LITMIR.BIZ

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of puddles and junk.’

      ‘You were outside the vehicle?’ I asked, slipping into the conversation. ‘Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi,’ I introduced myself, calculating that it was time to start trying to sharpen this thing to a point. Driver gave me a look, but it was a token, he knew that he was outranked.

      ‘They tricked me,’ the minibus driver protested.

      ‘How did they manage that?’

      ‘One of them told me someone was going to be sick. I hate that smell,’ he announced vehemently. ‘Beer puke on the upholstery, you can’t get rid of it. So I found somewhere to pull over quickly. Two of them got out and went round the back as soon as I stopped.’

      ‘Did you hear them being sick?’

      ‘No. A lot of passengers get sick for one reason or another, and I don’t listen out for it. I kept the engine running. Next thing one of them is at the door saying that there’s something about my rear wheel that I should see. So I get out, and there’s the other one crouching, kind of squinting at my nearside back tyre. “Should that be like that?” he asks me, and like a prat, I get down there trying to see what the fuck he’s talking about. Next thing I know the bus takes off, and I’m left out there in the dark.’

      ‘No build-up to this?’ I asked. ‘It came as a complete surprise?’

      ‘Total. I thought they were all as happy as Larry in the back. What with the booze, their fucking rugby songs, and joking around with the girl.’

      My face cracked. He looked at me, puzzled by the change. Driver and Shotgun hadn’t picked up on it.

      ‘What girl?’ I demanded.

      He swayed back defensively, shaking his head. ‘A hitchhiker. It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t pick her up. I stopped for diesel at a garage this side of Newtown, and she was already inside when I got back from paying. The passengers said they had offered her a ride to Dinas. I didn’t argue.’

      ‘Describe her,’ I said, letting him hear the new snap in my voice.

      He shook his head again, sickly smile set, wanting to help me now. ‘I can’t. She was stuck up in the back behind the men. I never saw her properly. I only heard her laughing back there.’

      A flash: Regine Broussard.

      I sometimes get a foreboding when things are about to go very, very wrong. It predicts awful possibilities from the merest of nuances. It translates as a melting feeling in the region of the kidneys. A little bit like sex. Perhaps it was my Ligurian genes? Warm loam reactions in a damp northern climate. Often it got me into trouble. I should have learned by now to run the other way, but some warped instinct always managed to spin me in the wrong direction.

      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

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