above my right temple to clean the abrasions. Also in the scrubbing brush they used, which looked more suited to removing heavy-duty stains on the urinals than to the healing arts. But I took it all without complaint. I was their damaged goods now, and I had no intention of going anywhere else tonight.
I had been treated for superficial cuts and abrasions, and was under observation for possible concussion. They also found and treated a nasty contusion on my left ankle. Consistent, they reassured me, with having run into an exposed tree root in the dark. Fine, I didn’t argue, it kept them happy to keep cause and effect in cosmic balance. But I had no recollection of seeing any trees on that sector of the hill.
Jeff came back into see me after they’d patched me up. ‘You can tell me what happened up there now,’ I said.
‘How much of it did you miss?’
‘Your puncture? Was it rigged?’
‘A piece of two by four on the track studded with nails. I thought one of the crew had got careless.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t thinking. That’s why I called Donnie over. Leaving the camp open. We were even taking the time to change the tyre, for Christ’s sake,’ he remonstrated against himself.
‘What did he get?’
‘The hydraulic lines on the other diggers.’
The drugs they had given me kicked in. Jeff went into soft focus. I tried to blink him back, but I had forgotten what went where, gave up, and joined the undead.
I came to in the muzzy, grey, artificial twilight that passed for darkness in the ward. Jeff had gone and my head hurt.
I forced myself not to drift off again. I tried to concentrate on taking myself back to that moment before I had found myself launched off the hillside. Had someone turned up beside me? Or could it have been a tree? But my memory didn’t want to play.
Because there was something else nagging.
I shifted tack. I brought back the picture of Donnie rigging up his lights. What was wrong with that image? What jarred with the information that Jeff had given me?
The hydraulic lines on the other diggers …
That line of machinery had not been task dedicated. The diggers had been mixed in at random with bulldozers, self-propelled rollers and dumper trucks of assorted sizes. So why had he been selective? His time must have been scary and limited. If you were just trying to screw with the system why not go down the line taking stuff out as you come to it?
Why complicate it by just targeting the diggers?
Because the diggers were important.
Get back to basics. What do mechanical diggers do?
Diggers dig.
I felt the tickle in my kidneys, and my stomach lurching southwards.
They wanted to stop us digging up something else on that site.
Six o’clock in the morning. I groped in the bedside drawer. Keys, coins and wallet, but no mobile phone. Then I had a vague memory now of Jeff taking it from me when we had driven here. Why had he taken it? Why hadn’t he given it back?
I dressed quietly. It was a bit ironic, I reflected – I had bullied and wheedled to get to stay here, and now I was doing a runner. The porter on the front desk eyed me curiously as I approached down the corridor.
‘Have you been discharged?’ he asked.
I flashed my warrant card. ‘I’m discharging myself.’
‘Suit yourself.’ He shrugged and heaved himself up reluctantly to unlock the front door.
‘How do I get some transport around here?’
He looked at me like I had just awakened from a coma. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘Isn’t there an ambulance?’
He grinned maliciously. ‘If you’re discharging yourself you must be better. You don’t need an ambulance.’
‘Ambulances take cured people home too,’ I countered.
His grin widened, and he shook his head. ‘Not at this time in the morning.’
It was frustrating. There was no one around to appreciate the urgency of the situation. There was no one around, period. I was a cop on a mission, but the place was dead, there wasn’t even a milk float to commandeer. And it was cold. It was that grey, miserable hour of the morning that you know you were never meant to belong in.
And what was I going to do when I eventually got up there? All the diggers had been put out of commission. But that was the least of my worries. I was deliberately ignoring the fact that I was soon going to have to stare at a whole fucking hillside, with no idea where to begin searching.
The hospital was way outside of town. A drear, dark-stone Victorian building that had once been a refuge for fallen women. I started walking. It was too early to wake David Williams up, but I had already figured that I could hot-wire the old Land Rover that he kept parked and unlocked in the rear yard of The Fleece.
It kept churning over in my mind. What else were we going to find? Could the missing head and hands be buried elsewhere on the site? I was so wrapped up in speculation that I almost didn’t hear the approaching vehicle.
And it was a big one. I stepped out into the road with my warrant card in my outstretched arm, waving him down.
‘Have you escaped?’ the driver asked, pulling up, a short cheery guy with red hair and a thick forearm perched on the open-window ledge.
It took me a moment to realize that he’d made the link between the dressing on my head and the hospital. ‘No,’ I said reassuringly, ‘I’m a policeman, I desperately need to get somewhere where I can organize some transport.’
He looked slightly disappointed that I wasn’t an injured loony on the lam. ‘So where to?’ he asked, shifting noisily into gear as I climbed up into the cab.
I explained about the wind-farm site, but said that I would be happy to be dropped off in the centre of Dinas.
‘No worries, I’ll take you up there,’ he said chirpily, introducing himself as Jim. ‘We can pretend it’s a car chase,’ he added with a grin.
He explained that he worked for the local animal-feed mill and delivered to all the farms in the area.
‘Anything unusual about the farms down the wind-farm valley?’ I asked.
‘You’re looking for someone for that body you’ve found up there, aren’t you?’ he conjectured happily, jumping slightly out of his seat to notch the truck into a recalcitrant gear.
‘Background only. My own interest.’
He thought about it for a moment. ‘There’s not that many left that are still farms. Pen Tywn has been turned into some kind of fancy shop that’s hardly ever open. Then Fron Heulog Farm, which is now the activity centre.’
‘What kind of activity?’ I asked.
‘A bunch of Brummies bought the place. They take in gang members from the city. It’s supposed to help them see the error of their ways. They get to come out here on a break from thieving cars. Using our tax money to give them a holiday because the deprived bastards have never seen a sheep.’
I made a mental note of Fron Heulog. It contained the elements of Jack Galbraith’s suggested city connection.
‘It’s Cae Rhedyn after that?’ I prompted.
‘That’s right. Crazy Bruno with his so-called gold mine.’
‘I’ve been there.’
He glanced over to see if I was going to expand on Crazy Bruno before he continued. ‘Then there’s the Joneses at Cogfryn.’
‘I’ve been there too.’