Dead People. Ewart Hutton

>

       Dead People

      EWART HUTTON

      Contents

       Title Page

      About the Book

      

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Sorting Through the Tailings

       Exclusive extract of Wild People

       About the Author

       Also by Ewart Hutton

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       About the book

      DS Glyn Capaldi, exiled to the big empty middle of Wales to atone for past sins in Cardiff, is called in to investigate a human skeleton that has been uncovered during the excavations for a wind farm in a remote valley. The body is missing its head and its hands. Identity erasure or a ritual killing? Glyn’s assertion that there must be a local connection is overruled by his superiors. They believe that the body has been transported and dumped, a theory that gains support when additional bodies start to pile up. But Capaldi is unconvinced, and sets out to prove that there is someone within the local community capable of achieving the levels of cold and manipulative brutality that have been demonstrated.

       1

      Boy had my life turned glamorous since my ejection from Cardiff. Not too many cops get to start off their day trying to chase down a character who is castrating ram lambs, and end it in the company of a mutilated corpse. At that precise moment, however, I was still at the crappy midpoint of that day. And lost.

      It didn’t help that I knew exactly where I was lost. Pinpoint stuff. The satnav was telling me that I was deep smack bang in the middle of a conifer forest in Mid Wales. I could almost smell the resin coming off the satnav screen. The problem was that I was on a logging trail that didn’t exist. It didn’t surprise me. I had had enough experience of forestry tracks by now to know that they were a constantly shape-shifting and mutating phenomenon.

      ‘Sergeant, someone’s nicked a bulldozer.’

      I had taken the call in a moment of reckless altruism. Helping out my local colleagues. And, admittedly, to take a break from my sheep-molesting case, which was going nowhere, and giving me the blues. A Forestry Commission operative had called in to report that they had had some plant stolen. Chainsaws, I figured, protective clothing, brush-cutters, a generator at most.

      I hadn’t thought big enough.

      I met the guy in a large clearing where the logging tracks forked off and wound up the hill. We were both working on a Sunday, although he looked less happy about it than I was. It was voluntary on my part. I had found even the routine drudgery of updating my investigation reports preferable to the stretched-out grey static numbness that constituted the Sabbath in these parts. The prospect of chasing down a lost bulldozer had seemed positively radiant for a while.

      From where we stood, I could see that rain and trucks had turned the surface into a superfine slurry of light-grey mud. Stripped branches from fir trees were strewn along the side of the tracks, as if a religious procession had suddenly taken fright and bolted off, leaving their devotional foliage behind.

      ‘Is this where it was taken from?’ I asked, making a professional show of casing the surroundings.

      ‘No, it was further up. On a spur. We were using it to clear a new trail.’

      ‘When did you last see it?’

      ‘Friday.’

      No one had reported a bulldozer ripping up the streets of any of the neighbouring villages. ‘Are you sure it isn’t still up there?’ I asked.

      He gave me a hurt look.

      ‘Okay,’ I relented, ‘I’ll go up and check it out.’

      He gave me directions. ‘Don’t you want a description?’ he shouted after me as I headed for my car.

      I didn’t need one. I knew it would be yellow and big, with shiny stainless-steel hydraulic shafts, and that it would smell of diesel and rust and that grim, grey, heavy clay that had never been meant to be turned over into the light of day. I also knew, in my heart of hearts, as I started my engine, that I would get lost. I always did in these places. It was the same, I reckoned, with the bulldozer. It hadn’t been stolen. It had just got lost. It had succumbed to the weirdness that were forestry tracks.

      I got out of the car now. The drizzle was as fine as a mist. The silence was total. No birds. I looked out into the thick, dark, matted mass of Sitka Spruce, or whatever the fuck kind of trees they were. The perspectives were tight and mesmeric. Strange and creepy. I wasn’t cut out for this. Lost in Pig Wales. A real country policeman wouldn’t get lost. He would find missing bulldozers, deliver lambs, and have his own pet collie. Me, I still needed buildings and corners, streetlights, signs that announced where I was.

      I kicked a stone out over the edge of the track and incanted a curse on DCS Jack Galbraith. It worked to break the spell. I heard the sound of an engine approaching.

      It was the Forestry Commission guy in his crew-cab pickup. ‘Where the hell did you get to?’ he shouted, leaning out of his window. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour.’

      ‘I must have missed the turning,’ I confessed.

      ‘Your people have been trying to get in touch with you.’

      He let me try his radio. But the weirdness had got to it too. An earful of feedback and static.

      ‘It could be important. I’m going to have to go down the hill to call in,’ I told him, climbing back into my car.

      ‘What about my bulldozer?’ he shouted after me.

      ‘I’ll be back,’ I lied. It was time to cut altruism adrift.

      Perhaps, I prayed as I drove, they were calling in to say that they had nailed my man. So that I could forget about him and the veterinary equivalent of pincer pliers that he was using to crimp the vasa deferentia of Badger Face Welsh Mountain tup lambs. The bastard was selective. Just that one breed, no others. And he could get close to them. He obviously knew his way around sheep, and how to handle them. I was supposed to be the good guy and they ran away from me.

      I