Sunday 5th April 2009 – 1.10 p.m.
With no news from London, and the atmosphere in Heron House as cold as winter, Jason made his way down to the pub, not so much for the chips there – he wasn’t that hungry – but for company. With his still-damp jacket collar up against the drizzle, he kept glancing around. Glancing everywhere, in fact. Listening for the sound of oncoming wheels, and all the while harking back to that dark, shape-shifting kitchen. That nightmare...
A red kite hovered overhead, wings stroking the sky until the time was right to pounce on its prey. He wished his own life was that simple. He’d come here to write, for God’s sake. To hit the big time, and now look. All that had been a con. Sucker was his middle name. In every sense.
He’d be asking Monty Flynn for a refund the moment he got back. And then what? Buy his ticket to Hounslow? To needy Colin? The thought of it made him quicken towards the sloping car park hosting a 4X4 he immediately recognised, and three cars he didn’t. At least Gwilym Price would speak to him. Judy Withers too, if she was there.
He pushed open the pub door to the smell of dogs, dinner, and Radio 2 bringing news of more troops being sent from the UK to Helmand Province. For a few seconds, with Archie Tait’s face clear in his mind, he imagined himself tooled up in army fatigues, climbing into a crowded chopper, lifting off into the blue. Into danger.
At least being of some use.
The farmer’s distinctive black hat perched on a nearby coat rack, but neither the friendly blonde licensee nor her partner seemed to be around. Instead, a guy whom Jason guessed was in his sixties, and a probable parent of one of them, was chatting from behind the bar to a well-dressed couple with home counties accents. The words ‘estate agents’ reached his ears.
As for Gwilym Price, no sign either, until he stepped out of the Gents with a distracted look on his face.
“Mr Price. Hi, there. What can I get you?” Jason moved to make an order.
“Not stopping, diolch,” said the farmer, whose head, Jason noticed, was completely bald save for a few strands of dry grey hair. “Too much goin’ on, see. In me mind and everywhere.”
“Can I help at all? I mean, I’m just stuck up there at the asylum waiting for news.”
The older man hesitated, lifted his hat off the stand and crammed it down on his head. “I can tell you now I’ve got to know you. I want to live to see that bastard Llyr Davies behind bars. Carol wouldn’t have died the way she did if he’d not…” he halted, swiping his coat sleeve across his watering eyes. “When he’s finally banged up, mind, I’ll visit him every day to remind him what rape can do to a woman of any age.”
So it hadn’t been cancer.
Jason wondered if this was the earlier ‘form’ DC Prydderch and Jane Harris had mentioned? All thoughts of a possible lunch and a drink or two vanished and, as the bulletin on troop deployment ended, he realised there were enough wars here at home. Less public, but still devastating for those affected.
Outside again, in that deathly still afternoon. Nothing much was visible through the soft rain, except the widower’s grief, but beneath it, Jason sensed a toughness hard as those rocks dynamited from the mine shafts, now strewn about Cerrigmwyn Hill. “My light went out when she had her stroke,” the man continued. “One minute she was there, getting the tea, the next...” He looked hard at Jason. “And to think she’d helped Gwenno Davies give birth to it. Some gratitude, that.”
“Quite.”
“Like I’ve told you, she’d been up there with the milk van when she heard the din. Being Carol, she didn’t think twice about offering assistance, but that Idris pushed her away. Let slip his sister could manage labour on her own.”
“Sister? You sure?”
“That I am.”
Now he’s said it.
“Was it his child? Pretty sick if so.”
“Who knows? But folk talk. That Pitt-Rose monster had dropped dead the month before. There is a likeness with him, mind. Specially that mouth. The round shape of his eyes. Never told the police, did Carol. Frightened she was. But not me. Only when it was too late, mind. Still, she’d described her attacker down to every last detail, and I passed that on. Why my Bob got done on Wednesday. And other stuff off and on ever since she died.”
“I want him caught too. His overturned Transit van was found in the early hours on the M4, but at least Helen’s safe. She’d managed to leave a Tesco receipt with her name on in the cab to prove she’d been there earlier, then given him the slip before getting a taxi into London.”
The faintest smile crept across those damaged lips. “I told you she had an old head on young shoulders. But there’s something else.” Gwilym Price opened his Nissan’s passenger door and gestured for Jason to get in. “I heard through the grape-vine that human blood’s been found on one of Betsan’s smashed ornaments. Not hers, that’s for sure. It’s being checked with a saliva sample found on some half-eaten sweet on the driver’s side of his van.” He turned to Jason, his eyes on fire. “I keep asking myself how come that waster’s still drawing breath?” He banged his bare fist on the steering wheel. “There is no justice.”
He revved too hard and the vehicle, still in first gear, lurched forwards. Jason’s knees slammed into the glove box and the wooden crates in the boot piled up in a heap. For a moment he wished he’d stayed in the pub.
“Sorry. You alright?” the farmer turned towards him.
“Yep.” But he wasn’t. That hurt. Here was the last place for his Woolies’ knee pads to have come in handy.
“Those samples are also being tested in connection with a rape up near Abergwesyn few years back. A schoolgirl she was then. Walking home after a netball match.”
“Five years ago,” said Jason.
“How did you know?”
“The Fuzz mentioned him having form.”
“I’ll be taking his balls off if I get half a chance. I’ve still got the right gear from when I kept the pigs.”
They reached Gwilym’s new aluminium gate and perfectly stretched wire fencing, however, the farmer didn’t move. As if Cysgod y Deri’s plain square farmhouse, with its six plain windows, the swept yard and surrounding neat barns, weren’t enough of a draw. “I’m off back to my schooldays now,” he said suddenly, ignoring a fleet of rooks cruising by overhead. “Not that I went to school much. Nice man mind, the headmaster, Mr Hargreaves, but learning from books wasn’t for me. Anyway, there was my mam. I had to help her out.” He glanced upwards to where Golwg y Mwyn’s one chimney was just visible. “I remember Betsan telling me about this quiz he’d organised. Spur of the moment thing it was, on Heron House mainly, though he tried disguising it. Just after one of his pupils suddenly collapsed and died in front of him. Walter Jones it was. Funny business that. Saw something he shouldn’t have, was the gossip.”
Jason recalled the boy’s sad memorial in the churchyard. The pine cones’ remains.
“Helen and I saw his grave yesterday.”
“Well, not long afterwards, Mr Hargreaves disappeared,” Gwilym continued.
“You mean walked out?”
“No, I don’t.”
The way he denied the question made Jason release his seat belt and pull his jacket closer around his body.
“I’d met him up by Heron House. Shown him where to see the heronries. That’s what he wanted, but did I believe him? No. During the lunch hour it was, so he didn’t have long to spare. I had to get home, but overheard that bastard of a judge having a real go at him for trespassing.”
As Jason took in the rest of the story, and young Walter Jones’ sudden death a few days before, he realised how big a part the house and its mysterious occupants seemed to have played in the lives of those outside its dank dark walls.
“Although Betsan won the prize, she wasn’t happy answering his questions, but back then, ten pounds was ten pounds with no other money coming in.” The farmer turned to him. “Poor dab.”
“I did notice a quiz certificate on the mantelpiece, signed by a Mr Hargreaves,” Jason said. “Dated Wednesday October 8th 1946.”
“That’s the one. She was never the same afterwards.”
Just then, a muddy red Post Brehninol van arrived and, parked up behind him. A fat guy wearing a baseball cap the wrong way round, squeezed himself and his bag out into the open, waddled over to pass Gwilym his mail.
“Late enough, as usual,” remarked the farmer. “Before you were born, my Carol used to deliver this lot on her horse. Up hill and down dale, it was. But still the post always arrived before eleven o’clock.”
The man waddled off without a word while Gwilym left the assorted envelopes he’d been given unopened on top of the dash. One, Jason noticed, was from the police in Llandovery.
“About Betsan,” he nudged him. “What happened next?”
“Never went back to school, that was for sure. In fact, she rarely left home till she attended College near Swansea. Her mam died shortly after that and left her enough to get Golwg y Mwyn done up.”
“So her mother didn’t walk out?”
“Who said that?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Meanwhile, those old eyes that had battled against too much rain and wind, glazed over again. “And then there was my uncle Robert. Gave my da’s brother too much grief, he did. His own mam, too. Sticking to his principles like that.”
“Just a minute,” Jason still dwelling on the dead woman’s past. “To win that kind of prize, she must have known quite a bit. Stuff that this Mr Hargreaves had to find out, perhaps?”
“She did. But try getting her to say. All she ever admitted was that she and Gwenno had been friendly.”
“But Helen said they fell out.”
A nod. “And,” the man who’d probably heard of more goings on in this quiet backwater than if he’d lived in Tower Hamlets, finally unclicked his seat belt. “She got too scared of the judge to keep going there, see. He’d interfered with her and the others. Know what I mean? A twelve-year-old.”
“Did her mother know?”
“Never. If she had, she’d have gone over and killed them with her bare hands.”
Silence. The drizzly mist still concealing everything over roof height. Not a living creature to be seen.
“Did Betsan ever mention anyone called Margiad?”
“Just the once, and once was enough. Sodom and Gomorrah was Heron House, and I’d like to think that if Robert had lived longer, he’d have used that conscience of his to land those criminals in jail and have the place burnt down. And don’t tell me those Davieses didn’t have a part to play. But no proof, see?”
“Who was she?”
That silence around them seemed to deepen.
“Charles’ older sister. Daughter of the house.”
So Margiad had spoken the truth…
Jason sucked in his breath. The mystery was, piece by piece, beginning to make sense, and he decided it was now time to share his news of the exile’s death and how the loathed Llyr Davies might well have rights to a small fortune.
***
“You’d think such a small community as this would be in the know,” Jason said once Gwilym had recovered his composure. “Especially back then.”
“Don’t you believe it. But there was Peris Morgan – bit of a one-off, mind – built like a brick shit-house if you get my meaning, who tried dragging the law up here to sort things out. But guess what?” That angry face turned to Jason while its owner’s hand felt for his door handle. “We’re talking untouchable. He ended up being shot.”
Holed up with this relative stranger from that misty, wet world outside, Jason felt the whole of his dead-end life welling inside his body – an empty vessel filling and filling until no space remained. Until it spilled over. First the ghostly phone calls, the odd happenings not only in his room, and then the sex in that kitchen.
“Yesterday evening, at Heron House, something truly sick and weird happened to me,” he began in barely a whisper and, when the rush of words had ended, felt the farmer’s arms inside their waxed sleeves, smother him in a prolonged hug. A shared foreboding and despair.