Disturbing Ground (17 page)

She sat outside Esther’s house, staring down at the valley which still seemed stained with coal dust, dull black, dirty grey. She fiddled with her mobile phone, tempted. She could do with talking to a friend. Someone balanced, someone sympathetic. But it was not fair to burden Alun with her doubts. He had his own life to lead, a wife, a child, soon to be joined by another baby. For her to keep contacting him would do him harm.

The police had dismissed the cases years ago after full investigation. Alun wasn’t interested. And why should he be? It was history.

She began the slow, wet crawl up the valley towards home, hemmed in by cars. And yet something was still stopping her from entirely abandoning her ruminations. To distract herself she switched the car radio on, listened to the jaunty ramblings of the two presenters on Red Dragon radio and moved at fifteen miles an hour. Until she reached a grey-stone detached house halfway between the upper part of the village and the lower group of houses. A place where the slag heap had been flattened to provide a rugby pitch, a few swings, a roundabout and this one house with a pristine, pocket handkerchief front garden, windows polished like jet and perfect white paintwork. On impulse she pulled to a halt.

She found the front door unlocked, caught no response to her call and walked in. Barbara Watkins was a woman whom many called on unannounced. She was always waiting for - expecting - someone.

A retired headmistress who had once taught Megan,
she had lived in these valleys all her life apart from a brief spell at university learning her trade and a year or two working in North Wales under the shadow of Cader Idris. Rumour had it that her one solitary love affair had ended in a fall from the heights of the mountain about which so much folklore had originated. Tales of madness and poetry, of violent death and disappearance, insubstantial legend, hints of mists and druids, bards and poets. Maybe that great mountain was influencing her still - even from afar. She had an uncanny knack for sensing the truth, a reputation, in spite of her prosaic profession, of being fey.

The hall was narrow and dark, fussy with bits of polished brass and a pair of ancient portraits foxed with damp. Megan announced herself as she entered. It was the custom here, to shout out and prevent Barbara from being surprised.

She appeared in the kitchen door, a tall, angular figure with short, well cut straight grey hair and piercing blue eyes, wiping her hands on a cotton apron, her face breaking into smiles when she saw who it was. “Megan. What a surprise.” She laughed, holding out her hands. “I’m not ill, am I?”

Megan laughed with her. “No. No you’re not ill. And I do wish people would stop making that assumption whenever they see me unexpectedly. I wanted to ask your advice. Well - your opinion, really.”

“Well - you can have my advice and my opinion,” Barbara said tartly, “but you’ll have to come into the kitchen or my Welsh cakes’ll burn. Nothing’s free in this life, Megan.”

Megan followed her through, already salivating at the scent of the fresh Welsh cakes and relishing the anticipation of her one time headmistress’ penetrative wit. She sat at the end of the scrubbed pine kitchen table, stuffing one
of the Welsh cakes into her mouth and watching while Barbara deftly flipped fresh ones over on the griddle. When she’d finished and a pile was cooling on a wire tray she made them both a cup of tea and sat opposite Megan.

“For the chapel,” she explained. “We have a fête on Saturday to raise enough money to extend our churchyard. So many people are dying.” She shot Megan a steely glance, poured them both a second cup of tea and cleared her throat.

It gave Megan a starting point. “In a way,” she said, “that’s why I’m here.”

“Oh? Not about to make a dreadful confession, are you?”

Megan laughed. “No.”

“Good - you haven’t been killing off your patients?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Thank goodness for that. So?”

“Would you say that Llancloudy has a high crime rate?”

Barbara gave a deep sigh. “Yes - juvenile crime, petty vandalism, car crime. Yes, I would.”

“People disappearing?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“But quite a few people have vanished from here.”

“Go on.”

“Bleddyn Hughes?” Megan watched closely for Barbara’s reaction. “Do you remember him? As far as I know he was the first. He vanished thirty years ago. In 1971. A teacher.”

Barbara appeared to relax. She poured another cup of tea for them both. “Oh, I do remember Bleddyn. Funny bloke. I always knew there was something different about him even when he first came to Llancloudy. A maths teacher who offers to coach the boys in rugby. Put in a lot
of time after school hours if I remember rightly. I had a sneaking feeling that he wasn’t a hundred per cent bona fide. But then it wasn’t my place to point a finger. And you’ve got to remember, Megan, the climate was different then, thirty years ago. People weren’t so aware of things like child abuse. But his wasn’t a disappearance. There was nothing odd about it.”

“He vanished, didn’t he? So what did you think had happened to him?”

“He was hounded out of the valley. No doubt about it. He just went somewhere else.”

“But his money, his passport, his clothes? I’ve read the newspaper articles. He took nothing. Only the clothes he was wearing when he went.”

“I still don’t think anything happened to him. I really do think he just left. Things were gettin’ really difficult. When he started work in the school we had our suspicions but the rumours just grew and grew and a couple of the parents were starting to make complaints. Someone was bound to listen in the end. And he would have known it.”

“So you think he really did go away somewhere, maybe to London or a place where the climate was a little more tolerant and he would be anonymous?”

The retired teacher nodded.

“Leaving everything behind him?”

“He was panicked into it. There was a meeting of the Parent Teachers Association on the Friday. He left over the weekend. How much more evidence do you want?”

Thirty years ago Barbara Watkins had made up her mind. And no finger pointing by a middle-aged schizophrenic was going to change that very certain opinion. Megan breathed in the scent of hot Welsh cakes and began again. “OK. So what about Rhiann Lewis?”

Immediately Barbara’s expression changed to show
sympathy, grief, pity. “Oh, that was different. Terrible for the family. Lovely little thing she was. Great mop of dark curls. She would have been pretty when she’d grown up.”

“I know the story,” Megan said. “I’ve read all about it in the papers. Seen the pictures too. She was a beautiful child. So what do you think happened to her?”

Barbara ignored the hint of irony in her voice. “Someone else thought she was beautiful too,” she said softly. “Someone took her away. I doubt even that she’s dead. Some couple who wanted a child of their own took her. She was only three. Broke the family’s heart. But I don’t believe she’s dead.”

“And Marie Walker?”

The retired teacher narrowed her eyes. “She was the little ten-year-old, wasn’t she? Went missing sometime in the late eighties? Buying chips. Saucy little thing. I always thought she was murdered. Assaulted and her body hidden somewhere. A couple of years after a man was arrested exposing himself right outside the same chip shop, Valley Chippie. They tried to make him confess but he said he didn’t know anything about her. Completely denied it. No one believed him, of course.” Her eyes were directly focused on her. “We knew, Megan. Knew as though we’d been there ourselves and witnessed it.”

“And the man?”

“Left the valleys. I heard he had a motorbike crash and was badly hurt some years after. Poetic justice.” There was more than a hint of chapel hardness in her face. “Don’t know anything more. Except he never did confess.”

“So what about the two boys who vanished together? Not so long ago.”

“What was it? Five or six years?”

“Eight.”

“George Prees and Neil Jones. I remember their names. Little monsters they were according to their teachers. I was glad, in a way, that they were never my problem because believe you me, Megan, they would have been a problem - all their lives. Perhaps it’s being a teacher all my life, having no family but watching what people make of themselves. Makes us cynical. We can recognise a rotten apple in the barrel early on.”

It was true. Barbara had a hearty scepticism when assessing children’s characters and potential. And again she had a rational explanation for the disappearance of the two boys.

“They hitched a lift out of the valley and disappeared - like many other truants, probably in London or Brighton or one of the other places the homeless gravitate to. Or maybe they just fell down a mine shaft.”

“So why weren’t their bodies discovered?”

“Haven’t you got any idea what’s down there, Megan? It’s like a city. The catacombs of Rome aren’t more intricate than the tunnels beneath these valleys. We were sitting on coal. Tons and tons of it. Like an ocean beneath our feet. And there’s still plenty there. It’s just that nobody wants to dig it up any more. Old-fashioned, coal is. Like these poor little valleys. Sold our souls to the Japanese and their light industry. Anything from badges to microchips. But that isn’t what’s at the heart of these places. Megan. Those boys could have fallen down a shaft and no one would ever be the wiser no matter however hard they looked. They could have wandered in, got lost down there. The tunnels go for miles. One day they’ll be found. Together like they always were, either in a city or under our feet. Always in trouble that pair. Tell them not to do something and it was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. They were the most rebellious kids I’ve ever
known in my entire teaching career. And I’ve known some Che Guevaras and Pol Pots in my time, I can tell you. I was glad they never got to the comp.”

Megan sat still, uncomfortable with Barbara’s words as well as with her underlying attitude. She was so judgmental, so unpitying, so unsympathetic. But she had been a witness to all the disappearances - an impartial observer who had known at least one of the victims well. She was undoubtedly sane and rational - unlike Bianca Rhys.

Her version of events must be the right one.

Poor Bianca had looked at the cases and threaded them together with explanations so bizarre no one had taken any notice. Even ringing the police with her suggestions of “flying saucers” and trolls had been understandably treated as a very good joke.

It was more rational for her to agree with Barbara.

The only other person who had listened to Bianca’s strange wanderings had been Smithson.

She looked up as Barbara poured her a second cup of tea. “So what do you think happened to Bianca?”

“She fell in the pool.” It was the simple answer.

A message was flashing on her phone to visit Triagwn. And so she turned right out of Barbara’s house, away from her own place and back towards the point where the roundabout crosses the M4. Turn right for Swansea, left for Cardiff, Newport and England. Megan drove went straight over then took the narrow lane, first right after the roundabout.

She pulled up right outside the front door of Triagwn House and sat in her car for a moment, watching the cherub spout his stream into the pool below. A few drops bounced into the water, rippling its glassy surface. She climbed out of her car, slamming the door behind her and
thought of the little girl who had fallen in, too terrified to save herself. It had all been so unnecessary. The pool could have been no more than a couple of feet deep. If the child had stood up her head would have been well above water.
And
years
later
the
same
event
had
happened
in
the
Slaggy
Pool.

If Bianca had stood up … she had a brief vision of Alun’s trousers, wet to the knees and corrected herself. If Bianca had been able to stand up.

What
if
she
couldn’t.
What
if
she
had
been
already
dead?

The sun escaped for a brief moment from behind the thick cumuli and framed Triagwn in a rainbow arch giving it a sudden, surreal beauty. Megan was reminded of a quote she had read by Herman Melville.
“Who
in
the
rain
bow
can
draw
the
line
where
the
violet
tint
ends
and
the
orange
tint
begins?
Distinctly
we
see
the
difference
of
the
color,
but
where
exactly
does
the
first
one
visibly
enter
into
the
other?
So
with
sanity
and
insanity.
In
pronounced
cases
there
is
no
ques
tion
about
them.
But
in
some
cases
in
various
degrees
supposed
ly
less
pronounced,
to
draw
the
line
of
demarkation
few
will
undertake
.”

But there was no doubting Bianca’s insanity. Only now was she appreciating the deep and chilling truth expressed by Herman Melville more than a hundred years ago. In sudden frustration she splashed some water. Droplets sprayed up, caught and captured the sunshine but the cherub’s face itself was thrown into deep, sullen shadow. Not a chuckling angel but a wicked and malicious little faun.

She glanced up, hoping to see Smithson’s face watching from the window. She was, in a way, fond of the old man and the sedatives were surely wearing off by now. There would be a return of the puckish, sharp wit.