LITMIR.BIZ

      1

      I could have gone home by a different route, I could have driven a lot slower, but it was late, the end of a long and tedious day. My inner child was nudging, so I let the self-centred little bastard slip out of his cage. It would be a distraction, and I would only be adding a couple of minor new enemies.

      Boy was that going to prove to be one great big painful underestimation.

      The squad car was off to the side, parked up on a stakeout for hayseed drunks, just where their radio chatter had placed them. I caught a glimpse of it in my headlights as I crested the hill. Getting on for close to midnight, and I was tramping it.

      They pulled out behind me, their full light rig coming on to crank up the drama. I played with them down through a few safe bends, and then pulled over to give them at least the start of their Stormtrooper moment.

      ‘Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi.’ I grinned up into their torch beam and waved my warrant card.

      Now they were truly regretting it. Driver and Shotgun, both of them young. They knew me by reputation. Hawked up and spat out of Cardiff, and put out to graze in the tundra. And here I was with my Jonah vibe ranged out over their rear seat. And I was drinking their coffee supply. I was no longer in a hurry. This had turned into my Saturday night. The ratshit investigation I was working on had left it too late for me to make it to The Fleece in Dinas before closing time.

      The talk was desultory. They didn’t quite trust me enough to bitch about the job. We stuck mainly to the safe subjects of high-performance cars we had chased, and gruesome RTA’s attended.

      Their call sign broke through an undercurrent of static on the radio. Shotgun picked up the handset eagerly.

      I leaned forward to rest my arms on the back of his seat. ‘I speak Welsh,’ I warned him cheerily. It was mainly a lie – my Italian was better, and that wasn’t good – but he didn’t need to know that.

      But he ran with the bluff and took the call in English. A minibus driver had reported being hijacked and abandoned in a lay-by.

      ‘Been nice having your company, Sarge,’ Driver said, strapping in, and starting the engine up.

      I eased myself over to the door. ‘I’ll follow you down. It’s on my way home.’

      They didn’t like it, but they didn’t argue. Arguing would have kept me in their car.

      I pulled out behind them. With their blue strobe turned off, the night had got big again. Gradations of darkness, treetops in serrated silhouette, the loom of the hills against the paler sky, dishcloth shreds of clouds trawling in from the west. Rain before morning – my newly acquired Pig Wales lore.

      We found the minibus driver sheltering in a telephone booth outside the hulk of a Baptist chapel. The booth’s light was the only illumination in the street of a village that looked like its occupants had packed up and retired underground for the winter.

      He crossed the street towards us as we parked, stepping off the pavement without checking. He had obviously been hanging around for long enough to know the likelihood of traffic. He walked with the stride of a man who is advertising grievances.

      Driver and Shotgun got out of their car with that air Traffic guys have of sloughing skin every time that they exit their vehicle. It was their call, so I hung back out of courtesy, just listening in. Catching that the minibus driver had managed to flag down a car that had dropped him here. By his estimation, we were already something like two hours into the event. You could cover a lot of Wales in two hours.

      ‘How many passengers were there, sir?’

      ‘Six. I was taking the bastards to Dinas.’ He looked at the three of us entreatingly. ‘It’s not as if we’d even fucking argued about anything.’

      I nodded sympathetically from the sidelines, my interest raised by the mention of Dinas.

      ‘They were totally pissed, all of them, not one of them would have been capable of driving safely,’ he protested righteously.

      ‘Do you have the names of the passengers?’ Driver asked.

      ‘No, you’ll have to get those from the office. I was just told to pick them up at Shrewsbury Station, off the train from London. They’d been at the England–Wales match at Twickenham.’

      ‘Did you see who actually drove the minibus away,

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