Wild People

2

The coincidences seemed to be just too loaded.

I had been lying there for days wallowing in guilt and anguish until something in the kick-ass side of my brain took over and said, Wait a minute, stop playing the helpless victim and look at this in another light. A tyre bursts on you, bad news, but it happens. Invariably you pull over to the side of the road, fix the bastard and get your hands dirty. But when the one crucial tyre explodes on a wet surface, at the very worst point on a killer bend and you go flying off the road, you have to start questioning the likelihood of all those factors coming into conjunction without perhaps a little assistance.

Jack Galbraith turned back to face me. ‘We thought about that.’

‘We checked it out. It was definitely an accident,’ Bryn amplified.

‘No disrespect, Capaldi, but who would go to all that fucking effort to waste you?’

Who indeed?

I racked my brains for people with grudges. Sadly there were plenty of takers. I then factored in the possession of enough intelligence and resources to have come up with a scheme like this that had left no trace, and that narrowed the field down quite considerably. To zero in fact. I could think of no fiendish Professor Moriarty type who I had crossed badly enough in my past.

But it was occupying me. Keeping my brain engaged. And, more importantly, deflecting my sense of guilt. If someone else had caused this, I could concentrate on retribution rather than morbidity. I could act rather than mope. I was a cop after all. I could use my métier to find out who had been behind it.

I started by putting a call in to Kevin Fletcher in Cardiff. I had been his mentor when he had first joined the force. We had worked together when we had both been detective sergeants, although he had since risen to the rank of detective chief inspector, while I remained a DS, with the added distinction of now being a disgraced emissary in the boondocks. We didn’t like each other these days, but I reckoned that he owed me one for unintentionally giving his career another upward shunt recently.

‘Glyn!’ His tone was ebullient.

‘Hi, Kevin, can you talk, or is this a bad time?’

‘Absolutely no problemo.’ His voice was raised over a background of clinking glasses and conversations. I could picture him in his element, networking with the movers and the sharks in a swanky boozer. His tone dropped to sympathetic. ‘Are you okay? We heard about the accident. Fucking shame.’

‘It’s a terrible thing. And thanks, I’m getting better, but I need a favour, Kevin.’

The brief silence was like a security grille crashing into place. ‘And I’d love to have you back here working for me, don’t get me wrong. Like a shot, if the decision was mine to make. But it’s a political thing.’ In the background I heard a couple of his cronies laugh, and I wondered what gesture he’d just flashed them. ‘You’re still a raw wound down here. The head honchos wouldn’t consider it.’

I gritted my teeth to cover my gag reaction at all that faux sincerity, and tried to keep my voice sunny. ‘I’m not looking for a transfer, only some information.’

He chuckled benignly. ‘That I can do, if I’m able.’

‘Can you ask around discreetly to see if there’s any talk out there about anyone having a special interest in me.’

‘Special interest?’ His voice was alert now.

‘A big chip on their shoulder. It might be someone I put away, or it might be a more tenuous connection. Perhaps someone I put inside has died in the nick, and a relative might be holding me responsible.’

‘As in revenge?’

‘Something like that.’

He sewed the pieces together. ‘You think the accident might not have been an accident?’

‘I’d just like to reassure myself.’

‘Leave it with me.’

Give him credit, he acted quickly. Pity he didn’t do it in my interest.

‘Capaldi!’

‘Sir?’ As soon as I saw Jack Galbraith’s number come up on the caller display I knew that Fletcher had finked on me.

‘A little bird has told me that you are about to take off on a flight of fucking fantasy.’

‘I just thought I’d check out the opposition, Sir. There are some twisted people out there.’

His voice rose. ‘And I told you we already had.’

I held the phone away from me and ate shit. ‘Yes, Sir.’

‘The possibility has been checked and discounted.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Get this, Capaldi, you are currently non-operational. So you are either going to be on sick leave getting up to whatever you do with your sheep or your fucking elks or whatever else you use to relax with up there, or I will haul you back to Carmarthen and have you collating endless reams of useless shit. Understood?’

‘I understand, Sir.’

Contacting Fletcher had been a calculated risk. But, even if he hadn’t shafted me, I had always known that probably, and sooner rather than later, I was going to have to take this thing underground.

Which is why I declined the offer of a police driver to take me home and asked Mackay to come for me instead. Without my mother this time.

They had allowed me to take light exercise for the last couple of days, so although I was still stiff, I wasn’t too woozy on my feet by the time he came to fetch me. And, now that it had arrived, my discharge wasn’t the huge relief I had been anticipating, because, in a way, it felt like leaving sanctuary. Back out into the big world where no one gave a shit what the exonerating evidence said. I was a cop and I had crashed a car and killed a young woman coming into her prime, who had been entrusted to my care. Blame accrued.

You could never call Mackay a ray of sunshine, he had too much black history for that, but he certainly brought freshness back into my life, like the proximity of running water on a very hot day. My institutionalized days had turned me stale.

Mackay and I went back a long way, to childhood holidays in Scotland, where his family was entwined into the Capaldi clan there. I had been enraptured by the wild Mackay brothers, and he and I had become close friends despite the geography that separated us. Our life paths diverged when I joined the police force in Cardiff, and he went into the army. After that, whenever we did get together, big trouble inevitably seemed to flare up on our periphery, and I discovered I had lost my appetite for mayhem. Our nadir came when he took up with my ex-wife Gina. Now she had dropped him through the trapdoor in favour of a younger Australian version, he had retired from the SAS, and we had reconnected, with him taking on the self-appointed role of my protector.

He still carried that baby face that was so redolent of Glasgow, although there were now a few crinkles around the corners of his eyes. He ran initiative training courses for corporate executives from his farmhouse in Herefordshire, and this occupation was reflected in his lean fitness, the weathered face, and bleached sandy hair that he wore short.

I climbed into his familiar old Range Rover while he put my bag in the rear. He caught me looking at my face in the vanity mirror as he climbed into the front seat. It was improving. Now it just looked like an accident involving some suspect tanning products.

‘Even with the sympathy vote I still wouldn’t fancy you.’ He grinned.

‘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.