Ewart Hutton - Wild People

I wasn’t used to this road, but I had driven it enough times to know about the bend. To treat it with respect. I had approached it with anticipation, doing all the right things, dropping down to third gear, braking evenly, starting the turn.

And then the car had stopped turning. A huge jolt, which I later realized must have been the offside front wheel hitting a rock on the verge after the tyre had blown. Then take-off.

Did she scream?

Am I going back into a voided memory and inventing that?

But her seat belt was on. And the rear door was locked.

How could they have found her outside the car?

Could I have missed anything in the build-up?

Emrys Hughes had called me. He was the local uniform sergeant, and acted as if Dinas had been his patch ever since his ancestors had crawled out of the sea complete with gills, Stalin moustache and truncheon. I could understand that he would have mightily resented it when my boss DCS Jack Galbraith had decreed that he was going to be sharing his demesne with me. I could even sympathize. Although empathy didn’t stop me from rubbing his nose in it from time to time. Sparking up Emrys Hughes had been one of the pastimes that helped to ease my way through a long Mid Wales winter.

‘Morning, Glyn.’ His tone was cheerful and friendly, and I was immediately wary. His usual greeting was ‘Fuck you, Capaldi.’

‘Emrys.’

‘I was wondering how busy you are.’

I was at my desk in Unit 13 Hen Felin Caravan Park, which doubled up as my office and approximation of a home. I didn’t have to look anything up to know that my caseload comprised a con couple, male and female, who were claiming to be from Social Services and targeting pensioners, and an outfit who were knocking off touring caravans. On the computer screen I had the latest swatch of missing person reports. Customers of varied form and function whose last-known coordinates made it possible that they could have been heading into these latitudes. I had a female Latvian student, a middle-aged Turkish Cypriot businessman, and a dyke from Brighton with a completely shaven head, including eyebrows, who was described as bipolar.

‘Snowed under,’ I told him.

‘Good.’ The bastard hadn’t even allowed my reply to register on his consciousness. ‘So how would you feel about helping make up the manpower on a stakeout that Inspector Morgan has asked me to organize?’

In the normal course of events I would have told him straight out where to stick his stakeout. But Jack Galbraith had recently instructed me to mend my bridges with the local force, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was responsible for alienating them in the first place by dumping me in Dinas to act as his command outpost in the empty quarter. Get onto sweetheart terms, he had told me, just in case I ever needed the back-up, because, in the current state of the relationship, any emergency call from me would have most of them reaching for the cudgels so that they could have their go at me before the opposition bagged all the fun.

Which meant that I now had to add finesse to my avoidance tactics. I sucked in a deep doubtful breath. ‘It’s looking like my diary’s pretty stuffed-up here.’

‘You’ll be free on this night.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because Inspector Morgan’s already cleared it with DCS Galbraith.’ I heard the smug chuckle spread down the line.

I checked my annoyance. He’d been playing with me, it was already a done deal. ‘What’s the operation?’ I asked.

His voice dropped low. ‘You’ll find out on the night. We’re keeping this close to our chest. A need-to-know basis, we don’t want the targets getting wind of it.’ Jesus, he was taking this way too seriously. I’ll bet he was even having Special Forces dreams.

I looked out of the caravan’s window. We were having a run of good early summer weather. The tops of the exposed boulders in the low-running river were bleached dry and streaked with wagtail guano, the deep green leaves on the alders that fringed the bank were a celebration of chlorophyll, and the sky thrummed blue with small groups of puffy prancing white clouds. I just knew that it was going to end up raining on the night.

I called Huw Davies, a local uniform cop I had made friends with. Huw kept away from the politics and the backbiting, but was an astute enough observer to be able to go to for an overview. ‘Have you got any information about a stakeout operation that Inspector Morgan’s corralled me into?’

He chuckled. ‘You too?’

‘It’s supposed to be a secret.’

‘Oh, it is, everyone that’s been told has been made to promise not to tell anyone else.’

‘Okay, so it’s a golf club locker room kind of secret?’ I ventured.

‘That’s right.’

‘So how come no one has made me promise not to tell?’

He laughed. ‘Because no one talks to you.’

‘I promise not to tell anyone, Huw.’

‘Have you heard of the Monks’ Trail?’

‘Vaguely. Remind me.’

‘It’s a long-distance footpath that starts near the village of Llandewi. There’s a purpose-built car park in the woods at the beginning of the trail. That’s where the problem is. Some of the cars that have been left there have been vandalized and broken into while their owners have been off hiking or mountain biking. Certain local worthies have got it into their heads that this is bad for tourism, ergo their businesses, and have bent Inspector Morgan’s ear.’

‘We’re gathering all this manpower and going on a stakeout for vandals?’ I let him hear my amazement.

‘Correct.’

‘There’s something quite endearingly reassuring about this, Huw. That this is the extent of major crime in the area. But is it really worth the time and the effort?’

‘Feral youth.’ I heard his amusement.

‘What?’

‘They’ve somehow fixed on the notion that it’s down to gangs of wild drug- and booze-fuelled kids from Swansea or Liverpool driving in to target our community and heading back with their bags full of swag.’

‘I take it you’re not sharing this apocalyptic vision?’

‘I think we’d have come across a bit more noise and a lot more damage. And they’re not taking our virgins with them.’

‘Have you got anyone in mind for it?’

‘I could probably point to a couple of people, but I’m keeping my head down. I don’t want to be seen as the one who pissed on Inspector Morgan’s crusade.’

I registered the warning.

Feral youth?

Back in my hospital bed I tried to square that with what little I remembered of Jessie Bullock. I couldn’t. No snarls, no attitude, not even a visible piercing.

I had been prescient. It did rain on the night.

Those of us who weren’t already in their assigned places assembled in a hut that was shared between the local Boy Scout troop and the Women’s Institute, as evidenced by the rope knot posters and a tea-making roster on the walls. The floors creaked, and I imagined the memories locked into the fabric, a combination of suppressed unfocused juvenile lusts and home-made scones and jam.

Everyone was in mufti, and most of them had somehow managed to over-emphasize the fact that they were out of uniform by making their outfits look like disguises. A room full of charged and eager hyper-civilians.

Morgan briefed us from the raised dais. I had only ever seen him in uniform before, a stiff and disapproving man with a widow’s peak over a crinkled washboard forehead. Tonight he looked incongruous in a pale blue anorak and a knitted ski cap, his voice raised to overcompensate for the lack of visible rank badges.

He ran us through it. Two vehicles had been planted in the car park to act as honey pots, a swanked-up BMW 3 Series coupé, and a Subaru Impreza. Two surveillance vehicles were already in place, a camper van at the far end, and a Ford Transit covering the entrance, which could also double up as a blockade vehicle if the bad guys attempted to leave the car park in a hurry.