Good People (36 page)

The train that the group had taken from London had been approximately one and a half hours late arriving in Shrewsbury.

So, what did I have?

I had Tony delivering Marta for a rendezvous with the minibus. He would deny it, and until we had Marta to corroborate it, we could prove nothing.

An East European girl. Probably recruited from the seasonal student fruit-picking community. A girl who had stayed on after the season had finished, probably on an expired permit. What had she been offered? A free trip to her boyfriend in Ireland? But, the really big question, did she know what would be expected of her when she got into that minibus?

And who in that minibus knew what was happening when Marta turned up? I was about to dismiss Ken and Les from that equation, but then I shifted laterally. Could they have arranged it as a treat for themselves? Was this something that they had done before? Had I missed the obvious? Was this a process? After Wendy fled, and the children’s home supply dried up, had they been using Tony Griffiths to procure new product?

I had an image then of Ken and Les helping her to climb inside. Spider grins fixed. Already salivating over the prospect. Fresh meat.

Did Boon fuck up the plan by wanting to go to Ireland with her? Or did he just get himself fucked by trying to protect her?

Far enough …

Had I got close somehow, without realizing it, to discovering what they had really done with Boon and Marta? Was that the warning that they were sending me? Telling me to back off? The Rumpus Room had given up its secrets; they would have to deal with those consequences, but they didn’t want things getting even murkier.

They were going to have to contact me again. The delivery of the photographs had been the first shot across the bow. Next would come the ultimatum. Which would be what … ? Full compliance or they contact my superiors/the press/the RSPCA?

Whatever they had in mind, it was unlikely they’d be using Tony Griffiths again. They would need a more refined tool for the next piece of this business. Besides, they couldn’t take the risk that I might crack him.

I drove back to Sally’s feeling damp and dolorous. And nervous. Now that I had the notion that I had been choreographed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was keeping watch on all my movements.

My phone rang. Sally’s number came up on the display. ‘Hi,’ I said, answering it.

‘Where are you?’ I picked up distress. Had someone told her about the chainsaw the dogs had sniffed out?

‘I’m on my way,’ I said cheerily.

‘Why is no one else here yet?’

I tensed. Something dark had slipped into the picture. ‘Sally, where are you?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice as normal as possible.

‘Where I was told to meet you. I’ve had to walk up the hill a bit though, to get a signal for the phone.’

‘What hill? Please, can you be more specific?’

‘The place where the minibus was found. I was told that you and Chief Superintendent Galbraith were waiting for me up here.’

‘Who told you that?’ I asked, feeling the chill drawing in.

She heard the change in my tone. ‘The man from your Operations Room. What’s wrong, Glyn? Why aren’t you here?’

‘I’m on my way. I’ll be there as soon as I can. What else did he say?’

‘He said that there was nothing to be anxious about, but that you needed me to come up here and identify something that had been found.’

‘Have you seen any other cars? Any kind of light?’

‘No. It’s dark up here … and it’s wet and cold.’ She paused. I could imagine her looking around. ‘Glyn, I’m scared …’ I heard the tremor in her voice.

‘There’s no need to be. I’m on my way. I’ll be with you before you know it.’ I thought hard. ‘I want you to get back down to your car. Come down the mountain road and I’ll … No …’ I realized that she would be more vulnerable on that road. ‘No, forget that, Sally. Just go back to your car and lock the doors. Remember that we’re on our way. You’re soon going to see headlights, and they’ll be ours.’

‘Who’s done this, Glyn?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Don’t worry about that. That’s for us to sort out. I just want you to get back down to your car and out of the rain. Please, Sally, do it for me.’

‘Okay, boss,’ she said, making a joke of it, trying to be brave. I felt the ache of not being there to protect her.

I slammed the car into a three-point turn. I was the wrong side of Dinas for the mountain road. I activated my blue lights, and put my foot down hard.

Now I didn’t have to wait for the next approach. They had just demonstrated that they had other ways of manipulating me.

I called Emrys Hughes. ‘I don’t see the problem,’ he said laconically when I had described the situation.

‘She’s up there and she’s scared,’ I explained, biting down on my impatience.

‘She drove up there okay, let her drive back down.’

‘She was lured up there by someone impersonating a police officer. God knows what could happen if she tries to negotiate those bends with some madman tearing after her.’

‘Where did this madman suddenly appear from?’

‘Emrys, for fuck’s sake,’ I screamed, losing my temper, ‘can you get a car up there or not?’

‘Okay, okay, watch the language,’ he drawled sulkily. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Relief flared out the worst of the tension as soon as I saw the blue flashing light. It was a beat patrol car, parked behind Sally’s. The uniform cop got out as I pulled up, his raincoat on, averting his eyes from my headlights. I recognized him. He was the one Emrys Hughes had dispatched as an emissary that first day up here, when the minibus had been found.

I nodded at him as I approached. ‘I’ll take Mrs Paterson back down in my car …’ I stopped dead. Both cars were empty. I wheeled on him, the question etched into my expression.

‘There was no one here, Sergeant,’ he explained nervously. ‘The car was locked and empty when I got here.’

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to impose control before I took my shock out on this poor bastard. I exhaled. ‘You saw nothing?’

‘No, Sergeant, just the car parked here, like …’

‘Don’t call me sergeant, it wastes time,’ I interrupted. I took out my flashlight and started slowly panning the ground around Sally’s car. ‘Have you been anywhere near this?’ I asked, holding the beam on the soft ground outside the driver’s door.

‘No, I remembered what you said the last time.’

There were footprints. Messed up, but compatible with someone swivelling their feet to get into or out of the car. The road’s tarmac surface started immediately adjacent to the softer ground, giving no indication of where those feet had gone to, or whether they had been joined by any others.

I spread the beam wider. Sally had said that she had moved up the hill to get reception for her phone. A bad thought struck me. Had she ever got back down again? I scanned the ground by the driver’s door again, but there was no way of telling whether those prints were two-way, or just exit.

‘Bring your torch,’ I instructed, leading him to the edge of the road where the hill started to rise away. I pointed. ‘You take that direction. Walk along the verge, take it slowly. You’re looking for any sign of someone leaving the road.’ I moved away from him, torch beam trained on the verge, trying to read through the shadows the harsh illumination cast on the grass.

‘Sergeant …’

He held his torch beam on a patch in the heather, where Sally’s foot had disturbed the rain’s surface sheen. The drizzle was re-establishing the patina, but not fast enough to cover her traces leading erratically up the hill. It was a definite one-way trail.

‘Get on the radio. I want DCI Jones apprised of this.’

‘Don’t you want me to help you look?’

‘No.’ I shook my head to reinforce it. If I was going to find Sally up there, I wanted to be alone with it.

My shoes and trouser cuffs were soon soaked through. I followed in Sally’s step pattern. It disrupted my normal gait, but it felt important to be retracing her exact steps. I kept my torch beam shining ahead. I was tensed, ready for an alien outline to show itself mounded above the low shrub cover.

I reached a trampled patch of heather. This must have been where she had performed the cell-phone pavane while she made the call to me. Squatting down, I realized why her trail had only led one way. I had highlighted a perfect imprint of her shoe in the black, peaty mulch. Pointing downhill. She had found and used a sheep track to get back down to the road.

My relief was brief and laced with frustration, before another wave of anxiety took over. She had returned to the car. And then locked it and left it. In the wet, in the dark, in the middle of a wilderness. Why, for Christ’s sake?

Bryn Jones arrived with some of the investigating team. Other groups, police and civilian, were on their way to augment the search party.

I told him about the call Sally had received requesting her to come up here and meet with Jack Galbraith and me.

‘What’s your take on it?’ he asked me, staring off towards the dark mass of the forest that loomed away to the south.

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. There are no signs of violence. They must have used some sort of persuasive force to get her to go with them.’

‘An abduction?’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Who would gain from it, Glyn?’

I had already thought about that. ‘Maybe Gordon McGuire? To take the heat off his brother?’

He shook his head. ‘He’s got a reputation to worry about; he’s already busy putting distance in.’

‘Is Paul Evans still being held in Hereford?’

‘We had nothing to hold him on. He was let out on the recognizance that he stayed with your friend Graham Mackay until we deem it fit for him to come back here.’

It was a big surprise, I tried not to show it.

‘It’s a very tidy scene, Glyn. Car neatly parked. Locked. You know yourself, there’s usually a frenetic side to these things.’

‘What are you trying to say, sir?’ I asked, already knowing.

‘It might be exactly what it seems,’ he said softly. ‘She’s decided to go off for a long walk in the woods.’

‘She’s not the suicidal type.’

‘I’m not saying she is. She may just be trying to take stock.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Grief screws things up,’ he said, as if reliving a particular memory of his own.

‘She had that phone call, sir.’

He looked at me for a moment. ‘Did she?’ he asked carefully.

‘Why would she make it up?’ I retorted, trying to shake his scepticism.

‘Maybe when she found herself up here, she had to find a reason for it?’

‘She was scared. She wasn’t deluding herself, sir.’

For a moment I debated whether to come clean. To show him the blackmail photographs. Tell him about my suspicions concerning Tony Griffiths. Establish that there were other forces at work that could have engineered Sally’s disappearance. But what did I have? I had no demands from anyone, apart from the cryptic phrase,
far enough.
And I had no guarantee that, following the revelation, I would still be a part of the posse. Bryn, good cop and good Christian that he was, would most likely suspend me on the spot.

And he was right, there was nothing up here to indicate that Sally had been forced to do anything against her will.

‘Something else you want to tell me about, Glyn?’ he asked, picking up on some of the disturbed waves in my deliberating.

‘I have a key, sir.’

‘Meaning?’

‘To Sally Paterson’s house. Perhaps there will be some way of telling whether she really did receive that call?’

He smiled. ‘I think we owe her that much.’

I went off at a trot, heading for my car. He called after me. ‘Don’t worry, Glyn, we’ll find her. We’ve got some good people up here.’

I needed more reassurance than that. So I resorted to magical practices as I drove, using the force of will and despair to project Sally back into her house. The image I conjured was blurred, but I think I managed to get her into an apron. Trying to root her in place, going for settled and contented domesticity. I didn’t ride my luck, and kept sex projections out of the immediate future.

It didn’t work. Although I did experience an initial surge of spooky expectation when I saw that the lights were on in the front porch and the kitchen. But the place was empty. Filled with that hollow resonance that people’s absences charge their houses with.

She hadn’t left a note. Which wasn’t surprising, since she had thought that she was going to be meeting me.

I checked the telephone. The display showed that she had been called just over two hours previously, but the caller had withheld their number. I tried last-number redial, and experienced a small shock when my mobile phone started vibrating in my pocket. She must have tried to call me after she had got that message. But I had turned my phone off while I was staking out Tony Griffiths. The thought made me feel even guiltier.

I used my own phone to call Mackay.

‘Why didn’t anyone tell me that Paul Evans was with you?’ I tried not to sound angry.

‘He was still gunning for you. Your bosses didn’t want all that uncontained aggression crashing round up there, so they asked me if I minded carrying on with the baby-sitting for a bit.’

‘I thought that you were his enemy too?’

He chuckled. ‘Paul and I are cool now.’

‘Stockholm syndrome?’

‘No, we had our big breakthrough on the climbing wall.’

‘You got Paul Evans up the climbing wall?’ I couldn’t hide my astonishment.

‘Not quite. I took him up the easy way and gave him the options. I pointed out that there were only two ways down, and that we had already walked up one of them.’ His tone shifted, sensing the tension coming off me. ‘Why the concern with Paul Evans now?’

‘Sally’s been abducted.’

His voice turned grim. ‘I’m on my way.’

‘No. It would be more useful if you could get your new buddy to tell you if Ken and Les had anyone else up here they could have trusted to do this.’

I put the phone down. ‘Where are you, Sally?’ I intoned silently with my eyes closed, part rhetorical, part an attempt to get the crash-cart back on to the magic.