Wild People

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

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.

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?