Sympathy for the Devil (34 page)

‘Put it this way, it’s not that unusual.’

‘Because the investigating officer can’t be arsed to collect them?’

‘Lack of NHS rural dentists more like.’

She looked round for the ashtray, but couldn’t see it.

‘Height, build and age range match?’

‘Height’s one-eighty in both cases, pathologist’s age range eighteen to twenty-five on the Strumble Sands body.’

Huw had stopped tapping for a moment, and Catrin turned her head towards the door. She could hear no sounds yet in the passage outside and no voices filtering up through the floor from the pub.

She passed the coroner’s report over to Huw’s side of the table. ‘Anything in the Dyfed-Powys database that’s not already in the pathologist’s report on the Sands body?’

The dark reds and blues of the Dyfed-Powys portal poured out over the room as Huw went back into the local file.

‘Nothing.’

‘Did the Pembroke coroner run DNA tests?’

‘Yes, but we don’t have DNA for Stephens.’

‘Did the coroner run diatom tests to see how long the body had been in the water?’

‘There wasn’t sufficient organic matter left on the bones to run a diatom.’

‘Anything at all to suggest foul play?’

Huw bent over the report. ‘Nothing at all. No abrasions, no broken bones. No signs of battery, laceration or external injury.’

She looked down again at the two photographs of the young man, then opened the nets, brought the bedside light onto the table. She stood under the window with the photographs for almost a minute, then passed them back to Huw.

‘Look closely at the colour of the boy’s skin. Doesn’t it look slightly jaundiced?’

Huw looked over her shoulder for a full minute at the photographs. Then he opened the cardboard folder under the lamp, began looking at the photocopies of Stephens’s GP notes.

‘There’s nothing unusual with the GP,’ he said after a long pause, ‘just the normal vaccinations, a broken ankle when he was seven. No blood work or other hospital referrals.’

‘What about on the Dyfed-Powys file?’

He bent close over the screen again.

‘They’ve scanned one inpatient record for Stephens from Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest.’

‘But they didn’t bother to log it on the PNC or PNMPB?’

‘That’s probably because it’s from January 1994, five years before Stephens was reported missing.’

Catrin reached over to the breakfast tray and tapped her long ash into a saucer.

‘What was Stephens admitted for?’

‘Acute liver failure.’

‘At the age of sixteen?’

Huw was scrolling back through the notes. ‘Recovery is recorded as complete, there are no follow-up outpatient records.’

He began to cough, raised a hand up to his mouth. Catrin was about to put the cigarette out, but took a final deep draw.

‘Any history of hepatitis, drug use?’

‘Nothing flagged here.’

Huw began to cough again. She stubbed out her cigarette in the saucer. ‘How severe a case of liver failure are we talking about?’

‘He was in intensive care for three weeks. Encephalopathy was three out of four on the scale. They were considering moving him down to the Morriston if there was any further deterioration in his condition.’

‘Potentially life-threatening, then?’

‘The notes show he required high doses of corticosteroids and insulin, catecholamine support and continuous haemofiltration before he recovered.’

‘Yet no follow-up treatment?’

‘None recorded.’

‘Which suggests he was not suffering from hepatitis or any other long-term liver condition. So what we seem to be looking at here is an isolated episode of extreme toxicity.’

‘A suicide attempt perhaps, using a liver-toxic agent like paracetamol?’

Catrin reached back for the Stephens notes.

‘I don’t think so.’ She clicked down, stared at one of the pages. ‘Normally with suicide there’s some incidence of depression or mental illness in the GP’s notes, but there’s nothing resembling that – no self-harming profile – in the Stephens file.’

Huw raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Suicides can be spontaneous though, especially at that age. It’s a vulnerable time.’

She stood by the window, began slowly to roll another cigarette. Something else had struck her. She looked at him.

‘In the grow-sheds, those fly agaric ’shrooms, the strong hallucinogens, you said they were liver-toxic.’

‘Right, like almost anything taken in the wrong amounts.’

She felt the damp air through the window, held her roll-up without lighting it. ‘How long had that kit been there, d’you think?’

‘It’s more recent than his death, at least the lights and piping are.’

‘There could’ve been previous grows, though.’ She walked round the table and pulled her chair closer to Huw’s. As he scrolled back over the file nothing was flagged.

‘There’s no tox report in the hospital notes,’ he said, ‘so looks like the medics didn’t suspect anything like that or weren’t alerted to it.’

‘Go back into the PNMPB database,’ she said. She watched Huw’s heavy fingers moving quickly across the keys, the blue light washing over his drawn features.

‘See if the system will let you cross-match drug-related deaths, mispers, unidentified bodies, and an age range fifteen to twenty-five – for the maritime park area?’

‘Period?’

‘Try ’89 to the present.’

He pushed the screen to the left, so she could see it more clearly. ‘There’s thirty-seven matches in all.’

Catrin closed her eyes for a moment, the flickering light was making them ache. ‘Now try the same search criteria on other isolated seaside regions, with comparable population figures: North Devon, North Cornwall, Antrim, North-Eastern Scotland and the rest?’

Huw was already tapping in the searches, scrawling a column of figures on the back of one of the photocopied pages.

‘There’s no significant difference,’ he said slowly.

‘What if you exclude DRDs, keep the age range, narrow the search to mispers and unidentified bodies?’

‘Pembrokeshire’s higher by a factor of about sixty per cent, but on such relatively low numbers that’s not statistically significant. Taking into account the legacy of alternative lifestyles in the area from the Sixties and Seventies it’s probably what one would expect.’

‘The overall figure?’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘How many of those have a connection to the north, the maritime park area?’

She watched him pull up the postcode chart, then tap in the codes. He looked exhausted, his shoulders slumped against the back of the chair.

‘Twenty-nine.’

‘But the national park’s the most thinly populated part of the county – what’s the population percentage in relation to the rest of the county?’

‘About twenty per cent.’

She closed her eyes again, took deep breaths, the after-images of the light shivering still over her eyelids.

‘How many of those mispers later matched to bodies?’

‘Nineteen.’

She turned towards the wall, her eyes closed. ‘I think we need to take a closer look at those nineteen cases,’ she said finally.

As Huw downloaded the files there was a low whirring noise. She could hear the faint clatter of glasses downstairs in the bar, then there was silence again.

Catrin looked at the faces. Her eyes moved slowly from one to the next. There were none she recognised from the photographs in Pryce’s room. But many were poor, overexposed. She ran her fingers over the screen, trying to read the foreshortened lives through the faces. A hatchet-faced youth standing in a muddy field whose thinness bordered on emaciation, a seventeen-year-old farmer’s son from Martletwy, reported missing in June 1998, his body found seven years later lying on rocks near Cat Head. A twenty-year-old girl, a trainee teacher from Laugharne holding a wine glass, her wide blue eyes made owlish by large round spectacles, found floating in the sea off Crincoed Point. Next to her, ringed in a group photograph, a slight, seemingly bemused adolescent in a faded black Motörhead T-shirt standing in a crowded students’ union bar. She’d been reported missing in February 1997 while reading Ancient History at Aberystwyth, her body spotted by a Stena Line employee and hauled out of Fishguard Harbour three years later.

‘This one,’ Catrin said. ‘During the years of the Jones abductions, his reign of terror, I remember seeing her face in the papers as one of the potential abductees.’

Huw sighed quietly. ‘But any girl who went missing in those years, the media always ran it as a Jones case.’

She looked more closely at the picture of the teacher. ‘This one also. She was in the papers as a potential abductee. I distinctly remember her face from that time.’

‘That means nothing. A girl would run off with her boyfriend for the weekend, it was put down to Jones. He was like the bogeyman. During the height of his abductions, the papers were running Jones scare stories every week.’

‘That’s true but there’s something to think about here. These disappearances begin at almost exactly the same period as the Jones abductions.’

Catrin scrolled back to the first of the nineteen cases. The photo showed a boy just turned eighteen from St Dogmaels, to the north of the national park. He had the typical local colouring. Dark hair, wan cherubic features, shy downturned eyes. The file reported him as missing in the winter of 1989; unemployed, a school leaver, his family were travellers. ‘The first case here’s from February ’89. That’s within three weeks of the first reported Jones abduction.’ She looked closer. ‘There aren’t many details, just a last sighting late at night at a pub.’ She clicked into the end of the file, the coroner’s report and the autopsy. ‘His body washes up nine years later, down the coast here in a cove. Not a full skeleton, just the skull, a few ribs, a femur.’ The screen showed dim sea-licked rocks, a small pale circle of bones.

Huw’s eyes were bloodshot, half closed with tiredness, blinking rapidly.

‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘The cases do begin at almost the same time as the Jones abductions.’ Slowly he cleared his throat. ‘But we know Jones was committed in early 2001. Yet the bodies have continued to appear.’ He moved the screen so she could see the dates. ‘Two years, four years, five years later. All during the time we know Jones was inside. And now, a month ago, there’s another body found down on the Sands.’

‘Stephens, the file Rhys had pulled?’

‘Exactly.’

‘The sea giving back its dead?’

‘Most probably.’ She watched as he enlarged the photo of the rocks at Cat Head where the farmer’s son had been found, then brought up the picture of the locations of the traveller’s bones in the cove. The fragments of bones lay in loose rings over the black rocks.

Huw pointed at the tideline further down, the seaweed crusting the base of the cliffs. ‘Those look like atypical wash-ups.’ He’d panned in closer to the images of the ribcage and the skull.

‘Right, no ligaments or flesh still binding the separate bones.’

‘That means they probably didn’t wash up all together like this.’ Huw was sitting back, rubbing his eyes. ‘Most likely these bones didn’t come directly from the sea. There was some mediation first, a scattering agent, an animal, a beachcomber.’

She took a deep breath, held his gaze.

He clicked back into the screen, flicked through several pages. ‘The local inquests didn’t flag anything unusual, they’re dealing with wash-ups all along this coast. There are strong currents, a lot of different wildlife that could’ve moved the bones about. There’s nothing that suspicious in the bones being found like this.’

Catrin put her face to the window and gazed out into the mist over the yard. The air smelt of fires burning wood that caught in her nostrils. She felt faintly nauseous. She sat down very slowly, unsteadily at the table.

Huw pushed back his hair, sighing. ‘Jones was Cardiff-based. He mainly targeted girls in the BDSM scene. I’m not seeing his hand here.’

‘Unless he was a player with greater reach, as people thought at the time.’

Huw was looking at her, she couldn’t see his expression in the dimness. ‘But Jones was inside when these bones appear. A man can’t be in two places at once. Jones was banged to rights on the drugs evidence, no question, they got the right man.’

Catrin thought back to how the case against Jones had been built. The prosecution had not relied on the victims’ testimonies, as they’d been drugged, but the drugs evidence itself had been irrefutable. The drug they’d got him on was a homebrew scopolamine, effectively unique. Only his DNA had been found on the drug preparatory kit. The tox reports had matched the exact chemical fingerprints of the drugs on Jones’s person and in his cellars to all the vics, so the case was airtight.

She knew Huw was right. A man could not be in two places at once. But still she sensed there was some aspect of Jones and what he was that she had somehow missed. For a moment the long hair of the figure in the hood and the sense of there being nothing behind it shimmered again before her eyes then vanished into the shadows.

‘You’re like all good cops.’ Huw’s voice was almost fading into silence. ‘You want to find order, correspondences. But sometimes that order isn’t where you think it is, and sometimes it isn’t there at all.’

Huw had closed his eyes, as if in pain, his hands covering them. She heard his breathing, shallow and disturbed. She looked at the remaining pictures of the nineteen mispers. There were photographs of half-blurred faces in crowded raves, with red flash eyes. A sixteen-year-old boy from Trewidwal, his face barely visible in the candlelight of a house party. His bloated remains had been found by fishermen under the concrete causeway at Hobbs Point where the cars used to wait to board the ferry. A girl with long black hair in a half-empty dance hall, above her head a white arrow. Her skeleton had been discovered by divers near one of the coaster wrecks off Skomer island six years after her disappearance. Most seemed to have been drifters and runaways. In many cases there were only childhood photographs, in some no pictures at all.