Dead People (25 page)

I was hyperventilating and sweating. I had to convince myself that these were all sneaky tricks created by my mind in an attempt to make me abandon what it considered to be a fucking crazy notion and not conducive to the survival of the body that it was conditioned to preserve.

I stopped and forced myself to repeat my arrival announcement. ‘This is DS Capaldi. I am alone and unarmed.’

It was strangely comforting to hear my voice rolling on down the tunnel. It broke the isolation. Even the torchlight took on a new vibrancy. I was my own good company. I felt the tension ease slightly.

I continued to repeat the announcement until I reached the chamber Bruno had dedicated to his mother.

Inside, all the former smells of spinsterhood and latex had disappeared and been replaced by the same mineral dampness that pervaded the rest of the mine. I swung the torch beam round slowly. The furniture had been removed by Forensics. I played the light over the
trompe l’œil
painting of the window, which seemed even more sad and primitive now that it had lost the context of the pretend room.

I shifted the beam to the next quadrant, and illuminated the sleeping bag and inflatable mattress on the ground. But it wasn’t those that made me catch my breath. It was the shapes behind them that seemed to have no logic in this place. And then all too much of logic, as their form and intent combined.

Gas cylinders.

So had Owen prepared a treat for our arrival?

I moved the torch beam again and a terror archetype overwhelmed me. The two dead things had been arranged on the floor in a simulation of sodomy. I forced myself to do a double take. Only one dead thing, I reminded myself, the realization diluting some of my fear. Redshanks was synthetic. And so, by elimination, the skeleton that he appeared to be humping, his sightless eye sockets and rictus grin adding demonic intensity to the performance, had to be the mortal remains of poor Anthea Joan Balmer.

I invoked a silent imprecation on the sick bastard, and then I was visited by blindness.

I had instinctively shut my eyes against the sudden incandescent flare of light that seemed to explode right in front of my face, but I still held the afterimage on my retina like a popped flashbulb.

I felt a tug on my torch. I resisted the reflexive instinct to clutch harder, and loosened my grip and let him remove it. I told myself to stay absolutely still.

‘There’s a shotgun pointed at you,’ he warned.

I nodded carefully, acknowledging it.

‘Turn away from me slowly, sit down and put your head between your knees, and put your hands out behind your back.’

I sank to the ground and did as I was told, trying not to remind myself that this was a classic execution arrangement. He slipped the loop of a cable clip over my hands and onto my wrists, and pulled tightly, the thin plastic cutting in painfully as the ratchets caught and held.

I opened my eyes experimentally. He had a huge flashlight trained on me. I could see nothing past it. I kept my head to the side, my eyes averted from the beam. I didn’t want to look down; that would make me appear too much like a victim.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ There was a taint of tension in his tone, although he had obviously been aware of my presence for long enough for it not to have come as a surprise.

‘I came here to head off the carnage.’

‘Are there more of you outside?’

‘No, I’m alone. No one else in the force knows I’m here. I promise you that.’

‘That’s a bit fucking stupid.’

‘Listen to me.’ I put command into my voice. It was vital that he saw me as an equal. ‘I worked it out, Owen. I knew you’d be holed up in here. And I knew you’d have guns. Probably more than that shotgun. I came here on my own to stop you killing other people, and then probably getting killed yourself.’

‘Are you offering yourself as a sacrifice?’ I heard the puzzlement in his voice.

‘You won’t shoot me.’

‘No?’

‘There’s no advantage to you. Work it out.’

‘You tell me.’

‘You haven’t been doing this at random. Every time you’ve killed someone you’ve gained something from it. It was justice with the ones you killed for Rose. Insurance from Evie. A diversion from Bruno. There’s no gain from killing me. I’m a policeman. You’ll just be hiking up the wrath-storm.’

‘I would be gaining time.’

‘That’s what I’m offering you. You don’t need to kill me for that.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It’s over, Owen. I know what went down. Greg has realized too. Soon everyone else will. I’m giving you a head start.’

‘Greg won’t turn me in.’

‘He doesn’t have to. They know about your place in Port Eynon. No matter how carefully you think you’ve cleaned it up, we’re going to find traces of Evie.’

He was silent, absorbing the logic of that. ‘Why are you here? Why are you telling me this?’

‘I’ve already explained. I want you out of here. Sooner or later, someone’s going to put things together the way I did. I don’t want you here when they do, because they’ll come in force and they’ll come armed.’

‘Since when have you cared what happens to me?’

‘If we’re being brutally honest here, Owen, I don’t give a fuck what happens to you. But I do care about my colleagues. I don’t want a load of twitchy cops facing up to an armed gunman in a mineshaft. You’re going to end up dead, and the chances are that some other people are too, and I’m trying to prevent that. That’s why I’ve come here to warn you. It’s over now. But you still have some time left to act. If you stay here we’ll find you. I’m not promising you anything. If you run we’ll probably still catch you, but at least that way there’s options open for you, and who knows, you might even get away.’

Without eye contact I had to imagine him weighing it up.

‘I’ve got this place wired.’

‘Why?’ I had already figured that out, but it was important to let him hear my surprise. I needed to persuade him that this was out of character. An act of desperation.

‘In case it comes to negotiations.’

‘You’re holed up in a rat trap, Owen. That’s not the way you play it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re a planner and an enactor. A soldier. You work through the contingencies, calculate strategies, move yourself forward. But most importantly you give yourself space for manoeuvring. You’re not the kind of guy to dig yourself into a hole and threaten to blow yourself up. That’s for losers.’

‘How the fuck do you know so much about me?’

‘I recognized your gift to your sister.’

‘Are you trying to shit me?’

I looked at him as directly as I could without scorching my eyes on his flashlight. ‘Why did you bury them where you did?’ I asked quietly. ‘No matter how hard I looked at it, I couldn’t see any significance in that place.’

The silence extended for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

‘When we were kids, Rose and I found a dead buzzard up there. Not a mark on it. We each held an outstretched wing and it was as big as us. Looking back, it had probably been poisoned. But to us it was perfect. It was as close as we had ever been to something wonderful. Something so powerful. So we buried it. And that became our special place.’

‘You were very close to her?’

‘She was my sister. She trusted me to do things for her. She relied on me. I found her future husband for her. When they had children I was going to be the best fucking uncle in the world.’ He was quiet again for a moment. ‘And then those bastards killed her!’ he spat out.

‘I heard that it wasn’t deliberate,’ I suggested carefully, ‘that it might even have been our guys.’

‘It doesn’t matter. They were the cause of it. They killed Rose. They didn’t deserve to just pick up a new life and go on as if nothing had happened. They had to pay.’

‘We only found three bodies. What happened to the fourth?’

‘He died before I could get to him.’

‘His former compadres catch up with him?’

‘No, thank Christ. If those pricks had got there first the others would have scattered. No, just to prove that there is a God in His Heaven, leukaemia got the bastard.’

‘Did you use your MI contacts to find them?’

‘I asked around. I had to be patient. I had to work fucking hard to find the right source.’

‘That’s why it took so long?’

‘Yes.’

‘You waited about two years after the first one. Why didn’t the other two get spooked and cut and run?’

‘Because I kept him alive.’ I heard the pleasure in his tone.

‘You imprisoned him for all that time?’

‘No. Not literally alive. Only on paper. I kept paying all his bills.’ He laughed. ‘And spending his Social Security payments.’

‘The other two were married?’

‘The other two were bastards who gave up any shred of human dignity when I came for them,’ he spat at me angrily.

I veered away from the danger topic and let him see me gesture towards the dead-sex tableau. ‘I understand why you stole the skeleton, but why did you take Redshanks?’

‘The what?’

‘The body at the archaeological dig.’

‘That thing’s a pile of plastic.’

‘I know.’

‘The Northern Ireland connection spooked me. Then you and the so-called professor looked like you were getting chummy. I had to make sure that MI hadn’t rumbled who the bodies were, and that you weren’t pooling information with them. When I saw what they had in that tent, I realized it was a surveillance gig and had nothing to do with me.’

‘You still took the body.’

‘An exercise in disinformation.’ I heard the cocky smirk in his voice.

‘How did you meet Evie?’ I asked it quickly, trying to fit it in as part of the seamless flow of the conversation.

He was silent. I didn’t push it. I had heard the pride in his voice. He was enjoying the recounting. It went hand in hand with the power he felt he had over me.

‘I was in the UK between jobs. I had just finished a tour in Afghanistan and was waiting for the security clearances to go through for the job in the Nigerian oilfields. I was having some renovation work done at home, so I was staying at Cogfryn. I saw her a couple of times standing by the road.’

‘Near Pen Twyn?’

‘A lay-by just down from there. The next time I saw her I stopped and asked if she wanted a lift. She said no, she was waiting for someone. But the look she gave me, I got the impression she was sorry about that. So, I went and parked down the road, just out of sight. I was curious.’

‘Gerald Evans picked her up?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I was leaning against my car. I was looking buff, if I say so myself. I made a point of giving her the look as they went by.’

‘You had a nice car?’

‘BMW M3. How did you know?’

‘Evie liked nice cars.’

‘I went back there the next week. I could tell that she was attracted. She told me about the Evans gig, how it creeped her out, but she needed the money.’

‘You offered to pay her?’

‘That’s how it started. It wasn’t sex at first, it was just a bit of fun. I could afford it. And it stuffed Gerald Fucking Evans.’

‘But you told her not to tell anyone about you?’

‘That began as a bit of a joke. I was playing the man of mystery.’ He went silent. ‘Funny that, isn’t it? Do you think these things are meant to happen? That somehow, even right at the beginning, subconsciously, I knew what I was going to have to do to her?’

I didn’t want to get into a cosy speculation about predestination with him. I also didn’t want to tell him that I knew why he had made Evie promise not to tell anyone about him. That he hadn’t wanted his mother to know that he was hanging out with someone she would have regarded as inappropriate. ‘She moved in with you?’ I asked instead.

‘She kept harping on about how much she hated Dinas. How she felt protected by me. How much she loved me and couldn’t do without me. By that time, I was driving her up and down to the Gower on Saturdays. She was getting a feel for the place. I thought, Fuck it, she’s attractive, not bad company, all right in bed, and with my job I didn’t have to be around her all the time. Let her look after the place when I’m away.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘She lost her fear of the big wide world, and got to be a bit too fucking free. Started hanging around with the third-rate wannabe surfers down there. The dope-and-cider brigade and their mash-up barbecues on the beach. I was thinking of turfing her out the next leave I got, and then Mum sent me a cutting from the paper.’

‘The wind farm?’

‘Of all the fucking hills in Wales!’ he declaimed bitterly. ‘I panicked at first. Thought I could never go home again. Then I thought about Mum and Dad, what they would think when they heard. After that I started thinking a bit more carefully. That there was still a chance their excavations might miss the bit that was dedicated to Rose.’

‘Or, even if they did, there was a way round it that wouldn’t lead to you?’ I ventured.

‘It took some fucking working out,’ he said, sounding pleased with himself. ‘As I said, it’s strange the way things fall into place. Because Christ knows how I would have managed it if Evie hadn’t turned herself into a slut.’

‘Or if Bruno Gilbert had been normal?’

‘No one was going to miss him. It was a kindness, in a way. What kind of a life did the crazy old bastard have?’

I wanted to tell him that this place would miss Bruno, that his loss diminished the natural balance, but I forced myself to keep quiet. He had reached the end of his narrative. He knew that he had decisions to make.

I could tell by the movement of the torch beam that he had just checked his watch. I felt my heart rate surge. It was the gesture of a man who was preparing for action.

‘Where’s your car?’ he demanded.

‘At the gate.’

‘Keys?’

‘Left-hand pocket.’

‘Turn round, face away from me.’

The torch beam jiggled. I heard the faint sound of metal against rock, and then felt his hand in my jacket pocket rooting for the car keys. He had had to put the gun down to release a free hand. Was there an opening? I flashed through the permutations, and realized that, with my hands tied and my back to him, I didn’t even have surprise on my side.