Sympathy for the Devil (21 page)

‘Here, let me.’

He fed money into another machine that offered only coffee. Catrin noticed that he did everything with his right hand, the lower part of his other sleeve hanging down in a knot, as if empty. When he spoke his mouth barely moved, his voice was a whisper. She removed the plastic cup from the dispenser.

‘Thanks. You must be a veteran.’ She eyed his jacket: ‘You been with the band a long time?’

He said nothing, looked past her. The sound of footfalls further down the corridor had distracted him. He moved away abruptly, making for the door. Catrin caught up with him, put her free hand on his arm in the doorway. He looked back at her, his anxiety obvious.

She managed to guide him back into the room. She stirred her coffee without taking her eyes off him.

‘You were there with the band in the early days, weren’t you?’

He nodded, glancing down the passage. Catrin saw that an old wound that ran from the corner of his eye along his jaw-line had been stitched clumsily. The brief smile he gave her came out as a grimace.

‘You must have got to know Face then?’

‘No. He wasn’t someone you ever got that close to.’

As he began to turn away she put her hand on his arm. He looked towards the door again, motioned to her to keep her voice down.

‘Nobody here knows anything,’ he said. His voice was a whisper that she had to strain to catch.

‘Who then?

‘If you’re serious about this Face business, there’s only one of them left now who knows anything.’

‘Who’s that?’

He glanced again at the doorway. The corridor outside seemed empty.

‘I don’t know what his real name is, he used to be a late-night pirate DJ. He’s used different names over the years. Nogood Boyo, Captain Cato, later he used the name Overseer.’

‘How would I contact him?’

‘He’s gone to ground out in the country north of Pontardawe.’

‘Where?’

‘That’s all I’ve heard. There was a fire in the pirate station where he was working. He ended up badly burnt. No one’s heard from him for years.’

The roadie didn’t say anything more. He walked quickly away through the doorway.

The rush hour was over, the streets cold despite the bright sun, and quiet. Catrin parked further up by the station. Huw had left another text, telling her to meet him in half an hour, in the main concourse. There’d be lots of people about there, dozens of cameras. He obviously wasn’t taking any chances. He’d chosen a safe location to talk, not a wireless phone connection. He was using a different number to text her from each time. She wondered if this was another precaution.

Less than a hundred yards along the street, she found an internet café. She walked past it a couple of times, in each direction, looking in the shop windows. No one was following her.

The café seemed empty. The neon sign in the window was switched off, the windows dark. At the back there was a bar area, a Gaggia machine and a line of juicers on a shelf under which an Asian boy sat reading.

Catrin ordered a coffee, sat at a computer away from the window. She found a site that contained Ordnance Survey maps of all the country north of Pontardawe. It allowed her to zoom into any area up to a scale of 1:25,000, and was detailed enough for her to see farm buildings. She panned the scale back, to see the area as a whole first, the lower peaks around the A4069 giving way to the wilder, sparsely inhabited regions of the Black Mountains and the Beacons to the north.

Saving the map, she clicked onto the internal access page of the only Severe Burns Unit in the region, the West Glamorgan NHS Morriston Burns Unit. The patient waiting-time stats showed an adult intake of approximately one thousand patients each year, and of those only thirty were severe burns cases: the inpatient files were held behind the standard NHS double password system, a single password for the unit and another for each authorised user.

She clicked straight over onto the initial patient admission files for the unit: these were low-security, the single password overridden by her last Tri-Service pass number. Searching by postcode, she brought up a young girl from Llandybie, the victim of a school arson attack who’d needed reconstructive surgery, and an elderly man caught in a house fire in the Ammanford area. But there were no other matches. After a few minutes she managed to access the National Burns Injuries Database and run the same postcodes, but there was nothing there either.

Next she tried a keyword search on ‘Overseer’ and ‘Captain Cato’ on the National Criminal Intelligence System database, then on Google, but again found no useful matches. She panned back to broaden the area, including the lower reaches of the Cambrians to the west. She keyword-searched the names of every farm, peak and feature on the map in conjunction with ‘Nogood Boyo’ and the other handles. But still no links came up apart from references to Dylan Thomas.

She noticed that one of the other characters in Thomas’s play was called Captain Cat, only one letter away from ‘Captain Cato’. Perhaps the old roadie had got the name slightly wrong. She tried a search on Captain Cat, and came up with links to a variety of fishing tackle shops and tourist souvenir shops to the west. She double-checked the addresses but all were in the coastal regions, with the exception of one. A fish restaurant called ‘Captain Cat’s in the rural Garnswllt area, north-west of Pontardawe.

The photographs on the website showed a large building located next to a minor road. On the walls inside she could make out several framed fish hanging alongside sepia photographs of old fishing steamers. The section entitled ‘Who we are’ showed a picture of the elderly husband and wife team that ran the restaurant. Both, the section said, were originally from the South London area. But when she checked the names on the NCIS, neither flagged up any form, nor did the pair have any connections she could see to the name ‘Cato’.

Going back to Google, she typed in ‘Captain Cat’s restaurant’ alongside the name of the nearest village ‘Garnswllt’, and was directed to a single link: the website of the
South Wales Evening Argus
. Their internal search facility revealed only one article on the place.

It seemed the original establishment had had some connections to the art deco style. There had been a short local campaign to save the building. It was shot from a variety of angles, showing the neon signs, the rounded corners and clean lines of the original structure. These were contrasted with more recent pictures, which showed the changes under the new management. These later shots had a grainy quality, presumably because they served no architectural purpose. Some were of the interior with its nets and lobster pots, the rest of the building’s altered front. In the last two shots, the focal points were two signs, erected at each corner. Catrin looked from one to the other, but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The flowers blooming on the verges identified the time of year as late spring or summer, and the trees on the drive threw deep shadows over the walls behind the signs. One of the signs just read ‘Captain Cat’s’. The other was identical, but with an arrow that would have lit up at night, pointing towards the door. It took more than a minute for her to notice what should have been obvious from a quick glance. Her brain had fooled her, making her see what she had expected to see, not what appeared in the image. The darkness on the white wall behind the letters was not a shadow, but the stain of soot from a fire.

The same blaze had warped the apostrophe and the ‘s’ at the end of the name into a single rough oval, so that from the road the sign now read ‘Captain Cato’. Catrin thought about this for a moment. She looked under the arrow of the sign to where the soot was darkest, but saw only a small, blackened shape, perhaps once a small statue of the captain, now barely human in form. As she peered closer she could just make out the face and the stumps of the arms visible in outline against the damaged wall behind. The thing reminded her a little of a voodoo doll, of something burnt in sacrifice.

She could imagine the place being referred to as Captain Cato’s. There was a possibility the restaurant was where Overseer had picked up the name. If this was the case it suggested some connection or familiarity with the area. It wasn’t that far from where the roadie said the man had moved. But she knew she was groping in the dark.

She clicked back to the detailed map. The restaurant lay several miles north of the village of Garnswllt, just at the start of the A4069, which wound through the hills to the small town of Llangadog. After this lay the Black Mountains. On either side of the road were small hamlets and isolated farmsteads. By the time she had made a note of all the relevant information her coffee was cold. She left her cup by the computer, and picked up her jacket.

Outside the sky had darkened. A thin, icy rain had begun to fall. Catrin fastened her collar, pulled it tight at the neck to keep out the cold. As she leant into the corner she noticed a tall figure in a suit walking between the rows of cars.

He was followed a few paces behind by a younger man carrying two laptop cases: a male secretary type with a brush cut, a shiny suit. A car was waiting, its back doors already open. With a gallant opening of his palm, the taller man ushered the younger one in. Then the man paused, glanced back at her. It wasn’t Huw, though from a distance they looked a little similar.

It was many years since she’d last seen him in the flesh, but he didn’t feel like a stranger. He’d appeared on all the late-night
Newsnight
shows, the ones she so often fell asleep to. His position as head of the Association of Gay Police Officers had made him a regular there. The chief was smiling but she wasn’t sure at what. There was no one else near him. His suit had a fashionable herringbone pattern. His hair was full still, dyed jet black. He looked every inch the media player and politician-in-waiting he’d become.

She’d hoped he hadn’t seen her, but he was coming towards her now. Catrin straightened up, held out her hand.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘it’s been a while.’ Immediately she felt stupid saying it. Maybe he made a point of greeting everyone now his business was to be popular. He looked down at his feet, seemed almost lost for a moment.

‘I was very sorry to hear about Rhys,’ he said quietly.

Apart from Pugh, it was the first time someone had said it to her like that. His eyes watered over, then as quickly the wind dried them.

‘I’ll always regret not looking out for him more.’ He said this more hesitantly as if speaking his thoughts aloud. Catrin wondered if he’d been coached to sound sincere. Usually she could tell the real thing, but here she wasn’t sure.

It was on his watch that Rhys had left. She remembered Rhys joking a few times how Rix had a crush on him. There’d been nothing in it, she was sure. If there had been, Rix would have intervened in the Internals inquiry that had spat Rhys out, but he hadn’t. After the failed drugs tests, Rix had let the disciplinary procedure take its natural course. He could have saved Rhys but he hadn’t.

Rix asked a few questions about when she’d be fit for duty. He said how much they were all looking forward to having her back. He held her gaze for a moment longer. He seemed to be weighing something up, but then he walked away towards the car, his brogues gleaming in the lights over the parking area.

She noticed Huw now standing by his Lexus. He was wearing a long black cashmere coat, and he looked much like the other businessmen coming out of the station. There was no sign of his bodyguards. Quickly she walked him into the station. Inside it was much warmer, the windows clouded by steam. She glanced back: it didn’t look as if anyone had followed them in. She chose a table not exposed to the concourse.

Huw came back with the teas and was blowing on his, clearly in a hurry to drink it. He hasn’t lost the common touch, Catrin thought, still likes a warm cup of builder’s tea.

‘You ever hear rumours about Rix having a crush on Rhys?’ she said.

He raised his eyebrows. She knew what he was thinking, it was a rumour attached to almost every young male officer in the force at one time or another. If there’d been anything to it Thomas, who kept in with Rix, would have likely made an aside to her about it. She decided to let it go.

‘So, what happened in the studio?’ he asked, still holding the cup.

‘Before I get to that, I need to tell you about something that happened last night.’

He waited, his eyes on hers.

‘It was as I left a club. A man there looked like the one in the van. He followed me from the club to the Hayes. His face was covered by long hair.’

‘Did you get a look at him?’

‘No. None of his face was visible behind the hair. It was dark, and Della sent a car to pick me up.’

‘How did she seem?’

‘Frightened, very drunk. She was in some temporary office space in St Andrew’s Crescent, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. She’s been moving around for a while, living out of a suitcase.’

‘What’s her line?’

‘She said she’d met Rhys the night he died. She’d worked out from what you’d told her that the photos came from him. She heard from Rhys that I was someone the source of the photos would trust, that I was a link to the source, that was why she came to me. And presumably that’s also why you came to me?’

He nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have led us anywhere, does it?’

Catrin felt her old fear of failure creeping back like a fever. ‘You feel I’ve let you down?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not. So what’s spooked Della?’

‘When she saw Rhys that night, she got the sense he was being watched. Then the next night her house was broken into, ransacked.’

‘So whoever was following Rhys came after her also?’

‘Seems that way.’

Huw sipped at his tea. He looked concerned, disconcerted. It was the closest she’d come to seeing fear on his face.