Ewart Hutton - Good People

And the tickle makes me wince.

Shotgun saw it. ‘You all right, Sarge?’ he asked, eyeing me curiously.

I ignored him. It had to be the woman. The source of the tickle. The presence of the woman added the crown of thorns.

Otherwise it was fairly typical Saturday-night bloke behaviour. Drink and testosterone fuelled. A prank with a potentially lethal edge. Sparked by impulse, opportunity – or the driver was not giving us the complete story of his relationship with his customers. Either way we had six drunks and a minibus, and a lot of different ways that they could wreck it.

How many ways did they have to wreck the woman?

What did I know about these men? According to the driver they were all young. They liked rugby. They supported the national team. They were country people. They had hired a minibus so that they could drink responsibly. All of that, if you discounted their age, stacked up reassuringly. Not quite nuns, but the profile was comfier than skanky-haired baby-fingerers with weighty Temazepam habits. A bunch of nice lads out on the town for the day.

So why the fuck had they turned idiotic?

There was no way to answer that yet. I left Driver and Shotgun to take the minibus driver back and deal with the procedures. Until we had a victim of some variety, or a complaint from someone other than the driver, I was redundant. I volunteered to cover the road between there and Dinas, keeping an eye out for the minibus.

With only a minor detour I let my route take me past the lay-by the driver had described. I used my high beams to light it up. Puddles and wind-blown rubbish. I got out and walked slowly. The hard light did weird things to empty crisp packets, disposable nappies and crushed drink cans. I almost missed it, floating upside-down in a puddle, the peak tipped away, looking like a miniature coracle.

It was a baseball cap. Dark blue, soaked, with an illegible logo. No telling how long it had been there. I turned it over and round in front of a headlight. No identifying labels. From its size, if could have belonged to a kid. Or a young woman with a small head. I put it in the glove compartment. I had thought about using an evidence bag, but I didn’t want to tempt fate.

I saw nothing on the rest of the way home. No skid marks, no smoking wreckage, no Indians circling the wagon train. I stopped in town and called Dispatch, gave my contact number, and asked them to log a message that I wanted to be kept up to date with the story.

Then I had no excuse. The Fleece was closed. The Chinese takeaway was closed. And a cold rain was starting, earlier than I had predicted. It was time for bed. I drove out of town. Heading for home.

The planks on the bridge rumbled under the wheels as I crossed the river into the utter blackness of Hen Felin Caravan Park. At this time of the year I was the only resident. Unit 13. I wasn’t superstitious.

The site held the frost, the electricity supply was erratic, and the water that came out of the taps was the colour of weak tea, but there was an upside to the location. It kept the public away. People who might think that it was a local policeman’s duty to help them out with squirrels in the attic, or neighbours playing the harmonium too loud. The site was out of town, badly lit, muddy, and in the holiday season it was full of outsiders whose brat-kids taunted the locals for speaking queerly.

Another advantage was that it was a caravan. It was temporary. It kept my impermanence tangible. Some day I would be leaving this awful place. Every time I walked in through the door, and was met by the mingled smells of condensation, plastic curtains and propane gas, I could remind myself that this was not going to last. This was the smell from family camping holidays long ago in Borth. And holidays in Borth had never lasted. Thank Christ.

The message light on the answering machine was blinking. I hit the play button thinking that the dispatcher might have an update for me. Two messages. The first one was from a cop in Caernarfon who thought he might have some information on a stolen Kawasaki quad bike that I was investigating. I hoped that he was wrong. Caernarfon was way the hell to the north, and the geographical limits of this case were already stretching me.

The second message was even less welcome.

‘Capaldi, it’s Mackay, we need to talk.’

The voice was Scottish, clipped, and to the point. Mackay was ex-SAS and we went back a long way. Every time he resurfaced in my life trouble happened, albatrosses fell in flocks from the sky. Currently, he was only hopping along the fringe, having become my ex-wife’s current lover.

It hadn’t really upset me when he had taken up with Gina. In fact, it had had the beneficial effect of keeping both of them off my back. The trouble was that she, at this point in the orbit of our relationship, unjustifiably in my opinion, felt that I was the sack of shit in her life. Now I could start to worry. What poison had she managed to work into Mackay’s system concerning me?

I double-checked the lock on the caravan before I went to bed. It was a token gesture, a fruit-juice carton would be more secure. After Mackay’s call, I knew that I was going to be crediting every sound that I heard out there tonight with having army training.

I sent a flighted wish out into the night for the woman in the minibus to be safe. I didn’t include the guys. They had got themselves into it, and I wanted to retain enough juju in my system to keep Gina and Mackay out of my life.

The telephone woke me too early on Sunday morning. I registered wet windows, grey sky, and the branches of the riverside alders drooped and dripping as I lurched to the dining nook to answer it. On mornings like this I truly missed the city, where you could pretend that weather didn’t exist.

‘Glyn Capaldi,’ I grunted.

‘Sergeant, a minibus was hijacked last night over at …’

‘I know,’ I interrupted him, ‘I left a message for you to keep me updated.’

He went silent for a moment. ‘We’ve found it,’ his tone changing to eager.

Overnight, the isobars had packed together and the wind was coming strong out of the northwest. And cold. The rain that stung my face as I opened the caravan door was thinking about applying for an upgrade to sleet.

I went out of town on the mountain road, climbing up to open hill country. Scrub grass, sedge and heather, with grey, lichen-splotched boulders crumbled in for texture. It was a big, scrappy geography up here.

The minibus was parked on a narrow lane beside a small arched bridge near the junction with the mountain road. There was a marked police car close by. Uniform locals. I recognized the man who was making a point of watching my approach. Sergeant Emrys Hughes. We knew each other. He didn’t like me. It wasn’t a complicated issue, just a matter of his boss detesting mine. The fact that I didn’t like my boss either didn’t seem to help.

He shouted something up at me as I parked on the splay. I ignored him. I wanted to take in an overview of the scene before I got involved in other people’s perceptions.

The minibus was parked, neatly squared off, on a patch of compacted gravel. It hadn’t been abandoned. Thought had gone into where and how it had been left.

Emrys turned away from me. He must have shouted something else, because two more uniforms appeared from behind the minibus, where they had been sheltering from the wind. Emrys issued an instruction, and one of them came over the bridge, and up the slight incline towards me. I smiled to myself, recognizing a troop movement.

He had his head lowered, and kept his face slanted away from me to keep the rain out of his eyes. I gestured for him to go round to the leeward side and dropped the passenger window. He lowered his face to the opening. Lanky and young, his eager expression overcompensating for his nervousness. ‘Sergeant Hughes told me to tell you that we’re in control of this.’