Sympathy for the Devil (16 page)

Outside she could hear a horn, and some music blaring. Through the mist, she saw a Lexus saloon, long and silver, parked at an angle half up on the pavement. It was next year’s model, she’d seen them in the ads but not on the road before. Powell had driven alone despite her earlier instructions. She could barely see him for the thick smoke filling the car. Jesus, she thought, the man is a complete stoner. Either that, or he’s done this to piss me off. He’s showing me he doesn’t take orders.

She tapped on the window. ‘Move over, big shot,’ she said, ‘I’m driving.’

By the time they reached the Bristol Channel the sleet had eased. They had hardly spoken on the journey. Ahead now Catrin could see the orange glow of the warehouses with access roads to the motorway, and in the distance the lights around the Severn Estuary.

‘Which way, Mr Powell?’ she asked.

‘Didn’t I tell you to call me Huw,’ he said. He asked her to pull in at the services. The place was deserted now the traffic went over the new bridge.

At the far end of the empty parking lot she saw a raised viewing platform. Huw – she thought of him as Huw already she had to admit – was pointing towards it without speaking. Through the curtain of drizzle, the bridge behind them was barely visible. The platform had been built at the edge of the cliff and the drop was immediate and sheer. The railings would have stopped a toddler from getting too close to the edge, but not an adult. Huw was gesturing at a low wall under the platform.

In the half-light at the base of the wall, there was just visible the remains of a small shrine. Several sprays of drooping flowers, handwritten poems in plastic covers. Among them was a rain-soaked bear with a Cardiff City scarf around its neck, looking out towards the estuary.

Huw showed her the empty tarmac by the wall.

‘Face’s Honda Civic was found along here after the last gig.’

‘Not your typical rock star’s vehicle.’

Huw was looking at her as if she’d missed the point. She remembered what he’d said about Face’s unworldliness; here was another sign of it. Perhaps for Face a car was just a car, a means of getting places.

‘How was the car parked?’

‘Square up to the wall, very tidily.’

She knew there was nothing odd in that. It was usual for cars to be left that way by suicides. It was very rare for jumpers to leave their cars badly parked.

A gust of wind through the window caught the collar of her jacket, batted it against her face. Huw took out a tissue, passed it to her. ‘Face’s car was found here only two hours after he left the gig.’

She vaguely remembered there’d been witnesses who’d seen Face driving. A couple had sold their stories at the time about seeing him wandering near the edge but she couldn’t recall the details.

Huw seemed to have read her mind. ‘Two pump cashiers saw him, also some roadside workers. There’s no doubt Face was the driver, no doubt he came here alone. There was also his blood on the seat. Not a lot, but consistent with the self-inflicted bleeding on stage. That positively places Face in the car after the gig, as photographic evidence showed he wasn’t bleeding prior to it.’

‘And the witnesses saw him walking by the edge, right?’

‘Correct. They did.’

‘So all the evidence seems to support the suicide hypothesis. Face announces his intention at the gig, self-harms there dramatically, then drives alone to the bridge. No one ever saw him leave here alive. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.’

Over to the right Catrin saw a man leaning against the barrier at the edge of the viewing platform. He seemed to be gazing down at them intently for a moment. His face was covered by the hood of his anorak.

She tried to make out more details, his height, his build, but couldn’t see much through the drizzle. Then abruptly, as if sensing her eyes on him, he bowed his head. He strolled slowly away until lost from sight.

She looked back at Huw. ‘You’ve checked the forensics report on the car carefully, I imagine.’

Huw looked a little sheepish. He didn’t have to tell her nothing had been turned up. If anything interesting had been found she knew it would have been raised at the inquest, which had been detailed and thorough. The same went for the whole investigation into Face’s presumed suicide. Catrin knew they were going over fallow ground.

‘And the car went where?’

‘To Face’s mother.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets, stared through the half-light. ‘I tried to buy it via her lawyer, she wouldn’t sell. It went to the band after she died.’

At the end of the car park the man in the anorak was getting into a dirty grey van. The vehicle remained stationary, no lights from it behind the railings.

Huw got back into the car, in the driving seat this time. She didn’t try to stop him. He reversed across the empty forecourt, spun the car round into a narrower lane to the right.

It cut through a steep wooded outcrop, out onto a promontory about fifty metres above the estuary. They passed the driveway to a building with faded paintwork, a sign outside advertising pub food.

Huw got out, and she walked alongside him to the edge. The wind was stronger here than it had been at the services, the gusts pushing at their backs. She watched as he picked up a stone and threw it out over the edge.

Beneath them the waves were a deep mauve, the colour of the sky reflected in the water. She heard a distant splash as the stone hit the waters and disappeared. The horizon was already growing dark.

Huw was hunching his shoulders inside his coat.

‘Did you know that the tides in the Severn Estuary are the second highest in the world? Only the tides in the Bay of Fundy off Nova Scotia are higher. So we’re talking about some very strong currents here.’

‘So bodies get carried off some distance?’

‘It’s not unheard of for bodies to end up as far away as Ireland – several local misper cases in the past have been closed with the help of the Garda.’

He still used the police shorthand for missing person. Once a copper, always a copper it seemed. ‘In that case it’s not so surprising the body was never found,’ she said.

Huw screwed up his eyes, still focusing on some point in the distance. ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘The sea always gives up its dead.’

‘So the bodies usually return whole, then?’

‘Not always. There was a case of a builder who got thrown over the bridge by loan sharks. A few years later he started to reappear down on the mud flats, one piece at a time. First a tibia, then a femur, then a few ribs.’

A seagull skimmed the tops of their heads, making a squawking sound that seemed too loud for its size.

‘Then a while back they found that skeletal foot in a trainer in Caswell Bay. Everyone thought it was Face. The press were all over it, but it turned out the foot belonged to some sixty-year-old alkie who’d jumped a year previously.’

‘So what are you saying? No body, no suicide?’

‘The laws of probability are against it. This would be almost the only case in twenty years where the body hasn’t returned in some form.’

‘Unless the body has already been recovered, by some hardcore fans perhaps, and buried secretly.’

Huw was already shaking his head.

‘The bodies don’t come back at predictable times and places. They’d have had to search hundreds of miles of coastline for months. Face’s hardcore fans in those days were a scruffy, spaced-out crowd. They’d never have had the resources for an operation like that.’

Catrin remembered what had first bothered Rhys about the suicide story.

‘But why d’you think Face came all the way down to the bridge from the gig? Why couldn’t he have topped himself at the concert hall?’

‘No one really knows. It may just be that he wanted to go by his flat first, collect something or drop something off perhaps.’

‘But the team never found anomalies at the flat. There was nothing left there or missing. It would’ve come out in the inquest.’

‘No, there was nothing there at all.’

‘No signs of a clean-up either, I presume.’

‘The place was exactly as those who visited it remembered it. Empty apart from the basics.’

‘Nothing weird in there that they would’ve ignored at the time but would tie in with the film? Dead animals, masks. That kind of thing?’

‘Nothing like that.’

‘Anything that would link with the photos in the woodland? Robes? Maps of the west?’

‘No. And the flat was so bare, things like that would have been noticed. Nothing had been touched. His paperwork was all there, his passport, bank statements, bank cards and several savings accounts.’

‘But no withdrawals in the months prior to the date of his going missing, no run money.’

‘Nothing. The inquest showed royalties and fees from the band as his only source of income. He wasn’t a big spender, as you can tell from the Civic.’

‘And his flat, he owned it?’

‘Correct. It’s not there any more because of the docks redevelopment.’

‘But there were photos of the interior at the inquest.’

‘Only small-scale to support the forensic checks. He never had it redecorated, there wasn’t even a single piece of art in there. He never splurged on drugs and partying, any of the typical rock star’s trophies. He lived austerely. No television, no sound system, no luxury articles of any type. He didn’t even have any girlfriends that we know about.’

‘What about political interests, hobbies, private causes?’

‘Nothing like that. He seems to have lived quite separately from the world around him.’

Huw took his briefcase from the car and went ahead of Catrin towards the pub. It didn’t seem to get much custom now the new road had been built. Beneath the terrace area, the car park was empty. The path led up between barrels filled with black earth to an archway, one of the doors loose and fretting in the wind.

At the far end the doors opened onto a patio where piles of rusted garden furniture were stacked and chained to pillars.

The place was deserted. At a table in the corner Huw opened the case, took out two maps and spread them on the table. The first was a map of the world, the type that hung on the wall of schoolrooms, the different countries clearly demarcated by colour. The other was a 1:250,000 scale map of Wales. The maps were covered with dots in different colours. At the corners he’d placed ashtrays as weights to hold the paper down against the wind.

On the map of the world she could see clusters of green dots over Southern Europe, and blue ones in Asia. The barman brought a light to the table along with their drinks. It was a spotlight, on a stand, the type that might be used in a presentation.

He angled the beam over the maps, turned off the overhead lights, then closed the door and left them alone in the hall. Evidently the man had done all this before. It felt almost like a routine.

She waited for an explanation of what was going on. All the time Huw was smiling thinly, staring at the maps.

‘Don’t worry, I own this place,’ he said quietly.

‘This old pub?’ Catrin glanced around at the dim surroundings.

‘Right, it comes with all the land down to the bridge. I didn’t want it going to developers, any potential evidence getting lost.’

She looked at him. ‘You really are obsessed with this Face thing, aren’t you?’

He didn’t reply. He was running his fingers around the green dots on the map.

‘These represent the cluster of sightings in the first years after Face’s disappearance,’ he said softly.

‘Anything even remotely plausible?’

He was shaking his head.

‘Most can be discounted. These areas, the Canaries, Ibiza, Cyprus, were where a lot of Face’s rank-and-file fans went on holiday. In most cases the sightings were late at night in bars. Too much sangria and the imagination starts to work overtime.’

‘And the blue dots?’

‘The ones in Goa and Kerala were reported by older, diehard fans, out on spiritual quests of self-discovery. It’s known there was a culture of psychotropic drug-taking among this older fan group. So the reliability of these later sightings can largely be discounted.’

He began to point, more carefully and slowly this time, at the clusters of dots over the high-detail map of Wales. He told her these were the sightings reported in the last two years. There were fewer dots and they were less diffuse. Many of the sightings had been out in West Wales. There were several in Tenby, Newgale, the typical holiday spots. But the wild area to the north, the part where Rhys’s photographs had been developed, this seemed almost clear of marks.

‘None to the north. What could that tell us?’ Huw cleared his throat.

‘It’s isolated, the boondocks. Either they haven’t heard of Face, or wouldn’t recognise him if they ran into him.’

The expression on his face told Catrin that she was missing the point. She realised he was reading a significance into the absence of sightings, presumably seeing it as a sign that the locals might know Face was there and were protecting him. She knew at once this was far-fetched, stoner’s logic, not evidence of anything at all. She crossed her arms, sighed, looked at him hard and sceptically.

‘Face’s not even from there, though. His family were from further east. As far as I know he’s never had any connection with that area.’

‘Of course, you’re right,’ he said. Huw looked genuinely apologetic. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been lost in this Face mystery too long. The sad truth is I’ve gone down so many blind alleys, run in so many circles over so many years, I’ve begun to clutch at any shadows I can.’

‘These sightings you’ve mapped, are any of the sources even credible?’

‘Varied. Reports published in local newspapers, gossip in the band’s chatrooms. Official, unofficial. There’s a fair bit of speculation out there.’

She nodded, took out her iPhone and opened a couple of pages she’d bookmarked. ‘I checked through them all last night,’ she said. ‘After I left your place I was up half the night. Nothing I found stood up at all to serious scrutiny.’