Dead People (6 page)

‘Why would I want you to do that?’

He smiled knowingly. ‘Because he’s the bastard that everyone around here would like to see toasted.’

‘Does he deserve it?’

‘They say he tried to buy in infected sheep during the foot-and-mouth. To get the compensation.’

‘I’ve heard that rumour about a lot of farmers.’

‘Yes, but he’s the sort of bastard who would have really done it.’

Gerald Evans was getting more and more interesting.

We turned off the main road into the valley. As we passed the Pen Tywn Barn Gallery I thought I caught a glimpse of a yellow car parked up by the house. ‘When does the gallery open?’ I asked Jim.

‘God knows. They’re not like a regular shop, its all posh and expensive, nothing in there for any local to buy. They seem to turn up when it suits them.’

‘They?’

‘Two women. They say they’re from Cheshire. Somewhere posh anyway.’

Cheshire worked as a generic location for people who were rich enough to escape from Manchester or Liverpool. I craned round to get a last look at the place. My quick reconnoitre yesterday had told me that they had spent money on it. But why the hell would anyone with any sort of business acumen open an up-market joint in a place like this? A dead-end valley from which even the glacier had packed up and left.

I glanced down the drive to Cogfryn Farm as we went past. Fantasizing the sort of breakfast Mrs Jones could probably conjure up.

‘Stop here!’ I yelled to Jim, as the image I had just seen resolved itself onto my consciousness, erasing the vision of bacon.

I walked up the driveway to the farm. The dogs started barking, bringing a man out of the lambing shed. He was tough-skinny, weathered, and wore an old flat cap at an angle that had probably never changed over the last thirty-five years.

‘Mr Jones?’ I called out as I approached.

He nodded warily, taking in the dressing on my head, but making an adjustment in his expression for the fact that I knew his name.

I held out my warrant card. ‘Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi, I met your wife yesterday.’

He held up his forearms, showing me the uterine gloop and iodine on them to let me know that we wouldn’t be shaking hands. ‘She mentioned it. So what can we do for you this early in the morning?’

‘I’d like to borrow that, if I could,’ I said, nodding in its direction.

He looked puzzled. ‘Borrow what?’

‘That.’ I pointed this time. ‘The tractor.’

He flashed me an anxious look.

‘It’s for official business,’ I explained reassuringly.

‘That’s an old bugger, we just use it as a yard scraper. We can spare you a newer one if you need a tractor.’

We walked up to the tractor. It was old and grey and had a metal seat covered with dusty sacking. But it was the hydraulic attachment with the wide bucket at the front that had caught my attention.

‘This is exactly what I need,’ I said, tapping the bucket with my foot.

He looked at me dubiously. ‘Would you know how to use that?’

‘No.’ I smiled at him. ‘But I think I know a man who would.’

Driving the tractor was like perching on top of a giant crab with a grudge. It buckled and scuttled and slewed up the track, while I bounced up and down on the metal seat that acted on my backside like a solid trampoline.

And it made a big, unhappy noise. So much so, that by the time I rounded the last bend, Jeff and Donnie were outside the huts watching anxiously for whatever was coming their way. And their faces didn’t exactly break out into great big smiles of relief when they saw that it was only me.

‘What the fuck is that?’ Donnie yelled.

I killed the engine. It protested with smoke, and fluttered out. ‘It’s a digger,’ I informed him.

Jeff shook his head sagely. ‘No, it’s not.’

‘How far have you come on this?’ Donnie asked.

‘Only up from the valley.’

They shared a glance, and then, in unison, turned to look up at me with overelaborate smiles. ‘You should have called,’ Jeff said soothingly, ‘I would have come and collected you.’

‘I didn’t have a phone, Jeff. You took it with you.’

He looked at me, puzzled. ‘You asked me to. Said that you wouldn’t be able to use it in hospital and asked me to look after it for you. It’s up there in the office.’ He looked at me appraisingly. ‘Are you sure they said it was okay to leave?’

The memory lapse was worrying. But now I understood Jeff and Donnie’s reaction. Imagining the picture I presented, with a big dressing stuck on one side of my head, and lurching up the hill on an old tractor that I evidently couldn’t control. They probably thought that my mental faculties were still back there in the hospital, sedated and resting in a locker.

‘Jeff, honestly, I’m okay, but I do need your help.’ I explained my theory. That the diggers had been sabotaged to prevent us from using them to uncover the missing skull and hands.

It was Donnie who saw the obvious flaw. ‘The site’s been closed down, so why go to the bother?’

‘Because Jeff here might just take it on himself to sneak in a bit more work while we’re not looking.’

Jeff flushed guiltily. ‘But what do they get out of the spoiling tactics? At best it’s only a temporary respite.’

I had already thought this one through. ‘Desperate measures probably, but they might be hoping for an opportunity to get in here and recover them. Remember, they know where they’re buried, they just need a pickaxe and shovel.’

Jeff looked up at the line of stationary plant. ‘We haven’t got a digger, and we don’t know where to look.’

‘I’ve just brought you one.’

He laughed, but I noticed him looking at the tractor again. As I had hoped, the engineer in him was rolling up its sleeves, and nudging the sceptic out of the light.

‘I suppose . . .’ He walked round to the front of the tractor, dropped to his knees and squinted. ‘It’s a bit crude, but it could work in a fairly primitive way. As long as we didn’t encounter rock.’ He looked up at me, something new crossing his mind. ‘Is this official?’

I looked back at him for a moment. Gauging. How stuck on rules was Jeff? ‘What else have you got to do?’

He laughed. It was the answer I wanted. He faced the hill. ‘But where the hell do we start?’

I followed his gaze. The hillside, still mostly in shade, rolled up massively in front of us. This was the nightmare I had avoided envisaging back at the hospital. But now I had had a little more time to think it through. ‘You start where you would have if you were carrying on with the job.’

‘The roadway?’

‘We have to be close. Something rattled them into action.’

He shook his head. ‘The shale level’s rising that way.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘No, it’s good. Good for us,’ he corrected himself. ‘It means that we can get a firm base down without having to go too deep. But it’s bad for you.’

By which he meant that it was not ripe grave-digging strata.

‘What about over there?’ I pointed to where a large rectangle had been pegged out where the ground sloped away from us. It was dotted with tussocks. The grass, reed and heather cover was charred. There had been a fire over this area. ‘Is that deeper soil?’

He nodded cautiously. ‘Probably. That’s the next turbine base to be excavated. But it doesn’t fit in with your theory.’

‘How?’

‘The roadway access to this turbine goes round the top.’ He described an arc in the air with his finger.

His deflation was catching. I felt my energy levels sag. Then I looked down at the pegged-out area again without a civil-engineer’s hat on. ‘They wouldn’t know that.’

‘Wouldn’t know what?’

‘That you wouldn’t excavate until you had the roadway in above it.’

I ran down to walk the perimeter of the base while Jeff brought the tractor over. I looked at it again, trying to see it the way a guy who was already pissed off with digging would see it. A guy with a bag over his shoulder, the hefted weight of a human head and a pair of hands in it.

I looked behind me and got a fix on the tent that covered the grave. Taking a straight-line bearing on it I walked slowly away. I stopped when the ground began to rise. I tried to get into the guy’s mind. You’ve already dug one big hole, you’re weary, so does your mind work some sort of psychological delusion on you? If you started going up a slope, does it tell you that the hole you’re going to dig would have to be deeper?

I waved Jeff over. ‘Start here,’ I yelled.

I watched the blade of the bucket slide in easily. The ground was soft. Jeff started to carefully peel the top layer off. I waved for him to stop.

‘What’s the problem?’ he shouted.

‘We haven’t got the time for precision. We may have a lot of ground to cover. Just scoop the stuff up and dump it for me to go through with the spade. Hopefully, if there is something in there it’ll come up clean in the bucket.’

‘Aren’t you meant to do this systematically and scientifically?’ he asked, looking concerned.

‘I’ll take the risk.’ I said.

After all, I thought, as I sifted through the second pile of spoil that Jeff had dumped beside me, if you accidentally break a couple of fingers off, or crack a skull, there’s bound to be systems in place for rectifying things. The vital thing was to locate them. Weld in another link.

I had my back to the tractor. It took me a beat to realize that something had changed.

Silence.

I turned around. The front attachment of the tractor was raised. Poised in front of me. There, minus its head, minus its hands, minus its legs, perched upright in the tractor’s bucket, like it was sitting on a designer fucking sofa, was a rotting, naked torso.

The stink hit us with the olfactory equivalent of a water canon. Jeff vomited over the side of the tractor. I cupped my hand over my mouth and nose, checked my gagging reaction, and forced myself to look, distracting myself from the ghastliness by trying to remember the stages of decomposition a forensic scientist I had once dated had taught me.

Autolysis had caused skin slippage on the chest. The green tint of putrefaction was present, but the worst of the bloat had gone, the gas and fluid accumulations already purged out. Insects were crawling or dropping out of the huge wound the tractor’s bucket had made. But no adipocere yet. I tried to remember. How long for the soapy deposits of adipocere to form?

Her breasts had collapsed into triangular flaps on the slumped chest skin. But they were still recognisable as breasts. This was a she. This one was fresh.

I sent out a silent prayer to the angel who watched over my hunches.
Don’t do this to me. Don’t let this be Evie.

Evie left two years ago. This one still had skin. Skeletonization would have occurred if she had been in the ground for two years. It came back to me. Those gruesome pillowcase lectures I had had with my forensic scientist. Adipocere formation takes from several weeks to months to form. There was no adipocere formation yet.

And Evie had been gone for two years. I clutched at that.

I found the legs. Down on my hands and knees with a trowel, an old T-shirt of Jeff’s soaked in aftershave and wrapped around my lower face, keeping the worst of the stench at bay. I had left Jeff with Donnie at the site huts, still in shock. I had called this one in from down there before I had come back up with my jury-rigged face mask.

I knew I should have left this bit to the experts, but it was personal. I felt that I had desecrated her. She had been chopped in half as a result of my instructions. I had to do the best I could to make her at least symbolically whole again.

The bastard had left her shoes on. It turned her back to human, and I felt my stomach churn again. Raised heels, thin strap at the back, wickedly pointed, and still recognizably red.

One had been partially dislodged by the swelling that accompanied decomposition. I took a photograph of it and the leg
in situ
with my digital camera. For the forensic record. Then I grasped the heel, closed my eyes, and pulled it away. I took another photograph of the shoe, zooming in so that the grotesque dead foot was not in the shot. If I was going to have to show this picture around I wanted to keep it as trauma-free as possible.

I stood back and looked down at the legs, still lying where I had uncovered them. We hadn’t scooped them up from the deep. This was a shallow grave. Much more so than the other one. And, given the condition of the body, it had to be much more recent.

Why? The illogicality of it had started to crowd in on me. Why bury something on a construction site just before the work has started?

Because, in other respects, they had been clever. By setting fire to the surrounding vegetation they had disguised the freshness of the excavation. Just another one of the many burned or blighted patches that scabbed the hillside. And they would probably have had to bury her in daylight as the torched heather would have shone like a beacon in the night. Or wouldn’t that matter around here? Was that why this place had had been chosen? Because even God had His blind spots?

Jack Galbraith and Bryn Jones turned up shortly after the SOCO team and Bill Atkins. We were now all wearing white gauze respiratory masks and white sterile suits, which gave us the look and the fuzzy sound of the survivors of an alien virus.

They both stared at the dressing on the side of my head. ‘Husband came home unexpectedly, eh? Had to close her legs a bit too quickly, did she, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith quipped, deadpan.

I assumed that I wasn’t meant to answer that.

He made a big deal of taking in the whole scene and groaned theatrically. ‘How do you manage it? Didn’t I say it, Bryn? On the way back to Carmarthen the last time we were here. “Just you watch,” I said. “Just you watch Capaldi fuck up the serenity. Watch him turn a nice, cold, total cul-de-sac case into a fucking Hollywood spectacular.” He looked around him with unfeigned disgust. ‘In Indian fucking territory.’

Bryn was taking in the remains. ‘Looks like this one’s coming off the desktop.’ He glanced at me as he said it. I couldn’t tell whether it had contained a smile or a frown.

‘Where’s your big black box and your saw, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith asked eventually, breaking the silence that had accompanied his ruminations over the corpse, which was still sitting in the tractor’s bucket.

‘Sir?’ I asked, wondering what was coming at me.

‘Your amateur magician’s kit. Saw the lady in half. Missed the rest of the lesson, did you? The bit where they showed you how to put her back together again?’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

He turned to Bryn Jones. ‘I’m getting a very bad feeling about this.’

Bryn nodded his concurrence morosely.

Jack Galbraith came back at me. ‘Tell us about it, Capaldi. What brainstorm made you decide to start mashing around this spot with that mechanical deathtrap?’

‘It was a lucky guess, sir.’

He winced. He didn’t think it was lucky. He could now see part of his future stretching out in front of him with an accompaniment of mud, drizzle and Inspector Morgan. ‘The doc reckons she’s been in the ground for anything between four and eight weeks,’ he reflected.

‘Only a guess at this stage,’ Bryn cautioned.

‘Close enough to start running a working hypothesis. When did the work start here?’

‘Just under five weeks ago, sir,’ I said. I had already asked Donnie.

‘So, he just managed to dump her in time,’ he mused.

‘If he was local he’d have known about the prospect of the wind farm for a long time, sir,’ I said.

He shook his head dismissively. ‘He’s not local. Give me the stats on the first one again, Bryn.’

‘Forensics are saying about six to eight years in the ground,’ he replied without consulting his notes. ‘Male, broad-spectrum middle-age. Zero identifying marks or indicators as to cause of death.’

Jack Galbraith spread his arms, an index finger pointing at each of the gravesites. ‘Six years . . . Six weeks . . . What the fuck is going on here?’

Bryn and I stayed quiet, we both knew that the question was rhetorical.

‘Head and hands gone in both cases,’ Jack Galbraith ruminated aloud, ‘both bodies naked. It’s too soon for a copycat, and there hasn’t been any publicity. We have to assume it’s the same workman.’

‘Different genders,’ Bryn observed, ‘and this latest one looks young, which would make different age ranges.’

So, no nice, tight victim pattern to work with. This guy is not particular. And why the time spread?’ Jack Galbraith looked at me when he said it. ‘Why six years between them?’

‘We don’t know that this is it, sir. The final victim count,’ I ventured.

‘You win the coconut, Sergeant Capaldi, for providing the answer we did not want to hear.’

‘There’s something strange, sir.’ I had to share the illogicality that had started screaming at me as soon as I had got over my first visceral response to the sight of the body.

‘Something strange . . .?’ he said sarcastically, raising his eyebrows, and letting me see his glance over at the corpse in the tractor’s bucket.

‘They must have known about the wind farm. I thought that was why they were trying to sabotage the diggers. To get the evidence out before we could get to it. But why bury another one here just before they started the site work?’

‘He’s not local,’ Jack Galbraith said with conviction, ‘this is a dumping ground, I’m sure of it. So he may not have known about the wind farm.’

‘The site would still have been advertised, sir. Even if he had managed to get the body up here before the work started he must have seen that they were going to be pulling the hill apart to build the wind farm’

He frowned. ‘I’m changing my mind on this one. I don’t think these are professional hits. I think we’ve got a nut job. I think we’re going to find more. I think this is his dumping ground, his squirrel’s nest.’

‘Why bury a fresh one, sir,’ I persisted, ‘if he knows it’s going to be discovered?’

‘You may be right, Capaldi. Either he hadn’t been keeping up with the news, or that’s what he wants. The thrill of exposure. His craftsmanship coming out into the light. So much so that he decides to welcome us here with fresh meat.’

I had a sudden bad feeling, which I was not about to share with my superiors. Could the sabotage of the diggers have been a double bluff? Was my reaction the one they had been manoeuvring for? Had I been led here to find this body? Had I been played for a patsy?

‘That’s when they fuck up, isn’t it, Bryn?’ Jack Galbraith continued, happily mining his new vein. ‘When they start to think they can play around with us.’

‘I’d be happier if he’d left us with more identifiers,’ Bryn replied morosely.

Jack Galbraith pointed at the torso in the tractor’s bucket. ‘That thing there has to be DNA soup.’

‘We’re working on getting a mitochondrial DNA profile off the skeleton, too. But where do we start the match process?’

‘Got any missing girls in your patch, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith asked with a smirk. ‘That aren’t covered in wool and say, “Baa”?’

‘I’ve got one that went astray two years ago.’

He frowned, he hadn’t expected that answer. ‘This one hasn’t been in the ground for two years.’

‘I know that, sir. But the parents will hear about this and I’d like to try and reassure them.’

He nodded towards the torso. ‘The sight of that is not going to reassure anyone.’

I showed him the image of the red shoe on my digital camera. ‘I can ask them if their daughter ever wore anything like that.’

‘If she’s been gone for two years, what’s to say she didn’t buy the shoes in the interim?’ Bryn asked.

‘It would be an elimination, sir,’ I pushed. ‘We can then start moving the ripple outwards.’

Jack Capaldi shook his head. ‘She’s not local. I expect the poor cow was a tart from somewhere. But not here.’

Bryn shrugged. ‘We’ve got to start somewhere. May as well clear the local field before we spread.’

David Williams had said that the Salmons’ smallholding was at the head of a crappy valley. In my book a valley was a piece of level ground where the hills had come down to rest. There was nothing level about this place. It was all on a slant. The tilt in the land affected everything, the runty trees, the stone field walls, even the weeds looked tired with trying to find the true vertical.

I walked the last fifty metres rather than risk my car’s suspension on the deeply rutted track. It was a low stone house with a patched slate roof, the rendered walls painted sky blue, which, with the wind chimes, marked the owners as outsiders. An old-model Isuzu Trooper was parked beside the grass-choked hulk of a Ford Sierra, which had probably died pining for the asphalt of Bromley.

Mr Salmon was in a field behind the house, bouncing on the seat of an open-topped tractor, dragging what looked like a rusty iron bedstead behind to scarify the grass. He waved, and cut across at an angle towards me, the tractor taking on the universal list of this place.

Mrs Salmon came round from the back of the house at the same time as he arrived. He cut the engine. They were both wearing blue overalls, and looked earnest and worried, as if they had been expecting a visit from the foreclosure man. Or perhaps it was the dressing over my injury, damaged cops being a not-too-reassuring sight.

‘Hello, Sergeant,’ Mr Salmon called out warily. His wife stayed tight-lipped.

‘Hello,’ I called back cheerily, ‘I thought I’d call by to allay any worries you might have.’

‘Worries about what?’ Mrs Salmon asked.

Oh, shit
. . . I swore inwardly. The rumour-mill had stalled. The news hadn’t reached them yet. ‘We’ve found another body, I’m afraid.’ I found myself in the weird position of trying to project casual reassurance into that announcement.

They both blanched. Her hand went to her mouth. He tried to put an arm around her shoulder, but she shrugged him off.

‘It’s a girl . . .?’ Mrs Salmon croaked.

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘We showed you a photograph of Evie,’ Mr Salmon reminded me anxiously.

‘We can’t go on visual evidence, I’m afraid,’ I said, trying to make it sound procedural, hoping that they wouldn’t ask me to elaborate.

‘Have they done something horrible to her?’ Her voice quaked.

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t go into details.’

‘Does she fit Evie’s description?’ Mr Salmon asked shakily.

‘You told me Evie left two years ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘And no one has reported having seen her since?’

They shared a glance. ‘No.’ Mr Salmon spoke for both of them.

‘I can’t be precise at this stage, but I can tell you that the time frame doesn’t appear to match Evie’s leaving. So you may be able to help us to eliminate her from the enquiry.’

‘How do we do that?’ Mr Salmon asked.

‘By telling me if she ever possessed a pair of shoes like this?’ I passed the photograph.

Mrs Salmon grabbed it. She stared at it for a moment, and then shook her head slowly, an expression of palpable relief forming. ‘No. Definitely not. She would never have been allowed anything as tarty as that.’

I glanced at her husband, who was looking over her shoulder. If anything his pallor had got worse.

‘Mr Salmon?’

He pulled a weak smile and shook his head. ‘Don’t ask me, I’m not an expert on the ladies’ shoe front.’ His voice was hoarse and soft. His way of expressing relief, I thought.

‘Poor girl.’ She handed back the photograph. She beamed at me. This one was someone else’s problem. Her world had clicked back into its safe and comfortable groove. ‘Will you stay and have a cup of tea?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘I’ll walk you down to your car,’ Mr Salmon offered.

I felt the bad vibe as soon as we started walking. ‘Are you all right, Mr Salmon?’ I asked.

‘Don’t turn round. Please don’t let her see you turn round. Just keep on walking.’ He still had the hoarse voice, but now he let me realize that it wasn’t relief. This was a man of ash and lye, an absolute inversion of joy.