Wild People. Ewart Hutton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ