Dead People by Ewart Hutton Read Free Book Online

with red paint that had dripped and run below the letters like fake theatrical blood. It was written in English only, which seemed to me to be a bit imperialistic. It was also a bit daft if you valued your security and privacy, to advertise the fact that you were sitting on top of a goldmine. Literally.
    Mrs Jones at Cogfryn had intrigued me. Nice Welsh farmers’ wives don’t generally finger their neighbours as potential killers. So what had these two done that had placed them beyond the pale?
    Gerald Evans was in another valley, so I decided to start with Bruno Gilbert, the Gold Mine Man. And it was a goldmine. Deep boyhood mythologies kicking in from a time of innocence, before big holes in the ground, putatively awash with treasure, had accumulated sexual baggage.
    I had remembered more of what Sandra Williams had told me about him that day in Dinas. He was a recluse. No one was quite sure whether he had been a schoolteacher or a civil servant, or whether he had taken early retirement or suffered a breakdown. He came into town for his shopping, scurried about with his head down, and ordered his goods by pointing.
    He may have been pretty inept socially, but he had managed to construct a solid pair of gates. Which, despite repeated hammering and calling out, he wasn’t opening. Perhaps he just couldn’t hear me. Maybe he was mining a vein, or crushing ore, doing whatever it was that made the place qualify as a goldmine in his book.
    I was conscious of time passing. Jack Galbraith could change his mind and haul me off this at any moment.
    I studied the gate again. Three obstacles to progress: the gate, the barbed wire on top of it and the fact that I hadn’t been invited.
    I got over the height issue by standing on the roof of the car. The coiled barbed wire on top was old, rusting and laced with cobwebs that had trapped leaves and thistledown. One good push would send it down like an uncoiling slinky.
    On the other side of the gate, the track, flanked by a pair of rusted Morris 1000 Travellers, turned round a sharp bend out of sight. The hidden side of a sharp bend was always tantalizing.
    This was where an invitation would have been useful. Technically what I was contemplating was illegal entry seasoned with criminal damage. But fuck it, I reasoned, a man who wasn’t even capable of asking a shopkeeper for his favourite cheese was hardly likely to have me dragged up in front of the High Sheriff.
    I dislodged the barbed wire and jumped down, landing heavily, my heels kicking up two little geysers of dust. Everything about this side of the gate – the air, the vegetation – felt more desiccated. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bird sporting fluff instead of feathers.
    I called out Gilbert’s name again. No reply. No sounds of any activity. I walked round the bend in the track. Ahead of me, across a yard of massed junk, was a green timber shack, with a rusted corrugated-iron roof, which was in the process of deconstructing itself. The paint was peeling down to rotting boards, the roof was slumping, and a couple of the windows were falling out.
    ‘Go away!’
    The voice made me jump. I hadn’t seen him. I turned to find him squatting in a niche in a bramble cluster that I discovered later had overwhelmed an old tractor. He had his head down and his fingers pressed to the sides of his brow.
    ‘Mr Gilbert?’ I asked.
    He shook his head.
    I bent my knees to lower myself to his level, my warrant card out. ‘Mr Gilbert, my name is Glyn Capaldi, I’m a police officer, I’d like to ask you some questions.’
    He shook his head again.
    He was an old man. Dressed in his usual shorts and a faded khaki shirt, both tattered, his arms and legs deeply tanned, but knucklebone thin. I couldn’t see his face, but his hair was grey and closely cropped in irregular patches as if it was growing out after a scalp infection. Then I realized that it was probably because he cut it himself, the angle of the mirror, and the