Good People (35 page)

‘He didn’t want to involve you in that aspect.’

‘Why not?’

I tried to recall the psychologist’s profile. ‘Because that was his dirty side. It was a compulsion, but he was deeply ashamed of it. That self-loathing was transferred to the women who indulged him. They became sluts by definition. He couldn’t respect a woman who was prepared to be degraded. But you were his wife, he needed to be able to respect you, and so he had to keep you pure.’

She looked pained and puzzled. ‘But poor Wendy Evans … I don’t know about the others … But didn’t they groom Wendy? She wasn’t degraded until they got their hands on her.’

‘They conveniently managed to overlook the finer points. Probably, in their books, a truly virtuous woman would be genetically programmed not to succumb to Rohypnol.’

She nodded. ‘So he put me on a pedestal. Without even asking my permission.’ She looked at me anxiously. There was something so raw in the look that I knew we had hit the root of what she was drinking to cover. She spoke with a quiet intensity. ‘Do you think that’s what could have created those needs? By turning me into something that couldn’t be sullied, did he have to go to the opposite extreme to work out those urges?’

‘That side of him was in place long before you came along. If anything, you helped him. You gave him a rounded, three-dimensional woman who was more than just a sexual object.’

‘But it didn’t stop when I came along.’

‘It was embedded pretty deep by then.’

She looked at me candidly. The flush had spread on her face. ‘That poor girl who died. I looked it up on the Internet: it’s called autoerotic asphyxiation. People do die sometimes. It’s dangerous. Do you think it was an accident?’

‘I can’t talk about it, Sheila,’ I said apologetically.

‘I know.’ She nodded and took another hit on her wine. ‘Do you think I could be?’ she asked in almost a whisper, a rasp in her voice.

‘Could be what?’

‘Sullied?’

I smiled, playing it lightly. ‘I couldn’t possibly answer that.’

‘Do you know what the worrying thing is, Glyn?’

I shook my head neutrally.

‘I can’t answer it myself.’

‘It’s not something that needs answering.’

She frowned and waved a hand, dismissing my attempt at reassurance. ‘I think it is. I think it’s something that I need to know. Or I’ll always be wondering if it was me who drove him to it. Putting up some unconscious barrier that he could sense, giving off a whiff of revulsion.’

‘He started long before he met you, Sheila.’

‘But he didn’t stop.’ It came out almost as a wail, despair cracking her voice. She closed her eyes, bringing herself under control, and then opened them to stare as levelly at me as the booze would allow. ‘I need to know, Glyn.’

I shook my head, starting to get the understanding of something. ‘This is the drink speaking.’

She held up her glass. ‘I need it to help me get through this. But it’s only a tool. I made the decision when I was stone-cold sober.’

‘I can’t help you, Sheila.’

She pulled a face and smiled wryly. ‘That’s a real pity. Because I am going to do this anyway. If you won’t help me, I will go to Cardiff or Hereford or Newport, anywhere, and find some stranger in a bar who will let me do it to them.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

She flared, defiance cutting through the booze flush. ‘I’ve promised myself. I am not going to have that bastard leaving me twisted with guilt that I could have prevented all this. I mean it, Glyn. I am totally sincere. If you won’t help me here, I’ll find a total stranger to do it with.’

I believed her. ‘Why me?’

She managed a weak smile. ‘Because I don’t know any other mildly attractive policemen that I can trust to be absolutely discreet.’

‘You’re asking the impossible, Sheila.’

She scowled. ‘That bastard put me on a pedestal. I didn’t ask for that. I wanted a normal, healthy sex life. I think that I probably wanted the dirty bits that went with it as well, Glyn. Eroticism, at least. But I didn’t push; he was my husband. If he was timid where sex was concerned, fine, it was no big deal, I could live with that.’ She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. ‘And now I’m going to get the blame. The whispers are going to follow me around. “Ken McGuire was driven to do those terrible things because his wife was frigid.”’

‘They won’t say that, Sheila,’ I said soothingly.

‘They will … So now I want to prove to myself that I’m not frigid. I want to do this, Glyn. I’ve been drinking to get the courage.’ She pushed her glass away symbolically. ‘But I don’t need it. If I was afraid, if I was repulsed, the booze wouldn’t be able to mask it. But I want it …’ She threw her hand across the table on top of mine. Her face flushed blotchily. ‘Glyn, thinking about it, talking about it has made me wet … I’m so aroused … I want to taste you …’

Oh Jesus … She was an attractive woman. She was offering me a blow job. No strings attached. Absolute discretion. A male myth. My cock was already erect.

I covered the hand that was covering mine. ‘I can’t, Sheila,’ I said softly.

She stared at me fixedly. She breathed in deeply through her nose. She pulled her hand away. Still staring. I couldn’t tell which way her psyche was about to swing.

I noticed then that her eyes were tightly closed, as if she was praying. I stood and moved quietly around the table towards the door on the balls of my feet. And then I felt a wave of pity go out towards this woman. I tiptoed up behind her, put my hands gently on her shoulder and then leant down to kiss her on the side of the cheek. ‘You’ll come through this, I promise you. You’re a strong and attractive woman, and one day you’ll be glad that you found out that you were with the wrong man before it was all too late.’

She was quiet and still for a moment. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and then began to nod. ‘I’m going to tell him anyway.’

‘Tell who what, Sheila?’ I asked gently.

She raised her head to look round at me. ‘I’m going to tell that bastard that we’ve just done that thing.’

I let myself out.

Sex, even nobly spurned sex, casts a mushy spell. It wasn’t until I was driving home that I began to wonder if I had just been bamboozled. Had Sheila McGuire deliberately led me around by the balls to divert me from asking about Marta? Or Boon? Could she have effected Marta’s release?

I shook my head to clear it.

Mush. It was all still mush.

But soon I had something more tangible to worry about. The Beast had been let out of its cage.

It was in the caravan’s mailbox. A cheap Manila envelope addressed to
The Occupier
. No big deal, obviously some sort of unsolicited flyer for cheap car insurance or plastic fascia boards. Except that I had an explicit agreement with the postman not to deliver any of this crap.

Instinct made me wait until I was inside before I opened it. Shaking the contents out on to the table. My gut tightening as I recognized the images. From the depth of field they had to have used a telescopic lens. Three shots of me with the ends of my belt dangling, in a borrowed pair of abattoir boots, looking like I was attempting to re-awaken sexual interest in a stone-dead heifer.

I shook the envelope out over the table. It was empty. But there was something on the back of the second image that I turned over. The same printer font as on the envelope.

Far enough …

Far enough? What was someone trying to tell me?

I called Sally to explain that I was going to be late.

How far out into the world had these travelled? I called Bryn Jones to test the waters. ‘Any new developments your end, sir?’ I asked breezily.

‘Potentially,’ he said, and I let myself go limp with relief as I realized that I was not about to face an order to come in and explain myself. ‘One of the dogs sniffed out the broken chain from a chainsaw buried under a pile of sawdust at Les Tucker’s yard. It was wrapped in an old rag. It’s in for analysis, but there are possible blood and cloth fibres on it.’

‘It’s a messy way to dispose of a body.’

‘Not if you’ve got a forest that you can call your own.’

I got off the phone as quickly as I politely could. I had only called to make sure that I was still perceived as one of the good guys. I didn’t want to find myself volunteered to lead a party of amateur rangers out into the wild woods to look for scenes of carnage.

The rain was still with us, working now to mute and thicken the night. It suited me. It covered my approach on foot down Tony Griffiths’s muddy drive, which was bordered with the shadow forms of junked cars.

I kept going over it in my head. The stupidity of what I had done. I had let the moment drive the occasion. Tony Griffiths hadn’t needed the insurance that I had so naïvely provided. There was no way that I could have proven that he had been trucking poached venison. I should have realized it was a set-up when he let me take his phone away from him so easily. He had orchestrated the venue and the event. For someone else to capture.

I had been suckered.

Far enough …

I stopped and crouched into cover when I came into sight of the small bungalow blocked out against the night, the light in one of the front windows punching through the gap in the home-made curtains. In the gap I could make out part of a television screen flickering abstract colour changes.

I dialled the number and heard the phone start to ring in the house as well as through my handset. It was a weird sense of double connectivity.

‘Hello?’

‘Tony Griffiths?’

‘That’s right.’

‘This is Detective Sergeant Capaldi. Do you remember me?’

‘How could I forget?’ I heard the grin in his voice.

‘I warned you, Tony.’

‘Warned me about what?’ he asked, his tone textured with puzzled innocence.

‘The consequences of what would happen if those pictures ever showed up.’

‘Hey, hey, hey, Sergeant, hold up,’ he protested. ‘You took my phone away from me, remember?’

‘I’ve stuck to my side of the deal, Tony.’

‘You took the phone,’ he wailed, aggrieved.

‘I’m pulling together a few friends here. Brother officers who are very upset about the way you’ve insulted me and the force. We’re coming to pay you a visit, Tony. Probable cause, no search warrant necessary. And unless you have information for me about who took those photographs, I am predicting, in your very near future, a case of injuries received in the course of resisting arrest.’ I cut the connection, counted off ten seconds, and called his number again. And got the engaged tone.

A short time later I heard the motorbike start up. I ducked deeper into cover and Tony went past me, the bike slithering, its wheels kicking up arching clots of mud. He was in a rabid hurry to get away.

So, why had he used some of that precious time to make a phone call?

I messed up Tony’s back door, making it look like a whole bunch of vengeful and rampaging cop buddies had kicked it in. Why they stopped their destructive surge after they crossed the threshold was something he would probably always puzzle over.

I found the telephone in the hall. It was a clunky, old-fashioned handset with no caller display screen. I lifted the receiver and took a deep breath to calm myself down before I pushed the redial button. It began to ring out. I prayed that I would recognize the voice.

And I did.

One is not at home
… A recorded parody of the Queen’s voice. A fucking answering machine.

It had backfired.

I had deliberately let Tony skedaddle in order to find out who he had called. Now, not only didn’t I have that information, but I didn’t have him to lean on either.

Had he called for salvation? Or warning?

I paddled over to the plus side. Hopefully, he had told whoever he had just called that I was holding him responsible for the emergence of the photographs. They would assume that I thought he was trying to run a simple coercion job on me. That I hadn’t seen past that to the bigger picture. Which kept the photographs viable as leverage material. It would not be in their best interest to put them out into the public domain yet. How much of this was analysis, and how much wishful thinking, I didn’t want to put on the scales to test.

Now all I had to do was identify the bigger picture.

I made a cursory search of the bungalow, already knowing that I wasn’t going to find anything more incriminating than bachelor crud and bad odours. Tony was a spear-carrier, not a player.

I got back to my car and started asking myself hard questions.

Why had Tony let himself be recruited? What did he get out of it? It now looked like the whole simulated bovine sex episode had been a set-up. So, even at that early stage they had started to work me into the procedures. Preparing me for the patsy fall if it was ever required.

Far enough …

What else had they set me up for?

Stop … I checked myself. I was asking the wrong question. Forget about me. I wasn’t important in this. I was purely a reactive force. The checks and balances had only been instigated when they saw the opportunity to weave me into the story.

Take it back to the stage before that.

What else had Tony been contracted to do? Before he was instructed to meet me and fit me up.

To deliver Marta?

But there was a big flaw in that. He left her at the filling station two hours before the minibus arrived. That timeline worked with the random, chance encounter version of the story. A hitchhiker is dropped off. It’s a bad spot and a lousy time of night, family traffic mainly, going the wrong way. So it takes two hours before another lift comes along in the shape of the minibus.

Which is what we had accepted until now. But what throws it out of kilter is that I now know that Tony is not the innocent hayseed that I had taken him to be. He was not just the random lift provider.

Oh Jesus … Why hadn’t I checked?

I scrabbled for my phone. It was so first principles, and I had neglected to follow it through.

I listened to the recorded timetables, checking the numbers in my head. I let it spool past me twice. To be certain.