Alias

by Cari Hunter

  As if alerted by a sixth sense, she turns from the window as I approach and stands to offer her hand. We shake in an awkward greeting, and I don’t sit until she gestures to the seat opposite her.

  “I appreciate you coming out here,” she says after I’ve dragged my chair across the granite floor. “I didn’t think you’d get my text last night.”

  I fiddle with the menu, craving caffeine and calories. I’m going to let her order first. I bet she’s the one bobby who goes into a greasy spoon and requests muesli with yoghurt.

  “My sleep patterns are a bit buggered up,” I say, omitting the part about sharing my bed with a kitchen utensil. “I’m staying awake late and needing a nap by mid-afternoon.”

  The fleet-footed waitress politely interrupts to place a cafe latte in front of me. “Can I get you anything to eat?” she asks.

  “I recommend the full Welsh,” Pryce says, as my preconceptions make an about-turn and march out the door. “It’ll set you up for the day.”

  “I’m game if you are.” I’m starving but unwilling to be the only one smearing myself with egg yolk and lard. I catch her eye over the rim of the menu, and she nods, accepting the challenge.

  “Okay, then,” the waitress says, sounding a little dubious, as if Pryce and I fail to fit her stereotype of cheerful, bourgeois, outdoorsy types and she’s now questioning what we’re doing dining out in the middle of nowhere on a Sunday morning. I sympathise entirely, but she undermines our comradeship by confiscating my menu before scuttling off. Needing something to do with my hands, I cradle my mug of coffee and turn back to Pryce.

  “Either she’s very good at her job, or I have you to thank for this.”

  Pryce slides two sachets of brown sugar across the table. “I’m sure she’s competent, but no, she’s not psychic.”

  “Thank you, then.” I sprinkle sugar onto the froth, letting it sit and sweeten my first sip. I want to ask why she chose this as our meeting place, but at some unseen signal, the gang of hikers mobilises toward the exit, forcing me to wait out the general ballyhoo and squeal of metal chairs on stone. I steal surreptitious glances at her, trying to read her body language. My only conclusion is that she seems more at ease here than she ever did in the hospital, and that the low winter sunlight is catching her eyes and the auburn strands in her hair and making her look rather lovely. I take too deep a gulp of coffee and burn my mouth, which at least gives me something else to focus upon. She’s looking beyond me at the last of the group as he shoulders his rucksack and disentangles his hiking poles.

  “Snowdon,” she says, as if she’s been assessing their potential and has reached a decision. “Walk up and get the train down. Either that, or a gentle stroll around Llyn Idwal.”

  “Llyn.” I roll the unfamiliar word around on my tongue, mimicking her inflection. “Is that lake?”

  “Yes. This is Llyn Ogwen. Idwal is a kilometre or so from the Ranger Base car park. I go swimming there after work sometimes. It’s got a great beach, and once the crowds have gone home, I get the water, the sky, and the mountains to myself.”

  I picture her marching up there alone and launching herself into the frigid water, a masochistic test of endurance she’s devised to build character, but the affection in her tone tells me I’m doing her a disservice.

  “It must be a bloody chilly spot to take a dip,” I say, making amends by being nice. “Do you wear a wetsuit?”

  “No, a regular costume.” She sips her coffee. “Unless it’s really late. Then I don’t even bother with that.”

  I splutter into my drink, shooting a shower of foam up my nose. I can, and have, imagined her doing a lot of things: arresting grannies, putting the fear of God into miscreants, confiscating sweets from infants, but skinny dipping was never one of them. I’m rescued by the fortuitous arrival of heaped plates of sausage, bacon, eggs, shellfish of indeterminate species, and what I initially mistake for slices of black pudding until I detect a conspicuous whiff of the seaside.

  “Why does my breakfast smell like seaweed?” I ask.

  She chuckles and cuts into a piece of her not-black-pudding. “They’re laver bread cakes. Seaweed paste mixed with oatmeal and fried in bacon fat. Feel free to pass them over if you don’t like them.”

  I’ve never been a fussy eater, and being best mates with Priti has further broadened my horizons. I shrug and take a generous bite, chewing slowly as if I’m a connoisseur of fine fried breakfasts. The taste is reminiscent of standing on a beach in a bracing wind with sea spray hitting my face, only crunchier and wrapped in a hint of bacon. Pryce certainly won’t be getting any leftovers. She nods her approval as I tuck in, and we eat in silence for a while. There’s safety to be found in a plate of good food. It’s hard to conduct official business when you’re cramming bacon, cockles, and sausage onto your fork.

  “My dad used to make these for Friday supper,” Pryce says, dipping her cake in egg yolk. “He split with my mam when I was seven, and I’d stay with him every other weekend. Laver bread cakes on the griddle were his way of showing an effort before he went out to the club for the night.”

  I stop eating and look at her, but she’s preoccupied cutting the rind from her bacon, and she doesn’t seem to be angling for sympathy.

  “Does he still live local?” I ask.

  She slices through the last of the fat and arranges the bacon on a piece of toast. “He’s in Rhyl, about half a mile from my mam. She remarried and decided she liked her new kids better, and he phones me when he’s run out of fags.”

  “Oh.” I’m about to put down my fork when she shrugs and bites into her butty. My lazy profiling had assigned her a traditional middle-class upbringing, not this mess of indifferent, chain-smoking, club-dwelling parents.

  “Did you speak to your brother?” she asks, reminding me that my family is nothing to shout about either.

  “Aye, he phoned yesterday. His wife broke her leg, so he’s stuck minding three children and a farm. Reading between the lines, we’re not very close. And my dad lives in Tenerife.”

  She licks ketchup from her thumb and wipes her fingers on a napkin. “I suppose you’d have to be a bit of a loner to accept a long-term UC case.”

  “I suppose,” I mutter, but I don’t want her to see me as a social misfit whose life was so crap I sought another. I was settled in my flat, I had friends and a coveted role on the MCT, and I played on the footy team, none of which fits the profile of alienated malcontent. It’s more plausible that I viewed the assignment as a challenge, something I could do that might actually make a difference. I leave her to believe what she wants, though. I doubt I can sway her opinion, when she holds me responsible for Jolanta’s death.

  We finish our breakfast without speaking. I can’t think of a neutral topic to steer conversation onto, and she seems to have hammered the shutters back in place. Her eye contact falls away, and her posture stiffens. I calculate the bites of food remaining on her plate, as if the last scrap of bacon is all that prevents her from opening her rucksack and pulling out a file full of damnation.

  She’s mopping her plate with toast when a second group of hikers tromps through the door, ushered into seats by a braying gobshite decked out in the latest high-spec clobber.

  “Snowdon Horseshoe,” Pryce says, swirling her bread through a puddle of yolk. “He’ll probably end up cragfast on Crib Goch.”

  I nod, liking the sound of that, whatever it means. The volume in the small room increases exponentially, and she requests our bill from the waitress in a series of charade-like hand signals. Ignoring my protests, she pays the full amount and hauls her bag onto her lap.

  “Come for a drive with me,” she says.

  * * *

  We walk out into bright sunshine, the breeze chivvying the clouds along to leave large patches of blue sky. The sudden switch from humidity to brittle cold sets off an ache deep in the mending bones of my bad arm and plays havoc with my heat-swollen fingers. Oblivious to the grinding of my teeth, Pryce dons sungla
sses, and I follow her across to the Discovery. I clamber into the passenger seat, nosing around the cab while she stashes our bags in the boot.

  You can tell a lot about a car’s owner from its interior, and this one is no exception. Spartan and devoid of personal knickknacks, detritus, or fuzzy dice, it’s a closed book, which matches Pryce to a tee. She climbs in as I’m attempting to fasten my seat belt and guides my hand to the catch, ensuring the buckle clicks into place before she starts the engine. She puts the Disco into gear but doesn’t move off.

  “There’s Brufen in the glove box. Take a couple if it’s bothering you,” she says, watching me try to reposition my arm without drawing attention to it. What I really want to do is hold the damn thing in the air until the blood drains from my fingers.

  “It’s just the weather. It’ll settle in a minute.” My smile feels like I’ve dragged my lips through barbed wire.

  “I broke mine a few years ago. Right radius and ulna.” She checks her mirror and rejoins the main road, accelerating with care so that we don’t get bounced around. “Bloke called Taff smacked me with a fire extinguisher as I tried to arrest him.”

  “Arsehole,” I murmur, finding solidarity in our shattered bones.

  “Yes, he was.” She shrugs, her eyes fixed on the road. “I headbutted him and gave him a concussion.”

  A laugh rattles out of me before I can stop it, and the corner of her lip curls upward as she smiles.

  “He deserved it,” she says. “He was lucky my mate didn’t bean him with the extinguisher.”

  She slows for a bend, passing a lorry on a curve that forces the Disco toward the rocky verge. The violent motion raises the hairs on the back of my neck, and I lunge for the passenger armrest, mashing my sore fingers through its handle and clinging to the plastic. Tryfan is looming on the horizon, and the closer we get to it, the less air there seems to be in the car.

  “Alis?”

  I shake my head, closing my eyes tight.

  “Alis!”

  The snap of my name acts like a plunge into ice water. I look at her, my teeth chattering.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, we’re not going that far.”

  I don’t know how far “that far” is. I don’t even know which direction I was travelling in that night, but her assurance loosens my grip on the door. Another hundred yards, and she indicates right, nosing into a turning that most people would drive past without noticing. She follows a rutted track until it tapers out by a small brook, and then she nudges the car into a space between two boulders and switches off the engine. This spot seems to be an unofficial refuge rather than the start of any obvious trails, and there’s not a soul in sight.

  “That’s more like it,” Pryce murmurs, eyeing the deserted landscape with satisfaction. “We were searching for a drunk, suicidal lad a few years ago and used this as a rendezvous point. I don’t think he expected it to be so cold in late May, and it sobered him somewhat. When we found him, he was trying to light a pile of wet leaves by whacking two pieces of slate together.”

  “Yeah? How did that work out for him?” I keep my tone jovial, because it’s the only thing that stops me from shaking her and yelling “Why the fuck have you brought me here?”

  “Minor lacs to his fingers, and hypothermia,” she says, but instead of elaborating, she lets the anecdote die a sudden death and pulls a folded piece of paper from her pocket. She rests it on her knee, still folded. I can see printed type: random letters and the odd number, but nothing I can properly decipher. She toys with it for a few seconds, turning it and straightening it again. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was nervous.

  “I worked overtime yesterday,” she says, her fingers still busy with their adjusting. “The CPS have been pushing us hard on a nightclub stabbing, and I’d arranged a second interview with the vic’s best friend.” She pauses and frowns as if unsure why she’s telling me this. She’s not usually a scene setter, tending to favour the direct approach. “Anyway, I was on my own in the office, so they put the call through to me.”

  A bird lands on one of the boulders. I watch it preen and open its beak in a song that’s buried beneath my tinnitus.

  “Pryce?” I say once it becomes apparent that her pause is more of a full stop. “What the hell is going on? What call?”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to be all cloak and dagger, I just…” She shakes her head and rips a little chunk off the paper. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

  I set my hand on hers, leaving it there until the movement of her fingers ceases, and then withdrawing. “I’m pretty sure we’re on our own,” I say quietly. “And that bird’s not for telling. So what was the call?”

  She looks straight at me, daring me to blink. “Two possible witnesses. A woman and her husband who saw your car that night.”

  “Oh.” I manage to form the sound while my battered brain screams profanities. “And?”

  She hands me the paper, but I can’t focus well enough to read it, so she paraphrases. “They remember your car passing at speed, approximately half a mile from the scene of the crash. You drew their attention because it was pouring down and foggy and you were going far too fast.”

  I nod, starting to relax slightly. The witnesses have only confirmed what she suspected.

  “There was something else,” she continues. “The woman described a second vehicle, a dark-coloured SUV, possibly an Audi, almost sitting on your rear bumper. She thought you were racing each other. You were swerving all over the road.”

  If practicality allowed, I’d have knotted myself into a foetal position right here on the passenger seat, my legs up by the time she said “second vehicle” and gently rocking before she got to “bumper.” As it is, I stare at the sheet of paper, picking out the words most likely to drop me in the crap: “SUV,” “racing,” “swerving.”

  “Wh—why did it take them so long to come forward?” I ask, stalling for time. I don’t have the faintest idea how to play this, and every option I claw at threatens to unleash the mother of all shitstorms.

  “They have a caravan in Capel Curig. They were on their way home that night and only saw the witness appeal sign when they drove up again yesterday.” She rests her hands in her lap: okay, your turn.

  I mimic her position, covering the paper and concealing its text. “Did they get a reg?” I ask, with remarkable calm.

  “The plate might have started with a J, but the woman wasn’t certain.” Pryce slides the sheet from my grip and refolds it. “Any of this ringing a bell?”

  “No. None of it.”

  This earns a sceptical arc of her eyebrow. “None of it?”

  “No,” I repeat with more emphasis. “He sounds like a typical arsehole Audi driver. I mean, there was no impact debris on the road, so it’s not like he ran us off it. At that speed, the car they saw might not even have been ours.” I’m sweating beneath my shirt, cold beads of it slithering down my back to gather by the elastic of my knickers. I’m getting this all wrong. I should be keen to pass on the blame to a third party, relieved to learn that someone else might have caused the crash, and I can practically hear the cogs whirring as she processes my reaction. Condensation is steaming the windscreen, obscuring the view and hemming us in. Nothing happens when I flick the switch for the window, so I open the door and kick it wide.

  “Alis?”

  I bolt like a starter from the blocks, lurching toward the brook as if I might find some kind of haven on its opposite bank, but she grabs my arm before I can get my toes wet, and I can’t shake her off. I’m not even sure that I want to.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” she says. “It’s all right. I haven’t told anyone.”

  I stop struggling and bend forward, my hands on my knees, cold air burning my lungs. “There’s nothing to tell,” I gasp between frigid breaths. “I don’t know anything.”

  “I can help you.” There’s an odd strain to her voice, not quite a plea but close. If this is an act, she’ll be shortlisted co
me Oscar night. “But you have to trust me.”

  That word again, dangled just out of reach like a carrot on a stick. Instinct bellows at me to grab the opportunity with both hands, reminding me that I do need help, that I need someone like Pryce with her insider access and her integrity.

  “I can’t remember,” I whisper. I can’t drag her into this, down with this. “I can’t remember what happened.”

  She takes my hand and slowly encourages me to stand upright. “Come over here,” she says and leads me across to a low rock. We sit facing the amphitheatre formed by Tryfan, a wide expanse of scrub and scree dotted with weather-beaten trees and snowdrifts. The brook and the birds provide the orchestra, their combined melody rising and falling with the breeze.

  “Shall I tell you what I think?” she asks. She’s released my hand, but the rock is small, and we’re sitting shoulder to shoulder. “I think you’re scared,” she says into the silence of my non-answer. “I don’t think you know exactly what went on that night, but you know more than you’ve told me, and you’re scared to death of whatever you’re hiding.”

  Like me, she’s looking directly ahead, not seeking a reaction, simply laying out the facts as she understands them. It’s comforting, somehow, to hear her assemble the jigsaw puzzle.

  “Maybe I’m one of the bad guys,” I whisper, barely managing to voice a fear that still chews away at me in my darkest moments. I hang my head, ashamed by the mere possibility. I don’t feel like a bad person, I really don’t, but I was working on my own for months, and I have a hefty mortgage to pay. If someone had named a price, would I have been tempted?