Angel on the Inside (36 page)

Next problem: access.

I checked my watch. Half and hour had gone by since I'd left Steffi and there had been no phone call. I took that as a good sign. But then again, I was trespassing on someone's property with a car full of weapons and there was a dead body within 200 yards. Better get a move on.

Mrs Williams had said that no-one in Tregaron locked their back door. Hadyn Rees did, and the separate, lower door to the windowless brick extension was also locked, with a hefty hasp and a shiny new padlock.

If Ion Jones had been heading this way, intent on planting the guns inside Rees's house, surely he'd have had a plan to gain access without making it too obvious a break-in? Just leaving them on the doorstep would have looked a bit weak, wouldn't it?

Then again, Ion Jones, fine precision engineer though he might have been, had managed to shoot himself dead, so whatever he'd had planned, it probably hadn't been rocket science. But I was damned if I could think of it.

Anyway, I didn't have time to think. I had to go and ask him.

 

The foxes had been back and the birds had started on him.

I tried not to look.

His body had slumped, or been pulled down and to the left, but he somehow had his arms still curled around the box of guns. The body looked pliable, so I assumed that rigor had been and gone, but I wasn't actually going to touch him if I could help it, as bits of him were moving slightly. Insect movement.

I gagged and took my eyes off his face, looking at the box of pistols instead, just to concentrate on anything that didn't actually make me feel nauseous. And there it was. A multi-head rotational screwdriver, nestling in between the replica Smith & Wessons.

When faced with a padlock, you don't try and pick it, you unscrew it from its hasp or hinge. Then you screw it back in when you leave. Oldest trick in the book.

I reached over his arm, trying not to brush his flesh, and lifted it from the box, holding my breath until I was sure one of the guns wasn't going to go off.

‘Cheers, Ion,' I said.

There was something I could do for him.

His torch had fallen face down, and when I pulled it out of the moss, the bulb glowed weakly. I took the batteries I had brought for the Freelander and exchanged them for the spent ones, leaving the torch on. Then I rammed it upright into the one soft patch of earth I could find, directing the beam towards him.

No one would see it in daylight, but if he hadn't been found before nightfall, he would have his own
son et lumiere
to guide people to him. If nothing else, it might keep the foxes away from him for a while.

It was the best I could do.

 

I unscrewed the hasp and bent it back over the padlock. The door swung open.

It was a workshop, complete with lathes, benches down either side, drills, angle-grinders, you name it. There was a small model tank engine on one shelf, a disembowelled shell of another locomotive awaiting repair on another, radio controlled helicopters, model aircraft and a scale working model of a traction engine. A single office chair on castors was the only furniture, and clearly designed to slide from one workbench to the other. The whole place was neat and tidy, with tools put away, clean cans of oil and a laundry basket, for Christ's sake, containing bits of oily rag. There was also an open box of disposable rubber gloves. The guy was obsessive, and neat with it. Not an empty can of Coke, a cigarette butt or an oil spillage anywhere. You could eat your dinner off all the surfaces.

The only thing slightly out of place was a TV monitor hooked up to a video cassette player with a tape resting half out of the slot, as if it had just been ejected quickly. Maybe they did
Modeller's World
on instructional videos now.

There was a door at the far end, with a Yale lock, which presumably lead into the house, but I had no intention of going there. I didn't have time. It had been an hour now since I'd sent Steffi back to the races, but at least there had been no phone calls.

I went back outside and reversed the Freelander up to the workshop door. That made unloading the guns easier, and in no time at all I had them stacked in, on and under his workbenches. Then I spread the boxes of .22 ammunition about quite liberally, scattering one box on the floor. Finally, I emptied the bag of dust and metal shavings over the floor, sprinkling some over the workbench near the lathe and one of the drills.

I stood back to admire my work.

Get out of that one, Mr Solicitor.

The back of my legs collided with the poncy laundry basket of rags, a real ‘Ali Baba'-type thing, which I automatically reached out to catch before it fell over.

They weren't rags.

Well, they were in the sense that they were pieces of material that had been used to mop, wipe and no doubt polish, because they were all covered in grease and oil and, from the smell, metal polish and methylated spirit.

But the curious thing was, they were all pieces of women's underwear.

 

 

 

 

 

Knickers. Mostly.

Cotton briefs for the majority, in white, pale blue and pink, sizes ranging from 10-12 to 14-16, but also a couple of pairs of thick, black opaque tights, a single red stocking with a black seam, two camisole tops and one bra, size 36B. Analysed by maker, almost all Marks & Spencer, though there were two pairs of French knickers, one green, one red, from
Agent Provocateur
.

What was I doing? An inventory?

This surely wasn't regular practice for a model engineer. Oh, I could see the scenario where it was all lads together on the steam railway and one would pull out a pair of pink panties to casually wipe the oil off his hands and he'd say ‘Ooh! Where did those come from?' or ‘What on Earth will the wife forget next?' for a bit of a laugh. But this was a bachelor model builder who worked mostly alone in a windowless workshop tacked on to an isolated house at the top of a mountain.

Maybe he threw wild parties, but there was enough underwear here to indicate that every eligible female (I discounted the Daughters of the Dawn) in the town had attended at least once.

I looked at the door to the house at the far end of the workshop and wondered what went on in there. Then I began to wonder exactly where the door went, because the workshop was built at a lower level than the back door, so if it actually went into anywhere, it must be a cellar. If it wasn't and it was just the outside wall of the back of the house, why build a door there?

And why put the Yale lock on this side? If you wanted to keep intruders out of the house, you put the lock on the inside. The only thing this lock would do is keep people in. As in a prison.

I hadn't got time for this, I thought, as I turned the Yale and snapped the catch up so that it couldn't close behind me.

It was the cellar of the house, with a door at the other end, but it wasn't the dank, dark cellar filled with household rubbish or even wine racks you might expect. The first thing that struck me was how warm it was: positively stifling and definitely sweaty. But it was windowless and dark, though the light from the workshop door was reflecting off something.

I groped my hand up the wall, and sure enough there was a light switch where I would have expected one. I flipped it and almost went blind.

The were six adjustable spotlights on a single track in the centre of the ceiling, and they all seemed to have 100 watt bulbs. One would have been overkill, but the effect was multiplied dramatically be the fact that the walls were lined with sheets of kitchen foil, shiny side out. There was enough there to cook every Christmas turkey in Tregaron.

And it was
hot
.

There were two portable Calor Gas heaters in the room and an electric fan heater, as well as a large, curved iron radiator with pipes leading up through the ceiling to the domestic central heating system. I took off a glove and put my hand over but not on the radiator. It was on full belt, and I was feeling the heat now. The floor was covered in a bouncy grey carpet of underfelt, which was probably insulating material. I couldn't imagine what it would be like if the gas heaters and the fan heater were on as well.

So the guy was a cold fish, or a reptile who needed to warm up before he could work.

Or he was a pervert.

Given that the only other objects in the cellar were a set of handcuffs locked around the downpipes to the radiator and a Canon digital camcorder on a tripod in the corner pointing at the radiator, I was going to go with pervert.

 

The camcorder was fixed to the tripod and was powered through an adapter plug from the mains instead of a battery, which was unusual. So unusual that I unplugged it and had a look. It wasn't just a power lead; there was another small cable alongside it that continued through a hole drilled into the wall of the workshop. I knew instantly what that was and where it went.

I turned the camcorder on, fumbling at the switch with my gloved fingers, and then moved back into the workshop to turn on the TV on the bench directly on the other side of the wall. As the picture emerged, it showed what the camcorder was focused on: the radiator in the cellar. The one with the set of handcuffs dangling from the pipe. These were just like the ones the Turner boys had used on me in Armstrong II. They must get them wholesale in Wales.

I flipped the channels on the set, which seemed to be for a/v input only. There was no aerial, so he didn't use it to record
Pobol Y Cwm
while he was out. There was a tape half-in, half-out of the machine with just the number ‘17' written neatly in ballpoint on the spine label. I slotted it home and the machine indicated that it was on long play, giving six hours of running time.

The VCR hummed and whirred but nothing appeared on the screen to replace the live picture from the cellar. I stabbed the channel button again, flipping to ‘8', which was where most people put the video link.

Bingo. There was the picture from the tape. It was still the same shot of the radiator in the brightly lit cellar, although the camcorder had been angled so that it didn't show in the reflective tinfoil that coated the walls.

But I wasn't really looking at the fixtures and fittings of the cellar, I was looking at Amy.

Amy wearing the light blue woollen two piece suit I had found in a dustbin bag back home, the skirt riding up to reveal a lot of leg and her red Jimmy Choo shoes.

Amy kneeling uncomfortably on the grey carpet of the cellar, turning her head to try to blow away the strand of hair that was falling over her eyes.

Amy itching and wriggling inside the suit jacket, trying to wipe the sweat from her forehead on the sleeve.

Amy moving position and touching the radiator with her knees and pulling away rapidly.

Amy handcuffed to the radiator pipes.

 

I stopped the tape and fast-forwarded it, then pressed ‘Play'.

Same scene, same Amy, same handcuffs; only by now the heat was getting to her. Her skirt was now around her waist, and she had managed to unbutton the jacket so that the camera could see her white bra with darker damp stains where the sweat was running off her breasts. She had her eyes closed and was slumped, resting her head on her forearms, her hair hanging in damp strands like wet string.

I stopped the tape and ejected it.

It said it was tape ‘17'. That meant there were 16 others.

I went back into the cellar and tried the far door. It wasn't locked, and it revealed a flight of stairs up into the house with another door at the top, which was not only unlocked but open.

There was a kitchen to my right and a hallway leading to the front door to my left. The first room was obviously used as an office, with a desk and a computer, a basic PC. I switched it on at the mains, and while it beeped into life, I explored the other room.

This was the bachelor-pad living room, with two black leather swivel chairs, bookshelves with a few paperback thrillers, a low coffee table, a compact hi-fi system and a cube rack of CDs, another VCR and the biggest wide-screen television I'd ever seen. I've been in Odeons with smaller screens.

And he had three shelves of video tapes. I ignored the commercial ones and concentrated on the home video recordings. There in a neat row were tapes marked ‘1' to ‘16'. I turned the TV on and selected tape ‘4' at random.

It was a tall, slim redhead, aged about 20, looking slightly bewildered and slightly amused by being handcuffed to the radiator. She wore a checked shirt and tight jeans and high heeled boots. I fast-forwarded a good way and pressed ‘Play'.

She was still handcuffed to the radiator, but had managed to strip herself of boots and jeans and had ripped open the front of her shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra, and I thought I recognised her panties from the laundry basket in the workshop.

I ejected the tape and threw it across the room, selected number ‘6', pushed it in and pressed ‘Fast Forward'.