скачать книгу бесплатно
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.
