to fetch me. And, now that it had arrived, my discharge wasn’t the huge relief I had been anticipating, because, in a way, it felt like leaving sanctuary. Back out into the big world where no one gave a shit what the exonerating evidence said. I was a cop and I had crashed a car and killed a young woman coming into her prime, who had been entrusted to my care. Blame accrued.
You could never call Mackay a ray of sunshine, he had too much black history for that, but he certainly brought freshness back into my life, like the proximity of running water on a very hot day. My institutionalized days had turned me stale.
Mackay and I went back a long way, to childhood holidays in Scotland, where his family was entwined into the Capaldi clan there. I had been enraptured by the wild Mackay brothers, and he and I had become close friends despite the geography that separated us. Our life paths diverged when I joined the police force in Cardiff, and he went into the army. After that, whenever we did get together, big trouble inevitably seemed to flare up on our periphery, and I discovered I had lost my appetite for mayhem. Our nadir came when he took up with my ex-wife Gina. Now she had dropped him through the trapdoor in favour of a younger Australian version, he had retired from the SAS, and we had reconnected, with him taking on the self-appointed role of my protector.
He still carried that baby face that was so redolent of Glasgow, although there were now a few crinkles around the corners of his eyes. He ran initiative training courses for corporate executives from his farmhouse in Herefordshire, and this occupation was reflected in his lean fitness, the weathered face, and bleached sandy hair that he wore short.
I climbed into his familiar old Range Rover while he put my bag in the rear. He caught me looking at my face in the vanity mirror as he climbed into the front seat. It was improving. Now it just looked like an accident involving some suspect tanning products.
‘Even with the sympathy vote I still wouldn’t fancy you.’ He grinned.
‘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
