aren’t standard operating equipment.’ I could hear the laugh in his voice. ‘And from this high up I can’t distinguish tits.’
Two of the party apparently missing, and this funster thinks it’s a joke. I was tempted to tell him to check his mirror if he wanted to be able to distinguish a real tit.
2
I got to the location first. I needed to stay ahead before Morgan could pull rank and swamp me. I had to cheat to make sure of it. Knowing my luck with the weirdness of forestry tracks, I got the helicopter pilot to call the turns and guide me in.
I stopped the car as soon as I saw them.
Five men. Even from this distance I couldn’t mistake them. I felt the bad tickle in my kidneys again. Somewhere in the night we had lost the woman. One of the men, too, by the look of it.
I let them come to me. I wanted time to observe them. They were making their way down an incline on a forest track between new-growth fir trees. All were dishevelled. Some of the faces seemed vaguely familiar. The two at the front, similar in height, had the look of brothers. The older-looking of the two had his mouth set in stock chagrin, the other one was experimenting with damping down his smirk, trying to tamp some regret in.
They both met my stare. I had the impression that they had been practising.
The three following behind were having a harder time of it. The one in the middle, an enormous guy, had his shaved head drooped, and his arms draped around the shoulders of his two companions, who were bracing themselves to keep in step with his lurching pace.
The big shaven-headed guy was wasted. The other two were using the effort of supporting him as an excuse to look anywhere but my way.
I heard vehicles pulling up behind me, car doors opening. I didn’t turn round. My car was blocking the track so no one could get past. I concentrated, trying to read an explanation. The only consolation so far was that there was no spilled blood in evidence.
‘Where have you been, Ken?’
I was suddenly aware of Emrys Hughes standing beside me.
Ken – Mr Chagrin, the older of the two who looked like brothers – shook his head and pulled his mouth into a tight grimace of shamed apology. ‘We’re really sorry to have put everyone through this, Emrys.’
‘What happened to you?’ Hughes asked entreatingly.
‘We spent the night in Gordon’s shooting hut. Up by the old dam.’ He pulled a wry, regretful smile. ‘We were abandoned.’
‘Where are the rest of you?’ I pitched in.
‘Sergeant –’ Emrys and I both turned instinctively. Inspector Morgan glowered at us. ‘This is not an open inquisition. I want these men to have medical attention as a priority. And then they’ll be taken down to Dinas and given hot food and dry clothes before we even think about asking questions.’
‘We need to know about the others, sir,’ I protested. ‘There could still be lost or injured people up here.’
‘It’s just us, Inspector. There’s no one else, and no one’s hurt,’ Ken said penitently, then gestured back towards the big slumped guy, ‘Paul just over-indulged a bit.’
‘What about the woman who was with you?’ I demanded.
He smiled apologetically. ‘I expect she’s back in Cardiff by now.’
‘Where’s Boon?’ Emrys asked, before I could ask Ken for clarification.
‘Sergeant Hughes, Sergeant Capaldi, that will do!’ Morgan shouted angrily.
We stood back to let the five men shuffle past us like a file of train-wreck victims, paramedics coming up to meet them. The conscious ones gave Emrys Hughes a shamefaced smile as they passed. No one looked at me.
‘When do I get to talk to them, sir?’ I asked Morgan.
‘You don’t, Sergeant Capaldi.’
‘Sir?’
‘DCS Galbraith’ – I could tell that it hurt him to say the name without spitting – ‘is diverting directly to Dinas. He will interview them himself. And he didn’t request your presence,’ he added, clawing back a little consolation from my expression.
I couldn’t get over it. Suddenly no one was worried any more. By my reckoning we still had two missing persons to account for. But, since these five had turned up without any severed heads in string bags, the consensus appeared to be that everything was sorted.
I tackled Emrys about it before he joined the convoy driving back down the hill.
‘Don’t fret, Capaldi. It’s over.’
‘You don’t know what’s happened.’
‘Not the detail. But I trust these people. If there were any kind of a problem they would tell me. I know that they wouldn’t go calmly into those ambulances if there was anyone still in trouble up here.’
I couldn’t share in his faith. I kept it to myself, but another thing rankled. Even scrubbed up and alert, I couldn’t picture any of these guys in Calvin Klein underpants, or wearing Paco Rabanne aftershave.
So it looked as though I was the only one who had not been sprinkled with happy dust. Was the Italian side of me not seeing something that the Welsh side could embrace? Okay, I could run with it. I didn’t know these men, I had been excluded from the enchanted circle, so I was allowed to be mean-spirited.
I could dig for dirt.
But first I had to find it. The groups that had made up the search party were dispersing. I homed in on a Land Rover with Forestry Commission on the side and two bushy-haired occupants rolling cigarettes. They looked out at me as if I was a swish who had just dropped in from a piano bar through a hole in the space-time continuum.
I buttonholed the driver. ‘They said that they stayed at a shooting hut up there. Near an old dam.’
‘Right.’ He nodded, staring at me, waiting for something strange to happen.
‘Do you know where it is?’
They shared a silent geographer communion. Then the passenger leaned forward, his finger starting to point, his visible thought process chewing through the directions he was about to give me.
‘Great, I’ll follow you,’ I exclaimed, slapping the side of the Land Rover with macho gusto, like I was a roustabout jefe getting the crew rolling. I ran to my car hoping that they would assume we had just made some kind of a deal.
It worked. They blazed a convoluted trail, which may have been intended to shake me off. But I hung on behind them until the passenger flashed me a hand sign to let me know that we had arrived. I realized very quickly that it also indicated they were not stopping.
The hut was a long, low, timber-boarded affair, like a barrack, with a sagging mineral-felt roof, and plywood squares replacing some of the missing window panes. Well on its
