Wild People - Ewart Hutton

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and never recovered from the journey. The place bore all the marks of neglect, an all-pervading sense of why bother. Roofs with missing or slipped slates, walls cracked and algae stained, peeling paintwork and a few faded people on the street staring at me listlessly as I passed. And, the saddest sight of all, the local pub boarded up.

      I turned left out of the village and started the drive up into the hills. The full glare of the sun was in my face, it was an angel’s ascent, and I left Llandewi mouldering behind me. I drove between stone field walls and rumbled across the cattle grid where the estate wall started on my left, and the land opened out on my right into unfenced scrub and heather moorland that rolled up to the ridge, the hillside sprigged with the occasional gale-tormented hawthorn.

      Huw had shown me the route on the map and described what to look out for. But I was still unprepared for the gates to the Plas Coch estate. The Ap Hywel pile, as he had put it, with just a trace of class-warrior irony. The lichen-flecked grey stone piers were massive and capped with pineapple finials on ornately moulded capstones. But it was the gates themselves that made me stop. They were a contemporary take on early Georgian ironwork, but powder-coated the blue-green of copper sulphate. Architecturally it had been a risk, but it worked. The whole thing declared money, taste and artistic daring. What a contrast to Llandewi.

      I carried on as instructed until I reached the end of the estate wall, and another entrance, more modest this time, with Home Farm picked-out on slate on a gatepost, and The Ap Hywel Foundation inscribed into a brass plaque beneath it.

      I turned into the driveway and my nervousness began a scampering arpeggio up the scale. I felt like I was arriving with an undigested anvil in my gut.

      I went down a neat gravel track that was lined with young chestnuts, following an undulating line of rhododendrons on my left that delineated the grounds of the big house. The track was descending gently and I soon saw a long slate roof and the tops of deciduous woodland behind it. This would be the Home Farm, and I knew from the map that the trees were part of the same woods that rose up from the car park.

      The track widened out into a big gravel turning area in front of an exquisitely maintained whitewashed stone long-house. But I didn’t have time to take it in properly as I had arrived unannounced into activity.

      I parked and tried to work out what was happening before I got out of my car and made a fool of myself.

      Two women were sitting in front of the entrance door to the farmhouse at a rectangular wooden picnic bench with an open parasol over it. A man with a camera raised to his eye was backing away from the table at a crouch, taking photographs as he went. A younger woman in a short red coat was standing off to the side, and, as I watched, I saw that she was directing both the women’s actions, and the photographer’s positions.

      Had I crashed a fashion shoot?

      I took a more studied look at the women at the table. The older one grabbed the immediate attention. The lines on her face and the heavy mane of silvery grey hair worn in a loose and careless chignon betrayed her to be probably in her sixties, but she was strikingly handsome, her features radiating a combination of confidence and humour and just something in the corner of her eyes that made you think that she might be holding in more knowledge than she was letting out.

      Was she too old to have had an eighteen-year-old daughter?

      The other woman was slighter, probably more than twenty years younger, her un-styled hair still dark, her sharp features heightened by the small, round, wire-rimmed glasses she wore, and the way she screwed her face, as if she was over-compensating for lenses that weren’t quite working any more.

      It was the older woman who saw me watching them. She nudged her neighbour, and, when she had her attention, nodded towards me. I felt immediately guilty. By the time I was out of the car both of the women at the bench were standing and the photographer and the younger woman had stopped in place and were looking at me.

      I dragged a voice up out of my dry throat. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m looking for Cassandra Bullock.’

      ‘I’m Cassie Bullock,’ the younger of the two women at the bench spoke, a quick anxious glance at her companion, her tone apprehensive.

      That anvil was still there pinning me to the spot. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t help it. The silence was rapt, electricity fried the air. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Glyn Capaldi.’ I killed your daughter.

       4

      Cassie Bullock poured me a glass of water from a jug on the picnic table. I had already registered the deep shadows around her eyes. Only now did it click that she was dressed all in black, a lamb’s wool sweater over tight leggings.

      The older woman had taken charge as soon as I had introduced myself. ‘I’m Ursula ap Hywel,’ she had announced, getting up and approaching, putting herself between me and Cassie, a protective block, her hand held out to shake. ‘I live over there —’ her gesture casually encompassing the vastness of her estate.

      I shook the proffered hand. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. And I don’t know whether this is a bad time …?’ I suggested, part of me wanting her to tell me that it was.

      Instead she turned her head to Cassie. ‘Is it?’ she asked gently.

      Cassie shook her head almost imperceptibly. She spoke past Ursula, a small tremor in her voice. ‘It’s very kind of you to come, Sergeant.’

      And now we were alone, Ursula ap Hywel having retreated diplomatically, efficiently shepherding the other two along with her. Back to the big house, I supposed. But, before she had led them off, she had taken me aside and whispered, ‘Be kind. She’s putting on a brave face, but she’s still very fragile.’

      I took a grateful drink of the water.

      ‘You look as if you needed that,’ Cassie observed.

      ‘More than you know.’

      ‘I did mean what I said in my note. I don’t blame you in any way.’ She held those dark-rimmed eyes on me as if she were trying to force herself not to look away.

      ‘That was very kind of you.’

      ‘I imagined how terrible you’d be feeling.’

      ‘I was. That’s why I felt that I had to come and tell you to your face how dreadfully sorry I feel for your loss.’

      Her eyes flickered and she waited me out for a moment. ‘And …?’ she asked softly, sensing the incompleteness in my declaration.

      I steeled myself. ‘The and is the difficult bit.’

      She nodded as if she understood. Or was she still numbed by grief and working on automatic responses? ‘Come inside. I’ll make us some tea.’

      I gestured at the photo-shoot props on the table: the jug of water, glasses and a bowl of fruit, apples and bananas. ‘Shall I help you carry these in?’

      ‘Thanks, but they stay outside.’ She managed a small smile at my flicker of puzzlement. ‘You don’t know about the Foundation?’

      I shook my head. ‘No, sorry.’

      ‘You know you’re on the Monks’ Trail?’ she asked.

      ‘I know about the footpath, I didn’t realize I was actually on it.’ I sensed that we were both relieved by this temporary diversion.

      She stood up. I got the impression that she was forcing herself to stand erect, when all she really wanted to do was fold up and crumple. I followed her out into the turning circle, from where we could see both ends of the house. ‘The path from the car park comes up through the woods over there—’ she pointed as she described, ‘and then runs past the front of the house, and carries on up over there. It’s a very old trail. It was one of the ones Cistercian monks from the mother house at Clairvaux used to use to travel between

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