Dead People. Ewart Hutton
to fathom what strange event field she was trying to drag me into.
‘It’s our daughter, Sergeant,’ Mr Salmon explained. I waited for him to elaborate. ‘We need to know what you’ve found up there.’
‘Who! Who you’ve found up there,’ she corrected him in a hoarse whisper, the tension arcing between them.
‘Tell me about your daughter,’ I said quietly to Mrs Salmon.
‘Evie. She left home. This is Evie …’ Her voice a fast stutter. She thrust a photograph under my nose. It showed a young girl astride a fat pony, blonde hair in bunches under a riding hat, a cautious smile, bright-blue eyes, and a spatter of freckles on her upper cheeks. She lowered the photograph and looked up at me beseechingly. ‘We have to know if it’s her that’s been found up there.’
I placed another piece into the jigsaw. I turned to Mr Salmon, hoping that he was less sparked. ‘Your daughter’s gone missing?’
‘Why won’t you tell us?’ she wailed, riding close to her breaking point.
‘What age is she? When did she leave?’ I persisted, trying to gently ignore her, needing facts, not hysterics.
‘She’ll be twenty-three now,’ Mr Salmon explained, throwing his wife a worried look, ‘and she left close to two years ago.’
It was hard to put an age to the kid in that photograph. One thing I would be willing to bet on was that the 23-year-old version was no longer looking like that.
‘We need to know …’ She couldn’t contain it; the tears and the snot finally erupted. Her husband tried to comfort her, but she shrugged him off.
I pictured it again. The dirty carapace choked with grass and heather roots. Two years in that ground could have turned a body to a skeleton. But that one had been in there longer. Hunch and experience convinced me. That wasn’t their daughter.
I turned to face her. In the last few minutes, her face had puffed up and welled out, into a frantic mask that had abandoned any sense of caring about appearance. I spoke slowly and carefully. ‘It’s too early yet. We don’t know who we have up there, Mrs Salmon, but I think we can be fairly sure that it isn’t your daughter.’
Miraculously, she dried up. ‘How sure?’ she challenged me, turning, in that instant, from pure mush to interrogator.
‘Totally,’ I lied. But it didn’t worry me – I had inner certainty. Boy was I going to regret it.
David and I watched him lead her off. Back out into the rain. Turning themselves out of the inn. Their misery had rooted deep.
‘Another runaway kid?’ I asked.
David dried a glass absently, and nodded. ‘He’s an ex-fireman from Kent. Took early retirement. They bought a run-down smallholding up at the head of a crappy valley. They expected a teenage daughter to swap Bromley for the dream of the good life.’
I could empathize. ‘Mud and chicken shit.’
‘Broken generators and no phone signal.’
‘Still, she lasted it out until she was twenty-one,’ I observed.
‘On and off,’ he corrected me, ‘there was a time when they had to keep fetching her back. This time she must have found somewhere better to hide.’
‘Glyn, you are here …’
I turned round. Sandra Williams had come through from the kitchen. She looked tired and had wicked half-circles under her eyes. She was carrying a cordless phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. She proffered it. ‘I didn’t think you were, but I said I would look.’
I took the phone. ‘Hello?’ I said, hoping that I was not going to hear the sadly familiar sound of bleating lambs in the background.
‘DS Capaldi?’ The voice was brusque and authoritative, with a North Wales accent. And familiar.
‘Yes,’ I answered warily, desperately trying to recall the voice. ‘Who am I speaking to, please?’
‘Inspector Morgan.’
Oh, shit … Emrys Hughes’s boss. A scowling red-faced man with a widow’s peak. He considered Jack Galbraith the Antichrist. And, as his perceived little helper, I also qualified for the rite of exorcism. ‘How can I help you, sir?’ I asked, pitching for amicable.
‘Who gave you the right to commandeer my men, Sergeant?’
‘I required their assistance to help secure a probable crime scene, sir.’
‘And subject them to exposure?’
‘There is shelter available, sir.’ I had an image of Hughes and Friel safely ensconced in the site hut, drinking coffee and choosing their favourite nipples from the drill-bit calendar.
‘That’s beside the point. What you have asked my men to do is totally unnecessary. You don’t understand the terrain. We don’t have the same problems that you do in the city. We don’t have the ghouls and the vandals, and an intrusive, prurient press. Tell me –’ I could hear the scorn building in his voice – ‘who do you think is going to turn out on a filthy night like this, in that wilderness, to dig up a pile of old bones?’
‘The person who put them there?’ I suggested.
That silenced him for a moment. ‘Don’t be a smart alec, Sergeant. That site has its own security. Sergeant Hughes has informed me that there is a watchman.’
‘Yes, but with respect, sir, he is only responsible for the security of the construction site, not for a crime scene.’
He leaped over that one as well. ‘And, in the meantime, while my men are suffering the vagaries of the elements, I find you well-ensconced in a public house.’ The reprimand came from deep within his soul and his faith.
I looked over at David Williams. My local informant. ‘I am currently in active pursuit of the preliminary aspects of the investigation, sir.’
‘I am pulling my men out of there. And I am going to complain formally to Detective Chief Superintendent Galbraith.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied meekly.
‘You should have stayed in Cardiff where you belong, Sergeant Capaldi.’
‘I know, sir,’ I agreed wholeheartedly.
‘We don’t want or need your kind around here.’
‘No, sir.’
David looked at me speculatively as I went back to the bar. ‘Trouble?’
‘I’ve just upset the local mullah.’
I took a drink of my beer. Should I go back up to the site and make my own night vigil? No. Morgan had been right. Different rules applied here. And all I had ever really been doing was punishing Hughes and Friel.
And I didn’t regret it.
I did make a concession, though. I got myself up early in the morning, while it was still dark. There was no moon, the night was anvil black, the sound of the river kept up its own incessant dynamic, and an owl hooted, flitting from location to location like a trickster.
I drove over the wooden-plank bridge out of Hen Felin Caravan Park. Jack Galbraith had forced me to live in Dinas, and I had chosen to stay in a caravan. Unit 13, to be precise. I needed the sense of impermanence, putting up with the cold, the mould spores and the intermittent electrical and water supplies, the very discomfort comforting me with the knowledge that this surely couldn’t last.
This time, even in the dark, driving up the valley to the wind-farm site, I felt that I knew it better. Last night, when I had got home from The Fleece, I had studied the OS map and the electoral register. I had a loose fix on where people lived. There weren’t that many of them.
It had been cold at the caravan, but it was even