Good People (39 page)

‘No.’ It came out as a choked whisper.

‘Did he say anything about her?’

‘Only that she’s okay. Waiting for him in a safe place.’

‘He didn’t say where that place was?’

‘No.’ She seemed close to tears. ‘I didn’t want to lie to you Glyn. But I didn’t think you knew. DCI Jones didn’t say anything.’

‘No one else knows, Sally.’

She looked gaunt. ‘I only cared that Boon was all right.’

‘I know.’ I reached across and took her hand away from her mouth and held it. Stroking the back with my thumb. ‘You know that this is all about Wendy Evans getting her revenge.’

‘They did terrible things to her.’

‘I know, but that doesn’t excuse what they’ve done here. Or what they’ve done to you. What they’ve put you through, the way they’re using you.’

She shook her head weakly. ‘They’re not using me for anything.’

I let that ride for the moment. ‘Did Boon ever tell you that he and Soph had hooked up with Malcolm and Wendy in Cyprus?’

‘No.’ She screwed her eyes closed. She had already been through this pain once tonight.

‘Who is Boon doing it for, Sally? Who rates all this love and sacrifice? Malcolm or Wendy?’

She closed her eyes again. ‘Please, Glyn – don’t.’

She tried to pull her hand away, but I held on. ‘I’m not being deliberately cruel. I just want you to be aware how callous and calculating these people are. Where they’ve positioned you. Keeping you out of the loop until you were needed.’

‘Boon didn’t have to come back here to let me know that he was safe.’

‘Yes he did.’ I stood up, held her shoulders across the table, and made her face me to emphasize how seriously I wanted her to take this. ‘Sally, they knew that I was going to tell you. They had to get in there first. They didn’t know how much I knew, only that sooner or later I was going to be able to tell you that Boon was not in a hole in the ground somewhere in the forest. They were buying your silence so that this can go on playing itself out. This hunt for bodies that don’t exist, just to mire Ken and Les deeper in it. But it’s not a game, Sally. I don’t give a shit about Ken or Les, but I do care about what happened to Trevor Vaughan. And I care about our people wasting time, resources and worry on a bullshit investigation.’

She looked away and shook her head hopelessly. ‘You could tell them.’

‘With what? I have no concrete evidence to back me up. Even if I go public about seeing Boon and Malcolm, that won’t count – I’m not an impartial witness. They’re relying on that, and now they’re relying on you to keep this vicious farce rolling. They’re playing you for a patsy. Don’t you see the awful irony of it? You are the one who is propping up Wendy’s sweet revenge.’

‘She deserves something for what they did to her,’ she said stubbornly.

‘She got your husband Sally. They got their life in the sun. You got Mid Wales and the night shift at the Sychnant Nursing Home. She now has the satisfaction of seeing Ken and Les going down for Colette Fletcher. That’s enough. She doesn’t need or deserve any more than that.’

She dropped her head and sobbed. I felt my heart wrench. I walked round the table and pulled her close and wrapped myself around her, feeling the spasms of anguish racking her like physical jolts. ‘Oh God, Glyn, what am I going to do?’ She pulled her breathing together, shook her head, searching for the words. ‘My first reaction was total relief … Knowing that Boon was okay … Then he told me that I wouldn’t be able to see or contact him again until this was all forgotten. That could be years. Boon can never come back here.’

I kissed the top of her head. ‘Bring him back to life, Sally.’ I gave it time for the worm of the thought to wriggle in before I whispered again. ‘If he isn’t dead, he doesn’t have to stay hidden.’

She shook her head. ‘I promised,’ she blurted, not looking up.

‘Wendy and Malcolm have got enough out of this. You don’t need to bleed too.’

‘I don’t think I would ever want to be with Malcolm again,’ she announced quietly, as if she had only just surprised herself with the realization.

I felt a small plug of latent anxiety vanish. ‘I’ll be here with you. I’ll help you. All you have to do is call DCI Jones and tell him that you’ve seen Boon. That he and the girl are okay.’

She twisted her head round to look up at me. ‘It would be betraying a trust.’

Yes, to a cheating bastard of an ex-husband, and a dumbfuck adopted son who cannot work within the normal extremes of loyalty and friendship. But I didn’t say it. ‘You’ll be freeing-up Boon’s life,’ I said instead. ‘He’ll thank you for it later, when whatever kind of a mission he feels he’s on has worked its way through his system.’

I could see that she was tempted.

‘Do you want to go to bed?’ I whispered, trying to pitch the prospect of comfort rather than lust.

‘Yes please,’ she whispered back with a long sigh. ‘I would like nothing more than to close my eyes and curl up with you holding me, and forget all about this …’

I sensed the ‘but’ poised, ready to intrude.

‘But I can’t forget about it. I’m sorry, Glyn, but I need the time alone to think things through. Try to think about what’s best for Boon –’

‘And what’s best for you,’ I interrupted.

She smiled weakly. ‘And that too.’

‘If it helps with your thought process and decision making, I am unfettered and unencumbered. As a cop, I have to stay here. They’ll make sure that no one else will have me. But I don’t have to stay as a cop.’

‘Thanks, Glyn. That helps me.’ She reached down, took my hand and squeezed it, lifted it and kissed the back of my fingers. I knew that it was the signal to release her.

I left happy.

Shame that it wasn’t going to last.

I went to sleep alone that night in my own bed with the conviction that Sally was going to come through. She would see sense and make that call to Bryn, and the bullshit investigation would be called off. And we could all, barring Ken and Les, live happily ever after.

The morning brought a joyless film of wet snow that was already morphing to slush. The sky was the grey of weathered zinc, and the birds seemed to have abandoned the planet. When the phone rang, I got out of bed with the duvet wrapped round me to postpone the shock of the cold.

‘Glyn …’ Her voice was shaky.

‘How are you this morning?’ I asked solicitously.

‘We need to talk.’ I could hear the fatigue in her voice.

I saw it in her eyes too when she opened her front door. And something more. Something hard and set below the pillow-mussed hair that she hadn’t bothered to brush.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, concerned, following her through to the kitchen.

She spoke without turning. ‘There was an envelope in the hall when I came down early this morning. Someone must have put it through the letterbox.’ She wheeled round to look at me, no smile, her eyes deep-set and dark-rimmed from lack of sleep.

‘And … ?’ I felt something hard and heavy drop into my stomach.

‘Someone has sent me a photograph of you.’

The bastards …

I winced inwardly. I should have realized what they were capable of and prepared for this. They must have made copies of the images on the memory card before they had given it to me.

‘It’s a fake, Sally.’

‘It looked real enough to me.’

‘It was a simulation. Malcolm and Boon set it up.’

‘Stop blaming my son for everything,’ she snapped angrily, simultaneously lifting a magazine off the table to reveal the photograph that was lying there, face-up.

Oh fuck …

I closed my eyes and prayed that when I opened them again the world would have been reinvented as a kinder place.

It didn’t work. The photograph was still there. It was a bad shot. It was a terrible shot. Dark and fuzzy, taken from outside without a flash, reliant on the low level of ambient light in the kitchen. But the grainy image only served to make the scene more intimate.

There I was, leaning over Sheila McGuire, head bent coming down into a kiss. No caption saying that this was a pure act of consolation. No way of telling that the trajectory was only aimed at her cheek. And, more damning than that, in the lost shadows it would have been easy to make the mistake of thinking that I had one hand down cupping her breast.

‘This wasn’t the picture I meant …’ I stammered without thinking.

She shuddered. ‘I don’t want to know about any more.’

‘Sally, I can explain …’ I pleaded.

And then, just at the high point of the very worst time it could ever happen, my phone rang. Sally stared at me impassively. I checked caller ID: Bryn Jones. I knew instinctively that I had to answer it.

‘Hello?’ I said, turning my back on her.

‘Glyn, something’s come up, we need you to get up into the forest.’

I cupped the phone in my hand and turned to Sally. ‘It’s DCI Jones, will you speak to him?’ I entreated.

She shook her head. And all the despair and the finality of it hit me then. They were going to win.

‘Glyn, are you there?’ Bryn was shouting.

‘Sorry, sir …’ I stared at Sally, letting her see my anguish under the semblance of the normal tone that I was keeping up for Bryn, ‘What’s so important up in the forest?’

‘We’ve had a call. A male, wouldn’t give his name, but he thinks that he might have witnessed something suspicious that night near the hut.’

‘Probably a crank, sir.’ I felt my stomach tighten even more as I realized that they had just ratcheted the game to another level.

‘He said he saw a group of men digging. We can’t ignore it, Glyn. You know your way around that place; get up there and wait for us to arrive with the search team and the dogs.’

‘Yes, sir.’

I shut down the phone. I looked at Sally across the room. She looked back at me. ‘I was trying to give Sheila McGuire some comfort, Sally.’

‘Good for you, Glyn,’ she said, deadpan.

I pointed to the table. ‘Think who benefits from that picture.’ I looked at her despairingly. ‘Please, Sally …’

‘Just leave.’

If she had slammed the front door behind me, I might have thought that there was some hope.

I drove like a madman. I did it partly to scare the shit out of myself and block the recall of the hurt and contempt on Sally’s face as she had closed the door on me. But I also wanted to buy time. I had a new agenda, and I needed to get up there before the search party arrived to spoil it.

Because I had now worked out the secret of why the hole that they had dug in the forest had been empty.

They had always intended it to be part of the evidence trail. Drunk as they all were that night, it wouldn’t have been hard for Boon to persuade them to join him in some kind of sentimental ritual.
Hey guys, let’s bury something up here, let’s symbolically sever my connection to the Army.
It would have been something loaded with his DNA. So that, when the hole was conveniently found after he became a missing person, it would read as an attempt to conceal incriminating evidence.

But Trevor followed them out of the hut. He didn’t see what they were up to, but Soph, who had followed him, didn’t know that. The plan appeared to be compromised. Gordon’s presence they could handle, because his testimony would always be seen as slanted. But add Trevor’s corroboration that he had witnessed a celebration, and they were fucked. Where was the black intent? It was hardly sinister any more, the last sighting of Boon and he’s horsing around with the guys who were supposed to have topped him.

So they removed whatever had been buried, and left the hole empty.

Except now they must have re-seeded it. With Trevor out of the way, and not knowing that he had shown it to me, it had obviously been deemed safe to re-plant the evidence.

But I was going to screw them.

I had dug that hole up once before and found it empty. Now I intended digging it up again and making it empty.

I had to slow down after spinning the car on the snow that was still a fixture on the tracks higher into the forest. But at least it would also delay the cavalry. As another precaution, I left my car so that it blocked the access to the track that led down to the hole.

I had worried about finding the exact spot again, but the snow cover actually helped me pinpoint it. The ground had been excavated so many times now that the snow crust had slumped, showing a perfect outline.

But the snow soon posed another problem. As I dug, the ground around the excavation turned muddy, runny-shit caramel, in stark contrast to the surrounding virginal whiteness. There was no way that I was going to be able to dig this up and fill it back in again without it being obvious that the ground had only just been disturbed.

I carried on. I had to at least find out what they had left in here.

I had guessed that I might find a beret, but it was a cap. A baseball cap, not a military one. It was sodden and muddy. It could have been a larger twin to the one at the lay-by. I could make out the initials
BP
on the sweatband. And it would be swarming, I knew, with Boon’s DNA. It was too wet to tell if they had augmented it with blood traces.

I had no moral or professional qualms. I was not tampering with evidence but disappearing a corrupt signpost. Fuck it, I was Excelsior, lighting the way back up to the truth. I was on the side of the angels. Despite what Sally now thought of me.

Except that it was going to require a trade-off.

Jack Galbraith was not going to buy an empty hole.

I took the cap back to the car and stashed it in the boot well, under the spare wheel. I would burn it later at Hen Felin, along with the one that Soph had left for me to find. I returned to the hole and placed the one thing that I had to offer as trade goods in the bottom, and started filling it in. I didn’t put too much effort into it. It was only going to be dug back up.

As I had hoped, when the cavalry arrived, they assumed that I was in the process of digging out, not filling in.

Jack Galbraith and Bryn, both in borrowed Wellington boots, led the procession. The dogs had been left in the vans. I was glad, I didn’t want them sniffing out evasion.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith shouted, striding towards me. ‘We told you to look around, not start mining for fucking gold.’