About the Book

DS Glyn Capaldi is in hospital recuperating from concussion and the after-effects of a car crash.

But, worse than that, a young woman is dead. She was the passenger in the car, whom he was bringing in for questioning following a night operation in a remote rural location.

Glyn is initially riven with guilt and self-recrimination. Until he starts to question the possibility that it may not have been an accident. But, if not, who had been the target? Had he made an enemy capable of achieving that level of planning and implementation? Or, if not him, what could a young woman have possibly done in her short country life to warrant that degree of retribution?

Glyn, on sick leave, has time on his hands to explore the background to these questions, and, in doing so, confronts a conspiracy that envelops arson, torture, blackmail, and leaves a clutter of bodies that further muddy the already murky waters.

EWART HUTTON
Wild People

Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Ewart Hutton 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014.

Cover design © www.blacksheep-uk.com

Ewart Hutton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007391196

Ebook Edition © March 2014 ISBN: 9780007507511

Version: 2015-03-05

Dedication

For all the scattered ones – family and friends.

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Copyright

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 Dust Settles

About the Author

Also by Ewart Hutton

About the Publisher

1

I was bad juju again. But this time they had learned from experience, and had tucked me away out of sight. Unlike the previous fiasco in Cardiff, when they tried to pull a PR trick and highlight me as a hero in an attempt to deflect the mess that had really gone down. No, this time they knew better. This time they treated me like the crazy uncle in the attic, and used the equivalent of nine-inch coach bolts and a heavy-duty plank to keep me secure behind the door.

I didn’t care, because this time I had real injuries.

The medicos were mostly concerned about the after-effects of the concussion that had knocked me out. I wasn’t, because that was nothing more than clinical record by the time I surfaced from it. The real bitch for me was the cracked ribs. Especially since the fuckers had only just started to heal after the Evie Salmon investigation. The contusions didn’t help either. The fact that my face looked like a twisted biochemist was trying to cross a yellow tomato with an aubergine. With stubble, as it hurt too much to shave.

They had shipped me off to a specialist hospital in north Shropshire. I only found out later that I was in a secure and private wing that they kept reserved for damaged cops and high-echelon gangsters who had been mysteriously injured in the course of turning Queen’s evidence.

I was hurting.

And as I started to adjust to it and come to terms with the physical side of the pain, the emotional trauma took over. But no one would tell me anything. They shushed me and said I needed to reserve all my mental strength for the recovery process. But even in a tight, shut-down place like that I was picking up the broad brushstrokes through a kind of osmosis.

Something terrible had happened.

I had quickly checked out the fundamentals. I still had my arms and my legs, my cock and my balls, and could move the parts that were meant to be moved. I could still remember that a tangent was the product of the opposite over the adjacent, and my date of birth. So it wasn’t me.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out after that. Although I was still refusing to accept it.

Until I had to.

Two days into it and they deemed me fit enough to receive a visitor.

DCI Bryn Jones knocked diffidently and shuffled his big bulk uncertainly into the room. It was crepuscular, the blinds were drawn, and I could tell that he wasn’t ready to be sure that he had the right occupant. Until he started to adjust to the light and his expression screwed-over involuntarily at the sight of my face.

I shuffled to sit up. He gestured for me not to bother. It was the signal I had been testing for. This was unofficial. He was on his own.

‘It’s a stupid question, but are you okay?’ His exploratory smile didn’t mask his concern.

I nodded lumpily, keeping the movement within the safe parameters I now knew to work to. ‘Thanks for coming.’

‘Everyone in Carmarthen sends their best,’ he lied.

‘Will DCS Galbraith be coming?’

He knew what I was asking. ‘Not yet,’ he said softly.

He had answered my question. I had to accept it then. I was a Cop Who Had Killed a Girl.

I was Bad Karma.

‘They haven’t told you?’ he probed.

I shook my head gingerly.

‘It would have been instantaneous.’

The suppressed knowledge crashed to the surface. And there was no relief in the acceptance. ‘Tell me about her, Bryn.’

‘What do you know?’

‘Her name was Josie.’

He shook his head gently. ‘Jessie.’

Fuck. I felt the tears rise. I had killed her, and I hadn’t even got her name right.

‘Jessie Bullock.’

‘What age?’ I asked, dreading the answer.

‘Nearly eighteen.’

My multicoloured face collapsed.

He looked miserable as the messenger. ‘Don’t blame yourself. It was an accident. We’re all sure there’s nothing you could have done about it.’ He paused, waiting for me. I stayed silent. ‘What do you remember?’

I lay there, looking up at the grid of ceiling tiles, but knowing that I would have to relinquish the numbness I had previously found there. ‘I’ve been in car crashes before. There’s usually an instant when you recognize the inevitability of it, and time locks down, and everything shunts on towards the moment.’ I shut my eyes and went back to it again. ‘But not this time. There was no build-up, Bryn. No recognition that we’d just entered an event. This was like suddenly finding yourself blindfolded and taking off in a rocket that you didn’t even know you were travelling in. There was no lead-up sequence of things starting to go wrong. It was as sudden as that.’

He nodded. ‘They say that your seat belt saved your life.’

‘Why didn’t hers?’

His expression saddened. ‘She wasn’t wearing one. They found her outside the car. She had been thrown. Her neck was broken.’

I shook my head. I looked at him intently. ‘She had her seat belt on, Bryn.’ It wasn’t meant to be a plea, but it came out like one.

‘Put your seat belt on.’

After Bryn had gone I went back to that night in the car park in the woods in the rain. The girl had been pulled. But they had already fucked up. They had been too eager. Broken out of cover too soon. We were standing around in the drizzle, heavy drips coming off the trees, while they reorganized themselves. They were going to have to go chasing into the woods now, relying on blind luck. This was bullshit. I wanted out of there. I offered to take the girl off their hands and drive her back to the police house in Dinas.

Why hadn’t I got to know something about her? Concentrated, made more of an effort. Instead of just using her as a ticket out of that mess.

‘Here’s how it’s going to go down,’ I told her as I led her back to my car. Knowing better than to hold her. But poised, ready to grab her above the elbows if she made any move to run. ‘I’m going to drive you to Dinas. There will be a woman police officer there to look after you’ – I avoided using the word process – ‘until we bring the others in, and then you’ll all be taken to either Aberystwyth or Newtown.’

‘How are you going to do that?’ she asked.

And that was the only time I really saw her. I looked down at her then. In the pale second-hand gleam of a headlight reflecting off a car’s side window. A wan teenager with a sharp nose and a curled wisp of damp hair dangling over her forehead under the hooded top. Curiosity framed in her expression.

‘Do what?’

‘How do you know there are others to bring in?’

‘Are you saying you were on your own out there?’

‘I’m not saying anything.’ We had passed out of the light and I couldn’t make out her face any more, but from her tone I got the impression that she wasn’t being cute. Simply matter-of-fact. Saying it as it came to her. Knowing that it was up to us to do the work.

She also hadn’t seemed concerned. This only came back to me now. She had just been arrested, but she showed no sign of anxiety. No nervous bravado reaction, no fear, only curiosity.

I stopped at my car and opened the rear door for her. Another opportunity missed. I could have used the interior light to study her. But I didn’t, I used it to make sure she fastened her seat belt.

‘Put your seat belt on,’ I instructed, and she complied.

I flashed on the ways I could have fucked up. But I wouldn’t have driven too fast on that road. I didn’t know it well enough. And it was dark, and it was one of those rains that filmed the windscreen. I would have been extra careful.

‘I’m Glyn Capaldi. What’s your name?’ I asked into the rear as we drove away.

‘Josie.’ I thought she had said Josie.

‘You don’t strike me as a thief, Josie,’ I said, my eyes on the rear-view mirror, my tone telling her that I wasn’t being mean, letting her know that I was prepared to listen if she wanted to talk.

She stayed silent.

And she remained silent. The radio turned right down to velvet static, only the windscreen wipers and the wet tyre hiss as a backdrop. I would have heard it. I was sure of it. One of the few things I was certain of. At no time did I hear even the faintest hint of her seat belt being unbuckled.

I wasn’t used to this road, but I had driven it enough times to know about the bend. To treat it with respect. I had approached it with anticipation, doing all the right things, dropping down to third gear, braking evenly, starting the turn.

And then the car had stopped turning. A huge jolt, which I later realized must have been the offside front wheel hitting a rock on the verge after the tyre had blown. Then take-off.

Did she scream?

Am I going back into a voided memory and inventing that?

But her seat belt was on. And the rear door was locked.

How could they have found her outside the car?

Could I have missed anything in the build-up?

Emrys Hughes had called me. He was the local uniform sergeant, and acted as if Dinas had been his patch ever since his ancestors had crawled out of the sea complete with gills, Stalin moustache and truncheon. I could understand that he would have mightily resented it when my boss DCS Jack Galbraith had decreed that he was going to be sharing his demesne with me. I could even sympathize. Although empathy didn’t stop me from rubbing his nose in it from time to time. Sparking up Emrys Hughes had been one of the pastimes that helped to ease my way through a long Mid Wales winter.

‘Morning, Glyn.’ His tone was cheerful and friendly, and I was immediately wary. His usual greeting was ‘Fuck you, Capaldi.’

‘Emrys.’

‘I was wondering how busy you are.’

I was at my desk in Unit 13 Hen Felin Caravan Park, which doubled up as my office and approximation of a home. I didn’t have to look anything up to know that my caseload comprised a con couple, male and female, who were claiming to be from Social Services and targeting pensioners, and an outfit who were knocking off touring caravans. On the computer screen I had the latest swatch of missing person reports. Customers of varied form and function whose last-known coordinates made it possible that they could have been heading into these latitudes. I had a female Latvian student, a middle-aged Turkish Cypriot businessman, and a dyke from Brighton with a completely shaven head, including eyebrows, who was described as bipolar.

‘Snowed under,’ I told him.

‘Good.’ The bastard hadn’t even allowed my reply to register on his consciousness. ‘So how would you feel about helping make up the manpower on a stakeout that Inspector Morgan has asked me to organize?’

In the normal course of events I would have told him straight out where to stick his stakeout. But Jack Galbraith had recently instructed me to mend my bridges with the local force, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was responsible for alienating them in the first place by dumping me in Dinas to act as his command outpost in the empty quarter. Get onto sweetheart terms, he had told me, just in case I ever needed the back-up, because, in the current state of the relationship, any emergency call from me would have most of them reaching for the cudgels so that they could have their go at me before the opposition bagged all the fun.

Which meant that I now had to add finesse to my avoidance tactics. I sucked in a deep doubtful breath. ‘It’s looking like my diary’s pretty stuffed-up here.’

‘You’ll be free on this night.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because Inspector Morgan’s already cleared it with DCS Galbraith.’ I heard the smug chuckle spread down the line.

I checked my annoyance. He’d been playing with me, it was already a done deal. ‘What’s the operation?’ I asked.

His voice dropped low. ‘You’ll find out on the night. We’re keeping this close to our chest. A need-to-know basis, we don’t want the targets getting wind of it.’ Jesus, he was taking this way too seriously. I’ll bet he was even having Special Forces dreams.

I looked out of the caravan’s window. We were having a run of good early summer weather. The tops of the exposed boulders in the low-running river were bleached dry and streaked with wagtail guano, the deep green leaves on the alders that fringed the bank were a celebration of chlorophyll, and the sky thrummed blue with small groups of puffy prancing white clouds. I just knew that it was going to end up raining on the night.

I called Huw Davies, a local uniform cop I had made friends with. Huw kept away from the politics and the backbiting, but was an astute enough observer to be able to go to for an overview. ‘Have you got any information about a stakeout operation that Inspector Morgan’s corralled me into?’

He chuckled. ‘You too?’

‘It’s supposed to be a secret.’

‘Oh, it is, everyone that’s been told has been made to promise not to tell anyone else.’

‘Okay, so it’s a golf club locker room kind of secret?’ I ventured.

‘That’s right.’

‘So how come no one has made me promise not to tell?’

He laughed. ‘Because no one talks to you.’

‘I promise not to tell anyone, Huw.’

‘Have you heard of the Monks’ Trail?’

‘Vaguely. Remind me.’

‘It’s a long-distance footpath that starts near the village of Llandewi. There’s a purpose-built car park in the woods at the beginning of the trail. That’s where the problem is. Some of the cars that have been left there have been vandalized and broken into while their owners have been off hiking or mountain biking. Certain local worthies have got it into their heads that this is bad for tourism, ergo their businesses, and have bent Inspector Morgan’s ear.’

‘We’re gathering all this manpower and going on a stakeout for vandals?’ I let him hear my amazement.

‘Correct.’

‘There’s something quite endearingly reassuring about this, Huw. That this is the extent of major crime in the area. But is it really worth the time and the effort?’

‘Feral youth.’ I heard his amusement.

‘What?’

‘They’ve somehow fixed on the notion that it’s down to gangs of wild drug- and booze-fuelled kids from Swansea or Liverpool driving in to target our community and heading back with their bags full of swag.’

‘I take it you’re not sharing this apocalyptic vision?’

‘I think we’d have come across a bit more noise and a lot more damage. And they’re not taking our virgins with them.’

‘Have you got anyone in mind for it?’

‘I could probably point to a couple of people, but I’m keeping my head down. I don’t want to be seen as the one who pissed on Inspector Morgan’s crusade.’

I registered the warning.

Feral youth?

Back in my hospital bed I tried to square that with what little I remembered of Jessie Bullock. I couldn’t. No snarls, no attitude, not even a visible piercing.

I had been prescient. It did rain on the night.

Those of us who weren’t already in their assigned places assembled in a hut that was shared between the local Boy Scout troop and the Women’s Institute, as evidenced by the rope knot posters and a tea-making roster on the walls. The floors creaked, and I imagined the memories locked into the fabric, a combination of suppressed unfocused juvenile lusts and home-made scones and jam.

Everyone was in mufti, and most of them had somehow managed to over-emphasize the fact that they were out of uniform by making their outfits look like disguises. A room full of charged and eager hyper-civilians.

Morgan briefed us from the raised dais. I had only ever seen him in uniform before, a stiff and disapproving man with a widow’s peak over a crinkled washboard forehead. Tonight he looked incongruous in a pale blue anorak and a knitted ski cap, his voice raised to overcompensate for the lack of visible rank badges.

He ran us through it. Two vehicles had been planted in the car park to act as honey pots, a swanked-up BMW 3 Series coupé, and a Subaru Impreza. Two surveillance vehicles were already in place, a camper van at the far end, and a Ford Transit covering the entrance, which could also double up as a blockade vehicle if the bad guys attempted to leave the car park in a hurry.

The police house in Dinas was going to be used as a reception and holding area, from where the detained suspects would be distributed to the larger centres.

The rest of us were assigned to roadside stations where we would park out of sight and cover all the routes leading to the car park. If any suspicious vehicle went past us we were to call it in to Morgan. But we were to wait for his signal before we moved.

‘Any questions?’ Morgan asked, his wrist crooked in front of his face as he made a big deal of checking his watch.

I put my hand up. I knew I should have kept quiet, but I couldn’t help it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Huw Davies give me a significant look.

‘Sergeant Capaldi?’

‘It’s the bait vehicles, Sir.’

‘What about them?’

‘Aren’t they a bit …’ I searched for a nice way to put it. ‘Aren’t they kind of out of place?’

‘What’s your point?’

‘It’s just that I can’t imagine the kind of people who would normally drive that type of car to be the sort who would leave it in the middle of the countryside while they go off for a long healthy hike.’

He smiled nastily. ‘You’re probably right, but the people we’re targeting tonight don’t know that.’

‘Sir?’

‘They’re only interested in the bling, Sergeant. They don’t care what motivates people to come out here. That’s why we’ve carefully chosen these particular cars.’ He smiled superciliously. ‘I think you’ll find that they’re going to be more interested in the Subaru or the BMW than any old Land Rover or Vauxhall Corsa we could have left in there with a no-nukes sticker on it.’ He was rewarded by an all-round chuckle.

‘Yes, Sir.’ I bowed out.

The teams paired up preparatory to leaving. I was left conspicuously on my own.

I sat in my car in my allocated slot in the dark and listened to the carillon of heavy drips on the roof from the tree canopy, with the occasional heavier note of dislodged beech mast. The radio was turned down to low static with the odd interference jump.

This was bullshit, I told myself again.

‘Go, go, go!’ Morgan’s voice whipped out. And, despite my deep-seated cynicism, I felt the familiar lurch of adrenalin and excitement kicking in as I reached out to start my car.

There were two other cars fishtailing down the access road to the car park in front of me. I pulled up at the entrance and tried to make sense of it. The far end of the car park was illuminated by headlights which were focused on the surveillance team’s camper van. The two honeypot vehicles were off to the side, still in the dark, and being ignored. On the other side was the dark hulk of an abandoned and burnt-out car that ruin had made unrecognizable.

I got out and slipped a high-visibility police raincoat on. I walked across the car park until I caught up with a straggler on the edge of the group that was concentrated around the camper van. A loose semi-circle of people had formed, and I could make out Emrys Hughes and Inspector Morgan in the midst of it.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘We’ve caught a kid,’ he replied breathlessly, still meshed up in the excitement of the chase.

‘What about the rest of them?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

I moved towards the semi-circle in time to catch Morgan saying, ‘… spread out and move into the woods.’ My heart sank.

He caught sight of my hi-viz jacket and scowled at me furiously. ‘I didn’t give any orders about breaking out of cover, Sergeant Capaldi.’

I looked at the floodlit mêlée that had been created, but thought better than to remark on it. ‘I’m sorry, Sir. I just thought we had a result.’

‘We got one of the little buggers,’ Emrys Hughes chimed in gleefully.

I made a point of looking round significantly. ‘Have we got their vehicle trapped in here, Sir?’

‘They’ve parked somewhere else,’ Morgan announced crossly. ‘They didn’t drive in, they came down out of the woods.’

I turned to Emrys. ‘How many were there?’

‘Don’t know yet. We caught this one trying the handle on the surveillance vehicle.’

‘She was a scout,’ Morgan added his wisdom, ‘the rest have scattered. We’re going to have to go into the woods after them.’

‘They’re city kids, they won’t know how to handle it in there, they’ll all be terrified of the dark,’ Emrys raised his voice reassuringly as some of the faces around him began to look distinctly unenthusiastic.

I saw her for the first time then, close to the camper van, hemmed in by a couple of big cops, her back to me, hooded top up. A plan formed. A route out of this debacle.

‘Why don’t I take this one back to Dinas, Sir? Out of your way.’ I shrugged apologetically. ‘Sorry about the coat. I’m a bit too bright for a chase. But I can free your hands up.’

He thought about it. ‘Okay,’ he agreed reluctantly, ‘but I want you back here after.’

‘Of course, Sir.’ I moved away from him and towards Jessie.

Only now I knew that I wasn’t going to make it back, and I was about to lead her on her death march.

It took two more days before Jack Galbraith turned up at the hospital. My relief was mixed. On the one hand his presence meant that I was probably in the clear. He wouldn’t have risked the taint by association otherwise. On the other was the still nagging feeling that I might not deserve to be. Jessie Bullock was dead after all.

I had also started to speculate on another more radical scenario.

He strode in with Bryn Jones in tow. I sat up straighter in bed. They had opened the blinds by now, the room was lighter. He took his time scrutinizing me. ‘Jesus, Capaldi, you look like someone stuck your head in a cement mixer.’

I had checked the mirror. The bruising on my face had faded down to shades of apricot and plum. ‘It’s getting better, Sir.’

He sat down and made a big show of staring at the bedside table. ‘Where are the fucking grapes?’

‘I think you’re meant to bring them, Sir.’

He flashed a grin at Bryn Jones. ‘I reckon he’s on the mend.’ He turned back to me, his face serious. ‘Who’s been to see you?’

I nodded towards Bryn. ‘DCI Jones. And my friend Graham Mackay brought my mother up from Cardiff.’

‘They haven’t let the press in?’

‘No, Sir.’

‘Good. They’ve been fucking pestering me. Bastards.’ He grunted and returned to his original tack. ‘Has Inspector Morgan been?’

‘No, Sir.’

He scowled. ‘Sanctimonious fucking hypocrite. The least he could have done was come and see how you were getting on. A thank you might also have been appropriate. If it wasn’t for his chicken-shit operation, that poor girl would still be alive.’

‘Did they catch anyone else that night?’

Jack Galbraith batted the question on to Bryn, who shook his head. ‘No, they chased around for hours. Half of his men ended up getting lost.’

‘Inspector Morgan will not be repeating the operation,’ Jack Galbraith pronounced.

‘What more do we know about Jessie Bullock?’ I asked.

He opened a thin file folder he had been holding. ‘She’s local. She lived with her mother at the Home Farm of a big estate called Plas Coch up the hill above the car park. They run it as some kind of religious retreat.’

‘It’s strictly secular, from what I heard,’ Bryn corrected.

‘Whatever.’ Jack Galbraith shrugged loosely. ‘She had finished school and was intending to go to university in the autumn.’

I looked at Bryn. ‘Could they have charged her with anything?’

‘I’ve talked to some of the people who were there that night. They started mouthing off about an attempted B & E, but when I got them calmed down, all it appears she did was touch the door handle on the camper van. She may have been trying to open it, or she may have been totally innocent. We’ll never know now because the stupid bastards over-reacted.’

‘What a fucking waste,’ Jack Galbraith exclaimed. He fluttered the file folder at me. ‘Nothing’s official yet, so don’t celebrate too prematurely, but it’s looking like you’re going to be exonerated. There’s still the coroner’s inquest to get through, and we’re setting up an internal enquiry, but everything I’ve looked at is saying it was an unavoidable accident.’

‘Your offside front tyre blew on the bend, which was the worst possible place for it to happen,’ Bryn took over the story. ‘You lost your steering, it would have been impossible to correct it once it started to go. The car took off, cleared a brook beside the road, hit the ground and turned over a couple of times. It looks like Jessie was thrown clear on the first impact.’

‘Do they know what caused the puncture?’ I needed the answer to this question for my alternative line of enquiry.

He shook his head. ‘The tyre shredded. There was no way of piecing it back together to find out. Whatever it was, it caused it to blow big time. The theories are either a sharp stone on the carriageway, or a latent fault in the tyre.’

Jack Galbraith came back in. ‘You’re fucking lucky, Capaldi, your seat belt saved you.’

‘I know, Sir.’

‘What’s the long face for then?’

‘She was wearing her seat belt, Sir. I saw her put it on. And the rear door was locked.’

He exchanged a look with Bryn. ‘And we believe you, but something must have happened to change that. Something that was out of your hands.’

‘All you can tell the coroner is what you know,’ Bryn said gently.

‘How much longer have you got in here?’ Jack Galbraith changed the subject.

‘A few more days of observation, unless I have some kind of a relapse.’

‘We’re putting you on sick leave,’ Bryn announced.

‘You can come back to the bright lights of Carmarthen and lick your wounds. We’ll find you some sort of accommodation,’ Jack Galbraith offered magnanimously.

I thought about my alternative line of enquiry. ‘Thank you, Sir. Would it be okay to go to Cardiff? I’ve got family there.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘Cardiff is still out of bounds.’

‘Even though I’ll be off active duty, Sir?’

‘That makes you even more vulnerable. It’s for your own good. There are a lot of people there who are still clutching sore balls because of you, and would just love to truly fuck you up.’

I nodded, accepting his protective wisdom. ‘Then, if it’s all right with you, I’ll stay in Dinas, Sir.’

He frowned in surprise. ‘Jesus, they didn’t say anything about it affecting your brain.’

‘I thought you were desperate to get out of there?’ Bryn asked, also surprised.

I didn’t want to tell them the real reason. That I didn’t want Jack Galbraith being close enough to make me nervous while I considered the alternatives to the official line. ‘I think I want to stay where it’s quiet for a while,’ I explained meekly instead.

They exchanged another look, managing to hide most of their shared incredulity. They both got up. ‘Just don’t talk to any reporters, Capaldi. Not until this thing has been cleared away.’

‘I won’t, Sir.’

I waited until they had got to the door. ‘Sir …’

They both turned.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking. Do you think that there’s any possibility that it could have been a deliberate set-up? That it wasn’t an accident?’

I kept it casual, but I needed to know if there was anyone else pursuing this line.

2

The coincidences seemed to be just too loaded.

I had been lying there for days wallowing in guilt and anguish until something in the kick-ass side of my brain took over and said, Wait a minute, stop playing the helpless victim and look at this in another light. A tyre bursts on you, bad news, but it happens. Invariably you pull over to the side of the road, fix the bastard and get your hands dirty. But when the one crucial tyre explodes on a wet surface, at the very worst point on a killer bend and you go flying off the road, you have to start questioning the likelihood of all those factors coming into conjunction without perhaps a little assistance.

Jack Galbraith turned back to face me. ‘We thought about that.’

‘We checked it out. It was definitely an accident,’ Bryn amplified.

‘No disrespect, Capaldi, but who would go to all that fucking effort to waste you?’

Who indeed?

I racked my brains for people with grudges. Sadly there were plenty of takers. I then factored in the possession of enough intelligence and resources to have come up with a scheme like this that had left no trace, and that narrowed the field down quite considerably. To zero in fact. I could think of no fiendish Professor Moriarty type who I had crossed badly enough in my past.

But it was occupying me. Keeping my brain engaged. And, more importantly, deflecting my sense of guilt. If someone else had caused this, I could concentrate on retribution rather than morbidity. I could act rather than mope. I was a cop after all. I could use my métier to find out who had been behind it.

I started by putting a call in to Kevin Fletcher in Cardiff. I had been his mentor when he had first joined the force. We had worked together when we had both been detective sergeants, although he had since risen to the rank of detective chief inspector, while I remained a DS, with the added distinction of now being a disgraced emissary in the boondocks. We didn’t like each other these days, but I reckoned that he owed me one for unintentionally giving his career another upward shunt recently.

‘Glyn!’ His tone was ebullient.

‘Hi, Kevin, can you talk, or is this a bad time?’

‘Absolutely no problemo.’ His voice was raised over a background of clinking glasses and conversations. I could picture him in his element, networking with the movers and the sharks in a swanky boozer. His tone dropped to sympathetic. ‘Are you okay? We heard about the accident. Fucking shame.’

‘It’s a terrible thing. And thanks, I’m getting better, but I need a favour, Kevin.’

The brief silence was like a security grille crashing into place. ‘And I’d love to have you back here working for me, don’t get me wrong. Like a shot, if the decision was mine to make. But it’s a political thing.’ In the background I heard a couple of his cronies laugh, and I wondered what gesture he’d just flashed them. ‘You’re still a raw wound down here. The head honchos wouldn’t consider it.’

I gritted my teeth to cover my gag reaction at all that faux sincerity, and tried to keep my voice sunny. ‘I’m not looking for a transfer, only some information.’

He chuckled benignly. ‘That I can do, if I’m able.’

‘Can you ask around discreetly to see if there’s any talk out there about anyone having a special interest in me.’

‘Special interest?’ His voice was alert now.

‘A big chip on their shoulder. It might be someone I put away, or it might be a more tenuous connection. Perhaps someone I put inside has died in the nick, and a relative might be holding me responsible.’

‘As in revenge?’

‘Something like that.’

He sewed the pieces together. ‘You think the accident might not have been an accident?’

‘I’d just like to reassure myself.’

‘Leave it with me.’

Give him credit, he acted quickly. Pity he didn’t do it in my interest.

‘Capaldi!’

‘Sir?’ As soon as I saw Jack Galbraith’s number come up on the caller display I knew that Fletcher had finked on me.

‘A little bird has told me that you are about to take off on a flight of fucking fantasy.’

‘I just thought I’d check out the opposition, Sir. There are some twisted people out there.’

His voice rose. ‘And I told you we already had.’

I held the phone away from me and ate shit. ‘Yes, Sir.’

‘The possibility has been checked and discounted.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Get this, Capaldi, you are currently non-operational. So you are either going to be on sick leave getting up to whatever you do with your sheep or your fucking elks or whatever else you use to relax with up there, or I will haul you back to Carmarthen and have you collating endless reams of useless shit. Understood?’

‘I understand, Sir.’

Contacting Fletcher had been a calculated risk. But, even if he hadn’t shafted me, I had always known that probably, and sooner rather than later, I was going to have to take this thing underground.

Which is why I declined the offer of a police driver to take me home and asked Mackay to come for me instead. Without my mother this time.

They had allowed me to take light exercise for the last couple of days, so although I was still stiff, I wasn’t too woozy on my feet by the time he came to fetch me. And, now that it had arrived, my discharge wasn’t the huge relief I had been anticipating, because, in a way, it felt like leaving sanctuary. Back out into the big world where no one gave a shit what the exonerating evidence said. I was a cop and I had crashed a car and killed a young woman coming into her prime, who had been entrusted to my care. Blame accrued.

You could never call Mackay a ray of sunshine, he had too much black history for that, but he certainly brought freshness back into my life, like the proximity of running water on a very hot day. My institutionalized days had turned me stale.

Mackay and I went back a long way, to childhood holidays in Scotland, where his family was entwined into the Capaldi clan there. I had been enraptured by the wild Mackay brothers, and he and I had become close friends despite the geography that separated us. Our life paths diverged when I joined the police force in Cardiff, and he went into the army. After that, whenever we did get together, big trouble inevitably seemed to flare up on our periphery, and I discovered I had lost my appetite for mayhem. Our nadir came when he took up with my ex-wife Gina. Now she had dropped him through the trapdoor in favour of a younger Australian version, he had retired from the SAS, and we had reconnected, with him taking on the self-appointed role of my protector.

He still carried that baby face that was so redolent of Glasgow, although there were now a few crinkles around the corners of his eyes. He ran initiative training courses for corporate executives from his farmhouse in Herefordshire, and this occupation was reflected in his lean fitness, the weathered face, and bleached sandy hair that he wore short.

I climbed into his familiar old Range Rover while he put my bag in the rear. He caught me looking at my face in the vanity mirror as he climbed into the front seat. It was improving. Now it just looked like an accident involving some suspect tanning products.

‘Even with the sympathy vote I still wouldn’t fancy you.’ He grinned.

‘At least I don’t look like a fucking vegetable hotpot any more.’

‘Try an eye-patch and a sling. The damaged look brings out the need to nurture in the ladies.’

‘Until they find out the whole story.’

His smile shifted and he dropped into a slow sympathetic nod. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Confused.’ He waited me out. I gave him a wan smile. ‘I’ve been repaired. They’ve let me out to catch up with my life again. But all that’s been changed. There’s a dead girl, Mac, who’s stopped going anywhere.’

‘But it’s not your fault.’

‘People keep telling me that.’

‘Accidents happen, Glyn.’

‘This may not have been one.’

He tried to keep his expression blank, but I saw this hit home. He knew me well enough by now not to probe. I would tell him when I was ready. Or not.

He started the car and looked across at me, his smile trying to lift me out of the moment. ‘Home James and don’t spare the horses?’

‘Can we go the long way round?’

He frowned, he didn’t have to ask where. ‘Are you sure you’re ready for it?’

‘I’m not being morbid. There are things I’ve got to check out. And I’d like you to be there. I’d appreciate your overview.’

‘It’s a long detour. Are you sure you don’t want to go straight home?’

I smiled at his concern. ‘Home’s a fucking caravan, Mac. It can keep. It’s not as if it’s going to have sprouted comfort and high style in my absence.’

‘At the risk of too much repetition, you can always come back with me. You’re meant to be on sick leave after all.’

I shook my head. ‘Thanks, Mac,’ I said gratefully.

He shrugged but dropped the issue. I knew he wanted to keep me away from there. He thought it was in my best interest.

As far as I was concerned, my best interest lay in finding the equivalent of a hidden machine-gun nest up there.

Something tangible to blame.

We approached from Dinas, the opposite direction to the way I had been driving that night with Jessie. It was also daylight, and the weather was dry.

We had dropped down into a small level-bottomed valley. The road was a narrow two-lane affair that followed the curving profile along the foot of a low, steeply raking, rocky escarpment. The brook coming down off the watershed followed the same course on the other side of the road. The far side of the brook was marshy, tending into rough pasture and then rising slowly to conifer plantations on the side of the hills.

As we got closer to the fatal bend, Mackay slowed down, looking for somewhere to pull off the road.

‘Can you carry on and turn round and come back at it the way I would have been travelling?’ I asked him.

‘Sure.’

Driving in this direction we were on the inside of the bend, close to the face of the escarpment. As we rounded it slowly I looked over past Mackay at a small mound of dead flowers and soft toys on the opposite verge, another example of the kind of tacky public grief shrine that had entered the national psyche following the death of Princess Diana.

‘You going to be okay?’ he asked, seeing where I was looking.

I nodded. ‘Don’t worry, as far as I’m concerned that’s just a heap of shit. You’d think if people were really sincere about paying their respects they’d at least have the grace to get rid of the fucking supermarket packaging.’

‘Don’t let it get to you,’ he instructed, sensing my tension.

‘I won’t.’

He turned the car round. I concentrated on the approach. The brook was on my side of the road now, about a metre below us, and narrow here, reed-fringed, the peat in it giving it the slow slick look of dark oil as it coursed between rounded boulders.

I took it in. A road sign giving warning of a sharp bend. A sinuous inside curve to the road ahead before it turned sharply to disappear around a projection in the escarpment. I realized that I was holding my breath.

‘Take it at the speed you normally would,’ I told him.

My eyes flicked between the speedometer and the road as he dropped down to third gear and swept round. Just under thirty miles an hour. In the wet and the dark I would probably have been going slower. But still fast enough for take-off.

Mackay parked and we walked back to the bend. I tried to ignore the low pile of wilted flora in its cellophane and the forlorn sodden teddy bears.

A grouping of fresh striations on a hefty boulder in the verge showed us where the front offside wheel had made contact. This was the launch pad. I looked across the brook. The wreckage had been cleared up, but the ground was still scored and turned over in the places where my car had made its tumbling contact.

It had been quite a leap.

‘You’re not thinking of going over there, are you?’ Mackay asked, reading my mind.

‘We’ve come this far.’

‘I don’t think you should.’

‘Come on, Mac, don’t be such a fucking mother hen.’

‘There’s no sense in it.’

I looked at him pointedly. ‘You’re the first guy arriving on the scene. In your headlights you see my car over there, on its roof. You make an instant assumption. More people arrive, they see Jessie’s body thrown from the car, no front tyre, a mangled wheel, and that same assumption keeps trotting itself out. That assumption then turns into an explanation. Case closed.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

I pointed across the brook. ‘Everything’s been cleared away. There are no distractions left. So let’s take a fresh look.’

‘It wasn’t just an assumption, Glyn. You told me yourself, everything stacked up to it being an accident.’

I smiled at him. ‘That’s what was reported. Now it’s time to take our own look.’

I was stiffer than I thought. He had to help me down the bank and across the brook, both of us getting our feet wet in the process. I followed the pattern of the cartwheels my car had made in the soft ground, reaching the spot where it had finally come to rest. I looked off to the side. In the direction of where they had found Jessie. A shape I hadn’t seen from the road.

As I approached I saw that it was a small cairn. A recent pile of stones. I looked around for the source. This was all grass and sedge. These stones had to have been fetched from the brook. Someone had put effort into building a crude but sensitive memorial. The sight of it made my stomach lurch.

I was the one who had something to atone for and what had I done?

I’m starting now, Jessie, I’ll find out for you, I floated out a silent promise.

I looked back at the road, trying to visualize myself approaching on that dark wet night.

How could they have done it?

‘There were no signs of it being anything other than an accident, Glyn,’ Mackay, standing behind, reminded me softly, tuning into my thought process.

‘There wouldn’t be.’

‘Sorry?’

I turned to face him. ‘If it was done professionally, they wouldn’t leave any evidence.’

He pulled a face, torn between sympathy and frustration. ‘That’s a cop-out and you know it. The ultimate conspiracy theory fail-safe. Look, I know it’s natural to want to find an outside cause. But believe me, I’ve seen it before; trying to invent an absolving scenario is only going to fuck up the healing process.’

‘Help me then.’

‘How?’

‘Tell me that it couldn’t be done. Put your hand over your heart. Convince me that it’s impossible.’

He frowned. He knew I’d trapped him. ‘Anything’s possible,’ he admitted grudgingly.

‘So how would you have made this one happen?’

‘I wouldn’t. I’m a civilian now.’

‘Humour me, Mac.’

He stared at me for a moment. Shook his head. He knew I wasn’t going to drop it. ‘That’s why you wanted me to bring you here?’

‘You’ve got the expertise.’

‘You can be a manipulative bastard, Glyn.’

‘I think someone deliberately hurt me, Mac. Killed that girl. I think they might have been trying to kill me.’

He looked as if he was about to protest, but dropped it. He started to look round, and then shifted his eyes sharply onto mine. ‘This is an invention. You have to understand that. This is no kind of truth. I’m spinning you a fairy tale here. All we’re doing is entering the land of possibility.’

I gave him the acknowledgement his expression was looking for.

He turned slowly, taking in the panorama, gradually increasing his circle. I shuffled along beside him, keeping quiet, respecting his concentration. He took off at a tangent, aiming for a small stand of Scots pine at a point where the ground started to rise up to the denser conifer plantations. I followed him. From time to time he paused to take a bearing on the bend.

He stopped at the pine trees and sighted a line back the way we had come. ‘They could have set up here.’

‘They?’

‘It would need two of them.’ He held up a hand to stop me asking any more questions and dropped into a crouch to investigate a small mossy mound between two of the pine trees. I stood behind him and tried to work it out for myself as he slowly stroked and parted the moss and grass, dipping his nose down from time to time and sniffing deeply.

From here we were about a hundred metres away from the road. My car would have been directly side-on when it reached the apex of the bend and the tyre blew. Mackay was obviously working on some kind of sniper theory rather than something having been planted on the road.

He lay down in a prone rifleman’s position and sighted along an imaginary barrel. ‘This would have been the optimum position.’

‘Did you find anything on the ground?’

He shook his head. ‘They’re not going to leave a casing behind. And it’s been too long, and this ground’s too springy to have retained the mark of anyone having lain here.’

‘What were you sniffing for?’

He shrugged. ‘Powder residue. You never know.’

‘You think it was a rifle?’

He looked up at me. ‘I don’t think anything. This is your story.’

‘Okay.’ I nodded, starting to run with it. ‘So I’m side-on to them when they fire. Is that to stop me seeing the muzzle flash?’

‘They’d have used a suppressor. They’d already have sighted-up with the laser, so they wouldn’t have to worry about you seeing that.’

‘Wouldn’t they have used a telescopic sight?’

‘Yes, a scope with a laser designator to set up the target initially. And the main reason they’d have set themselves up to the side here would be to make the target easier to hit.’

‘I’m presuming the target’s my front nearside tyre?’

He nodded. ‘The side wall of a tyre presents a better profile.’ But he was distracted. Still working through the mechanics of it. ‘The gun would have been pre-sighted and locked into position here with a tripod and clamps, ready to fire when you came along. There’s plenty of cover, it’s remote, no livestock, so the chances of anyone nosing around are scarce. They could even have set the gun up a few days before, camouflaged it and waited for the moment.’ He sighted along his imaginary barrel again. ‘The car’s always going to be slowing down for the bend, so its speed is broadly predictable. And over this short range they could accommodate variable wind speeds and directions.’

Something he had said before suddenly made sense. ‘They needed two people to set the tyre up as a target?’

‘Right. One here tuning the rifle and the other one driving a car, probably with a paint stripe on the tyre to get the exact mark. On a quiet road like this they could drive the simulation target backwards and forwards until they were sure they’d got it right. Then lock the thing down so that when it’s fired it’s always going to hit the same place.’

‘It sounds easy.’

He smiled. ‘Everything is in fairy tales.’

‘Would they have used an exploding bullet?’

He shook his head and tried not to make his smile too superior. ‘Too dangerous, even in fairy tales, and even if you could get hold of one. Probably a hollow-cavity bullet. It would fragment on impact, shredding the tyre, and making it virtually impossible to trace in this sort of terrain.’

Even if anyone had been looking. Which they hadn’t. It had been designated as an accident, not a crime scene.

He got up slowly, brushing dry grass and pine needles off himself. He was gazing back towards the road, his face distracted again.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I could be completely wrong, of course; they could have used the cobalt zirconium ray.’

‘What’s that?’ I asked eagerly.

He turned his grin on me. ‘Another myth I just invented. That’s what I need you to hold on to. This is a story, not an explanation.’

I nodded my acceptance. But both of us knew I was going to totally disregard his rider.

The pied wagtail I had anthropomorphized into my special little friend wasn’t around when we got back to Unit 13. I felt an irrational twinge of sadness that he wasn’t there to welcome me home. I was used to him bobbing around on the rocks in the river outside the large rear window of my caravan, although, if I was being honest, I had to admit I was never sure that I was seeing the same bird every time.

Mackay wanted to fuss around making things comfortable for me. Much as I appreciated his friendship and kindness, I needed to be on my own to reflect on what he had told me. He left when I played up fatigue, mentioning that the drive, the fresh air and the emotion had taken its toll.

I took on board his disclaimer that it had only been a story, an invention. And okay the details might be totally wrong, but that didn’t matter. What was important was that he had demonstrated that it could have happened. Someone could have set out to shut me down and make it look like an accident.

But who and why? I came back to it again. Who, as Jack Galbraith had so succinctly put it, would go to all that fucking effort to waste me?

Were there other possibilities? Could someone have deliberately set out to target the girl? Or could it have been a random hit? But both of those scenarios seemed as unlikely and as implausible as someone trying to waste me.

Because, what could a teenage girl have done in her short country life to warrant that sort of terrible attention? And who would set up a random hit in an area so remote and deserted that they were more likely to end up assassinating an otter than a person. No, random shootings were a strictly urban feature. If someone was that sick and determined to take out a stranger in a car they would have set up their kit on a motorway overpass, or a crowded city street.

So, if it was specific and deliberate, that left me or the girl.

I reminded myself that Kevin Fletcher had never come back to reassure me that my name was not on a butcher’s order in Cardiff.

Had I been too quick to dismiss the possibility of a Professor Moriarty?

I set the mental sieve finer and went back over my past cases. I had been involved in a number of murder investigations that had resulted in prosecution and a subsequent life sentence for the perp. But why target me? I had always been part of a team. It had never come down to me being the one brilliant brain that had brought the bastards to justice. No convicted murderer had ever screamed, I’ll get you, Capaldi, across a shocked courtroom as they dragged him from the dock.

What about the ones I had booked who had died?

Two suicides, one on remand, one inside after sentencing, both of them clinically depressed junkies already well on their way down the dead-end road. One serial car thief who had received his moment of illumination in prison, when the sharpened end of a toothbrush had been rammed into his ear to let him know that he hadn’t been as hard as he had thought he was. The kiddie molester who had jumped off a railway bridge to get away from me just as the delayed 9.13 to Swansea was coming through.

And Nick Bessant. The pimp who a farmer had executed for desecrating his son and his daughter. The farmer I had led to Bessant’s lair in Cardiff, thinking I was doing something for justice and common humanity. Which was the reason that I was at this moment sitting in a cold, damp caravan in the middle of the boondocks looking out the window in the hope of seeing the return of a small fucking bird.

It was impossible to believe. No one could have mourned any of those trashed-up lives that much. Okay, they had mothers. But I didn’t think that love or tenderness could have been anywhere in the air at the moment they were being fucked into existence.

And even if one of them had someone who was carrying a torch for their memory, it was way too sophisticated for that world. If they had stooped to revenge it would have been boiled-down battery acid in the side of the face, or a bunch of hired scagheads with pickaxe handles. Something course and mean and demonstrative.

It was a jaundiced view, but I was feeling blue and bitter, and my excuse for it was twofold. First, someone had tried to kill me, and secondly, I now had to let these low-rent bastards back into my thought process again.

EDGAR FISKE!

The name crash-landed on my consciousness. A name I hadn’t even run past idle recollection in years. Edgar Fiske had once threatened to kill me.

But it had had nothing to do with me being a cop. When had it been? I racked my memory. But he was back in my head now, looming up too close to make out background details like time or place. A thin-faced young man with short curly sandy hair, freckles, and thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses actually quivering on the bridge of his nose as his anger boiled tears and flecks of spit out of him.

I am going to destroy you, Capaldi. I don’t care how fucking long it takes. One day you’re going to know what it’s like to die.

It was uncanny. I wasn’t even paraphrasing. They had come back to me after all these years. The very words he had used.

3

I reached for the phone. But it had been so long since I had called that I had to fetch my diary and look up the long number.

‘Pronto!’ A confident young girl’s voice.

I had two nieces. I hazarded a guess. ‘Graziella?’

‘Si.’ A hesitancy.

‘Ehi, e Zio Glyn da Galles.’

The receiver clattered down. I heard the receding cry, ‘Mama …’ as she ran away.

I had often wondered whether, if my parents had given me an Italian name, I might have made my home in my father’s old country, like my sister Paola. Something rolling like Giancarlo. Waving to all and sundry in my silk suit in the sun in the piazza sucking up spaghetti con vongole, instead of my single-syllable Brythonic moniker predestining me to grey skies and scrub-topped hills.

Paola lived in a village above San Remo with her husband Roberto, a plumber who hated me. I had never found a reason for that hatred, which both my sister and my mother, trying to keep extended family cracks smoothed over, told me I was imagining. The only thing I could pin it on was that I had once informed him in a spirit of bonhomie that Paola and I used to share a bath as children.

‘Naked!’ His reaction had surprised me.

And it should have warned me not to respond with a quip, that underwear only got in the way of soaping down the fundamentals.

Whatever it had been, Roberto had inculcated a terror of me in his children, so that Graziella’s reaction hadn’t come as a surprise.

‘Glyn!’ I don’t know whether it was the richness of her adopted language, but Paola managed to put a lot of expression into merely saying my name. Like anxiety and What the fuck are you calling for?

‘Hi, Paola, you all right?’

‘How’s Mum?’ she asked anxiously. As usual, she couldn’t imagine a call from me without an image of our mother face-first at the bottom of the stairs, or straining to hear the last hopeless echo of the defibrillator.

‘She’s fine.’

Even over the phone I felt her de-stress. ‘I was sorry to hear about the accident.’

‘Thanks, but I’m fine now.’

‘Mum says you’re on convalescent leave?’ She was probing. The worry being that I might be trying to swing some Mediterranean recuperation, and she was already preparing herself for Roberto’s reaction.

I put her out of her misery. ‘Do you remember a guy called Edgar Fiske?’

‘Edgar Fiske? What on earth brings him up?’

‘He was stalking you at teacher training college?’

She gave a small laugh. ‘Well, stalking is putting it a bit strong.’

‘That’s the word you used. When you came home once and told me about it. You were really upset, said you couldn’t say anything to Mum or Dad.’

‘Glyn, I don’t really remember that, and what’s it got to do with anything now?’

I had hoped for a more sinister recall from her, but I ploughed on anyway. ‘Colin Forbes, my friend from Splottlands?’

‘I remember Colin. What about him?’

‘We went over to Bath and sorted it out for you.’

‘Sorted what out?’ she asked, puzzled.

I felt that it was time to add a rider. ‘I was eighteen. I wasn’t very subtle in those days. My social skills weren’t too highly developed.’

‘Tell me about it,’ she chuckled. ‘But what did you sort out?’

‘Didn’t you ever wonder why he didn’t bother you again?’

‘I got a new boyfriend.’ She paused. ‘Are you trying to tell me something different?’

I winced at the crassness of the memory. Feeling the shame now in the retelling. ‘We boot-polished his private parts and took a Polaroid photograph and told him we’d post it on the student noticeboard if he didn’t leave you alone.’

‘Glyn!’ she screeched. ‘How could you? That was horrible.’

‘It worked,’ I protested righteously.

‘No it didn’t. Going out with a rugby player worked.’

I didn’t try to correct her. ‘Have you any idea where Edgar Fiske is now?’

‘Why? Are you going to apologize?’

I thought of the set-up in the Scots pine stand. ‘I think it may have gone past the time for an apology.’

‘I think you should. God, Glyn, that was such a horrible thing to do. Poor Edgar.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Edgar and his partner Michael are running a little gallery and tea room in Yeovil. You’ll find him in the telephone book.’

‘Edgar Fiske is gay?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Of course. That’s why he was pretending to be interested in me at college. He didn’t want the trainee PE teachers finding out and making his life a misery.’

A tea room in Yeovil? Suddenly it looked as though Edgar Fiske had lost his sting.

Okay, gay men could be vindictive too. But not usually if their life had settled into a comfortable and contented pattern, which would appear to be the case with Edgar Fiske.

Back to square one. With Edgar Fiske disposed of, there was really no one I could think of out there with a big enough grudge against me.

Was I going to have to consider Jessie Bullock again?

No. It couldn’t be. I shook my head to reinforce it. She was an eighteen-year-old girl from the foothills. The Mid Wales equivalent of fucking Heidi. And the Heidis of this world didn’t draw down the wrath of professional snipers.

Now that I was home, had no pied wagtail, and had run up against another brick wall, I found that I wasn’t yet ready for the isolation. I didn’t want to be here alone when the night came down.

Dinas, the town that Jack Galbraith had exiled me to, hadn’t quite achieved the tourist bonanza it had hoped for when it had promoted itself as having more abandoned Primitive Methodist chapels per head of population than anywhere else. Consequently the Chamber of Commerce was currently debating whether to give up on failed religion and to try and ride the coat-tails of the town’s dead lead-mining legacy instead. It was that kind of vibrancy that kept the tumbleweed moving.

I bought some basic foodstuffs in the convenience store and made my way to The Fleece across the empty market square, past the Victorian gothic clock tower, and the statue of a shepherd with a tilted traffic cone on his head.

The Fleece had been a coaching inn until a smarter and more enterprising town had stepped in and pinched the mail trade. The place now doubled up as my unofficial city desk and recreational centre. Its owners, David and Sandra Williams, who had both spent some time out in the wider world, were also the nearest things I had to best buddies in Dinas without feathers.

I went in through the door to the rear bar. It was early, and the place was quiet enough for David to be making a show of polishing glasses behind the front bar. He held one up to the light with the scrutiny of an ever-hopeful opal miner.

I saw myself in the mirror behind the bar. My gait was still stiff, and the jolting motion it produced, combined with my discoloured, unshaven face and the plastic carrier bag of groceries, gave me the look of an old lush on automatic pilot treading the well-worn nightly path to the beer tap.

I sent out a silent prayer for this to please not be the future I was seeing.

David turned round. He did a jerky double-take when he saw me. ‘Jesus, Glyn …’ He ducked his head into the service entry between the two bars and yelled, ‘Sandra!’ He emerged smiling. ‘We weren’t expecting you. You should have called and I’d have come over and got you.’

‘Thanks, but I need the practice.’

He took a step backwards and appraised me, following it up with a wince. ‘You’re not a great advert for the health service.’

‘Don’t knock it, you should have seen the before pictures.’ I climbed stiffly onto a bar stool.

He started pulling me a beer and looked at me seriously. ‘We were all fucking devastated, you know that.’

I nodded. ‘Thanks for the card.’ It had been signed by David and Sandra and their cat, and by two of the old regulars who had probably thought they were putting their names to a petition to repeal the Corn Laws.

‘We would have come up to the hospital, but Emrys Hughes said you weren’t allowed visitors.’

I smiled ruefully. ‘They didn’t want Joe Public seeing the levels of luxury and excess their taxes were keeping me in.’

He chuckled and let it run out to a questioning expression. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

I lifted the pint glass he slipped across the bar. ‘I’m not going to avoid it.’ I took a drink. It tasted good, and it helped me avoid it for the time being.

‘Glyn!’

I swung round on the stool to see Sandra coming through from the kitchen, her apron balled into one hand. She caught me into a hug, her cheek pressing tightly against me. I smelled old shampoo and cooking oil in her hair.

She pulled back to look at me. She had tears in her eyes. ‘It’s so good to see you home again in one piece.’

The door to the front bar opened, interrupting the return-of-the-prodigal tableau. Four young-farmer types entered in a whirl of noise and motion. One by one their sweeping glances lit on me, and their animation wilted. It was as if all the juice had been suddenly sucked out of their batteries. They stared at me like they were one entity for a moment, before carrying on to the bar in whisper mode.

David moved away to serve them. Sandra was watching me anxiously. ‘I gather there’s been talk?’ I quipped, trying to lighten the moment.

‘It’ll pass. They just need something to gossip about.’ She touched my hand comfortingly.

Right, until the next time I was seen to fuck up. I had been in this situation before. As an outsider I made a convenient Jonah. Why blame global warming when you had me in town?

I took my beer over to a corner table.

‘How are you doing, Capaldi?’

He startled me. I spun in my chair to see Emrys Hughes standing over me, a sheepish smile on his face.

He looked awkward. Trying not to shuffle from one foot to the other. I had an image of this shambling bear of a man crowded into a small lift with a posse of diminutive female Chinese acrobats, knowing that any movement of his was going to nudge tit. If he had been feeling guilty for being partly instrumental in what had happened to me I could have felt sorry for him. But I didn’t credit him with that degree of sensitivity. What was probably cutting him up was having to be in my proximity now that I was even more of a social leper.

He put an envelope down on the table. ‘This was left for you. I’ve been holding onto it.’

Sergeant Capaldi. The handwriting was neat, cursive, and probably female. ‘Thanks. You could have dropped it off at the caravan.’

He pulled a face. On reflection, I think it was meant to be sympathetic. ‘It might be hate mail. I wouldn’t have wanted you coming home and this being one of the first things you found.’

I smiled up at him. ‘Thanks, Emrys.’ What was the deal? I asked myself. My wellbeing didn’t usually loom too large in Emrys’s repertoire.

Then it struck me. Seeing the anticipation in his face. He knew who had written this. He wanted to be in attendance when I read it. He wanted to watch my reaction. He and his cronies probably had some sort of sweepstake running.

He made no move to go. ‘Thanks, Emrys,’ I repeated.

He still didn’t budge, his smile frozen in place. ‘Emrys?’ I said quietly.

‘What?’ He bent forward to hear me better.

‘If you don’t fuck off now I’m going to thank you very loudly for sending me the sweet flowers and then stand up and give you a great big kiss on the lips.’

His head shot back like a sprung trap. He coloured. ‘You don’t have to be like that, I was only trying to do you a favour,’ he said crossly.

I waited until he had left the bar before I opened the envelope. It was a card with a printed header, but I honed straight in on the handwritten message.

Dear Sergeant Capaldi,

I hope that your injuries are not too extensive, and that your time in hospital will be short. This is just to let you know that I hold you in no way responsible for the tragic accident that has resulted in the loss of my daughter Jessie.

Wishing you a speedy recovery.

Yours,

Cassandra Bullock

Jesus! I put the card down carefully on the table to mask my emotions. I started to get teary. Torn up by the fact that this woman could have taken time out in the middle of her grief and devastation to write this. To comfort me. A stranger.

And that’s when it came to me. The catalyst that snapped me out of my egocentricity. What I had missed seeing. What my self-centredness had blinkered.

Forget Edgar Fiske. Forget the convicted murderers and the dead lags. Forget Nick Bessant.

I had overlooked the facts that made it impossible for me to have been the target.

Which meant that they had been out to kill Jessie Bullock.

Maybe not Jessie precisely. I pulled back and rejigged it. I gave it more thought and revised the specificity down. Maybe the target had been more general, like whoever I had ended up carrying in the back of the car.

But definitely not me. Because, once I’d ditched the persecution complex and thought about it analytically, I had to conclude that I couldn’t have been the target. Okay, so Morgan’s so-called security blanket hadn’t been exactly tightly banded with razor wire. In fact, it had been as leaky as a spiked hose. So anyone who had been at all interested would probably have known that I was part of the operation. But they couldn’t have anticipated the role I ended up giving myself.

Because what was crucial was that my offering to transport Jessie had been an opportunistic whim. When they had set up that gun in the stand of Scots pines they had no way of knowing that it would have been me driving. What they could presume was that the operation would produce at least one kid travelling to Dinas in the rear of a police car. They didn’t care who the driver was, it was the passenger they were after.

I returned to Jessie again. Was she a random victim? Or had it been somehow arranged that night that she would be the one that we caught? I couldn’t answer that. I left it hanging. Hopefully at some point I would find a hook for it.

And this all now made terrible sense of things. The locked rear door, the fastened seat belt. Whoever had created the accident must have taken her out of the car and cold-bloodedly broken her neck and flung her away like an abandoned manikin.

I felt a chill creep over me. What would have happened if I hadn’t been unconscious? Would they have broken my neck too? Or torched us both in the car? Because those people were after only one consequence and I was certain that they wouldn’t have hesitated to kill me if I had gotten in the way of it.

Who could do that to someone who wasn’t much more than a child? What kind of person could shut down all humane and nurturing instincts like that? What kind of training in the poisoned arts could produce that kind of soul?

The corollary intruded. What the fuck could she have done in her short country life to warrant such a dreadful reprisal?

I looked at the card her mother had sent me again. The printed heading read The Ap Hywel Foundation. I knew I was going to have to visit Cassandra Bullock. I only hoped that she was going to remain as generous and forgiving when she saw me in the flesh.

I got up early the next morning, dragging all my protesting stiffness out of bed in the dark. I shaved for the first time in days, watching my face reappear in the steamy mirror. I stared at myself. Had I changed? I felt that I was underscoring a new start. The old lush was setting aside his torpor.

I needed some background before I met up with Cassandra Bullock, and had arranged to meet PC Huw Davies at the car park at the start of the Monks’ Trail where we had arrested Jessie.

I arrived deliberately early. I wanted to have some time there alone. It was an area that had been cleared, levelled and gravelled at the foot of a wooded hillside. It looked bigger in the daylight, but that might have had something to do with the paucity of traffic and activity compared to that night. There were three empty cars parked at random intervals around the perimeter, along with the junked car I had seen before.

The sun hadn’t cleared the hill to the east, and the air was cool and damp and smelled of leaf mould and ferns. I circled the car park on foot. The waymarked trail started at the far end, rising up and curving away through the sessile oaks. I returned to the information board and experienced a sense of disappointment, although I didn’t know what I had been expecting.

I couldn’t bring myself to read the historical and biodiversity notes on the board. There were illustrations of birds, insects and flora, and the graphics showed the trail winding up through the woods, past a pool and waterfall, and onto the ridgeway above the village of Llandewi. A smaller-scale inset map showed the entire length of the trail traversing the Cambrians and bifurcating to join up with other long-distance footpaths. It made me wonder where the occupants of those three parked cars were now. There was something inviting in the prospect of losing yourself up there in all that space and sky.

Huw Davies turned up dead on time in his marked police Land Rover.

‘Sarge.’ He nodded and I could see him appraising me for damage.

‘Thanks for this, Huw.’ I shook his outstretched hand. I had already warned him that this was unofficial. ‘Ever walk the trail?’ I gestured at the information board, kicking off on small talk.

He shook his head. ‘I leave that to the leisured classes.’

‘I thought you liked being out in the wild wide-open?’

‘I do.’ He nodded towards the start of the trail at the far end of the car park. ‘But this is channelled. It’s the safe path through the jungle. All marked out to make sure you don’t trespass. I prefer to spoof it.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s a load of sanitized bullshit, you know.’

‘What is?’

‘Starting the Monks’ Trail from here.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a recorded historical fact that the track the monks used to use came from the coast and passed through the village of Llandewi on its way up to the ridgeway and on over the mountains.’

‘Why did they change it?’

He shrugged. He still hadn’t dropped that wry smile. ‘A cynic would say it’s because Llandewi didn’t fit the image they wanted to project.’

‘Not pretty enough?’

‘The place is a mess now. Totally depressed. The way all these communities go when the lifeblood gets sucked out of them. In Llandewi’s case, it was the sawmill closing down about ten years ago.’

I made a point of looking up at the trees. ‘I would have thought that there was still plenty of product around.’

‘Not for construction timber. The stuff from Canada and the Baltic’s undercut them. The local softwood’s all carted off to the pulp mills now.’

‘So, the place sounds ripe for juvenile crime?’ I offered, getting down to it at last.

He pulled a face. ‘You’d think so. But they’re an apathetic bunch round here. And everyone’s in the same boat, no one’s got anything worth nicking.’

‘What about the thefts that happened in the car park here that Morgan’s cronies got so worked up about?’

He turned sombre. ‘After what happened that night I leaned on the local bad boys and they’ve all denied it. And I believe them.’

‘And we know it wasn’t Morgan’s marauding city hoodlums?’ I left it as a question.

‘It’s stopped now, Sarge.’

I gestured for him to go on.

‘Since the raid, there have been no more vehicle break-ins or vandalism.’

We both looked at each other carefully. I voiced the conclusion behind his statement. ‘You don’t think Jessie Bullock had been responsible for the previous ones? On her own?’

‘I can’t answer that. Maybe whoever was behind it got frightened off.’

‘Was she a troublemaker?’

He shook his head loosely. ‘I’d seen her around. But only as a face on my patch. She’d never come up on my radar before.’

‘Tell me about the stuff that happened here.’

‘Essentially it was all low-grade. They weren’t after nicking the cars themselves, or even things like the alloy wheels or the cycle racks. Windows got broken, and some stuff got nicked – CDs, floor mats, dangly mascots – the sort of silly useless shit that gets left in cars. The kind of things that were worthless, but could have been taken as souvenirs or trophies. The only thing of any real value that was ever taken was a portable satnav. And some of the cars got things spray-painted on them.’

‘Such as?’

‘Property is theft, was a favourite.’

I shared his smile. ‘You got any anarchists or radical Marxists in Llandewi?’

‘Not that I know of, and definitely not among the baseball-cap brigade.’

‘Jessie Bullock was obviously an intelligent kid. Could she have politicized the local bad boys?’

‘I told you, she’d never come up on my radar. When kids like her start hanging out with the rough, I make a note of it. It didn’t happen with her.’

‘It has to be local though?’

‘I agree. But it was all juvenile stuff, Sarge. That’s what I tried to tell Inspector Morgan. This was kids posturing. It didn’t warrant shock and awe tactics.’

‘Any chance of getting sight of the reports on the car park break-ins?’ I asked.

‘I’ll email the file references to you.’

‘What about the names of the local bad boys?’ I tried.

He shook his head. ‘Sorry.’ He took pity on my expression and elaborated: ‘You’re meant to be on sick leave, Sarge. I don’t want you to get into trouble.’

‘Thanks, Huw.’ We both left the name Inspector Morgan unsaid.

I watched him drive away. I knew I was procrastinating. Now I had nothing between me and my confrontation with Cassandra Bullock. Except for the insurance policy that the coward in me had built in. I had never called her to arrange the meeting. There was a chance, which a part of me was clutching at, that she wouldn’t be available.

As a cop I was used to difficult encounters. That sombre walk down a hallway as you wondered how you were going to be able to tell a mother that her husband had gassed himself and their two young children in his car. Or getting parents to sit down as you attempted to prepare them for the awful fact that the body of their toddler son had been found in a river snarled in the roots of a tree. But never before had I had to face the mother of a young girl whose death I had been partly responsible for. Because, even if my third-party hypothesis was correct, I had to accept that I had been the one who had delivered her to that final appointment.

I drove away from the tree shade of the car park and out into the sun. It was a glorious morning, but it didn’t help Llandewi. Huw had been right. The village was a mess, and the sunlight only highlighted the faults.

It was a linear village, curving along the base of the hill, and the state of some of the buildings gave the impression that they had slipped down from a higher point on the slope and never recovered from the journey. The place bore all the marks of neglect, an all-pervading sense of why bother. Roofs with missing or slipped slates, walls cracked and algae stained, peeling paintwork and a few faded people on the street staring at me listlessly as I passed. And, the saddest sight of all, the local pub boarded up.

I turned left out of the village and started the drive up into the hills. The full glare of the sun was in my face, it was an angel’s ascent, and I left Llandewi mouldering behind me. I drove between stone field walls and rumbled across the cattle grid where the estate wall started on my left, and the land opened out on my right into unfenced scrub and heather moorland that rolled up to the ridge, the hillside sprigged with the occasional gale-tormented hawthorn.

Huw had shown me the route on the map and described what to look out for. But I was still unprepared for the gates to the Plas Coch estate. The Ap Hywel pile, as he had put it, with just a trace of class-warrior irony. The lichen-flecked grey stone piers were massive and capped with pineapple finials on ornately moulded capstones. But it was the gates themselves that made me stop. They were a contemporary take on early Georgian ironwork, but powder-coated the blue-green of copper sulphate. Architecturally it had been a risk, but it worked. The whole thing declared money, taste and artistic daring. What a contrast to Llandewi.

I carried on as instructed until I reached the end of the estate wall, and another entrance, more modest this time, with Home Farm picked-out on slate on a gatepost, and The Ap Hywel Foundation inscribed into a brass plaque beneath it.

I turned into the driveway and my nervousness began a scampering arpeggio up the scale. I felt like I was arriving with an undigested anvil in my gut.

I went down a neat gravel track that was lined with young chestnuts, following an undulating line of rhododendrons on my left that delineated the grounds of the big house. The track was descending gently and I soon saw a long slate roof and the tops of deciduous woodland behind it. This would be the Home Farm, and I knew from the map that the trees were part of the same woods that rose up from the car park.

The track widened out into a big gravel turning area in front of an exquisitely maintained whitewashed stone long-house. But I didn’t have time to take it in properly as I had arrived unannounced into activity.

I parked and tried to work out what was happening before I got out of my car and made a fool of myself.

Two women were sitting in front of the entrance door to the farmhouse at a rectangular wooden picnic bench with an open parasol over it. A man with a camera raised to his eye was backing away from the table at a crouch, taking photographs as he went. A younger woman in a short red coat was standing off to the side, and, as I watched, I saw that she was directing both the women’s actions, and the photographer’s positions.

Had I crashed a fashion shoot?

I took a more studied look at the women at the table. The older one grabbed the immediate attention. The lines on her face and the heavy mane of silvery grey hair worn in a loose and careless chignon betrayed her to be probably in her sixties, but she was strikingly handsome, her features radiating a combination of confidence and humour and just something in the corner of her eyes that made you think that she might be holding in more knowledge than she was letting out.

Was she too old to have had an eighteen-year-old daughter?

The other woman was slighter, probably more than twenty years younger, her un-styled hair still dark, her sharp features heightened by the small, round, wire-rimmed glasses she wore, and the way she screwed her face, as if she was over-compensating for lenses that weren’t quite working any more.

It was the older woman who saw me watching them. She nudged her neighbour, and, when she had her attention, nodded towards me. I felt immediately guilty. By the time I was out of the car both of the women at the bench were standing and the photographer and the younger woman had stopped in place and were looking at me.

I dragged a voice up out of my dry throat. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m looking for Cassandra Bullock.’

‘I’m Cassie Bullock,’ the younger of the two women at the bench spoke, a quick anxious glance at her companion, her tone apprehensive.

That anvil was still there pinning me to the spot. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t help it. The silence was rapt, electricity fried the air. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi.’ I killed your daughter.

4

Cassie Bullock poured me a glass of water from a jug on the picnic table. I had already registered the deep shadows around her eyes. Only now did it click that she was dressed all in black, a lamb’s wool sweater over tight leggings.

The older woman had taken charge as soon as I had introduced myself. ‘I’m Ursula ap Hywel,’ she had announced, getting up and approaching, putting herself between me and Cassie, a protective block, her hand held out to shake. ‘I live over there —’ her gesture casually encompassing the vastness of her estate.

I shook the proffered hand. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. And I don’t know whether this is a bad time …?’ I suggested, part of me wanting her to tell me that it was.

Instead she turned her head to Cassie. ‘Is it?’ she asked gently.

Cassie shook her head almost imperceptibly. She spoke past Ursula, a small tremor in her voice. ‘It’s very kind of you to come, Sergeant.’

And now we were alone, Ursula ap Hywel having retreated diplomatically, efficiently shepherding the other two along with her. Back to the big house, I supposed. But, before she had led them off, she had taken me aside and whispered, ‘Be kind. She’s putting on a brave face, but she’s still very fragile.’

I took a grateful drink of the water.

‘You look as if you needed that,’ Cassie observed.

‘More than you know.’

‘I did mean what I said in my note. I don’t blame you in any way.’ She held those dark-rimmed eyes on me as if she were trying to force herself not to look away.

‘That was very kind of you.’

‘I imagined how terrible you’d be feeling.’

‘I was. That’s why I felt that I had to come and tell you to your face how dreadfully sorry I feel for your loss.’

Her eyes flickered and she waited me out for a moment. ‘And …?’ she asked softly, sensing the incompleteness in my declaration.

I steeled myself. ‘The and is the difficult bit.’

She nodded as if she understood. Or was she still numbed by grief and working on automatic responses? ‘Come inside. I’ll make us some tea.’

I gestured at the photo-shoot props on the table: the jug of water, glasses and a bowl of fruit, apples and bananas. ‘Shall I help you carry these in?’

‘Thanks, but they stay outside.’ She managed a small smile at my flicker of puzzlement. ‘You don’t know about the Foundation?’

I shook my head. ‘No, sorry.’

‘You know you’re on the Monks’ Trail?’ she asked.

‘I know about the footpath, I didn’t realize I was actually on it.’ I sensed that we were both relieved by this temporary diversion.

She stood up. I got the impression that she was forcing herself to stand erect, when all she really wanted to do was fold up and crumple. I followed her out into the turning circle, from where we could see both ends of the house. ‘The path from the car park comes up through the woods over there—’ she pointed as she described, ‘and then runs past the front of the house, and carries on up over there. It’s a very old trail. It was one of the ones Cistercian monks from the mother house at Clairvaux used to use to travel between the coast and their satellite abbeys in Mid Wales.’

I nodded attentively. I didn’t spoil the moment by mentioning that I had been told that the route had been diverted and prettified.

‘Well, we think that the original building up here at Plas Coch was built by the monks as a shelter or a hostel on the route. A sort of way station. So, we’re just continuing that tradition.’ She nodded at the picnic table. ‘We provide the basics for passing travellers to help themselves to. Usually it’s produce from our own gardens, but we’re a little bit short at this time of year.’ She tried out what she thought was a laugh. ‘And we never quite run to bananas.’

‘You work for the Foundation?’

‘Yes, I’m sort of the housekeeper and warden.’

‘You keep the table stocked?’

She produced another warped laugh. ‘There’s a bit more to it than that. We run a retreat here. But we’re not affiliated to anything in the religious sense. People come and stay for some non-denominational spiritual healing.’ She walked back to the door. ‘Come inside and I’ll show you round after we’ve had that tea.’

‘I’m not intruding?’

Her tour-guide persona dropped and she looked at me solemnly for a moment. ‘No, I think we both need this.’

She pushed open the low, wide oak front door, and stood aside to let me through. I stopped on the threshold, adjusting to the surprise. Instead of the dark hallway I had expected it was a fully vaulted space with a red-and-black tiled floor and flooded with light from the two-storey glazed bay at the far end that gave out onto a formal knot garden, edged with low clipped box hedges, that filled an inner courtyard formed by a cloistered arrangement of glazed and timber-boarded, single-storey contemporary buildings. It was a similar sort of architectural juggling as the gates at Plas Coch.

She led me through to a comfortable stone-flagged kitchen, explaining that this was her private quarters. I heard the hesitation as she suppressed the word our. Another adjustment she was having to practise without cracking-up.

‘How long have you been working here?’ I asked as she busied herself with a kettle at the Rayburn.

‘Fifteen years.’

So Jessie would have been nearly three, I calculated silently.

‘You can talk about her, Sergeant,’ she read my thoughts, ‘that’s what we’re here for.’

‘Please, call me Glyn.’

She nodded. ‘Ursula tells me that it’s good for me to talk about her. That I’ve got to celebrate that she had a presence on this earth.’ She closed her eyes forcefully. ‘It’s so very difficult to think of her life as something that’s over. Stopped.’ Her knuckles went white on the handle of the kettle.

I waited for the tears. ‘Shall I go?’ I asked softly.

She shook her head, opened her eyes and forced a wan smile. ‘No, I’ve got to start adjusting to this.’ She unclenched her hand and went on as if I had already asked the question: ‘Yes, Jessie grew up here. She had no real memory of anywhere else.’

‘Where were you before?’

‘London. A single mother. Despairing about my future, and then a wonderful piece of serendipity arrived. I was introduced to the ap Hywels, who were starting up the Foundation and were looking for someone to help them run the Welsh side of it.’

‘The Welsh side?’ I asked.

‘We’ve also got health clinics in Sierra Leone.’ She spread her arms to take in the kitchen. ‘I got this, and the rest is history.’

‘I don’t mean to be indelicate …’

She looked at me questioningly.

‘Jessie’s father?’

She let a reflective beat pass. ‘Dead, I’m afraid.’

We sat there drinking tea and eating biscuits with the photograph albums in front of us and she told me the tales behind the pictures, seeming to relax into the memories as the pages turned over. Jessie’s life at the Home Farm. The guinea pigs, rabbits and ponies. The first days at school, the nativity angel, followed by promotion from first shepherd to the Virgin Mary. The picnics by the pool below the waterfall and on the moors, the beaches at Newport and Aberdovey. Jessie the child, growing up from skinny stagger-stepping topless and gap-toothed, to a serious, attractive young woman getting ready to move out into the wider world.

‘I wish I had taken a little time to know her,’ I said regretfully.

‘You might not have liked her.’

‘No?’ I asked, surprised.

‘She was at a wilful age. I’m afraid we argued quite a bit. It’s one of my real deep regrets now.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘The young think that we’ve never been their age. I was looking forward to her getting out there, finding her feet and mellowing. And then coming home and us becoming friends again.’ She fought back the tears.

‘I’m so sorry.’

She put her hand over mine briefly, sniffled and managed a weak smile. ‘Don’t be; we can’t stop the things that are meant to happen.’ She shifted her hand to the cover of one of the photograph albums. ‘As Ursula continually reminds me, I’ve got all these wonderful memories. I want you to fix these happier times in your mind, and take them away with you as well.’

I nodded. ‘Why do you think she was down there that night?’

Her face went rigid and she stared at me before she slowly started to nod. ‘We’ve come round to the and, haven’t we?’

‘You don’t have to talk about it.’

She studied me again. ‘But you do, don’t you?’

I nodded again.

She was contemplative. I thought for a moment that she wasn’t going to answer me. ‘I don’t know why she would have been down there on that particular night. It wasn’t unusual though. The pool and the waterfall are just above the car park. That was one of their favourite spots.’

‘They?’

‘She had lots of friends. She was a popular girl.’

‘It was raining that night.’

She gave a slanted smile, another memory had returned. ‘They were youngsters. They didn’t care.’

‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘She had friends who were boys. I don’t think she had learned the patience to work at a steady relationship yet.’

‘Would you be prepared to give me a list of Jessie’s friends?’

She thought about it for a moment before she leaned across the table towards me. ‘No, Glyn, I wouldn’t,’ she said softly. ‘They’ve all been dreadfully hurt as well. I think it’s time to put a line under it and leave them to heal.’ She scanned my face. ‘Why is this so important to you?’

I had tried to rehearse this moment. I had anticipated the question and experimented on the soft lies to answer it. But now that it came to it I felt that I owed this woman the truth. ‘This is only my own opinion,’ I warned her. ‘There will not be any kind of official investigation into this.’

She gestured for me to go on. She was frowning now.

‘I think that there’s a possibility that Jessie’s death wasn’t an accident.’

I waited for the shock. I waited for anger or incredulity. Instead she stood up and slowly walked to the window and remained there with her back to me.

‘Cassie?’

She turned round. Even backlit as she was I could make out the tracks the tears had coursed down both her cheeks.

‘Are you all right?’

She nodded tentatively. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. All I want to say is that living here has taught me that there is no such thing as the unexpected. We’re too small in the chain to begin to understand the reasons behind things. We’re too limited. All we can see is ourselves at the fulcrum point, and that’s a distorted view. I want you to ponder on that, Glyn, and to try to take some comfort out of it.’

Fucking bullshit!

But of course I kept that to myself.

Cassie recovered her composure and showed me Jessie’s room. I think I was expected to take comforting vibes from it, rather than look for clues of malice. But I couldn’t get a real feel for it without ransacking it, and that wasn’t on the cards with Cassie beside me, nervously straightening the covers and the battered teddy bears on the bed. Going through another one of her self-imposed therapy sessions, I realized.

Superficially I picked up that her music tastes ran to Indie bands, and her bookshelves showed a certain age progress, ranging from an anthology of famous ballerinas, the entire J.K. Rowling canon, the Brontë sisters, to edgier stuff by Palahniuk and Houellebecq. No evidence of radical Marxism in the collection, although there was the famous poster of Che Guevara on the wall, which was balanced to a degree by one of Johnny Depp. And no visible dope paraphernalia or extreme counter-culture memorabilia. There were five dusty wooden African statuettes on top of the bookshelf, the sort of tat that was sold in market stalls across tourist Europe.

I wouldn’t know an ordinary teenager if they parachuted into my soup, but Jessie, from this evidence, seemed to fit into the spectrum. But what had I expected? Death threats written in blood pinned to her corkboard beside a crumpled photograph of the netball team?

I pleaded pressure of work and turned down Cassie’s invitation of a tour of the rest of the Foundation. Something told me it would be useful for her not to know that I was currently off active duty.

I drove back up the farm track to the road thinking that I was no closer to knowing why Jessie could have been the target of a hit. That level of violence was just all too far removed from this neat corner of loving rural tranquillity.

The woman was standing in the middle of the drive as I approached the exit onto the road. She didn’t try to flag me down. She knew I would stop. She stood there with her hands in the pockets of her short red duffel coat, a self-satisfied smile on her face that wasn’t far off qualifying as a smirk.

‘Hi, Glyn, I’m Rhian Pritchard.’ She had moved round to my window after I had stopped the car, and, as a gentleman, I had lowered it. She put her hand in and I automatically shook it. If I had known what was about to go down, I would have said fuck politeness, put my foot down, and driven off.

I had recognized her. She was the one who had been directing the photographer. She had blonde hair tied into a high arcing ponytail, which, with the red duffel coat and skinny jeans with turn-ups, made her look in her mid twenties, although she was probably older. Her face was pale, like someone who didn’t get too much sun and wind with their daylight, but its geometry was pleasant, a composition of complementary curves to the cheeks and the chin, and a good nose that would probably flare when she laughed. But that irritating smile really fucked up the shape of her mouth.

‘Nice to meet you.’ I gave her my dumb-cop smile. I reckoned she was one of those people it was best to start out on the bottom rung with. Let them lead with their preconceptions.

She gestured her head back towards the Home Farm. ‘Is this business?’

‘I can’t say, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re a long way from Cardiff, aren’t you?’ Her smile didn’t waver.

‘What makes you say that?’

She passed me a business card. Rhian A. Pritchard, Freelance Feature and Investigative Journalist, it read above a Cardiff address and an NUJ membership reference. ‘I did some research while I was waiting for you to finish up with Cassie.’ She mimed typing with two fingers. ‘A little bit of Google here, a little bit Cardiff press contacts there.’

And still that fucking smile. ‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked, struggling to keep it dumb and pleasant.

‘This is a PR gig, it’s boring. A puff piece. How wonderful is the Ap Hywel Foundation and all who fucking sail in her. I could do with working on something with a bit of meat on it while I’m up here. Like what is a hero from Cardiff doing swanning around with the rednecks?’

I tried out a firm manly smile. ‘No thanks. Not interested.’

‘It’ll make a good story. Human interest. Tough city cop finds rural peace. Fuck!’ She leaned her head back, inspired. ‘If we could get a shot of you pulling out a lamb.’

‘You’ve missed the season.’

‘We’ll think of something with an equal schmaltz rating.’

‘No, we won’t. And I’ve got to go.’

She picked up enough from my voice to step away before I drove over her toes. I caught her in my rear-view mirror as I turned onto the road. She was waving. That smile telling me that she had latched onto this and wasn’t going away.

The last thing I needed. My Cardiff disgrace resurfacing.

Jack Galbraith would have me counting the puffins on Skomer Island.

Rhian Pritchard was going to be trouble. I could sense it. That face and attitude screamed devilish persistence, although she probably thought she was radiating cute pluck. She was a byline junkie. I had met the type before. Looking for a hot story under every pair of eyebrows, anything to swell the cuttings file that she hoped was going to land her that regular slot on a national magazine one day.

Why did our paths have to cross? Now she was out to use my head as a fucking career stepping stone and press me deeper into the ooze on the way.

I stacked her away in the groaning pile of future problems when I got back to Unit 13. I logged into my computer. Huw Davies had been true to his word and had emailed the file references to the break-ins and vandalism at the car park.

I opened them up. It was all dross. Huw had been right. This was all low-grade criminal activity. The worst thing that had been done had been the breaking of the cars’ windows. And that was probably as much to do with vandalism as it was with the petty thefts, because they had never demonstrated any intention of stealing the vehicles. And, apart from one portable satnav, the list of the stuff that had been stolen was banal. A travel rug, CDs, a lucky tortoise mascot, an insulated coffee container … It went on in that vein. As Huw had said, trophies, junk to reinforce the memories of the outlaw trips.

Who was going to kill anyone for a portable satnav?

Cause and effect.

None of the shit that had been taken could possibly have been the cause that had led to the effect of Jessie’s murder. None of those trinkets and baubles could have warranted anything as extreme as that.

Given the tat value of all the other stuff, I even idly wondered whether the reported satnav had actually been stolen, or if someone had used the opportunity to scam his insurance company.

That warped logic clicked on another step.

If someone could have reported something being stolen that hadn’t been, what about something being stolen that hadn’t been reported?

I felt the old familiar clutch in my kidneys as new possibilities opened up.

Something so valuable to its owner that the effect its loss had created was Jessie’s death. Something so valuable and so illegal that its theft couldn’t be recorded?

But what the fuck would something as precious as that be doing left in a car park in the middle of nowhere, frequented by mountain bikers and ramblers and the ghosts of dead monks?

I sidelined that question as irrelevant. It called for too much detailed information. What was important here was the concept. Something of value that couldn’t be brought to the attention of the police after it had been stolen.

But why kill Jessie? What would be gained?

A punishment? Or to scare whoever was holding on to it to give it up?

Or had they already tried to get rid of it?

I got on the phone to Huw.

‘A hypothetical question, Huw. You have a punter who is walking along a railway line and he comes across a parcel that has obviously fallen from a train. He looks inside and finds … Let’s say a camera. An expensive camera, in its original packaging, no owner’s name. So where does he take it?’

‘If he’s local, he brings it to me.’

‘Let’s say he’s been away for a bit and picked up bad habits. And his wife’s just given birth to triplets and he needs instant cash to buy disposable nappies and fags. Where would he take the hypothetical camera?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m on sick leave remember, Huw. I’m keeping my mind active, researching cottage industries between jigsaws and sudoku.’

‘Bullshit, Sarge.’ But he laughed. ‘You’ve met him.’

‘I have?’ I was surprised. I had no memories of any encounters with a neighbourhood fence.

‘Yes, our boy Ryan.’

Ryan Shaw. The local low-rent dope dealer. ‘Christ, Huw, is he a crook-of-all-trades? Renaissance Hoodie?’

I heard him laugh down the line. ‘We don’t have enough of the spread round here that you had in Cardiff that enables them to specialize.’

I thanked him and hung up. I had had one previous encounter with Ryan, and he had not been a very happy young hoodlum at the end of it. So much so that he had complained to Emrys Hughes. Because Ryan was also a local snitch.

He was protected. I was going to have to be careful how I approached him.

Orchard Close, Maesmore. Not much had changed. A supermarket trolley had joined the junk installation on the former front lawn outside number 3, Ryan’s house, which he shared with his mother and sister and at least one baby that I knew of.

I was glad to see his purple VW Golf was creating its usual obstruction on the pavement. Because, as I had no official business to go knocking on that front door with, I was going to have to wait for Ryan to come out to me.

It was heavy dusk by now. I calculated the distance I needed and parked a few houses down, facing in the same direction as Ryan’s car. I kept out of the pool of the street light. I didn’t think that he would know my car, but I didn’t want to take the chance. Curtains twitched in the house I was parked outside of, but I didn’t let it worry me. If you lived near a dope dealer you got used to strange traffic, and usually you learned not to complain about it.

When it was dark enough I slid over to the passenger’s side and got out of the car without closing the door. I had already de-activated the interior light. I checked that the street was empty in both directions before making my way up the pavement on the other side from Ryan’s house until I was opposite his car. I checked the street again, and then flowed across it, sinking into a low Groucho Marx stride, and dropping to a crouch at the rear of the VW.

I tied the end of the string to the towing ring and bundled the rest of it with the attached tin cans under the car, out of sight. I made my way back to my car.

Now all I had to do was continue waiting. Ryan could do two things to fuck my plan up. He could decide to stay in for the night, or, if he did elect to go out, he could do a three-point turn and head off in the opposite direction to where I was waiting for him.

In the end he obliged me on both counts.

The night had cooled down to chilly, but he still appeared in just a tight white T-shirt and cinched black jeans to showcase his pumped physique. He got in his car, gunned the motor and headed down the road in my direction.

KLANG! KLANG! KLANG!

I had tied the tin cans to a four-metre-long piece of string, so by the time they started rattling, and he had reacted to what sounded like his straight-through exhaust trailing the ground, he was a couple of car lengths short of me when he stopped. As I had anticipated, he left his door wide open and the engine still running when he jumped out and ran to the rear to investigate his mechanical prolapse.

I glided up, switched off the engine and took the car keys out.

He was still snarled up in the confusion of the moment. He had found the cans. He heard his engine stop. There was too much happening here, and it took him a beat to react. When he did turn, I could tell that he hadn’t recognized me in the dark.

‘What the fuck …?’ he growled threateningly, trying to make sense of this.

‘Shouldn’t leave your engine running like that, Ryan, it fucks up the atmosphere.’

Curtains were twitching all around like Aldis lamps. He stared at me malevolently. I could almost hear the tumblers in his brain clicking through the recognition process.

‘You!’ He pointed at me. ‘You’re fucked! You were warned off after the last time you tried to mess with me.’

‘This is just between you and me, Ryan.’

‘Says who?’

‘If I thought you were going to report me, I wouldn’t help you.’

He chuckled nastily. ‘And how are you going to fucking help me?’

I dangled his car keys. ‘You’re going to have a hard time finding these otherwise.’

‘That’s fucking theft,’ he whined indignantly.

‘Which is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Are you trying to fit me up?’ he asked suspiciously, his mind shifting into another gear.

‘No, I want your professional advice, that’s all. You talk to me nicely, and I give you your keys back, and walk away.’

He digested it. Probably wondering what particular branch of his profession I was talking about. He nodded his head carefully. ‘Okay. I’m not promising anything, mind.’

‘Did you know Jessie Bullock?’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘Oh, come on, Ryan,’ I snorted impatiently, ‘she was only the biggest piece of fucking news around here since the glaciers retreated.’

He shrugged, unconcerned about being caught out in the lie. ‘Okay, I might have heard the name.’

‘Did she or any of her friends ever give you something to try and sell for them?’

He looked at me calculatingly. ‘Like what?’ He was trying to work out what I knew.

‘Something valuable.’

He couldn’t help himself. It was embedded in his nature to brag. It was only the tiniest twitch, but I caught it. He smothered it with a big faux doubtful frown and a shake of the head. ‘Not that I remember.’

The bastard knew what I was talking about. I had my first small open chink into this thing. But what leverage was I going to be able to use on this guy to open it wider?

‘Thanks, Ryan.’ I tossed him the keys. ‘Remember the deal.’

‘Yeah. Thanks for nothing. And you can untie those fucking cans before you go.’

I complied. No point in upsetting him any further. Because, if I had my way, I was going to have a lot worse in store for him in the near future.

I even waved sweetly as he roared off.

5

As half expected, he finked on me.

Talk about honour among fucking thieves, I thought, as I listened to Inspector Morgan tearing me off a strip down the telephone line. But Morgan I could tune out. He had the whingeing drone of an ineffectual schoolteacher which whisked me in spirit back to the non-attentive zone at the rear of the classroom.

Jack Galbraith wasn’t quite so easy to sideline.

‘Sergeant Lazarus, I presume?’

‘Sorry, Sir?’ He also was on the phone, so I couldn’t use his expression to gauge what was coming.

‘Am I speaking to the man who miraculously got up off his sickbed and went out into the world to fool around with one of Inspector Morgan’s stoolies?’

‘I think Lazarus was raised from the dead, Sir.’

‘Don’t give me fucking ideas, Capaldi,’ he growled. ‘I detest talking to Morgan at the best of times, so having to listen through another rant from him about your transgressions is nudging my patience and tolerance into the red sector. What the fuck were you doing?’

‘I’ve just been talking to local people who might have known Jessie Bullock, Sir. I think Sergeant Hughes misunderstood and over-reacted when he reported it to Inspector Morgan.’

‘Hughes? Is that that idiot sergeant up there? The one that looks like a wax museum’s take on Stalin, with the personality to match?’

Who was I to speak ill of a colleague? ‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Fucking prat.’ He came back to me after a pause with a new note of reservation in his voice. ‘This nosing around about the Bullock girl sounds a bit unhealthy to me.’

‘It’s helping me to come to terms with it, Sir. Rounding her out into a real person.’

‘That helps?’ He sounded sceptical.

‘Yes, Sir.’

He gave it a reflective pause. ‘If you’re going to step on Hughes’s toes, do it subtly for Christ’s sake. Don’t give him any excuse to run bleating to Morgan again. Just make sure you keep me out of that particular loop.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘And don’t let your interest in the girl get obsessional.’

I promised that I wouldn’t and decided it was time to put my head down and be a good boy for a couple of days.

Until Jessie’s funeral service, to be exact.

Mackay turned up in the morning as we had arranged. Not very happy about it, but resigned to my intransigence. I knew he was trying to ease me through to the sunny side of a morbid phase he thought I was caught up in. So, while it was all about me, I had decided to take advantage.

He held the camera I had provided limply, and listened sulkily while I went over it again.

‘Isn’t it a bit sick, taking photographs at someone’s funeral?’ he complained.

‘Come on, Mac,’ I protested. ‘One way or another, I’m the guy who made this thing happen, so it would be a lot fucking sicker if I was seen filming it.’ He was still morose, so I tried a tactful approach. ‘And people record funerals now, they’re up there with weddings, christenings, Bar Mitzvahs and …’ I couldn’t think of another example.

‘Stasi mementos?’ he suggested cynically.

‘Just photograph the mourners …’ I had almost called them guests. ‘I need a record of her friends. Something I can use later to identify individuals. And I want to see who groups with who.’

He shook his head dismally. ‘I don’t know where you’re fucking going with this.’

‘Trust me. I’ve got my reasons.’

The fine weather was holding. The hawthorn blossom was finally out in the hedgerows, tiny red flowers were fighting a losing battle with docks and nettles in the verges, and the lambs were getting a little plumper and sadly a little less manic.

It was a good day for her funeral. It was an even nicer day to be alive, I reflected guiltily.

We drove up the hill from Llandewi and joined the tail-end of the queue of cars shortly after we crossed the cattle grid at the start of the boundary wall of the Plas Coch estate. Mackay got out at one point while we were waiting and started listing: ‘BMW, Jaguar, Audi, Audi, Mercedes. And I can make out at least one Bentley up near the front. What kind of fucking playground is this, Capaldi?’

‘I don’t know. This is most definitely not local farm-sale traffic.’ I didn’t get it. This was more like the kind of machinery you saw parked in the members’ enclosure of an exclusive Home Counties polo club.

Slowly we moved on up to the main gates. A couple of uniform cops were security checking the cars as they went through, which was the reason for the hold-up.

‘Hi, Sarge,’ PC Friel, one of Emrys Hughes’s sidekicks, bent down to look across to scope out Mackay.

‘He’s with me,’ I said. ‘And what’s with the cordon stuff?’

‘There are some important people here. Politicians and celebrities. Inspector Morgan wants them reassured that we’re running a tight operation.’

I jerked my thumb at the line of cars waiting behind me. ‘This will chasten them all nicely. Teach them a useful lesson in patience and humility. Probably something they’re not used to.’

The starfucker gleam dimmed in his eyes. I had pricked his mondo-celebrity bubble. He waved us through quickly, his eyes anxious now and turning towards the waiting traffic.

Mackay moaned audibly.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Celebrities! Now I’m not only going to be playing a voyeuristic ghoul, I’m going to look like the fucking paparazzi as well.’

‘Don’t worry about it. Exposure’s oxygen to them. Just tell them you work for The Tatler.’

‘That’s the point. I’m going to have to smile at the fuckers. Against all my socialist principles.’

We were diverted down a side track off the main drive before we got a sight of the big house, and parked where we were directed. Still grumbling, Mackay separated to go off and start taking photographs. I walked towards where people were congregating in front of an old chapel that harked back to the days when landowners built their own direct conduit to God to cut down on the commute and regulate the clientele. It was small, rectangular, stone built and buttressed at the corners, with simple lancet windows, and had lost its roof long ago, but money had obviously been spent to preserve it as a comely ruin.

As I got nearer I started to recognize faces, and was cross with myself for being impressed. Senior politicians of all hues, television pundits, actors, and a couple of novelists I could name. They looked like they had been displaced en masse from a fashionable London gala event. They were all immaculately dressed and radiated well-practised charm, confidence and power. The local mourners stood out like wallflowers that had strayed into a bouquet of tight bud roses.

I spotted Emrys Hughes and Inspector Morgan arrayed in dress uniform and full solemnity. Morgan gave me a cursory nod of acknowledgement that warned me to approach no closer. It suited me.

Rhian Pritchard was in her element working the crowd. She waved across to remind me that I was still in her basket, but wasn’t going to be bothering with me today with this feast of the famous to pick at. She also had her photographer working for her, which was going to help to stop Mackay from looking out of place.

At the front of the chapel I saw through the open gothic archway that Jessie’s simple wicker coffin had been placed on a shrouded bier at the centre of the building. A single white lily stood in a vase at the head of the coffin. It was all very understated, but the cynic in me wondered how much effort had gone into creating that effect.

An absence that had been niggling at me suddenly clarified itself. Apart from Rhian and her photographer, this was all a middle-aged to elderly crowd. There were no young people. Where were all the friends of Jessie’s that her mother had told me about?

As if on cue, a stirring in the crowd drew my attention to a procession that had appeared on a path between huge rhododendron bushes. At the head of it was Cassie in a black coat, no hat, her head down, and a small bouquet of primroses in her hand that could not deflect from the obvious misery in her gait. Her other hand was resting on the arm of a very tall and elegant man in a beautifully-cut grey coat, wearing a sad patrician’s smile, and a striking head of long white hair swept back behind his ears.

Behind them I recognized Ursula ap Hywel flanked by a middle-aged man and woman, and, behind them, what must have been Jessie’s friends, a mixed bunch of local youth, looking uncomfortable with the occasion and the attention.

They arranged themselves along the front of the chapel, Cassie and her male partner to the front. A ripple of expectancy went through the crowd, damping conversations down to dispersed random coughs. A crow cawed into the one moment of pure silence.

The man began to speak about Jessie. A deep rich baritone voice with an educated South Wales accent. He talked with an easy familiarity. It was evident that he had known her well. I saw Cassie’s hand tighten on his coat sleeve. He wasn’t a funeral director, as I had first supposed. He had obviously been chosen to give her eulogy.

I sidled up to a uniform cop I vaguely recognized. He nodded at me warily. It was the effect I had on local cops.

‘Who’s he?’ I whispered, gesturing towards the speaker.

‘That’s Rhodri ap Hywel.’

Ursula’s husband. The owner of Plas Coch. Foundation benefactor. I slotted him into place. ‘What about the couple who were walking beside his wife?’

‘The Stevensons. They look after the place.’

‘How come there are so many big names here?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t really know. Probably friends of the ap Hywels’. They spend most of their time at their place in London. And from what I’ve heard, they get a lot of famous people staying at the Foundation.’

I nodded reflectively. I looked across at a woman who had been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in her last film. Her name escaped me. Was she one of the Foundation residents? Her dark Prada outfit was a far cry from a fucking jug of water on a picnic table.

I was aware that another cop had appeared beside the one I had been talking to. They started conversing with each other in funeral undertones. I scanned Jessie’s friends, looking for something in their faces that might trigger a signal, until I realized that I had just overheard a familiar name.

I nudged the guy beside me. ‘What was that you just said about Ryan Shaw?’

He looked at me, surprised. ‘You haven’t heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘Ryan Shaw’s dead.’

I felt myself freeze. I had been staring at Jessie’s wicker coffin when he said this. Talk about fucking transference!

I sneaked off into the gloomy middle of a rhododendron bush to call Huw Davies. From here I could just make out the teary and desolate voice of one of Jessie’s friends adding her contribution to the occasion from the direction of the chapel.

‘Why didn’t anyone fucking tell me, Huw?’ I had to keep my frustration quiet.

‘You’re on sick leave, Sarge. And Ryan Shaw was outside of your jurisdiction.’

‘What happened?’

‘We don’t know exactly, but it looks like one of his dope buying expeditions went tits up.’

‘Where was this?’

‘They found his car in Cheshire. They’re working on the assumption that he was on his way back from Manchester.’

‘Had he had an accident?’

‘The car was found on a track leading to a worked-out sandpit. It had been burnt out, with him inside.’

I did a quick mental exercise. Having met Ryan twice I could dismiss suicide. And guys in his business didn’t drive down deserted tracks in the hope of spotting a rare orchid or an elusive bittern. ‘Did the fire kill him?’

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Emrys Hughes. He’s been appointed the liaison officer to help out the Cheshire force with what we know this end.’

‘Let me know if you hear any more on that front.’

‘One thing …’ His voice went sombre.

‘What’s that?’

‘There’s talk that he’d been tortured.’

It’s hard to emerge from a rhododendron bush nonchalantly, but I did the best I could while still stunned and fogged with the revelation of Ryan Shaw’s messy end. Our unfinished business hung there like an abandoned bridge project. Now we were never going to reach the other side. Not without hiring a fucking medium.

It could just be coincidence.

He was in a risky profession. He was a cocky bastard. He may have tried to stiff the wrong guys. Shit, knowing the reputation of some of those bastards, he may even just have sneezed at the wrong time.

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