Sympathy for the Devil (33 page)

The bar was quiet, only a few of the regulars talking with the barman. She sat down at an empty table in the corner. Her hands were trembling slightly so she put them down on her knees.

The men at the counter seemed hardly to have noticed her. Most of them she recognised from the previous day. Sure that they were not watching, she spread the black-and-white photos over the table. The dancers were in the same poses as in the earlier set from Della, the blurred figures and background behind the same also. They looked just like prints from the same negatives.

Next she took out the smaller, colour shot of the young man, the one they had mistaken for Face. It was clear, looking closely, that this was an entirely different person. The boy had similar high, noble-looking cheekbones and heavy eyebrows; there was a resemblance to Face, but that was all. She had seen Face because they’d been expecting to see Face. But the boy, with his pale skin and black hair, definitely did look familiar, all the same.

It was hard to be sure, but the pictures looked old, she thought, twisted at the edges, indented where once there’d been frames. The sleepy eyes of the boy seemed to meet her gaze, blink back at her across the years. Catrin found herself thinking of the men who’d pulled her into the car all those years ago. They had been wearing ski-masks, but something in her mind had made a connection between this face and those men.

The masks had covered everything except their eyes. She could put her finger on it: just a sense she had, that she was finally looking into the eyes of one of them. She felt a sudden rush of fear mixed with confusion. After all these years it looked like Rhys had not just been investigating Face, but something related to her own abduction, her own case. Could this be why Rhys had said she was the link to the source of the photos, why she’d be trusted by the source? Catrin took deep breaths, stared up at the ceiling to try to calm herself. The plaster there was crumbling, stained with damp. She singled out a square of it to concentrate on, shutting out everything else. In her ears the blood was pounding, the sound of the men by the bar gradually fading away.

She remembered again those weeks after Rhys had rescued her, after she came out of the hospital. She’d stayed alone in her room at home all day and night. Lying on her back, barely moving, staring at the ceiling. This had been her only view. It had been all she had trusted herself to see, all she’d felt safe looking at then.

All the mirrors in the room she’d covered. She couldn’t bear to look at herself, she’d been frightened of what she might remember. She’d made her mam leave her food outside the door, which she locked from the inside. When she’d eaten, she’d leave the tray outside the door again.

The one who’d rescued her, Rhys, had left her his pager number, but she hadn’t had the strength to call him at first. The only sound to reach her had been when he visited after his shifts and talked to her mam. She’d strained to hear his voice. A part of her had wanted to lie with him in the dark, lose track of time, lose herself in his dreamer’s eyes, make her bed an island on which they’d float away from that time and its harsh, bad choices. A part of her had wanted never to leave her room again.

6

Through the bedroom window the dull morning light fell across the ruins of their breakfast. Catrin held up a corner of the curtain, looked out into the rain. Down in the car park several men clad in bright yellow foul-weather gear were huddled in a circle. One had managed to light his pipe, which was giving off puffs of bluish-grey smoke. Above them the clouds were leaden, obscuring all views of the cliff heads and the hills.

On the tabletop, Catrin laid out the photographs again, the first set from Della’s envelope beside the ones from Rhys’s cottage. She looked slowly from one set to the other. She’d been right, they were identical, both sets printed from the same negatives.

Huw sat in his towel at the table. He looked briefly at the photos, then picked up the contact prints and held them under the lamp. They were enclosed in strip mounts from the same photographic shop in Abergwaun.

‘No negatives here,’ he said. ‘Looks like these shots were developed digitally.’

‘That would confirm what Rhys said to you, that the pictures came to him from a source. Rhys didn’t take them himself.’

Huw was still peering closely at the contact sheets. ‘They’ve been printed from a memory stick, probably. The originals would still be stored on the source’s camera or on his computer.’

She looked hard at Huw. ‘The source can’t have been willing to send the images online. Otherwise why would Rhys have come all the way out here? He must have insisted on giving them to Rhys in person.’

‘Unless Rhys met the source once he was out here?’

‘I don’t think so. To give Rhys the images digitally would require a significant level of trust. That sort of trust wouldn’t have been built up in a couple of weeks. The source was more likely someone already known to Rhys.’

Huw sat beside her, nodding slowly. ‘So then someone suspects Rhys has the images, and that leads to his cottage being turned over. And then they follow him back to Cardiff.’

‘Rhys wouldn’t have been able to go for more than a day without scoring,’ Catrin said. ‘So if the date the dealer said he last saw him is right, from here Rhys headed straight to Cardiff.’

‘Back to home territory where he thought it would be easier to lose a tail?’

‘Possibly. Della said they were being watched when she met him that last night, so by then whoever it was had probably caught up with him.’

Huw had picked up the canvas bag and now ran his fingers along the insides. ‘There’s something else in here,’ he said. From a side pocket he lifted out a disc and loaded it in the laptop. There was only a single file. It was marked by the blue icon for a video package. He began to run the film.

Catrin couldn’t see much at first, just some flickering, pale unfocused shapes among a confusion of shadows.

‘What the fuck!’ Huw suddenly backed away from the table, a look of alarm on his face.

She bent down and saw the interior of a cave or tunnel. The walls and low ceiling were glowing with the lights of candles in circles on muddy ground. Around the edges figures were crawling, three it seemed, though there could have been more, moving in a slow, uncertain circle. Every few seconds the screen went dark as the camera was jolted towards the ground.

As it pulled back briefly, the shapes gained mass and human form. Their heads were half bowed and all were naked, their bodies oiled and shining in the light. One of them was a boyish Face, his head shaved, his limbs pallid, emaciated. He was lurching forward into the lens, spreading his arms out on either side, his mouth dripping dark liquid onto the ground. On the floor was a puddle where there was some paler shape, four small limbs, a head barely distinguishable. Along the wall, what looked like more pale limbs lay in the darkness. All was black for a few moments, then the scene reappeared, at an angle. The camera was still now, placed on the rocks perhaps. To the side, someone was moving out from the wall, a fourth figure. It was taller than the boys, its back to the camera. Down its shoulders long black hair fanned out. One of the boys was crawling forward, head bowed, kneeling at its feet. Then the screen went dark again.

Catrin felt her heart thudding.

The piece didn’t feel faked. She had a sense for these things. It felt more like a glimpse of something that had happened long in the past, in some savage, barely human time.

‘You think that man is the cult leader?’ Huw was looking closely at her in the dimness.

‘Could be, he had long hair like the man Pryce saw in the car.’

The video had ended. There was just two minutes of blank footage on the file. She pulled the cursor back, rewound to the point where all three naked boys were visible. One of the boys’ faces was averted from the camera. A second had his head bowed, as he gazed down into the puddle at his feet. She pointed at him.

‘This boy, he looks like that one in Rhys’s photos, doesn’t he? The one we mistook for Face. He has the same pale skin and dark hair.’

Huw shrugged, turned away from the screen. ‘In that light it’s difficult to tell.’

Catrin put her hand on Huw’s shoulder, felt him shudder. He glanced up at her, his eyes wide with an undisguised fear. ‘What do you think it was in the film,’ he said. ‘Some kind of sick BDSM game?’

‘I’m not sure. There’s not much to go on, is there? It’s difficult to tell whether those shapes on the floor are human or animal limbs.’

‘They’re small, they’d have to be animals.’

‘Or children’s? Dug up from somewhere maybe, to use in a ritual.’

Huw didn’t seem to have the stomach to look again. She rewound, peered at the shapes, but it was too dark, they could have been anything. The closer she looked the more they became abstract disjointed lines. She turned back to the file in the bag, took out the snapshots of the young man they had mistaken for Face, the one she now believed had been one of her abductors.

The first looked like a school leaver’s portrait in profile. It showed an adolescent with dark, unruly hair, his lips twisted between a smirk and a sneer. The other was a discoloured Polaroid, taken in a pub, arms and pints held by unseen companions framing the shot. In this second picture the man was a couple of years older. He wore fraying jeans, a T-shirt with a blue logo, his eyes half closed, a beatific smile spread over his youthful face.

At the bottom of the bag she noticed an inner pocket with more papers in. She laid them out on the table. They seemed to be copies of a standard Police National Computer Missing Persons Report. The name on the report was
Iolo Stephens
, from Fishguard. There was also a coroner’s report on the skeletal remains of a body recently discovered on the coast north of Dinas Head.

The Iolo Stephens report contained all the usual information collated during the investigation of long-term missing person cases: the name, date of birth, distinguishing marks, GP’s medical records, interviews with relatives, friends, past employers, known associates. The boy had left school without finishing his exams, drifted through part-time jobs in Tenby and other small seaside resorts, been reported missing by his family back in September 1998. None of the names on the report meant anything to her.

The last papers were a hastily made printout from the Police National Missing Persons Bureau, from the section specialising in cross-matching mispers with unidentified bodies. There were pages from the Pembroke coroner’s report of the previous month on the skeletal remains of a young man discovered by Dyfed-Powys police on Strumble Sands, three miles north of Dinas Head. A blurred photograph showed all the bones laid out like the last stage in an anatomy study on a stainless steel slab. The entry from the pathologist gave no evidence of external injuries prior to submersion in the water, and the coroner had returned a verdict of accidental death.

Catrin looked from the still of the second boy in the film to the two photographs of the young man, Iolo Stephens. There was no question they were one and the same person. She put her fingers over his clothes and hair, so only the face was visible. She recognised him now as one of the early fans in the pictures over the cabinet in Gethin Pryce’s house.

She disconnected the chipped green rotary-dial phone from its socket and plugged in the laptop, while Huw looked over the photographs and the two reports.

‘The boy in the first report, Iolo Stephens, he’s in those photographs at Pryce’s of the early Face fans,’ she said, putting her fingers over the clothes and hair again.

Huw held the picture up to the light, a hint of recognition in his tired eyes.

‘So it looks like Pryce’s theory about the fans around Face disappearing when that man with long hair came on the scene has some substance.’ Huw picked up the photograph of the skeleton. ‘And the remains found in the Sands, it’s the same boy?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

She tapped in the address of the Dyfed-Powys Police database. After about a minute the force shield with the two red dragons in profile gradually filled the screen.

‘Why not take the usual route to the PNC via Command & Control at the Met?’ Huw asked. ‘Or am I out of date?’

She shook her head. ‘No, but the local force will often have more on their database than they upload to the PNC and the Police National Missing Persons Bureau.’

She keyed in the passwords and brought up the files. She put her finger under the case number on the original mispers report for Stephens.

‘Can you see any follow-up on the Stephens case?’ Huw asked

‘There’s nothing, only the routine six-month reviews by the DS.’

‘Any other forces pulled the file?’

‘None.’

The flickering light of the screen hurt Catrin’s eyes and made her feel slightly faint. She stood up, opened the window a crack and breathed deeply.

She pushed the laptop over to Huw’s side of the table. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I’ve already opened the databases of all the relevant agencies.’ She brought out her Drum from her bag, quickly rolled a cigarette.

‘Run all the relevant cross-checks,’ she said. Huw remained bent over the keyboard as he worked his way through the PNC, the PNMPB and the National Missing Persons Helpline.

She lit up, drew deeply. ‘Any links made between the Stephens file and the Sands body?’

‘None by Dyfed-Powys. No cross-matches on the PNC, the PNMPB or the National Missing Persons Helpline.’

‘Either case flagged on Scotland Yard’s Kidnap-Ransom desk, or the Met’s SO7?’

Huw pulled the keyboard closer and checked the files.

‘No, no trace on either.’

She turned away, blew her smoke towards the crack in the window. ‘Any match between Stephens’s ante-mortem dental records, and those of the Sands body?’

‘There weren’t any dentals in the Stephens file. Is that usual?’