Good People (31 page)

Then the sound that I had managed to insinuate into the backdrop intruded. It was the beep of the answering machine. A missed call that we had both slept through. At the same moment I realized that Sally’s eyes were open. She was listening to it too. ‘Don’t go just yet,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t spoil this.’

As she said it, she slipped up the bed. I turned into her. The kiss bypassed hesitation, our mouths and tongues met and functioned as if the fit had been engineered. Through the blood surge, I felt her nipples graze my chest, and my cock turned to concrete. I lifted my T-shirt to get the true feel of her. She broke the kiss, keeping the rhythm of it in her pelvis against me, to pull her T-shirt over her head. She came back to my mouth again, her hand slipping down to grab my cock. I licked the flat of my hand and circled it over a nipple, teasing the nub of it even harder. She arched her back. I was so spoiled for choice. So much to savour. I left the breast and travelled south, her weight shifting and her legs opening as she anticipated me.

She moved on to her side, raising her leg to lead me into her, cupping my balls as I drove in, pressing our chests together, clutching for as much contact as we could achieve. I felt myself come, a huge, pent-up surge that I didn’t want to be ready for. Too soon. I had wanted to take her with me.

Sensing my disappointment, she whispered, ‘It’s all right,’ Her hand stroking me down from the small of my back to the coccyx.

‘I think I just spoiled it,’ I whispered, full of postcoital failing and chagrin.

‘No, you didn’t. We have to start somewhere. That’s what’s important.’ She kissed me. ‘We’ve started.’

Sex had postponed the real world. We both shuddered involuntarily as the beep of the answering machine brought it back into our lives. ‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked softly.

There were too many paths forking ahead, each with its own branches and blank trails. Too many variable causes producing too many variable effects.

‘I don’t know, Sally.’

‘Give me a good lie then.’

‘What about a better truth?’

‘Try me.’

‘I want to take care of you.’

She looked at me steadily, holding her question back. ‘For how long?’

‘To see you through this. At least. A step at a time.’

She leaned across and kissed me gently. ‘Deal.’

I wrapped a towel around my waist and pulled a sweater on. Checked the clock. It was between midday and one o’clock. I felt my stomach clamp, it was as if I had girded tension on again with the towel. How much movement had we already slept through?

The call was from Bryn. The message had been left shortly after eleven o’clock.

‘Where are you?’ I asked, when they patched me through to him.

‘Rhayader. We’ve managed to set up a facility. It’s not perfect, but the phones and the computers work.’ He gave me my instructions.

When I turned round I expected Sally to be in the doorway. I just hadn’t expected her to be dressed. I buried my disappointment. ‘We’ve got a positive match with Boon’s blood type,’ I said, answering the question in her pose.

She squeezed her eyes shut momentarily, holding control. ‘What do we do now?’

‘They’ve been trying to call you. I’m meant to find you and bring you in to formally identify the sweatshirt.’

She managed a weak smile. ‘Okay. It has to be done.’

I went over and swept her up into a big hug. She buried her face into my chest. I spoke softly into her ear. ‘Take all the time you need. And just remember what I said about seeing you through this.’

The facility was on the outskirts of town and, if you overlooked the razor-wire compound, it appeared to be a small, innocuous industrial shed. It contained a cluster of holding cells and interview rooms. The place had been set up when the top brass realized there were potential terrorist targets in the locality – numerous wind farms, the Elan Valley dams – and nowhere secure in this low-crime area to hold any terrorists they might come across.

A woman PC took Sally off my hands. She played her part well, saying goodbye and thanking me like an amicable stranger.

They took me to Bryn and Jack Galbraith. I should have remembered their habits. I forgot to suck in some good clean air before I went into the room. Their cigarette fug had achieved the density of a screen laid down by a pocket battleship running for cover. But as a milieu it seemed to be working. They both looked happy.

Jack Galbraith, his chair tilted back under the
no smoking
sign, feet up on the desk, made a show of checking his watch. ‘You keeping California time, Capaldi?’

‘Did you manage to locate Mrs Paterson?’ Bryn asked, before I could respond. His voice betrayed no hint of irony or suggestion.

‘Yes, sir. She’s being shown the sweatshirt as we speak.’

As if on cue, the phone on the desk rang. Bryn listened with a chopped involuntary nod, and replaced the receiver. ‘It’s positive. She’s fairly certain that it’s what he was wearing to go to London.’

I winced internally. Poor Sally. She had told me that she had been prepared for the worst. I just hoped that that had included seeing her son’s dried blood on his sweatshirt.

‘Can we bring Ken McGuire in now?’ I asked.

‘We’re way ahead of you there.’ Jack Galbraith beamed.

‘We brought both McGuire brothers in for questioning this morning,’ Bryn explained.

‘What changed?’

Jack Galbraith laughed at my surprise. ‘The Cardiff hooker retracted her statement. She walked in this morning. Voluntarily.’ He gave me a crafty look. ‘Almost as if she was connected to a psychic link into the boondocks.’

‘Did you talk to Mackay?’ I asked Bryn.

‘Yes, he has very kindly delivered Paul Evans to our Hereford friends.’

‘Are we going to bring him up here?’

Jack Galbraith shook his head. ‘No, we’re going to leave him with the amigos there for the time being. Use the distance. He can be our control. If there’s a change-of-story virus running amok up here, I want to make sure that he doesn’t catch it.’

‘What about the laptop?’ I asked.

‘It’s not singing yet. The Tech boys are still delving and diving.’

‘We can hold them on suspicion with the sweatshirt. And with Monica Trent’s retraction, we’ve got enough to charge them with something inventive. So we’re not short on time for some careful sifting,’ Bryn told me happily.

‘What are they saying?’ I asked.

‘It’s like one of those fucking gizmos with callipers and pencils that can copy the same signature.’ Jack Galbraith scored crosses in the air with his forefinger to demonstrate. ‘They’re all telling the same story. Even after we floored them with the hooker’s retraction, they just picked themselves up and launched into the next identical version.’

‘Even Paul Evans in Hereford,’ Bryn explained, ‘when he was told that Monica Trent had pulled their alibi.’

‘Now they’re actually admitting that they did pick up your East European lady at the filling station.’ Jack Galbraith inclined his head at me. It was all I was going to get in the way of apology or approbation. ‘The reason they’re giving for the hooker version is that it was to give Boon Paterson time to get to Ireland with the hitchhiker. Seems that he had a sudden road-to-Damascus moment and decided to leave the Army and take off with her. His plan, supposedly, was to make for Amsterdam via Dublin. And his loyal buddies aided and abetted him by coming up with the hooker-and-pimp obfuscation.’

This was essentially the tale that Trevor Vaughan had given me. ‘How do they explain the sweatshirt? And the blood on it?’

‘They’re stonewalling. Pleading total ignorance,’ Bryn explained. ‘My guess is that they’re surprised that it’s surfaced. They’re having to stall because they haven’t been able to get together to work out how the sweatshirt got overlooked.’

‘What’s your take on it, sir?’ I asked Jack Galbraith.

He steepled his fingers. ‘It’s the fallback story. If it follows the usual pattern, we can suppose that there are elements of truth in it. We assume that there was an argument that they are not telling us about. So, best case, did Boon Paterson get to Ireland with the girl but with a bloody nose, and minus his sweatshirt? Or, worst case, did only the girl get there?’

‘What if neither of them got there?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t complicate things, Capaldi. Let’s just say that, at this stage, the only blood on the tracks appears to belong to Boon Paterson.’

Ireland …

What was it that was niggling me about Ireland?

And then I remembered. My first meeting with Zoë McGuire.

‘Sir, can I speak to Gordon McGuire?’

He picked up the urgency in my voice and flashed Bryn a glance. ‘Why him in particular?’

‘Because he’s got the most to lose.’

I watched Gordon McGuire through the mirrored glass. He was sitting in the interview room with his solicitor. The audio feed was on. If he was nervous, he wasn’t showing it. Or sounding it. He was telling the solicitor about a big pheasant shoot in Lincolnshire that he had been invited to.

His bluff auctioneer’s manner darkened when I walked in. He let me see the scowl. ‘I hope you’re coming to tell me that we can leave.’

‘That’s not up to me, I’m afraid, Mr McGuire,’ I replied soothingly, and proceeded to formally set up the interview. Bryn had already advised me that the solicitor wasn’t a threat; a country practitioner who was way out of his depth.

Gordon turned his professional charm back on. ‘We tried to help a friend out, Sergeant. Okay, technically, we may have done something borderline illegal. But isn’t all of this –’ he barked a short laugh and spread his hands, taking in the recording machinery and personnel in the room ‘– just a little bit over-elaborate for a misdemeanour?’

‘Where is Boon Paterson, Mr McGuire?’

He glanced at his solicitor and sighed wearily. ‘We’ve been through all this. Okay, we told some fibs, and maybe, unintentionally, we’ve wasted some police time, but we were just trying to help Boon.’ He gave me his good-fellow stare, about to pitch the sell. ‘We were drunk. Wales had beaten England. We’d had a great day out together. Possibly, under other circumstances, we wouldn’t even have considered doing what we did. But, once we had, we were committed to it for our friend’s sake.’

‘You haven’t answered my question, Mr McGuire.’

‘Okay, to answer your question, I would imagine that he should be in Holland by now.’

I made a show of studying the notes in front of me. ‘You didn’t actually see him go, did you?’

‘No, I stayed at the hut.’

‘So, how do you know that they got to the station at Devil’s Bridge?’

‘They didn’t go to the station at Devil’s Bridge, they went to Ponterwyd to catch the bus.’

I glanced at my mythical notes again. ‘Isn’t the train from Devil’s Bridge the obvious way to get to Aberystwyth?’

‘It would be, if the trains were running at this time of year.’ He smirked, pleased with himself at sidestepping what he thought was my attempt at a trap. He didn’t realize that I wanted him cocky. It would make the prospect at the cliff’s edge that much more abrupt when I led him to it.

‘How do you know they actually got to Ponterwyd?’

‘Ken and Les told me when they got back to the hut.’

‘And you believed them?’

He smiled at me condescendingly. ‘My brother and my best friend, Sergeant? Of course I did.’

‘Let me see if I’ve got this right …’ I said, pretending to read from my notebook. ‘They drove Boon and the girl back to his house to pick up his passport and pack some stuff. Then they drove to Ponterwyd, where they dropped them off. Then it’s back to Les’s to pick up a quad bike. The quad bike follows the minibus to the drop-off point. Then they both return to the hut on the quad bike. That about it?’

He nodded. ‘More or less. They hid the quad bike and walked the last bit. We didn’t want you lot finding it and spoiling Boon’s chances.’

I pulled a puzzled frown. ‘We’re hearing a lot about Boon’s chances. But not about why his bloodied sweatshirt was found in Les’s hut.’

He smiled bemusedly. ‘No, none of us can explain that either.’

‘Mr McGuire, why did you tell your wife that she wouldn’t be going to the rugby international in Dublin with you this year?’

‘What?’ The question had come at him out of the sun.

‘You told your wives and partners that they wouldn’t be accompanying you to Dublin. Breaking a tradition, weren’t you?’

‘What has this got to do with anything?’ he blustered, his smug crust starting to crumble, looking to his solicitor for support.

‘I think you know exactly what we’re talking about.’

‘It’s no business of yours what arrangements I make with my wife.’

‘I don’t see that there’s any relevance in this line of questioning, Sergeant,’ his solicitor came in, belatedly sensing Gordon’s concern.

I gave him a terror stare and shifted back to Gordon. ‘That’s how you persuaded the girl to stay, isn’t it? Told her that you would get her safely to Dublin when you all went over for the international. Safety in numbers, was that the line you used?’

‘She went with Boon.’

‘No, she didn’t, Gordon. She was locked up in the Den. She was turned into a sex toy. Just like you did with Wendy Evans, and Donna Gallagher, and Collette Fletcher, and God knows what other ones you managed to haul into your net.’

‘Sergeant, please …’ the solicitor protested.

I leaned in across the table at Gordon, shutting the solicitor out of my vision. ‘Did Boon try to save her? Is that what happened, Gordon? Did Boon get in the way?’

‘No.’ He leaned across to meet me, angry now. ‘Boon was our friend. Can’t you understand that, you bastard? Can’t you understand friendship?’

‘Did Boon try to protect her?’

‘There was nothing to protect her from. It was her free choice. She wanted to stay, for Christ’s sake …’ He slammed his eyes shut, realizing his admission.

I gave him time. I put the flat of my hand in front of the solicitor’s face to shut him up. I didn’t want Gordon distracted now.

He shook his head, pissed at himself. But there was a new note in his tone, almost relief. ‘Her work permit had expired, she was an illegal immigrant. She was afraid of the police. What was going to happen when she tried to get on to the ferry. And there was a gangmaster chasing her.’ He stared at me. ‘Does this have to come out into the open?’