Good People (37 page)

In the absence of an answer, I allowed myself to drift into Boon’s room.

Sally had shown me in here the second time that I had visited. Then I had been looking for any significant links between Boon and the group. What had surprised me at that time had been the absence of any. No record of them, either assembled or as individuals, in the photographs, snapshots and souvenir scraps of paper that were pinned to the corkboard above his cheap computer desk.

I looked at the images again. Boon in uniform with fellow soldiers. Boon in mufti with a variety of companions, male and female. Sally was in a couple of them, and, in one case, Boon was bending, grinning into shot in front of a puzzled llama behind a wire-mesh fence.

Images from happier times. Telling me that Boon was a normal, attractive, gregarious young man. Could they tell me anything else?

I went round the corkboard again slowly. One young woman recurred. I took down a picture of her with Boon, both of them smiling self-consciously into the camera in front of a grey stone Gothic church. The careful block printing on the back read
SOPH – LUNENBURG
.

She had fine, light brown hair, high Slavic cheekbones, a sharp nose and thin lips, but a confident and engaging smile that she wove into her whole face, which veered her over the border into loveliness.

I took down another one of the two of them. A beach shot. Boon in a pair of swimming trunks looking muscled and fit, Soph in a green bikini that didn’t quite work on her, one hand trying to hold back the hair that the breeze was playing with.
LIMASSOL
on the back in the same block printing.

I went to pin it back and noticed the photograph that it had been partially covering. A small black-and-white studio portrait. An old one, judging by the curled corners and the crazing on the surface sheen. A young black woman smiling out into the world, the photographer just catching her on the verge of uncertain laughter.

I turned it over. The message was in pencil, crabbed and unsteady handwriting, much faded. I took it over to the desk lamp and had to peer hard to decipher it.

Please let my baby keep this …

I went over it again and took my time to make sure that I was reading the name correctly. I sat down on the bed. It was trying to tell me something. Or rather something lodged in my memory was trying to flag my attention.

When it came back to me I had to dampen it with the rider that it could be a total coincidence.

I stood up carefully, not taking my eyes from the chicken-claw scrawl on the back of the picture. Not wanting to lose the moment. This was too slow-burning for a revelation. And it lacked the certainty. But it was still gut-churning stuff, the dawning realization that there was a possibility that I now knew why Sally had locked her car and walked off into the night.

And, at that moment, that possibility was all I cared about.

I palmed my phone and scrolled down through the contacts. I found the number that was singing to me. I took a deep, steadying breath and pressed call. It started ringing out.

One is not at home, please leave your name and number and one will return your call when one has dispensed with the affairs of state.

I cut the connection.

My phone rang. It startled me. I stared at it for a moment, unable to answer it. I was overcome with a sense of dread, a feeling that if I took the call I would be talking to a dead man.

‘Glyn?’

‘Mac …’ It was only when I released my breath that I realized how long I had been holding it for.

‘Paul says that there is no one he knows that Ken and Les would trust.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Mac.’

And it didn’t. Not now. I knew where I was going.

It was a strange sensation, standing deep in the night shadow, intensified by the wellingtonia tree, watching the front of the house. A perverse kind of high. An exhilaration composed of tension, dread and anticipation. But I forced myself to be patient, trying to get the feel and pattern of the place. A light shone in the hall and the sitting room. On a couple of occasions a light had gone on in one of the upstairs bedrooms, where the curtains had already been closed. This was where I needed Mackay. So that I could stand back here for the overview, and watch what happened to the pattern when the doorbell was rung. But I was on my own and stuck with it.

I called the number again and let Her Majesty cut in on the answering machine before hanging up. I wanted him to know that I was trying to reach him. He would wonder why I was calling, but he would also assume that a telephone call implied distance and separation.

I psyched myself up for it and set off down the front path under the low rumble cover of a big plane high up in the North Atlantic corridor. I used slow, deliberate strides, planting each footfall with the delicacy required to avoid the gravel turning into an auditory land mine. I wanted him to stay surprised. I stood dead still when I reached the porch, adjusting to the closeness. My heart was thrumming like a rogue piece of biology.

I used the door knocker rather than the bell to re-connect myself to the world of solid things. Nothing exploded. It seemed to take longer than it should for a blurred figure to frame itself in the door’s obscure glass. The porch light came on.

‘Who is it?’ The voice on the other side of the door was guarded.

‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi.’

The front door opened with the shocking squeal of a piece of trapped gravel on the quarry tile floor.

I nodded at him. ‘Mr Ferguson.’

He looked down at me from the top step, his face showing that the surprise was not a happy one. He recovered his composure. ‘It’s very late.’

‘Can I come inside, Mr Ferguson?’ I asked, ignoring his observation.

He couldn’t help the reflex. The momentary glance behind, before he caught himself. ‘What do you need to talk to me about?’

‘Coincidences.’

‘What coincidences?’

I held up the photograph that I had brought from Boon’s room. He came down off of the step and peered at it under the weak porch light. He looked at me quizzically. ‘Am I meant to know something about this?’

‘Rose Marie Ferguson.’

He nodded slowly, aware that something was changing. ‘Ferguson is a fairly common name.’

I smiled at him. ‘Tell me, is there any deep-veined psychological significance in re-naming yourself after your son’s birth mother? Or was it just laziness?’

‘Have you got a warrant?’

I slipped past him and in through the open door, turning on the threshold to look back at him still standing in the porch. ‘I don’t need a warrant, you invited me in.’ I took a step into the hall, listening for sounds of occupancy. Just a radio from the living room. I was aware of him moving into the space behind me.

‘I could call Constable Davies and tell him that you’re trespassing.’

I turned round, shaking my head. ‘Huw Davies is a friend of mine. We protect rare birds together.’

He waited. He wanted to know where I was driving this.

‘Where is she, Malcolm?’

He drew in a slow breath, wondering whether to issue a formal denial. He closed the door behind him. ‘Back in Jamaica. We didn’t keep in touch. We left that up to Boon. When we thought that he was old enough we gave him that photograph and explained about his mother.’

I nodded, acknowledging that we had managed to punch through one layer of bullshit. ‘I meant Marta. Or should I say Soph?’

He used a blank smile as a screen while he ran through the permutations. Was this a bluff ? How much did I really know?

‘Sophia – Boon’s ex-girlfriend,’ I amplified. ‘Where is she now?’

‘In Germany. I was on the phone to her yesterday, trying to reassure her as best I could about Boon. As far as the other girl is concerned …’ He stopped, frowning, when he saw me pick up the hall phone.

‘Call her,’ I instructed, holding out the receiver.

He shook his head and backed away from me.

I gave him the rueful smile of a disappointed headmaster. ‘Malcolm Paterson, it’s time to tell me what the fuck you have set in motion here.’

He closed his eyes, his head drooped and he shook it. ‘It’s all gone sour. It’s all gone terribly wrong.’ He dropped down to sit on the stairs, head still shaking. I waited him out. He looked up at me.

‘It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Nothing bad was meant to happen to Boon or Sophia.’

‘Sophia was Marta?’

He nodded.

‘Who you just called in Germany?’

He shook his head. ‘I was just trying to put you off. I didn’t want you to know that this had been organized.’

‘Start from the beginning, Malcolm.’

His head dropped again. ‘Wendy …’ he said the name so softly that I almost didn’t catch it. ‘Wendy tried to commit suicide for the third time.’ His voice strengthened. ‘I had learned to keep the sharp stuff away from her. This time she broke my razor apart. Tried to use those thin strips of blades on her wrists. She cut her fingers to shreds in the process.’ He looked up at me, a blaze of rage crossing his face. ‘All because of those bastards. She still has to suffer. I’ve had to have her committed to a psychiatric unit in Cyprus.’

‘So this is all about revenge?’ I asked quietly.

He nodded. ‘I wanted to take something back to Wendy. I wanted her to know that they were now suffering. That they hadn’t got away with it.’ He looked at me, a pained expression on his face, as if I was working on a misunderstanding that hadn’t been aired. ‘Boon wasn’t involved. Not in the beginning. This was my fight. Mine and Wendy’s.’

He burst into tears. ‘Why did it go so wrong? She was the victim. We should have had right on our side.’

I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. It gave me the opportunity to survey the ground floor. There was no evidence of anyone else living here. One single mug with tea dregs by the sink, any other dishes and cutlery washed and stacked away. No signs of any excess foodstuffs in the cupboards.

He drank the water gratefully, slowing down as he composed himself. ‘I got the job here. Just far enough from Dinas. Then I had to think of a way to make contact with Trevor Vaughan. I got lucky: he brought his mother to that concert I told you about. I thought luck was with me then. That was the plan you see: to use Trevor to get at them.’

I shook my head, not getting it. ‘Surely he recognized you? You’re his friend’s father, for God’s sake, a teacher at the local school. You went off with another friend’s sister. Didn’t he run a mile?’

‘He didn’t know me. Not at first.’ He allowed himself the ghost of a smile. ‘I’ve inverted myself. From the neck up. I used to have longish hair and sideburns, now I’ve got more hair on my chin than my head. And I wear contact lenses instead of Clark Kent glasses. And I had a Cyprus sun tan. He may have thought that there was a resemblance, but what you have to remember is that he wasn’t looking to find Malcolm Paterson. What he thought he’d found was an interesting older man who understood music.’

‘But he did find out who you really were?’

‘I told him. It was the whole point in me coming here.’

‘And he didn’t run a mile?’

‘Not when I told him about Wendy’s condition. What those bastards had done to her.’

‘He didn’t know?’

‘He said he didn’t. Maybe he just wanted to be able to pretend that he didn’t.’

I nodded, letting him know that I was keeping up with the train so far. ‘What did you expect from him?’

‘It was more about hope. That he would back me up. Go to the police and corroborate the systematic abuse that McGuire and Tucker had inflicted on Wendy. And the other girls they messed up.’

‘But he wouldn’t?’

He shook his head. ‘Not that far. He sympathized, he was genuinely morally torn, but in the end his loyalty to his warped friends won out.’

‘So you activated Plan B?’

‘Plan B?’

‘Boon and Marta, aka Sophia.’

His expression shifted back to doleful. ‘It backfired. We only intended to persuade Trevor that they were still capable of terrible things. Not that terrible things could really happen.’ He looked up at me. ‘Remember, we didn’t know then that they had actually killed that poor girl.’

‘What was meant to happen?’

‘Boon was meant to convince them that he was going to quit the Army that night. Sophia was the bait. She was going to offer to stay with McGuire and Tucker after they’d helped Boon on his way. I was going to pick up Boon in Aberystwyth, and then work on Trevor to persuade him that McGuire and Tucker were up to their old tricks again.’

‘You deliberately let Sophia go off alone into the night with them? Christ, man, you of all people should know what they’re capable of.’

‘Sophia’s tough. And Boon was going to be monitoring her.’ He looked up at me plaintively, a rasp in his voice. ‘But Boon never showed up in Aberystwyth. I don’t know what’s happened to either of them. I don’t know what they’ve done to them, and I don’t know what to do.’

I let the silence expand for dramatic purpose before I shouted, ‘Bullshit!’

It had the desired effect. He was so startled his bum almost lifted off the stairs.

I leaned in close to his face. ‘There never was a Plan B.’

He squirmed away from me, shaking his head, working on puzzled and injured.

‘Wendy was over sixteen. She was legal. They did terrible things, but there was no offence committed that could be proven, so there was nothing for Trevor to go to the police about. Not until you tried to con him into thinking that Boon had been disposed of, and that Marta had been abducted. Boon and Sophia were part of Plan A right from the start.’

He shook his head more vigorously. ‘I told you … It’s all gone wrong … I don’t know what’s happened to them.’

‘Then why haven’t you come to us to report them missing?’ I answered for him: ‘Because you’re quite happy with the way things are panning out. You’ve hit the bonus with the discovery of poor old Colette. That was unexpected. But it serves to concentrate the mind even more on the still unaccounted for Boon and Marta.’

He stared up at me. ‘God, you are a cold and unfeeling bastard, aren’t you?’

I grinned. ‘Nice try, Malcolm. But I was there the night that Ken and Les came to get Sophia out of the Den. I saw their reaction when they realized that she wasn’t there. And who, I wonder, let her out? Because it wasn’t the Good Fucking Fairy, was it?’