Dead People

Dead People
Ewart Hutton

DS Glyn Capaldi, half Welsh, half Italian, all maverick, returns in the CWA shortlisted series blowing fresh life into crime fictionDS 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.

Dead People

EWART HUTTON

Contents

Title Page (#uca79a832-d041-5a29-9c1e-8b1e1f12034b)

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

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About the Author

Also by Ewart Hutton

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher

About the book (#ud1582740-71f6-5b60-81e2-0a6a9d47af90)

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 (#ud1582740-71f6-5b60-81e2-0a6a9d47af90)

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.