Good People (38 page)

He studied me warily, trying to calculate where I was going with this.

‘Ken and Les will be put away for what they did to Colette. You’ve got your revenge to take back to Wendy. It’s time to call Boon and Sophia back into the fold.’

He shook his head so slowly that I wasn’t sure whether he was refusing or still calculating.

‘And why did you need to bring Sally into this?’ I let him hear my real anger. ‘I couldn’t figure it out. She was frightened, she was in a cold and wild place. What would make her get out and leave her car?’ I held up the photograph of Rose Marie Ferguson again. ‘And then I made the connection. God, what would have gone through her mind when she saw you walking up out of the gloom? She probably thought she was hallucinating. What did it take to make you solid to her? A rap on the window? An old, familiar, cracked smile? Because you knew that she would have to respond. No matter how bitter, betrayed and damaged she felt, you still had Boon linking you. And Boon was in danger.’

‘It wasn’t me.’ He said it quietly, head down, not looking at me.

‘Who else could it be?’

Something in the air changed. I sensed the movement at the top of the stairs. Before I heard the voice.

‘What about her son?’

Boon Paterson looked down at me, smiling, amused by my surprise. He looked healthy. Dressed in tight black jeans and a grey, baggy sweatshirt.

‘Is Sophia up there?’ I asked.

‘Why?’

‘It’s time for you both to come in. It’s time to stop this.’

He came down the stairs, taking them slowly, rolling a sway into his steps. Even with the loose-fitting sweatshirt, I could tell that he was powerfully built. I hoped that this wasn’t going to turn into something that I was going to regret.

‘Soph isn’t here.’ The same studied swagger in his voice as in his gait.

Malcolm got up to let him join us at the foot of the stairs. I had the height, but he was stacked with youth and energy. And no fear.

‘Where is she?’

‘That’s what you people are trying to find out in the woods.’ He laughed. ‘Along with poor busted-up old me. Isn’t that where everyone thinks we are? Chopped up and buried by those two sick fucks?’

‘We’ve got them for Colette, you don’t need to take this any further.’

He shook his head. ‘It isn’t enough.’

I realized then that he had brought his own agenda into this. He had embraced new histories and cultural possibilities and was now looking back on his past with venom. He was possessed of a confused rage that Malcolm had been able to channel.

‘They’ll deal it down to manslaughter,’ Malcolm protested.

‘We can’t charge them if we don’t find the bodies,’ I reasoned.

‘But you can fuck up the rest of their lives with the insinuation,’ Malcolm said gleefully.

‘If we’re never found, they’ll carry the blame around with them for ever.’

I turned to Boon. ‘You can’t just disappear for ever.’

He grinned. ‘Wanna bet? Believe me, people disappear all the time. I’ve taken advice from enough of them before I started this.’

‘I’ve seen you.’

He scowled. ‘So?’

‘I now have a responsibility to take you in.’

‘The fuck you will,’ he growled. I saw the muscle cords in his neck tense.

Malcolm eased in to keep us separated. ‘It’s okay, Boon, let him.’

Boon and I looked at him, equally surprised.

He smiled snidely. ‘If Boon goes in with you, he’s going to testify that he went to Ireland. He’s only just managed to make it back after he heard about poor Marta’s disappearance.’

It took me a moment to see the path his game had taken. The bastard had just used Boon to check me. If I took Boon in as a live one, he would swear on oath that the last time he saw Marta she was going off in the company of Ken and Les. Off into the sunrise with demonstrable sexual deviants and killers. And she had never been seen since. We would have to redouble our efforts to find her. And I would know, but could not prove, that there was nothing to find.

I realized then that there was another way out.

‘Okay,’ I played up my reluctance, defeat in my tone, ‘I’m going to walk away. I’m going to leave the doubt diluted.’

Malcolm nodded. ‘Either way, it works for us, Sergeant.’ He dug into a pocket and produced a small plastic case, and proffered it, trying not to grin too hugely. ‘There’s something on this that you might want to keep private.’

It was a digital memory card.
Far enough …
It ratcheted into place. ‘Tony Griffiths’s truck? You took those photographs?’

He nodded smugly.

I pocketed the case. ‘Why me?’

‘You were the only one who took an interest.’

‘Where does Tony Griffiths fit into this?’

‘I used to score weed off of him in the old days,’ Boon answered. ‘He’s a useful, minor local outlaw.’

I turned to Malcolm. ‘You paid him to deliver Marta. The rendezvous was a set-up. Boon was the only one in on it. He was the one who persuaded Ken and Les to come up with the fable of the Cardiff hooker. It had nothing to do with loyalty or friendship, he was trading in his girlfriend. He pimped Soph to them.’

Malcolm put up a hand to quiet Boon’s angry reaction.

I shook my head angrily. ‘She was the tethered goat. Jesus, you were playing it close to the wire. What if it had gone wrong?’

‘It didn’t go wrong. Boon was watching over her the whole time.’

‘You think we didn’t have safety checks in place?’ Boon snorted angrily. ‘We knew from Wendy exactly how the Den worked. How to get in and out. And Soph had a short-range pager, just in case she needed a panic button.’

‘But we knew that wasn’t ever going to be necessary,’ Malcolm expanded, ‘because Ken and Les were still in the soft, nurturing, gift-bearing stage of the grooming process. And they had to stay high-profile model citizens following their escapade.’ He grinned. ‘And now it’s going to haunt them for the rest of their lives.’

I stared at him coldly for a moment, and then did my wondering right out loud. ‘How far would you have gone?’

He shrugged.

‘Reassure me, Malcolm.’

He smiled at Boon before he replied. ‘We’ve killed no one, Sergeant Capaldi.’

I let his self-satisfaction roll around us for a moment.

‘Yes you have.’

Surprise kicked the smugness off his face.

‘You killed Trevor Vaughan.’

‘Whoa … Whoa … Whoa …’ He held up a hand and shook his head slowly and firmly, wanting to impress his words on to me before he spoke them. ‘Trevor Vaughan killed himself.’

‘He may have tied the rope, climbed that ladder, and launched himself off into the great by and by, but you were the motor that powered him.’

He shook his head contemptuously.

‘All the way over here tonight, I’ve been trying to figure it out. Why you took the chance? Why you made contact with me, pretending you wanted to know about the funeral arrangements. My first thought was that it was because you were a risk junkie. You were getting off on the danger. It worked with your arrogance, your sense that you were in control of this thing.’

He smiled patronizingly. ‘Whatever you think, Sergeant.’

‘There was probably an element of that. But essentially you wanted to feed me. You wanted to make sure that I was on the right track. What was it you told me? Something about his inner conflicts, the line between betrayal and duty? You just wanted to make sure that I was pointed in the right direction.’

He flashed Boon a supercilious smile.

‘Because I was always part of this, wasn’t I?’

He shook his head, not understanding.

‘You built me in. When it was just Emrys Hughes and Inspector Morgan, you didn’t have a hope in hell of anyone taking this seriously. But when you heard that I was in place, a new rogue kid on the block, suddenly it all became possible. Someone prepared to spit in the old guards’ faces.’ Another tumbler connected. ‘You impersonated the dispatcher. You told me where to find the minibus.’

He grinned. ‘I was actually calling as a concerned citizen. It was you who mistook me for the dispatcher. I didn’t correct you. And we did get you there in the end,’ he observed with a smirk.

‘Did you flirt with him, Malcolm?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not going to dignify that with a reply.’

‘Trevor Vaughan was terrified of his sexuality. Is that the wire you played him out on?’

‘He knew I was Boon’s father.’

‘But, as you said, he also knew you as an interesting older man with an understanding of the finer things in life. Did you charm him with your urbanity? Did you weave the spell of a possibility, Malcolm? Knowing that Trevor couldn’t allow himself to fall for a man. Wouldn’t dare to; there was too much turmoil and self-loathing in that direction.’

‘We never intended that Trevor take his own life,’ Boon said, a note in his voice that sounded almost close to regret.

‘No, it may not have been your intention – but it still worked for you, didn’t it?’

‘And what was our intention?’ Malcolm challenged.

‘You already told me. You wanted to get him to turn informant, tell the world what Ken and Les were really like. He was good people, a cast-iron, solid citizen. He would be listened to. If he were to point the finger at them as sex fiends after Marta and Boon disappear, then it’s not too much of a connective leap for the world to make …’ I paused, looking at each of them in turn. ‘But he couldn’t do it, could he?’

Malcolm shook his head. ‘He came very close.’

‘But he couldn’t take it as far as direct betrayal. Even with you threatening to expose him as a homosexual.’

Boon shook his head angrily. ‘We wouldn’t have done that.’

‘I know. You couldn’t have – it would have meant revealing yourselves in order to do it. But he didn’t know that. He was a gentle, tortured bastard, who believed what people told him. That threat, and with it the betrayal of his first real sexual possibility, was enough to destroy him.’

‘I never let him believe that I was a sexual possibility,’ Malcolm protested.

‘You don’t know what you built him up to believe.’ I stared at him for a moment, wondering. ‘Or do you?’ I let that hang there. ‘You gave him Wendy’s panties. What was he supposed to tell us? That he had found these years ago, along with other evidence of Ken and Les’s behaviour? He had only kept quiet about it up until now to protect them?’

I saw from the look that they exchanged that I was close to the mark.

‘You bastards drove him into that awful corner.’

‘You’re not entirely blameless yourself,’ Malcolm sneered. ‘You were hounding him too.’

‘Right, but I was floundering. I was after answers.’ I turned to Boon. ‘I thought that I was trying to save you and your fucking girlfriend. You were cold-bloodedly directing him, leaving him with no options.’ I shook my head disconsolately. ‘I can’t forgive you for that.’

‘Is that meant to be a threat?’ Malcolm asked.

I suppressed my anger. I flashed them both one bitter last look before I walked out the door.

I had to leave. I didn’t dare betray the fact that I was about to attempt to cut them off at the knees.

Bryn called me to tell me that Sally had been found near Dinas, and that the search had been called off. I heard it in his voice that he was pleased to be passing this news on to me. I had been expecting it, but I managed to play it surprised and relieved. I still had an empty feeling, knowing that I was the only one among the good guys with the understanding that we were being directed. Sally was going to save us, but I had to wonder dismally how far she had been pulled into their game?

I drove past her empty house, parked a little way down the street, and waited in the dark. I watched the complicated physics of amalgamating raindrops on the windscreen, and kept attempting to tuck Malcolm’s parting smile of triumph away for ever.

She arrived in a squad car. A uniformed cop got out and opened the rear door for her, and I watched the mime as she declined an escort. They waited until she was inside. I waited until they had driven off.

I didn’t use my key. I rang the doorbell. She opened the door with a half-prepared smile, expecting to find one of the cops who had driven her home. ‘Glyn …’ Her face collapsed with the complication of having to deal with my being there. She clutched me, and I felt her head on my cheek, straddling my shoulder. ‘Oh God, Glyn … I’m so sorry to have caused all this fuss.’ I returned the embrace. But I couldn’t hold back the uncharitable thought that she didn’t want me to see the mechanics at work as she struggled to find a place to pitch her control.

We walked through to the kitchen, a silent double bundle of nervous smiles. I watched her take her coat off. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

She managed a chastened smile. ‘I feel very foolish.’

‘What happened?’ I asked, sitting down at the table.

She shook her head, grimacing self-reproachfully. ‘I couldn’t get the car started. I know I should have stayed put, like you told me, but I was getting a bit scared. I felt I had to move. To do something. And you had told me not to drive. So I walked. It was only when a car stopped to see if I was all right that I realized that I had been going in completely the wrong direction.’ She experimented on taking her smile slightly out of chastened.

She had rehearsed the story. And Bryn would have bought it. He probably didn’t believe it, but he would only have assumed that she was trying to cover up her lapse into fugue.

I nodded understandingly. ‘It was Boon wasn’t it?’

The smile that had started to grow slipped, and her mouth fell open. For a moment she thought seriously and hard about protesting, continuing the lie. Instead, she slumped. ‘Who saw me?’ It came out as a hard-drawn whisper.

‘No one. I worked it out. Although at first I thought it was Malcolm you saw up there.’

‘You know?’ She brought the knuckles of her right hand to her mouth.

‘I’ve seen them both.’

She shook her head, her eyes wide. I felt so sorry for her. She had been through so much turmoil already tonight. But I couldn’t let up.

‘Was Soph with Boon when you saw him?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice as gentle as possible.