Ewart Hutton - Wild People

He put an envelope down on the table. ‘This was left for you. I’ve been holding onto it.’

Sergeant Capaldi. The handwriting was neat, cursive, and probably female. ‘Thanks. You could have dropped it off at the caravan.’

He pulled a face. On reflection, I think it was meant to be sympathetic. ‘It might be hate mail. I wouldn’t have wanted you coming home and this being one of the first things you found.’

I smiled up at him. ‘Thanks, Emrys.’ What was the deal? I asked myself. My wellbeing didn’t usually loom too large in Emrys’s repertoire.

Then it struck me. Seeing the anticipation in his face. He knew who had written this. He wanted to be in attendance when I read it. He wanted to watch my reaction. He and his cronies probably had some sort of sweepstake running.

He made no move to go. ‘Thanks, Emrys,’ I repeated.

He still didn’t budge, his smile frozen in place. ‘Emrys?’ I said quietly.

‘What?’ He bent forward to hear me better.

‘If you don’t fuck off now I’m going to thank you very loudly for sending me the sweet flowers and then stand up and give you a great big kiss on the lips.’

His head shot back like a sprung trap. He coloured. ‘You don’t have to be like that, I was only trying to do you a favour,’ he said crossly.

I waited until he had left the bar before I opened the envelope. It was a card with a printed header, but I honed straight in on the handwritten message.

Dear Sergeant Capaldi,

I hope that your injuries are not too extensive, and that your time in hospital will be short. This is just to let you know that I hold you in no way responsible for the tragic accident that has resulted in the loss of my daughter Jessie.

Wishing you a speedy recovery.

Yours,

Cassandra Bullock

Jesus! I put the card down carefully on the table to mask my emotions. I started to get teary. Torn up by the fact that this woman could have taken time out in the middle of her grief and devastation to write this. To comfort me. A stranger.

And that’s when it came to me. The catalyst that snapped me out of my egocentricity. What I had missed seeing. What my self-centredness had blinkered.

Forget Edgar Fiske. Forget the convicted murderers and the dead lags. Forget Nick Bessant.

I had overlooked the facts that made it impossible for me to have been the target.

Which meant that they had been out to kill Jessie Bullock.

Maybe not Jessie precisely. I pulled back and rejigged it. I gave it more thought and revised the specificity down. Maybe the target had been more general, like whoever I had ended up carrying in the back of the car.

But definitely not me. Because, once I’d ditched the persecution complex and thought about it analytically, I had to conclude that I couldn’t have been the target. Okay, so Morgan’s so-called security blanket hadn’t been exactly tightly banded with razor wire. In fact, it had been as leaky as a spiked hose. So anyone who had been at all interested would probably have known that I was part of the operation. But they couldn’t have anticipated the role I ended up giving myself.

Because what was crucial was that my offering 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.’