Sympathy for the Devil (25 page)

‘How is Della?’ she asked quickly.

‘In a coma still.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Emyr, can you get into the force intranet, the archive section, from your home drive?’ Under his breath Pugh muttered something about not being able to pass material without clearance.

She fumbled for her pack of Drum, remembered it was empty. ‘The woodland loci where the Angel Jones victims were found. They’d all have been photographed by scene of crime officers, right?’

There was a low whirr as Pugh booted his system, ‘They’d have swept for fibres and DNA within a fifty-metre radius of each body, so it’s a fair bet.’ A few moments of silence then, just a muted tapping in the background.

‘The last six sites, from the late 1990s, are on computer,’ he said.

‘The woodland there, any trees visible in the shots?’

‘The shots are of the ground cover.’

‘What about leaves, foliage? Rowan? Silver birch, goat willow? Sessile oaks? Any of those?’

‘Not that I can see, it’s mostly mulch and mud. Looks like Jones used clearings, not tree cover, to dump his vics in.’

‘And the locations of the woods he used?’

There was the soft tapping again, longer this time.

‘No real cluster. They’re spread at the edges of the national maritime park. St Dogmaels in the north, Mynyddog-ddu in the east. Pontfaen in the north, several in the woods around the Preseli hills.’

‘Any symbolism, any patterning to the placement of the bodies?’

‘None noted here. The SIO superimposed a number of geometrical shapes, hexagons, pentangles and so on. Nothing, it looks random.’

‘So how was Jones accessing the park?’ She cracked the window, still left the curtain closed, felt the cool air over her face. Outside everything sounded still, silent, no traffic moving yet beyond the trees.

‘Seems he just drove up the B4313, the B4329, turned off when he saw dense woodland.’

‘So he took his van up narrow tracks into the woods.’

‘Unlikely. The assumption was he parked then carried the bodies on foot.’

She knew this was reasonable, it would have been an effort, but possible.

‘His victims didn’t weigh much by the time he’d finished with them,’ she said, ‘so Jones could’ve carried them in a mile or more, but further and he’d have needed help.’

‘Right, the bodies weren’t further in than a mile or so. No evidence of Jones using accomplices was ever found, as you know. In his cellars there was no DNA except his and his vics’. The vics’ tox reports matched to the exact chemical footprint of the drugs found in his cellars. His vics said Jones was always alone with them. In the CCTVs he’s alone in his hoodies and other disguises. They did biometrics on all the footage from the clubs, it was never anyone else but Jones in that gear.’

‘You’re right, nothing indicates he did use accomplices.’ She looked down at the carpet, how dark the patterning was so as to hide stains. Something he’d said earlier had snagged in her mind.

‘You said they searched for fibres at the scenes.’

She heard him tapping again. ‘Within fifty metres, but as we’re talking deep woods, there’s not much here. The girls’ clothes, his clothes, that’s it.’

‘And the fibres, they include hairs from that black wig he wore?’

She thought she could hear a door closing somewhere in the background. There was a longer pause this time before he came back on.

‘Two samples here,’ he said: ‘both matched those found at his cellar. He used the wig to cover his face.’

‘But the wig wasn’t among the evidence taken from his cellars, right.’

‘No, but then nor were some of his other disguises.’

She stared at a patch of damp on the wallpaper, thought about this for a few moments. The detail about the missing wig had not been released to the press. There had been the usual anxieties about fakes by pranksters contaminating the evidence chain if it had been revealed that some disguises were missing. But the photos taken by security cameras did show Jones with long, mask-like hair, so many people could have guessed it was a wig, or anyone imitating that particular disguise of Jones’s might have chosen to wear a wig. It was another aspect of the hair disguise that interested her.

‘Those hairs from the wig,’ she said, ‘they’re jet black, or tinted in some way?’

There was a low snorting sound. It sounded as if Pugh was blowing his nose. This time the pause was so long she thought maybe the details weren’t fully on file.

‘They are tinted, some kind of yellow,’ he said.

She thought back to the man who’d followed her in the park, the strange sense she’d had that behind the hair there was nothing at all, just a pair of yellow eyes, no face. She wondered how that thought had formed in her mind. The truth was it had been too dark to tell, she couldn’t have seen anything under the hair. The harder she thought about it the more the face seemed to recede as it had before like an image in a dream.

‘Any match to other wigs from shops or theatrical outlets?’ she asked.

She apologised then to Pugh for taking up his time. He said he didn’t mind, but she sensed his impatience mounting; she wondered what she was keeping him from. The tapping continued, quicker this time.

‘No, they searched all known outlets, online, even internationally. They were hoping for proof he’d personally purchased the items. But they never got it.’

‘And the hairs, what were they?’

He laughed briefly. ‘Goat, it says here.’

‘Goat?’ She moved her feet under the radiator.

‘Painted with a vegetable dye, they never traced that either. Sounds like a home-made job, that’s why they never found a retail match.’ He cleared his throat then coughed. ‘He probably thought it was safer to make his own gear.’

She heard a click, the line had gone dead. It’s the weather, she thought, these old country lines go down all the time in winter. She called back, just got a continuous beep. She left it a couple of minutes, staring out at the glare of the whiteness in the dark, tried again. The line was still dead.

Catrin sat in the gloom, listening for sounds from Huw’s room. There was silence. She thought back to what Pugh had said. The security camera pictures of the wig in the press had been black and white. It was unlikely members of the public would have known about the yellow tint. She was almost certain that was what had made the yellow shimmer she had seen. Beyond that, all seemed darkness.

They drove west towards Pembrokeshire. The snow had thinned to an icy drizzle, the winds whisking the drifts against the hedgerows into blinding eddies across the road.

Huw was un-talkative, seemed lost in his own thoughts. Catrin browsed the in-car audio memory. She had expected some vast archive, but found only a small playlist. Some obscure medieval religious chants she’d never heard of. Then Allegri’s Miserere and several other settings of the same psalm from the seventeenth century. The rest was all relatively modern. The Shangri-La’s ‘Walkin’ in the Sand’, ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’. From the Sixties, Marty Wilde. Quicksilver Messenger Service ‘Just for Love’. The Dells’ ‘Love is Blue’.

From the Seventies, Terry Reid’s ‘Stay with Me Baby’. The Motels. John Martyn, Little Feat, Gram Parsons. From the Eighties, only some early Seerland, and Amanda Lear. It was all melancholic, nostalgic music, felt like the music of someone in mourning for something, irrevocably lost.

‘Sorry it’s all old stuff,’ he said.

‘No it’s fine,’ said Catrin, ‘you’ve got okay taste.’

Huw looked over at her then and she felt embarrassed, like maybe he thought she was flirting with him. It wasn’t her style to give compliments, she wondered if in a small way she had been.

She decided on John Martyn’s
Solid Air
, a record that never failed to lift her spirits. The title track, the song Martyn was meant to have written about Nick Drake, never failed to remind her of Rhys, as if Rhys’s spirit was out there somewhere, moving through solid air.

The way up to Glangwili was slow going. For the first few miles she drove slowly behind the tail lights of the gritting truck. There were no lights of other cars behind them. They had to stop on the outskirts of the village to allow a herd of cattle to cross the road. Then the sky ahead began to clear.

The road twisted past a village shop and up a hill past several chapels and pubs. The place looked as if it probably hadn’t changed much since Face’s childhood in the 1970s. Through the hedges they could catch glimpses of the surrounding fields. In the lee of the trees the cows stood with heads bent low over the frozen grass.

Catrin followed a driveway that led round the back of the last pub on the hill. Hanging above it from a peeling post, a rusted plaque read the Sporting Chance. When they stopped, she tried Pugh again, on his office line this time. She got a pre-recorded message saying he’d be off for the week, annual leave. She tried his home line again, but it just rang without anyone picking up. No answerphone, no message.

Huw went forward and opened the door for her, then followed her through the entrance to the bar. Along the walls the mirrors were etched with images from playing cards, the character behind the barman a sour-faced queen of hearts. On the other walls roulette wheels and dice had been mounted under the light sconces, alternating with photographs of prizewinning cattle from agricultural shows of years long past.

About half the tables were occupied, despite the early hour, mainly by elderly farming types with weathered faces. Huw walked over to a table by the door at which a morose-looking man was sitting opposite two women. The couple, she noticed, were already shifting uneasily in their seats. Huw smiled at them.

‘Did you know the Matthewses? Their son was Owen Face, that one who disappeared a while back,’ he asked. The old man looked uncomfortable, his wife tutting under her breath. The couple turned away from Huw, and began talking to each other in Welsh.

The barman had come out from behind the bar and now stood by the table.

‘The locals don’t like to talk,’ he said, ‘they’re tired of all the journalists coming round over the years.’

Huw took out a couple of fifties and pressed them into the young man’s hand. The barman spoke quietly now. ‘Best thing you can do, is buy Rhonwen over there a couple. She might talk.’

They looked over and saw an elderly woman sitting on her own in the corner, two glasses in front of her, one already dead, the other half gone. Closer up, the woman’s age – at a distance she looked nigh on seventy – was less obvious. She could have been in her mid-fifties but any attempts at grooming had long since lost out to the gin.

Huw’s nose wrinkled briefly before he realised what he was doing, then he slapped his palms on his thighs, all business.

‘So what are you having, Rhonwen?’

She didn’t ask him how he knew her name, clearly she was already confident in her status as a local character.

‘G&T please, love.’

Huw came back with the drinks, put down a double on Rhonwen’s side of the table. ‘Didn’t you used to know the Matthews family?’ he asked.

Huw waited while Rhonwen took a long, slow sip on her gin.

‘Journalists, are you?’ she asked.

Huw was nodding confidently.

‘We haven’t had many of you lot round for a while,’ she said.

He put his glass down, out of range of her spray.

‘Not many, you said.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So there have been some round then?’

‘Well, a couple of nights back, one came in.’

‘How did he strike you?’ Catrin asked.

‘The usual sort. Polite, sounded like a Cardiff man.’

‘How did he look?’

‘He had a beard, long hair like one of those surfer types. I didn’t really get a look at him. He was here one moment then gone the next.’

Catrin glanced at Huw, then back to the woman. ‘What did he want to know?’

‘Well, like yourselves he was asking if there’d been other journalists through.’

‘That’s all he asked?’

‘That’s all.’

Catrin was about to speak, but Huw was signalling to her to let him come in. The woman picked up her glass and Huw smiled reassuringly at her.

‘When Owen was born, did you know the family then?’

She paused, the glass close to her lips. For a moment Catrin wondered if they were going to get anything out of her: she seemed too lost in the drink. But then her face slowly filled with a vague warmth, that warmth that comes from remembering better days. Huw pulled out another fifty, passed it over. Would anything they got out of her be reliable? Catrin thought. Inducements always tarnished evidence.

‘I only lived a few doors down from them,
bach
,’ the woman said to Huw as if she’d known him all her life. ‘Owen was a beautiful child, so quiet, a little angel. He was born end of August 1972, I always remember it because it was during the Olympics: I didn’t have a telly then, so Megan invited me over to watch it on hers.’

‘What was Owen like when he was a bit older?’ he asked.

The woman took a large gulp of her gin, held the glass against her chest.

‘I didn’t see him much then,’ she said.

‘Anything at all you remember?’

‘Not really, no.’

Catrin caught the woman’s eye. ‘What about when he was at school, he get into any trouble?’

‘No.’ She paused. ‘Well, I know Megan was worried about that, what with his father being away a lot, but no, nothing like that.’

Huw signalled to the bar for more drinks. Catrin pulled her chair closer.

‘So Owen’s father wasn’t around much, then?’

‘Well, no, he wasn’t. But then it wasn’t easy for him with his job.’

‘He was in the merchant navy, wasn’t he?’

‘For years he was.’

Catrin looked over at Huw. He seemed slightly detached, as if he’d already written off the interview as a waste of time.