I spat on my palm and laid it flat on the seat between us. An old Ligurian trick of my father’s. Sometimes it worked, impressing strangers with the deep scope and breadth of my ouvrier honesty. ‘This goes no further, I promise you. Anything you tell me stays here. Stays strictly between us.’
He glanced down at my hand, and then up at me with a look that told me he had been around too many gypsies in his time to fall for that one. ‘You’re a cop,’ he stated simply.
‘I can be trusted,’ I replied earnestly.
A knowing smile split his lips.
‘What can I do to prove that?’ I asked, still hoping that rhetoric and persuasion were going to carry me. Not quite catching the shift in his concentration. Not realizing that the bastard had actually started to think about it.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course I’m serious. I promise – you can trust me.’
‘No. About proving it?’
‘Does that mean you did give the woman a lift?’
He grinned. ‘You haven’t earned my trust yet.’
‘How do I do that?’
He held up a mobile phone. ‘You know what this is?’
‘It’s a mobile phone.’
‘It’s also a camera.’ He smiled as my expression turned puzzled, and inclined his head towards the rear of the truck. ‘Do you know what I carry in the back there?’
He lowered the tailgate. I understood then why the sides of the truck were so high. To stop people seeing the dead meat.
‘Farm casualties,’ he explained. ‘We get paid to pick them up and dispose of them.’
The components of the pile in the back of the truck were small in number, but they made a big gruesome bundle. Two dead sheep tangled on top of a black-and-white cow, which lay on its side, legs splayed out, as stiff as driftwood. The harness and wire cables from a winch curled over the grouping. The smell was noxious. An ammoniacal reek from stale urine, combined with lanolin, and the start of decomposition. The sawdust that had been used to cover the truck bed had absorbed unimaginable fluids and turned to gelatinous slurry.
‘Jesus …’ I gagged involuntarily.
He laughed. ‘You get used to it. These ones are fresh.’
I had no intention of getting used to it. ‘Why are you showing me this?’
‘This is the deal.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘You’ve got to shag the cow.’
I waited for the punchline. It took me a minute to realize that it had already arrived. He was serious. ‘You can’t really expect me to …’ The line was too absurd to finish.
‘I don’t expect you to do anything. You want something from me. You need to pay a price.’ He pointed at the rear end of the cow with his mobile phone. ‘I want a shot on this which makes it look like you’re fucking that thing.’
‘Are you some kind of pervert?’
‘No, I just want to be safe. I need a cast-iron guarantee that if I tell you things you have a real good reason not to spread them. I can’t think of a better reason than a picture like that.’
‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘That’s your choice. It’s all voluntary, Sergeant Capaldi.’
Oh fuck … We had stopped pretending. We now both knew that he had a story to tell me. ‘Why are you making me this offer?’
He thought about it for a moment. ‘I want to help the girl.’
‘Do it for her then,’ I entreated.
‘No. I need to keep myself covered.’
‘You want win–win?’
‘Fucking right I do.’
I shook my head slowly. It had to stop here. She was a stranger. She would have moved on, totally oblivious of my search for her. She didn’t need any kind of sacrifice. Bryn Jones was right, no crime had been reported, no one was missing. She would be back in Cardiff by now. Where I should really be, instead of discussing necrophilic bestiality with a twisted hayseed under a too big sky. It was time to let go.
He lifted the tailgate tentatively. ‘Okay?’ he asked. ‘I drive off now and you leave me alone?’
I started to nod. ‘Tell me,’ I blurted. ‘One thing …’
He stared at me.
‘Was she a prostitute?’
I thought that he wasn’t going to answer.
‘No.’
Another flash on Regine Broussard.
Oh fuck …
I drew the line at dropping my trousers. We had a brief, heated, artistic disagreement over that, until I persuaded him that it could all be done by inference. By posture, camera angle, and the loose ends of my belt drooping free.
He had the grace to lend me a pair of heavy-soled rubber boots. The kind that abattoir workers wear when they hose the crud off the floor. Crouched there, arms splayed, trying to get into position while he shouted directions, I must have looked like some monumental fool.
Fool … ? I was kidding myself. Substituting vanity for the bigger picture. Which had me flying way off the outer scale of foolishness by simulating penetrative sex on the rear end of a dead sideways cow.
Back in the truck cab, trying to warm up, he wanted to show me the images.
I shook my head. ‘If those pictures ever see the light of anyone else’s day, I will arrange it so you have your balls cut off. And believe me, I can do it. I have the contacts. I’m a cop, and I’m half Italian.’
‘Don’t worry, they’re just my insurance.’
I held a Bad Cop stare on him for a moment to underscore the threat. ‘So, what were you doing wrong on Saturday afternoon?’
He braced himself for it, still not comfortable with confessing to me, despite the huge security deposit he had just obtained. ‘I was using the truck to run some deer carcasses for a couple of mates.’
‘Poached?’
He shrugged. ‘I was just doing the delivering.’
‘You bastard!’ I exploded. ‘You put me through that depraved fucking charade to cover up a bit of poaching.’
He shot me an aggrieved pout. ‘My mates take trust very seriously. The man whose land the deer came from is a vindictive bastard. And I was using the company’s truck.’
‘Poaching.’ I snorted dismissively.
‘You seemed to think it was worth it at the time.’
He was right. I had accepted the price. I calmed myself down. ‘Where to?’
‘A butcher down on the Radnor, Herefordshire border.’
‘Where did you pick the woman up?’
He looked at me, surprised that I didn’t want more detail on the butcher. ‘On my way home. Near Painscastle. I was sticking to the back roads.’
‘Show me.’ I flicked through his road atlas to get to the right page. He pointed. It was a minor road that strung a line of nondescript villages together. ‘Is this where she had started from?’
‘No, she’d come from somewhere outside Hereford. She’d got sidetracked, a lift from a farmer who’d left her there. The road was quiet, she was lucky that I came along.’