Читать книгу Wild People - Ewart Hutton - Страница 10

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?

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.

The last thing I needed. My Cardiff disgrace resurfacing.

Jack Galbraith would have me counting the puffins on Skomer Island.

Rhian Pritchard was going to be trouble. I could sense it. That face and attitude screamed devilish persistence, although she probably thought she was radiating cute pluck. She was a byline junkie. I had met the type before. Looking for a hot story under every pair of eyebrows, anything to swell the cuttings file that she hoped was going to land her that regular slot on a national magazine one day.

Why did our paths have to cross? Now she was out to use my head as a fucking career stepping stone and press me deeper into the ooze on the way.

I stacked her away in the groaning pile of future problems when I got back to Unit 13. I logged into my computer. Huw Davies had been true to his word and had emailed the file references to the break-ins and vandalism at the car park.

I opened them up. It was all dross. Huw had been right. This was all low-grade criminal activity. The worst thing that had been done had been the breaking of the cars’ windows. And that was probably as much to do with vandalism as it was with the petty thefts, because they had never demonstrated any intention of stealing the vehicles. And, apart from one portable satnav, the list of the stuff that had been stolen was banal. A travel rug, CDs, a lucky tortoise mascot, an insulated coffee container … It went on in that vein. As Huw had said, trophies, junk to reinforce the memories of the outlaw trips.

Who was going to kill anyone for a portable satnav?

Cause and effect.

None of the shit that had been taken could possibly have been the cause that had led to the effect of Jessie’s murder. None of those trinkets and baubles could have warranted anything as extreme as that.

Given the tat value of all the other stuff, I even idly wondered whether the reported satnav had actually been stolen, or if someone had used the opportunity to scam his insurance company.

That warped logic clicked on another step.

If someone could have reported something being stolen that hadn’t been, what about something being stolen that hadn’t been reported?

I felt the old familiar clutch in my kidneys as new possibilities opened up.

Something so valuable to its owner that the effect its loss had created was Jessie’s death. Something so valuable and so illegal that its theft couldn’t be recorded?

But what the fuck would something as precious as that be doing left in a car park in the middle of nowhere, frequented by mountain bikers and ramblers and the ghosts of dead monks?

I sidelined that question as irrelevant. It called for too much detailed information. What was important here was the concept. Something of value that couldn’t be brought to the attention of the police after it had been stolen.

But why kill Jessie? What would be gained?

A punishment? Or to scare whoever was holding on to it to give it up?

Or had they already tried to get rid of it?

I got on the phone to Huw.

‘A hypothetical question, Huw. You have a punter who is walking along a railway line and he comes across a parcel that has obviously fallen from a train. He looks inside and finds … Let’s say a camera. An expensive camera, in its original packaging, no owner’s name. So where does he take it?’

‘If he’s local, he brings it to me.’

‘Let’s say he’s been away for a bit and picked up bad habits. And his wife’s just given birth to triplets and he needs instant cash to buy disposable nappies and fags. Where would he take the hypothetical camera?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m on sick leave remember, Huw. I’m keeping my mind active, researching cottage industries between jigsaws and sudoku.’

‘Bullshit, Sarge.’ But he laughed. ‘You’ve met him.’

‘I have?’ I was surprised. I had no memories of any encounters with a neighbourhood fence.

‘Yes, our boy Ryan.’

Ryan Shaw. The local low-rent dope dealer. ‘Christ, Huw, is he a crook-of-all-trades? Renaissance Hoodie?’

I heard him laugh down the line. ‘We don’t have enough of the spread round here that you had in Cardiff that enables them to specialize.’

I thanked him and hung up. I had had one previous encounter with Ryan, and he had not been a very happy young hoodlum at the end of it. So much so that he had complained to Emrys Hughes. Because Ryan was also a local snitch.

He was protected. I was going to have to be careful how I approached him.

Orchard Close, Maesmore. Not much had changed. A supermarket trolley had joined the junk installation on the former front lawn outside number 3, Ryan’s house, which he shared with his mother and sister and at least one baby that I knew of.

I was glad to see his purple VW Golf was creating its usual obstruction on the pavement. Because, as I had no official business to go knocking on that front door with, I was going to have to wait for Ryan to come out to me.

It was heavy dusk by now. I calculated the distance I needed and parked a few houses down, facing in the same direction as Ryan’s car. I kept out of the pool of the street light. I didn’t think that he would know my car, but I didn’t want to take the chance. Curtains twitched in the house I was parked outside of, but I didn’t let it worry me. If you lived near a dope dealer you got used to strange traffic, and usually you learned not to complain about it.

When it was dark enough I slid over to the passenger’s side and got out of the car without closing the door. I had already de-activated the interior light. I checked that the street was empty in both directions before making my way up the pavement on the other side from Ryan’s house until I was opposite his car. I checked the street again, and then flowed across it, sinking into a low Groucho Marx stride, and dropping to a crouch at the rear of the VW.

I tied the end of the string to the towing ring and bundled the rest of it with the attached tin cans under the car, out of sight. I made my way back to my car.

Now all I had to do was continue waiting. Ryan could do two things to fuck my plan up. He could decide to stay in for the night, or, if he did elect to go out, he could do a three-point turn and head off in the opposite direction to where I was waiting for him.

In the end he obliged me on both counts.

The night had cooled down to chilly, but he still appeared in just a tight white T-shirt and cinched black jeans to showcase his pumped physique. He got in his car, gunned the motor and headed down the road in my direction.

KLANG! KLANG! KLANG!

I had tied the tin cans to a four-metre-long piece of string, so by the time they started rattling, and he had reacted to what sounded like his straight-through exhaust trailing the ground, he was a couple of car lengths short of me when he stopped. As I had anticipated, he left his door wide open and the engine still running when he jumped out and ran to the rear to investigate his mechanical prolapse.

I glided up, switched off the engine and took the car keys out.

He was still snarled up in the confusion of the moment. He had found the cans. He heard his engine stop. There was too much happening here, and it took him a beat to react. When he did turn, I could tell that he hadn’t recognized me in the dark.

‘What the fuck …?’ he growled threateningly, trying to make sense of this.

‘Shouldn’t leave your engine running like that, Ryan, it fucks up the atmosphere.’

Curtains were twitching all around like Aldis lamps. He stared at me malevolently. I could almost hear the tumblers in his brain clicking through the recognition process.

‘You!’ He pointed at me. ‘You’re fucked! You were warned off after the last time you tried to mess with me.’

‘This is just between you and me, Ryan.’

‘Says who?’

‘If I thought you were going to report me, I wouldn’t help you.’

He chuckled nastily. ‘And how are you going to fucking help me?’

I dangled his car keys. ‘You’re going to have a hard time finding these otherwise.’

‘That’s fucking theft,’ he whined indignantly.

‘Which is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Are you trying to fit me up?’ he asked suspiciously, his mind shifting into another gear.

‘No, I want your professional advice, that’s all. You talk to me nicely, and I give you your keys back, and walk away.’

He digested it. Probably wondering what particular branch of his profession I was talking about. He nodded his head carefully. ‘Okay. I’m not promising anything, mind.’

‘Did you know Jessie Bullock?’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘Oh, come on, Ryan,’ I snorted impatiently, ‘she was only the biggest piece of fucking news around here since the glaciers retreated.’

He shrugged, unconcerned about being caught out in the lie. ‘Okay, I might have heard the name.’

‘Did she or any of her friends ever give you something to try and sell for them?’

He looked at me calculatingly. ‘Like what?’ He was trying to work out what I knew.

‘Something valuable.’

He couldn’t help himself. It was embedded in his nature to brag. It was only the tiniest twitch, but I caught it. He smothered it with a big faux doubtful frown and a shake of the head. ‘Not that I remember.’

The bastard knew what I was talking about. I had my first small open chink into this thing. But what leverage was I going to be able to use on this guy to open it wider?

‘Thanks, Ryan.’ I tossed him the keys. ‘Remember the deal.’

‘Yeah. Thanks for nothing. And you can untie those fucking cans before you go.’

I complied. No point in upsetting him any further. Because, if I had my way, I was going to have a lot worse in store for him in the near future.

I even waved sweetly as he roared off.