LITMIR.BIZ

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they’d have set themselves up to the side here would be to make the target easier to hit.’

      ‘I’m presuming the target’s my front nearside tyre?’

      He nodded. ‘The side wall of a tyre presents a better profile.’ But he was distracted. Still working through the mechanics of it. ‘The gun would have been pre-sighted and locked into position here with a tripod and clamps, ready to fire when you came along. There’s plenty of cover, it’s remote, no livestock, so the chances of anyone nosing around are scarce. They could even have set the gun up a few days before, camouflaged it and waited for the moment.’ He sighted along his imaginary barrel again. ‘The car’s always going to be slowing down for the bend, so its speed is broadly predictable. And over this short range they could accommodate variable wind speeds and directions.’

      Something he had said before suddenly made sense. ‘They needed two people to set the tyre up as a target?’

      ‘Right. One here tuning the rifle and the other one driving a car, probably with a paint stripe on the tyre to get the exact mark. On a quiet road like this they could drive the simulation target backwards and forwards until they were sure they’d got it right. Then lock the thing down so that when it’s fired it’s always going to hit the same place.’

      ‘It sounds easy.’

      He smiled. ‘Everything is in fairy tales.’

      ‘Would they have used an exploding bullet?’

      He shook his head and tried not to make his smile too superior. ‘Too dangerous, even in fairy tales, and even if you could get hold of one. Probably a hollow-cavity bullet. It would fragment on impact, shredding the tyre, and making it virtually impossible to trace in this sort of terrain.’

      Even if anyone had been looking. Which they hadn’t. It had been designated as an accident, not a crime scene.

      He got up slowly, brushing dry grass and pine needles off himself. He was gazing back towards the road, his face distracted again.

      ‘What’s the matter?’

      ‘I could be completely wrong, of course; they could have used the cobalt zirconium ray.’

      ‘What’s that?’ I asked eagerly.

      He turned his grin on me. ‘Another myth I just invented. That’s what I need you to hold on to. This is a story, not an explanation.’

      I nodded my acceptance. But both of us knew I was going to totally disregard his rider.

      The pied wagtail I had anthropomorphized into my special little friend wasn’t around when we got back to Unit 13. I felt an irrational twinge of sadness that he wasn’t there to welcome me home. I was used to him bobbing around on the rocks in the river outside the large rear window of my caravan, although, if I was being honest, I had to admit I was never sure that I was seeing the same bird every time.

      Mackay wanted to fuss around making things comfortable for me. Much as I appreciated his friendship and kindness, I needed to be on my own to reflect on what he had told me. He left when I played up fatigue, mentioning that the drive, the fresh air and the emotion had taken its toll.

      I took on board his disclaimer that it had only been a story, an invention. And okay the details might be totally wrong, but that didn’t matter. What was important was that he had demonstrated that it could have happened. Someone could have set out to shut me down and make it look like an accident.

      But who and why? I came back to it again. Who, as Jack Galbraith had so succinctly put it, would go to all that fucking effort to waste me?

      Were there other possibilities? Could someone have deliberately set out to target the girl? Or could it have been a random hit? But both of those scenarios seemed as unlikely and as implausible as someone trying to waste me.

      Because, what could a teenage girl have done in her short country life to warrant that sort of terrible attention? And who would set up a random hit in an area so remote and deserted that they were more likely to end up assassinating an otter than a person. No, random shootings were a strictly urban feature. If someone was that sick and determined to take out a stranger in a car they would have set up their kit on a motorway overpass, or a crowded city street.

      So, if it was specific and deliberate, that left me or the girl.

      I reminded myself that Kevin Fletcher had never come back to reassure me that my name was not on a butcher’s order in Cardiff.

      Had I been too quick to dismiss the possibility of a Professor Moriarty?

      I set the mental sieve finer and went back over my past cases. I had been involved in a number of murder investigations that had resulted in prosecution and a subsequent life sentence for the perp. But why target me? I had always been part of a team. It had never come down to me being the one brilliant brain that had brought the bastards to justice. No convicted murderer had ever screamed, I’ll get you, Capaldi, across a shocked courtroom as they dragged him from the dock.

      What about the ones I had booked who had died?

      Two suicides, one on remand, one inside after sentencing, both of them clinically depressed junkies already well on their way down the dead-end road. One serial car thief who had received his moment of illumination in prison, when the sharpened end of a toothbrush had been rammed into his ear to let him know that he hadn’t been as hard as he had thought he was. The kiddie molester who had jumped off a railway bridge to get away from me just as the delayed 9.13 to Swansea was coming through.

      And Nick Bessant. The pimp who a farmer had executed for desecrating his son and his daughter. The farmer I had led to Bessant’s lair in Cardiff, thinking I was doing something for justice and common humanity. Which was the reason that I was at this moment sitting in a cold, damp caravan in the middle of the boondocks looking out the window in the hope of seeing the return of a small fucking bird.

      It was impossible to believe. No one could have mourned any of those trashed-up lives that much. Okay, they had mothers. But I didn’t think that love or tenderness could have been anywhere in the air at the moment they were being fucked into existence.

      And even if one of them had someone who was carrying a torch for their memory, it was way too sophisticated for that world. If they had stooped to revenge it would have been boiled-down battery acid in the side of the face, or a bunch of hired scagheads with pickaxe handles. Something course and mean and demonstrative.

      It was a jaundiced view, but I was feeling blue and bitter, and my excuse for it was twofold. First, someone had tried to kill me, and secondly, I now had to let these low-rent bastards back into my thought process again.

      EDGAR FISKE!

      The name crash-landed on my consciousness. A name I hadn’t even run past idle recollection in years. Edgar Fiske had once threatened to kill me.

      But it had had nothing to do with me being a cop. When had it been? I racked my memory. But he was back in my head now, looming up too close to make out background details like time or place. A thin-faced young man with short curly sandy hair, freckles, and thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses actually quivering on the bridge of his nose as his anger boiled tears and flecks of spit out of him.

       I am going to destroy you, Capaldi. I don’t care how fucking long it takes. One day you’re going to know what it’s like to die.

      It was uncanny. I wasn’t even paraphrasing. They had come back to me after all these years. The very words he had used.

       3

      I reached for the phone. But it had been so long since I had called that I had to fetch my diary and look up the long number.

      ‘Pronto!’ A confident young girl’s voice.

      I had two nieces. I hazarded a guess. ‘Graziella?’

      ‘Si.’

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