Dead People. Ewart Hutton

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СКАЧАТЬ river, it would never have known disappointment. But it hadn’t, it grew, and it got prosperity. Twice. Lead and sheep. And lost it both times.

      And then it got me.

      I didn’t have a choice about it. Dinas was prescribed for me. The day that Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Galbraith, obviously repaying my former superiors some deep Masonic favour, rescued me from disgrace in Cardiff, tucked me briefly under his wing, and then booted me out of the nest and into the boondocks. I was to be his piggy in the middle. His catch-all detective in the empty heartland. In which capacity, I was kept busy chasing down missing livestock, stalking stolen quad bikes and tractors, observing first-hand how the full moon fucked people up, and generally trying to avoid confrontations with the local cops.

      Don’t get me wrong, Dinas is not a bad place; it can even be quite quaint in certain lights. It also helps if you have somewhere else to keep on going to when you get to the far end. I didn’t, so I headed for the next best thing, the Fleece Hotel.

      I took a stool at the rear bar and nodded cursory greetings to the few men in the room. They were all regulars, so I was able to do that on automatic, a nod more to the zone than the person.

      David Williams, my best buddy in Dinas, and not just because he owned the pub, was busy serving at the crowded front bar. He saw me and smiled happily when he turned to the cash register.

      ‘Quite a crowd,’ I commented.

      He nodded contentedly. ‘They’ve all come down from the wind-farm site.’

      Then I realized that this was where I had seen Jeff Talbot, the site engineer, before. In the front bar. A figure glimpsed occasionally, drinking with his men.

      David finished up and came over and started pulling a pint for me.

      ‘So, what’s the verdict on the body?’ I asked, knowing that the Dinas rumour mill would already have digested, analysed and spat out its own theory.

      He winced. It was a warning, but it arrived too late. I turned in the direction of his almost imperceptible nod. A middle-aged couple in rain-slicked coats were standing in the archway between the two bars, staring at me. Their smiles were clamped into a rictus. I didn’t recognize them, but I did recognize anxiety.

      ‘Mr and Mrs Salmon,’ David introduced them.

      They flowed forward towards me like penitents released into a sanctuary. It was hard to put a precise age to them as the rain had smoothed and darkened their hair, and freshened their skin.

      ‘We heard about the discovery, Sergeant.’ Mrs Salmon spoke, her eyes glistening, scorching mine, already afraid of what they might find there. Her look was accusing, as if I was attempting to hide something from her.

      ‘Up at the wind-farm site,’ her husband clarified. He gestured his head towards the front bar. ‘We’ve been talking to the workmen, but they say they don’t know anything. They said that you were the one to talk to. That you’re in charge.’

      Even stressed, they both had the lazy vowels of Estuary English. Essex or Kent.

      ‘Can we go up there?’ Her voice was pure raw entreaty. I glanced down at her hands, already knowing that they would be tightly clenched.

      ‘Helen …’ Her husband checked her, as if she had just broken an agreement they had made.

      ‘Please …?’ she implored, ignoring him.

      ‘There’s nothing to see up there, Mrs Salmon,’ I said soothingly, stalling, trying 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. СКАЧАТЬ