Sunday 5th April 2009 – 4 p.m.
Jason jumped down from the Nissan still dwelling on Helen’s shock at his stop-start account of Gwenno Davies and the equally expert Margiad. He had to grab the nearest fence post for support as yet another bout of dizziness cocooned him. He wished to God he’d kept quiet about the whole sordid episode, but the cleaner was a loose canon. Better his version of events reached Helen’s ears first. But would she ever trust him again?
“You’ll have a cup of tea?” suggested Gwilym Price who’d recovered his rifle and a battered copy of Farmers’ Weekly.
“Brilliant. Thanks.” Yet he walked towards that immaculate new gate as if his confession and Helen’s bombshell about Monty Flynn and his writers’ courses still weighed him down. The lying git. He’d be getting a refund the moment the Irishman stepped over Heron House’s doorstep.
Gwilym Price unlocked the farm gate’s padlock and pulled it open, but Jason held him back. “Please,” he urged. “What I’ve just told you was just between us, OK? I don’t want the ‘pervert’ word on my CV.”
The other man’s mouth stretched into a smile as he indicated the two tall chimneys poking through the distant foliage. “It’s not you who’s perverted. Remember that.”
Once inside the farmhouse, he carried a spare chair into the spotless kitchen. A space devoid of any woman’s touch, observed Jason, warming his butt against the old cream-coloured Aga. He noticed an empty dog basket and the pine Welsh dresser opposite, laden not with fancy plates and trinkets but photos, ranging from sepia to bright colour, of an attractive woman at various stages of her life. A woman whose useful years on earth had ended with Llyr Davies.
He left the Aga’s warmth to study the pictures in close up. A typical land girl posing with a rake. Next, a postmistress astride her sturdy horse, and finally her marriage to Gwilym, ten years younger. Not that he looked it, with his brooding looks. Those serious Welsh eyes.
“Who’s that?” Jason pointed at a smaller image of an equally serious young man who’d obviously moved before the camera’s shutter had come down. His dark form had blurred; and was that St. Barnabas’ Church’s delicate bell tower lurking in the background? Something about him seemed familiar.
“That’s uncle Robert,” said the widower filling Jason’s Cymru mug and its tea bag with boiling water. “A true non-conformist, like the church who paid him.” He then passed Jason an already opened packet of chocolate digestives. “I’ve had this psychical research society wanting to pick my brains about him. Do some digging. But I told them to bugger off and leave things be.” He set down his mug, picked up his and Jason’s uneaten biscuits and returned them to the packet. “Robert often comes to me, you know. Whether I’m asleep or awake, makes no difference to him. He pulls at my arms, breathes his cold breath on my neck. Begs me to find her. His Margiad. Carol thought I was going doolally. Told me to get help. But it’s not me that needs help. It’s Robert.”
A persistent tremor passed through Jason’s body. His hands seemed sealed like ice to a rock around his mug.
“He sings that same William Williams hymn over and over like some old record: ‘O’er those gloomy hills of darkness, look my soul be still, and gaze...” Gwilym Price’s singing voice was more like a death rattle.
“Why?”
“For consolation, I suppose. He’d heard she’d gone off to London to start a new life, you know the sort of thing. Like you coming all the way here. But deep in his heart he didn’t believe a word of it. I remember him coming over one Sunday after church, just after the Headmaster had disappeared. Early November it was. 1946. I was only nine at the time, but I’d never seen a grown man cry like that. Nor since. Grieving for both of them he was. Carol had been upset too but I never probed too much.”
“What did Robert do then?” Jason glanced out at the sombre sky beyond the window. At the rickety line of trees along the brow of the hill opposite. He tried recalling that Headmaster’s name as the other man shrugged.
“We never found out. The Christmas Eve carol concert was the last time anyone heard him play the organ. Not long afterwards, Beynon ‘The Shop,’ who’d been in the congregation, recognised him trudging through the snow along the road to Llandovery. Suitcase and all. Sounds of a scuffle then, he said, but no proof, mind, except for a mess of footprints. “Good riddance, conchie,” we’d heard people say, but for us – what was left of his family – him disappearing like that was nothing but a worry. My mam tried getting the police involved, but they just shrugged their shoulders.” He looked at Jason. “Nothing’s changed, has it?”
“Nope. And Helen’s already seen his ghost twice up by the old lead workings. Including yesterday when we were together. He seemed to be waiting for something or someone. Dressed all in black.”
“Margiad, like I said. Sure to be.”
“But definitely no singing.”
“Saves that for me, then.”
Gwilym Price stood up. “Sixty-two years of unrest have passed since that Christmas. Too many of the living still draw breath who know the truth of what really happened to him and Margiad.” He regarded Jason with a question clouding his old eyes. “Are you up for helping me get to the bottom of it all?”
For a panicked moment, Jason thought about Helen. The thriller he’d planned to write. ‘Thriller’ now a faint, feeble word for another time, another life.
“OK,” Jason said.
“Whatever it takes?” The widower came over, clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Getting those freaks in the asylum to talk? And their son who shot all the herons?”
“Llyr?”
“Still in short trousers he was. All hushed up and I never found out till after Carol...” He paused to pick up his rifle and check the barrel. Jason gave it a wide berth. “We only gave Llyr work to keep him out of more trouble, but he got sent away, just like Margiad’s young brother, Charles. So Betsan says. Poor sod he was. No wonder he’s just topped himself.”
“Is that what you really think?”
“What else, given his background?”
“Did you ever see him around the place?”
“Never. Nor Betsan nor Uncle Robert.”
“If it is murder and he’d been left Heron House…”
“Answer my question,” Gwilym said.
Shit.
“You’re on,” Jason replied.
They shook hands on it, and once the determined rook-killer had locked up and accompanied him out into the thickening drizzle on to the track leading past Betsan’s taped-up bungalow, towards the old mine, Jason added his own lengthening list of unexplained occurrences. Beginning with Margiad Pitt-Rose’s invasive demands, and ending with those four portly men he’d glimpsed by the swimming pool.
***
The whine of saws and distant quad bikes accompanied them both up the hill via a different route Jason had taken with Helen, on to more boggy ground, bristling with fan-like reeds. Here, rough-woolled sheep scattered in fear. That dead ewe and lamb now all gone. He saw how that vast crescent of scrubby hillside darkened by pines, harboured nothing but dereliction.
Neither attempted to speak above the din of the forest’s machinery and when, for a moment it ceased, came the tinkling sound of water, so pure, so calming, Jason stopped to listen. He also had the oddest sensation they were being watched and that somehow, his life, so far like a rudderless boat, was being guided to shore.
“There’s something else I’ve not mentioned.” Jason broke the silence, needing this relative stranger’s take on things. “Helen told me Monty Flynn only advertised the writing course to get more company at Heron House. Scared of the Davieses apparently. So why hasn’t he left? Doesn’t make sense.”
Silence.
Puzzled, he followed Gwilym Price up on to the now familiar, sloping track, whose wet stones had become embedded in fudge-coloured pools of mud. Hard to avoid them at such a pace, as though his companion had suddenly found his second wind. A purpose.
“This where you saw him?” Gwilym asked without looking round. Still not answering that question about Monty Flynn.
“Robert?”
“Who else do I mean?” Gwilym then paused, turned his glazed eyes towards Jason. “Look, son, I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that leprechaun. No-one has the faintest why he ever came here, or why he’s hung on. As for his fellow inmates...” he lifted his rifle from his shoulder and took a pot shot at something small and black flying over a copse of straggly willows.
He missed.
“But with Charles Pitt-Rose gone, you wait. Heron House was his after his da died. Common knowledge, and when the shit hits the fan, that’s when I’ll act.”
Gwilym Price parked himself on one of a line of stones forming the entrance to the old workings and, lifting the front brim of his hat off his forehead, pointed towards the spoil heaps, blue-grey in the drizzle. “You take yourself over there by that adit you mentioned. If you spot anything unusual, just tilt your head to the right so I can see. Understood? They say the camera never lies.”
Gwilym pulled out a small digital job from inside his coat pocket and fiddled with the telescopic lens while, for the second time that day, Jason walked on, the same way he’d come with Helen, until the different levels of spoil and scree now faced him, littered with disconnected walls and random blocks of crumbling buildings. The adit’s mean, black mouth still all too visible, but this time was jammed open with a length of timber. Someone else had been here and done that. But who? Why? For a moment, fear whispered to him as he repositioned himself to face the farmer.
Click.
“Stay there,” shouted Gwilym. “Don’t move!”
One minute, then two, three, four, seemed more like a week in the perpetual soft soak of drizzle. And then, just as Jason was about to desert his post, noticed a movement alongside the derelict engine house’s nearest corner. A moving shadow solidifying inch by inch into what he realised was the young man in black. This time however, he carried an oar dripping dark weeds. Not only that, but he was proceeding towards Jason over the ravaged ground with that oar now raised to attack.
No time to obey Gwilym’s instructions. He must move. Quick.
“What’s up?” barked his companion.
“I’m not staying to find out. Come on,” Jason said.
But the farmer with his own agenda, held the digital camera steady as the oncoming figure came closer, closer. Two mouldy sockets instead of eyes. The mouth a bleached, puckered wound.
“Hurry!” yelled Jason. “For Chrissake!” Yet what was his problem? How could a mere mirage present any danger? But mirages didn’t speak. Or did they?
Yes.
“This is my place. Lle fi,” came a surprisingly strong, young man’s voice. “You and Gwilym, are you listening?” he said. “Leave it be.”
By now, the farmer had shifted from his perch, camera gone, rifle cocked, to face his accuser. “You’re guarding Margiad, is it?” Gwilym began in a non-threatening tone. “You can tell me, Robert. We were always close, weren’t we? You and your little nephew, Gwilym. Remember?”
However, the spectre remained motionless and silent; that loaded oar ready to strike. Jason’s heart seemed to stop because water – brown, muddy water – was leaking from that now gaping mouth. Next came the gurgle of bubbles that were nothing to do with the nearby stream. Then a shot. And another, coming from a different direction, further away. The forestry, Jason assumed. Rooks, pigeons, whatever.
“C’mon!” Jason yelled again, then began to run, faster than he’d done in months, stumbling, slithering away from the eerie past. The farmer could take care of himself, he reasoned. At least he was armed. He’d given him every chance to leave, and then, just as Jason finally reached Heron House’s open iron gates, saw a mud-lined, beaten-up dark blue Ford Escort parked on the drive.
Immediately, something about it felt wrong and with an ever-increasing sense of danger, he quickened his pace.