Ewart Hutton - Wild People

‘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.