Dead People by Ewart Hutton Read Free Book Online Page A

way he had to crank the scissors, distorting things.
    By not looking at me he was holding on to the pretence that I wasn’t really there.
    I stood up briskly. ‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll have a look around. A setup like this must be fascinating,’ I declared chirpily.
    ‘No!’ He leaped up with almost alacrity. A definite crackle. A creaky old elf unfurling. His eyes were blue and scared. His face was lean and fissured, with a sparse dirty-white billy-goat beard accentuating the length of his chin. His expression was a definition of anguish. ‘You can’t! No one’s allowed in here.’
    I took a couple of steps back to reassure him. ‘It’s all right, Mr Gilbert. I promise, I’ll stay back here, I won’t go any farther. But I do need to talk to you.’
    ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’
    ‘I know, it’s just a routine enquiry, I’m talking to everyone in the valley.’
    He shook his head. ‘I don’t have anything to do with the rest of the valley. I can’t tell you anything.’
    ‘Have you heard that we’ve discovered a body at the site of the new wind farm?’ I watched him carefully.
    ‘I don’t care. That has got nothing to do with me.’
    He wasn’t even curious. As far as he was concerned it was news from a dead planet. He just wanted to be left alone to live the life internal that he had constructed around his tumbledown Shangri-La.
    He looked at me defiantly. ‘She sent you here, didn’t she?’
    ‘She?’
    He nodded in the direction of Cogfryn. ‘The one at the farm.’
    ‘Why would she do that?’
    A smile almost broke through. ‘I used to have to chase her children off my land. They came trespassing, poking their noses into things.’
    ‘That must have been a long time ago.’
    He nodded sagely. ‘It was, but none of them have ever forgotten.’
    I thought about it as I drove back. Okay, no butchered and trimmed cadavers strung up on meat hooks, but the visit had been useful in a couple of respects. Now, having met him and seen his reaction, I was fairly certain that Bruno Gilbert had had nothing to do with the body we had found. And I now knew that Mrs Jones’s finking had been personal.
    So what, I was now even more interested to know, was the grudge that she held against Gerald Evans, a man who was not even a neighbour?
    I was twitching to brace Gerald Evans, but had to spend the next day frustratingly back up at the construction site to babysit the SOCO team, and oversee the removal of the body, which was now ready to be trucked back to the lab. I did manage to call the Salmons to give them the good news.
    When I eventually got to The Fleece that evening I found that David Williams was no longer a happy man. His bounty had decamped. The wind-farm construction workers had been discharged and sent home or relocated until they were required again.
    ‘How long is this going to take your people to sort out?’ he grumbled as he pulled my beer.
    ‘No idea,’ I replied, slightly irked that I didn’t seem to be included among the people who were capable of sorting it out. I waved reflexively to the group of regulars at the far end of the bar.
    Seeing them gave me an idea. ‘Who among that lot would know about the wind-farm site?’ I asked David.
    He looked at them appraisingly. ‘Blackie Collins might. He used to work at Pentre Isaf. It’s way over on the other side of the hill, though.’
    I had heard the story. Blackie had worked man and boy as a labourer and shepherd for the Haymer family at Pentre Isaf farm. The sons who had inherited the place had decided that life had to be about more than sheep ticks, deflated livestock prices and splashing around in organophosphate dips, and had sold it off as a riding school. Not surprisingly the new owners hadn’t seen Blackie as an asset that would work in harmony with prepubescent girls fixated on horses. So Blackie was now living with his sister in Dinas.
    I walked down to the far end of the bar. ‘Blackie, can I buy you a