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Overnight, the isobars had packed together and the wind was coming strong out of the northwest. And cold. The rain that stung my face as I opened the caravan door was thinking about applying for an upgrade to sleet.
I went out of town on the mountain road, climbing up to open hill country. Scrub grass, sedge and heather, with grey, lichen-splotched boulders crumbled in for texture. It was a big, scrappy geography up here.
The minibus was parked on a narrow lane beside a small arched bridge near the junction with the mountain road. There was a marked police car close by. Uniform locals. I recognized the man who was making a point of watching my approach. Sergeant Emrys Hughes. We knew each other. He didn’t like me. It wasn’t a complicated issue, just a matter of his boss detesting mine. The fact that I didn’t like my boss either didn’t seem to help.
He shouted something up at me as I parked on the splay. I ignored him. I wanted to take in an overview of the scene before I got involved in other people’s perceptions.
The minibus was parked, neatly squared off, on a patch of compacted gravel. It hadn’t been abandoned. Thought had gone into where and how it had been left.
Emrys turned away from me. He must have shouted something else, because two more uniforms appeared from behind the minibus, where they had been sheltering from the wind. Emrys issued an instruction, and one of them came over the bridge, and up the slight incline towards me. I smiled to myself, recognizing a troop movement.
He had his head lowered, and kept his face slanted away from me to keep the rain out of his eyes. I gestured for him to go round to the leeward side and dropped the passenger window. He lowered his face to the opening. Lanky and young, his eager expression overcompensating for his nervousness. ‘Sergeant Hughes told me to tell you that we’re in control of this.’
I leaned across the seat towards him and grinned. ‘Sergeant Hughes told you to tell me to fuck off?’
His face dropped. ‘No, Sergeant, not at all.’
‘Where are the people from the minibus?’ I asked before he could recompose himself. ‘Have you managed to get them down off the hill?’
He looked confused, and shot an involuntary glance at Emrys. ‘There weren’t any people.’
‘What were you doing round the back of the minibus?’
‘Sheltering.’
‘Had you checked for footprints, any other evidence, before you trampled the area?’
His brain mired on that one. I didn’t wait for an answer. I got out of the car and fought my way into my coat, the wind whipping rebellious life into the sleeves and tail. It was even colder out here. The young cop caught up with me, trying to get my attention, but not quite daring to come abreast. I ignored him.
‘Morning, Sergeant Hughes,’ I called out affably.
He glared at me stonily. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I got the call.’
He scowled. ‘There was no call. Not for you. This isn’t a CID matter, Capaldi. We’re handling it.’ As usual he put a heavy stress on my name. As if he had had a grandfather die on the Anzio beaches and I was somehow to blame. Emrys Hughes was a big man, with black, wavy hair, craggy features, and a mosaic of broken veins in his cheeks. His square bushy moustache and matching set of eyebrows looked like they might have been lifted from an identikit box.
I inclined my head towards the minibus. ‘Have you put in a request for a SOCO team?’
‘Why would I do that? This isn’t a crime scene.’
‘The minibus was stolen.’
He shrugged. ‘And now it’s here.’
‘So what’s your plan of action?’
‘I’ve put a call in to contact the owner and get him to come up here with a spare set of keys.’
‘You intend to move it?’ I deliberately pitched my tone to needle him.
He struggled to keep his temper. ‘It went missing. Now it’s been found. Happy endings.’
‘It was stolen, Sergeant.’
‘I know the owner. I’m sure he won’t want to press charges.’
‘Someone was drunk in charge of a stolen minibus last night.’
He pulled a fat face and shrugged.
‘Where are they?’ I asked.
He leaned his face in towards mine, lowering his voice. ‘I know these people, Capaldi.’
‘If you haven’t been able to make contact with the owner yet, how did you come by the passenger list?’
He flashed me a pitying smile. ‘We’re a small community. We know who the lucky bastards are who can get hold of tickets to a rugby international like that. And the operative word here is “community”. Sometimes you have to take the sensible line. I know them all, I can vouch for them personally: they’re good people. Not one of them has a criminal bone in his body.’
‘It’s still taking and driving away. Driving under the influence. Maybe more, if the driver decides to stay mean.’
‘He won’t,’ Emrys announced confidently. ‘And, after the rollicking I’m going to give them, none of them will be doing this again.’ He spread his hands, trying me out with a reasonable-man-to-reasonable-man smile. ‘Okay, they were wrong. But that would have been the drink, the excitement of having been in London. It would have been meant as a bit of fun, nothing malicious.’ He shook his head. ‘And they’ll stick together. Even I’ll never find out which one of them actually drove it away. You’re not in your city now. There’s a time and a place for the heavy-handed route and this isn’t one of them.’
It was a big speech for Emrys. This was obviously important to him. Credibility issues, perhaps. ‘Where are they?’
He tried out a grin. ‘In their beds I assume. Getting ready to wake up and realize how lousy they feel.’
I recognized that he was offering me an opportunity here. The chance to play Cottage Cop, ingratiate myself into the community, show them that I didn’t always have to be seen as an aloof and hard-ass outsider.
‘What about the woman?’
He frowned. ‘We don’t know for sure that there was one. That could just have been the driver trying to make it worse for them …’ He raised his hands to stop my protest. ‘Okay, I promise you this, if there was a woman on that minibus with them last night, she’ll have been treated with absolute courtesy and respect.’
‘So where will she be now?’
‘Wherever it is, she’ll be safe. I can guarantee that. I expect she’ll probably have been offered hospitality for the night. It’s not like the city, women don’t have to fear for their bodies or their lives.’ He smiled smugly. ‘We don’t lose or misplace our womenfolk around here.’
Womenfolk … He actually used the word. As if he was describing a separate species that could be displayed in pens for admiration and grading. I used a spluttered cough to cover my astonishment.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘I’ll make you a deal.’
He inclined his head to listen.
‘If you can convince me that everyone who was on that minibus last night is safe and sound and where they’re meant to be, I’ll walk away and leave you to wrap it up your own way.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll take that deal.’
‘And that includes the woman.’
He smirked. ‘If she exists.’
I left him to get on the radio, and went over to take a closer look at the minibus. There was a dent in the front offside wing that could have been historic, and a new scratch on the driver’s door that cut through the dust patina.
At the rear I had a hunch, and dropped to a crouch to study the exhaust. I moved in close; the uniforms had already corrupted this area, and I couldn’t make it worse. Using the long serrated blade of my Swiss Army knife, I probed inside the pipe. When I pulled it out a set of vehicle keys fell on to the gravel.
This fitted in with the careful way that the minibus had been parked. The keys had been left for us to find. Emrys was right. Someone was trying to signal that there was no malicious intent in this.
I dangled the keys at Emrys as I walked round to the side door, but he was occupied with the radio and didn’t see me. The two uniforms, who had been circling the minibus with me, keeping it as a shield between us, looked like they thought I was fucking Merlin when they saw the keys.
I always carry a couple of supermarket plastic bags in my coat pocket. Generally, they’re for shopping, but occasionally they come in useful in situations like this. I unlocked the minibus door, and, using my handkerchief on the handle, slid it open. I put the plastic bags over my shoes before I climbed in.
Stale cigarette smoke was the main olfactory make-up over the background of synthetic upholstery and diesel. I sniffed selectively. No vomit. No dope. No girls’ stuff either, or I just wasn’t good enough to pick it up.
I trawled the interior slowly. Some rubbish on the floor, a couple of beer-bottle caps, a crumpled potato-crisps packet. This didn’t look like a vehicle a bunch of drunks had stumbled out of.
I found it tucked under the seat in front of the back seat. I felt the tickle again. Bad news arriving. Regine Broussard had also been in possession of a plastic carrier bag.
I pulled it out carefully. This had been well used, creased and bearing the faded imprint of a butcher in Hereford. I looked inside. Paco Rabanne aftershave and Calvin Klein underpants both boxed in their original packaging.
‘Capaldi …’
Emrys was at the open door.
‘I’ll take that.’ He held his hand out.
I passed him the bag. For a moment I mistook his expression for fury. Then I realized that the torsion in his face went with anxiety.
‘None of them are there … None of them got home last night …’
‘Have you any idea what conditions are like up here?’ I asked the duty officer at headquarters in Carmarthen over the radio.
‘I can’t authorize a helicopter search.’
‘Yes, you can.’
‘I need senior officer clearance.’
‘Call DCS Galbraith.’
‘It’s a Sunday,’ a note of panic rising in his voice at that prospect.
‘And this is an emergency. I have seven people missing up here in conditions of extreme exposure. One of them is a young woman. You take the fall if any of them die or suffer serious injury.’ I let that doom note resonate for a moment before pressing down on the exaggeration pedal. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. I’m talking mountain conditions here, an enormous wind-chill factor, snow, a warren of forestry trails to be covered.’ The last bit, at least, was true.
‘Is a helicopter any use if it’s snowing?’ he asked.
‘It’s passing over,’ I said quickly, ‘but the wind’s getting colder.’
‘Okay,’ he came to a decision, ‘I’ll set it up, but it’s your responsibility. I am only acting on information received.’
It’s only accounting, I told myself, the budget must have an allocation for such emergencies. I raised a thumb of acknowledgement to Emrys, who was down at his own car, on the radio to his boss, trying to get more people in for the search.
But where to start? I traced the course of the minor road with my eyes until it disappeared into the forest that rolled outwards and onwards for hectare after hectare. New growth, old growth, clearances, logging trails, abandoned trails, and the bastard, shape-shifting magic trails that I always ended up getting lost on. The imminent prospect of moving into that forest held no appeal.
The imminent prospect of a call from Detective Chief Superintendent Galbraith was even less appealing.
I had a lot to blame Jack Galbraith for.
For a start, he had rescued me. After my career in Cardiff had effectively gone down the tubes, he had stepped in and offered to have me in the Carmarthen Division. The Wild and Woolly West, as we used to say in Cardiff. I had thought about it when I had gone in to clean out my desk in that strangely empty squad room. After they had told me that it was safe to surface from my “emotional” leave. Why was he taking in a burned-out and redundant “hero”? Jack Galbraith did not have a reputation as a philanthropist. Had someone in high places called in a big favour? Or was he setting up an even bigger one, to be redeemed at some future date?
‘I’ve been informed that you used to be a good cop, Capaldi,’ he had told me on that first day of my official reincarnation in Carmarthen. When I had been born again as one of his men. ‘That’s why you’re here with me instead of wearing a rinky-dink security uniform and patrolling the booze aisle in some shanty-town supermarket. I’m giving you another chance. See if you can get back some of that good judgement that you occasionally used to demonstrate.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I had replied humbly.
‘Look at this.’ He walked across his office to the map of Wales that hung on the wall.
I looked. He tapped the map, a drummer’s rhythm. I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be looking at. He was tapping the bit in the middle, the empty bit, the bit God gave to the sheep.
‘Do you know how much it’s costing … to send men out from here …’ he rapped the pen on each of the divisional headquarters, then came back into the middle again ‘. . . to here? Every time a case comes up?’
‘I can imagine.’ I nodded sympathetically.
‘Overtime, petrol, hotel bills if they have to stay over.’
‘And you’re paying out for unproductive time with all that driving,’ I added helpfully. I would have kept my mouth shut if I had known what was coming.
‘Exactly. You’ve hit it right on the head there, son. Unproductive bloody time.’ He sat down on the edge of the desk. A power move. Looking down at me, nodding at the question before he had even framed it. ‘So what are we going to do about it?’
I didn’t even pretend to think that I was being invited to advise on strategy here. ‘I don’t know the answer to that, sir.’
‘I’m going to try an experiment, Capaldi.’
I gave him my best fresh, interested look.
‘I’m going to put a man in there. A resident detective, someone who can cover the routine crap, so back-up only gets called in when it’s absolutely necessary.’
Something plummeted. I felt like a specimen butterfly watching the mounting pin descend. ‘You’re surely not thinking of me for this, sir, are you?’
He grinned. It wasn’t meant to be friendly. ‘I’d have thought you would be grateful for any chance.’
‘I’m straight out of the city, sir.’
‘And you fucked up good there, didn’t you?’ He didn’t embellish. Didn’t remind me that I was responsible for the messy death of a man. He didn’t have to; the memory still kept me on familiar terms with the Hour of the Wolf most nights.
‘But I wouldn’t know how to operate out there,’ I protested, not faking my bewilderment.
‘Don’t fret your head about that, Capaldi, No one fucking does.’
