‘Can you ask around discreetly to see if there’s any talk out there about anyone having a special interest in me.’
‘Special interest?’ His voice was alert now.
‘A big chip on their shoulder. It might be someone I put away, or it might be a more tenuous connection. Perhaps someone I put inside has died in the nick, and a relative might be holding me responsible.’
‘As in revenge?’
‘Something like that.’
He sewed the pieces together. ‘You think the accident might not have been an accident?’
‘I’d just like to reassure myself.’
‘Leave it with me.’
Give him credit, he acted quickly. Pity he didn’t do it in my interest.
‘Capaldi!’
‘Sir?’ As soon as I saw Jack Galbraith’s number come up on the caller display I knew that Fletcher had finked on me.
‘A little bird has told me that you are about to take off on a flight of fucking fantasy.’
‘I just thought I’d check out the opposition, Sir. There are some twisted people out there.’
His voice rose. ‘And I told you we already had.’
I held the phone away from me and ate shit. ‘Yes, Sir.’
‘The possibility has been checked and discounted.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Get this, Capaldi, you are currently non-operational. So you are either going to be on sick leave getting up to whatever you do with your sheep or your fucking elks or whatever else you use to relax with up there, or I will haul you back to Carmarthen and have you collating endless reams of useless shit. Understood?’
‘I understand, Sir.’
Contacting Fletcher had been a calculated risk. But, even if he hadn’t shafted me, I had always known that probably, and sooner rather than later, I was going to have to take this thing underground.
Which is why I declined the offer of a police driver to take me home and asked Mackay to come for me instead. Without my mother this time.
They had allowed me to take light exercise for the last couple of days, so although I was still stiff, I wasn’t too woozy on my feet by the time he came to fetch me. And, now that it had arrived, my discharge wasn’t the huge relief I had been anticipating, because, in a way, it felt like leaving sanctuary. Back out into the big world where no one gave a shit what the exonerating evidence said. I was a cop and I had crashed a car and killed a young woman coming into her prime, who had been entrusted to my care. Blame accrued.
You could never call Mackay a ray of sunshine, he had too much black history for that, but he certainly brought freshness back into my life, like the proximity of running water on a very hot day. My institutionalized days had turned me stale.
Mackay and I went back a long way, to childhood holidays in Scotland, where his family was entwined into the Capaldi clan there. I had been enraptured by the wild Mackay brothers, and he and I had become close friends despite the geography that separated us. Our life paths diverged when I joined the police force in Cardiff, and he went into the army. After that, whenever we did get together, big trouble inevitably seemed to flare up on our periphery, and I discovered I had lost my appetite for mayhem. Our nadir came when he took up with my ex-wife Gina. Now she had dropped him through the trapdoor in favour of a younger Australian version, he had retired from the SAS, and we had reconnected, with him taking on the self-appointed role of my protector.
He still carried that baby face that was so redolent of Glasgow, although there were now a few crinkles around the corners of his eyes. He ran initiative training courses for corporate executives from his farmhouse in Herefordshire, and this occupation was reflected in his lean fitness, the weathered face, and bleached sandy hair that he wore short.
I climbed into his familiar old Range Rover while he put my bag in the rear. He caught me looking at my face in the vanity mirror as he climbed into the front seat. It was improving. Now it just looked like an accident involving some suspect tanning products.
‘Even with the sympathy vote I still wouldn’t fancy you.’ He grinned.
‘At least I don’t look like a fucking vegetable hotpot any more.’
‘Try an eye-patch and a sling. The damaged look brings out the need to nurture in the ladies.’
‘Until they find out the whole story.’
His smile shifted and he dropped into a slow sympathetic nod. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Confused.’ He waited me out. I gave him a wan smile. ‘I’ve been repaired. They’ve let me out to catch up with my life again. But all that’s been changed. There’s a dead girl, Mac, who’s stopped going anywhere.’
‘But it’s not your fault.’
‘People keep telling me that.’
‘Accidents happen, Glyn.’
‘This may not have been one.’
He tried to keep his expression blank, but I saw this hit home. He knew me well enough by now not to probe. I would tell him when I was ready. Or not.
He started the car and looked across at me, his smile trying to lift me out of the moment. ‘Home James and don’t spare the horses?’
‘Can we go the long way round?’
He frowned, he didn’t have to ask where. ‘Are you sure you’re ready for it?’
‘I’m not being morbid. There are things I’ve got to check out. And I’d like you to be there. I’d appreciate your overview.’
‘It’s a long detour. Are you sure you don’t want to go straight home?’
I smiled at his concern. ‘Home’s a fucking caravan, Mac. It can keep. It’s not as if it’s going to have sprouted comfort and high style in my absence.’
‘At the risk of too much repetition, you can always come back with me. You’re meant to be on sick leave after all.’
I shook my head. ‘Thanks, Mac,’ I said gratefully.
He shrugged but dropped the issue. I knew he wanted to keep me away from there. He thought it was in my best interest.
As far as I was concerned, my best interest lay in finding the equivalent of a hidden machine-gun nest up there.
Something tangible to blame.
We approached from Dinas, the opposite direction to the way I had been driving that night with Jessie. It was also daylight, and the weather was dry.
We had dropped down into a small level-bottomed valley. The road was a narrow two-lane affair that followed the curving profile along the foot of a low, steeply raking, rocky escarpment. The brook coming down off the watershed followed the same course on the other side of the road. The far side of the brook was marshy, tending into rough pasture and then rising slowly to conifer plantations on the side of the hills.
As we got closer to the fatal bend, Mackay slowed down, looking for somewhere to pull off the road.
‘Can you carry on and turn round and come back at it the way I would have been travelling?’ I asked him.
‘Sure.’
Driving in this direction we were on the inside of the bend, close to the face of the escarpment. As we rounded it slowly I looked over past Mackay at a small mound of dead flowers and soft toys on the opposite verge, another example of the kind of tacky public grief shrine that had entered the national psyche following the death of Princess Diana.
‘You going to