Dead People (10 page)

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Right, so heed it. Stay rooted. Stick with the simplest solution. Don’t pull this away into fantasy land. We have a demonstrable warp here. Definite signs of maladjustment. You are too tolerant of strangeness, that’s what got you here in the first place.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get more uniforms in and pull this place apart. This guy had set patterns.’

The observation surprised me. He had done his homework. ‘That’s right, sir.’

‘And it’s now looking like killing people might be one of them. So get this place broken down for me, and deliver me Mr Gilbert’s sins.’

I delegated the search of Bruno’s place to Emrys Hughes, who arrived with the additional men. I didn’t want to waste my time looking for bodies that I was pretty certain wouldn’t exist. He didn’t try to hide his smirk. His stance had been vindicated by the example of another crazy incomer fucking up in the game of life.

I didn’t bother arguing with him. I wanted to check out the surrounding properties, just in case someone had heard the shot. They might not have identified it as one, but if someone had heard something it could give us a timeframe.

But first I had to get back to Unit 13 to change out of my impromptu speleological outfit and get cleaned up and into something that would make me presentable to the public again.

I stood under the thirteen-and-a-half slow drips of tepid water that constituted my shower and tried to make sense of Bruno’s apparent suicide. I corrected myself. His apparent suicide
at this particular point in history
. At any other time it would be tragic. Now, with its juxtaposition, it had the potential to change the focus and direction of our investigation.

I froze. The soap slipped from my hand. I ignored it.

Could that be the intention? Had this been manufactured? Had Bruno just been set up as the fall guy?

Was it possible for someone to be that evil and manipulative?

I slammed my eyes shut and shook my head to clear out the judgemental crap. That was only going to get in the way.

Take it back to the beginning.

Three people had been killed, their heads and hands had been removed, and they had been buried over a period of two years, approximately six to eight years ago. Which should have been the end of the story.

Until the wind farm is announced. Which posits a real danger of discovery. But this is a long-term procedure involving consultations and public enquiries, the slow grind of due process. It leaves plenty of time to remove the bodies.

So why leave them in place? And then compound it by adding a new one?

What does this act say about the status of the original bodies?

I ran into a mental blank wall and went back to Evie. She was the disruptor. She broke the pattern. Young and new. What was she meant to tell us?

I took it back chronologically and broke it down into sequence. The first body is uncovered. The diggers are sabotaged. I dig up Evie.

Oh fuck!

We had been manipulated. They had taken over the controls after we had discovered the first body. The whole business with the sabotaged diggers was to alert us to keep on digging. A way of picking up the reins and steering us in the direction they wanted us to take. We had found the first body, which meant that we were going to find the others, so they speeded up the process to make sure that we found Evie quickly. Complete with her distinctive and identifiable red shoes.

Why?

To stop us concentrating too much on the other three bodies? By ensuring that Evie was the second body unearthed, were they trying to distract us from the collective significance of the other three?

If I was right, Evie’s murder had just been a device, a counter-play in the game that the original murderer was controlling.

I closed my eyes at the cold horror of it. She had been murdered to provide the meat. The bastard had used her as a fucking chess piece. He had carved her up to suit his purposes, removing her head and hands to connect her to the other victims. Just in case the location wasn’t enough of a clue.

And then he had figuratively chopped Bruno into the mix.

It was a storyboard, designed to make us believe that Bruno Gilbert was a retired serial killer who had reactivated himself. That he had started killing again. But then we were meant to understand that he had felt the ineffable pressure as we closed in on him. No option left but to take his own life.

Oh Jesus! If I was right, this bastard had murdered two innocent people to provide a diversion. To shift us down an investigative path that was going to lead to nowhere. Evie had been used to draw us away from the initial focus and to point us down the line, but Bruno was the one that now switched the points. This part of the strategy was designed to swing us in the direction that he had chosen for us.

The warm water in the tiny tank had drained, the shower was turning cold. I shivered under it, but the discomfort suited my next grim realization. I had just worked out how he was going to manage to consolidate this. How he was going to complete the arc of the story. I flashed on the underground chamber. Bruno’s retreat from the world. The red dress! It was as good as a suicide note. Because I now knew as an absolute certainty that the dress was going to turn out to be Evie’s.

I bequeath you the total proof of my guilt.

As I towelled myself dry I realized that no one was going to buy a word of this. Because in the real world that even cops were a part of, the world of small pleasures and disappointments, boredom and television news and the belly laugh after the third beer, it still seemed incomprehensible that a person could take the life of two others, for no other reason than to send an investigative train down a branch line that was going to swallow it up.

Bruno may not have known his killer. But Evie must have. It had to be the person she had left home two years ago to be with. She must have trusted him. Been proud of him. She must have talked to someone about him.

And that’s how I was going to get the bastard.

As I had anticipated, the Joneses at Cogfryn Farm had been at full tilt in the lambing shed the previous night and had heard nothing that wasn’t associated with that process. The three of them, Mr and Mrs Jones and the labourer they employed, had all been in attendance at the pens.

Fron Heolog, the activity centre, adjoined the gold-mine site on the other side from Cogfryn Farm. I reread the small file I had prepared on it. A couple called Trevor and Valerie Horne and her brother, Greg Thomas, all from the West Midlands, lived there. It was a registered charity, which they ran as a residential centre as part of a rehabilitation regime for young male offenders, mainly street-gang members.

Greg, the brother, was the guy I had met a few days ago at Cogfryn Farm. The friend of Owen Jones who was driving him to the airport.

According to my notes the place had been semi-derelict when they first took it over, and it had taken about five years of working part-time to refurbish the farmhouse and convert the outbuildings to its current use. So, even though they had only been up and running for about four years, they had had a presence in the valley when the first of the bodies had been buried.

It turned out that the place was also one of Emrys Hughes’s bêtes noir. According to him it was a nursery of imported urban malevolence peopled with young marauders who were out to overrun Dinas if they could only free themselves from their electronic tags.

Their sign was a big shiny cartoon sun with a wide smile, dark glasses and a starburst of rays that turned to dreadlocks on the top. Any idea of freedom stopped at the graphics, however. The gates were automatic and locked. I got out and went to the intercom.

‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice, tinny behind the static.

‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi.’

‘Can you show the camera some identification, please,’ the voice asked wearily, not giving me time to state my business. The security camera was mounted on the trunk of a tree. I stretched my hand up to it with my warrant card. The gates gave a little shimmy, and started to open.

The drive was surfaced with fresh tarmac, and lined with new saplings protected by tree guards. I followed the signs for Reception and drove into a courtyard formed by a low, L-shaped, whitewashed stone building. A small group of youths, a mixture of races, watched me cross the yard. Their stares of practised defiance took me back to Cardiff. These kids recognized me as a cop. I went back and locked my car.

‘I’m Valerie Horne, I’m the voice on the intercom.’ She held the door open. I went in, shook her outstretched hand, and she closed the door behind her. ‘Please, sit down.’

She was short, had overemphatic cherubic curves in her face, and unstyled, dense brown curly hair, all of which combined to make her appear chubbier than she was. She looked tired. The room was a converted cowshed, open to the roof, National Trust paintwork, newly bought contemporary office furniture, cheery prints, and a couple of computers banked against the rear wall.

I sat down opposite her at her desk. I did a double take on a framed photograph that was hanging on the wall above her head. I had met both the men in it. At Cogfryn Farm. Owen Jones and Greg Thomas again, but much younger versions, with a young woman sandwiched between them, the camera catching her with her eyes closed and a goofy grin that she must have regretted later. It was a buddy picture. The three of them packed tight together, the men with their arms around the girl’s shoulders, she with hers around each of their waists.

Both men in army uniform. A new dimension. Did it make any kind of a difference?

She cleared her throat to bring me back to earth. ‘Sorry.’ I smiled apologetically.

She scrutinized me for a moment. ‘We haven’t dealt with you before, have we?’

‘No,’ I confirmed.

‘Well, have you actually caught anyone doing anything, or is it just the usual, blame it on Fron Heulog?’ she asked, her smile weary and deliberately false.

‘Blame what on Fron Heulog, Mrs Horne?’

She blinked in surprise. ‘You’re not here . . .?’ She caught herself. Something relaxed. She allowed herself a short laugh. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so used to us getting the blame for anything that goes wrong out there.’

I understood. Emrys must have been a frequent visitor. Every vandalized bus shelter and unsolved crisp-packet theft. ‘You’re a convenient dark beacon?’ I suggested.

‘Tell me about it.’ She sighed. ‘So what can I do for you?’

‘I’m trying to find out whether anyone here might have heard anything unusual coming from the direction of Mr Gilbert’s place last night.’

‘What sort of unusual?’

‘Something that might have sounded like a gunshot?’

She glanced out the window. ‘So that explains all the activity over there.’ She looked back at me. ‘Am I allowed to ask what happened? And has this got anything to do with the bodies they’ve found at the wind-farm site?’

I smiled apologetically. ‘I’d rather keep to what you might have heard, at the moment.’

‘The kids keep pestering us about it. It’s almost made this place cool for them.’ She waited me out for a moment, and then shrugged. ‘Well, I personally heard nothing, over and above the normal racket that goes on round here until they all decide to settle down.’

‘Could you ask the kids?’ I pushed a card with my contact numbers across the table.

‘Of course, but they’re the ones who are usually making the racket.’

‘What about your husband and your brother?’

She shook her head vaguely. ‘We were all together until bedtime.’ Then she realized my question had been more specific. ‘They’re not here, I’m afraid. It’s a Tuesday. They’re down at the river doing things with rope bridges.’ She saw me glance at the group of youths out in the courtyard. ‘There are always some who claim to be allergic to cold water. But I will ask them when they get back.’

‘How do you get on with your neighbour, Mr Gilbert?’ I deliberately kept him in the land of the living.

She thought about it for a moment. ‘He keeps to himself. We see him walking on the moors above here, but that’s about as far as contact goes.’

‘He doesn’t bother the kids?’

‘Not intentionally.’ She laughed at my puzzled expression. ‘They think he’s strange. The way he dresses and scuttles around. Although anyone who would chose to walk in the hills when they could be watching television is weird in their book.’

I produced the new photograph of Evie we had got from her parents. This was more recent. No sweet kid on a pony this time. That had been the memory they wanted to hold on to. This was more real. She was scowling, caught turning away from the camera, not wanting them to take possession of any part of her. Her hair was still blonde, but streaked with pink highlights, and cut to hang straight, with a spiky fringe. Her complexion was blotchy, but there was raw energy in her expression, and she was attractive, in a disconcerting way. ‘Did you know her?’ I asked. ‘Evie Salmon?’

‘No.’ She replied without hesitating, a glum look crossing her face, realizing who she was seeing.

‘Ever heard of her?’

‘Only from the rumours that are going around town. That she’s one of the victims.’

‘She was young, Mrs Horne. She might have been drawn to the boys here.’

She shook her head. ‘It may sound harsh, but we don’t let them fraternize with the locals. We tried it once and it didn’t work. We ended up receiving a torrent of abuse from the so-called good people of Dinas.’ She smiled. ‘They didn’t appreciate their children’s newly discovered language skills.’

I made a point of letting her see me looking at the photograph behind her desk. ‘Your brother looks much younger there.’

She looked surprised. ‘You know him?’

‘And Owen Jones. I met them both briefly at Cogfryn Farm.’

She turned her head round to look up at the photograph. Her expression clouded. ‘That was poor Rose, Owen’s sister.’ I hadn’t recognized her from the photograph of the child in Mrs Jones’s kitchen. This time I was forewarned and let my mouth bunch up into a tight little mark of respect. ‘That photograph’s up there to keep her in our memory.’

I nodded.

‘It was through Owen and Rose that Greg got the opportunity for us all to buy this place,’ she explained.

I waited for her to expand on that, but she got up instead, making it clear that she was moving on to more important business. ‘Could you ask your husband or your brother to contact me if they have any recollection of her?’ I asked as I left.

The group of youths were still outside. They eyed me suspiciously as I approached them. I took out the photograph of Evie and went up to them. ‘Have any of you seen this woman around?’

They didn’t have a chance to answer. Valerie Horne came out of the office behind me. ‘There’s no point in showing them that. This lot have only been here for six days.’