The space inside was taken up with piled-up boxes and packing-cases, overflowing files and sacks of paper. There was a cleared space with a workbench and a chair that looked like it had been borrowed from a pre-war dentist's. It had leather restraining straps. There were dark stains of splattered liquid on the cement floor, stains that could have been blood, and over in the corner was a table covered in fancy-dress clothing. A wolf's outfit and a little girl's dress - a dirndl, the sort that Heidi used to wear. They pushed me into the chair and fastened the straps. The nausea of fear began to well up inside from the pit of my stomach, up and up to my throat. I swallowed hard.
'Like the chair? We got it from the sanatorium. They're not allowed to use them any more — illegal.'
I was too scared to answer.
Harri dragged up a chair and sat, legs astride it, facing me from the side. I nodded towards the table in the corner. 'Are we going to have a party?'
He gave a quick glance and said, 'Yeah but you're not on the guest list.'
He took out a pack of cigarettes, gave it a rapid shake, and grabbed a protruding cigarette between his lips. Then he lit it and spoke through clenched lips the way they do in the movies. Why didn't he just take the cigarette out for a minute if he wanted to speak? The same reason he did everything: just one long trailer for a movie I'd seen a hundred times before.
The deputy brought over a canvas bag and dumped it with a loud metal clang on the table. There were a lot of iron things inside and my heart froze. How crazy were they? I had no idea. Harri Harries was new here. Maybe they really did keep law and order like this in Llanelli. Where was the deputy from? He was dressed like a constable but I noticed now the numbers on his arm were all zeros. I'd never seen him before and something told me if I survived this night I probably wouldn't be seeing him again. Not unless Harri Harries needed to do some more special policing.
Harri put his hand inside the bag and performed the pantomime of someone doing a lucky dip. He pulled out a monkey-wrench. Lucky old me. I put a foot on the tabletop. Harri turned the wrench in his hand and then let the flat side fall on to the exposed bone of my shin. Tears of pain filled my eyes. It was just a lazy slap but the message it conveyed was clear: if this is the hors d'oeuvre, just imagine the banquet to come. 'What do you want?' I said though gritted teeth.
He rested his elbow on the back of the chair, rested his chin on the palm of his hand and said simply, 'I want to ask you a few things about Dean Morgan. Principally, where the fuck he is.' He puffed smoke gently out towards the ceiling.
'But I don't know where he is.'
He made a thoughtful face. 'I thought you might say that. That's why you'll notice a slight departure here from formal police-interview procedure. It's not an easy one to spot, quite subtle, but someone with your enormous experience should be able to get it. Any ideas?'
'The fancy dress?'
He glanced again at the clothing in the corner and shook his head. He pulled the pen out of his breast pocket and held it out to me. 'You see? It's this. I'm not taking any notes.'
Again I said nothing, just wished he'd cut the comedy.
'Now there's a good reason for that. My experience with interviewing peepers is that they generally know a good deal of information that would be useful to the police but that they are reluctant to release it, either because they are selfish or because of something that is called protecting client confidentiality. They usually lay great store by this which is an area where they differ greatly from me because I don't give a fuck about it. And that, my friend, is the reason that in contrast to established procedure I'm not taking notes. Because the first ten minutes of any interview is usually bollocks. And then after I have used some of the plumbing tools in the bag here interviewees start to open up a bit. A bit like unblocking a drain.'
The deputy snorted in appreciation.
'You just love to hear yourself talk, don't you?'
'Wrong, peeper. I love to make other people talk; shy retiring people like you.'
'What is it you want to know?' I said.
'I want to know where the Dean is.'
'I've been looking for him for two weeks. I don't know where he is. No one does.'
'You see what I mean? You're just like all the rest. They start off saying they know nothing and by the end of the interview I've got an aching wrist from taking notes.'
'Why are you looking for him?'
A sudden flash of anger seized him and he smacked the wrench against my shin again. 'Don't you fucking start interviewing me! I'm not the one tied to a chair.' He stuck his face up close to mine, so close I could feel the heat of his anger burning on his skin. 'You creepy little snoopers never stop, do you? Always poking your dirty little snouts into where they don't belong, prying and snooping and spying ... isn't that right? You'd just love to put your eye to my keyhole, wouldn't you?'
'I don't need to, Harries. I wouldn't see anything I hadn't seen a thousand times before.'
'Oh is that so!'
'You're just another two-bit Sunday-school teacher that took a wrong turning, Harries; brought up in some quagmire of a valley above Ebbw Vale, in the shadow of the chapel, living in a grey house beneath a dripping grey sky drinking grey spoons of gruel fed to you by your grey mam and singing grey songs of thanks every grey Sunday for the shitty grey life the good grey Lord so kindly gave you. The highlight of your week was getting beaten with a leather strap to make you good and the only girl you ever kissed went 'Baaa!' -'
The wrench smashed down again. I gagged like a sobbing child and screwed my eyes up as the tears squelched out of the corners. As I groaned he brought his face up close and hissed in a cloud of nicotine, 'It may help your memory to know that the wrench is the friendliest tool in the bag. Five minutes from now and you'll be begging me to use that nice old wrench. Do you understand?'
I nodded. I was no tough guy. I was ready to tell him anything. The trouble was, I didn't know anything. A few scraps of nothing that would only serve to convince him I was holding out on him and make him madder, because I was sure now that when he got mad like he just did it wasn't an act. Make him madder and introduce me to the whole range of his DIY plumbing skills. He reached into the bag and pulled out an electric sander. The deputy's face lit up and Harri looked around for a plug. He found one on the wall behind the bench.
'Would you 'effin' believe it!' he cursed. 'It's a round-pin.' He held the flex of the sander and let the plug that he couldn't plug in dangle uselessly just to help me realise how close I'd come. He threw the sander back into the bag and did another lucky dip. This time he pulled out a blowtorch. His mood brightened. 'That's better! Old-tech, can't go wrong.' He pumped the plunger to build up the pressure and lit the gas, then adjusted it until he got a perfect spear-blade of hot blue flame. He held it next to his ear. 'They say that the worst part about being burned with one of these is after it stops, when the flesh cooks itself slowly like a leg of lamb in the oven.'
'Please don't do it, I'll tell you anything you want to know.'
He waved the flame at my face. 'OK, so where is he?'
'He's out at the Komedy Kamp. Buried under the floor of chalet 7c,' I said in desperation.
A look of surprise lit up the cop's face. 'You're kidding? How did he get there?'
'It's like this,' I began. 'This Dean acted the part of the big holy monk, you know the type - wouldn't know one end of a woman from another. Holier than thou and all that, but it's all for show. Inside he has a special hobby, something he likes to do, something that he is ashamed to even think about but he still likes to do it ...' I looked at the cop. He had put the blowtorch down and was sitting there drinking up the story. This was easier than he'd expected.
'So what was it then, peeper?'
'Stiffs.'
Cop nodded, trying to look businesslike, as if this what he had suspected all along.
'Of course, he's not the only person around town who likes them a bit cold. It's quite a popular pastime in some quarters, so I'm told. But not many people are in such an excellent position to do something about it. Old men, young girls, you name it, he was into it. And that might have been an end of it. He could have carried on like that and no one would have been any the wiser. But he gets greedy. Maybe he's planning on a retirement and needs a better quality nest egg, or maybe he's just tired of scrimping and saving all his life. Either way he could do with a little extra money. Couldn't we all? He finds himself approached by a couple of guys who want in on the game. They happen to have some clients who also fancy a night of passion in the morgue and they're willing to pay.
