CHAPTER TWO

1.

The oncoming headlights came up the hill above Castlebay, and as they swung round the corner they held the white Jaguar parked on the side of the road, so that for a moment two faces glimmered white, close together under the drophead. Then the headlights swept over the Jag and tunnelled their way again through the blackness of overhanging trees, up towards Penybryn, where the river twists down towards the estuary.

‘That was Dr. Griffiths’ car,’ Dick Merrill said. He drew his mouth away from hers, his teeth glistening in the Jag’s claustrophobic darkness.

She made no comment. She said she would like a cigarette, and he lit one for her. He lit one for himself, and she let her head fall against his shoulder, while he cupped his hand round her breast.

He heard the rumble of thunder somewhere in the distance, and felt her start as a flicker of lightning sped across the dark sky. He turned and she pressed herself to him, while his other hand moved along her thigh. He caught the mutter of thunder again. This time it sounded nearer, so that he drew his head away to listen to its dying echoes.

‘What’s the matter?’

He told her it sounded like a storm blowing up.

‘I didn’t notice,’ she said, her voice mocking him, and she pulled his face down to hers again.

He was thinking the evening had been oppressive and he had felt a slight headache coming on, the way his head did ache sometimes when there was thunder about; at least it did lately, the past few months. Then he thought he heard the splash of rain on the hood, and she said, her mouth against his, so that he could feel her teeth smooth and the edges sharp: ‘You’re not concentrating.’

‘I think it’s going to rain.’ He didn’t take his mouth away.

She used the four-letter word she often used, and which always shocked him a little, and drew back from him. She gave him the stub of her cigarette which she had been holding and he threw it into the road, and it arched through the darkness and fell on the bank, a few feet above which the woods ran up the hillside.

From the corner of his eye he knew she was watching him as he took a drag from his own cigarette stub. He exhaled slowly so that the smoke clung on the close air about them, then he aimed his stub into the road.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘You, darling,’ she said, ‘worrying about the rain when you’ve got your hand up my skirt.’

He turned to her quickly, staring into the eyes which blinked up at him; he could feel his heart racing as he watched the soft moistness of her mouth and the planes of her face dusky white in the glimmer from the dashlights.

‘You didn’t hear it that time,’ she said. He looked at her questioningly. ‘The thunder,’ she said.

‘I was thinking of something else.’

She kissed him and clung to him, forcing her body against his. She had on only a thin sweater and tight skirt, which was pushed up to her thighs as she held him, her fingers digging into his back; his sports-jacket was open and her hands reached under it beneath his shoulder blades.

‘Now…now…,’ she was saying; and it was always this way with her, this devouring urgency. He paused for a moment, while she hung on to him and he reached into the car and took the ignition key out of the dash.

She was smiling at him, her eyes brilliant; and he heard the thunder now, and almost immediately afterwards the trees and the road sprang into blue flickering light. ‘You think of everything, don’t you, darling?’ she said.

He saw that her face was a ghastly pallor in the lightning flash, but her eyes were closed against the sudden brilliance. She did not see the expression on his face as he caught what she said. Then his face was in darkness, and he was thrusting the ignition key into his pocket and helping her up the bank, stumbling into the blackness of the trees, until they reached the patch of grass and they knelt down, locked in each other’s arms, and there they lay together.

The rain fell out of a starlit sky on to the two shadows. She smiled up at him deliberately, her face wet.

‘We’ll get soaked, darling,’ he said.

‘Don’t stop…’

2.

Philip Vane and Dr. Griffiths left the Ford by the side of the road; there was no moon but the stars were brilliant, low in the sky. The thunderstorm had been short and sharp and they had sat it out in the car.

Cautiously they got to the side of the pool. Their eyes had grown used to the darkness so that they hardly needed their electric torches to show them the way through the bushes and over the rocks.

‘Some say they can catch fish before a thunderstorm.’ Dr. Griffiths was keeping his voice down. ‘Some say they do best during a storm; some, after a storm.’

He said that anyway the rain would cause the water to become reoxygenated, and the flies to be beaten down on the surface. And, he said that thundery weather does not appear to affect the rise of the fly, as there is often a big rise of fly when thunder is about; the electric discharge apparently eases the pressure which causes the nymphs, waiting to hatch out, to rise to the surface.

The silence in the darkness was broken only by the sound of the running river as they scrambled down through the trees and hedges towards the open pool where the boss-trout lay.

Philip Vane had spent a holiday at Castlebay in 1950. He had been getting over a car smash which had killed the girl who had been with him. He had been in love with the girl. It was Dr. Griffiths who had helped him cope with his insomnia. They had become friendly, and most evenings he had spent with Dr. Griffiths at the river up above the town. Vane had been prevented from going back to Castlebay next year because he had been serving a prison sentence.

Now, it was the beginning of July, 1956, Vane had been out since May and he had come to Castlebay again. Dr. Griffiths had been glad to see him, it was as if nothing had happened in the meantime.

‘Listen,’ Dr. Griffiths was saying, under his breath. Vane heard the soft splash that immediately followed. ‘Another damned fisherman.’

‘Poachers?’

‘Not a human fisherman,’ Dr. Griffiths said, ‘that was an otter.’

The pool was one of several along this stretch of the river caused by erosion of the banks which the waters had whittled away rushing on their way down to the estuary; and here a mass of rock had jutted out to form a shoulder brushing the river aside. It was only a few yards across the pool towards which they were now heading; it was deep and clear, and under a rocky ledge the boss-trout had its holt.

Dr. Griffiths had the first cast while Vane stood out of range and waited. The silence pressed down on them, only the faintest rustle from the tree tops, and the distant mutter of thunder now somewhere out over the sea beyond Conway. Vane didn’t hear Dr. Griffiths’s fly settle on the water, although he thought he caught a glimpse of it as it flicked the surface.

The minutes passed, and then there came a sudden flash out of the darkness of the pool. Dr. Griffiths gave a grunt, and then the flash had vanished, and Vane felt sure he could see the rod bending, silhouetted against the stars.

‘It’s hit,’ Dr. Griffiths said, mingled disbelief and excitement in his low tones.

A boss-trout is generally old, Dr. Griffiths had told Vane earlier that evening, often past its prime, who seeks out a holt in some big water which offers him maximum security. Lying in the shadowy recesses, the colour of his body altering to match his surroundings, he takes on a dark, sinister appearance; his massive curved jaw fits his ferocity and cunning. He slides from his holt, a menacing shadow through the night-time water, all set to act with deadly precision, striking and ripping into small trout, salmon fry, even small eels.

For twenty minutes Dr. Griffiths played the trout until gradually its curving shape was held suspended while it thrashed the surface of the pool. Then it was caught in the gaff, and it lay there flapping helplessly on the bank. It was the boss-trout all right; in the light of their torches he looked lean and his great black head ugly and vicious-looking. It must have weighed several pounds; Vane had expected it to be a more massive specimen. But he wasn’t prepared for Dr. Griffiths’s comment as he bent over it.

He straightened suddenly and looking at Vane, with his dark eyes abstracted in the glow from their torches. ‘My God,’ he said, under his breath, ‘Mrs. Merrill.’

Vane stared at him without knowing what he was talking about, and when he asked him what he meant, Dr. Griffiths brushed it aside, saying it was just something that had occurred to him; it was nothing really, he said.

Later Vane supposed he could have said that he had noticed when they had gone out this night that Dr. Griffiths had appeared a little more thoughtful than usual, but in retrospect it seemed merely that he’d been concerned with the boss-trout.

Dr. Griffiths didn’t say anything more about Mrs. Merrill, but Vane could tell he was distracted going back in the car. The thrill of landing the boss-trout seemed to have gone.

Vane remembered afterwards that the white Jag he had noticed in the headlights on their way up to Penybryn was no longer parked by the side of the road. But he didn’t connect it with Dr. Griffiths’s remark about Mrs. Merrill.

Dr. Griffiths dropped him at the Antelope Inn, where Vane was staying. They said goodbye, Vane was returning to London next day, and Dr. Griffiths went on home. But it wasn’t until the dawn crept down the valley that the doctor finally fell asleep, to be woken by his housekeeper an hour and a half later, at his usual time. By then Vane had left for London.