Dead People (9 page)

I climbed down using the metal rungs that had been fixed to the side. It bottomed out about three metres down. There was a collection of buckets, a small sled with metal runners, and a stumpy but solid little hand-operated machine with a hopper on top, which I guessed was an ore crusher.

Three tunnels branched off from the bottom of the access shaft, slanting down. The tunnels were low, you would have to crouch to move along them, and they all smelled of damp rock and lichen growth. And rats? The romance was dropping out of the gold-mining world.

I shone my torch into each of them. No light was reflected back. Part of my funk was fear of the unknown. How far in did these shafts go? How safety-conscious had Bruno been?

I didn’t have to do this, I reminded myself. I could just wait until Fletcher arrived and slot meekly back into the command chain. That prospect galvanized me into action. I ducked down into the left-side tunnel. Everything was clammy, and the air smelled immediately fetid, my crouched body acting like a plug, keeping the fresh air behind me.

The tunnel was cut through a soft, shale-type rock, and it was propped with timbers whose dank, dead bark peeled back like old parchment. The shaft turned and dipped to avoid obstructions of harder, sedimentary rock embedded with reflective flakes of mica that caught the torch beam. Everywhere beads of water dripped.

It was hard work, even without the claustrophobia. Bruno had constructed the tunnels to accommodate his body, and I was bigger. I began to feel the pressure change. It was imaginary, I knew, but it didn’t help to ease the sense of the weight of the hill above me. I had also completely lost all judgement of distance.

Periodically there were side shafts. I worked out that these were where Bruno had been extracting his ore. They were usually shallow enough to dismiss by using the torch as a sounder.

Until I came to the one that absorbed light. Instead of a roughly gouged rock face I was registering black. Total black.

I scuttled closer, half intrigued, half terrified. If it was possible to have an optical illusion in a place where you couldn’t actually see anything, this was one. An illusion of absolute darkness that turned out to be wooden and painted black.

Up on the surface, Bruno’s shack was in a state of collapse. He didn’t paint things. So why had he taken such care with this? I ran the torch round the perimeter. It was a door of sorts, a plywood panel set into a frame. I felt my mouth go dry, and a light quiver of tension shivering the end of my fingers. What was in there that, even this far down, had to be sealed off?

His explosives store?

No one in their right mind would have given Bruno Gilbert access to a sparkler, let alone dynamite, but it was the only answer that explained what I was looking at; that went some way to diluting my fear. Something practical and sensible to do with mining, with no spooky overtones.

But the reassurance didn’t last, and I kept coming back to it. Why was it here and why paint it black?

I prised it open with the screwdriver blade of my Swiss Army knife. I imagined a slight hiss, a seal breaking, when it opened. When I shone my torch in I thought the batteries were dying. I couldn’t pick out the end or the sides of the shaft. It was only when I stepped inside that I realized that it was because this was such a large chamber. Bruno had scooped a room out of the heart of the hill.

And I couldn’t identify the half-familiar odour that was now mixed in with the damp mineral smell of the rock.

My torch beam was useless for an overview in this large space. It had just picked up another optical illusion. A bedside table. I steeled myself for the instant of total darkness and switched the torch off and on again quickly. The beam was still picking up a bedside table.

Bedside tables do not feature in mine shafts. Bedside tables live beside beds.

I moved the torch, and jumped back involuntarily, a stab of panic jolting me like an electric clamp. The bed was occupied. I forced myself to move the torch again. And pieced together long blonde hair and a waxy shine on a pale, pale face. And the sort of stillness you just know has not changed in a long time.

I had a sudden flashback to McGuire and Tucker. Oh, please, not again!

We needed more light. I forced myself not to touch anything.
Disturb nothing
, I chanted the mantra internally. Don’t vomit. Don’t piss yourself. Don’t corrupt the scene in any way.

I didn’t have to force myself to back away. It was time to slot meekly back into the command chain. Let someone else take this over.

‘Fucking hell, Capaldi, the state of you! Where have you been?’ Fletcher yelled at me as I approached. ‘And I thought I told you to secure the fucking site?’

He was congregated with one of the DCs and a couple of uniforms outside the shack. I assumed the scratch SOCO team he had assembled was inside. With Jack Galbraith?

I pictured how I must look. Soaked through, scuffed and filthy, as if I had just crawled through an active sewer, against the flow.

‘I’ve found another one, boss.’

His authoritarian face cracked, just as I had hoped it would. He looked at me as if I was deliberately strewing dead bodies at his feet for him to trip over. ‘What kind of a fucking place is this, Capaldi?’ he exclaimed, aghast.

‘It’s normally pretty peaceful, boss.’ I told him what I had seen. A woman’s body in a bed.

‘Dead?’ he snapped.

‘She looked so pale she could have been embalmed.’

‘But you didn’t check?’

I held my temper. ‘I promise you, she was way past rescuing. I didn’t have enough light, and I didn’t want to compromise the scene by going in any farther with just a torch.’

He held me in a reproachful stare for a moment to let me know that he was not happy with today’s performance so far. He turned to one of the uniforms. ‘Go in and tell the doctor we need him,’ he snapped, indicating the door of the shack. ‘Get me some overalls from somewhere,’ he instructed the other one.

‘Is DCS Galbraith inside?’

He blanched. I had rubbed a sore spot. ‘He’s not here yet. Some idiot accidentally cut the landline to the wind-farm site. I’ve had to send a man up there to fetch him down.’

‘So he doesn’t know yet?’

‘That we apparently have two more dead fucking people? No, Capaldi, he doesn’t know yet.’

I knew from past experience not to push him further. Instead, I suppressed my smile and tucked it away in the little mental bank I reserved for such private rewards.

I led the way back down the shaft. The heavy-duty flashlight they had given me was like a searchlight in the confines of the tunnel. The one that Fletcher was carrying behind me projected a warped version of my shadow on the walls ahead. The doctor Fletcher had commandeered from Dinas, and a couple of members of the SOCO team, were behind him. Somehow everyone but me had managed to acquire protective clothing.

Had I been totally wrong about Bruno?

I tried to see him as a serial killer. But I couldn’t get past the problem of his timidity and his isolation. He seemed to be too scared of people to kill them. And how could a man like him have got close enough to someone like Evie Salmon?

I pictured that ghastly wax complexion on the bed, the long blonde hair. Was I about to be proven wrong?

And I had still not identified that odour.

I stopped outside the side shaft and let Fletcher come up beside me to get the sense of the thing. I heard him sniff the air experimentally. ‘What’s that smell?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. It’s familiar, but I can’t figure it out.’

He tensed himself. ‘Okay, let’s do it.’

I shone my torch on the bed to light the way for him. The same blonde hair, but the complexion, in the light from the high intensity beam, was now an unnatural pink. The body was still pinned down tightly under the sheet and blanket.

Fletcher was using his own torch on the floor to make sure that he wasn’t compromising anything as he crossed to the bed.

And then it hit me. The smell. A recall. Unit 13. Mould growth on plastic shower curtains. Underscored with the scent of the kind of talcum powder that old ladies use.

It was too late to warn Fletcher.

As he reached down to pull the bedcovers away I saw that he wasn’t looking at the body. His squeamishness was his undoing. If he had looked he would have seen what it was before it leaped into action. But he didn’t, and jumped back in shocked reaction as the thing on the bed surged up, released from the confines of the covers.

He looked now. ‘You bastard, Capaldi!’ he shrieked. ‘You fucking set this up!’ The body’s arms had popped up, and its knees sprung into an arch. It was naked apart from a pair of pants and a loose-fitting bra, and was the pink of denture-plate acrylic. The expression of rage on Fletcher’s face was magnified and distorted by the torchlight. ‘You are fucking screwed!’

It wasn’t dead. It had never been alive. Bruno hadn’t killed anyone.

I came closer. Fletcher was trembling. The release from the sheets had skewed the blond wig. The odour was now explained. An inflatable plastic sex doll. Its arms and legs, held open in invitation, made it look like it had just fallen from a tree trunk that it had wrapped itself around.

‘I didn’t know,’ I told him softly.

Behind me the doctor and the SOCO guys were at the entrance of the chamber, their torches playing over the inflatable doll. The relief in the air was palpable. I suddenly realized that if they laughed, Fletcher was going to take it personally. I would be even more fucked.

‘Shine your torches over the walls,’ I instructed, to distract them from the absurdist comedy.

There was a dressing table against the far wall with a rococo gilt-edged mirror, unguents on the surface, a hairbrush. A padded stool in front of it. The talcum-powder smell explained. A woman’s short red dress on a hanger was suspended from the wall beside it. A window painted onto the wall. Blue curtains swagged back from a naively rendered
trompe l’œil
view out over a lawn to a white picket fence.

I turned my torch on the bedside table. A glass of water topped with a film of dust. A romantic novel folded open, which I knew would turn to papier-mâché if I tried to pick it up. On the far side of the bed there was a white WC bowl, and a pedestal washbasin with a mirror over it. There was no drainage system to connect either of them into. Like everything else in the place they were pretend.

‘What the fuck is this place?’ Fletcher asked.

‘Isn’t it obvious? It’s a boudoir.’

‘This is sick.’

‘No, it’s not,’ I said reflexively.

‘You’re not serious?’ Fletcher sneered.

‘It’s sad, but it’s not sick. It obviously gave him some sort of comfort.’

Both our eyes swung to the plastic doll. ‘Do you think he fucked it?’ Fletcher speculated incredulously.

I had a picture of Bruno sitting at the dressing table, the doll a reflection in the mirror. Was he recreating a lost domestic scene, or inventing one? ‘I don’t know.’ I winced at the prospect. ‘But I’m not putting my hand up its snatch to find out.’

*

We left the two SOCO guys in the chamber to start their process and retreated with the doctor, who wanted to get back to work on Bruno.

‘What are we going to find down those?’ Fletcher asked, indicating the other two tunnels, when we emerged into the relative freshness of the access shaft.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is that where he’s set up his Papa Bear and Baby Bear fuck-pads?’ he said meanly.

‘We should be glad it wasn’t a body.’

He watched the doctor reach the top of the shaft before he turned back to me. ‘You set that up deliberately to undermine me,’ he hissed accusingly. ‘You knew exactly what was lying under those covers.’

‘Honestly, Kevin, I didn’t—’

‘Boss!’ he snarled, cutting in over me.

‘Fuck that,’ I snapped back, ‘we’re on our own down here, and you’d better believe that I’m not going to revert to cadet-force japes in the middle of a murder investigation on my patch, just to put one over on you.’

He laughed nastily. ‘
My patch!
You’re fucking welcome to it, Capaldi. Throwbacks and failed weirdoes, just your sort of people.’

‘DCI Fletcher.’ Jack Galbraith’s voice boomed down at us from above.

Looking up, seeing him foreshortened and sky-lined, he really did look like an emissary from a dark power.

Fletcher scrambled up the metal rungs. I took my time. By the time I breasted the surface, Fletcher and Jack Galbraith were ensconced together. Fletcher’s right arm was semaphoring to accompany his explanations.

The conversation broke up, Fletcher making his way back to Bruno’s shack, Jack Galbraith approaching me. I stiffened expectantly. Behind him I saw Fletcher send me a look compounded of anxiety and malice. It was a warning. He was obviously sensitive to what his boss and I might be discussing behind his back.

‘You look like you’ve just lost the bog-snorkelling championship,’ Jack Galbraith observed.

‘It’s a bit damp down there, sir.’

He looked down into the shaft. ‘So this is a gold mine?’ He sounded disappointed.

‘Do you want to go down there and see what we found?’ I asked.

He looked at me incredulously. ‘No, Capaldi, that is what I employ people like you for. So just describe it for me, your take on it.’

He nodded when I had finished. ‘DCI Fletcher tells me that you don’t think that humping a piece of latex in an underground chamber can be construed as weird behaviour.’

‘I didn’t say it was normal, sir, just maybe not as deviant as DCI Fletcher obviously found it. Mr Gilbert had a hard time coping with people. So he invents a little corner of his ideal world.’

‘And tops people and chops their heads and hands off. Where does that particular sideline fit into this ideal world?’

‘I don’t know whether he would be capable of that, sir.’

He used his thumb to indicate Bruno’s shack over his shoulder. ‘So what drove him to the final act?’

‘We don’t know that it is suicide yet, sir.’

He winced and shook his head. ‘Capaldi, Capaldi. Sometimes I despair of you. You’ve heard of Occam’s razor?’