Dead People Read Online Free PDF Page B

theory she had concluded that the body we had found was the real thing. ‘You want me to tell you who I think might be bad enough to do something like this?’
    ‘I’m always interested in local knowledge.’
    ‘And this is private?’ she asked warily, but I could hear the thrill in her voice.
    ‘Strictly between you and me.’
    ‘Gerald Evans, Pentre Fawr. I’ll say no more than that.’ She sat upright, looking quickly around to make sure that the walls weren’t going to betray her. But she wasn’t finished. She leaned forward. ‘And Mr Gilbert at Cae Rhedyn. The man who messes up the river with his so-called gold mine.’
    The Gold Mine Man. I remembered him. That’s what Sandra Williams had called him when she pointed him out to me one day in Dinas. On the other side of the road, head down, scurrying, carrying a ragged canvas shopping bag. And dressed in what looked like a grey school blazer with a scorch mark on the left sleeve. It was a cold day, but he was wearing shorts, fat grey socks collapsed around the ankles of his stick legs, his knees protruding like the knob on the end of a shillelagh.
    She saw me to the door. I sensed a reluctance to release me. ‘Is there anything more?’
    ‘It’s what my husband said about it, but I think it’s a bit silly.’
    ‘Go on,’ I prompted.
    ‘It’s about the planes that fly over, the big slow ones, not the small ones that fly too fast and make such an awful noise.’
    ‘The Hercules?’
    ‘Maybe–’ she shook her head dismissively, the ability to name planes was boys’ stuff – ‘but they used to say that sometimes they dropped bodies.’
    ‘Why did they say that?’
    ‘They said that they dropped dead bodies to see what happened to them. They were trying to see if there was any safe way that soldiers could jump from planes without parachutes.’
    ‘I’ll look into that, Mrs Jones.’ I was only partially humouring her. It sounded like one of the half-crazed ideas that Special Forces might actually contemplate. I put ‘M’ in brackets beside the note. Something Mackay could help me out with later.
    Mackay and I went back a long way. We were tenuously related, his family having a connection with the Scottish branch of the Capaldi family. We had shared a reckless adolescence before he joined the army and ended up in the SAS. Our relationship had been troubled after that, and had hit a real low when he took up with my ex-wife, Gina. Since then he too had been dumped by her, and we had now returned to our old close conjunction, but with the former wildness hopefully burned-out.
    I left Cogfryn and drove down towards the main road instead of turning back to the wind-farm site. It would be useful to get a feel for the valley in daylight.
    Just before the junction I pulled in beside a sign I had missed when I had driven the road in the dark: PEN TWYN BARN GALLERY
.
The driveway had been newly surfaced in tarmac, and led to a large circular parking area in front of a refurbished and freshly limewashed stone barn. Just up the rise from the barn was the house, also restored, and with a tasteful, contemporary, glazed rear extension. Money had been spent on both the buildings. They were also both equally shut up. I made a note of them. Pen Tywn had not featured in the electoral roll.
    On the way back I turned off the road at the signpost for the by-way, an old drove track that wound up to the ridgeway. I had checked it out on the OS map, and was pretty sure that it would lead to Tessa MacLean’s dig site.
    And discovered a bonus. This particular spot possessed a mobile-phone signal, a rare attribute in these parts. I decided to put that call through to Mackay.
    ‘Glyn, how are you?’ The reception was fuzzy. But that was par for the course when calling Mackay. He had retired from the SAS, but the background chatter on his line made you think of wind in a high desert and an old truck’s engine being nurtured with an oil can to keep the mobile phone’s