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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 (#ulink_0117f8b8-8d22-5613-afa0-630fed048d57)
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.
