I needed some background before I met up with Cassandra Bullock, and had arranged to meet PC Huw Davies at the car park at the start of the Monks’ Trail where we had arrested Jessie.
I arrived deliberately early. I wanted to have some time there alone. It was an area that had been cleared, levelled and gravelled at the foot of a wooded hillside. It looked bigger in the daylight, but that might have had something to do with the paucity of traffic and activity compared to that night. There were three empty cars parked at random intervals around the perimeter, along with the junked car I had seen before.
The sun hadn’t cleared the hill to the east, and the air was cool and damp and smelled of leaf mould and ferns. I circled the car park on foot. The waymarked trail started at the far end, rising up and curving away through the sessile oaks. I returned to the information board and experienced a sense of disappointment, although I didn’t know what I had been expecting.
I couldn’t bring myself to read the historical and biodiversity notes on the board. There were illustrations of birds, insects and flora, and the graphics showed the trail winding up through the woods, past a pool and waterfall, and onto the ridgeway above the village of Llandewi. A smaller-scale inset map showed the entire length of the trail traversing the Cambrians and bifurcating to join up with other long-distance footpaths. It made me wonder where the occupants of those three parked cars were now. There was something inviting in the prospect of losing yourself up there in all that space and sky.
Huw Davies turned up dead on time in his marked police Land Rover.
‘Sarge.’ He nodded and I could see him appraising me for damage.
‘Thanks for this, Huw.’ I shook his outstretched hand. I had already warned him that this was unofficial. ‘Ever walk the trail?’ I gestured at the information board, kicking off on small talk.
He shook his head. ‘I leave that to the leisured classes.’
‘I thought you liked being out in the wild wide-open?’
‘I do.’ He nodded towards the start of the trail at the far end of the car park. ‘But this is channelled. It’s the safe path through the jungle. All marked out to make sure you don’t trespass. I prefer to spoof it.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s a load of sanitized bullshit, you know.’
‘What is?’
‘Starting the Monks’ Trail from here.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s a recorded historical fact that the track the monks used to use came from the coast and passed through the village of Llandewi on its way up to the ridgeway and on over the mountains.’
‘Why did they change it?’
He shrugged. He still hadn’t dropped that wry smile. ‘A cynic would say it’s because Llandewi didn’t fit the image they wanted to project.’
‘Not pretty enough?’
‘The place is a mess now. Totally depressed. The way all these communities go when the lifeblood gets sucked out of them. In Llandewi’s case, it was the sawmill closing down about ten years ago.’
I made a point of looking up at the trees. ‘I would have thought that there was still plenty of product around.’
‘Not for construction timber. The stuff from Canada and the Baltic’s undercut them. The local softwood’s all carted off to the pulp mills now.’
‘So, the place sounds ripe for juvenile crime?’ I offered, getting down to it at last.
He pulled a face. ‘You’d think so. But they’re an apathetic bunch round here. And everyone’s in the same boat, no one’s got anything worth nicking.’
‘What about the thefts that happened in the car park here that Morgan’s cronies got so worked up about?’
He turned sombre. ‘After what happened that night I leaned on the local bad boys and they’ve all denied it. And I believe them.’
‘And we know it wasn’t Morgan’s marauding city hoodlums?’ I left it as a question.
‘It’s stopped now, Sarge.’
I gestured for him to go on.
‘Since the raid, there have been no more vehicle break-ins or vandalism.’
We both looked at each other carefully. I voiced the conclusion behind his statement. ‘You don’t think Jessie Bullock had been responsible for the previous ones? On her own?’
‘I can’t answer that. Maybe whoever was behind it got frightened off.’
‘Was she a troublemaker?’
He shook his head loosely. ‘I’d seen her around. But only as a face on my patch. She’d never come up on my radar before.’
‘Tell me about the stuff that happened here.’
‘Essentially it was all low-grade. They weren’t after nicking the cars themselves, or even things like the alloy wheels or the cycle racks. Windows got broken, and some stuff got nicked – CDs, floor mats, dangly mascots – the sort of silly useless shit that gets left in cars. The kind of things that were worthless, but could have been taken as souvenirs or trophies. The only thing of any real value that was ever taken was a portable satnav. And some of the cars got things spray-painted on them.’
‘Such as?’
‘Property is theft, was a favourite.’
I shared his smile. ‘You got any anarchists or radical Marxists in Llandewi?’
‘Not that I know of, and definitely not among the baseball-cap brigade.’
‘Jessie Bullock was obviously an intelligent kid. Could she have politicized the local bad boys?’
‘I told you, she’d never come up on my radar. When kids like her start hanging out with the rough, I make a note of it. It didn’t happen with her.’
‘It has to be local though?’
‘I agree. But it was all juvenile stuff, Sarge. That’s what I tried to tell Inspector Morgan. This was kids posturing. It didn’t warrant shock and awe tactics.’
‘Any chance of getting sight of the reports on the car park break-ins?’ I asked.
‘I’ll email the file references to you.’
‘What about the names of the local bad boys?’ I tried.
He shook his head. ‘Sorry.’ He took pity on my expression and elaborated: ‘You’re meant to be on sick leave, Sarge. I don’t want you to get into trouble.’
‘Thanks, Huw.’ We both left the name Inspector Morgan unsaid.
I watched him drive away. I knew I was procrastinating. Now I had nothing between me and my confrontation with Cassandra Bullock. Except for the insurance policy that the coward in me had built in. I had never called her to arrange the meeting. There was a chance, which a part of me was clutching at, that she wouldn’t be available.
As a cop I was used to difficult encounters. That sombre walk down a hallway as you wondered how you were going to be able to tell a mother that her husband had gassed himself and their two young children in his car. Or getting parents to sit down as you attempted to prepare them for the awful fact that the body of their toddler son had been found in a river snarled in the roots of a tree. But never before had I had to face the mother of a young girl whose death I had been partly responsible for. Because, even if my third-party hypothesis was correct, I had to accept that I had been the one who had delivered her to that final appointment.
I drove away from the tree shade of the car park and out into the sun. It was a glorious morning, but it didn’t help Llandewi. Huw had been right. The village was a mess, and the sunlight only highlighted the faults.
It was a linear village,