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‘Have you taken them in?’ I asked, surprised, wondering whether to start feeling vindicated. ‘Is it turning out to be more serious than we thought?’
‘They’ve gone home. All of them.’
I stared at him for a moment, perplexed. ‘Even the men?’
He nodded. ‘Even the men.’
I shook my head, trying to clear a path to my next question. Then the inner voice of self-preservation sideswiped me. ‘DCS Galbraith – has he gone home too?’ I asked, trying to conceal the hope in the question.
Bryn dropped his cigarette end, crushed it underfoot, and then shook his head. Not unkindly. ‘No. I’m on lookout duty.’
I didn’t have to ask who the smoke on the horizon was.
Jack Galbraith was sitting at a stacking table at the end of the hall, an empty plastic chair beside him, and an identical one opposite. He was having a cigarette under a sign that read Please refrain from smoking under the eyes of the Lord.
He looked up when I entered, closed his eyes, and steepled his fingers. I hoped that he was looking for guidance. Trying to find the strength to stop him swearing under the eyes of the Lord.
‘Fuck you, Capaldi.’ His eyes flicked open. ‘Where do I fucking start?’
Bryn Jones slipped into the empty chair beside him.
Even seated, you could tell that Jack Galbraith was tall. He had light brown hair swept back in a swagger behind his ears, a strangely effeminate frame for the firm, square-boned face with its deep-set, incisive, brown eyes. He looked as though he had been built for stamina, for distance and endurance, and you could tell from his bearing that he thought that he still had it, just hadn’t tried it out in a long time.
‘My wife thinks this is a put-up job to stop me taking her to an amateur choral rendition of fucking Elijah …’ All his years in Wales had hardly touched the gruff Scottish accent. He ticked the points off on his fingers: ‘That supreme fucking tosser Inspector Unctuous Morgan has witnessed my ritual humiliation. And you called out a fucking helicopter.’
‘No disrespect, sir, but we are in a church here,’ Bryn said quietly, out of the corner of his mouth.
‘No we’re not,’ Jack Galbraith corrected him. ‘We’re in a church fucking hall – there’s a difference. In here, I’m allowed a few transgressions.’ He paused to dump his cigarette into the residue of a mug of tea before fixing his gaze back on me. ‘What have you got to say for yourself, Capaldi?’
‘I thought we had a situation, sir. I had seven people missing, one of them a woman, in extreme weather conditions. I made a decision that seemed to be appropriate for the circumstances as I saw them at the time.
‘I was especially worried about the woman – a hitchhiker, picked up by the men. She didn’t know them. And the men were drunk. In my opinion she was vulnerable. And I’m still concerned for her. Do you remember the Broussard case, sir? In Cardiff? About six years ago? A Haitian illegal immigrant?’
‘There’s no parallel.’ Jack Galbraith shook his head and smirked. ‘Tell him, Bryn,’ he instructed. ‘Give him the low-down on the little flower he’s so concerned about.’
‘She was a hooker, Sergeant.’
‘A Cardiff tart,’ Jack Galbraith amplified. ‘Called herself Miss Danielle.’
I tried to absorb my surprise. ‘They picked her up in a rural petrol station. The minibus driver said she was hitching.’
‘That was the cover story,’ Bryn explained.
‘It was organized, Capaldi.’
‘It was meant to be a stag event,’ Bryn clarified. ‘They were setting up a surprise for the two bachelors in the group. They were meant to believe that the girl was just an innocent hitchhiker.’
‘Then, surprise, surprise, the girl drops the Young Rambler guise’ – Jack Galbraith clapped his hands together – ‘and at least one of our two virgins gets his rocks off, courtesy of his buddies.’
I tried to get my head round it. They waited me out. ‘But they took her up to a hut in a forest. That’s where I’ve come from.’
Jack Galbraith nodded. ‘We gathered that. And we also notice that you haven’t returned clutching a dripping axe in the evidence bag.’
‘Did you see anything up there that we should be concerned about?’ Bryn asked.
I thought about the crumpled tissue, the log rounds, the bracken bed. ‘No, sir.’ I shook my head and frowned. ‘But I don’t get it.’
‘Where have we lost you, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith asked.
‘Why did they stay up there for the night? The men, I mean. It was cold and damp. Uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to describe it. And they must have realized the furore it would cause.’
‘That’s where it went wrong for them,’ Jack Galbraith said. ‘According to the master plan they were supposed to have their party, get the virgins’ cherries popped, and be back in their beds, tucked up with their loved ones, before they were missed.’ He eyed me carefully. ‘Tell Capaldi the story we were told, Bryn.’
I picked up on his use of the word ‘story’. Jack Galbraith was very precise with his words. And instead of the savaging I’d been expecting, he was being relatively gentle with me. Was I about to discover the reason?
‘They claim that they were very drunk. That, despite the conditions up there, they slept through until the morning.’
I remembered the sight of them coming down the hill. ‘They did look pretty rough,’ I conceded. ‘One of them, the big one, was totally out of it.’
Jack Galbraith grinned. ‘Paul Evans, one of the virgin bachelors. That must have been some kind of a fuck, eh?’
‘It didn’t look like rapture to me, sir,’ I observed.
‘But it wasn’t just the demon drink that was their undoing.’
‘No?’ I answered cautiously. He looked amused. I wondered if he had found some way to fold me into the blame for this.
He grinned. ‘No, it was the Big Bad Pimp.’
‘Sir?’
Jack Galbraith gestured, and Bryn took over. ‘They’re claiming that it was the girl’s pimp who drove the minibus away.’
‘A pimp … ?’ I didn’t try to hide my astonishment.
He nodded. ‘According to the men, he had never been part of the arrangement. They had assumed that they could persuade the minibus driver to take them up to the hut, then just give him a good bung for his waiting-around time.’
‘The driver never mentioned that.’
‘They never got round to negotiating it. When the girl was picked up at the service station she announced that the deal had changed. She wanted her pimp with her. Told them that she felt vulnerable out here in the boondocks without protection.’
I pondered it, seeing how the fit started to work for them. ‘So the girl has it arranged that this Cardiff pimp is waiting in a lay-by in the middle of nowhere, all set to cut the minibus driver adrift, jump into the driving seat and carry them away?’
‘That’s more or less how the authorized version goes,’ Jack Galbraith confirmed.
‘Which means that there’s no drinking and driving involved?’
He nodded. ‘Correct. Our heroes remain unblemished.’
‘And then they’re abandoned by the pimp and his girl.’
‘Like some kind of fairy story, isn’t it? Our bunch of poor foundlings left to their cruel fate in a woodsman’s hut in the middle of the dark fucking forest.’
I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t work, sir.’
‘Explain.’
‘The place where we found the empty minibus this morning – if that was the rendezvous, the place where the pimp and the girl had arranged to be picked up and taken back to Cardiff – they would never have found it. Not in the dark, not in that warren of forestry tracks. Chances are, this guy’s never driven in a night situation that didn’t involve street lights.’
Jack Galbraith and Bryn exchanged a glance. ‘It does work, Sergeant,’ Bryn said.
‘Why?’
Jack Galbraith pulled a face. ‘Because we have five solid, upright and honest citizens who all say that that was the way it happened. And we’re all so dreadfully sorry to have inconvenienced everyone.’
‘They even had a whip-round while they were here to pay for the damage to the minibus,’ Bryn added.
‘Damage caused by the pimp, mind you. These guys are nothing if not magnanimous,’ Jack Galbraith observed with an ironic chuckle. ‘And it also works because I don’t have any relevant reports of a missing person, or a woman claiming that she has been abducted and abused.’
‘Has anyone in Cardiff been able to talk to the girl?’
They both shook their heads. Jack Galbraith frowned. ‘No. And do you know why? Because the sanctimonious fucks claim that they found the number in a telephone booth. And now they’ve lost it.’
‘Do Vice know this Miss Danielle?’
‘Nothing matching the description we’ve been given,’ Bryn replied. ‘Either the girl was using a false name, or the men don’t want us to trace her.’
‘So they just walk? It’s over?’
Jack Galbraith nodded. ‘There’s nowhere to take it. These bastards are too respectable for us to resort to the rubber hose, never mind the thumbscrews.’
I didn’t know whether that was a coded invitation for me to opt out of their enforced inaction. I accepted it as such anyway. And then I remembered that we had another missing person. ‘There were supposed to be six men. Only five came down the hill.’
‘They dropped off one of their number on the way. He never went into the forest.’ He looked over at Bryn for amplification.
Bryn checked his notes. ‘Boon Paterson. He was on leave from the Army, going home today. He asked to be let out in Dinas.’
That fitted in with the six pixie stools that I had counted in the hut. ‘What kind of a name is Boon?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know, Sergeant Capaldi,’ Jack Galbraith replied with a mean chuckle, making a drawn-out meal of my surname.
It was already dark when they left, the afternoon colder now and winter-killed. I felt oddly lonely watching them go, like I was the patsy who had somehow been tricked into staying behind to man the empty gulag.
The Fleece didn’t exactly lift my heart with gladness. It was virtually empty. Locked into a race memory of not being able to drink on a Sunday, the old men who usually occupied the back bar stayed away.
I took a stool at the bar. David Williams, the owner, wasn’t around. That suited me fine. I leaned over the counter, took my glass down from its place on the shelf, put it under the beer tap and filled it. Self-service meant I could avoid the inclusion in my drink of stuff from the black plastic bilge bucket that stood under the pump, collecting everything from drips through pork-pie particles to the common cold virus.
David popped his head round from the serving area of the front bar. He came over, picking up his drink as he passed it. The two separate bars were a godsend to him. He could keep a drink active in each one, and work on the mistaken belief that his customers were only seeing the half of what he was actually consuming.
‘Scandal?’ he asked with a great big eager grin.
‘What have you heard?’ I closed the beer tap.
He pretended to look crestfallen. ‘You mean you’re not going to tell me?’
‘I want to hear your version.’
He checked to see who might be listening, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘The story is that they picked up a couple of hitchhikers on their way back from the match, supposedly without realizing that they were working girls.’ He raised his eyebrows, waiting to see if I would respond.
‘One hitchhiker.’
‘Just one?’ He sounded disappointed.
‘Go on,’ I prompted.
‘Whoever it was turned out to have a boyfriend with her. They tried on some sort of a shakedown, and then they took the transport and abandoned our boys up in the forest.’ He leered salaciously. ‘What we’re all wondering is, what went on up there that the boys wouldn’t want their loved ones to know about?’
He stood back and waited for my reaction.
I just nodded, noncommittal. It was a raggedy version, maybe deliberately so, but it was interesting that the group had managed to get their spin working for them so quickly.
‘You’re not going to tell me?’ he asked, disappointed.
‘I couldn’t improve on that, David.’
David and Sandra Williams were Dinas’s version of the Golden Couple. That status was still current only because any contenders to their throne had opted for a Bronze future in a bigger place.
David was also the nearest thing I had to a friend in Dinas.
‘I’ve seen some of those guys around,’ I said. ‘Tell me about them. Two of them looked like brothers.’
He didn’t have to think about it. ‘That’s Ken and Gordon McGuire. Ken’s the oldest. He got the family farm, Rhos-goch. A big holding out on the Penygarreg road, some hill country, but a lot of good river land.’
‘Good farmer?’
‘Yes, but you wouldn’t have to be on that land. A walking stick would sprout if you left it in the dirt long enough.’
‘The brother?’
‘Gordon’s an auctioneer with Payne, Dyke and Thomas.’
‘A lush?’ I asked, knowing the occupational hazard.
David shrugged. ‘Not as bad as some. Good at his job, though. He got a nice Victorian farmhouse when Ken got the farm.’
‘Who’s the big guy? Shaven head.’
‘Paul Evans. Works for his father, a builder up at Treffnant. He’s a really good rugby player. Awesome tackler.’
