She sat and stared out over God knew how many counties and then pulled the phone from the dash and called Bliss.
‘Let me call you back,’ Bliss said.
‘I can’t wait for—’
‘Five minutes.’
She couldn’t go anywhere because you couldn’t rely on a parking place or a signal after leaving the Bluff.
Tamsin? Was this some appalling coincidence? How often did police officers just disappear? Why this one? Why now? The dizzying views before her were across the lower hills of Radnorshire, Herefordshire, Shropshire. She looked over her shoulder, to where the soiled sky lay like a gloved hand on a long thigh of naked mountain. A helicopter in the distance.
The phone chimed.
‘Where are you?’ Bliss said.
Meaning was she on her own?
‘Hay Bluff. I said last night that I’m supposed to be meeting Huw Owen. Have you—?
‘No,’ Bliss said. ‘Nothing. I was gonna call you… at some point.’
‘You think this…?’
‘Merrily, I don’t know, do I? It might be totally unconnected. We… they found her car a couple of hours ago, on the car park at Hay.’
‘Oh, hell… I passed it, wondered what was happening. Nobody saw—?’
‘Nobody saw anything. Nobody saw her getting out of the car, but it could’ve been in the middle of the night. And there’s a little gate at the bottom of the car park accessing an endless network of footpaths. Miles of them. Up into the mountains to where you are. Lorra ground to search.’
‘You have any idea why she might’ve… gone off somewhere?’
‘No. And then there’s the possibility, not so remote, that when the car got here it wasn’t Tamsin at the wheel.’
‘That sounds even worse.’
‘Yeh. That is worse. I can guess what Brent’s thinking. He’s thinking Tamsin, out of uniform, just another nice-looking girl, only this one’s going to places where nice girls don’t go on their own. And maybe some creep chats her up or just spots her somewhere quiet and goes for it.’
‘It’s not impossible, is it?’
‘No.’
‘She’s just a kid,’ Merrily said.
‘She’s a serving police officer.’
‘That’s what you keep telling yourself.’
‘Yeh.’
‘In between wondering how Tamsin being missing could possibly be connected with the drowning of an old wizard.’
And wondering, too, no doubt, if all this would be happening if he hadn’t come back to work until his wounded nervous system could cope with bright lights.
The grey sky was visibly moving in, and she was feeling exposed between the empty cars and the broken relics of cold history. Would a woman come up here alone, when it was even quieter? Well, yes, maybe, because the country wasn’t like that.
If you didn’t think too hard about, say, the couple who’d been shot dead on the Pembrokeshire Coast long-distance footpath and all the bodies dumped in ditches and the rarely publicized increase in rural organized crime.
‘In all honesty,’ Bliss said, ‘I don’t know how it could possibly connect with the man in the pool, and it could be I’ll be the only bugger even asking the question. Cross-border inquiry now. Brent’s moved in with the Welsh, and I’m just a spare prick at a wedding. Me and Karen’s in Cusop, which I’m convinced still has things to tell us, but I’m buggered if I can think what they might be. Coppers don’t go missing like this, Merrily, it doesn’t happen.’
‘I liked her,’ Merrily said.
Liked? Past tense? For God’s sake…
‘Keep me in the loop,’ Bliss said. ‘I have to get back.’
You came round the corner from switchback hell – tight bends, risky roadside drops, cynical mountain sheep shaving the stubbly grass – and then the lane dipped and the stony landscape softened into a tunnel of trees. And there, close to the roadside, about eight interminable miles from Hay Bluff, was the tiny white St Mary’s Church, the capel, with its squat, crooked bell tower like the cap on a rusting petrol can.
Not much of a settlement, otherwise. A track opening up into a paddock, a farmhouse across the narrow road. Sheepdogs barking as she climbed down from the Freelander, but no human presence.
The yew trees in the churchyard were whispering about how ancient it all was as she approached the porch. The chapel had been built in 1762, dedicated to St Mary in a place of far older worship, doubtless on both sides of the Christian era.
She went in. Some churches, no matter how small, would greet you with a menacing yawn, but this wasn’t one of them. This was a galleried shoebox with the sense of sanctuary you only found in remote places. The window at the east end was plain, apart from engraved lettering which said,