Wild People

‘What’s that?’ I asked eagerly.

He turned his grin on me. ‘Another myth I just invented. That’s what I need you to hold on to. This is a story, not an explanation.’

I nodded my acceptance. But both of us knew I was going to totally disregard his rider.

The pied wagtail I had anthropomorphized into my special little friend wasn’t around when we got back to Unit 13. I felt an irrational twinge of sadness that he wasn’t there to welcome me home. I was used to him bobbing around on the rocks in the river outside the large rear window of my caravan, although, if I was being honest, I had to admit I was never sure that I was seeing the same bird every time.

Mackay wanted to fuss around making things comfortable for me. Much as I appreciated his friendship and kindness, I needed to be on my own to reflect on what he had told me. He left when I played up fatigue, mentioning that the drive, the fresh air and the emotion had taken its toll.

I took on board his disclaimer that it had only been a story, an invention. And okay the details might be totally wrong, but that didn’t matter. What was important was that he had demonstrated that it could have happened. Someone could have set out to shut me down and make it look like an accident.

But who and why? I came back to it again. Who, as Jack Galbraith had so succinctly put it, would go to all that fucking effort to waste me?

Were there other possibilities? Could someone have deliberately set out to target the girl? Or could it have been a random hit? But both of those scenarios seemed as unlikely and as implausible as someone trying to waste me.

Because, what could a teenage girl have done in her short country life to warrant that sort of terrible attention? And who would set up a random hit in an area so remote and deserted that they were more likely to end up assassinating an otter than a person. No, random shootings were a strictly urban feature. If someone was that sick and determined to take out a stranger in a car they would have set up their kit on a motorway overpass, or a crowded city street.

So, if it was specific and deliberate, that left me or the girl.

I reminded myself that Kevin Fletcher had never come back to reassure me that my name was not on a butcher’s order in Cardiff.

Had I been too quick to dismiss the possibility of a Professor Moriarty?

I set the mental sieve finer and went back over my past cases. I had been involved in a number of murder investigations that had resulted in prosecution and a subsequent life sentence for the perp. But why target me? I had always been part of a team. It had never come down to me being the one brilliant brain that had brought the bastards to justice. No convicted murderer had ever screamed, I’ll get you, Capaldi, across a shocked courtroom as they dragged him from the dock.

What about the ones I had booked who had died?

Two suicides, one on remand, one inside after sentencing, both of them clinically depressed junkies already well on their way down the dead-end road. One serial car thief who had received his moment of illumination in prison, when the sharpened end of a toothbrush had been rammed into his ear to let him know that he hadn’t been as hard as he had thought he was. The kiddie molester who had jumped off a railway bridge to get away from me just as the delayed 9.13 to Swansea was coming through.

And Nick Bessant. The pimp who a farmer had executed for desecrating his son and his daughter. The farmer I had led to Bessant’s lair in Cardiff, thinking I was doing something for justice and common humanity. Which was the reason that I was at this moment sitting in a cold, damp caravan in the middle of the boondocks looking out the window in the hope of seeing the return of a small fucking bird.

It was impossible to believe. No one could have mourned any of those trashed-up lives that much. Okay, they had mothers. But I didn’t think that love or tenderness could have been anywhere in the air at the moment they were being fucked into existence.

And even if one of them had someone who was carrying a torch for their memory, it was way too sophisticated for that world. If they had stooped to revenge it would have been boiled-down battery acid in the side of the face, or a bunch of hired scagheads with pickaxe handles. Something course and mean and demonstrative.

It was a jaundiced view, but I was feeling blue and bitter, and my excuse for it was twofold. First, someone had tried to kill me, and secondly, I now had to let these low-rent bastards back into my thought process again.

EDGAR FISKE!

The name crash-landed on my consciousness. A name I hadn’t even run past idle recollection in years. Edgar Fiske had once threatened to kill me.

But it had had nothing to do with me being a cop. When had it been? I racked my memory. But he was back in my head now, looming up too close to make out background details like time or place. A thin-faced young man with short curly sandy hair, freckles, and thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses actually quivering on the bridge of his nose as his anger boiled tears and flecks of spit out of him.

I am going to destroy you, Capaldi. I don’t care how fucking long it takes. One day you’re going to know what it’s like to die.

It was uncanny. I wasn’t even paraphrasing. They had come back to me after all these years. The very words he had used.

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I reached for the phone. But it had been so long since I had called that I had to fetch my diary and look up the long number.

‘Pronto!’ A confident young girl’s voice.

I had two nieces. I hazarded a guess. ‘Graziella?’

‘Si.’ A hesitancy.

‘Ehi, e Zio Glyn da Galles.’

The receiver clattered down. I heard the receding cry, ‘Mama …’ as she ran away.

I had often wondered whether, if my parents had given me an Italian name, I might have made my home in my father’s old country, like my sister Paola. Something rolling like Giancarlo. Waving to all and sundry in my silk suit in the sun in the piazza sucking up spaghetti con vongole, instead of my single-syllable Brythonic moniker predestining me to grey skies and scrub-topped hills.

Paola lived in a village above San Remo with her husband Roberto, a plumber who hated me. I had never found a reason for that hatred, which both my sister and my mother, trying to keep extended family cracks smoothed over, told me I was imagining. The only thing I could pin it on was that I had once informed him in a spirit of bonhomie that Paola and I used to share a bath as children.

‘Naked!’ His reaction had surprised me.

And it should have warned me not to respond with a quip, that underwear only got in the way of soaping down the fundamentals.

Whatever it had been, Roberto had inculcated a terror of me in his children, so that Graziella’s reaction hadn’t come as a surprise.

‘Glyn!’ I don’t know whether it was the richness of her adopted language, but Paola managed to put a lot of expression into merely saying my name. Like anxiety and What the fuck are you calling for?

‘Hi, Paola, you all right?’

‘How’s Mum?’ she asked anxiously. As usual, she couldn’t imagine a call from me without an image of our mother face-first at the bottom of the stairs, or straining to hear the last hopeless echo of the defibrillator.

‘She’s fine.’

Even over the phone I felt her de-stress. ‘I was sorry to hear about the accident.’

‘Thanks, but I’m fine now.’

‘Mum says you’re on convalescent leave?’ She was probing. The worry being that I might be trying to swing some Mediterranean recuperation, and she was already preparing herself for Roberto’s reaction.

I put her out of her misery. ‘Do you remember a guy called Edgar Fiske?’

‘Edgar Fiske? What on earth brings him up?’

‘He was stalking you at teacher training college?’

She gave a small laugh. ‘Well, stalking is putting it a bit strong.’

‘That’s the word you used. When you came home once and told me about it. You were really upset, said you couldn’t say anything to Mum or Dad.’

‘Glyn, I don’t really remember that, and what’s it got to do with anything now?’

I had hoped for a more sinister recall from her, but I ploughed on anyway. ‘Colin Forbes, my friend from Splottlands?’