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, not 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 halfhearted, 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...