Wild People

I was the one who had something to atone for and what had I done?

I’m starting now, Jessie, I’ll find out for you, I floated out a silent promise.

I looked back at the road, trying to visualize myself approaching on that dark wet night.

How could they have done it?

‘There were no signs of it being anything other than an accident, Glyn,’ Mackay, standing behind, reminded me softly, tuning into my thought process.

‘There wouldn’t be.’

‘Sorry?’

I turned to face him. ‘If it was done professionally, they wouldn’t leave any evidence.’

He pulled a face, torn between sympathy and frustration. ‘That’s a cop-out and you know it. The ultimate conspiracy theory fail-safe. Look, I know it’s natural to want to find an outside cause. But believe me, I’ve seen it before; trying to invent an absolving scenario is only going to fuck up the healing process.’

‘Help me then.’

‘How?’

‘Tell me that it couldn’t be done. Put your hand over your heart. Convince me that it’s impossible.’

He frowned. He knew I’d trapped him. ‘Anything’s possible,’ he admitted grudgingly.

‘So how would you have made this one happen?’

‘I wouldn’t. I’m a civilian now.’

‘Humour me, Mac.’

He stared at me for a moment. Shook his head. He knew I wasn’t going to drop it. ‘That’s why you wanted me to bring you here?’

‘You’ve got the expertise.’

‘You can be a manipulative bastard, Glyn.’

‘I think someone deliberately hurt me, Mac. Killed that girl. I think they might have been trying to kill me.’

He looked as if he was about to protest, but dropped it. He started to look round, and then shifted his eyes sharply onto mine. ‘This is an invention. You have to understand that. This is no kind of truth. I’m spinning you a fairy tale here. All we’re doing is entering the land of possibility.’

I gave him the acknowledgement his expression was looking for.

He turned slowly, taking in the panorama, gradually increasing his circle. I shuffled along beside him, keeping quiet, respecting his concentration. He took off at a tangent, aiming for a small stand of Scots pine at a point where the ground started to rise up to the denser conifer plantations. I followed him. From time to time he paused to take a bearing on the bend.

He stopped at the pine trees and sighted a line back the way we had come. ‘They could have set up here.’

‘They?’

‘It would need two of them.’ He held up a hand to stop me asking any more questions and dropped into a crouch to investigate a small mossy mound between two of the pine trees. I stood behind him and tried to work it out for myself as he slowly stroked and parted the moss and grass, dipping his nose down from time to time and sniffing deeply.

From here we were about a hundred metres away from the road. My car would have been directly side-on when it reached the apex of the bend and the tyre blew. Mackay was obviously working on some kind of sniper theory rather than something having been planted on the road.

He lay down in a prone rifleman’s position and sighted along an imaginary barrel. ‘This would have been the optimum position.’

‘Did you find anything on the ground?’

He shook his head. ‘They’re not going to leave a casing behind. And it’s been too long, and this ground’s too springy to have retained the mark of anyone having lain here.’

‘What were you sniffing for?’

He shrugged. ‘Powder residue. You never know.’

‘You think it was a rifle?’

He looked up at me. ‘I don’t think anything. This is your story.’

‘Okay.’ I nodded, starting to run with it. ‘So I’m side-on to them when they fire. Is that to stop me seeing the muzzle flash?’

‘They’d have used a suppressor. They’d already have sighted-up with the laser, so they wouldn’t have to worry about you seeing that.’

‘Wouldn’t they have used a telescopic sight?’

‘Yes, a scope with a laser designator to set up the target initially. And the main reason they’d have set themselves up to the side here would be to make the target easier to hit.’

‘I’m presuming the target’s my front nearside tyre?’

He nodded. ‘The side wall of a tyre presents a better profile.’ But he was distracted. Still working through the mechanics of it. ‘The gun would have been pre-sighted and locked into position here with a tripod and clamps, ready to fire when you came along. There’s plenty of cover, it’s remote, no livestock, so the chances of anyone nosing around are scarce. They could even have set the gun up a few days before, camouflaged it and waited for the moment.’ He sighted along his imaginary barrel again. ‘The car’s always going to be slowing down for the bend, so its speed is broadly predictable. And over this short range they could accommodate variable wind speeds and directions.’

Something he had said before suddenly made sense. ‘They needed two people to set the tyre up as a target?’

‘Right. One here tuning the rifle and the other one driving a car, probably with a paint stripe on the tyre to get the exact mark. On a quiet road like this they could drive the simulation target backwards and forwards until they were sure they’d got it right. Then lock the thing down so that when it’s fired it’s always going to hit the same place.’

‘It sounds easy.’

He smiled. ‘Everything is in fairy tales.’

‘Would they have used an exploding bullet?’

He shook his head and tried not to make his smile too superior. ‘Too dangerous, even in fairy tales, and even if you could get hold of one. Probably a hollow-cavity bullet. It would fragment on impact, shredding the tyre, and making it virtually impossible to trace in this sort of terrain.’

Even if anyone had been looking. Which they hadn’t. It had been designated as an accident, not a crime scene.

He got up slowly, brushing dry grass and pine needles off himself. He was gazing back towards the road, his face distracted again.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I could be completely wrong, of course; they could have used the cobalt zirconium ray.’