Ragged Alice Read online

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  Epigraph

  Benthyg dros amser byr yw popeth a geir yn y byd hwn.

  —Welsh proverb

  What dies does not pass out of the universe.

  —Marcus Aurelius

  PROLOGUE

  AFTER BEING HIT BY THE CAR, Lisa managed to open her eyes three times before she died.

  The first time, she found herself with her cheek pressed against the wet surface of the road. Her feet were resting in the undergrowth on the verge. The rain had stopped and the moon threatened to break through the tattered rags of cloud above the valley. Fleetingly, she wondered why she was there. She had no memory of lying down. The last thing she remembered, she had been walking home, arms folded tightly across her chest, resenting her uncomfortable heels, cursing Daryl for being such an idiot, and cursing herself for having stormed out of the pub instead of demanding to be driven home.

  The car stood in the road a dozen or so metres ahead of her. The reflection of its red brake lights seemed to sizzle on the slick tarmac. The engine clicked and pinged as it started to cool.

  Maybe whoever was in the car would know why she had chosen to rest here, halfway between the pub on the main road and the town down at the far end of the valley?

  She tried to lift her head, but her neck hurt, and she didn’t seem to be able to stay awake.

  * * *

  The second time she opened her eyelids, she had been bundled onto her back, and overfamiliar hands were rifling through the pockets of her coat. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of aftershave and sour lager.

  “Daryl?”

  The hands stopped their rummaging. Carefully, Daryl extracted her mobile phone, turned it off, and slipped it into his jeans.

  “Sorry, love.”

  “What happened?”

  “A bit of an accident.” He sounded apologetic. Not angry, like he had been earlier.

  “Take me home.”

  “I can’t.” He stood and wiped his hands on the oil-stained thighs of his jeans.

  “Why not?” She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t helping her.

  “You’re hurt proper badly. I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  He shrugged and looked away, into the darkness.

  “I just am, okay.”

  * * *

  When Lisa pried open her eyes for the third and final time, the car had gone, and the air felt fresher. Now she could smell wet earth and wild garlic. The terraced, slate-roofed lights of Pontyrhudd glittered at the end of the valley. A plane passed overhead at high altitude, its vapour trail drawn like a pale spider’s thread against the hard, bright stars. Somewhere across the fields, an owl cried.

  Her breaths came in slow and shallow sips. Her chest felt full of gauze. Why had Daryl abandoned her out here? As kids, they’d never have ventured this far up the valley, especially at night. Even when they became teenagers, they took their nocturnal backseat passions to the headland overlooking the sea, instinctively distrusting the inland lay-bys and farm tracks. A girl had been murdered up here once, among the gorse and bracken. That was all they needed to know. And with the whole of Wales pressing at their backs, it was sometimes easier to stare west across the Atlantic and picture a distant, attainable liberation somewhere beyond the knife-sharp horizon.

  Lisa and Daryl had often talked of going to America. If they ever managed to save up enough money, they were going to hire a Winnebago and drive from New York to Chicago, and then on along Route 66 to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  At least, that had been the dream. Not that either of them had ever earned enough to put any money aside for such things. Her wages from the hair salon barely covered her rent and bills, and he earned next to nothing as an apprentice mechanic. And now she was pregnant. That was what they had been arguing about: money and timing. That was why she had stormed out and tried to walk the four miles down the valley, from the main road to the town.

  Now Daryl was gone, and she was here by herself. She wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. Blood roared in her ears like the ebb of waves on a shingle beach. The fingers of her left hand twitched as nerves fired like loose electrical connections.

  And suddenly, she had the prickly sensation she wasn’t alone. Her eyes were guttering like expiring candles, but she had the impression that a figure sat cross-legged on the tarmac beside her. A cold hand pressed to her cheek, and she heard the rustle of cloth. Caught a movement like the twitch of a crow’s wing or the flick of a ragged cape.

  Heard the hiss of a long, indrawn breath.

  A voice that whispered to her as she died.

  1.

  BY THE TIME DCI Holly Craig pulled up at the scene, the local police had closed the road and placed a tent over the body. The last traces of the night’s rain had blown inland on a stiff southwesterly, leaving a sky that looked spotless and freshly scrubbed. Flecks of sunlight danced on azure waves. Gorse flowers shivered in the wind.

  She closed the car door and curled her lip. She hadn’t been back to Pontyrhudd in fifteen years. And she hadn’t had a drink in almost six hours.

  “Okay, what have we got?”

  A plain-clothed young man detached himself from a small knot of uniformed officers.

  “Are you the new guvnor?”

  “For now.”

  He looked her up and down, taking in her long auburn hair and army surplus coat.

  “Looks like a hit-and-run,” he said hesitantly, obviously taken aback by her appearance. He must have been all of twenty-five years old. Pretty enough, but practically a child. His soul looked depressingly untarnished. “The victim’s a local girl, Lisa Hughes. Works in the salon.”

  Holly pulled back a tent flap and glanced at the body. “Drunk driver?”

  “Could be.”

  She let the flap fall shut. “What’s your name, son?”

  The kid bristled at her tone. “Scott,” he said. “Scott Fowler. Detective Sergeant.”

  Holly smiled. A twitch of the lips. A couple of hundred feet below, a stream wound across the boggy valley floor like a vein of silver winding through slate.

  “So, you reckon this was an accident?”

  “I think so.”

  Holly rolled her eyes. She turned on her heel and walked up the road. It was a simple two-lane blacktop that connected Pontyrhudd with the A487, which swept down from Aberystwyth in the north to Fishguard in the south. It was the only way in and out of the town.

  “He tapped his brakes here,” she said, pointing to a smudge on the surface. “Then again here.”

  Scott pulled his phone out. He snapped pictures of the marks as she pointed them out. When she reached the bend, she stopped.

  “He must have first seen her from here,” she said. She closed one eye and held her thumb out at arm’s length, lining up the car’s trajectory. “Then he touched the brakes again and swerved right, and clipped her there.” She pointed to a spot where tyre tracks had chewed up a patch of muddy verge.

  Scott dutifully snapped each of the sites as she indicated them.

  “So, n
ot an accident, then?”

  “No.” She returned to her contemplation of the curve, visualising the car’s path, the squeal of tyres and the thump of impact.

  “This must have been premeditated,” she said at length. “There’s no way the driver would have had time to decide to run someone over. He had to have been already looking for her when he came around that bend.”

  Scott lowered his phone. “And there’s definitely no way this could have been an accident? Maybe he lost control at the corner there, and overcorrected?”

  Holly shook her head. “Just at the spot where our victim happened to be walking? No, I don’t buy it. It’s too much of a coincidence.” She paused to listen as the breeze stirred the planted ranks of fir covering the north side of the valley. A wind turbine stood against the horizon, its blades turning with an insolent disregard for earthly matters. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her RAF greatcoat. The breeze ruffled her hair.

  “Does the victim have a family?”

  Scott consulted his notes. “There’s a sister, down in the town. We sent a liaison officer down to talk to her.”

  “When was this?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “Then it’s high time we paid our respects.”

  * * *

  They took the road downhill, following the contours of the valley as it descended towards the sea. Holly’s car was a hired Ford. She’d picked it up when she arrived in Carmarthen. There hadn’t been time for the local office to assign her an official ride.

  Scott sat in the passenger seat, gripping the grab handle above the door window. He was a nervous passenger. But she’d driven this road a thousand times in her youth. She knew every twist and kink, every dip and turn. Every sheep-short pasture, friable stone wall and crooked, black-limbed tree.

  Fifteen years, and nothing had changed.

  She downshifted into fourth as they came into the town.

  Pontyrhudd had never really made it as a tourist destination. It couldn’t compete with Aberystwyth, which had a direct connection to Birmingham New Street and the rest of the National Rail network. And with the main road four miles inland, the town saw little in the way of passing trade. Terraced streets barnacled the bracken-topped hills. Shabby cafés and run-down guesthouses adorned the seafront, their windows flecked with the dried salt spray from decades of winter squalls.

  It was the kind of town in which rifts and enmities ran beneath everything like festering seams of smouldering peat, and the children in the local primary school stifled beneath the weight of generational feuds stretching back to the misdeeds of their great-grandparents.

  When Holly thought of the town, she thought of it in terms of fish fingers and oven chips in front of her grandfather’s television, his electric fire lit and his ashtray overflowing with the soggy remains of hand-rolled cigarettes; of her and her friends kicking empty Coke cans on the pavement outside the out-of-season amusement arcades; of enduring endless rainy Sunday afternoons spent looking out from the sash window of her bedroom; and of a general, all-pervading sense of being slowly smothered. So it was strange to see the place again with an outsider’s eyes. Once, it had been her whole world. And although she had escaped and moved on, she had somehow been expecting the town to remain as it had been on the day of her departure.

  Now, as she followed Scott’s directions, she saw that a sort of half-hearted, creeping gentrification had transformed the local cafés into coffee shops and made space on the high street for an art gallery, a tapas restaurant, and a shop selling artisanal bread. Although, having said that, there also seemed to be a lot more charity shops than she remembered, suggesting not everyone had the means to buy into this new aspirational lifestyle.

  Some familiar landmarks remained unchanged. Here, she saw the same fish and chip shop where, at the age of fifteen, she’d been taken on her first proper date. There, the bus shelter where she’d broken up with the boy a week later.

  Negotiating the narrow streets felt like looking through an album of family photographs, only to find parties unknown had altered some of the pictures—an uncomfortable dissonance between the town she’d carried with her for a decade and a half and the town as it was now.

  Still feeling mildly disorientated and unreal, she pulled up at the kerb outside the terraced house owned by Lisa Hughes’s sister.

  “Okay,” she said as she unfastened her seat belt. “Is there anything I should know before I go in there?”

  “Like what, guv?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t need to ask.”

  Scott shrugged.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Does she have a dog?”

  “Not as far as I’m aware.”

  “Good.” Holly opened her door. “I don’t get on well with dogs.”

  * * *

  Nicola Hughes’s house stood a few streets back from the seafront. The window blinds were skew-whiff and the paint on the frames peeling. Holly rapped on the front door and a uniformed police officer answered. She flashed her credentials and was led through to the sitting room, where a tearstained woman sat crying on a sagging futon.

  “My name’s Detective Chief Inspector Craig,” she said. “I’m here to find out why your sister’s dead.”

  The woman looked up in horror and burst into fresh tears.

  From the hallway, Scott muttered, “Way to be blunt, guv.”

  Holly ignored him. She crouched in front of the sobbing woman and put a hand on her arm. She could see the hurt behind the swollen eyes.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I’m going to find out who did this and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. But first, I’m going to need you to tell me what your sister was doing out on the valley road last night.”

  Nicola Hughes scrunched and wrung the tissues in her hands. She sucked in a breath and gave a nod.

  “Good,” Holly said. “Take your time.”

  The woman had taken a few knocks over the years, but her internal light still flickered like a stubborn candle.

  “She said she was going out with Daryl. Up to the Galleon on the main road.”

  “Who’s Daryl?”

  “Her boyfriend. They’ve been seeing each other for about a year.”

  “And you don’t approve?”

  “I’ve never liked him.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  Nicola’s face hardened. “He can get nasty when he’s got a drink in him. Proper temper, like.”

  “Did they argue often?”

  “They argued last night. She rang me about ten to eleven in a right old state. Said she’d just walked out on him. I told her to phone a cab, but she wanted to walk home by herself.”

  Holly glanced at Scott. “Did the victim have a phone on her?” Nobody had mentioned one.

  Scott consulted his notepad.

  “No, guv.”

  “Interesting.” She turned back to Lisa’s sister and asked, “Does Daryl have a surname?”

  * * *

  Daryl Allen wasn’t at home, and nobody at the garage where he worked had seen him since the previous day. So Holly and Scott drove back up the valley, passing the crime scene, and continued on until they reached the junction with the A487.

  The Galleon Inn nestled in the crook of the junction. The stones in its walls had been quarried from the local hills, the blackened timbers in its frame taken from an eighteenth-century shipwreck. Its front door faced the road and the fields beyond. From its topmost rear windows, you could see the sea.

  Holly parked at the side of the building and sat for a moment, gripping the steering wheel. The Galleon had always been the place the town’s young people went. Its proximity to the main road gave it a liminal, edge-of-the-world feel, and as long as you looked vaguely of age, you could always get served. Looking at the chalkboards advertising happy hours and meal deals to passing motorists, she felt a sudden queasy nostalgia. This had been the place she’d first learned to drink.

  “Are you all r
ight, guv?”

  “I’m fine.”

  The last thing she needed to think about right now was alcohol. She climbed out of the car and sniffed the air. A truck thundered past. She could do this. She really could.

  “Come on.”

  She strode around to the front of the building and pushed through the thick oak door. Scott hurried to keep up.

  Inside, the place was exactly what you would have expected: nautical paraphernalia on the walls, a fruit machine cycling in the corner. The wooden panelling on the walls bore a couple of decades’ worth of accumulated scuffs and scratches, and the ceiling glowered the yellow-ivory colour of nicotine-stained teeth. A brass rail ran around the bar, and the pumps bore the colourful logos of independent breweries—tiny paintings of goblins, pirate ships and foxes. A giant wall-mounted flat-screen TV showed a rolling news channel.

  As Holly stepped into the gloom of the public bar, the barmaid called, “We’re not open yet.”

  Holly put her hands in the pockets of her long coat and walked slowly to the counter, letting her eyes adjust to the stale gloom.

  “I don’t care. I’m here to ask questions.”

  The barmaid stopped setting up and gave her a look. “Are you the police?”

  “Show her your warrant card, Scott.”

  “Yes, guv.”

  Holly waited while Scott fumbled his wallet from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. In her experience, 90 percent of the British public had no idea what a real police ID looked like, but it always helped to flash one. It provided a framework for discussion.

  “Did you hear about the girl who got run over last night?”

  The barmaid gave a cautious nod. The light inside her skull was bright but blemished. She’d done things she couldn’t have been proud of.

  “Yeah, I passed the police cars on my way up here this morning.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Not personal, like.”

  “But you’d recognise her?”

  The girl gave a shrug. “Lisa Hughes? Sure. She was in here last night.”

  Holly propped her elbows on the bar and leant forwards, trying to ignore the way the light glinted off the half-empty bottle of single malt on the shelf behind the bar.