Good People (12 page)

‘The daft bugger!’ she exclaimed crossly, but I caught a waft of relief under it.

‘Would Amsterdam fit?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘He spent a lot of time there when he was stationed in Germany.’ Then another thought struck her. ‘Does the Army know this?’

‘I haven’t told them. And I won’t be telling them, either. I’ve had to take a vow of silence.’

‘You’re telling me,’ she pointed out.

‘I’m allowing myself a dispensation in your case.’

She smiled, acknowledging the favour. She shook her head exasperatedly. ‘Via Ireland? Why on earth didn’t he just get on a train or a plane and go there directly? If he had made up his mind, why faff about going the long way round?’

‘It happens sometimes. People running away, they need the subterfuge. They have a false idea of how visible they are.’

She went silent. I winced inwardly, wishing that I hadn’t used the words
running away.
She pulled a philosophical smile. ‘Ah well … At least I now know that he’s not in a car wreck. Which is something. Which is a lot.’ She underscored the relief of it with a sharp nod of her head. ‘I suppose all I can do now is wait until he decides to grace me with contact.’ She smiled wistfully, and screwed up her face at me. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about you …’

The change in direction took me unawares. ‘You have?’ I blurted, feeling my face reddening.

‘Yes. I got to thinking about missing girls.’

I realized my mistake and notched my expression down from the boudoir and back into the hallway. Curiosity cushioned the let-down. ‘I thought we had agreed that it didn’t happen here.’

‘That’s just it. I thought about it again. And then realized that it might have happened.’

‘Might?’

‘Yes. Two that I know of. They used to work here. Not at the same time. But they both walked out without any warning. Packed their bags and were gone in the morning.’

‘Were they reported?’

‘I think so. You’d have to ask Joan Harvey about that. She runs the place. It’s terrible though, isn’t it?’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘Because of who they were, we never actually worried that anything might have happened to them. That’s why I never put this together when you asked that time.’

‘Because of who they were?’ I turned it into a question.

She hunched her shoulders apologetically. ‘How to put it nicely? Townies? Roll-throughs?

‘Roll-throughs?’

She laughed. ‘It’s one of the names locals use for incomers. They expect us to move on.’

‘So these girls weren’t locals?’

‘No, that’s my point. They came from Manchester, I think. They were tough. We assumed that they could look after themselves. That’s why we never considered them as “missing” per se. We just thought that they’d got fed up. Had enough of the quiet life and the dark nights, and moved on.’

‘Can you remember their names?’ I asked, taking my notebook out.

‘Colette something, and Donna … Gallagher, I think. You’d have to check with Joan Harvey.’

‘What sort of age were they?’

She didn’t answer. She stood up, a resigned and practised smile forming that wasn’t meant for me. I turned round on the bench. A tiny old woman in a pale green flannel nightgown stood in the doorway. A sparse puff of white hair over a face and neck creviced with wrinkles.

Sally moved towards her. ‘You need to go, do you, Mary?’

It was too late. She had already been. I noticed the damp-dark hem of her nightgown and the trail of urine that was now pooling on the vinyl floor below her. I stood up. ‘I think it’s time I got out of your way.’

She smiled at me resignedly. ‘Duty calls.’ She put her hands gently on Mary’s shoulders, feeling for the steering mechanism.

‘Glyn …’ I was at the door when she called out. I turned. She was smiling. ‘You know, someday I’d really like you to see me in something a bit more flattering than an old dressing gown and this.’ She dropped her chin to indicate the polyester housecoat.

There was a devastatingly urbane and romantic response to that somewhere. I didn’t find it. Instead I blushed for the second time that night. ‘Sure …’ I stammered.

‘Call me,’ she instructed, rescuing me. ‘I don’t work every night.’

I crossed the gravel to the car, shaking off my ineptitude and beginning to feel jaunty. I had a date to arrange. It was then that the irony hit me. Sally had laid the possibility of two new missing girls on me just when I had almost reached the point of waving Magda off into her Irish sunset.

I was still meant to be in Caernarfon, so I stayed in Unit 13 the next day, kept my head down, and caught up with a backlog of paperwork. My telephone rang a few times but I just monitored the answerphone. No more calls from Mackay; Emrys Hughes rang twice, and Bryn Jones once. Both left messages asking me to call them back. Being in pretend North Wales, a land where the mountains screwed communications even more than here, I ignored them.

I could guess the reasons. Hughes would be calling to berate me for going to see Ken McGuire and Paul Evans. Bryn was probably calling because Emrys Hughes had got his boss Morgan to lean on Jack Galbraith to clap the restrainers on me.

Donna and Colette.

I wrote the names in my notebook again and underlined them. Sally had called them Townies. Tough street kids who could look after themselves. I tried to shut it out, but the stereotype dropped down through the trapdoor. Cigarettes and chewing gum, unfit and overweight. Tattoos. But no kid called Dwayne or Britney in a pushchair – yet.

Or perhaps there was now. Maybe that was the future that they had run away into.

I made a note to go and see Joan Harvey at the Sychnant Nursing Home. What intrigued me was how a couple of girls from a background like that had independently found their way into the boondocks in the first place. How had the prospect of Ursa Major in the night sky ever managed to supplant the One-Stop Shop and neon lighting?

It was one of those drab and listless days at this time of year when daylight had given up trying to lead an independent existence by two o’clock in the afternoon. It was time to shut down the office. Time to return from North Wales.

I walked into The Fleece with my car keys conspicuous, the echt traveller, stretching the ricks of the journey out of my neck.

David Williams interpreted the sign language and brought a coffee over to the bar. ‘Emrys Hughes wants you to call him,’ he informed me.

‘How was he?’

‘Agitated.’

‘Happy agitated or mean agitated?’

‘He looked pleased with himself.’

Which probably meant that he had been given permission to tell me that I was in deep trouble.

‘What do you know about the Sychnant Nursing Home?’ I asked.

He looked at me for a moment, trying to work out the angle. ‘It processes the elderly. Not much trade for you there, I would have thought. Unless …’ He leaned forward over the bar, his voice dropping to conspiratorial: ‘Unless you’re going to start issuing exhumation warrants?’

‘Don’t be so ghoulish. I’m just asking. What’s its reputation?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know too much about it. It’s not Rolls-Royce, but it’s not the sort of place that chains the residents to the radiators either.’

‘Do you know of any young girls who have gone missing around here?’ I tried to keep it matter-of-fact.

He laughed. ‘No, but I’ve got a lot of customers who are still wondering where the hot spring chicken they married disappeared to.’ He looked up over my shoulder, his eyes flicking a warning at me. ‘Afternoon, Emrys.’

I turned slowly. David had been right: Emrys Hughes did look pleased with himself. ‘You’re a hard man to contact,’ he told me.

‘I’ve been away, in Caernarfon. I thought you knew.’ I waited for him to contradict me.

He smirked. ‘You’ve missed the news then.’

‘What news is that?’

‘The news that means you can stop harassing my citizens.’

I looked at him, trying to fathom it. Was this a secret society thing? Was he a party to the version that Trevor Vaughan had told me? That the whole thing was a cover-up to get Boon Paterson running free. ‘Amsterdam?’ I probed.

He stared at me distrustfully, wondering whether I was trying to work some cruel urban wind-up on him. Then the cockiness sprang back. ‘The prostitute from Cardiff – she’s verified the story. They found the telephone number they thought they’d lost. Gordon McGuire got me to call her, and she’s corroborated their story.’

I couldn’t believe it. My mouth hung open. I must have looked like a guy miming the involuntary inhalation moment after being kicked in the balls.

He flashed me a big fuck-you grin. He had mistaken my expression for chagrin. It wasn’t. It was amazement. I already knew that the prostitute story was pure hokum. Tony Griffiths had told me about Magda. Trevor Vaughan had confirmed it.

Why had someone felt the need to reinforce the lie?

Bryn Jones confirmed it when I called him from my car. Her name, real or acquired, was Monica Trent. A thirty-two-year-old white female working out of a walk-up flat over a bookmaker’s in a street off the road from Llantrisant into Cardiff. Strictly by appointment. No kerb crawlers, no random johns on street corners. It was a suburban operation, she kept it tidy and discreet, and didn’t get bothered by Vice.

She disturbed me.

Not her personally – I didn’t know her. But the fact that someone had felt the need to spend money or call in a favour to bolster a story that no one but me had been questioning.

Were they playing with me? Did they know that Trevor Vaughan had confirmed my suspicions that the prostitute story was a fabrication? Were they pushing Monica Trent across the board to counter any attack that I was preparing? But that’s where it went screwy. They had to know that I had nothing to attack them with.

So why go to all that trouble?

Unless they were shoring-up against the possibility of something really nasty oozing out between the seams. Was Monica Trent a caulking agent?

I smiled to myself at the unintended pun. I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the rim of the steering wheel. Why do this when Trevor Vaughan’s explanation had virtually reassured me? My head shot back. Because Trevor hadn’t been there … He had been asleep. Completely out of it. He had given me the story that had been reported to him. He only knew what he had been told.

Or was that not quite true? He had seemed more than just uncomfortable when he had been talking to me about that night. A couple of times he had shown definite signs of disturbance. Manifestations of evasion or anxiety? I hadn’t probed deeper at the time because I thought that they were resonations of his sexual distress. Could it have been more than that? Had Trevor found out something up there that he wasn’t meant to know? Something that he had kept from me? Something that had disturbed him?

Too many questions and only one person to answer them.

‘Yes …’ His mother’s voice was snappy and curt. Still answering the telephone with a suspicion for the instrument that she must have picked up from her parents about fifty years ago.

‘Mr Trevor Vaughan please?’ I asked in a smooth, plump voice. I had already checked that his father’s name was Harold.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Irfon Machinery Supplies – we’ve got a promotion on a new range of hedgecutters,’ I said breezily.

‘We don’t need one.’

‘We’re offering a free, no obligation demonstration on your farm. Totally free.’ I repeated the magic word that usually captured a farmer’s interest.

‘Wait a minute.’

I heard a muffled conversation. She was probably instructing him to get me to commit to a decent length of hedge trimming for their free, no obligation demonstration. ‘Hello?’ Trevor Vaughan came on the line.

‘Hello, Trevor, it’s Glyn Capaldi …’ I waited out the silence for a moment. ‘Don’t hang up,’ I warned into the void.

‘What do you want now?’ He had lowered his voice.

‘Who’s minding you tonight?’

‘No one’s minding me.’

If that was true, they were probably relying on his parents to stick close and raise the alarm if I appeared.

‘Make some excuse that you have to go out. I’ll pick you up at the end of your drive in half an hour. And don’t call anyone,’ I instructed.

‘I don’t want to see you. I’ve already told you more than enough.’

‘Half an hour,’ I repeated.

‘Didn’t you hear me? I won’t be there.’

‘If you’re not, you’re fucked, Trevor.’

He was silent again for a moment. ‘Are you threatening me?’ he asked, trying to hike some strength into his tone.

‘Yes.’

It wasn’t the answer he was expecting. He had to re-string his approach. ‘If you hit me, I’ll sue you.’

‘I’m not going to hit you.’ I waited for a beat. ‘I’m going to let the world know that you’re a fairy.’

‘That’s a lie!’ he spluttered.

‘I’ll bet a lot of people may have their suspicions confirmed.’

‘That’s malicious slander,’ he retorted furiously, but it didn’t quite carry the conviction, as he had to pitch it in a whisper.

‘Half an hour,’ I said, snapping my phone shut dynamically, and crossing my fingers.

He was alone in the bad light. A forlorn figure with his thin hair drifting, wearing an old fawn duffel, a drooped and baggy pair of jeans, and work boots with the metal toecaps shining through. I heard a bunch of rooks cawing when I leaned over and pushed the passenger’s door open for him.

He stared at me sullenly, but got in. ‘You’re a bastard. You know that? A mean and vindictive bastard.’

I ignored him and drove off.

‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked, looking out mystified, as if the view from my car had caused him to shift dimensions.

I continued to ignore him. It was easier to play it hard and heartless without speaking. He got the message and retreated back into his sulk. I headed confidently for the forest.

‘Where are you taking me?’

His voice startled me. I had got used to our silence. We were on a track winding up the hill and deeper into the trees. He was looking out of the window with a curious interest now.

‘We’re going up to the hut,’ I said, deciding that I could afford to ease back on the tough-cop pedal a touch.