Dead People (14 page)

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.

I distractedly thought about Tessa again. In
Boys’ Own
fiction the girl wasn’t even a fixture, never mind a reward.

It was a Saturday afternoon, a bad day for finding red-blooded country males at home. But at least the shooting season was over, which narrowed their options down slightly.

I went out into the back courtyard of The Fleece where I had parked, and found myself under a dark and violently oppressive sky that had not been there when I arrived. It was as if God had finally come to His senses, realised what He had created, and rolled out the celestial equivalent of weed suppressant over humanity.

‘You might want to borrow the Land Rover.’ David had followed me to the door. He used his head to gesture at the sky. ‘They’re forecasting snow.’

‘It’s nearly fucking April,’ I groaned. ‘What kind of country is this?’

He laughed at my innocence. ‘It’s lambing time in Dinas.’

I looked up at the bruise-blue heavens. ‘The little buggers are meant to be gambolling under fluffy white clouds in a bright azure sky.’

He shook his head. ‘No, that’s the day we call summer.’

I declined the offer of the old Land Rover as I wanted to arrive with some credibility. The road narrowed down to a lane that wound up a small valley running parallel to the one with the wind-farm site. No river here though, just a choppy stream fringed with spiked rushes and small clumps of gorse, silver birches and alders. The pasture covered the floor of the valley and ran partially up the sides, eating into the bracken where the marginal lands had been improved.

I passed the entrance to Pentre Isaf, where Blackie Collins had been dispossessed by the pony-trekking centre, which was already showing the signs of its own failure in the paint peeling off its hoarding, and the horseshoes askew on the gate.

I almost drove past the entrance to Pentre Fawr Farm. It was too tidy. Not what I had been expecting: a new hardwood five-bar gate; the name of the farm incised into a slab of slate on one of the stone pillars, the letters picked out in silver paint; the grass recently trimmed. Around these parts I was used to farm names sloppily daubed onto old milk churns rusted through to the colour and texture of brandy snaps.

The driveway added to my sense of disquiet. It was neatly fenced off, and surfaced with new gravel, which crunched evenly under the tyres. Farm driveways were usually a lurching experience.

The farmhouse was red brick, with yellow-brick detailing around the door and window reveals, and a horizontal stringcourse band. The roof had been replaced with new slate, and the windows recently painted, as had the barns that formed a three-sided courtyard.

It was a nice place. This didn’t fit the picture I wanted. Neither did the trim row of stables with shiny horses watching me curiously out of two of them, the motorized horsebox parked in an open barn, and the pro-fox-hunting stickers on the windscreen and front bumper.

The yard was clean. Where were the hens, the clumps of variegated animal shit and the lagoons of leaked sump oil? This wasn’t Dinas, this was Surrey. As I walked towards the house I began to get a sinking feeling that perhaps everyone disliked Gerald Evans so much because he was too close to being English.

I rang the doorbell and heard the first sound of a dog. It wasn’t reassuring though, it didn’t transform the place back into a scruffy working farm. It wasn’t a sheepdog going mental and straining at its chain, it was something small, yappy and pampered, yelping from deep in the house.

‘Quiet, Tata . . .’ the voice came at me through the closed door as it approached. High, and sure of itself, a ripe English accent.

She opened the door and cocked her head at me. A confident smile cramming surprise and enquiry into it. She had thin blonde hair that flicked up at her shoulders, escaping from a loose headscarf tied and draped around her neck over a green, quilted, sleeveless jacket. I put her in her early forties, although her complexion was cracking from either too much dry sherry or too much hacking into the wind. Her eyes were deeply recessed above thin, prominent cheekbones, and her tight lips were still flecked with the residue of a sickly pink lipstick.

Okay, she was wearing patchily, but she was still a far remove from the trailer-trash-slut composite I had built up as Gerald Evans’s life-companion.

‘Mrs Evans, I’m Detective Sergeant Capaldi. I wonder if I could have a word with your husband, please.’

The mannered smile trotted over into frowning territory. ‘Tata, shut up!’ She turned and snarled at the dog, before turning back to me. ‘It’s a dreadful business, and it’s very upsetting about poor Evie Salmon, but we’ve already spoken to Sergeant Hughes. There’s nothing more we can tell you.’ The tone was disinterest now – she had marked me down as trade – and her body language was preparing me for the door to be shut in my face.

It would pain me, but for the sake of progress I was going to have to eat shit.

‘It’s your husband’s judgement that I’m interested in, Mrs Evans.’

That caught her attention.

‘Between you and me,’ I continued, ‘most local people are too insular, so I was hoping to get the overview of someone with a broader perspective.’

The smile returned. ‘I understand, and I’m sure my husband would be only too happy to help, but unfortunately he is salmon fishing in Herefordshire this afternoon.’

‘Perhaps you could help?’ I suggested, covering my disappointment. ‘As Evie did work for you.’

She shrugged magnanimously. ‘I can try.’

Tata and I trotted obediently behind her to the sitting room, although, thankfully, she only felt the need to yell at the dog. I took in the house as I walked through, including the glass-fronted drinks cabinet, which was Bunnahabhain-free, as far as I could tell. The place wasn’t to my taste, everything was overelaborate, and the rooms too dark, but none of it was cheap.

She allocated me a seat, sat down on a sofa opposite, curled her legs up, and allowed Tata to nestle on her lap. ‘You’re new in these parts?’ she observed.

‘Fairly.’

‘I’m glad to see that you haven’t allowed yourself to be swayed by local tittle-tattle about us.’

‘I ignore gossip, Mrs Evans,’ I lied priggishly.

‘Good for you. It’s all down to jealousy, you see. We suffer from all this hostility because people are envious of my husband’s farming and business acumen.’

‘What businesses are those?’

‘He’s an entrepreneur.’ She threw it into the air and let it fly away, and I knew better than to run after it.

‘How did you get on with Evie?’

She made a regal show of thinking about it. ‘She was not the world’s brightest girl. And she had no real passion for horses. She worked here mainly for the money, I think, and to get away from her parents.’ She preened. ‘But I like to think that we were friends. With me more in the big-sister role, of course, given the age difference.’ She raised her eyebrows, giving me the cue, but I didn’t contradict her. There was only so much toadying I could do without puking.

‘Did she talk about any other friends?’ I asked instead.

She gave me a pause to show that I had disappointed her. ‘We shared a healthy scorn for the local populace.’

‘But she didn’t talk about boyfriends, or special friends?’

‘No, but . . .’ She went back to the memory. ‘On about two or three occasions, when she was having her lunch, a very strange boy with yellow hair appeared.’

‘Appeared?’ I queried.

‘Well, it wasn’t magic, I suppose. He came over the hill on one of those off-road motorbikes they use.’

‘Did she tell you his name?’

She shook her head. ‘Oh, no, we weren’t introduced, and I made a point of staying away. After the third time I had to tell her that I didn’t want motorbikes around, scaring the horses. And it was fortunate that Gerald was never here.’

‘Why is that?’

‘The boy looked sort of druggy. Gerald wouldn’t have put up with anyone like that on our land.’

‘You mentioned that you thought that one of the reasons Evie came here was to get away from her parents?’

She nodded.

‘So it didn’t surprise you when she left?’

‘She was here, you know. She worked here that morning, and then just went up and off in the afternoon.’ She watched for my reaction, but I prompted her with silence. ‘But did it surprise me? Yes and no, I suppose. She was forever running down her parents, how they didn’t understand her, how this place was so awful. But she had been doing it for so long I thought it had just become a ritual.’

‘You drove her down to Dinas that afternoon?’

‘No, Gerald did.’

I felt the warm tingle in my belly. ‘This was lunchtime?’ I offered innocently.

‘Yes, but Gerald was going to a meeting anyway, so he volunteered.’

‘So he didn’t come right back?’

She frowned. ‘No, I’ve just told you, he was going on to a meeting.’

‘How well did Evie get on with your husband?’

She went tight-lipped and hag-faced on me.

‘Can I ask when your husband got back?’

‘No.’ She took her displeasure out on the dog, sweeping it roughly off her lap as she stood up. ‘I don’t think that that has anything to do with you, Sergeant.’

Which meant that it had been late.

And Gerald, from being possibly the last-known person to see Evie in Dinas, could now turn out be the guy who had whisked her off to Xanadu. To set her up in a pleasure dome?

A yellow-haired boy had now appeared on the scene, and I still had to find out what Evie had been doing on her lost Saturdays, but it was getting too late to carry on today. I drove down the hill from the Evanses’ place in the dark, and David’s snow had still not materialized.

But I had Gerald Evans in the cross hairs, and I was happy. It had been a long slog of a week, and I felt I deserved a Saturday night.

And I had spoken too soon. A cold rain that was starting to take on the texture of sleet had begun as I drove into Dinas. The town was filling up with other peoples’ Saturday-night release. Including Gloria and Isabel Fenwick, by the looks of it (I saw the unmistakeable yellow Audi parked outside The Fleece).

I was only half right.

‘Sergeant Capaldi!’ Gloria had seen me come through the door and was standing to grab my attention, jiggling up and down, arm high, but not quite waving. She was wearing a tight, roll-necked charcoal-grey wool dress that rode high over black tights, and exaggerated all the contours.

I raised my hand socially, but she wasn’t going to be fobbed-off with that. She yelled at David. ‘Get him a drink on my tab, and another one for me.’

David tapped the top of the beer pump quizzically. I dropped my voice. ‘How many has she had?’

‘This is the third large Shiraz,’ he said, as he poured it.

I shook my head. ‘Apple juice.’ So much for Saturday night, I thought, as I took the drinks over. ‘Hello, Mrs Fenwick.’

‘Gloria . . . And what the hell is that you’re drinking?’

‘Apple juice. I’m driving.’

‘So am . . .’ She stopped herself with a big grin. ‘Fuck, you’re a policeman.’

I put the drinks on the table and sat down opposite her, raising my glass. ‘Cheers! No Isabel?’

‘Clive’s driven down. He flew back into Manchester this afternoon.’ She leaned across the table and dropped her voice to a whisper: ‘I thought I’d be diplomatic and scarper to give them some privacy.’ She gave me a dirty wink. ‘You know, they haven’t seen each other for a while.’

‘Flew in from where?’ I asked.

‘Kuwait. That’s where the Middle Eastern end of the business is based.’

‘Import–export?’

She raised her glass and smiled over it slyly. ‘You’ve been doing your homework, Sergeant.’

‘It’s a murder investigation, Gloria, we have to cover every possibility.’

‘And are we suspects?’

‘Should you be?’

She held my eyes, the glass in front of her distorting her amused expression, and I wondered whether she was playing with me. She took a deep drink and didn’t answer.

‘The Barn Gallery?’ I asked.

She cocked her head, wondering for a moment precisely what I was asking. ‘It’s Isabel’s baby, really. I’m happy to trot alongside. We get to go to Milan and Barcelona and New York and Berlin on big shopping sprees.’

‘Have you ever questioned the gallery’s location?’

She laughed. ‘Isabel is convinced that she’s creating a style shrine. That sooner or later our exclusivity is going to bring the customers to us. In the meanwhile, we wait to be discovered.’

‘Along the Welsh-tweed-and-crappy-pottery trail?’

She laughed again. ‘No, a write-up in a style magazine will do. And we’re lucky, the economic truth is that we don’t have to worry about it. The other business can cover it.’

‘What do you import?’

‘Anything that’s available to fill the containers we’ve sent out there. The focus is on the export side.’ She leaned across the table again. ‘Are you really interested in this, or are you just trying to explore my motives?’

‘I’m interested.’

‘Meat pies are big; saveloys, faggots.’ She smiled at my puzzlement. ‘We cater for the expat oil workers in the Gulf, and all those NGOs that have sprouted in Iraq. You have no idea how many people in those deserts have a craving for a good old Cornish pasty.’

‘And your husband, Derek, he’s still over there?’

She nodded her head slowly. ‘He runs that end of the operation.’ She made a big show of studying me. ‘Are you trying to suggest something?’ She let it come out mock shocked.

I ignored her banter, and reached over and picked up her car keys from the table next to her purse. I dangled the Audi badge in front of her. ‘The business must do very well?’

A momentary flash of uncertainty sparked in her eyes, and then she nodded. ‘It pays for Isabel and me to play.’ She reached to take the car keys from me. I folded them into my fist.

‘I’m driving home now, Gloria. I’m happy to drop you off, or you could call a taxi later, or you can see if David and Sandra can find you a room here.’ I stood up. ‘Your choice.’

I half expected anger. Instead, she stood up meekly, shook her head to get her expensive hair back into shape, and smoothed the dress down over her hips. It was a calculated and practised gesture. She let me help her on with her coat.