us. But Jeff’s men had managed to rig a tarpaulin over the crucial areas, the half-exposed skeleton and the mound of excavated material, and Hughes and Friel had taped off the rectangle I had prescribed for them.
Vehicles were leaving, a procession heading down the access road. Jeff had obviously released his men. Mine were attempting their own escape, Emrys keeping his head down to avoid eye contact as he got into the passenger’s side of the patrol car. Which had been turned around and was now facing downhill, I noticed.
‘Sergeant!’ I yelled.
He froze in his crouch, half inside the car. He wanted to ignore me, but a conditioned reflex had kicked in at my shout.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I asked, approaching, as he unravelled himself. Inside the car, I could see Friel in the driver’s seat, craning past him to watch me.
‘We’re going back down to take up our normal duties,’ Emrys stated challengingly.
‘You’re supposed to assist me here until I release you.’
His eyes narrowed meanly as he tried to remember when that one had popped up on the order book. ‘I thought your people were taking over.’
‘They are, but the SOCO team aren’t starting the investigation until tomorrow. Which means that we need to secure the site.’
‘It is secure. We’ve taped it off, the workmen have covered it.’
‘I need a watch kept.’
He looked at me disgustedly, realizing now where this thing was going. ‘Isn’t that your responsibility?’
I smiled at him. ‘That’s right, and that’s why I’m delegating it to you. I have other things to do to get this investigation started.’
He almost shook his head in defiance. Instead, he thought better of it and smiled slyly. ‘Sorry, no can do.’ He tapped on the roof of the car. ‘We’ve just taken an urgent call requesting assistance. Haven’t we, Constable?’
On cue, Friel leaned over. ‘That’s right. Extreme urgency, they said.’
I took Hughes’s elbow. He resisted for a moment, then let me steer him away from the car. ‘Do you want me to write this one up,’ I asked him softly, ‘or are you going to be a good plod and do what I’ve instructed you to do?’
He bristled. ‘Write what up?’ he asked, a sneaky streak of doubt cutting through the belligerence.
‘That you’ve spun me a fucking lie to evade your duty.’ I held my hand up in front of his face to hush his protest. ‘That landline I was on is the only communications tool available here. No radio, no phone signal.’ I made a show of gazing up at the heavens wonderingly. ‘And I don’t see any sign of Pegasus, or Mercury the Winged Fucking Messenger, having delivered your urgent summons.’
He glared at me. I wondered whether I had taken him just too far. He had a short fuse, and had laid into me once before. Was he balancing the prospect of a reprimand against the instant gratification of realigning the side of my face? He snorted, and turned back to the car. ‘Get out of there, Friel,’ he snapped.
I drove down the hill thinking that this was the investigative equivalent of the Phoney War. I hoped that the body we had uncovered didn’t mind – whoever and whatever they were – that the start for the search for justice was on hold for a brighter new morning.
But I could feel the buzz starting. Much as my sympathy went out to all those poor tup lambs I had been seeing in their pens, huddled, stiff and ball-busted, this was a real case. Jack Galbraith had to let me in on it. It was what he had exiled me out here for. Like it or not, this was my country now, and I was his man in it.
I stopped at the nearest farm entrance. COGFRYN FARM
I turned onto the main road. The headlights swept the direction sign: DINAS. I smiled wryly to myself. Whoever would have thought that that would ever have meant going home?
If Dinas had been allowed to remain as an opportunistic collection of shacks on a dubious ford on a secondary river, it would never have known disappointment. But it hadn’t, it grew, and it got prosperity. Twice. Lead and sheep. And lost it both times.
And then it got me.
I didn’t have a choice about it. Dinas was prescribed for me. The day that Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Galbraith, obviously repaying my former superiors some deep Masonic favour, rescued me from disgrace in Cardiff, tucked me briefly under his wing, and then booted me out of the nest and into the boondocks. I was to be his piggy in the middle. His catch-all detective in the empty heartland. In which capacity, I was kept busy chasing down missing livestock, stalking stolen quad bikes and tractors, observing first-hand how the full moon fucked people up, and generally trying to avoid confrontations with the local cops.
Don’t get me wrong, Dinas is not a bad place; it can even be quite quaint in certain lights. It also helps if you have somewhere else to keep on going to when you get to the far end. I didn’t, so I headed for the next best thing, the Fleece Hotel.
I took a stool at the rear bar and nodded cursory greetings to the few men in the room. They were all regulars, so I was able to do that on automatic, a nod more to the zone than the person.
David Williams, my best buddy in Dinas, and not just because he owned the pub, was busy serving at the crowded front bar. He saw me and smiled happily when he turned to the cash register.
‘Quite a crowd,’ I commented.
He nodded contentedly. ‘They’ve all come down from the wind-farm site.’
Then I realized that this was where I had seen Jeff Talbot, the site engineer, before. In the front bar. A figure glimpsed occasionally, drinking with his men.
David finished up and came over and started pulling a pint for me.
‘So, what’s the verdict on the body?’ I asked, knowing that the Dinas rumour mill would already have digested, analysed and spat out its own theory.
He winced. It was a warning, but it arrived too late. I turned in the direction of his almost imperceptible nod. A middle-aged couple in rain-slicked coats were standing in the archway between the two bars, staring at me. Their smiles were clamped into a rictus. I didn’t recognize them, but I did recognize anxiety.
‘Mr and Mrs Salmon,’ David introduced them.
They flowed forward towards me like penitents released into a sanctuary. It was hard to put a precise age to them as the rain had smoothed and darkened their hair, and freshened their skin.
‘We heard about the discovery, Sergeant.’ Mrs Salmon spoke, her eyes glistening, scorching mine, already afraid of what they might find there. Her look was accusing, as if I was attempting to hide something from her.
‘Up at the wind-farm site,’ her husband clarified. He gestured his head towards the front bar. ‘We’ve been talking to the workmen, but they say they don’t know anything. They said that you were the one to talk to. That you’re in charge.’
Even stressed, they both had the lazy vowels of Estuary English. Essex or Kent.
‘Can we go up there?’ Her voice was pure raw entreaty. I glanced down at her hands, already knowing that they would be tightly clenched.
‘Helen …’ Her husband checked her, as