.
waste-paper basket, not caring where it landed. ‘Sit yourself down, Capaldi.’
Bryn had already taken the seat next to him, forcing me to sit opposite them, like the suspect under interrogation. They had an open laptop in front of them, connected to the SOCO camera.
They were both big men, but the spread of their bodies moved in different directions. Bryn Jones dark, squat and powerful, Jack Galbraith taller, his face more angular, the big head of swept-back hair betraying his underlying vanity.
‘Have the forensics people been able to tell us anything more, sir?’ I asked Bryn.
‘They think its male, and they think it’s middle-aged, and they’re not even going to attempt to tell us how long it’s been up here until they get it back to the lab.’
I nodded, keeping my pleasure at Evie Salmon’s continued existence to myself. I made a mental note to call her parents to confirm it for them.
‘And we’re the poor bastards who have to attempt to identify him,’ Jack Galbraith stated cheerfully.
‘The other hand was missing?’ I asked.
Bryn nodded. ‘And no trace or residue of any clothing. Every possible identifier has been removed. Only that plastic sheeting, which, after all this time, is next to useless.’
‘But at least we can discount suicide.’ Jack Galbraith chuckled facetiously.
‘Ritual killing?’ I offered.
Jack Galbraith snorted and shook his head contemptuously. ‘It’s a fucking hit. This place is just a dumping ground.’
I wasn’t quite sure whether he was referring to the actual grave or the entire locality he had assigned to me. ‘Will you be setting up an incident room, sir?’
Jack Galbraith grinned at Bryn. ‘I think Capaldi’s looking for some action.’
‘It’s going to be desktop to start with,’ Bryn explained. ‘Marry up all the stuff SOCO and forensics can give us and try to come up with an identity. Work the missing-persons route at the same time.’
‘You look crestfallen, Capaldi,’ Jack Galbraith commented.
‘It’s a crime scene, sir.’
Bryn leaned forward, but kept his tone sympathetic. ‘I know, but there’s nothing left here to investigate. Too much time has elapsed and the site has been devastated.’ He shrugged. ‘A place like this, if there were locals unaccounted for, we’d have known about it long ago.’
‘It’s a hit, Capaldi. As I’ve already said, this is just the rubbish dump.’ Jack Galbraith made a pistol using his thumb and forefinger and pointed it at me. ‘Dope? Gang related? Someone got caught fucking the wrong man’s wife? Who knows? I just know there’s nothing here.’ He clicked his thumb, mimicking a firing pin striking. ‘Kerpow … It’s a vanished legend. All those years ago someone drove out of somewhere, dumped a body in the boondocks, and then drove back to that place where things happen. The only thing that happens here is the fucking weather.’
‘You put me here, sir.’
He shot a smile at Bryn. ‘Is this a complaint?’ he asked me.
‘You put me here for this eventuality. To be in place when bad things happened.’ He was wrong. The tingle was telling me that there was a local connection here.
He gave me a wise, mock-patient look. ‘But I’ve just explained, the bad things didn’t happen here.’ He scrunched his eyes shut and took in a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ he said, resigned to it, ‘play my devil’s advocate. And don’t sir me every time. It gets tedious.’
I took in my own deep breath and almost choked on the smoke. ‘Why here?’
‘It’s remote, hard to get to,’ he came back at me quickly. ‘A fucking good place to hide a body. Until the Save the Planet Brigade decide to construct a wind farm.’
‘As you said, it’s hard to get to.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You would have to know it. And we’re talking about what was only a rough hill track in those days. I can’t see a hard man from Salford or wherever driving up it with a naked, dismembered corpse in the boot, just in the hope that he might arrive at somewhere convenient to dispose of a body. And he would have needed to be in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. And why travel so far out of the place where things happen?’
He glanced at Bryn. ‘Underline your point,’ he commanded.
‘They knew about this location. They had researched this. Or they were living here.’
‘Which makes them still around, does it?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
He looked over at Bryn again, who shrugged. He thought hard for a moment. ‘I suppose it works on a PR level. We’re seen to be doing something tangible. Okay, Capaldi, go and ask your questions. But I still say you’re wrong.’ He grinned. ‘And don’t step too hard on Inspector Morgan’s toes,’ he added.
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said gratefully. Mentally I had already hit the ground running.
PRIVATE – GOLDMINE – KEEP OUT
The sign had been daubed on the sheet-metal gate with red paint that had dripped and run below the letters like fake theatrical blood. It was written in English only, which seemed to me to be a bit imperialistic. It was also a bit daft if you valued your security and privacy, to advertise the fact that you were sitting on top of a goldmine. Literally.
Mrs Jones at Cogfryn had intrigued me. Nice Welsh farmers’ wives don’t generally finger their neighbours as potential killers. So what had these two done that had placed them beyond the pale?
Gerald Evans was in another valley, so I decided to start with Bruno Gilbert, the Gold Mine Man. And it was a goldmine. Deep boyhood mythologies kicking in from a time of innocence, before big holes in the ground, putatively awash with treasure, had accumulated sexual baggage.
I had remembered more of what Sandra Williams had told me about him that day in Dinas. He was a recluse. No one was quite sure whether he had been a schoolteacher or a civil servant, or whether he had taken early retirement or suffered a breakdown. He came into town for his shopping, scurried about with his head down, and ordered his goods by pointing.
He may have been pretty inept socially, but he had managed to construct a solid pair of gates. Which, despite repeated hammering and calling out, he wasn’t opening. Perhaps he just couldn’t hear me. Maybe he was mining a vein, or crushing ore, doing whatever it was that made the place qualify as a goldmine in his book.
I was conscious of time passing. Jack Galbraith could change his mind and haul me off this at any moment.
I studied the gate again. Three obstacles to progress: the gate, the barbed wire on top of it and the fact that I hadn’t been invited.
I got over the height issue by standing on the roof of the car. The coiled barbed wire on top was old, rusting and laced with cobwebs that had trapped leaves and thistledown. One good push would send it down like an uncoiling slinky.
On the other side of the gate, the track, flanked by a pair of rusted Morris 1000 Travellers, turned round a sharp bend out of sight. The hidden side of a sharp bend was always tantalizing.
This was where an invitation would have been useful. Technically what I was contemplating was illegal entry seasoned with criminal damage. But fuck it, I reasoned, a man who wasn’t even capable of asking a shopkeeper for his favourite cheese was hardly likely to have me dragged up in front of the High Sheriff.
I dislodged the barbed wire and jumped down, landing heavily, my heels kicking up two little geysers of dust. Everything about this side of the gate – the air, the vegetation – felt more desiccated. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bird sporting fluff instead of feathers.
I