EWART HUTTON
Good People

For Annie, Mercedes and Calum

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

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

Chapter 19

The End of the Affair

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

I could have gone home by a different route, I could have driven a lot slower, but it was late, the end of a long and tedious day. My inner child was nudging, so I let the self-centred little bastard slip out of his cage. It would be a distraction, and I would only be adding a couple of minor new enemies.

Boy was that going to prove to be one great big painful underestimation.

The squad car was off to the side, parked up on a stakeout for hayseed drunks, just where their radio chatter had placed them. I caught a glimpse of it in my headlights as I crested the hill. Getting on for close to midnight, and I was tramping it.

They pulled out behind me, their full light rig coming on to crank up the drama. I played with them down through a few safe bends, and then pulled over to give them at least the start of their Stormtrooper moment.

‘Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi.’ I grinned up into their torch beam and waved my warrant card.

Now they were truly regretting it. Driver and Shotgun, both of them young. They knew me by reputation. Hawked up and spat out of Cardiff, and put out to graze in the tundra. And here I was with my Jonah vibe ranged out over their rear seat. And I was drinking their coffee supply. I was no longer in a hurry. This had turned into my Saturday night. The ratshit investigation I was working on had left it too late for me to make it to The Fleece in Dinas before closing time.

The talk was desultory. They didn’t quite trust me enough to bitch about the job. We stuck mainly to the safe subjects of high-performance cars we had chased, and gruesome RTA’s attended.

Their call sign broke through an undercurrent of static on the radio. Shotgun picked up the handset eagerly.

I leaned forward to rest my arms on the back of his seat. ‘I speak Welsh,’ I warned him cheerily. It was mainly a lie – my Italian was better, and that wasn’t good – but he didn’t need to know that.

But he ran with the bluff and took the call in English. A minibus driver had reported being hijacked and abandoned in a lay-by.

‘Been nice having your company, Sarge,’ Driver said, strapping in, and starting the engine up.

I eased myself over to the door. ‘I’ll follow you down. It’s on my way home.’

They didn’t like it, but they didn’t argue. Arguing would have kept me in their car.

I pulled out behind them. With their blue strobe turned off, the night had got big again. Gradations of darkness, treetops in serrated silhouette, the loom of the hills against the paler sky, dishcloth shreds of clouds trawling in from the west. Rain before morning – my newly acquired Pig Wales lore.

We found the minibus driver sheltering in a telephone booth outside the hulk of a Baptist chapel. The booth’s light was the only illumination in the street of a village that looked like its occupants had packed up and retired underground for the winter.

He crossed the street towards us as we parked, stepping off the pavement without checking. He had obviously been hanging around for long enough to know the likelihood of traffic. He walked with the stride of a man who is advertising grievances.

Driver and Shotgun got out of their car with that air Traffic guys have of sloughing skin every time that they exit their vehicle. It was their call, so I hung back out of courtesy, just listening in. Catching that the minibus driver had managed to flag down a car that had dropped him here. By his estimation, we were already something like two hours into the event. You could cover a lot of Wales in two hours.

‘How many passengers were there, sir?’

‘Six. I was taking the bastards to Dinas.’ He looked at the three of us entreatingly. ‘It’s not as if we’d even fucking argued about anything.’

I nodded sympathetically from the sidelines, my interest raised by the mention of Dinas.

‘They were totally pissed, all of them, not one of them would have been capable of driving safely,’ he protested righteously.

‘Do you have the names of the passengers?’ Driver asked.

‘No, you’ll have to get those from the office. I was just told to pick them up at Shrewsbury Station, off the train from London. They’d been at the England–Wales match at Twickenham.’

‘Did you see who actually drove the minibus away, sir?’

‘It was the middle of the night out there. A poxy lay-by full of puddles and junk.’

‘You were outside the vehicle?’ I asked, slipping into the conversation. ‘Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi,’ I introduced myself, calculating that it was time to start trying to sharpen this thing to a point. Driver gave me a look, but it was a token, he knew that he was outranked.

‘They tricked me,’ the minibus driver protested.

‘How did they manage that?’

‘One of them told me someone was going to be sick. I hate that smell,’ he announced vehemently. ‘Beer puke on the upholstery, you can’t get rid of it. So I found somewhere to pull over quickly. Two of them got out and went round the back as soon as I stopped.’

‘Did you hear them being sick?’

‘No. A lot of passengers get sick for one reason or another, and I don’t listen out for it. I kept the engine running. Next thing one of them is at the door saying that there’s something about my rear wheel that I should see. So I get out, and there’s the other one crouching, kind of squinting at my nearside back tyre. “Should that be like that?” he asks me, and like a prat, I get down there trying to see what the fuck he’s talking about. Next thing I know the bus takes off, and I’m left out there in the dark.’

‘No build-up to this?’ I asked. ‘It came as a complete surprise?’

‘Total. I thought they were all as happy as Larry in the back. What with the booze, their fucking rugby songs, and joking around with the girl.’

My face cracked. He looked at me, puzzled by the change. Driver and Shotgun hadn’t picked up on it.

‘What girl?’ I demanded.

He swayed back defensively, shaking his head. ‘A hitchhiker. It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t pick her up. I stopped for diesel at a garage this side of Newtown, and she was already inside when I got back from paying. The passengers said they had offered her a ride to Dinas. I didn’t argue.’

‘Describe her,’ I said, letting him hear the new snap in my voice.

He shook his head again, sickly smile set, wanting to help me now. ‘I can’t. She was stuck up in the back behind the men. I never saw her properly. I only heard her laughing back there.’

A flash: Regine Broussard.

I sometimes get a foreboding when things are about to go very, very wrong. It predicts awful possibilities from the merest of nuances. It translates as a melting feeling in the region of the kidneys. A little bit like sex. Perhaps it was my Ligurian genes? Warm loam reactions in a damp northern climate. Often it got me into trouble. I should have learned by now to run the other way, but some warped instinct always managed to spin me in the wrong direction.

And the tickle makes me wince.

Shotgun saw it. ‘You all right, Sarge?’ he asked, eyeing me curiously.

I ignored him. It had to be the woman. The source of the tickle. The presence of the woman added the crown of thorns.

Otherwise it was fairly typical Saturday-night bloke behaviour. Drink and testosterone fuelled. A prank with a potentially lethal edge. Sparked by impulse, opportunity – or the driver was not giving us the complete story of his relationship with his customers. Either way we had six drunks and a minibus, and a lot of different ways that they could wreck it.

How many ways did they have to wreck the woman?

What did I know about these men? According to the driver they were all young. They liked rugby. They supported the national team. They were country people. They had hired a minibus so that they could drink responsibly. All of that, if you discounted their age, stacked up reassuringly. Not quite nuns, but the profile was comfier than skanky-haired baby-fingerers with weighty Temazepam habits. A bunch of nice lads out on the town for the day.

So why the fuck had they turned idiotic?

There was no way to answer that yet. I left Driver and Shotgun to take the minibus driver back and deal with the procedures. Until we had a victim of some variety, or a complaint from someone other than the driver, I was redundant. I volunteered to cover the road between there and Dinas, keeping an eye out for the minibus.

With only a minor detour I let my route take me past the lay-by the driver had described. I used my high beams to light it up. Puddles and wind-blown rubbish. I got out and walked slowly. The hard light did weird things to empty crisp packets, disposable nappies and crushed drink cans. I almost missed it, floating upside-down in a puddle, the peak tipped away, looking like a miniature coracle.

It was a baseball cap. Dark blue, soaked, with an illegible logo. No telling how long it had been there. I turned it over and round in front of a headlight. No identifying labels. From its size, if could have belonged to a kid. Or a young woman with a small head. I put it in the glove compartment. I had thought about using an evidence bag, but I didn’t want to tempt fate.

I saw nothing on the rest of the way home. No skid marks, no smoking wreckage, no Indians circling the wagon train. I stopped in town and called Dispatch, gave my contact number, and asked them to log a message that I wanted to be kept up to date with the story.

Then I had no excuse. The Fleece was closed. The Chinese takeaway was closed. And a cold rain was starting, earlier than I had predicted. It was time for bed. I drove out of town. Heading for home.

The planks on the bridge rumbled under the wheels as I crossed the river into the utter blackness of Hen Felin Caravan Park. At this time of the year I was the only resident. Unit 13. I wasn’t superstitious.

The site held the frost, the electricity supply was erratic, and the water that came out of the taps was the colour of weak tea, but there was an upside to the location. It kept the public away. People who might think that it was a local policeman’s duty to help them out with squirrels in the attic, or neighbours playing the harmonium too loud. The site was out of town, badly lit, muddy, and in the holiday season it was full of outsiders whose brat-kids taunted the locals for speaking queerly.

Another advantage was that it was a caravan. It was temporary. It kept my impermanence tangible. Some day I would be leaving this awful place. Every time I walked in through the door, and was met by the mingled smells of condensation, plastic curtains and propane gas, I could remind myself that this was not going to last. This was the smell from family camping holidays long ago in Borth. And holidays in Borth had never lasted. Thank Christ.

The message light on the answering machine was blinking. I hit the play button thinking that the dispatcher might have an update for me. Two messages. The first one was from a cop in Caernarfon who thought he might have some information on a stolen Kawasaki quad bike that I was investigating. I hoped that he was wrong. Caernarfon was way the hell to the north, and the geographical limits of this case were already stretching me.

The second message was even less welcome.

‘Capaldi, it’s Mackay, we need to talk.’

The voice was Scottish, clipped, and to the point. Mackay was ex-SAS and we went back a long way. Every time he resurfaced in my life trouble happened, albatrosses fell in flocks from the sky. Currently, he was only hopping along the fringe, having become my ex-wife’s current lover.

It hadn’t really upset me when he had taken up with Gina. In fact, it had had the beneficial effect of keeping both of them off my back. The trouble was that she, at this point in the orbit of our relationship, unjustifiably in my opinion, felt that I was the sack of shit in her life. Now I could start to worry. What poison had she managed to work into Mackay’s system concerning me?

I double-checked the lock on the caravan before I went to bed. It was a token gesture, a fruit-juice carton would be more secure. After Mackay’s call, I knew that I was going to be crediting every sound that I heard out there tonight with having army training.

I sent a flighted wish out into the night for the woman in the minibus to be safe. I didn’t include the guys. They had got themselves into it, and I wanted to retain enough juju in my system to keep Gina and Mackay out of my life.

The telephone woke me too early on Sunday morning. I registered wet windows, grey sky, and the branches of the riverside alders drooped and dripping as I lurched to the dining nook to answer it. On mornings like this I truly missed the city, where you could pretend that weather didn’t exist.

‘Glyn Capaldi,’ I grunted.

‘Sergeant, a minibus was hijacked last night over at …’

‘I know,’ I interrupted him, ‘I left a message for you to keep me updated.’

He went silent for a moment. ‘We’ve found it,’ his tone changing to eager.

Overnight, the isobars had packed together and the wind was coming strong out of the northwest. And cold. The rain that stung my face as I opened the caravan door was thinking about applying for an upgrade to sleet.

I went out of town on the mountain road, climbing up to open hill country. Scrub grass, sedge and heather, with grey, lichen-splotched boulders crumbled in for texture. It was a big, scrappy geography up here.

The minibus was parked on a narrow lane beside a small arched bridge near the junction with the mountain road. There was a marked police car close by. Uniform locals. I recognized the man who was making a point of watching my approach. Sergeant Emrys Hughes. We knew each other. He didn’t like me. It wasn’t a complicated issue, just a matter of his boss detesting mine. The fact that I didn’t like my boss either didn’t seem to help.

He shouted something up at me as I parked on the splay. I ignored him. I wanted to take in an overview of the scene before I got involved in other people’s perceptions.

The minibus was parked, neatly squared off, on a patch of compacted gravel. It hadn’t been abandoned. Thought had gone into where and how it had been left.

Emrys turned away from me. He must have shouted something else, because two more uniforms appeared from behind the minibus, where they had been sheltering from the wind. Emrys issued an instruction, and one of them came over the bridge, and up the slight incline towards me. I smiled to myself, recognizing a troop movement.

He had his head lowered, and kept his face slanted away from me to keep the rain out of his eyes. I gestured for him to go round to the leeward side and dropped the passenger window. He lowered his face to the opening. Lanky and young, his eager expression overcompensating for his nervousness. ‘Sergeant Hughes told me to tell you that we’re in control of this.’

I leaned across the seat towards him and grinned. ‘Sergeant Hughes told you to tell me to fuck off?’

His face dropped. ‘No, Sergeant, not at all.’

‘Where are the people from the minibus?’ I asked before he could recompose himself. ‘Have you managed to get them down off the hill?’

He looked confused, and shot an involuntary glance at Emrys. ‘There weren’t any people.’

‘What were you doing round the back of the minibus?’

‘Sheltering.’

‘Had you checked for footprints, any other evidence, before you trampled the area?’

His brain mired on that one. I didn’t wait for an answer. I got out of the car and fought my way into my coat, the wind whipping rebellious life into the sleeves and tail. It was even colder out here. The young cop caught up with me, trying to get my attention, but not quite daring to come abreast. I ignored him.

‘Morning, Sergeant Hughes,’ I called out affably.

He glared at me stonily. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I got the call.’

He scowled. ‘There was no call. Not for you. This isn’t a CID matter, Capaldi. We’re handling it.’ As usual he put a heavy stress on my name. As if he had had a grandfather die on the Anzio beaches and I was somehow to blame. Emrys Hughes was a big man, with black, wavy hair, craggy features, and a mosaic of broken veins in his cheeks. His square bushy moustache and matching set of eyebrows looked like they might have been lifted from an identikit box.

I inclined my head towards the minibus. ‘Have you put in a request for a SOCO team?’

‘Why would I do that? This isn’t a crime scene.’

‘The minibus was stolen.’

He shrugged. ‘And now it’s here.’

‘So what’s your plan of action?’

‘I’ve put a call in to contact the owner and get him to come up here with a spare set of keys.’

‘You intend to move it?’ I deliberately pitched my tone to needle him.

He struggled to keep his temper. ‘It went missing. Now it’s been found. Happy endings.’

‘It was stolen, Sergeant.’

‘I know the owner. I’m sure he won’t want to press charges.’

‘Someone was drunk in charge of a stolen minibus last night.’

He pulled a fat face and shrugged.

‘Where are they?’ I asked.

He leaned his face in towards mine, lowering his voice. ‘I know these people, Capaldi.’

‘If you haven’t been able to make contact with the owner yet, how did you come by the passenger list?’

He flashed me a pitying smile. ‘We’re a small community. We know who the lucky bastards are who can get hold of tickets to a rugby international like that. And the operative word here is “community”. Sometimes you have to take the sensible line. I know them all, I can vouch for them personally: they’re good people. Not one of them has a criminal bone in his body.’

‘It’s still taking and driving away. Driving under the influence. Maybe more, if the driver decides to stay mean.’

‘He won’t,’ Emrys announced confidently. ‘And, after the rollicking I’m going to give them, none of them will be doing this again.’ He spread his hands, trying me out with a reasonable-man-to-reasonable-man smile. ‘Okay, they were wrong. But that would have been the drink, the excitement of having been in London. It would have been meant as a bit of fun, nothing malicious.’ He shook his head. ‘And they’ll stick together. Even I’ll never find out which one of them actually drove it away. You’re not in your city now. There’s a time and a place for the heavy-handed route and this isn’t one of them.’

It was a big speech for Emrys. This was obviously important to him. Credibility issues, perhaps. ‘Where are they?’

He tried out a grin. ‘In their beds I assume. Getting ready to wake up and realize how lousy they feel.’

I recognized that he was offering me an opportunity here. The chance to play Cottage Cop, ingratiate myself into the community, show them that I didn’t always have to be seen as an aloof and hard-ass outsider.

‘What about the woman?’

He frowned. ‘We don’t know for sure that there was one. That could just have been the driver trying to make it worse for them …’ He raised his hands to stop my protest. ‘Okay, I promise you this, if there was a woman on that minibus with them last night, she’ll have been treated with absolute courtesy and respect.’

‘So where will she be now?’

‘Wherever it is, she’ll be safe. I can guarantee that. I expect she’ll probably have been offered hospitality for the night. It’s not like the city, women don’t have to fear for their bodies or their lives.’ He smiled smugly. ‘We don’t lose or misplace our womenfolk around here.’

Womenfolk … He actually used the word. As if he was describing a separate species that could be displayed in pens for admiration and grading. I used a spluttered cough to cover my astonishment.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘I’ll make you a deal.’

He inclined his head to listen.

‘If you can convince me that everyone who was on that minibus last night is safe and sound and where they’re meant to be, I’ll walk away and leave you to wrap it up your own way.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll take that deal.’

‘And that includes the woman.’

He smirked. ‘If she exists.’

I left him to get on the radio, and went over to take a closer look at the minibus. There was a dent in the front offside wing that could have been historic, and a new scratch on the driver’s door that cut through the dust patina.

At the rear I had a hunch, and dropped to a crouch to study the exhaust. I moved in close; the uniforms had already corrupted this area, and I couldn’t make it worse. Using the long serrated blade of my Swiss Army knife, I probed inside the pipe. When I pulled it out a set of vehicle keys fell on to the gravel.

This fitted in with the careful way that the minibus had been parked. The keys had been left for us to find. Emrys was right. Someone was trying to signal that there was no malicious intent in this.

I dangled the keys at Emrys as I walked round to the side door, but he was occupied with the radio and didn’t see me. The two uniforms, who had been circling the minibus with me, keeping it as a shield between us, looked like they thought I was fucking Merlin when they saw the keys.

I always carry a couple of supermarket plastic bags in my coat pocket. Generally, they’re for shopping, but occasionally they come in useful in situations like this. I unlocked the minibus door, and, using my handkerchief on the handle, slid it open. I put the plastic bags over my shoes before I climbed in.

Stale cigarette smoke was the main olfactory make-up over the background of synthetic upholstery and diesel. I sniffed selectively. No vomit. No dope. No girls’ stuff either, or I just wasn’t good enough to pick it up.

I trawled the interior slowly. Some rubbish on the floor, a couple of beer-bottle caps, a crumpled potato-crisps packet. This didn’t look like a vehicle a bunch of drunks had stumbled out of.

I found it tucked under the seat in front of the back seat. I felt the tickle again. Bad news arriving. Regine Broussard had also been in possession of a plastic carrier bag.

I pulled it out carefully. This had been well used, creased and bearing the faded imprint of a butcher in Hereford. I looked inside. Paco Rabanne aftershave and Calvin Klein underpants both boxed in their original packaging.

‘Capaldi …’

Emrys was at the open door.

‘I’ll take that.’ He held his hand out.

I passed him the bag. For a moment I mistook his expression for fury. Then I realized that the torsion in his face went with anxiety.

‘None of them are there … None of them got home last night …’

‘Have you any idea what conditions are like up here?’ I asked the duty officer at headquarters in Carmarthen over the radio.

‘I can’t authorize a helicopter search.’

‘Yes, you can.’

‘I need senior officer clearance.’

‘Call DCS Galbraith.’

‘It’s a Sunday,’ a note of panic rising in his voice at that prospect.

‘And this is an emergency. I have seven people missing up here in conditions of extreme exposure. One of them is a young woman. You take the fall if any of them die or suffer serious injury.’ I let that doom note resonate for a moment before pressing down on the exaggeration pedal. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. I’m talking mountain conditions here, an enormous wind-chill factor, snow, a warren of forestry trails to be covered.’ The last bit, at least, was true.

‘Is a helicopter any use if it’s snowing?’ he asked.

‘It’s passing over,’ I said quickly, ‘but the wind’s getting colder.’

‘Okay,’ he came to a decision, ‘I’ll set it up, but it’s your responsibility. I am only acting on information received.’

It’s only accounting, I told myself, the budget must have an allocation for such emergencies. I raised a thumb of acknowledgement to Emrys, who was down at his own car, on the radio to his boss, trying to get more people in for the search.

But where to start? I traced the course of the minor road with my eyes until it disappeared into the forest that rolled outwards and onwards for hectare after hectare. New growth, old growth, clearances, logging trails, abandoned trails, and the bastard, shape-shifting magic trails that I always ended up getting lost on. The imminent prospect of moving into that forest held no appeal.

The imminent prospect of a call from Detective Chief Superintendent Galbraith was even less appealing.

I had a lot to blame Jack Galbraith for.

For a start, he had rescued me. After my career in Cardiff had effectively gone down the tubes, he had stepped in and offered to have me in the Carmarthen Division. The Wild and Woolly West, as we used to say in Cardiff. I had thought about it when I had gone in to clean out my desk in that strangely empty squad room. After they had told me that it was safe to surface from my “emotional” leave. Why was he taking in a burned-out and redundant “hero”? Jack Galbraith did not have a reputation as a philanthropist. Had someone in high places called in a big favour? Or was he setting up an even bigger one, to be redeemed at some future date?

‘I’ve been informed that you used to be a good cop, Capaldi,’ he had told me on that first day of my official reincarnation in Carmarthen. When I had been born again as one of his men. ‘That’s why you’re here with me instead of wearing a rinky-dink security uniform and patrolling the booze aisle in some shanty-town supermarket. I’m giving you another chance. See if you can get back some of that good judgement that you occasionally used to demonstrate.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I had replied humbly.

‘Look at this.’ He walked across his office to the map of Wales that hung on the wall.

I looked. He tapped the map, a drummer’s rhythm. I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be looking at. He was tapping the bit in the middle, the empty bit, the bit God gave to the sheep.

‘Do you know how much it’s costing … to send men out from here …’ he rapped the pen on each of the divisional headquarters, then came back into the middle again ‘. . . to here? Every time a case comes up?’

‘I can imagine.’ I nodded sympathetically.

‘Overtime, petrol, hotel bills if they have to stay over.’

‘And you’re paying out for unproductive time with all that driving,’ I added helpfully. I would have kept my mouth shut if I had known what was coming.

‘Exactly. You’ve hit it right on the head there, son. Unproductive bloody time.’ He sat down on the edge of the desk. A power move. Looking down at me, nodding at the question before he had even framed it. ‘So what are we going to do about it?’

I didn’t even pretend to think that I was being invited to advise on strategy here. ‘I don’t know the answer to that, sir.’

‘I’m going to try an experiment, Capaldi.’

I gave him my best fresh, interested look.

‘I’m going to put a man in there. A resident detective, someone who can cover the routine crap, so back-up only gets called in when it’s absolutely necessary.’

Something plummeted. I felt like a specimen butterfly watching the mounting pin descend. ‘You’re surely not thinking of me for this, sir, are you?’

He grinned. It wasn’t meant to be friendly. ‘I’d have thought you would be grateful for any chance.’

‘I’m straight out of the city, sir.’

‘And you fucked up good there, didn’t you?’ He didn’t embellish. Didn’t remind me that I was responsible for the messy death of a man. He didn’t have to; the memory still kept me on familiar terms with the Hour of the Wolf most nights.

‘But I wouldn’t know how to operate out there,’ I protested, not faking my bewilderment.

‘Don’t fret your head about that, Capaldi, No one fucking does.’

We cordoned off the minibus with incident tape, and set up the command post there. With all that country to cover it was as good a place as any.

We had a mountain-rescue team on its way down from Snowdonia, volunteers from Forestry Services, and police teams with dogs already working their way into the forest. Inspector Morgan, Emrys’s boss, had turned up and was now running the uniform end of things. Apart from some filthy stares, he kept away from me, and left me in charge of the communications with the helicopter. Which was ominous. Had me wondering whether perhaps there wasn’t an emergency budgetary allocation after all.

My mobile rang. A number I knew only too well.

‘Capaldi …’ the voice boomed.

My stomach clenched. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘We’re on our way.’

The wind had dropped, the rain had thinned to a fine suspension. It wasn’t quite the Ice Queen blizzard that I had invoked. ‘I don’t think there’s any need, sir. There’s nothing to do but wait, you’ll just get cold and wet up here.’

Jack Galbraith chuckled darkly. ‘Don’t think you can call up a fucking circus, Capaldi, and not invite the chief paymasters. I’m bringing DCI Jones up with me. If my Sunday’s fucked I may as well spread the misery.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied snappily. Bryn Jones was one of the few cops in Carmarthen who hadn’t treated me like an AIDS carrier when I had limped in damaged from Cardiff.

‘Give me the background,’ Galbraith instructed.

I laid it out for him. Emrys Hughes couldn’t expect low profile now, so I nudged up the spin of the hijacking to six booze-fuelled guys and an unknown but vulnerable woman. Seven people missing in the hills. I played down the discovery of the neatly presented minibus. That didn’t fit in so well with the dark-tale storyboard.

He was silent for a moment, and then I could just make out indistinct conversation at the other end of the line.

‘You’re wrong.’ He came back on the line.

‘Sir?’

‘We think you’re wrong. This group isn’t the sort to be involved in anything truly sinister. You’ve been watching too much redneck massacre shit.’

‘It’s the woman that I’m concerned about, sir.’

‘The men don’t fit the gang-rape mould.’

‘What do you think I should have done, sir?’

‘Waited.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, you’re breaking-up …’ I cut the connection.

That was an unofficial rebuke. Was it going to end up turning official? Had I overreacted? I thought hard about it. No. Even Emrys Hughes had been spooked when he realized that none of those good people of his had made it home. But where had they made it to?

The helicopter’s call sign squawked over the radio. ‘DS Capaldi – we think we might have a sighting for you.’

‘Think?’

‘You’re looking for seven people?’

‘Check.’

‘We’ve only got five here.’

‘What about stragglers?’

‘I’ve circled. There’s only five.’

‘Is one of them a woman?’

‘Sexometers aren’t standard operating equipment.’ I could hear the laugh in his voice. ‘And from this high up I can’t distinguish tits.’

Two of the party apparently missing, and this funster thinks it’s a joke. I was tempted to tell him to check his mirror if he wanted to be able to distinguish a real tit.

2

I got to the location first. I needed to stay ahead before Morgan could pull rank and swamp me. I had to cheat to make sure of it. Knowing my luck with the weirdness of forestry tracks, I got the helicopter pilot to call the turns and guide me in.

I stopped the car as soon as I saw them.

Five men. Even from this distance I couldn’t mistake them. I felt the bad tickle in my kidneys again. Somewhere in the night we had lost the woman. One of the men, too, by the look of it.

I let them come to me. I wanted time to observe them. They were making their way down an incline on a forest track between new-growth fir trees. All were dishevelled. Some of the faces seemed vaguely familiar. The two at the front, similar in height, had the look of brothers. The older-looking of the two had his mouth set in stock chagrin, the other one was experimenting with damping down his smirk, trying to tamp some regret in.

They both met my stare. I had the impression that they had been practising.

The three following behind were having a harder time of it. The one in the middle, an enormous guy, had his shaved head drooped, and his arms draped around the shoulders of his two companions, who were bracing themselves to keep in step with his lurching pace.

The big shaven-headed guy was wasted. The other two were using the effort of supporting him as an excuse to look anywhere but my way.

I heard vehicles pulling up behind me, car doors opening. I didn’t turn round. My car was blocking the track so no one could get past. I concentrated, trying to read an explanation. The only consolation so far was that there was no spilled blood in evidence.

‘Where have you been, Ken?’

I was suddenly aware of Emrys Hughes standing beside me.

Ken – Mr Chagrin, the older of the two who looked like brothers – shook his head and pulled his mouth into a tight grimace of shamed apology. ‘We’re really sorry to have put everyone through this, Emrys.’

‘What happened to you?’ Hughes asked entreatingly.

‘We spent the night in Gordon’s shooting hut. Up by the old dam.’ He pulled a wry, regretful smile. ‘We were abandoned.’

‘Where are the rest of you?’ I pitched in.

‘Sergeant –’ Emrys and I both turned instinctively. Inspector Morgan glowered at us. ‘This is not an open inquisition. I want these men to have medical attention as a priority. And then they’ll be taken down to Dinas and given hot food and dry clothes before we even think about asking questions.’

‘We need to know about the others, sir,’ I protested. ‘There could still be lost or injured people up here.’

‘It’s just us, Inspector. There’s no one else, and no one’s hurt,’ Ken said penitently, then gestured back towards the big slumped guy, ‘Paul just over-indulged a bit.’

‘What about the woman who was with you?’ I demanded.

He smiled apologetically. ‘I expect she’s back in Cardiff by now.’

‘Where’s Boon?’ Emrys asked, before I could ask Ken for clarification.

‘Sergeant Hughes, Sergeant Capaldi, that will do!’ Morgan shouted angrily.

We stood back to let the five men shuffle past us like a file of train-wreck victims, paramedics coming up to meet them. The conscious ones gave Emrys Hughes a shamefaced smile as they passed. No one looked at me.

‘When do I get to talk to them, sir?’ I asked Morgan.

‘You don’t, Sergeant Capaldi.’

‘Sir?’

‘DCS Galbraith’ – I could tell that it hurt him to say the name without spitting – ‘is diverting directly to Dinas. He will interview them himself. And he didn’t request your presence,’ he added, clawing back a little consolation from my expression.

I couldn’t get over it. Suddenly no one was worried any more. By my reckoning we still had two missing persons to account for. But, since these five had turned up without any severed heads in string bags, the consensus appeared to be that everything was sorted.

I tackled Emrys about it before he joined the convoy driving back down the hill.

‘Don’t fret, Capaldi. It’s over.’

‘You don’t know what’s happened.’

‘Not the detail. But I trust these people. If there were any kind of a problem they would tell me. I know that they wouldn’t go calmly into those ambulances if there was anyone still in trouble up here.’

I couldn’t share in his faith. I kept it to myself, but another thing rankled. Even scrubbed up and alert, I couldn’t picture any of these guys in Calvin Klein underpants, or wearing Paco Rabanne aftershave.

So it looked as though I was the only one who had not been sprinkled with happy dust. Was the Italian side of me not seeing something that the Welsh side could embrace? Okay, I could run with it. I didn’t know these men, I had been excluded from the enchanted circle, so I was allowed to be mean-spirited.

I could dig for dirt.

But first I had to find it. The groups that had made up the search party were dispersing. I homed in on a Land Rover with Forestry Commission on the side and two bushy-haired occupants rolling cigarettes. They looked out at me as if I was a swish who had just dropped in from a piano bar through a hole in the space-time continuum.

I buttonholed the driver. ‘They said that they stayed at a shooting hut up there. Near an old dam.’

‘Right.’ He nodded, staring at me, waiting for something strange to happen.

‘Do you know where it is?’

They shared a silent geographer communion. Then the passenger leaned forward, his finger starting to point, his visible thought process chewing through the directions he was about to give me.

‘Great, I’ll follow you,’ I exclaimed, slapping the side of the Land Rover with macho gusto, like I was a roustabout jefe getting the crew rolling. I ran to my car hoping that they would assume we had just made some kind of a deal.

It worked. They blazed a convoluted trail, which may have been intended to shake me off. But I hung on behind them until the passenger flashed me a hand sign to let me know that we had arrived. I realized very quickly that it also indicated they were not stopping.

The hut was a long, low, timber-boarded affair, like a barrack, with a sagging mineral-felt roof, and plywood squares replacing some of the missing window panes. Well on its way to dereliction. It looked like the kind of place construction workers would have used. The only reason it had lasted this long was because no vandal could be bothered to take the kind of exercise required to reach it. The area in front had been cleared and levelled, but it was rutted and potholed now, and self-seeded birch and spruce saplings were collaborating with gorse in an effort to take over.

They had called it a shooting hut. On the drive up here, I had imagined something with rustic pine supports and trophy antlers nailed to the walls. This was more like a stalag way past its sell-by date.

I stood outside trying to get a feel for the place. Imagining it was night. Why would they come here?

Because it was so far off the edge of the world that anything could happen, and no one would ever be any the wiser?

I buried the thought. I went back to the facts. The minibus driver had said that the men didn’t seem to know the girl. So she wasn’t local. This location had to be the choice of one or all of the six men. It’s night, it’s cold, it’s late, and it’s a long way into a labyrinth. Why here? And why walk? Why not use the minibus? Why park it way the hell over where we found it? Because you were all so fucked-up that it seemed like fun at the time?

Because your party was still flowing?

I opened the door and met the party. Beer bottles and cans mainly, some wine, one bottle of vodka. All empty. But all stacked neatly. Tidied up. With empty crisp and snack packets crumpled and stuffed into a supermarket carrier bag.

The place had the damp, earthy smell of fern roots. I was standing in a vestibule. To my left was a small room that would have functioned as an office or foreman’s room, to the right a larger room, door hanging open: the mess quarters. In front of me, opposite the entrance, was a toilet cubicle with no door, and a cracked WC pan.

I went through the open door into the mess room. The floor had been swept. Not thoroughly; scrappy piles of old pine needles, twigs and other debris that had blown in through the broken windows had been pushed back against the wall. The other homely touch was six – I counted them – sawn log rounds arranged as seating. It all implied organization.

But when? Had this been set up before they arrived? Premeditated? Or had they all piled out of the minibus and set to making an impromptu den? And why only six pixie stools for seven people?

None of the log rounds had been recently cut. I touched the nearest one. It was still damp. But in this atmosphere so was everything else. I looked out of the windows. There were no other log rounds in sight. No imprints of any in the soft ground around the hut. It was possible that they could have ranged out with torches and collected these in the dark. Or they could have had them here already. But only six? Almost but not quite knowing how many were coming to dinner.

I nearly missed it. Running a last check before I backed out of the room I caught a glimpse of white behind the door. White and clean – alien matter in this place. I picked it up carefully. It was a crumpled paper tissue, slightly damp from absorption of the moisture in the atmosphere. I took a deep sniff. A complex background of unidentifiable fragrances. Opening it out I saw black smudges. The lessons from a fractured marriage informed me that these were smears of ruined mascara. Tears of fun or tears of terror? Another thought to bury.

I had made contact. My first meeting with the woman. I sniffed the tissue again to fix the esters in my olfactory library, and then fitted it carefully into an evidence bag.

I went back to the vestibule. The door to the small office was stuck. A clean section of arc in front of it showed where someone had tried to push it open and given up. Or had they? I put my shoulder to it and leaned in hard. It screeched horribly against the floor and opened with difficulty. The space was dark and even mustier than the mess room. Some damp Hessian sacks had been nailed over the windows. I pulled one away, grimacing at the slimy feel of it in my hand.

There was so much crud piled on the floor that I looked up reflexively, wondering whether this section had lost its roof. It hadn’t. But, even if it had, dead bracken did not usually tumble out of the sky in quantities like this. This had been imported. It had been heaped against the far wall, and it looked as though it had been compacted. To make some kind of a nest?

Another thought struck me.

To make a rudimentary bed?

DCI Bryn Jones was smoking outside the Methodist Church Hall in Dinas when I drove up. In the absence of a police station the hall had been commandeered for the occasion.

I ran up to him. ‘I’m sorry I took so long, sir. I got lost trying to find my way out of the forest.’ It wasn’t a lie. It was late afternoon now, almost dusk.

He just nodded, slowly exhaling smoke through his nostrils, a slightly ambivalent smile forming. ‘Thanks for your contribution to my Sunday, Sergeant Capaldi.’

Bryn Jones was short, but big in breadth. With tight black curly hair, happy green eyes, and a massive face that looked like it had been formed by pounding putty into place. He had a neck that seemed reluctant to narrow, and in the dark blue suit he appeared more constrained than dressed.

I gestured inside with my head. ‘Is DCS Galbraith in there working on them?’

‘Notice an absence?’

I looked around, puzzled. Not getting it at first. And then it hit. There was no one here.

‘Wives and girlfriends, concerned family …’ Bryn confirmed, seeing it dawn on me.

‘Where are they?’

‘Gone.’

‘Have you taken them in?’ I asked, surprised, wondering whether to start feeling vindicated. ‘Is it turning out to be more serious than we thought?’

‘They’ve gone home. All of them.’

I stared at him for a moment, perplexed. ‘Even the men?’

He nodded. ‘Even the men.’

I shook my head, trying to clear a path to my next question. Then the inner voice of self-preservation sideswiped me. ‘DCS Galbraith – has he gone home too?’ I asked, trying to conceal the hope in the question.

Bryn dropped his cigarette end, crushed it underfoot, and then shook his head. Not unkindly. ‘No. I’m on lookout duty.’

I didn’t have to ask who the smoke on the horizon was.

Jack Galbraith was sitting at a stacking table at the end of the hall, an empty plastic chair beside him, and an identical one opposite. He was having a cigarette under a sign that read Please refrain from smoking under the eyes of the Lord.

He looked up when I entered, closed his eyes, and steepled his fingers. I hoped that he was looking for guidance. Trying to find the strength to stop him swearing under the eyes of the Lord.

‘Fuck you, Capaldi.’ His eyes flicked open. ‘Where do I fucking start?’

Bryn Jones slipped into the empty chair beside him.

Even seated, you could tell that Jack Galbraith was tall. He had light brown hair swept back in a swagger behind his ears, a strangely effeminate frame for the firm, square-boned face with its deep-set, incisive, brown eyes. He looked as though he had been built for stamina, for distance and endurance, and you could tell from his bearing that he thought that he still had it, just hadn’t tried it out in a long time.

‘My wife thinks this is a put-up job to stop me taking her to an amateur choral rendition of fucking Elijah …’ All his years in Wales had hardly touched the gruff Scottish accent. He ticked the points off on his fingers: ‘That supreme fucking tosser Inspector Unctuous Morgan has witnessed my ritual humiliation. And you called out a fucking helicopter.’

‘No disrespect, sir, but we are in a church here,’ Bryn said quietly, out of the corner of his mouth.

‘No we’re not,’ Jack Galbraith corrected him. ‘We’re in a church fucking hall – there’s a difference. In here, I’m allowed a few transgressions.’ He paused to dump his cigarette into the residue of a mug of tea before fixing his gaze back on me. ‘What have you got to say for yourself, Capaldi?’

‘I thought we had a situation, sir. I had seven people missing, one of them a woman, in extreme weather conditions. I made a decision that seemed to be appropriate for the circumstances as I saw them at the time.

‘I was especially worried about the woman – a hitchhiker, picked up by the men. She didn’t know them. And the men were drunk. In my opinion she was vulnerable. And I’m still concerned for her. Do you remember the Broussard case, sir? In Cardiff? About six years ago? A Haitian illegal immigrant?’

‘There’s no parallel.’ Jack Galbraith shook his head and smirked. ‘Tell him, Bryn,’ he instructed. ‘Give him the low-down on the little flower he’s so concerned about.’

‘She was a hooker, Sergeant.’

‘A Cardiff tart,’ Jack Galbraith amplified. ‘Called herself Miss Danielle.’

I tried to absorb my surprise. ‘They picked her up in a rural petrol station. The minibus driver said she was hitching.’

‘That was the cover story,’ Bryn explained.

‘It was organized, Capaldi.’

‘It was meant to be a stag event,’ Bryn clarified. ‘They were setting up a surprise for the two bachelors in the group. They were meant to believe that the girl was just an innocent hitchhiker.’

‘Then, surprise, surprise, the girl drops the Young Rambler guise’ – Jack Galbraith clapped his hands together – ‘and at least one of our two virgins gets his rocks off, courtesy of his buddies.’

I tried to get my head round it. They waited me out. ‘But they took her up to a hut in a forest. That’s where I’ve come from.’

Jack Galbraith nodded. ‘We gathered that. And we also notice that you haven’t returned clutching a dripping axe in the evidence bag.’

‘Did you see anything up there that we should be concerned about?’ Bryn asked.

I thought about the crumpled tissue, the log rounds, the bracken bed. ‘No, sir.’ I shook my head and frowned. ‘But I don’t get it.’

‘Where have we lost you, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith asked.

‘Why did they stay up there for the night? The men, I mean. It was cold and damp. Uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to describe it. And they must have realized the furore it would cause.’

‘That’s where it went wrong for them,’ Jack Galbraith said. ‘According to the master plan they were supposed to have their party, get the virgins’ cherries popped, and be back in their beds, tucked up with their loved ones, before they were missed.’ He eyed me carefully. ‘Tell Capaldi the story we were told, Bryn.’

I picked up on his use of the word ‘story’. Jack Galbraith was very precise with his words. And instead of the savaging I’d been expecting, he was being relatively gentle with me. Was I about to discover the reason?

‘They claim that they were very drunk. That, despite the conditions up there, they slept through until the morning.’

I remembered the sight of them coming down the hill. ‘They did look pretty rough,’ I conceded. ‘One of them, the big one, was totally out of it.’

Jack Galbraith grinned. ‘Paul Evans, one of the virgin bachelors. That must have been some kind of a fuck, eh?’

‘It didn’t look like rapture to me, sir,’ I observed.

‘But it wasn’t just the demon drink that was their undoing.’

‘No?’ I answered cautiously. He looked amused. I wondered if he had found some way to fold me into the blame for this.

He grinned. ‘No, it was the Big Bad Pimp.’

‘Sir?’

Jack Galbraith gestured, and Bryn took over. ‘They’re claiming that it was the girl’s pimp who drove the minibus away.’

‘A pimp … ?’ I didn’t try to hide my astonishment.

He nodded. ‘According to the men, he had never been part of the arrangement. They had assumed that they could persuade the minibus driver to take them up to the hut, then just give him a good bung for his waiting-around time.’

‘The driver never mentioned that.’

‘They never got round to negotiating it. When the girl was picked up at the service station she announced that the deal had changed. She wanted her pimp with her. Told them that she felt vulnerable out here in the boondocks without protection.’

I pondered it, seeing how the fit started to work for them. ‘So the girl has it arranged that this Cardiff pimp is waiting in a lay-by in the middle of nowhere, all set to cut the minibus driver adrift, jump into the driving seat and carry them away?’

‘That’s more or less how the authorized version goes,’ Jack Galbraith confirmed.

‘Which means that there’s no drinking and driving involved?’

He nodded. ‘Correct. Our heroes remain unblemished.’

‘And then they’re abandoned by the pimp and his girl.’

‘Like some kind of fairy story, isn’t it? Our bunch of poor foundlings left to their cruel fate in a woodsman’s hut in the middle of the dark fucking forest.’

I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t work, sir.’

‘Explain.’

‘The place where we found the empty minibus this morning – if that was the rendezvous, the place where the pimp and the girl had arranged to be picked up and taken back to Cardiff – they would never have found it. Not in the dark, not in that warren of forestry tracks. Chances are, this guy’s never driven in a night situation that didn’t involve street lights.’

Jack Galbraith and Bryn exchanged a glance. ‘It does work, Sergeant,’ Bryn said.

‘Why?’

Jack Galbraith pulled a face. ‘Because we have five solid, upright and honest citizens who all say that that was the way it happened. And we’re all so dreadfully sorry to have inconvenienced everyone.’

‘They even had a whip-round while they were here to pay for the damage to the minibus,’ Bryn added.

‘Damage caused by the pimp, mind you. These guys are nothing if not magnanimous,’ Jack Galbraith observed with an ironic chuckle. ‘And it also works because I don’t have any relevant reports of a missing person, or a woman claiming that she has been abducted and abused.’

‘Has anyone in Cardiff been able to talk to the girl?’

They both shook their heads. Jack Galbraith frowned. ‘No. And do you know why? Because the sanctimonious fucks claim that they found the number in a telephone booth. And now they’ve lost it.’

‘Do Vice know this Miss Danielle?’

‘Nothing matching the description we’ve been given,’ Bryn replied. ‘Either the girl was using a false name, or the men don’t want us to trace her.’

‘So they just walk? It’s over?’

Jack Galbraith nodded. ‘There’s nowhere to take it. These bastards are too respectable for us to resort to the rubber hose, never mind the thumbscrews.’

I didn’t know whether that was a coded invitation for me to opt out of their enforced inaction. I accepted it as such anyway. And then I remembered that we had another missing person. ‘There were supposed to be six men. Only five came down the hill.’

‘They dropped off one of their number on the way. He never went into the forest.’ He looked over at Bryn for amplification.

Bryn checked his notes. ‘Boon Paterson. He was on leave from the Army, going home today. He asked to be let out in Dinas.’

That fitted in with the six pixie stools that I had counted in the hut. ‘What kind of a name is Boon?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know, Sergeant Capaldi,’ Jack Galbraith replied with a mean chuckle, making a drawn-out meal of my surname.

It was already dark when they left, the afternoon colder now and winter-killed. I felt oddly lonely watching them go, like I was the patsy who had somehow been tricked into staying behind to man the empty gulag.

The Fleece didn’t exactly lift my heart with gladness. It was virtually empty. Locked into a race memory of not being able to drink on a Sunday, the old men who usually occupied the back bar stayed away.

I took a stool at the bar. David Williams, the owner, wasn’t around. That suited me fine. I leaned over the counter, took my glass down from its place on the shelf, put it under the beer tap and filled it. Self-service meant I could avoid the inclusion in my drink of stuff from the black plastic bilge bucket that stood under the pump, collecting everything from drips through pork-pie particles to the common cold virus.

David popped his head round from the serving area of the front bar. He came over, picking up his drink as he passed it. The two separate bars were a godsend to him. He could keep a drink active in each one, and work on the mistaken belief that his customers were only seeing the half of what he was actually consuming.

‘Scandal?’ he asked with a great big eager grin.

‘What have you heard?’ I closed the beer tap.

He pretended to look crestfallen. ‘You mean you’re not going to tell me?’

‘I want to hear your version.’

He checked to see who might be listening, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘The story is that they picked up a couple of hitchhikers on their way back from the match, supposedly without realizing that they were working girls.’ He raised his eyebrows, waiting to see if I would respond.

‘One hitchhiker.’

‘Just one?’ He sounded disappointed.

‘Go on,’ I prompted.

‘Whoever it was turned out to have a boyfriend with her. They tried on some sort of a shakedown, and then they took the transport and abandoned our boys up in the forest.’ He leered salaciously. ‘What we’re all wondering is, what went on up there that the boys wouldn’t want their loved ones to know about?’

He stood back and waited for my reaction.

I just nodded, noncommittal. It was a raggedy version, maybe deliberately so, but it was interesting that the group had managed to get their spin working for them so quickly.

‘You’re not going to tell me?’ he asked, disappointed.

‘I couldn’t improve on that, David.’

David and Sandra Williams were Dinas’s version of the Golden Couple. That status was still current only because any contenders to their throne had opted for a Bronze future in a bigger place.

David was also the nearest thing I had to a friend in Dinas.

‘I’ve seen some of those guys around,’ I said. ‘Tell me about them. Two of them looked like brothers.’

He didn’t have to think about it. ‘That’s Ken and Gordon McGuire. Ken’s the oldest. He got the family farm, Rhos-goch. A big holding out on the Penygarreg road, some hill country, but a lot of good river land.’

‘Good farmer?’

‘Yes, but you wouldn’t have to be on that land. A walking stick would sprout if you left it in the dirt long enough.’

‘The brother?’

‘Gordon’s an auctioneer with Payne, Dyke and Thomas.’

‘A lush?’ I asked, knowing the occupational hazard.

David shrugged. ‘Not as bad as some. Good at his job, though. He got a nice Victorian farmhouse when Ken got the farm.’

‘Who’s the big guy? Shaven head.’

‘Paul Evans. Works for his father, a builder up at Treffnant. He’s a really good rugby player. Awesome tackler.’

‘He looks like a dumbfuck.’

‘Paul’s okay until he gets a drink in him, then you want to keep away.’

‘Boon Paterson?’

‘Boon hasn’t been around for a while. He joined the Army.’ He looked at me, interested, picking up on a new twist. ‘I’d heard he wasn’t there. Was he?’

I shook my head. ‘Who are the other two?’ I had no real picture of them, just props swaying under Paul Evans’s weight.

‘Trevor Vaughan and Les Tucker. Trevor farms up in the hills, and Les has a pretty successful timber-felling business.’

‘Which ones are married?’

‘Ken and Gordon – the McGuires. Les has a long-term girlfriend though. Sara Harris, she’s a hairdresser in Dinas. You’d probably know her if you saw her.’

So Trevor Vaughan was the other bachelor. ‘Paul and Trevor, have they got girlfriends?’

He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t know. All I do know is that they both still live at home.’

‘What keeps them together as a group?’

‘Ken and Gordon, probably. Trevor was Ken’s best mate, Les was Gordon’s. They’ve just kept together from school. Paul and Boon got to tag along.’

I hadn’t seen Boon Paterson, so I had to exclude him from the mental line-up. Four of them fitted there, worked as a loose match. I could imagine them pictured in a local newspaper, a group shot of young rotarians handing over a large-format cheque to a good cause. But Paul Evans stayed out of the shot. Why were they associating with a lunk like that? What would a bunch of young countryfolk require muscle for?

I moved my hands in front of him as if I was drawing open a concertina. ‘In a range that spans monsters to saints, where would you place them?’

He smiled, not needing to think about it. ‘Customers.’

I returned the smile dutifully. But I couldn’t shake Paul Evans from my mind. Performing a function. Pinning down the shoulders of a woman whose face I couldn’t see. Her legs thrashing wildly. For the enjoyment of the others.

‘Capaldi, we still need to talk.’

Back at the caravan, and another message from Mackay. I reset the answering machine. I was almost tempted to call him. Get this thing over with.

I picked up the receiver. Then gently put it back down again when it occurred to me that my wife might answer it.

I picked it up again, dialling the Dispatch number, just remembering what Emrys Hughes had said about the embargo he had put on the news of the minibus discovery. The news that I was supposed not to hear.

‘This is DS Capaldi.’

‘Yes, Sergeant.’

‘Did Sergeant Hughes instruct you not to call me with an update on the hijacked minibus?’

‘No, Sarge – that was Inspector Morgan.’

I heard the laughter in the background. I smiled as I put the receiver down. It was good to know that I had support in lowly places.

3

Torches …

The thought of torches brought me out of a fitful sleep. They had to have had light.

I called headquarters in Carmarthen after breakfast. Bryn wasn’t around, but I got someone to check the transcripts of the group’s statements. Torches were mentioned. The story was that the pimp and the girl had made off with them when they did their runner.

But, according to Bryn, there had been no confrontation with the pimp. They had paid over the agreed fee up front when they arrived at the hut, and waited for the good times to roll. The girl had said that she was just going outside to use the minibus to prepare herself. Next thing they knew, both girl and pimp had managed to sneak off in the minibus.

Sneak off? I couldn’t see it. The guy could hardly have gathered up the torches without declaring some sort of intention. No matter how smashed you were, you would know the party was finishing when the lights went out.

It was like the parked minibus, the neatly stacked rubbish in the hut, the tart’s missing telephone number … Disturbances in the details. Their story was frayed at the edges. But the smell coming off it wasn’t bad enough for Jack Galbraith to keep it open. I recalled his parting admonition, warning me off any direct approach to the members of the group.

The upside of having to investigate crap cases in the boondocks that no one else wants to touch is that it gives you the autonomy to invent leads that will take you to wherever you want to be.

Which, on this Monday morning, was the service station outside Newtown where the minibus had filled up with diesel. And where they had managed to add Miss Danielle to the roster.

I showed the manager my warrant card and told him that I wanted to see the security CCTV coverage for Saturday night.

He looked at me warily, and for a moment I thought he was going to tell me that it had already been erased, or that the cameras were only there for show. ‘You people have already been to look at it.’

‘When?’

‘Last night.’

‘Two big guys? One wide, one Scottish and grumpy?’

‘Yes.’

So Jack Galbraith and Bryn had diverted here on their way home. Taking this seriously. But they hadn’t called me. If there had been anything on the tapes to justify action, they would surely have contacted me.

I persuaded the manager to run the tape for me, and settled down in front of the dirty monitor in the cleaner’s cupboard that he called an office.

I felt a small flutter of anxiety below my sternum. Crazy. I didn’t know this woman. She hadn’t existed for me thirty-six hours ago. And she was probably some junkie hag, back in Cardiff now, just where the story placed her. But we had made the same sort of mistake with Regine Broussard. I wasn’t going to let it happen twice.

There was no denying I was nervous. I was about to get my first sighting of her, and I couldn’t shake off a sense of something that shifted between romance and doom.

I fast-forwarded through the tapes to get to the point where the minibus arrived at the service station. Business was slow. The forecourt was empty when it pulled in, the CCTV image grainy and stuttering. The driver got out and proceeded to fill the tank. No one else got out of the minibus. No other cars there either, so no witnesses to trace through the DVLA computer.

It happened too quickly. She was there just after the driver screwed the fuel cap back on and walked out of shot to go and pay. I rewound and watched again. I hadn’t missed anything. She just appeared, no approach. It was as if the tape had jumped or stalled, editing that segment out.

I peered at the screen. It didn’t help. The picture quality was terrible. A baseball cap. Blonde hair bunched through the gap at the back. I moved in as close as I could, but couldn’t tell if it was the cap that I had found. Her facial features were a blurred soup of pinkish pixels over a knotted scarf tucked into a puffy, red, down-filled jacket. About a hundred and sixty-two centimetres, I gauged from the relation of her shoulders to the roof of the minibus. A large rucksack sagging one shoulder.

She was on the far side of the minibus from the camera. Head bent, as if she was in conversation with someone through the sliding door on the side. She tossed her head back, her face turning into the camera, the smile pronounced enough to register as a big, happy smudge. Then she slid her rucksack off, handed it into the minibus and climbed in after it.

I knew the rest of the story. She didn’t escape.

I had just witnessed a transaction. Something had been negotiated between the woman and some of the men in the minibus. But what? A lift or a fuck?

I went back to the counter. The young cashier glanced up from a magazine. She seemed tired, dark circles under her eyes, bad complexion, the mix of colours in her hair making it look like she had fallen into a chemistry set.

‘Were you working Saturday night?’

‘Some of it,’ she said, an edge of suspicion in her tone and eyes.

‘Can you have a look at this?’ I moved to the side to create enough room for her to get into the room and see the image that I had paused on the screen.

She stared at it blankly.

‘This is at half past nine. Did you see this woman getting into that minibus?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I was clocked off by then.’

‘Who was on duty?’

‘Him.’ She cocked her head towards the manager, who was stacking shelves.

I pulled a face in frustration. The manager had already told me that he hadn’t seen her.

‘Helly Hansen …’

‘You know her?’

‘No. Her jacket – it was a Helly Hansen.’ The covetousness in her voice surprised me.

‘I thought you hadn’t seen her?’

‘I saw her earlier, when she arrived. I’ve always fancied a jacket like that.’

I kept my excitement down. ‘You saw her arrive?’

‘It was busy. Something like half past seven, seven o’clock. People going into town for Saturday night, people coming home from a day out shopping. It got dead quiet after that.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Positive. If that’s the one you’re looking for, that’s when I saw her.’

At least two hours. What was she doing there two hours before the minibus picked her up? It was a blow. It tied in with the group’s story. That it had all been pre-arranged, that the girl had been there waiting for them.

Or did it?

If a pimp had brought her up from Cardiff, why had he arrived so early? Even a deep-city hustler would have to realize that a service station whack in the middle of Baptist nowhere was no place to drop one of his girls off to trawl for casual trade.

‘You should ask Tony Griffiths.’

‘What?’ I did an auditory double take.

‘You want to know about her, you should ask Tony. He was the one what brought her in.’

‘Bryn, she was carrying a rucksack …’ I could hear the plea in my own voice. Sanction this. Please make it so I can take this forward with an official blessing.

There was no response at the other end of the line. I was used to it. Where Bryn Jones was concerned, silence was a communications tool. He was a born moderator, always giving you the chance to reconsider what you had just said to him.

‘A rucksack, Bryn.’

‘I know. We watched the footage.’

‘Hookers don’t carry rucksacks.’

‘DCS Galbraith and I discussed that.’

‘She was hitchhiking.’

‘That’s an assumption. You’ve no evidence to support it.’

‘What would a tart be doing with a backpack?’ I asked, and immediately sensed the flaw in the question.

‘Sex toys, fantasy outfits, sleazy underwear, unguents, cosmetics, spermicidal jelly, Mace, condoms,’ Bryn enumerated, ‘and a big woolly jumper and nice warm tights, because she’s coming out into the cold night air.’

‘Bryn, she looked like a hitchhiker.’

‘That’s an emotive reaction, and you should know better. Face it, on that screen she just looks fuzzy.’

‘Those bastards are lying.’

‘Probably,’ he admitted calmly.

‘You can say that and just walk away from it?’

‘Yes, because we have no evidence of a crime having been committed. And yes, they probably are lying, because it’s normal behaviour when white middle-class males get discovered in flagrante delicto with a prostitute. It’s a function of the squirm reaction.’

‘Did Emrys Hughes hand in a bag?’

‘What kind of a bag?’

‘A carrier bag. I found it in the minibus. It had some aftershave and designer underpants in it.’

‘I expect he gave it back to whichever of the men had left it behind.’

‘Bryn, the bag was from Hereford.’

‘So? People travel to Hereford to shop.’

‘None of those bastards that I saw walking down that hill would have bought those things. They don’t fit.’

‘You’re speculating again.’

I paused, bringing myself back under control. ‘What if I could find the person who gave her the lift to the service station?’

He was silent for a moment. ‘Are we talking about a pimp?’

‘No.’

‘We would be interested in that.’ He paused. ‘DCS Galbraith has asked me to pass a message on to you.’

Which meant that Jack Galbraith knew that I would be calling Bryn. ‘And what would that be, sir?’ I asked, switching to formal.

‘Don’t blow this up into something it isn’t in an attempt to climb back on board the big ship.’

‘No, sir.’ I had a sudden flash of my fingertips clutching the gunnels with Jack Galbraith’s polished brown brogues poised over them. ‘I have to go, sir,’ I said, catching sight of the truck in my rear-view mirror. I cut the connection and got out of the car as it approached, weaving to avoid the worst of the potholes in the lay-by. A small truck with a standard cab, but an unusually high-sided, open-topped rear.

The driver’s window rolled down. I assumed that the head that poked out belonged to Tony Griffiths. ‘I got a call from the office to meet someone here.’

I held up my warrant card. ‘They said that this was the best place to intercept you on your route.’

He looked at me suspiciously. ‘I don’t know you.’ He glanced down at my warrant card and scowled. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

I beamed up at him. ‘My parents embraced the spirit of Europe.’

He wasn’t impressed. ‘I don’t remember being the witness to any incident.’

‘I’ll come up,’ I said, swinging round the front of the truck before he had a chance to say that we were fine the way we were. I climbed into the passenger’s side of the cab. It was overheated, despite the open window, and smelled of something stale and bad that I couldn’t put my finger on.

His look of suspicion shaded off into new knowledge. He pointed a finger at me, pleased with himself. ‘I heard about you. You’re the city cop they shifted up here. What did they catch you doing?’ He grinned wickedly. ‘Kiddy-fiddling, was it – with a name like that?’

I overcame the urge to tip his face into the steering-wheel boss. I needed him.

‘What’s this about?’ he asked, still grinning, cranking the window back up. He was wearing a high-visibility yellow tabard over stained and crumpled blue overalls. He had dark oily hair swept back behind his ears, small but smart brown eyes, and a dark complexion that was accentuated by a heavy shadow of beard growth. The way he sat hunched over the steering wheel gave him the appearance of a small man, but the shirt and overall sleeves rolled up past his elbows revealed hairy and powerful forearms.

‘You’re not in any trouble, Tony. I just need your help,’ I said reassuringly, forcing a smile, keeping it friendly. ‘Saturday night, someone tells me that you might have dropped a female hitchhiker off at a service station on the Llanidloes road outside Newtown.’

‘I don’t pick up hitchhikers,’ he came back at me, deadpan. ‘We’re told not to. It’s against company policy.’

I smiled at him. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone.’

‘And my last drop was eleven o’clock Saturday morning. Bachdre Kennels, half an hour away from my place.’

‘You were seen, Tony. Seven, half past seven, Saturday night.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve got a motorbike. A trials bike, it doesn’t take passengers.’

He was lying. But why? He didn’t look like a man who would give a toss for company rules.

‘My only concern is for the woman.’

He held my gaze and shook his head.

‘You were seen with her.’

He just shrugged; he knew that he didn’t have to give me any more. But he didn’t smile. That was important. He wasn’t cocky about it. I looked for the natural line of leverage.

‘I’m worried about her, Tony. She got into a minibus with six drunk guys, and she hasn’t been seen since.’

He shook his head and dropped eye contact. ‘I’ve nothing more to say.’

He wasn’t going to tell me. What had he been doing on Saturday that he did not want me to know about?

I spat on my palm and laid it flat on the seat between us. An old Ligurian trick of my father’s. Sometimes it worked, impressing strangers with the deep scope and breadth of my ouvrier honesty. ‘This goes no further, I promise you. Anything you tell me stays here. Stays strictly between us.’

He glanced down at my hand, and then up at me with a look that told me he had been around too many gypsies in his time to fall for that one. ‘You’re a cop,’ he stated simply.

‘I can be trusted,’ I replied earnestly.

A knowing smile split his lips.

‘What can I do to prove that?’ I asked, still hoping that rhetoric and persuasion were going to carry me. Not quite catching the shift in his concentration. Not realizing that the bastard had actually started to think about it.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course I’m serious. I promise – you can trust me.’

‘No. About proving it?’

‘Does that mean you did give the woman a lift?’

He grinned. ‘You haven’t earned my trust yet.’

‘How do I do that?’

He held up a mobile phone. ‘You know what this is?’

‘It’s a mobile phone.’

‘It’s also a camera.’ He smiled as my expression turned puzzled, and inclined his head towards the rear of the truck. ‘Do you know what I carry in the back there?’

He lowered the tailgate. I understood then why the sides of the truck were so high. To stop people seeing the dead meat.

‘Farm casualties,’ he explained. ‘We get paid to pick them up and dispose of them.’

The components of the pile in the back of the truck were small in number, but they made a big gruesome bundle. Two dead sheep tangled on top of a black-and-white cow, which lay on its side, legs splayed out, as stiff as driftwood. The harness and wire cables from a winch curled over the grouping. The smell was noxious. An ammoniacal reek from stale urine, combined with lanolin, and the start of decomposition. The sawdust that had been used to cover the truck bed had absorbed unimaginable fluids and turned to gelatinous slurry.

‘Jesus …’ I gagged involuntarily.

He laughed. ‘You get used to it. These ones are fresh.’

I had no intention of getting used to it. ‘Why are you showing me this?’

‘This is the deal.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘You’ve got to shag the cow.’

I waited for the punchline. It took me a minute to realize that it had already arrived. He was serious. ‘You can’t really expect me to …’ The line was too absurd to finish.

‘I don’t expect you to do anything. You want something from me. You need to pay a price.’ He pointed at the rear end of the cow with his mobile phone. ‘I want a shot on this which makes it look like you’re fucking that thing.’

‘Are you some kind of pervert?’

‘No, I just want to be safe. I need a cast-iron guarantee that if I tell you things you have a real good reason not to spread them. I can’t think of a better reason than a picture like that.’

‘I couldn’t do it.’

‘That’s your choice. It’s all voluntary, Sergeant Capaldi.’

Oh fuck … We had stopped pretending. We now both knew that he had a story to tell me. ‘Why are you making me this offer?’

He thought about it for a moment. ‘I want to help the girl.’

‘Do it for her then,’ I entreated.

‘No. I need to keep myself covered.’

‘You want win–win?’

‘Fucking right I do.’

I shook my head slowly. It had to stop here. She was a stranger. She would have moved on, totally oblivious of my search for her. She didn’t need any kind of sacrifice. Bryn Jones was right, no crime had been reported, no one was missing. She would be back in Cardiff by now. Where I should really be, instead of discussing necrophilic bestiality with a twisted hayseed under a too big sky. It was time to let go.

He lifted the tailgate tentatively. ‘Okay?’ he asked. ‘I drive off now and you leave me alone?’

I started to nod. ‘Tell me,’ I blurted. ‘One thing …’

He stared at me.

‘Was she a prostitute?’

I thought that he wasn’t going to answer.

‘No.’

Another flash on Regine Broussard.

Oh fuck …

I drew the line at dropping my trousers. We had a brief, heated, artistic disagreement over that, until I persuaded him that it could all be done by inference. By posture, camera angle, and the loose ends of my belt drooping free.

He had the grace to lend me a pair of heavy-soled rubber boots. The kind that abattoir workers wear when they hose the crud off the floor. Crouched there, arms splayed, trying to get into position while he shouted directions, I must have looked like some monumental fool.

Fool … ? I was kidding myself. Substituting vanity for the bigger picture. Which had me flying way off the outer scale of foolishness by simulating penetrative sex on the rear end of a dead sideways cow.

Back in the truck cab, trying to warm up, he wanted to show me the images.

I shook my head. ‘If those pictures ever see the light of anyone else’s day, I will arrange it so you have your balls cut off. And believe me, I can do it. I have the contacts. I’m a cop, and I’m half Italian.’

‘Don’t worry, they’re just my insurance.’

I held a Bad Cop stare on him for a moment to underscore the threat. ‘So, what were you doing wrong on Saturday afternoon?’

He braced himself for it, still not comfortable with confessing to me, despite the huge security deposit he had just obtained. ‘I was using the truck to run some deer carcasses for a couple of mates.’

‘Poached?’

He shrugged. ‘I was just doing the delivering.’

‘You bastard!’ I exploded. ‘You put me through that depraved fucking charade to cover up a bit of poaching.’

He shot me an aggrieved pout. ‘My mates take trust very seriously. The man whose land the deer came from is a vindictive bastard. And I was using the company’s truck.’

‘Poaching.’ I snorted dismissively.

‘You seemed to think it was worth it at the time.’

He was right. I had accepted the price. I calmed myself down. ‘Where to?’

‘A butcher down on the Radnor, Herefordshire border.’

‘Where did you pick the woman up?’

He looked at me, surprised that I didn’t want more detail on the butcher. ‘On my way home. Near Painscastle. I was sticking to the back roads.’

‘Show me.’ I flicked through his road atlas to get to the right page. He pointed. It was a minor road that strung a line of nondescript villages together. ‘Is this where she had started from?’

‘No, she’d come from somewhere outside Hereford. She’d got sidetracked, a lift from a farmer who’d left her there. The road was quiet, she was lucky that I came along.’

Hereford again. I tucked the reference away.

‘Where did she want to go?’

He grinned. ‘Would you believe Ireland?’

I contained my surprise. ‘Was she Irish?’

‘No, she was foreign.’

‘What kind of foreign?’

He pulled a face. ‘She told me, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to keep asking in case she thought I was thick. It wasn’t a common foreign country though. I would have got something like France, or Germany, or Poland.’

‘How well did she speak English?’

‘A bit of an accent and a few words the wrong way round, but pretty good really.’

‘Did she tell you her name?’

He pulled his contrite face again. ‘She told me, but I didn’t really get that either. It was something foreign, beginning with an “M”.’

‘Can you describe her?’

He nodded. ‘She was a real smiler. Big high cheeks that puffed out when she grinned. Her face was small but kind of chubby. Not fat or anything. Just …’ He searched for the description. ‘Just nice.’

She sounded Slavic. Or Scandinavian with the blonde hair? ‘Did she say why she was going to Ireland?’

‘To meet up with her boyfriend. I don’t know whether she was talking about an Irish lad, or a boy from her own country who was working over there. She knew that she had to get a ferry to Dublin, and she would be met there.’

A boyfriend. The fit went in. The carrier bag from Hereford with the aftershave and the underpants. Presents for the beloved. The worry was that she would not have left those behind lightly.

‘Not quite the straight-arrow run to Holyhead where you dropped her, was it, Tony?’ I said, smiling to soften the accusation.

He looked hurt. ‘That wasn’t my fault. I even suggested taking her into Newtown to catch a train. It was already dark by then. But she didn’t like that idea.’

‘Too expensive?’

‘I don’t think that was it. She had already asked me if I knew how strict the Immigration people were at the ferry port. I got the impression that she thought there might be too many people asking questions on a train.’

‘The service station was her choice?’ I asked, letting him hear my doubt.

‘Yes. We checked the map. She wanted to stick to the country roads, she said.’

‘You liked her?’ I asked.

The question puzzled him. He looked at me warily, wondering where I was going with this. ‘I liked what I saw of her,’ he answered guardedly.

‘Weren’t you concerned for her? It’s night now. The dead of winter. She’s a stranger, and you’ve left her in the middle of nowhere.’

He bristled. ‘It wasn’t the middle of nowhere. I left her where it was light, and where she could buy stuff if she needed it. I even bought her chocolate. And water. I’ve never bought a bottle of fucking water in my life before. And I went back.’

‘You went back?’

‘Everyone was coming into town at that time of night. I reckoned she wouldn’t be able to get a lift. So I gave her about half an hour to get fed up, and then I went back to see if she wanted somewhere to stay for the night.’ He held up his hands as if anticipating a protest. ‘Just a bed, mind you. I didn’t have any other intentions.’

‘But she turned you down?’

‘No. She wasn’t there. She’d already gone.’

This rocked me. ‘Tell me, Tony, what time would this be?’ I asked very carefully.

He thought about it. His head moving slightly with the enumeration process. ‘About eight o’clock. No later than quarter past. I hung around for a while to make sure that she hadn’t just gone for a bit of a wander.’

It made no sense. Her destiny lay with that minibus one and a half hours later. So where had she disappeared to?

‘Sure you don’t want to have a look?’

I turned round. He was holding the phone up tauntingly, a big grin on his face. I had counted on him not being able to resist it.

I snatched the phone out of his hand.

A split second of jaw-dropped surprise, and then he wailed, ‘You bastard –’ Making a lunge for it.

I held him back with my forearm, the other hand holding the phone up out of his reach.

‘Give that back to me, you fucker!’ He was snarling now, pushing hard, trying to snatch at the phone in my hand. He was straining, twisted out of balance. I dipped the forearm I was using to restrain him, and used my elbow to chop him hard in the groin.

A huge gasp of air fused into a groan and he went slack. For a moment all he could do was stare at me reproachfully, mouth wide open like a betrayed carp.

He shook his head. ‘I should have known better than to trust a fucking cop.’

‘You didn’t trust me,’ I corrected him. ‘You tried using extortion. I gave you my word, and that’s all you need.’ I opened the door and backed out of the cab holding up the phone. ‘I’m impounding this on suspicion that it’s been used to take pornographic images.’

4

I christened her Magda. I was getting closer. Most likely East European. A student or a migrant worker, probably running in the wrong direction from an expired work permit.

Not a prostitute from Cardiff.

I had been vindicated. I had my own proof that the group had been lying. Now I had to face the scary edge of that triumph. What had really happened in the hut on Saturday night? Where was the girl now?

I spent the next two and a half hours back at the service station watching the CCTV footage in real time. I saw Tony Griffiths walk across the forecourt to buy the chocolate and water. He had been careful, he’d kept his truck out of surveillance range. But I didn’t see Magda. Not until the minibus.

I called Bryn Jones in Carmarthen.

‘Sir, I have uncorroborated evidence that the woman might have been an East European student.’

‘How uncorroborated?’

‘No one is going to speak up.’

‘Can you be any more specific than East European?’ he asked.

‘No, sir, sorry.’

‘Okay, we’ll spread the word informally. See if we have any reports of missing persons that match out there in migrant-worker land.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

I sat in my car and put in enough calls about the other cases I was working on to log that I was still on the planet. Just. I even called the guy in Caernarfon about the Kawasaki quad bike. Now that Tony Griffiths had told me that Magda had been making for the ferry in Holyhead, I wanted to keep an excuse to visit North Wales active.

I leaned back, closed my eyes, and tried to recall the image of the group coming down the hill on that cold Sunday morning. The two brothers in front, the other three staggering behind them.

Who to brace?

I could probably forget the three with partners. The McGuire brothers and Les Tucker. They would now have backtracked with enough explanations and excuses to make them as virtuous as Mother Teresa. Paul Evans, the big one, would either be dumb or belligerent. I didn’t relish tackling either persona.

I called David Williams at The Fleece.

‘Trevor Vaughan, the hill farmer. How do I find him?’ I asked.

I wrote down the directions. As usual I marvelled at how complicated it was trying to find anywhere in the countryside.

‘Anything else you can give me on him?’

‘Quiet. Nice man. Inoffensive.’ He went silent.

‘Am I hearing hesitation?’

‘I don’t like spreading unsubstantiated rumours.’

‘Yes, you do – so give.’

‘There’s talk that he’s done this before. Visited prostitutes.’

‘Am I missing something in Dinas? Is there a local knocking shop?’

He laughed. ‘No, Sandra wouldn’t let me set it up. I’m not talking about Dinas; it’s trips away, to London or Cardiff, rugby games, agricultural shows, stuff like that.’

I thanked him and hung up. So the talk was that Trevor Vaughan wasn’t a virgin. So why did the rest of the group use him and Paul as an excuse for the presence of the girl? Probably to wrap themselves in sanctity, and preserve them from the wrath of their partners. Or was it their intention to test the truth of the rumours?

Some friends.

The road to Trevor Vaughan’s farm followed a small river, which had receded to an alder-lined brook by the time it arrived. The hills were steeper here, the land poorer; sessile oaks, birch, and hazel clumps in the tight dingles, monoculture green pasture on the slopes where the bracken had been defeated, and glimpses of the wilder heather topknot on the open hill above.

A rough, potholed drive led off the road past an empty bungalow and a large new lambing shed to the farmhouse. No dogs barked. An old timber-framed barn formed a courtyard with an unloved, two-storey, whitewashed stone house, raised above the yard. Its slate roof was covered with lichen, and the old-fashioned metal windows were in need of painting.

I’d been around these parts long enough to know not to let the air of neglect fool me. These people could probably have bought a small suburban street in Cardiff outright. They just didn’t waste it on front, or what they regarded as frippery. They saved it for the important things in life: livestock and land.

I parked in the courtyard and got out of the car. Still no dogs. Just the sound of cattle lowing in one of the outbuildings. A woman appeared from around the side of the house wiping her hands on an apron. Small-framed, short grey hair, spectacles, and an expression that didn’t qualify as welcoming.

‘We don’t see representatives without an appointment,’ she announced in a surprisingly firm voice.

‘I’m not a rep,’ I said, opening my warrant card. ‘I’m a policeman – Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi. Are you Mrs Vaughan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Trevor around?’

She scowled. ‘I thought we were finished with that business. Emrys Hughes told Trevor that it was over.’

I smiled. ‘I just need to ask a couple more questions.’

‘You’ll have to come back another time.’ She inclined her head at the hill behind the house. ‘He’s busy up there with the sheep.’

‘I could go up and see him.’

She gave my car a sceptical appraisal. ‘You won’t get up there in that.’

‘I could walk.’ She looked askance at my shoes. ‘It’s all right, I keep some boots in the car,’ I told her. She sucked in her cheeks, her face tightening into mean little lines as she suppressed her natural inclination to tell me to get off their land. I was glad that she wasn’t my mother.

Following her instructions, I took a diagonal line across the contours, steadily rising towards the open hill, making a point of shutting all the gates behind me. I came to a collapsed stone field shelter with an ash tree growing through the middle of it. According to the woman’s directions I was spot on track.

And I would have kept on going like a naïve and trusting pilgrim, onwards and upwards to the open moor, if a fluke of the wind hadn’t brought the sound of sheep to me. From the wrong direction. I followed the sound to the crest of a rise. The ground dropped into a cwm, and, where it levelled out, I saw a Land Rover in a field beside a pen of sheep. The old crone had deliberately misdirected me.

The dogs were the first to see me traversing down the steep side of the cwm. Two of them. Black-and-white sheepdogs circling out at a scuttling run to flank me, practising dropping to their bellies, preparing to effect optimum ankle damage. The sheep, sensing the dogs on the move, started to make a racket.

Trevor Vaughan, in the pen, looked up from the ewe he was inspecting. He raised his voice and called the dogs in. I waved. He watched me descending for a moment, and then waved back, any welcome in the gesture held in reserve.

He was wearing a grey tweed flat cap, an old waxed jacket worn through at the creases, and green waterproof overtrousers. I had checked, he was twenty-four, but he looked older. A mournful, triangular-shaped face, which, for a man who spent his life outdoors, was remarkably pale.

‘Mr Vaughan,’ I shouted, as I got closer, ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Capaldi.’

‘I know who you are, Sergeant. Emrys Hughes told us.’

The dogs, sensing a distraction, made a move towards me again. He checked them with a series of short whistles, and with a couple of clucks and a gesture he got them on to the open tailgate and into the back of the Land Rover. I was impressed.

‘I have nothing more to say about Saturday night.’

‘I’m not here to ask about that.’

He looked surprised. ‘You aren’t?’

‘No, I want to know where – what’s her name? Magda? – where is she now?’

He wasn’t a good actor. He shook his head and feigned surprise, but he wasn’t used to it. ‘I don’t know anyone called Magda. I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

I gave him a con cop smile. ‘Who decided to call her Miss Danielle?’

‘That’s what she called herself.’

‘You’re lying, Mr Vaughan.’

He didn’t protest. He looked away from me. I thought I had him. And then I heard it too. I followed his line of sight. A late model, grey Land Rover Discovery was coming up the cwm towards us. I stuck myself in front of him. ‘I need to know, Trevor. Has anything happened to that woman?’

He shook his head. Almost imperceptibly. It was aimed at me. As if he didn’t want whoever was driving the Discovery to see that he had communicated.

‘Trevor …’ The yell came out of the open window as the Discovery pulled up. The driver pretended to only then recognize me. ‘What are you doing here?’ his voice registering surprise. Ken McGuire was a better actor than Trevor Vaughan. The old crone had not just misdirected me, she had call in reinforcements.

‘Afternoon, Mr McGuire,’ I said cheerily. I sensed that I had got close to something with Trevor Vaughan, but instinct warned me not to let Ken McGuire suspect it.

He got out of the Discovery playing it puzzled, looking between the both of us. ‘I came over to borrow a raddle harness, Trevor. You’re Sergeant Capaldi, aren’t you? I’ve seen you in The Fleece.’

‘I was out for a walk, Mr McGuire.’

‘He was asking about Miss Danielle, Ken,’ Trevor volunteered.

I pulled a weak grin and resisted shooting a reproving glance at Trevor.

Ken winced theatrically. ‘Please, Sergeant, we’re trying to forget that episode.’

I couldn’t resist it. ‘Like you’ve forgotten her telephone number?’

He didn’t break a sweat. ‘That’s right. And just as well, eh?’ He chuckled. ‘No more temptation down that road. We’ve learned a hard lesson. That right, Trevor?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You didn’t mention that she was foreign.’

‘What makes you say that, Sergeant?’ Ken came back just a bit too quickly.

I shrugged. ‘A rumour I picked up. That the girl was from Eastern Europe. Trying to hitchhike to Ireland.’

‘She didn’t try that story on us, did she, Trevor?’

Trevor shook his head.

‘And as for her being foreign – who knows? We’re hicks up here, Sergeant. Ladies of the night from Cardiff are as exotic as the label gets. We’re not good with accents.’

‘Where is she now, Mr McGuire?’ It was a long shot, but I was up close to him, and I wanted to see if anything flecked his composure.

‘In Cardiff, I imagine,’ he replied without hesitating, without a flicker. He grinned at me wickedly. ‘I’m just sorry I can’t pass on her telephone number, Sergeant – you seem so interested.’

The patronizing bastard actually winked at me.

Emrys Hughes and a uniformed sidekick flagged me down before I got back to Dinas.

I was impressed. It had happened quicker than I had expected. Someone was carrying more clout than I had realized.

‘Afternoon, Sergeant Hughes,’ I said pleasantly, lowering the window.

He gave me a measured dose of silence before he slowly leaned down towards me. ‘Your own boss warned you, Sergeant.’

‘And what would that warning have been about?’

‘Harassing my people.’

I played perplexed. ‘Harassing … ?’

‘Don’t get cute,’ he growled. ‘You know exactly what I mean. You were specifically told to lay off the men from the minibus.’

‘Questions, Sergeant. That wasn’t harassment. I was only following up on some discrepancies in their testimony.’

‘There is no case. This has nothing to do with you. You were told not to contact them.’

I bluffed. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Galbraith is not entirely happy with all the answers we’ve had.’

He called it. Leaning in closer and lowering his voice to keep his sidekick out of earshot. ‘Yes, he fucking is, or this thing would still be live.’

I acted hurt. ‘Why do you think I’m asking these questions?’

‘Because you’re playing the lone fucking vigilante. You’ve got no authorization and you know it.’ He glared, challenging me to refute him.

I just nodded, suppressing my frustration. If I made it worse I would have his boss, Inspector Morgan, on my back too.

He grinned, savouring his moment of triumph. ‘Back to work, eh, Sergeant?’ he suggested smugly, straightening up.

I ignored him and drove off. We both knew that I had to take the warning seriously. Morgan and his men could make my life in these parts even more difficult than it already was. But another message was coming in over the horizon. Ken McGuire really did not want me talking to Trevor Vaughan. I sighed inwardly. Revelations like that can corrupt the best intentions.

It had been a bad day, which, I soon discovered, had the potential to get worse.

‘You’ve had a visitor,’ David Williams called out when he saw me walk into The Fleece.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked absently. I was distracted by the prospect of a proper bath and a hot meal. I had temporarily forgotten that people did not come to visit me in Dinas.

‘He was Scottish.’

I stopped rummaging in the drawer of the reception desk where I kept the shampoo and flannel I used at The Fleece. ‘Did he leave a name?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

He glanced down at a notepad. ‘Graham Mackay.’

Why did he want me? One possible answer to that question disturbed me. Really disturbed me. Knowing what he was capable of, both on and off the field of battle.

How deeply had Gina got into him? Could he now be the besotted instrument of my wife’s intense rage?

She blamed me for everything that had gone sour in her life. She blamed me for her weight gain. For the first crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes, the advent of grey hairs, and the back pains that she never used to suffer from. The increase in traffic on the streets of Cardiff was down to me, as was the dogshit on the pavements.

But most of all she blamed me for the Merulius lacrymans. As if I could really be held responsible for the dry rot that had been discovered in the house after she had bought me out of my share. I had laughed when she first accused me. That had been a mistake.

‘Was he on his own?’ I asked.

‘Yes. He said he was on his way to Aberystwyth and that he’d call in again on his way back through.’

‘No,’ I said to David as he started to pull my pint.

He looked surprised. ‘Sun’s over the yardarm.’

‘I haven’t finished work yet.’

‘Someone you don’t want to meet?’ His question followed me as I left the bar.

I got away fast. It was precautionary. It would have been messy enough tangling with one of Gina’s run-of-the-mill lovers, but mixing it with the one who had been trained in the precise arts of close-range warfare would have made the mess too one-sided.

Trevor Vaughan was still a temptation. But, after my visit this afternoon, he would now be well and truly buffered. So I decided to shift my interest to the one member of the group that I could currently tackle with impunity. Mostly because he was no longer around.

And I still couldn’t get a handle on the name. Boon Paterson?

It was virtually dark now, with a vague wash of blue-grey light high in the west, the sky clear, promising a cold night. I crawled slowly along the frontage of the few houses that comprised the hamlet. Low cottages with a terrace of ugly brick houses, and a corrugated-iron chapel surrounded by metal railings.

Boon Paterson’s house was the one I would have chosen. A freshly painted stone cottage with its first-floor windows hunkered down under low eaves. The soft light through the curtained windows promised the warmth of a proper fire, and an imagined smell of baking. All safe and well inside, with the cold and cheerless night shut out.

The woman who answered the door was wearing a faded yellow dressing gown and a frown.

‘Mrs Paterson?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied guardedly, pulling the dressing gown tighter around her.

I held out my warrant card. She leant forward to read it before I could introduce myself. ‘What is this about, Sergeant?’ She wasn’t local. English. Slow, flat vowels, a south or southwest accent.

‘Have I come to the right address for Boon Paterson?’

She blanched. ‘Yes. Is anything the matter?’ Her voice rose anxiously.

I smiled reassuringly. ‘No. There’s nothing to worry about. I’m just trying to get in contact with him.’

She shook her head, watching me carefully, as if she was trying to work out whether I was about to spring something awful on her. ‘I’m his mother, Sally Paterson. He’s not here.’

‘I was aware of that.’

‘Well, why turn up here in that case?’ she snapped, visibly annoyed.

‘Does he have a mobile phone number?’ I asked quickly, before she could close the door in my face.

‘I’m letting all the heat out here.’

‘I could come inside?’ I suggested.

‘Is Boon in any kind of trouble?’

‘No, I just need his help on something I’m working on.’

She relented. I caught a glimpse of sandwich preparation on the kitchen table as she led me through to the living room. A portable gas heater stood on the hearth in place of my imagined open fire. The furniture was old, chunky, and looked comfortable, and there were some classy touches of understatement in the arrangements and the decoration. I would have moved into the place as it stood and only changed the fire.

‘Does this have anything to do with Saturday night’s shenanigans?’ she asked.

‘You heard about them?’

She smiled for the first time. ‘It would have been hard not to, round here.’

‘My interest is in the young woman that was in the minibus.’

‘Boon wasn’t there.’

‘He was when she was first picked up. He could give me a description. Perhaps help me identify her.’

She looked surprised. ‘I didn’t think there was any mystery. I thought that she was supposed to be a prostitute from Cardiff?’

‘That’s what I’d like to establish.’

‘Is there some sort of doubt?’

I decided to trust her. ‘I’m concerned that she might still be missing.’

She cocked her head to look at me. ‘Capaldi? I think I’ve heard your name mentioned, but I haven’t seen you before, have I?’

‘Probably not. I haven’t been here long. I used to be in Cardiff. I’m here on a secondment.’

‘You must have done something very bad to deserve that,’ she said, deadpan.

I smiled wanly. She hadn’t realized how close to the mark she was.

‘And young ladies don’t go missing in these parts, Sergeant.’

‘I’ve already had something along those lines explained to me.’

She laughed, it softened her features. ‘Well, a word of advice: don’t believe everything that the sanctimonious buggers tell you.’

‘Can you elaborate on that?’ I asked, trying to keep a lid on the flash of interest that she had just sparked.

She shook her head, shrugging it off, moving on to look at me quizzically. She had an intelligent set to her face, but there was a carelessness about the way she projected herself. Without too much effort she could have shifted to attractive. This evening’s projection, however, was tiredness. ‘Do the McGuires know that you’re asking me these questions?’

‘Your son’s friends?’

She nodded.

I decided on honesty. ‘I think they thought Boon’s absence kept him safe from me.’

She laughed. I sensed that it was private amusement.

‘Did Boon mention anything to you about Saturday night?’

‘I haven’t seen him.’

It was my turn to show surprise.

‘I’m a care assistant at the Sychnant Nursing Home. I’m working nights at the moment.’ She touched the collar of her dressing gown, explaining it. ‘Boon must have left in the small hours on Sunday morning. He had packed up and gone by the time I got home.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know why he left so early, he wasn’t due to catch his flight until very late last night.’

‘He’s posted abroad?’

‘Cyprus. He’s with the Signals Regiment.’

‘Where was he flying from?’

‘Brize Norton, Oxfordshire. It’s not really that far.’

‘Perhaps he had other people to say goodbye to?’

She pulled a face. It made her look older and even more tired. ‘More like he couldn’t stand spending any more time with his mother.’ She tried it out as a joke, but a tiny crease of pain blistered the surface.

Her emotion was palpable. I smiled sympathetically. She started to respond, and then remembered that I was a cop, that I was trained to entice people into the confessional. She shook her head, pulling herself out of it. ‘Testosterone. It turns young men into monsters.’

She moved forward and reached out to the mantelpiece behind me. For an irrational instant I felt myself thrill at the possibility of physical contact. ‘Here,’ she said, stepping back, handing me a framed photograph, ‘that’s Boon.’ I hid my disappointment as she retracted.

But I couldn’t conceal my surprise.

‘You didn’t know?’ she asked, amusement showing in her eyes.

I shook my head. Boon Paterson was a handsome, sturdy, not too tall, young black man. He was standing in khaki fatigues besides a camouflaged Land Rover, a wide smile on his face, and a radio with a long whip antenna strapped to his back.

‘His father?’ I asked, hoping that it didn’t sound too crass.

‘His father’s a shit,’ she said vehemently. But she had understood the question. ‘Boon’s adopted,’ she explained in a softer voice. ‘His birth mother was sixteen years old, and no one was volunteering as the father. She gave him his name. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? You call your child Boon, and then decide that you can’t cope with the reality of it.’ She was pensive for a moment. ‘My husband left me,’ she said, explaining the outburst.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘So was I.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Now I have to spend my nights at the Sychnant Nursing Home.’

I looked down at the photograph again. Trying to understand what it must have been like. To be black and grow up in a place like this.

She read my mind and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Sergeant, that’s it, time’s up. I’m running behind now. I’ve still got to shower, and I’ve got stuff to prepare to sustain me through another long night.’

She shook hands under the front porch. Her parting smile was warmer. I walked to the car thinking about her. We shared the same polarity. We were both outsiders, both damaged goods. By the laws of magnetism I should have been repelled. I wasn’t.

As soon as I was clear of the house, I tried calling Boon on the mobile phone number that Sally Paterson had given me.

I got an unable-to-connect message. No answering service. I tried again, with the same result. He could still have been in transit. On a plane with his phone switched off. Or, if he had returned, he could be catching up on sleep, or already on duty.

To try to go through official channels would require clearances that no one was going to give me.

On the drive home I rotated through the other information that she had supplied. Wondering what she had meant when she told me not to believe what I had heard about young women not going missing in these parts? Was Boon being black just a surprising fact? Did it have any relevance to Magda?

Why had they dropped him off in Dinas? His mother had been surprised that he had left so early. She had been hurt that he hadn’t seen fit to say goodbye to her. Even if he had been part of that group that had lurched down off the hill on Sunday morning, he would still have had plenty of time to report in at Brize Norton.

I started to develop a scenario. I put Boon back on the minibus. They have now picked up Magda, and have dumped the driver. Sod the pimp story, one of the group is driving. But that’s immaterial. They are heading towards the hills to continue the party.

With an attractive white girl on board.

And one black guy.

What if Magda was turned on by Boon? She wouldn’t know the social pecking order here. Her first impressions are of a busload of rednecks and an attractive young black kid. Where’s the choice? So is this what gets Boon booted off the bus in Dinas? And, more importantly, what does it do to the group’s perception of Magda? Does it change the dynamic? Angel to slut?

The telephone woke me in the early morning.

‘It’s Sally Paterson …’ A woman’s voice trying to contain urgency.

‘Sorry … ?’ I said groggily.

‘Boon’s mother. You gave me your number, I didn’t know who else to call.’

I straightened up, adrenalin kicking in. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I’ve just got in from work. There’s a message on the answering machine from Brize Norton. Boon never reported in for his flight back to Cyprus. No one knows where he is.’

5

Sally Paterson opened the door before I managed to knock. She had been watching for my arrival. Her hair, which had been pinned into a loose bun, was escaping in straggling wisps, and she was still wearing the sickly pink polyester housecoat that doubled as a uniform at the Sychnant Nursing Home. I followed her through to the kitchen, her handbag gaping open on the table where she had dropped it before checking the answering machine. She had shadows of fatigue under her eyes from her night’s work, and was speedy with worry, her heels working like castors, seeking solace from motion.

‘Did you make the calls I suggested?’ I asked.

She nodded distractedly, and I guessed that she hadn’t picked up much comfort. ‘I went back to the Transport Officer at Brize Norton. No change there. Boon’s about to be officially classified as absent without leave.’

‘What about his base in Cyprus? It could be a simple case of army SNAFU.’

She shook her head. ‘He never arrived. And he’s not on the way. There were no alternative travel arrangements. He was expected on the Brize Norton flight.’

‘Did you get in touch with the taxi company?’

‘I rang the one he usually uses. They didn’t get a call to pick him up on Saturday night.’

‘We’ll ring round,’ I said soothingly. ‘They may have been too busy.’

‘They would still have known if he had called,’ she snapped. She threw her head back and screwed her eyes closed tightly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed. ‘I mustn’t take this out on you.’

‘That’s okay.’ I persuaded her to sit down. She was frayed from trying to contain the arcing sparks of her anxiety. The night shift hadn’t helped. I made a pot of tea and sat down opposite her. ‘How did he get home?’ I asked.

‘Home?’ she replied, eyeing me blankly.

‘The minibus dropped him off in Dinas. That’s at least five miles away. How did he get back from there?’

She shook her head while she was thinking about it. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked at me wanly. ‘Is it important?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do I do?’ she asked, trying hard not to let helplessness in.

‘The first thing you ought to do is try and get some sleep.’

She shook her head in a vague protest.

‘Is there anyone you can get to come over? Family? Any friends you would like me to contact?’

‘My mother’s in Dorchester, but I wouldn’t want to worry her.’

‘Any special friends?’

She smiled weakly. ‘You’re very tactful, Sergeant Capaldi. No. No special friends. Boyfriend. Or girlfriend.’

‘You can call me Glyn, if it helps.’

‘Glyn …’ She tasted it. Then nodded. She looked up, eyes suddenly alert now, as if she had reached a decision. ‘Do you know why he doesn’t talk to me any more?’

‘You don’t have to say anything,’ I said quietly.

‘No, I want to. I have to keep trying to understand this myself.’ She arranged the words in her head for a moment. ‘It’s because he blames me. Blames us, I should say, but his father’s not around any more to take his share. He blames us for bringing him out here. For depriving him of his culture, he tells me. His heritage. You see, now that he’s in the Army and teamed up with other Afro-Caribbean men, he’s accusing us of dragging him away from his natural background.’ She laughed self-mockingly. ‘And to think that we deliberately brought him as far away as we could from that background. To keep him safe, we thought.’

I glanced out of the window. Cold slate roofs, grazing sheep and slanting rain. About as far away from life on the Street as you could get. ‘Why Wales?’ I asked.

‘It wasn’t meant to be Wales. We just wanted to get out of the city. Boon was six months old; we wanted to be in the countryside. I thought we could try somewhere like Oxfordshire or Northamptonshire. Somewhere not too far from town. But Malcolm was offered a good job here in Mid Wales.’ She shrugged. ‘Housing was cheap, we could buy a nice place, and still be relatively well off.’

‘What kind of a job?’

‘History teacher. Head of a small department. And then he ran away.’ She smiled, punishing herself. ‘It looks like that pattern’s repeating itself.’

‘How did Boon get on?’ I asked quickly, to stop her dwelling on it. ‘Socially? As a boy growing up here?’

She looked at me, and for a moment a sparkle came back into her eyes. She had recognized the question that I had been waiting to ask. ‘This brings it round to the others, doesn’t it?’

I nodded. ‘Do you like them?’

She was silent for a moment. ‘In their own way they were kind to Boon, I suppose.’

‘In their own way?’

‘It’s not their fault, they were children, but there is a certain endemic ignorance in country people. When I say “ignorance”, I probably mean intolerance. They don’t like change. They’re not used to things being different. Somehow it’s not quite right.’

‘They gave Boon a hard time?’

‘Let’s just say that they made him aware of his difference.’ She pulled a face. ‘I’m being unfair to them. They did become his friends. And they stayed that way.’

‘But … ?’ I prompted.

She smiled weakly. ‘I think that he was always made aware that that friendship was a gift. I remember one time he came home after a football match. He must have been about ten. They had been playing a team from another school who started giving him a hard time, calling him names. But what he was so pleased about was how his friends had stood up for him. “Mum,” he said to me, ever so excited, “Mum, and do you know what Gordon said back to them? Gordon said, ‘He may be a bloody Coon, but he’s our bloody Coon.’”’

Neither of us laughed.

‘He broke the bond?’ I asked. ‘He went away to join the Army?’

‘That was another difference. They all had farms or family businesses to move into.’

‘And he liked the Army?’

‘Yes. He was a bit overawed at first. A bit scared, although he wouldn’t admit it. You know, out there in the bigger world, and the regimentation, and the discipline. And then he discovered his Soul Mates, and I turned into the cruel bitch who had deprived him of the funky upbringing that they had all shared. Boys and the Hood, or whatever the hell it is.’

‘Why would he not turn up at Brize Norton?’

It was a question she had been torturing herself with. She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I told you, he didn’t talk to me any more.’

‘Was there a girlfriend?’

‘If there was a current one, I hadn’t been told about her.’

‘Current?’

‘He had quite a serious affair with a Czech girl he met in Germany when he was stationed there. Then he was posted to Cyprus. As far as I know, he hasn’t had a long-term relationship since then.’

She tried to smile to cover her distress, but her hands came up to her face, and she gave in to her tears. ‘I just hope something awful hasn’t happened to him,’ she wailed.

I went round to her and put my hands on her shoulders. It had been a long time since I had tried to comfort a woman. I felt awkward and unpractised. I kept my hands light and unthreatening, and felt her muscles relax slightly. The touch began to feel both intimate and sanctioned.

‘Please,’ I said, ‘you mustn’t worry. Let me put the word out, so that we can at least discount the worst of your fears.’

She reached a hand up to lightly cover mine. It was damp from her tears. ‘Thank you.’

She walked me to the front door. I hesitated to ask, given the state she was in, but I had to keep the momentum going for Magda’s sake. I turned to her on the threshold. ‘You mentioned, when we first met, that I shouldn’t believe them when they said that young women didn’t disappear around here.’

It took her by surprise. She nodded hesitantly. Then she surprised me by smiling. ‘How about a girl going on for eighteen who leaves for school one morning and is never seen again?’

I took my notebook out. ‘Can you give me details?’

She put two restraining fingers on the notebook. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being selfish at your expense. There is no mystery. I told you that my husband left me?’

I nodded, watching her.

‘He went out that morning too. They left together. Him and the schoolgirl.’

Okay, I could sympathize with Sally Paterson. The anxiety that her missing son was causing her, coupled with the other kicks in the teeth that life had dealt. But I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t experiencing a lift of professional elation over the gift that had just been handed to me. Now I had legitimate questions to ask the group about the disappearance of their buddy Boon.

Bryn Jones didn’t quite share my enthusiasm.

‘It’s an Army matter,’ he stated drily, when I called him in Carmarthen. ‘Let them clean up their own mess.’ In that terse sentence I realized that Bryn and the military shared a history.

‘It could be germane, sir.’

‘There is nothing for it to be germane to, Glyn. And don’t even think about mentioning a missing woman.’

‘The people on the minibus were the last people to see him, sir.’

‘The last people that we know of,’ he corrected me.

‘Don’t we have a duty to his mother, sir? To try and get close to what was on his mind that last night. In case it has some sort of bearing on why he didn’t turn up for his flight to Cyprus.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Distraught, sir.’

‘You’re a sly bastard, Capaldi.’ I heard the contained laugh under his voice.

‘Is that a yes, sir?’

‘You know it’s not a yes. But I’m not in control of your actions until I get a chance to confer with DCS Galbraith on how we should instruct you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ I disconnected quickly before he could remember his beef with the Army and rein me back in.

Trevor Vaughan was my obvious choice. But going to his farm would be pointless; it would just end up as a stand-off between me, him, and whoever had been appointed as minder for that day.

Even in the sad dead grip of winter an amateur like me, who was still trying out for his country-boy badge, could tell that Rhos-goch was a prosperous farm. The hedges were tidy and the drive was smooth, lined with beech trees that someone had had the unselfish foresight to plant a few generations ago.

Ken McGuire’s grey Discovery was parked in front of the house along with a red Audi A3 and a low-slung, black, two-door BMW 3 Series. All swanky machinery for these latitudes.

The house was a big architectural hybrid; a Victorian copy of a Georgian façade in stone, with a two-storey yellow-brick side extension. It was all in good shape and, I was glad to see, the dogs were kept locked up.

The woman who answered the door disappointed me though. She didn’t go with the house or the cars on the drive. A myopic woman in an apron, who peered at me as if she had forgotten that opening front doors sometimes revealed people standing there.

‘Is Mr McGuire in?’

‘No, he’s out in the cattle shed, checking the bedding.’

‘Can I wait for him?’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Birdie … ?’

The woman at the door cocked her head at the sound of the voice down the corridor.

‘Who is it?’ the voice asked, coming into view. She was in her mid-twenties, loosely styled brown hair, outdoor cheeks, a slight build, and the natural confidence of a woman who had learned to master horses and brothers at an early age.

‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi.’ I held up my warrant card. ‘Mrs McGuire?’

She nodded, an all-purpose smile masking her scrutiny and curiosity. Taking just a little bit longer over it than she needed, to fit me into place. ‘It’s all right, Birdie, I’ll take care of the sergeant. I’m Sheila McGuire. Please, come in.’ She used the act of opening the door wider as an excuse not to shake my hand. ‘Ken isn’t around at the moment. Assuming that it’s him you’re here to see?’

‘Would you mind me waiting?’

‘Not at all. We’re in the kitchen. I’ll put the kettle back on.’

I followed her. She was wearing a baggy sweater, and swung a good bum in a pair of tight-fitting, navy blue riding breeches that were stained at the contact points with something that I assumed was equestrian.

When I walked into the big kitchen, the other woman sitting at the long refectory table, with a cigarette and a mug of coffee, made no pretence of welcoming me into the tent. She looked at me as if I was something that had turned up on her plate that she hadn’t ordered.

‘This is Zoë McGuire, my sister-in-law.’ Sheila introduced us. Zoë raised her eyebrows in mock surprise, and then deigned to incline her head at me, still watching, as if she had been tipped off that I was about to do something really stupid.

So, this was Gordon’s wife. The younger brother, the auctioneer. I marked her down for the black BMW. I was in the presence of both the McGuire ladies and had not prepared myself for the eventuality.

Zoë was wearing make-up and showing cleavage. Both were artfully presented. Her hair was blonde and cut short, gamine style, setting off the sculptural forms of the long neck, chin and cheekbones. She had played it wild with the make-up around her eyes, making them hard to read.

‘I hope that you’re here to arrest the bastards,’ Zoë declaimed. I thought that the accent might be Shropshire or Cheshire.

Sheila laughed.

‘What reason would I have to arrest them?’

‘They’ve reneged on the deal, the cheapskates.’

‘Zoë …’ Sheila protested amiably.

‘What deal would that be?’ I asked, playing it slightly dumb and nervous in the presence of glory.

‘You tell him,’ Zoë instructed Sheila. ‘You’re pissed off about it too.’

Sheila smiled, apologizing for her sister-in-law. ‘Our husbands have cried off taking us to the rugby in Dublin.’

‘It’s a bloody institution, the Dublin trip,’ Zoë wailed.

‘They’re not going?’

‘Oh, they’re going all right, they just don’t want the WAGs with them this time. Selfish buggers,’ Zoë snarled.

‘Ah.’ I grinned, pretending that I had only just seen the light. ‘I thought you meant arrest them for what happened on Saturday night.’ I segued into a big, dopey cop smile, and waited for the reactions.

Sheila had the grace to look uncomfortable. Zoë just shrugged and pulled a face. ‘Bloody schoolboys,’ she hissed.

‘It was a silly stunt that went wrong, Sergeant, and now the episode is closed,’ Sheila said firmly.

‘And they learnt a lesson,’ Zoë added.

‘What lesson was that, Mrs McGuire?’

‘Getting ripped off by that dirty bitch, and spending a freezing night out in the forest. And then having to pay for the repairs to that minibus.’

‘Zoë, Sergeant Capaldi isn’t here to talk about Saturday night,’ Sheila said, and from the look she gave me, I realized that I was meant to recognize that as an instruction.

‘What are you here for?’ Zoë asked.

‘Do you know Boon Paterson?’

‘Of course,’ Zoë answered.

Sheila just nodded, but I thought that I picked up a small surge in the current of her concentration.

‘He didn’t turn up for his flight back to his unit in Cyprus.’

‘Has there been an accident?’ Sheila asked, and this time it was Zoë’s attention that seemed to be nailed.

‘Not that we’re aware of.’

The back door opened and Ken McGuire walked through in socks and a pair of faded blue overalls, a light dusting of chopped straw in his hair and on his shoulders. The air of slightly preoccupied contentment that he had carried from the cattle shed was wiped into a big, puzzled, angry frown as soon as he saw me. This time he wasn’t faking the surprise.

‘You …’ he spluttered angrily. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘He’s here about Boon, Ken,’ Sheila explained, cutting in over the erupting tirade.

‘Boon?’ It took a moment for it to register; he was still so affronted at the sight of me in his kitchen. ‘What’s Boon got to do with anything?’

I explained, taking it as far as I had got with Sheila and Zoë. He looked thoughtful as he listened.

‘Did he mention anything on Saturday night that might have made you think that he didn’t want to go back to his unit in Cyprus?’ I asked. ‘Did any conversation or discussion like that come up while he was home on leave?’

Ken shook his head. ‘Not in front of me. None of the others mentioned it either. If he had said anything, it’s something we would have talked about, believe me.’

‘He was drunk, wasn’t he?’

Ken frowned and looked at me sharply. ‘Why do you say that?’

I smiled pleasantly. ‘I would have thought that it might have loosened him up. If it was on his mind, that’s when he would talk about it.’

He relaxed. ‘I take your point. And I suppose we all had a pretty good skinful that night.’ He smiled mock-ruefully at the ladies, and then shook his head. ‘But the subject didn’t come up. Only the inevitable fact that his leave was over.’

I nodded understandingly. ‘How did he get home?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You dropped him off in Dinas. It was late, it was cold, and, you said it yourself, he was very drunk. So how did he get home?’

‘You didn’t abandon poor old Boon, did you,’ Zoë protested, ‘in your rush to get that dirty bitch up into the hills?’

‘Zoë!’ Sheila hushed.

Ken smiled to include me in the conspiracy that we shouldn’t take his sister-in-law too seriously. ‘We dropped him at his house. He asked us to. He was supposed to be travelling in the morning.’

I stared him out for a moment, giving him the opportunity to retract. ‘DCI Jones told me that you said in your statement that Boon Paterson asked to be dropped off in Dinas.’

He shook his head. ‘No, sorry, he’s got it wrong. He must have misheard us. Boon asked to be dropped off at home. Your Inspector Jones must have heard us saying that we drove through Dinas on the way out to Boon’s.’

‘He was okay with that?’

‘Who was okay with what?’ Ken asked, puzzled by the question.

‘The pimp who was doing the driving. He didn’t mind running a taxi service?’ I asked, deadpan.

His eyes drilled into me, trying to find what level of belief I was working on. ‘He didn’t have a choice. We were the paymasters.’ He flicked a glance of apology at the ladies.

‘Why did Boon want to be dropped off?’

‘I told you. His leave was over. He was travelling the next day.’

‘But not flying out until the evening. This was his last night, I would have thought that he’d have wanted to stay on with his friends for as long as possible. Continue the party.’

‘We tried to persuade him.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to ask him why he wanted to be dropped off early, Sergeant.’

‘It wasn’t a case of imposing apartheid?’

Ken’s lower jaw dropped as if he had been sucker-punched. I heard the women’s gasps of indignation, but I didn’t turn, I was locked on him. Letting him see that in my belief system he was full of bullshit.

‘I want you to explain exactly what you mean by that,’ he said slowly and coldly.

‘You told Boon to get off the minibus because you didn’t want him playing with a white girl.’

‘Sergeant, that is totally unfair!’ Sheila protested behind me.

Ken went rigid, his fists balled, and his eyes screwed tightly shut, and I realized that I had made a bad misjudgement. This man was seriously outraged. I had seen it before, fury on the way to manifestation, and I prepared myself for an onslaught. But the moment passed. He opened his mouth; there was a slight gurgle before he spoke. ‘I’m not going to dignify that with an answer. I want you out of my house now. And I am going to report you for making that disgraceful accusation.’

I smiled at him, and shrugged just flippantly enough so that he couldn’t take it for an apology. Okay, I may have been wrong with the racist slant, but, in my book, the guy was still a liar. ‘Mrs McGuire?’ I turned to Zoë, pulling out my mobile phone. ‘What’s your husband’s work number?’

She gave me a puzzled scowl, but called out the number. I watched Ken as I tapped the digits in. He tensed when he realized my intention. I nodded slightly, the gesture just for him, thanking him for sharing his discomfort with me.

Sheila had seen it. ‘What do you want to talk to Gordon about?’ she asked, questioning Ken with her eyes.

‘I assume that he wants him to verify something,’ Ken told her.

I smiled happily at them both as my call was answered. ‘Good morning, Payne, Dyke and Thomas.’ The receptionist’s voice was chirpy.

‘Gordon McGuire, please.’

‘Who shall I say is calling?’

‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi.’

‘Please hold, I’ll see if he’s available.’

Ken smiled at me. It was the wrong sort of smile. Suddenly he wasn’t nervous any more. I wheeled round. Zoë was holding her mobile phone.

Texting is silent.

‘Sergeant Capaldi?’ the receptionist came back on the line. ‘I’m afraid that Mr McGuire is in a meeting, but if you would like to leave a number he’ll call you back.’

‘Thank you very much, I’ll try again later.’ I cut the connection.

‘If there is some misunderstanding with our statement, Sergeant, I’ll get the others together and we can get in touch with Inspector Jones to rectify it,’ Ken offered helpfully, not a trace of malice or recrimination in the bastard’s understanding expression.

Zoë hunched her shoulder at me in lazy apology. For being part of a conspiracy? Or for just providing unconditional protection?

The bastards were playing a game with me. Ken McGuire had changed their story on the spur of the moment. Because he could. He had that power. He just had to call round the group with the amended version. The revised consensus became the new truth.

Where was Magda?

Where was Boon Paterson?

Did they connect?

Slamming Ken McGuire’s composure had been gratifying, but self-indulgent. Now I was going to pay for it. Because he was going to use his influence to get Inspector Morgan to cripple me. I was going to have to do something fast. To either find something concrete I could take to Jack Galbraith to get the investigation sanctioned, or to convince myself that I had been pursuing phantoms. What I didn’t have was time.

Trevor Vaughan was their soft spot. I needed to brace him hard. But they knew that he was their weakness; the defensive block would be in place. I had to try to persuade them that it was no longer required.

I found the Evans family builders team at work on a loft conversion in Dinas. Three men crammed into the cab of a white Ford Transit van drinking tea from thermos flasks. They stared at me as I approached. Paul in the passenger’s seat, with a skinny guy wedged between him and the driver, who shared the family likeness, older, but a little more hair, and marginally less bulk.

The driver got out of the van. I held up my warrant card and introduced myself pleasantly.

‘I know who you are. What do you want?’ he asked truculently.

‘I want to speak to Paul,’ I said, nodding towards the van.

‘I’m his father. He’s got nothing to say to you.’

‘It’s important.’

‘You’re wasting our time.’

‘I’m trying to help Paul.’

He shook his head. ‘Paul’s done nothing to need your help. So why don’t you just piss off now and leave us alone.’

‘I disagree.’ I took his sleeve between my fingers. The move surprised him, but he let me lead him away from the van. I lowered my voice. ‘It’s psychology, Mr Evans. Perception. It’s unfair, but it’s the way the world rolls.’

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