Dead People. Ewart Hutton

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      Mrs Jones returned, wiping the tears from her eyes with the bunched-up corner of her apron. It was such a private and homely gesture that it brought a lump to my throat.

      ‘He doesn’t talk about it, but I know that he has to protect all those people from some very bad things that can happen out there,’ she said, explaining her lapse, and sitting down.

      ‘I’m sure he can take care of himself.’

      She nodded absently, her mind still far off in siege and hostage situations.

      ‘Does your daughter live away as well?’ I asked, nodding at the photograph, to divert her from her immediate melancholy.

      She surfaced again and looked at the photograph, a dim, wry smile forming and crinkling the lines in the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m afraid poor Rose is no longer with us.’ I winced internally at my gaffe, but she was already moving on. ‘It was a long time ago now. Things heal.’ And I saw in her expression that gleam that I had seen so often in people caught up in the excitement of terrible events that they had never expected to experience, even on the edge of their quiet lives. She shook her head wonderingly. ‘It’s a terrible thing that’s happened up there, finding that murdered body.’ She gave me a piercing look. ‘If that’s what it really is.’

      ‘What do you mean by that Mrs Jones?’

      She lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘I’ve heard talk that it could have been the work of the wind-farm protestors. You know, if they could make it look like an ancient burial place, like the other one they’ve found farther up the hill, they wouldn’t be allowed to carry on with the construction.’

      I nodded, ‘Interesting,’ and wrote it down in my notebook. But it was an unlikely scenario. Wind-farm protestors were, on the whole, middle class, and the closest they got to civil disobedience was shaking their walking poles in the air. And even if Jeff Talbot, a civil engineer by training, had been mistaken about the ground being undisturbed, where would a bunch like that have got hold of an appropriate corpse?

      But, for the moment, without anything more concrete to work on, I was happy to entertain crackpot theories.

      ‘You must know everyone in these parts?’ I asked.

      A slyly humorous smile spread across her face. She was astute. By my reaction to the protesters theory she had concluded that the body we had found was the real thing. ‘You want me to tell you who I think might be bad enough to do something like this?’

      ‘I’m always interested in local knowledge.’

      ‘And this is private?’ she asked warily, but I could hear the thrill in her voice.

      ‘Strictly between you and me.’

      ‘Gerald Evans, Pentre Fawr. I’ll say no more than that.’ She sat upright, looking quickly around to make sure that the walls weren’t going to betray her. But she wasn’t finished. She leaned forward. ‘And Mr Gilbert at Cae Rhedyn. The man who messes up the river with his so-called gold mine.’

      The Gold Mine Man. I remembered him. That’s what Sandra Williams had called him when she pointed him out to me one day in Dinas. On the other side of the road, head down, scurrying, carrying a ragged canvas shopping bag. And dressed in what looked like a grey school blazer with a scorch mark on the left sleeve. It was a cold day, but he was wearing shorts, fat grey socks collapsed around the ankles of his stick legs, his knees protruding like the knob on the end of a shillelagh.

      She saw me to the door. I sensed a reluctance to release me. ‘Is there anything more?’

      ‘It’s what my husband said about it, but I think it’s a bit silly.’

      ‘Go on,’ I prompted.

      ‘It’s about the planes that fly over, the big slow ones, not the small ones that fly too fast and make such an awful noise.’

      ‘The Hercules?’

      ‘Maybe–’ she shook her head dismissively, the ability to name planes was boys’ stuff – ‘but they used to say that sometimes they dropped bodies.’

      ‘Why did they say that?’

      ‘They said that they dropped dead bodies to see what happened to them. They were trying to see if there was any safe way that soldiers could jump from planes without parachutes.’

      ‘I’ll look into that, Mrs Jones.’ I was only partially humouring her. It sounded like one of the half-crazed ideas that Special Forces might actually contemplate. I put ‘M’ in brackets beside the note. Something Mackay could help me out with later.

      Mackay and I went back a long way. We were tenuously related, his family having a connection with the Scottish branch of the Capaldi family. We had shared a reckless adolescence before he joined the army and ended up in the SAS. Our relationship had been troubled after that, and had hit a real low when he took up with my ex-wife, Gina. Since then he too had been dumped by her, and we had now returned to our old close conjunction, but with the former wildness hopefully burned-out.

      I left Cogfryn and drove down towards the main road instead of turning back to the wind-farm site. It would be useful to get a feel for the valley in daylight.

      Just before the junction I pulled in beside a sign I had missed when I had driven the road in the dark: PEN TWYN BARN GALLERY. The driveway had been newly surfaced in tarmac, and led to a large circular parking area in front of a refurbished and freshly limewashed stone barn. Just up the rise from the barn was the house, also restored, and with a tasteful, contemporary, glazed rear extension. Money had been spent on both the buildings. They were also both equally shut up. I made a note of them. Pen Tywn had not featured in the electoral roll.

      On the way back I turned off the road at the signpost for the by-way, an old drove track that wound up to the ridgeway. I had checked it out on the OS map, and was pretty sure that it would lead to Tessa MacLean’s dig site.

      And discovered a bonus. This particular spot possessed a mobile-phone signal, a rare attribute in these parts. I decided to put that call through to Mackay.

      ‘Glyn, how are you?’ The reception was fuzzy. But that was par for the course when calling Mackay. He had retired from the SAS, but the background chatter on his line made you think of wind in a high desert and an old truck’s engine being nurtured with an oil can to keep the mobile phone’s batteries charged. Perhaps the regiment gave them a filter to put on their phone when they retired, just so they would be forever reminded of the good old days.

      ‘Mac, here’s a bizarre one for you.’

      ‘I’m listening.’

      ‘Did you ever come across talk of an experiment that had the military dropping dead bodies from planes at low altitudes to assess if there was a possibility that live soldiers would be able to handle the jump?’

      He was silent.

      ‘Mac?’

      ‘Sorry, Glyn, I can’t say.’

      Can’t or won’t? I had learned over the years not to press him on these things. ‘Okay, let’s try another tack. Hypothetically, could such a thing СКАЧАТЬ