Good People (33 page)

It smells. It smells fucking terrible. It smells of tar distillation and poison. It covers other smells. Those other smells would have to be so bad that the smell of creosote was preferable.

I grazed my spine in my hurry to get under the hatch and out to my car. By the time I got back to the Rumpus Room with the crowbar it was hurting, and I could feel a slow trickle of warm blood making its way down to my waist. I blocked it out.

I could be wrong, I warned myself. This could turn into the wilful damage of private property.

I wedged the flat end of the crowbar into a seam in the planking. I levered the bar forward, and almost fell flat on my face from my own momentum as a section of timber broke away with neither resistance nor sound, just a big puff of dead wood dust. I worked more wood free until I had a hole big enough to shine my torch into. I peered in but could see only blackness.

Gingerly, I put my hand in.
There is nothing in there
, I told myself. Nothing is going to grab my hand. There is nothing that has been lurking in there, waiting for this moment to slither up and sink teeth or mandibles into my fingers.

I was so psyched up that even if I had encountered cotton wool I would have jerked my hand out. What I touched momentarily was cold, smooth and clammy.

Reptilian skin?

Black plastic sheet, I discovered when I enlarged the hole. Nailed to the top rails of the frame that supported the planking, and hanging like a curtain behind it. A damp-proof membrane. So why had they needed the creosote?

The plastic sheet bulged away from the wall when I pushed at it. There was a void behind. I used my Swiss Army knife to make a slit in the sheet. Plenty of bad smells lived back there. Damp, mineral and foetid, and that tight clot that takes you in the back of the throat and has as much to do with the imagination as it has with the olfactory system.

I shone the torch in through the hole in the sheet. The beam picked up the haphazard planes of a rock face. Fissured and erratically vertical, the depth of the gap fluctuating between thirty centimetres and a metre. I tilted the beam down. The floor of the void was strewn with a haphazard collection of green-brown rocks that must have fallen off the face. There was something about the shape of them though that didn’t quite seem to work with the strata that they had been dislodged from.

I focused the beam on a rounded boulder. To make sense of it my mind tried to tell me that it was sprouting a tangle of mycelium. A harmless but relentless fungal operation working silently in the dark. I wasn’t fooled for long. The realization made my stomach heave, and I had to draw back into the Rumpus Room for a charge of relatively fresh air.

It wasn’t mycelium. It was hair. Hair still attached to a skull. The stones on the floor were bones. But nothing was whole, the skeleton had been broken and scattered haphazardly. A documentary about Tibetan sky burials came back to me. Bodies laid out on flat slabs of rock being hacked into small pieces and fed to vultures that circled and hobbled in to catch the thrown offerings.

I made myself shine the torch carefully over the bone debris, trying to assess the volume. It was a difficult calculation, but I didn’t think that there was more than one body here.

And it had probably been rats. Rats and the other small mammals that make their way into caves and regard a dead human body as a bonanza. Once the soft tissue had been consumed, they would have gnawed through the bones to get at the marrow, severing and scattering them.

I forced myself to look at the skull again. The facial sockets were turned away from the beam. Algae, damp and oxidation had turned the surface of the bone green-brown. I could have been looking at a prehistoric find. But I wasn’t. I knew enough to call her she.

But which
she
?

‘Donna Gallagher or Colette Fletcher? Or someone we don’t yet know?’ Bryn asked the questions. The photographs of the remains as we found them after the wall was dismantled were fanned out on the desk in front of him.

Ken McGuire focused on a point above our heads. His solicitor looked distinctly nervous. First pornography and now a corpse. This was running into savage territories, a far remove from his usual pastoral frolics in title and tenure.

‘We can get DNA samples from the bones and the hair,’ I explained.

Ken dropped his head and looked at us both stonily. ‘It was an accident.’

‘Who was she?’ I asked quietly.

‘Colette Fletcher.’

‘What happened, Mr McGuire?’ Bryn prompted.

He rolled it around, looking for the words. I took some solace from the fact that, at last, he was uncomfortable with this. ‘She liked to be stimulated. This one time she took it too far.’ He looked at us hopefully, but Bryn nodded for him to continue. He lowered his head; we had to strain to catch his voice. ‘Sometimes she liked things to be tightened round her throat while we did … Things … She said that it heightened her pleasure.’

‘What were you doing on this occasion?’

‘This is awkward to describe, Inspector.’

‘Please try, Mr McGuire. It’s important that we understand what happened.’

‘She was on the chair. One of us was … One of us was behind her. She had a scarf round her neck, tied to the light bracket. She wanted us to push against her, to keep the scarf tight. We were worried we might hurt her, but she told us that it made the experience more intense for her. Only this time …’ He looked up at us. ‘This time she didn’t tell us when to stop.’

‘She was asphyxiated?’ Bryn asked.

He nodded.

‘Who was fucking her, Ken?’ I asked.

He looked at me sharply, as if I had just ruined the poetic delicacy of the moment. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘I’m just curious to know why the one doing the watching didn’t notice that Colette was choking to death.’

Ken flashed a look at Bryn to see whether I was allowed to be this intrusive.

‘It’s going to be asked at some stage, Mr McGuire,’ Bryn advised him.

Ken closed his eyes. ‘I was underneath her,’ he whispered. ‘Neither of us could see her face.’

Two in the saddle. Both of them claiming to be too engrossed in giving Colette pleasure to realize that her grunts had passed way beyond ecstasy.

Which was exactly Jack Galbraith’s take on it.

‘Do you know what this adds up to?’ He flapped the pages of Ken McGuire’s statement in the air when we met later for the war council. ‘Do you know what this fucker’s defence is? The poor girl dies because the sensitive bastards were trying to gratify her needs. Un-fucking-believable!’ He threw the transcript down. ‘I want them charged with murder, Bryn.’

‘It’ll end up as manslaughter, sir. They’ll corroborate each other.’

‘It doesn’t matter how it ends up. I want them charged with something big and nasty to give me some leverage. I want to wave a murder charge in their faces and offer up the possibility of clemency if they give up the other bodies.’

‘Ken McGuire’s going to play it remorseful. He’ll use his position in the community. Solid, responsible farmer, man of the earth. So sorry, Your Honour, but we were young and simple country boys and we panicked.’

‘But they went on to degrade other young girls.’

‘We can’t prove that they were minors, though, sir,’ Bryn pointed out. ‘We can’t prove any criminal behaviour.’

‘Because we can’t find the fucking participants,’ Jack Galbraith raged in frustration. ‘Donna, Wendy, and now Marta …’ He ticked them off with his fingers. ‘And all the other ones that we don’t know about. Not to mention Boon Paterson, who probably got in the way. And what have they done with them all?’

‘Boarding Colette up was a panic reaction, sir,’ I offered. ‘They learned their lesson there when she started decomposing.’

‘Which leaves us only a whole fucking forest and Ken McGuire’s huge farm to explore.’

‘There is a way of undermining their defence, sir,’ I said.

He looked at me warily. ‘Tell,’ he instructed.

‘The manager of the Sychnant Nursing Home told me that Colette Fletcher stole certain items of value when she ran away.’

Bryn and Jack Galbraith looked at each other and grinned simultaneously as the understanding hit. Jack Galbraith nodded, voicing it: ‘And now we know that Colette didn’t run away.’

‘That’s right, sir. But Ken and Les wanted it to look like she did. They must have used her key, after she was dead, and gone in to pack up her belongings and steal some stuff to establish her Bad Girl-runaway status.’

‘Which smells more of careful planning than a panic reaction to me,’ Jack Galbraith observed happily. ‘Where’s the remorse in burglary and character defamation?’

‘Donna Fletcher is supposed to have run away from the same nursing home,’ Bryn reminded us.

Jack Galbraith nodded. ‘And Wendy Evans and this teacher she is supposed to have run off with …’

‘Malcolm Paterson, Boon’s adopted father, sir,’ I contributed.

‘What if he was just another poor bastard who got in the way?’

I nodded in humble recognition of my leader’s sagacity. I was used to credit bypassing me.

I didn’t tell Sally about the evolving hypothesis on the possible fate of Wendy and Malcolm. She had enough anxiety and grief to contend with. She was flitting between hope and black acceptance of the worst. I knew that I should be working on comfort and reassurance, but the only good proof that I could effectively come up with was the absence of a body. Which brought us full circle, back to the possibility of a body.

We slept together that night in her bed, but we didn’t make love. She was carrying too much despair, and I was still too close to the smell of Ken and Les’s antics. I did my best to console her. And I took my own comfort from her presence and this re-emerging memory of closeness.

And then I woke up.

Sally’s alarm clock told me that it was after three in the morning. She was sleeping soundly beside me. I tried to pretend that it was the unfamiliar surroundings that had confused me. When that didn’t work, I had to confront it. It was the vivid recall of Ken and Les that had jolted me from my dream.

The memory itself wasn’t shocking. It was the new thinking that lay behind it. Ken and Les had arrived at the Den. They had driven into the clearing on their quad bikes and I had been watching them from my ledge.

They came out of the Den and started searching. I had wondered what had taken them so long, but now knew that they had been into the Rumpus Room. They had scuttered around outside, and then they had driven off in different directions on their quad bikes.

They had been spooked. I thought at the time that they might have lost something. Now I was wondering if something that they had expected to find had gone missing.

Or someone?

Marta?

We had been assuming that they had previously moved her from the Den. That they weren’t giving up her whereabouts because they thought she was still a useful card that they could play. Or that they didn’t want to damn themselves even more.

I concentrated on it again.

Had that been their intention that night? Was that why they had arrived on two quad bikes? To move her on? To get her out of there in case Paul Evans cracked and gave up the Rumpus Room?

This wasn’t making sense. We had Ken and Les in custody. We had Colette Fletcher’s remains, their admission that they had been present when she had died, and that they had concealed the body. We were going to charge them. Why was my mind trying to mess things up?

Because we had another anomaly.

I now had to confront the real trigger of my disturbance. Ken and Les wouldn’t have risked the lights from the generator being seen from outside. The Den had been padlocked, the Rumpus Room would have been bolted shut, from the Den side. So, if she had been in there, how could she have got out?

I had to rephrase that. Who, apart from Ken and Les, could have let her out? Who else might have known that she was in there?

I jump-cut my memory to the discovery of Boon’s sweatshirt under the sofa. I had seen it when I had been crawling out through the hatch. But both Ken and Les had crawled out through that same hatch not long before me. Why hadn’t they seen it? This piece of evidence effectively damned them, and yet they managed to leave it for me to find.

And why hadn’t I seen it when I first moved the sofa, when I was looking for a trapdoor? I groaned inwardly. I knew that if I ran with this I would have to consider the possibility that the sweatshirt had been placed there while I was inside the Rumpus Room.

Jesus Christ, how many layers of watchers could there have been out there that night?

Gordon was a definite.

Paul Evans maybe knew, but he had been in Mackay’s care that night. Sara, Zoë and Sheila also made the list of people who could have known about Marta’s presence in the Rumpus Room.

But who had released her? The hatch of the Rumpus Room could only have been opened by someone on the outside. And I was now fairly certain that it wasn’t Ken or Les. Because their headless-chicken act that night must have been the realization that Marta had fled the coop.

So, someone had helped her escape. But out of that prison into what? This was where it got sinister again. What if the motive hadn’t been altruism? If she was now free, why hadn’t we seen her?

And why feed us Boon’s sweatshirt? I was back to asking myself complicated questions that I couldn’t answer.

I didn’t tell Sally about my nocturnal struggle with Faith. She didn’t need the introduction of added confusion. So breakfast was quiet without being tense. She kissed me at the door, in her dressing gown, not worrying about the neighbours, giving me a pleasant foretaste of what more settled times might hold for us.

I had to run to the car through a slanted downpour of cold rain. The cloud cover was low and moiling along slowly like a nudged and sulky thing. It was one of those mornings that you wanted to miss, because already you knew that the day wasn’t going to get any better.

Jack Galbraith and Bryn were continuing their interviewing of Ken and Les. I had been pulled out of the loop, replaced by professionals from Carmarthen and Cardiff who were expert at cracking nuances apart. I wasn’t upset; I had already worked out the start of my day.