Wild People

‘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 be okay?’ he asked, seeing where I was looking.

I nodded. ‘Don’t worry, as far as I’m concerned that’s just a heap of shit. You’d think if people were really sincere about paying their respects they’d at least have the grace to get rid of the fucking supermarket packaging.’

‘Don’t let it get to you,’ he instructed, sensing my tension.

‘I won’t.’

He turned the car round. I concentrated on the approach. The brook was on my side of the road now, about a metre below us, and narrow here, reed-fringed, the peat in it giving it the slow slick look of dark oil as it coursed between rounded boulders.

I took it in. A road sign giving warning of a sharp bend. A sinuous inside curve to the road ahead before it turned sharply to disappear around a projection in the escarpment. I realized that I was holding my breath.

‘Take it at the speed you normally would,’ I told him.

My eyes flicked between the speedometer and the road as he dropped down to third gear and swept round. Just under thirty miles an hour. In the wet and the dark I would probably have been going slower. But still fast enough for take-off.

Mackay parked and we walked back to the bend. I tried to ignore the low pile of wilted flora in its cellophane and the forlorn sodden teddy bears.

A grouping of fresh striations on a hefty boulder in the verge showed us where the front offside wheel had made contact. This was the launch pad. I looked across the brook. The wreckage had been cleared up, but the ground was still scored and turned over in the places where my car had made its tumbling contact.

It had been quite a leap.

‘You’re not thinking of going over there, are you?’ Mackay asked, reading my mind.

‘We’ve come this far.’

‘I don’t think you should.’

‘Come on, Mac, don’t be such a fucking mother hen.’

‘There’s no sense in it.’

I looked at him pointedly. ‘You’re the first guy arriving on the scene. In your headlights you see my car over there, on its roof. You make an instant assumption. More people arrive, they see Jessie’s body thrown from the car, no front tyre, a mangled wheel, and that same assumption keeps trotting itself out. That assumption then turns into an explanation. Case closed.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

I pointed across the brook. ‘Everything’s been cleared away. There are no distractions left. So let’s take a fresh look.’

‘It wasn’t just an assumption, Glyn. You told me yourself, everything stacked up to it being an accident.’

I smiled at him. ‘That’s what was reported. Now it’s time to take our own look.’

I was stiffer than I thought. He had to help me down the bank and across the brook, both of us getting our feet wet in the process. I followed the pattern of the cartwheels my car had made in the soft ground, reaching the spot where it had finally come to rest. I looked off to the side. In the direction of where they had found Jessie. A shape I hadn’t seen from the road.

As I approached I saw that it was a small cairn. A recent pile of stones. I looked around for the source. This was all grass and sedge. These stones had to have been fetched from the brook. Someone had put effort into building a crude but sensitive memorial. The sight of it made my stomach lurch.