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‘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.’
