Dead People (20 page)

‘You didn’t have your own friends?’

He smiled unselfconsciously. ‘Most of the kids I went to school with thought I was a bit weird. A bit too out-there for Dinas. Evie was sort of in the same boat, so, by default, we hung out.’

‘Your sister left, why didn’t Evie?’

He shrugged. ‘Evie and I shared a problem. We both felt we were better than the place our parents had dumped us in, which was another thing that kept us together, but . . .’ He searched for the words.

I took a guess. ‘You weren’t sure you could hack it in the bigger world?’

He nodded and grinned ruefully. ‘We kept trying.’

I remembered Evie’s father telling me of her hitchhiking exploits. ‘You persuaded Evie?’

‘It was mutual support. We’d get somewhere, try to hang out where the other kids were, but we never seemed to fit in. We felt uncomfortable. We thought that we had the attitude, that we knew the jargon, the right music, but it was untried and untested. At the end of the day, we felt we were walking around with big Day-Glo hick signs on our backs.’

‘But you didn’t stay in Dinas, you went to art college.’

‘I guess I grew up a little bit more. I realized you couldn’t learn everything off the Internet, you had to get out and put your toes in the water, and keep them there. That was our problem before. We ran back to Dinas as soon as things got scary.’

‘And Evie left too?’

‘It was after I’d gone to Hereford.’

‘Do you know where she went?’

He pulled an apologetic face. ‘No, I’m sorry. Not if you’re looking for an address. I only know where she used to talk about while we were still in contact.’

‘Which was where?’

‘Swansea, the Gower Peninsula.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a big area.’

‘Why there?’

‘It’s where the guy she’d met had a place.’

I felt the focus sliding into place. ‘Tell me about him.’

‘She wasn’t allowed to talk about him. That’s exactly what she said to me. She wasn’t allowed. Like he’d laid down rules. Oh, she talked about how fantastic and wonderful he was, and how well he treated her, and how confident he made her feel, but she wouldn’t tell me anything real.’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘And I think she got a buzz out of that. Teasing me with her strong, silent lover. Like I had got my life in Hereford by that time, and she was telling me that she had found her way out too.’

‘Do you know how they met?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’ But he was frowning.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know whether it was actually some new guy she met. I got the impression that it could have been someone she already knew, but something had happened to change the basis of the relationship.’

‘What did Evie do on her Saturdays?’

He looked at me quizzically. ‘Pardon?’

‘She told her father that she was working at the Barn Gallery for the Fenwicks. They deny it, but she was still coming home with a wad of cash.’

He thought about it. ‘You know Gerald Evans?’

I felt a rewarding flutter in my stomach. I nodded.

‘Evie used to help out with his wife’s horses. She told me that he came up to her once and said not to mention this to his wife, but he and some friends had a little private gambling club they ran on the side. Just for the fun of it. They called it Grass Vegas, which they seemed to think was a real hoot, which tells you what kind of losers they were. Anyway, he asked Evie if she fancied doing a bit of hostess stuff for them. Had to dress-up in a skimpy costume, pad out her tits and wear fishnet tights, while she spun the little roulette wheel, or walked around with a silver tray offering lines of coke. She hated it, but the money was good.’

‘Did they come on to her?’

‘A few of them tried it, but she let them know that she wasn’t going to do any kind of deed with guys with turkey necks or nose hairs. None of them pushed it, she said, because they were all terrified of their wives finding out about the club.’

Gerald Evans again. Justin had just provided me with the equivalent of a big pipe wrench to dent that smug bastard’s boiler-plated self-assurance.

‘What about Clive Fenwick, did she ever talk about him?’

‘She said the women at the Barn Gallery were total bitches. She thought one of the husband’s was nice, though, but I don’t remember which one.’

‘What about Greg Thomas or Trevor Horne?’

He pulled a blank face. ‘I don’t remember those names.’

I looked out of the windscreen at the Wye Valley spread out below me. At one point I had thought that we were honing in on something, tightening the focus, but now we were back out here on panoramic view, with a whole new geographic area thrown in.

Poor Mary Doyle. What Justin had given me couldn’t come close to compensating her for being virtually flash-fried. Okay, I had Grass Vegas, and the existence of Evie’s lover confirmed, and living around Swansea or the Gower two years ago. But without anything more specific, I wasn’t going to allow myself to get too excited about it. And, much as I hated to admit it, Gerald Evans was looking less and less likely to be the prime mover here.

The only comforting thing was that the opposition probably weren’t aware of how little Justin knew. They hadn’t realized how rigidly Evie had stuck to the rules of disclosure they had laid down for her. And now that I had disappeared Justin, I was hoping that they were going to start getting twitchy.

But the spread had got too big for me. Driving around Swansea and the Gower with a photograph of Evie was not an option. Kevin Fletcher had to be told that he was going to have to widen his operations base. He wasn’t going to like it. Especially coming from me.

My call caught him on a late lunch. That old familiar ripple of conversations and the steady tinkle of glass in the background. I kept the story simple – no point in mentioning gas explosions whose cause I couldn’t prove at this stage.

‘Swansea, he said?’

‘Swansea area. Nothing ever got pinpointed.’

‘And this was all before she left home? Nothing to prove that she actually went there?’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘And what am I supposed to do with this? Move my operation out of Newport? Dip into the coffers and set up a new team in Swansea?’

‘I don’t know, boss.’

‘Hold on.’

That was the short phrase of doom. It meant he was about to consult with someone. And if he was deferring to that person’s opinion, I didn’t need more than one attempt at guessing who he was at lunch with.

‘Capaldi!’ I winced as Jack Galbraith’s voice boomed out. ‘I instructed you to investigate Evie Salmon’s background, not to fucking abduct her boyfriends.’

‘Sir?’

‘We’ve had a complaint through our compadres in Hereford. I quote, “A scary-looking cop took our mate away.”’

Scary?
My Good Cop façade obviously hadn’t had time to set properly.

‘He’s with me, sir. I needed to question him.’

‘Why remove him?’

I closed my eyes, counted a beat, and went for it. ‘I think he needs protection. There was a gas explosion at his flat. I think he might have been the target.’ I kept my eyes closed.

‘And who would target him?’ he asked very slowly.

I saw the minefield opening up ahead of me. ‘Someone who’s trying to confuse the investigation, sir?’ I suggested humbly.

‘Did Bruno Gilbert look like a man who would inspire a following?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And Bruno Gilbert is dead. Right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So drop this fucking nonsense. We’ll do a fine trawl through Gilbert’s background and see if there’s any connection with Swansea. But if I hear another peep about you still chasing after a live perp, you are off this fucking case. And one more thing.’

‘Yes, sir?’ It was time to open my eyes again.

‘Take that kid back to where he wants to go.’

I closed the connection and looked over at Justin. He smiled sympathetically. Jack Galbraith’s voice carries. ‘Where do you want to go?’ I asked.

‘I thought you were taking me somewhere safe?’

‘Right answer.’

I drove on to Mackay’s, an old farmhouse called Hen Dolmen on the English side of the Radnorshire border. It was an oak-framed house with a Victorian extension in mellow brick, which hunkered down under a moss-covered stone-tiled roof. It was a clutter of gables, dormer windows and massive stone chimneys, a collection of wonderfully restless elevations.

This, I had decided after my first visit, was the house that I wished I had been born in. Two hundred years ago. Life might have been harsher, but it would have been a hell of a sight less complicated.

I had called ahead. Mackay had been expecting me. He made me tea in the big-beamed kitchen, while Boyce, the scary ex-army buddy who helped him run his corporate-initiative-training enterprise, showed Justin to his room.

I sat at the big square limed-oak table in front of the Rayburn and squinted at the low evening sun streaming in through the window, dust motes jigging like live gnats.

‘Thanks for this, Mac,’ I said.

He raised his mug in salute. ‘No problem.’ His Scottish accent had softened from years of having to slow his speech down to be understood.

‘How do you reckon they worked it?’ I asked.

He didn’t have to ponder, which was slightly disturbing. ‘Pilot light off, for starters. Then they run the cooker-ring taps full-on to get the gas–air mix up to the right proportions. After that it’s just a question of keeping that balance going. A little nick in the feed supply, some compensatory ventilation, and then they rig-up a spark device that’s going to be triggered by the door opening.’ He clapped his hands together, then threw his arms out into wide arcs, like a physicist explaining the big-bang theory. ‘Whatever they used, it’s going to be blown the fuck to kingdom come when that mother goes up and become untraceable.’

‘How come no one smelled it?’

He shrugged. ‘Student accommodation. Rancid Central. Curries, pizzas, last year’s dishes still piled in the sink. And they probably laid a light seal at the bottom of the front door. A damp tea towel? Something that’s not going to look out of place in a burned-out messy flat, but not something that’s going to jam the door when they try opening it.’

‘Does this narrow things down for me?’

‘Like?’

‘Am I looking for an expert? Someone trained in sabotage techniques?’

‘It sounds like whoever rigged it knew what they were doing.’ He pulled a face. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s the guy you’re looking for. These people are out there for hire.’

‘So it doesn’t necessarily point me at soldiers?’

He shook his head regretfully.

‘Talking about soldiers, has anything more come up about Greg Thomas’s breakdown?’

‘Sorry, medical records are a bit hard to access. I’ve talked to some guys I worked with over there, and they’re spreading the word. But those were interesting times in that part of the world.’ He chuckled grimly at the memory. ‘Somehow, we had a lot better things to occupy us than worrying about a guy in communications who was buying his ticket to the funny farm.’

‘His fiancée died about the same time.’

‘How?’

‘Some kind of an accident.’ It suddenly hit me. I had never asked how Rose Jones had died. It had been fifteen years ago, and I had just assumed that it had lain outside the frame of reference.

‘You okay?’

I returned to the planet to see Mackay watching me with some concern. I nodded. ‘Can you get back to your guys and give them another bit of information. See if the name Rose Jones does anything.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded carefully, but still hadn’t taken his eyes off of me. ‘Do you want me to come to Dinas with you and watch your back?’

It was tempting.

One way forward would be to create a crisis and send Mackay running in through the front door, guns blazing, so I could be there to net whoever came flying out through the back door.

Only two problems there. What crisis? And whose front door?

Regretfully, I declined his offer.

It was dark when I got back to Dinas. The fine day had left its legacy in a clear night, with stars already visible; probably a few planets up there, too, if I knew where to look. I knew enough of the lore by now to recognize that there would be a frost in the morning. Unit 13 would become the home for all the stray condensation in the neighbourhood once again.

The Audi TT and the Porsche Cayenne were parked out in front, but the lights were out in the Barn Gallery. The steps up to the house were illuminated by small bulkhead lights set in the stone treads, and a motion-activated security light came on as I approached the front door. I had already clocked the CCTV cameras on a previous visit, so I knew that my arrival was not going to be a secret.

But Gloria still played along with the game.

‘Glyn!’ she announced. ‘What a nice surprise. Come on in.’

The hall floor was deep-blue polished slate with a red-and-yellow-ochre Persian rug, and an open-tread oak staircase leading up to a gallery with a green-tinted glass balustrade. The interior of the house had obviously been scooped out and remodelled, the original rustic Welsh replaced by architectural chic.

‘I hope this is social.’

I pulled a rueful face. ‘Business, I’m afraid. And I’m sorry to call so late, but I need to talk to your brother-in-law.’

She didn’t drop the happy-hostess face, but a small spark of curiosity jumped in her eyes. ‘I’ll put you in the study and go and see how he’s fixed.’

She opened one of the matching oak doors off the hall, switched on a light, and stood aside to let me enter. ‘What’s your schedule for after?’ she asked in a quieter voice.

I shook my head regretfully. ‘Catching up on paperwork.’

‘If you change your mind . . .’ She brushed the back of my hand with hers, and replicated the invitation in her expression as she left.

What would I have seen in a mirror if I had looked then? What had changed in the last few days to make me desirable?

I didn’t have time to look around for a mirror. Clive Fenwick emerged from the door on the opposite side of the hall, and approached carrying a heavy glass tumbler of ice-murdered whisky, to signal that this was an interruption.

He had the meticulous scrutinizing squint of a VAT inspector or a serious bridge player, and his tight and slender build proclaimed that there was more to his recreational activities than just playing golf. Squash? Tennis? Something that he would make sure that he was good at.

He was of medium height, with male-pattern baldness, the remaining hair on the side of his head close-cropped and allowing the first of the grey to show. I put him in his late forties, early fifties. An oval face, smooth features, small frameless glasses, thin lips and no smile. His clothes were restrained designer label.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’ I started to offer my hand, but an instinct told me that he would only make a virtue out of ignoring it.

‘Can you show me your identity, please, Sergeant?’ There was a chill of superiority in the request.

I produced my warrant card. Do whatever the customer requires, I told myself.

‘Thank you.’ He nodded curtly. ‘The women never inspect these things properly.’ He stared at me impatiently, no attempt to put me at my ease.

‘How well did you know Evie Salmon, Mr Fenwick?’

‘She was the young woman whose body you found. She also used to pester my wife and Gloria for a job.’ He smiled snidely. ‘Which part of that weren’t you expecting me to answer?’

‘The question was how well you knew her.’

It caught him off guard for a beat. ‘And why has this question been raised?’

The clever bastard had parried me. I had wanted him to deny knowing her. I had wanted to trump this cold fucker with my big card. ‘We have a witness who claims that you may be the last person she was in contact with in Dinas on the day she left.’

He frowned. ‘Left?’

‘She left home two years ago.’

He gave me a look of astonishment. ‘I’m supposed to know this? And you seriously expect me to remember what I was doing in Dinas two years ago?’

‘She was seen approaching your car.’

He raised his head and spread his hands in a
give-me-strength
gesture. ‘And on the basis of that, you’ve come round here two years later, not just interrupting me, but with a latent threat.’

‘There was no threat, Mr Fenwick.’

He ignored me. ‘Just because some young woman, who I’ve never met, was seen near my car, I’m hauled in as the last person to see her.’ He fixed me with a cold, angry glare. ‘And all because I have a distinctive car. I think that you’ve allowed yourself to be hijacked by the politics of envy, Sergeant.’

‘You never met Evie Salmon?’ I kept my own anger in check.

He dipped his head. ‘That’s what I’ve just said. She may have been seen approaching my car, but that coincidence is as far as the connection goes. Isabel and Gloria can corroborate the fact that neither my brother Derek nor I ever met her.’ His eyes bored into me again from behind his glasses, and I caught a glint of hostile amusement in them. ‘And if you want to ask them, it would imply that you don’t believe me.’

‘That won’t be necessary, Mr Fenwick.’ I forced myself to keep crawling. ‘And once again, I apologize for the intrusion.’

I asked to say goodbye to Gloria. He made a point of ushering me out of the study and closing the door, before brusquely instructing me to wait in the hall. Gloria came out with a smile on her face that was trying hard not to upgrade to a smirk.

‘Changed your mind?’ she asked cockily.

I shook my head. ‘Sorry, the paperwork’s still waiting for me.’ I inclined my head towards the door that Clive had gone through. ‘What does he drink?’

She pulled a quizzical frown.

‘Was that whisky?’

‘I think so. Horrible stuff, I don’t touch it.’

‘Could you find out for me, please?’ I asked nicely. I was just about to leave when I remembered something else, and turned on the threshold. ‘Swansea.’

She frowned, puzzled. ‘What about it?’

‘You don’t have a holiday home down there as well, do you?’

She shook her head. ‘No. But Clive and Derek keep a boat down at the Mumbles. That’s near there, I think?’

‘You don’t go there?’

‘No, Isabel and I keep well away. All that nasty, cold, wet water.’

The Mumbles. The Gower Peninsula. A geographical bull’s-eye. But I hadn’t been able to shake him up on the Evie front.

Clive Fenwick was good. He was a gold-medal Olympic eventer in stonewalling.

But was he lying? He was supremely confident that the Fenwick women would back up his claim that he didn’t know Evie. But that was just common sense. If he was screwing around he wouldn’t have broadcast it to his wife or his sister-in-law. And he could have met her independently. Or seen her hanging around from afar and decided that she was just the right ripe young ticket to set up in a fuck pad. To share with his brother?

Near where they kept their boat? The environs of Swansea and the Gower Peninsula, where Evie had told Justin the love of her life was located.

Because an insecure and impressionable young woman like Evie could easily have mistaken his nasty, domineering arrogance for supreme confidence and control. She didn’t have the same experience of life’s shits that I’d had, so where I saw self-centred boorishness, she might have read élan and urbanity.

I glanced over at the lights of the Activity Centre at Fron Heulog. They bordered Bruno’s land. And Rose, Greg’s fiancée’s death was now nagging me. But Greg was another one who had claimed no knowledge of Evie.

I closed my eyes tightly to redirect my concentration. Because this wasn’t just about Evie. I had to keep reminding myself about that. Although perhaps she hadn’t just been thrown into the pot at random to confuse us. Maybe her murder had been more expedient than that. A passion gone sour? But what was the possible connection with any of these people to the other three bodies?

Where was I going to find the crisis to smoke the bastard out with?

Or could I be circling the wrong tree? Was my guy someone who wasn’t even on my radar? I didn’t want to consider that one. But this was getting depressing. Finding myself coming up short every time I thought I was about to get an answer.

My phone beeped at the bottom of the Barn Gallery drive to let me know I had received a text message.

When you’re finished chasing married women, come and buy me a drink at The Fleece. Tx.

I smiled. From the tone it looked like I might have been forgiven. My mood tilted up the graph. If I was somehow in the middle of a desirability phase, secreting pheromones like a musk ox, then I may as well try to capitalize on it.

Tessa was sitting on her own with a tablet computer and a glass of white wine on the table in front of her. She looked up at me with a smile set for chagrin. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Glyn. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.’

‘It’s okay, you were upset.’

‘And a real bitch.’ She winced theatrically. ‘And to think that I had been giving you the relationship third degree.’

‘As I said, it’s okay.’ I sat down.

‘Thanks.’ She leaned over and squeezed my hand briefly, then cocked her head and made a show of scrutinizing me from a number of different angles.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Checking for signs of exhaustion.’

‘Concerned that I might be overworking?’

She grinned. ‘No, shagged out.’ She saw the question pop up in my face. ‘We saw your car in the driveway at the Barn Gallery when we came past.’

I held up my right hand. ‘Strictly business, Scouts’ honour.’

‘Grrr . . .’ She reached out a clawed hand and made a pantomime show of raking my face. ‘But seriously, what do you make of that outfit?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How can they make any money?’

‘I think they’re in a different league from us, Dr MacLean. I don’t think they have to make any money.’

She pondered that. ‘How’s your case coming on?’

‘If I said “slowly”, that would imply some sort of progress. In terms of movement, think pogo stick. I keep bouncing back to the point I’ve just left.’

‘As bad as that?’

I nodded.

‘You need a holiday,’ she instructed.

I spread my arms wide. ‘People come here for their holidays.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather be in Italy?’

A lot of people asked me that. I gave her my stock answer. ‘One day, I’ll spend some serious time there.’

She looked surprised. ‘You don’t go back?’

‘We only ever went there a few times when we were kids. Travelling wasn’t so easy then, and my parents couldn’t afford it.’ I looked at her apologetically. ‘And I have to confess that I didn’t really like it.’

‘Shame on you.’

‘The food was strange, I couldn’t understand the language, and the local bad boys used to beat me up in an attempt to impress my sister.’

She laughed.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that it got even less exotic. Summer holidays used to be a caravan at Borth. That memory took me off on a tangent. The couple of really wonderful summers we had spent with the Scottish branch of the Capaldi clan on Great Cumbrae island in the Firth of Clyde. Where someone’s uncle had a boat, and I got to hang out with the wild Mackay cousins who used to be able to start the engine with a carved iced-lolly stick.

‘You look happier,’ she said, breaking into the memory.

‘I’m sorry, I was miles away.’

She gave me a concerned look. ‘You’re tired.’ She inclined her head to the side. I followed her line of sight and saw two of her charges playing pool. ‘I’d invite you back for cocoa, but I’m in Mother Hen mode again tonight.’

When I left The Fleece a little later and alone I picked up a text message from Gloria. It informed me that Clive drank Jim Beam.

Philistine.

It was only when I was nearly home that the thought came to me. It was strong enough to make me turn back. I drove past Pen Twyn and the Barn Gallery, and turned around to come back the other way. The way that Tessa would have come.

Even going slowly, with my headlights on full beam, I couldn’t pick out the parking area in front of the Barn Gallery.

*

Tessa had lied to me. And why had she changed so abruptly from the Ice Queen one minute, banishing me from her kingdom, to the Sister of Mercy stroking my wearied brow the next? This had to be more than just the normal strangeness of women’s ways.

Nothing was making sense. There were too many mysteries.

And it was literally freezing in Unit 13. I turned the gas fire up full, wrapped myself in a blanket, sat down on the banquette seat and stared at the map of the wind-farm site pinned to the opposite wall. This was becoming a habit.

Talk to me,
I urged it.

Tessa had been right. I was tired. But underneath that, I felt a buzz. An excitement. Something was taking shape. I couldn’t put form to it yet, or resolve anything, I just had to be patient and wait for it to surface.

I reviewed what I had.

My hunch was still telling me that Gerald Evans probably had nothing to do with the bodies on the hill. But he had lied to me. ‘Grass Vegas’ meant he had got closer to Evie than he had admitted. He was a conduit to her other life, and I now had leverage on him.

Clive Fenwick claimed to have no knowledge of Evie. But he had the right geography. His boat at the Mumbles put him in the territory.

Greg Thomas was another one who denied knowing Evie. Could there be a connection between her and his dead fiancée? Although there was that huge dilemma. Something like eight years between her death and the first burial. If the killings and burials constituted a memorial dedicated to Rose, why had there been such a long delay in crafting it?

And, while I was making lists, Owen Jones had seemed more-than-naturally close to his sister. Her death would also have affected him badly. But he was in Africa.

It was so cold the next morning that I woke to find that my breath had turned to ice on the window. I dressed in my clothes and blanket and wiped a patch clear on the window. The frost on the grass a trapped white shimmer, but a pure-blue sky with the promise of early spring sunshine.