LITMIR.BIZ

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      I contained my surprise. ‘Was she Irish?’

      ‘No, she was foreign.’

      ‘What kind of foreign?’

      He pulled a face. ‘She told me, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to keep asking in case she thought I was thick. It wasn’t a common foreign country though. I would have got something like France, or Germany, or Poland.’

      ‘How well did she speak English?’

      ‘A bit of an accent and a few words the wrong way round, but pretty good really.’

      ‘Did she tell you her name?’

      He pulled his contrite face again. ‘She told me, but I didn’t really get that either. It was something foreign, beginning with an “M”.’

      ‘Can you describe her?’

      He nodded. ‘She was a real smiler. Big high cheeks that puffed out when she grinned. Her face was small but kind of chubby. Not fat or anything. Just …’ He searched for the description. ‘Just nice.’

      She sounded Slavic. Or Scandinavian with the blonde hair? ‘Did she say why she was going to Ireland?’

      ‘To meet up with her boyfriend. I don’t know whether she was talking about an Irish lad, or a boy from her own country who was working over there. She knew that she had to get a ferry to Dublin, and she would be met there.’

      A boyfriend. The fit went in. The carrier bag from Hereford with the aftershave and the underpants. Presents for the beloved. The worry was that she would not have left those behind lightly.

      ‘Not quite the straight-arrow run to Holyhead where you dropped her, was it, Tony?’ I said, smiling to soften the accusation.

      He looked hurt. ‘That wasn’t my fault. I even suggested taking her into Newtown to catch a train. It was already dark by then. But she didn’t like that idea.’

      ‘Too expensive?’

      ‘I don’t think that was it. She had already asked me if I knew how strict the Immigration people were at the ferry port. I got the impression that she thought there might be too many people asking questions on a train.’

      ‘The service station was her choice?’ I asked, letting him hear my doubt.

      ‘Yes. We checked the map. She wanted to stick to the country roads, she said.’

      ‘You liked her?’ I asked.

      The question puzzled him. He looked at me warily, wondering where I was going with this. ‘I liked what I saw of her,’ he answered guardedly.

      ‘Weren’t you concerned for her? It’s night now. The dead of winter. She’s a stranger, and you’ve left her in the middle of nowhere.’

      He bristled. ‘It wasn’t the middle of nowhere. I left her where it was light, and where she could buy stuff if she needed it. I even bought her chocolate. And water. I’ve never bought a bottle of fucking water in my life before. And I went back.’

      ‘You went back?’

      ‘Everyone was coming into town at that time of night. I reckoned she wouldn’t be able to get a lift. So I gave her about half an hour to get fed up, and then I went back to see if she wanted somewhere to stay for the night.’ He held up his hands as if anticipating a protest. ‘Just a bed, mind you. I didn’t have any other intentions.’

      ‘But she turned you down?’

      ‘No. She wasn’t there. She’d already gone.’

      This rocked me. ‘Tell me, Tony, what time would this be?’ I asked very carefully.

      He thought about it. His head moving slightly with the enumeration process. ‘About eight o’clock. No later than quarter past. I hung around for a while to make sure that she hadn’t just gone for a bit of a wander.’

      It made no sense. Her destiny lay with that minibus one and a half hours later. So where had she disappeared to?

      ‘Sure you don’t want to have a look?’

      I turned round. He was holding the phone up tauntingly, a big grin on his face. I had counted on him not being able to resist it.

      I snatched the phone out of his hand.

      A split second of jaw-dropped surprise, and then he wailed, ‘You bastard –’ Making a lunge for it.

      I held him back with my forearm, the other hand holding the phone up out of his reach.

      ‘Give that back to me, you fucker!’ He was snarling now, pushing hard, trying to snatch at the phone in my hand. He was straining, twisted out of balance. I dipped the forearm I was using to restrain him, and used my elbow to chop him hard in the groin.

      A huge gasp of air fused into a groan and he went slack. For a moment all he could do was stare at me reproachfully, mouth wide open like a betrayed carp.

      He shook his head. ‘I should have known better than to trust a fucking cop.’

      ‘You didn’t trust me,’ I corrected him. ‘You tried using extortion. I gave you my word, and that’s all you need.’ I opened the door and backed out of the cab holding up the phone. ‘I’m impounding this on suspicion that it’s been used to take pornographic images.’

      4

      I christened her Magda. I was getting closer. Most likely East European. A student or a migrant worker, probably running in the wrong direction from an expired work permit.

      Not a prostitute from Cardiff.

      I had been vindicated. I had my own proof that the group had been lying. Now I had to face the scary edge of that triumph. What had really happened in the hut on Saturday night? Where was the girl now?

      I spent the next two and a half hours back at the service station watching the CCTV footage in real time. I saw Tony Griffiths walk across the forecourt to buy the chocolate and water. He had been careful, he’d kept his truck out of surveillance range. But I didn’t see Magda. Not until the minibus.

      I called Bryn Jones in Carmarthen.

      ‘Sir, I have uncorroborated evidence that the woman might have been an East European student.’

      ‘How uncorroborated?’

      ‘No one is going to speak up.’

      ‘Can you be any more specific than East European?’ he asked.

      ‘No, sir, sorry.’

      ‘Okay, we’ll spread the word informally. See if we have any reports of missing persons that match out there in migrant-worker land.’

      ‘Thank you, sir.’

      I sat in my car and put in enough calls about the other cases I was working on to log that I was still on the planet. Just. I even called the guy in Caernarfon about the Kawasaki quad bike. Now that Tony Griffiths had told me that Magda had been making for the ferry in Holyhead, I wanted to keep an excuse to visit North Wales active.

      I leaned back, closed my eyes, and tried to recall the image of the group coming down the hill on that cold Sunday morning. The two brothers in front, the other three staggering behind them.

      Who to brace?

      I could probably forget the three with partners. The McGuire brothers and Les Tucker. They would now have backtracked with enough explanations and excuses to make them as virtuous as Mother Teresa. Paul Evans, the big one, would either be dumb or belligerent. I didn’t relish tackling either persona.

      I called David Williams at The Fleece.

      ‘Trevor Vaughan, the hill farmer. How do I find him?’ I asked.

      I wrote down the directions.

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