to leave the locals to me. Mr and Mrs Evans had already been interviewed. You turning up there yesterday amounted to harassment.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  His scowl turned puzzled. ‘For what?’

  ‘For letting me know that he is in there.’

  ‘This isn’t a joke, Capaldi, I’ve been instructed to tell you to leave the Evanses alone. And that especially goes for trying to waylay them outside church.’

  So Gerald Evans had a direct line to Inspector Morgan? Probably the Masonic underground. I held Emrys’s bull stare for a moment before throwing the acid bath into his face. ‘Get in the car!’ I snapped.

  ‘What?’ His righteousness deflated like a stomped puffball. I caught a fleck of panic in his eyes. This wasn’t meant to happen. He was meant to be in control.

  ‘Get in the fucking car now, unless you want your young pal Friel to see you turning into a limp prick before his eyes.’

  He shot me a look of wounded anger, but there was enough doubt laced in to let me know that he would comply. I had my phone out before he opened the door.

  ‘What are you trying to play at?’ he blustered as he got in, knocking his cap off in his annoyance.

  I raised a finger to shut him up, and started tapping numbers into my phone.

  ‘Who are you calling?’ he asked suspiciously, unable to conceal an edge of concern.

  ‘I want you to personally tell DCS Galbraith why you’re trying to block my investigation.’

  His face crashed. ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t know whether he makes a habit of humping Mrs Galbraith on a Sunday morning, or if you’re just going to catch him at the third hole on the golf course. Whatever it is, he isn’t going to be happy.’

  He looked at me calculatingly. ‘You’re bluffing.’

  I leaned over towards him, a big friendly threatening grin on my face. ‘I’ve been given the job of trying to trace Evie’s connections here. All of Evie’s connections. And that includes Gerald Evans.’ I made a big theatrical show of pressing the call button and held the phone out to him. ‘It’s all yours.’

  He recoiled away from it, both hands out, palms up. ‘Okay, okay, turn it off!’

  I put the phone to my ear and listened, catching the opening riffs of my answering machine before I cut the connection. I grinned at Emrys. ‘Mrs Galbraith gets to stay happy.’

  ‘You’re a real bastard, you are,’ he moaned sulkily.

  ‘And you were just doing your job.’

  ‘I’ve already interviewed the Evanses.’

  ‘So why isn’t there a report that says that he was the last person to see Evie in Dinas before she left?’

  ‘That was two years ago,’ he protested.

  ‘What the fuck did you ask them about?’

  He gave me a hurt look. ‘If they’d seen Evie Salmon since she left. If they knew anything about the bodies. If they’d seen anything suspicious on the hill.’ He smirked meanly. ‘You don’t really believe that Evans was keeping her at Pentre Fawr all that time?’

  ‘He could have kept her in a honey pot.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A flat in town somewhere. He could have been paying her rent. He could have been her sugar daddy.’

  He thought about it and shook his head. But the certainty wasn’t total.

  ‘Why is he so unpopular?’ I asked.

  He used a slow shrug to give him time to calculate how deeply to go into this with me. An outsider. ‘He’s been known not to keep his word.’

  I’d been in these parts for long enough to know that that was considered to be nearly on a par with child molesting. ‘Where does he get his money?’

  ‘He married rich. She puts it about that he’s a successful businessman, but the word is that it all comes from her.’

  That would fit. The hunting, the horses, the tidy farm. Her priorities. What would he have spent his pocket money on?

  ‘You don’t really think he had anything to do with those bodies up there do you?’ Emrys cut in over my speculation.

  I ignored his question. ‘Do the initials TB mean anything to you?’ I asked instead.

  He wasn’t used to subterfuge. He went into a great big pantomime process of pretending to think about it before shaking his head too firmly. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells.’

  ‘Who’s the local dope dealer?’

  The next performance he trotted out was sanctimony. ‘We don’t have one. This isn’t Cardiff, our kids don’t need it, they aren’t twisted like that.’

  I laughed into his po-faced sincerity. ‘Come on, Emrys, there’s nothing twisted about smoking a spliff. I’m not talking about bringing the Mexican cartels into town, just recreational dope smoking. Stuff the Boys’ Brigade would do behind the club house without thinking they’d broken some code of honour.’

  He shook his head grimly. ‘Not in Dinas they wouldn’t.’

  I didn’t believe him. He was either in denial, or he didn’t want me showboating in his parish. Uncovering a crazed dope monster from within the safe and cosy
bosom of his hand-knitted community. It didn’t matter. I had a fallback.

  He was halfway out of the car when I remembered. ‘You once had a run-in with a young soldier. It was a long time ago, I was told.’

  He looked at me blankly.

  ‘Greg Thomas. One of the people at Fron Heulog Activity Centre.’

  He slipped back into the seat. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Nothing, just background.’

  He thought about it. ‘You’re going back about twelve . . .’ He paused and shook his head. ‘No, more like fifteen years. It was a fight outside The Fleece. This was before David and Sandra’s time. Greg was here for the funeral of his fiancée.’

  The one who was meant to marry her. Bruno’s words came back to me. ‘Was Greg going to marry Owen Jones’s sister?’ It suddenly made sense. I flashed back on the photograph of the three of them I had seen at the activity centre.

  He nodded. ‘That’s right – Rose. Greg and Owen were friends in the army. He got to know the family when Owen used to bring him back to stay. He and Rose got serious, and then got engaged. They were going to live in Fron Heulog after they were married.’

  ‘But Greg ended up there anyway.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Was that because of Owen?’ I asked, remembering what Valerie Horne had said about their obligation to both Rose and Owen. Since Rose had died before she and Greg were married I presumed that Owen had become the main benefactor.

  ‘Yes, Fron Heulog was his. His grandfather had left it to him. He wanted Rose and Greg to have it. Even after Rose died he sold it to Greg because he said it’s what she would have wanted.’

  ‘They must have been close?’

  ‘Inseparable. Right from when they were tiny, Owen was always looking after her. He was really protective.’ I had meant Owen and Greg, but I let him continue. ‘He was a quiet kid, but he turned into a terrier if he thought anyone was trying to mess Rose around.’ He smiled. ‘There was a joke going round that he only went into the army because Rose had told him she wanted to marry a soldier, and he said he’d find one for her.’

  I flashed back on the photograph again. It would have been hard to tell who had been holding Rose the tightest.