The Watchers (13 page)

He furrowed his brow. ‘The liaison officer at RAF Brawdy asked our editor to keep a lid on them.’

‘You think that will hold?’ I was surprised. Such instructions to the press were usually made with extreme restraint, though more common since the Cold War had heated up.

‘With the public meeting tomorrow?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t see how it can. There’ll be busloads of sky watchers here within days. And the history of disappearances and so on will only add more fuel to the fire.’

‘Disappearances?’ I leaned forward.

‘Yes, not just the Jacksons. Years back some fella went out watching for birds on Stack Rocks.’ He shook his head hopelessly. ‘Never found.’

‘When was this?’

‘Before my time. Way, way back. It’s an eerie place, Stack Rocks Island, with that creepy old fort. Who does it belong to, do you know?’

I processed the question in silence. It had stirred something within me, a latent fear. Of something just beneath the surface of my memory. Whatever it was, I couldn’t reach it. So instead I told him what I thought about the local sightings.

‘We’re witnessing the anxieties of the Cold War manifesting in different ways,’ I said, my theory forming as I spoke. I gestured at the photographs behind the bar. ‘Threats from the sky? Flying saucers fit very nicely with that.’

But Frobisher wasn’t interested. ‘Some think the whole area is cursed,’ he said distantly. ‘That is was used for rituals, ceremonies. That sort of thing.’

I gave him a polite but disbelieving smile.

‘And then there’s the Jacksons, last summer. Look what happened to them.’

‘Everybody keeps mentioning them. Exactly what
did
happen to them?’

Frobisher dropped his eyes. Then he told me.

*

Frobisher spoke to the landlord of the Ram Inn and ensured that the room allocated to me that evening was not only comfortable but came with a sea view – and a discount! That suited me just fine; with no job I’d be broke soon enough. I couldn’t carry on questioning the people of the Havens for ever.

As I showered and shaved I told myself that I wouldn’t be staying long, that as soon as I got back to London I would start looking for a new job. Not politics. Journalism, maybe. Still, even with that positive thought in my head, I knew sleep would be slow coming. But I needed rest. I needed to be on best form for the public meeting the next day. So involved was Randall in the sightings, he was bound to make an appearance and advance wild theories. I felt my heart racing at the thought and with an effort turned my mind to other things.

Picking up the phone next to the bed, I decided to try another, more direct route of inquiry to what was going on. I dialled the operator.

‘RAF Brawdy, please.’

‘One moment, sir.’

RAF Brawdy was a NATO base. With so much strange activity in the area, they had to have some sort of public inquiry line.

As I waited to be connected, I mentally rehearsed the questions I would put, bluntly and directly. Had anything unusual been detected on radar? Had any jets been scrambled to intercept these craft? Could supersonic flights explain the booms that were shaking people’s houses? Who knows, I might get lucky and get an answer or two.

Eventually, I was connected to a Group Captain Brian Stamper. I introduced myself and stated what I wanted to know.

‘I’m not at liberty to go into detail on this matter,’ he told me firmly.

‘But you only fly conventional aircraft from Brawdy?’ I pressed.

‘That’s correct. We do receive some visitors. But our own aircraft are the very well-known Hunter and the Meteor.’

‘But they couldn’t cause the “sky quake”?’

He paused. ‘No. And we certainly don’t have any military aircraft that could explain such a thing. In any case, it sounds nothing like a sonic boom.’

‘Then you’ve heard it too?’

Another pause. ‘Yes. I’m familiar with the noise to which you are referring.’

‘Do your aircraft carry red and blue lights?’

‘Most aircraft do.’

‘Because, you see, I’m trying to work out if local people are mistaking your aircraft for something else—’

‘It may be so. But certainly we do very little night flying.’

‘Then what do you think people are seeing?’

‘Well, I would say ninety-nine point nine per cent of sightings can be explained away as tricks of the light.’ He sounded irritated now.

‘That leaves zero point one per cent unaccounted for.’

There was a long pause. Then came a startling admission: ‘Well, I’m sure we do have some strange things in our skies, but I’m not prepared to go beyond that.’

‘You must have top line on the matter. Come on, Group Captain, I know the way this works. These reports have been incessant. You’ve even asked locals not to talk about it.’

The line went quiet for a few seconds. ‘My understanding,’ the Group Captain said slowly, ‘is that what goes on seems to be . . . paranormal. That’s all.’

The line clicked dead.

From the window I could look out across the spray and the rocks. The sun had long lost its grip on the day. The fog had lifted but now the shadows were lengthening. I surveyed the tiny hamlet, listening to the foamy rush of water and thinking that the spectre of uncertainty now hung over this village.
You see, we’ve had everything – UFOs, ghosts, strange weather . . .
My eyes travelled from the valley where the school lazed in its mystery to the skulking shape of the Haven Hotel with its tall black windows and broken battlements, out past the bobbing boats tethered in the cove, and across to the far end of St Brides Bay.

From here Stack Rocks appeared less threatening and comfortably smaller than from Ravenstone Farm. I could see the fort that crowned the peak and feel only a ripple of anxiety.

Something caught my attention. I strained to see and then opened the window, keeping my eyes on the fort. What was it? A light? Something moving?
There’s a tale that in 1884 some labourers near Ravenstone Farm were rounding up cattle when they heard a terrific whirring noise from above and looked up to see a blazing object plummeting into the sea near Stack Rocks.
I closed the window and drew the curtains.
They say the water glowed for days afterwards, that the men went blind. And mad.

I went to bed. I did not sleep well.

RASH OF UFO SIGHTINGS CONTINUES

Two policemen from the heart of the ‘Broad Haven Triangle’ agree that many people who are seeing unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are indeed spotting actual aircraft, but question whether UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships under the control of nonhuman creatures.

‘People are not hallucinating,’ said Detective Constable Hewitt from Haverfordwest. ‘It’s also clear that they’re seeing things for which standard, run-of-the-mill explanations do not suffice. But just because they see something strange in the skies does not mean that the something strange is a spaceship of extraterrestrial origin. That just doesn’t follow.’

The rash of UFO sightings began in west Wales at Christmas when a hotelier driving home late at night witnessed a glowing ball of light that pursued her car. There have been hundreds of other sightings in the area, with a group of children seeing an object on the ground close to their school, which they reported to the police.

Coastguards at St Brides Bay have also logged reports of amber-coloured lights flitting just above the water at night. The lifeboat at Little Haven has been launched to investigate lights at sea three times in as many weeks.

‘At first we thought they were distress flares,’ said Coastguard Ian Chesterton. ‘But when we checked the area there was nothing there.

– 17 –

Friday 11 February 1977, Little Haven, 9 a.m.

My second morning in the Havens.

I thought about calling the admiral in London to let him know I’d arrived but quickly abandoned the idea. He would be keen for an update on my progress, but the truth was I hadn’t learned very much about the Happenings. Suppose the admiral asked about my grandfather or why I hadn’t yet called on him at Ravenstone Farm?

And then there was the bizarre deluge of rain –
fish
– that had welcomed me back to the Havens. I didn’t want to tell anyone about that, not until I had made sense of it myself.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling freaked out. I kept thinking of the wet thudding sound the fish had made on the car roof as they dropped from the sky. That and the police officer’s peculiar warning:
Take care in the Havens.

I was standing at the start of the stone jetty reaching out into the bay known as Giant’s Point. From here I could see the beginning of the narrow path that began at the bottom of the rocky gully and ran up to the cliffs – the route the Jacksons had taken on the morning of their disappearance. Frobisher’s telling of the tale was still fresh in my mind, and I decided that I needed to see where it had happened for myself. After all, it could be connected to the sightings and everything else that was going on in the community.

Talbenny Caravan Park, where the Jacksons had last been seen, wasn’t far from here – two miles at most. I knew it well because my school bus had stopped just outside its entrance by the rickety signpost that pointed the way to Ravenstone Farm. Ms Hewison, who ran the caravan park, kept four golden retrievers, and they would bark as you walked past the hedge that separated her house from the main road. If she still kept dogs, they might have barked at the Jacksons on the morning they set off on their walk.

‘Did you know Mr and Mrs Jackson?’ I had asked Frobisher.

‘Nope. But I saw them as I was coming out of the post office. They were on the slipway looking at the fishing boats near the shore and pointing at the fort on top of the Stack Rocks.’ Then, he told me, they had set off up along the steep footpath, with fields sloping up to their left and the ocean on their right, unaware that whatever time they had left was limited.

Many hours later someone finally telephoned the police.

I stopped on the cliff path. The freezing wind lashed my face as I took in the view. Out to sea banks of clouds were building, threatening trouble.
Did they stand where I am now?
I wondered.

‘Sergeant Blakemore did his best to reassure the family that most missing people turn up without harm, eventually,’ Frobisher had continued. ‘He seemed unconcerned initially, told not them not to panic, to wait a while. He said the couple were known to go on long walks, sometimes at night. And it was quite possible they had got lost on their walk. Never mind the fact that the missing couple had been visiting these parts for ten years and knew the area well. Next morning their son rang the station demanding something be done.’

According to Frobisher, the telephone call that changed everything came four days later, at precisely three o’clock. By then there had still been no sign of the couple, but some ramblers had seen something unusual on the cliff top that day.

‘Flies, a whole swarm of them! Sergeant Blakemore demanded to know where. I saw him that morning to take a statement for my article, and his face was white. Something about the report had spooked him, that’s for sure. I asked him about it afterwards, off the record. He said it was the mention of the place.’

Immediately opposite Stack Rocks.

Frobisher said it took very little time for Sergeant Blakemore and a PC to navigate the twisting roads serving the inland area from the coast of St Brides Bay. At 15.29 their car rolled to a halt at the end of a bumpy, narrow dirt track. From here the men progressed on foot, pulled by their sniffer dogs past the farmhouse – my grandfather Randall’s house – and over the fields behind it, sloping down to the cliffs.

Ahead of them, leading to the cliff edge, was an animal run that might have been made by foxes or badgers. Cutting through the tangled branches and ferns, Sergeant Blakemore advanced cautiously. Then he stopped, sniffed the air, listened to the waves slapping against the rocks. Below him the cliff plummeted to a sparkling ocean. Unlike the PC, Sergeant Blakemore was well acquainted with the smell of death. And he smelt it then: a pungent bouquet, sickening, drawing him towards a thick cluster of bushes and hazel trees some twenty yards away.

Slowly Sergeant Blakemore advanced. ‘He had to beat his own path through the long grass,’ Frobisher told me. ‘Do you know what he found, Rob?’

I shook my head.

‘Broken saplings jammed into the ground, woven together with overhanging branches.’

That sounded like a hide to me: a man-made screen. I had learned about the technique at one of Bestford’s committee sessions. Sticks were placed so bent-over branches and ferns that still had roots would continue to grow and screen whatever was beneath them.

At the Ram Inn Frobisher had nodded, finished his pint. ‘That’s exactly what it was. They pulled the screen aside and both men went jelly-legged at what they saw. Blakemore said PC Wheal threw up.’ Mr Jackson had been ripped apart by three shotgun blasts, each fired at point-blank range. The first had completely taken off his right leg; the second, which had come from behind, had exploded through his chest, sending chunks of his right lung far into the long grass. But the final shot was the one that did for him, blowing away the central part of his head and brain.

‘And his wife?

‘Face down in the dirt, hands tied. Fucking mess, Rob, I’ll tell you. Blakemore let me see the pictures. Her hair mottled with blood, the side of her face and head completely opened up; just a jagged bony hole with lumps of brain spilling out. Blood fucking everywhere. It had spread out in a dark pool that had hardened, like a big black plate. The worse thing was her husband’s eyes . . . Animals must have got to them – rats, birds, maggots? I don’t know . . . Whoever did it had fired from a distance of inches, certainly no more than a few feet,’ Frobisher added.

‘But who would do such a thing?’

‘It’s baffling. No obvious motive. They seem to have been picked at random. Police knocked on doors, tried to trace people they had met. Even checked the church visitor books. Didn’t find a thing.’

‘Then someone was waiting for them up there? A robbery perhaps?’

‘Nope, nothing stolen. Their camera was still in their rucksack. Some candles too.’

Not necessarily an odd thing to find, except it turned out that the candles were black and foul smelling. But Frobisher just shrugged that off. ‘They used to go walking a lot at night.’

‘Then they’d have used a torch, surely? Not candles.’

‘Beats me. Blakemore too. Anyway, keep all this to yourself, but he’s had some bloody strange reports these last few weeks: frogmen sighted just off the coast during the day and at night. The local diving club say it’s nothing to do with them. Seems a strange coincidence.’ The reporter had shrugged. ‘Might be related, I suppose, might be nothing.’

*

I thought about this conversation as I took the path back into the village. It was freezing this close to the Atlantic. I thought about the Jacksons’ son, Steve, who had apparently spent weeks searching for clues, combing through foxgloves and late bluebells on the cliffs, beating bushes and wandering the fields around the abandoned airfield at Talbenny, just inland from where his parents’ bodies were discovered. I knew that area well. I had played there as a child, when my soft hands were fond of uncovering secret hideaways in hedgerows and earthen banks thrown up long ago. Frobisher thought it likely the killer knew the area – that in all likelihood the leafy hedgerows would conceal him.

I rounded the corner by the post office and stopped. The Haven Hotel sat perched on the cliffs watching over the ocean. Huge and rambling. The sight of it made my mind jump from one bad memory to another. I walked on. I understood now, as I made my way to the school for the public meeting, why Frobisher had described the Havens as haunted. Who was responsible for the Jacksons’ murder? An outsider? A local? Was it related to the lights in the sky? Although the killer might have vanished, the stain he had left behind in the Havens never would.

Yet even this was not the most disturbing aspect of the whole thing.

That was to come.