Sympathy for the Devil (17 page)

‘Nothing?’

‘No, not really. The ones out in the west mostly come from unofficial chatrooms. These characters seem your classic paranoid types, secretive, changing names, moving all the time. If they appear on the same site more than a couple of times, they get flamed. But there was something about the writing style that was similar. Maybe the same small group is behind them.’

She looked down at Huw’s hands, noticed that they were clenched tightly around his glass.

‘There are some strange ideas out there,’ he said slowly.

‘I noticed that,’ she smiled, ‘mostly stoned ramblings.’

He glanced out of the window, then back at her.

‘Some of the weirder ones seem to be coming from an individual who calls himself Overseer. He uses that name on all the unofficial sites and he seems to command particular respect from the other users. He posts very irregularly. Months can go by before there’s anything new from him.’

Catrin thought she’d seen a movement through the window. It was dark now, the shapes outside vague beyond the glass.

‘So what does this Overseer have to say about Face?’ she asked.

‘Funny thing is, this character doesn’t actually talk about Face much.’

‘What then?’

‘He seems to be peddling a strange theory, about how some of the fans from the early days, who tried to find Face after he disappeared, have themselves now gone missing or died.’

She smiled again. ‘Right, sure. Any actual names?’

‘The only name I recognised was “Gerard Butcher”, the photographer who was the source of that weird footage of Face in the tunnel.’

She put her hands up to her face, looked at Huw sceptically again. ‘But this Butcher character didn’t even shoot that film.’

‘No, we don’t know how he came by it.’ Huw was starting to shake the maps, fold them back along their well-worn crease lines.

‘Anything even remotely suspicious about this Butcher’s death?’

‘Not really. He’d been an alcoholic and a heavy drug user since he was a teenager. He died from a heart attack.’

Huw put the maps in his briefcase and locked it. He finished his drink in one swig. Through the patio doors Catrin could see at the bottom of the overgrown garden a row of yellowish lights, their faint reflections bobbing and glimmering in the waters. Outside heavy rain had started falling again. As they left, the barman was still standing by the windows looking out into the dimness. She wished him goodnight, as Huw pushed past him silently.

Down the driveway the wind was blowing twigs and discarded cartons across the yard. The dim shape of a van was just visible, parked under the swaying trees. There was no movement inside, no lights. Its snub nose facing out towards the waters it looked like the same van that had been up at the services. Catrin moved closer, trying to read the plates.

Huw had begun to cross towards the trees. There was a sudden flicker as the vehicle’s lights came on, the whine of its engine rising through the wind.

For a moment they were blinded as the van swung forward, towards them over the uneven ground. It lurched straight at them, not stopping.

8

Catrin detached herself from Huw’s arms. ‘He was coming straight for us.’

‘Probably drunk and didn’t see us.’ Huw was walking down to the Lexus. ‘You know how they are out here.’

‘No, not any more I don’t,’ she said. In silence they drove back across the bridge, along the road into town.

She cracked the window, kept a fresh stream of air around her face. She changed pace a few times, slow, fast, checked for tails. Nothing. There was no sign of the van behind or ahead of them.

Huw reached for a pipe hidden under the console. A small chillum, with carvings around the bowl, an antique by the look of it. He tamped it up and lit it. She didn’t bother to try to stop him. He told her to go straight to her motel. His people would be waiting there he said, they would accompany him back to his office.

The pipe smelt strong, another cocktail. But when Huw spoke he sounded sober, focused. ‘Anything I’ve told you sound like a credible lead yet?’ he asked. She told him she’d run checks on Butcher and the Overseer, report back the next morning. But she made it clear to him that both lines of inquiry would likely end nowhere.

The footage he’d shown her seemed strangely still imprinted in Catrin’s mind when she blinked her eyes closed, as vivid on her retina as if she’d just watched it. It was inside her now, like a bad taste that just wouldn’t lift. Those dim shapes of the four limbs on the floor and the shadow rearing up over the wall. But as it was among Butcher’s possessions at his house-clearance sale, she figured the photographer might not even have known he owned it. And this Overseer character, he was probably some online nut.

‘You must think I’m just another eccentric recluse, clutching at the shadows of shadows, trying to draw you into the web of my obsession,’ Huw said finally.

She told him she didn’t know if he was or not. All she did know was that by obtaining the Face photos Rhys had put himself in danger, and now it was her duty to see the job through.

Huw asked her a few questions about herself, her career, her family. It was all very polite, very conventional. But he sounded genuinely interested in her answers. He wasn’t looking at her in the way he had done, at her mouth, or down at her thighs. He became quieter, seemed increasingly lost in his own thoughts as they drove to the motel.

When they arrived she saw the two bodyguards sitting in the lobby, an identical Lexus parked outside. With them was a hard-faced man in his fifties, well-groomed like a news anchor, probably one of Huw’s executives.

Huw got out, escorted her to the door. He was subdued as he shook her hand gently. He seemed genuinely sad to be parting from her, and strangely, she noticed she was feeling the same way.

Back in her room, Catrin called the photographic shop out in the west where Rhys’s pictures had been developed but got the answerphone again. She then called all the shops in the same street, asked if the owners had left contact details before they’d gone on holiday. None of them knew where the owners had gone, and they hadn’t left any contact details. She noted again the date of their expected return, in three days’ time, and that they lived above the shop.

Then she booted up her Mac and ran searches on the National Criminal Intelligence Service database of aliases and gang names. She went into all the regional force databases. But as she was expecting, she came up with no matches for
Overseer
. A quick check on Butcher’s Police National Computer record confirmed what Huw had already told her. The photographer hadn’t moved to Wales until several years after the film in the tunnel would have been shot.

Then she clicked into the website of Huw Powell Productions. It all looked conventional enough. There were short excerpts from reality and clip shows the company was airing. She scrolled down into the section containing the company reports. Those for the last five years were all on file.

Remembering her forensic accounting at Hendon, she looked for the telltale signs. But everything seemed straightforward. The cost structure was exactly what would be expected of an independent production company, mainly salaries and the various production budgets. The company was making respectable seven-figure profits every year, mainly from its foreign rights sales. There were some write-downs relating to development costs for shows that had never been bought, tax-efficient donations to a series of academic and local charities. No unusual outgoings, no signs of any off-book accounting.

The only thing that struck her was how little Huw Powell himself featured in any of the material. He was listed as sole owner, but appeared to have had little hands-on role in the company’s affairs for years. The executive type she had just met in the car park was listed as CFO, and directly managed all the sales and production teams. At most of the board meetings Huw Powell was not even listed as having been present.

It looked like Huw had had a lot of time on his hands, time to get high and indulge his obsession with the Face mystery and get a little lost, maybe. Catrin wondered if this had made him a man others were now trying to take advantage of. Her instinct was telling her that rich men with obsessions were often singled out as potential marks, as victims. She didn’t think people were right to see Huw like this, but she could see why they might do.

She clicked to the site of the private bank the cheques to Rhys had been made out on. It was a tax-planning vehicle, incorporated in the Caymans, and used as a platform to re-invest the company’s offshore revenue streams. There was nothing illegal or improper about this. The practice was common enough, and looking in detail at the company reports Catrin could again see no sign that Huw had much role in the bank’s day-to-day management.

She did a few online searches on his name. There was no sign he courted publicity on behalf of the company, no sign he’d particularly avoided it either. There were photographs of him with Branson, John de Mol and executives from Endemol and other well-known media players. There were reports of his attending industry events, some old gossip pages linking him to various glamorous local women, a news anchor, an opera singer, an actress on a long-running S4C show. This last she noted was from the online version of Della’s column. Most of these reports pre-dated his interest in the Face story. In the last few years, Catrin noticed, Huw had kept more and more out of the limelight, possibly as his interest in the mystery had increasingly taken hold of him.

Still, Huw seemed to have led a pretty charmed life, the only cloud over his head those old rumours about his resignation from the force all those years previously. Chances were this was in no way related to current events. But it was something Catrin knew she’d need to follow up on, if only to eliminate it.

She remembered now that DS Thomas’s father had also been an officer at around the same time Huw had been serving. And immediately she wished she hadn’t. Thomas’s door was the last door she should be knocking on. But his father would have been a contemporary of Huw’s at Cathays Park, might well even have served in the same unit at the same time.

The father was dead now, she knew that, but then Thomas had a good memory. That was how he got by, doing so little on the job, by remembering things others had to graft to find out. She phoned Thomas on his mobile, asked him if he wanted to meet for a drink. He sounded half asleep as usual, but he accepted without hesitating. He was acting as if he wasn’t in the least surprised she’d asked, as if he’d been half expecting it.

‘This isn’t a date,’ she said firmly.

She said she’d meet him at a car park off the Newport Road. That way she hoped she wouldn’t have to depend on him for a lift back. She knew only too well what that could lead to.

She washed and changed quickly, then headed out with the Cowboy Junkies on her iPod. She didn’t like to play music on her phone. A phone left a trace, an iPod used only in play function didn’t. This was how she liked it when she was working: as few traces as possible.

She checked her phone before she switched it off. She saw a text from Della, just asking her to call if she needed help. She wondered what she knew.

She tried closing her eyes for a moment, but the image of Face over those shapes on the floor and that strange unearthly shadow on the wall were still floating there as vivid as before. She walked out into the dark.

At the car park, she got into Thomas’s Audi, let him drive the rest of the way into town. She could tell it was a mistake from the start. She’d chosen an outfit that said she wouldn’t be messed with. Her hardest biker boots, a short combat jacket over an army-issue T-shirt. But his eyes were all over her. Everywhere except her face. He smelt heavily of strong cologne, never a good sign.

He played his fingers through the wires to her earpieces, following them down to the unit on her belt. He scrolled down the tracks silently for a minute, then just passed it back to her without a word but laughing to himself.

‘Okay, so what have you got on yours?’ She put it in her pocket, feeling angry already. ‘
Top Gear
’s all-time greatest tracks to take a dump to?’

Thomas said nothing, stared out at a few drunks walking past carrying bin bags towards an all-night burger bar across the street. He revved hard, pulling out fast and almost knocking over some of the drunks. To cool him down, clip his attitude, Catrin told him to take the street behind the station and to pull up outside a terraced house there. It looked like all the other houses in the street, but for her it had a special significance.

Whenever she’d had doubts about Rhys, she’d come to this house or pictured it in her mind. It was the scene of his greatest triumph, a place where he’d been brave and pure. That was how she always wanted to remember him, not as that low degraded figure in the CCTV.

‘Know what happened in there?’ she said. Thomas was playing dumb, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He knew exactly what had happened there. She pointed down towards the cellar floor.

‘That was Angel Jones’s dungeon.’ It was beneath them in cells below street level that Jones had kept the girls he’d raped and mutilated. The media at the time had played it as the city’s greatest shame. He’d kept his victims there for years drugged out of their minds, then left them for dead in the woods, and it was Rhys who’d busted him, and he’d done it alone.

‘But that was just a fluke. Everyone says that.’

She knew this was partially true, the bust had been a stroke of luck but in her eyes it didn’t take away from the bravery of what Rhys had done. She noticed Thomas was smiling to himself.

‘Rhys never made a big deal of it, did he.’ He glanced at her knowingly. ‘That’s cos Rhys was shaking down the guy who sold Jones the drugs he used to spike the girls. Then he tailed Jones’s van from there, blundered into Jones’s house without back-up. Probably thought he was going to shake some other little guy.’