Wild People by Ewart Hutton

Author:Ewart Hutton [Hutton, Ewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

11

I stood outside The Fleece and watched Jack Galbraith and Bryn Jones drive off for their next appointment in Machynlleth. The bell in my head was still tolling annoyingly. Taunting me for having tucked something important so far away out of reach.

I crossed the square to the convenience store to buy a few things to take home to Unit 13. I started to make a mental list of what I needed. The bell lost its insistence. Allowing the magic to make its entrance. Association. Passing the display in the pharmacist’s window, a phrenology head advertising laxatives, of all things.

The head was bald.

Association! A shaven-headed dyke from Brighton.

Back in Unit 13 I went into my computer, and found what I was looking for in a routine bulletin I had received before Jessie had died.

This had been widely circulated. It was out in the open. Had anyone else acted on it?

The bulletin wasn’t big on information. A passport-type photograph of a dark-skinned man with a scowl and frizzy hair, cut short and thinning, the open neck of a white polo shirt showing. His name was Kadir Hoca, aged fifty-three, a Turkish Cypriot with an address in Enfield, North London, and they had him down as the owner of an import and export business. He had been driving a late-model, black BMW 5 Series Touring, and his last sighting had been at a service station outside Newtown. Which was why I had received the bulletin. On the chance that he had been heading this way.

And of course I hadn’t thought anything about it at the time. Only that he was equally as improbable in these latitudes as the Latvian student or the shaven dyke from Brighton on the same bulletin. But with a possible Turkish Cypriot tie-in to the drug factories, his presence now took on a meaning that was more than merely arcane.

Another problem struck me. If this guy had a gangster tie-in, why hadn’t it been mentioned? Why had he been lumped in with the ordinary disappeared citizens?

Because the Met or some other organization didn’t want to share their intelligence? Or because they simply had no idea?

I called Bryn Jones with the information. He thanked me for it, but was noncommittal. I couldn’t tell from his voice whether this was something they were already working on. But that was Bryn for you.

It should have stopped there. I had done my duty and passed it on. I was on sick leave. Their investigation had nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with Jessie.

Or did it?

I made another call.

‘Glyn!’ Rhian sounded happy to hear from me. ‘Are you calling to invite me back for that Scotch now?’

‘I told you, not while you have to drive.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to work it that when I have it I won’t be going anywhere for a while, won’t we?’

Was she flirting? ‘Let me know when you’re ready for that.’

She laughed down the line. ‘Oh, I surely will.’

‘In the meantime, I’ve got something for you.’

‘You mean there’s more?’ she quipped.

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