11

Farming was in a desperate state. Wasn’t it always? I’d never heard a farmer who wasn’t teetering on the brink, hanging on by his teeth in the face of floods, drought, disease, world slumps and bureaucracy. But Castell Mawr’s teeth must have been good strong gnashers, because the farm looked flourishing to me. The broad concrete road passed down through lush pastures to a small industrial estate. As I pulled up in the yard, between farm vehicles that could eat my Fiat for breakfast, a man emerged from one of the sheds, short, slight, fiftyish, dressed in overalls.

He looked me over with quiet curiosity, waiting for me to do the talking.

‘Hi. Do you live here?’

‘Oh yes. Over from the cottage, are you? The new owner? Saw you were down.’ Of course he had. I should have guessed that everyone probably knew everything in a place like this. Which was all for the good.

‘Yes, that’s me. Sarah Peterson.’

He shook hands solemnly. ‘So how’s the old house? Bit of a wreck, isn’t it?’

‘A bit, yes. I’ve got a lot of work to do.’

‘Matthew Harries doing it up for you then?’

‘That’s right. I’m hoping he won’t take too long.’

He adjusted his cap with a hint of a knowing smile. Another schmuck in the neighbourhood. ‘Holiday cottage, is it?’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘You know the story of that house? Nasty business. Murder and all.’

I’d thought I’d have to skirt round it, just as I had with Dilys. But no, he came out with it, just like that. Didn’t even need prompting. Almost gloating over it, taking a ghoulish pleasure in shocking the English newbie. What he couldn’t guess was that I could parry him brilliantly. ‘Yes, I know. It was my grandfather who was murdered, actually. It used to be my grandparents’ farm.’

He definitely wasn’t expecting that. ‘John Owen? Well. Good God.’

‘Yes – Sorry, I don’t know your name.’

‘Gethin George.’

‘Oh, of course. There was a Mr George at Castell Mawr when my grandparents were here. I expect he got the land when my Nan lost the tenancy after the murder.’

He looked momentarily nonplussed. ‘My dad, that was. They didn’t want a new tenant at the cottage. Not viable.’ He stopped, squinting at me to convince himself I was real. ‘So you’re John Owen’s granddaughter?’

‘That’s right. Do you remember him at all?’

He laughed, less formal now there was a link between us. ‘No, that was a long time before I was born. You’d have to ask my dad about that. He’s in the house. Come in and see him.’

‘Your father?’ I knew I sounded shocked, because I was. Shocked to find that my grandparent’s nearest neighbour was still alive, still living here. A man who would know the truth. Please let him not be as coy about it as Dilys.

‘He’ll want to meet you.’ Gethin smiled. ‘But not all there in the head sometimes. He’s old, you know. And a bit deaf. You’ll have to shout.’

‘I’ve got a great-aunt just the same.’ Oh I’d shout. I’d bellow if I had to.

Gethin accompanied me to the house, past white palings separating the industrial estate from a large neat garden. We strolled up across trim lawns to a farmhouse newly reglazed and guarded by concrete lions, Georgian-style. It could have been part of a modern executive development, although as Matthew’s lessons had taught me, the building that lurked somewhere under the primrose rendering could be any age.

As honorary friend of the family I was ushered in through the kitchen door. Not the sort of farmhouse kitchen I’d imagine, with gingham cloth on an old pine table and antique dresser and rocking chair by the big black range. There was a shiny green Aga, but everything else was smart, modern, fitted and immaculately, depressingly clean. What really disturbed me was the smell. Not of disinfectant and air-freshener as the cleanliness suggested, but the warm comforting aroma of cake and bread and bacon and steak and kidney, doused in cabbage and chips. It lingered like a fine patina on the place. It wasn’t fair: how could anyone actually cook there, with all the chaos cooking entailed, and still leave the place as spick and span as if it had been fitted yesterday?

Mrs George bustled in from another room, a laundry where she had been ironing. She was stout and smart with immaculately trimmed short hair, dressed like a managing director, and I felt slovenly in my jeans and trainers.

‘Sarah, our new neighbour up at the cottage,’ explained Gethin, though it was obvious that Mrs George – Carys – already knew this.

‘I saw you’d taken the place back in June. Came to see it a fortnight back, didn’t you? Matthew Harries says you’ve got a big job on your hands there.’ There was no stopping her. She had the kettle on and while it boiled she established that I was single but soon to be married and that my young man was a lawyer and that I came from Surrey and I’d studied music and I’d reached grade 8 in piano and I used to be in a band and I was now in advertising and I was to have five bridesmaids and my brother lived in California and my mother lived in Ireland, and that she was one of the Felindre Thomases and she and Gethin had three children and Mared was married and living in Cardiff and Rhonwen was a musician and performed at the Eisteddfod and Dewi was being persuaded to consider university and last year they’d all had a holiday in Turkey, but she was keen on Florida.

I found myself trying to catch breath for her.

Gethin, a perfect foil for his wife, said very little, but he silenced her at last with the one fact she didn’t know. ‘Sarah is John Owen’s granddaughter.’

‘Oh.’ Carys’ shock was almost comical. It told me my grandfather’s murder was still a matter of notoriety round here, even sixty years on.

‘I’m taking her to see Dad,’ said Gethin. ‘Have a talk.’

He ushered me on into the house, past a lounge with vast padded sofas and glass tables, everything plush and new. We went through into a back parlour, and there, preserved like a museum exhibit, was a little corner of the house as it had once been. Cosy and cluttered, an old black fireplace with tiled surround, heavy polished sideboard, chenille tablecloth, a piano and dark framed prints of highland cattle. It was like stepping through a time warp into the past. A wizened old man sat buried in a faded sagging armchair. His chair. One modern touch, an enormous TV, filled one corner, its volume deafening. Gethin turned it down, which finally captured the old man’s attention.

‘Dad!’

‘Eh?’

Gethin spoke in Welsh, explaining carefully. The old man looked at me in bleary wonder and asked something I couldn’t understand. I should have realised. My grandparents must have been fluent Welsh speakers, but I don’t think my mother picked up more than a couple of random phrases from Dilys, and I knew nothing at all. Welsh roots or no, I was a foreigner here.

‘Sorry,’ I said to Gethin. ‘I don’t understand.’

He leaned over the old man and said clearly, ‘Saesneg, Dad. English. This is Sarah. She’s John Owen’s granddaughter. You remember John Owen? From Cwmderwen?’

‘Ah.’ The old man struggled, peering up at me with eyes that saw little, not in the present at least. ‘Is it Rosie?’

‘No.’ I tried to speak distinctly, without shouting. ‘I’m Ellen’s daughter. Siân Ellen Owen?’

‘Siân?’ His mind was groping into the past. ‘Little Siân? Y baban.’

‘Yes, the baby,’ Gethin confirmed, to encourage him. ‘Sarah is her daughter.’

‘She went to England.’

‘Yes! That’s right.’ A good sign if he could remember a detail like that.

‘Sarah wants to know if you remember her tad-cu,’ said Gethin, helping him along. ‘John Owen.’

William munched. ‘John Owen. Shot, he was.’

‘Yes.’ I sat down beside him on a chair Gethin had pulled forward for me. ‘You were his neighbour, weren’t you? You must have known him well. What was he like?’

He was having difficulty dredging up forgotten things, let alone explaining them in English. He struggled for the words. ‘Tall. Tall man, John Owen.’

‘Yes?’

‘Hard working. Very hard.’

‘I expect he had to be, yes.’

‘And a singer. Grand singer. Both musical, they were.’

‘What, my Nan too?’

‘Mrs Owen. Gwen. Played here, she did. The piano. In our house. Used to play the harp when she was young.’

So she was musical too. How strange. It was like catching a ghost in a painting. I thought of her old frail fingers on the hospital blanket and tried to picture them plucking at harp strings. No, I couldn’t. ‘And the…’ I hesitated, desperate. ‘The murder, do you remember that?’

‘Murder, there was.’

‘Can you tell me what happened?’

‘Oh. Yes.’ Surprisingly definite. He stared into an invisible horizon as the memories sorted themselves out and suddenly it all dropped into place. ‘German. It was the German, that’s who it was. Peter Faber. Yes it was Peter Faber. I saw him. I saw him running off, down the road. The boy Jack came to get me, trouble see, but when I got there, John Owen was dead. Nothing I could do. Or her. Mrs Owen. Terrible state she was in. Shock, yes. Nothing to be done. But it was him.’ He looked at me, watery eyes searching earnestly. ‘Peter Faber. That’s who it was, shot him down.’

All this from a man who was having trouble with three-word sentences a moment before. I was overwhelmed, my spine tingling, even though I’d been praying for any sort of detail. A German? Just as Sam had said before I had proved to him conclusively that it couldn’t possibly have been a German.

‘A German? I didn’t know that. Could you tell me…’

I had to stop as Mrs George bustled in with the tea and plates of fruit bread and Welsh cakes.

She wanted to know my plans, when the wedding was to be, if I hoped to have children, how many, if I planned to settle at Cwmderwen, and would I be interested in singing at the Chapel, fortnightly. I tried to chat politely in return, though I just wanted to get back to the old man and his shocking revelations. But when Mrs George finally retreated, William George had fallen asleep in his chair. His head drooped on his chest, a half-eaten Welsh cake in his hand.

Gethin shrugged, patting his father on the shoulder. ‘On and off like a light switch. Best leave him be for now.’

I swallowed my raging frustration, and tiptoed from the room.

‘I knew he’d remember it,’ Gethin said. ‘He’ll be thinking about it now. Tell you more when you come next.’

‘It’s something for me to think about too. He did say a German, Peter Faber, didn’t he?’

‘In the war, was it? It would be the camp then.’

‘Camp?’

‘Up the river. Prisoners of war. Your Mam, she got over it all, did she?’

‘Mum? Oh yes, I don’t think she ever knew much about it.’ Had she heard this story?

I thanked Gethin for the tea and promised to call again. He saw me out, watching me drive away with the faintest shake of his head.

My brain was whirring as I went back over William George’s words. A name, Peter Faber. What about the person or persons unknown? Was that just the official verdict of the inquest because he hadn’t been caught and charged yet? And never was, it seemed, or surely Dilys would have mentioned it.

A German, Peter Faber. If there had been a prisoner of war camp, what was he doing, roaming around the Welsh countryside? Surely prison camps were intended to keep prisoners in, not let them out to murder local farmers?

Anyway, this wasn’t during the war. It was three years after. We’d got rid of them all by then, hadn’t we? And if not, if some Nazi storm trooper had been on the rampage in the countryside, why the hell wasn’t he caught? How hard could it have been to track him down?

Every time one door opened before me, another one appeared. There was so much still to learn. William George had seen the German prisoner running off and had found my grandfather dead and my Nan in shock. Dear God, had she witnessed it then? Watched as her man had his brains blown out?

I swallowed bile. I knew what it was like to be a witness. I knew what it meant to stand and watch someone you loved violently killed in front of your eyes.

I’d stood there on the kerb, waving Jemma away, watching her car edge round the traffic cones of roadworks, and I’d watched the vast crushing bulk of the lorry, like a tidal wave, plough into her wing, swinging the little Peugeot round, pushing it, crushing it into the brick wall as casually as swatting a fly. And, somehow divorced from sight, I’d heard the squeal of brakes, the crash, the sickening grinding that seemed to go on and on.

None of it real. Not for a few seconds. Just an incomprehensible jigsaw of meaningless sight and sound. Until my brain clicked into action, saying ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ I could remember going forward, trying to run, my legs not working because my shins had turned to jelly and my innards to lava. I could remember the smell hitting me. Diesel, metal, something worse. I fantasised afterwards that I saw what was left of Jemma’s car, and Jemma in it, but I think that must have been my imagination. An imagination that began working overtime then, and would still slash at me, years later, when I least expected it. All I could genuinely remember was sitting on the kerb, someone’s hand pushing my head down between my knees, while I waited for the hallucination to end and someone to tell me it wasn’t true.

It must have been like that for Nan. Sam said she never smiled properly. Oh yes, I could relate to that.

I gripped the steering wheel, forcing the memories out of my head. I’d got over it. After Jemma’s death they’d made me talk. Called it therapy, making me sane again. Did Gwen get therapy? Had she been allowed to talk out her misery? Dilys would have listened to her; Dilys must surely have heard the whole story. Why did she have to be so infuriatingly secretive about it? Unless…

An unpleasant thought struck me. Perhaps the murder was such an embarrassment to prim and proper Dilys that Nan wasn’t a welcomed refugee in Peterborough after all. She was an awkward problem, shunted off to Leicester at the earliest opportunity, to work in the junior branch of the family firm, provided for but out of sight. Maybe my mother was only kept because, being so young, she would have hindered Nan’s removal?

Parking up back at Plas Malgwyn, I kicked myself, ashamed of my doubts. It was rubbish. I knew Dilys. Under that no-nonsense respectability, she was all warm blood. She’d kept my mother out of love. She and Nan would have talked, wept, commiserated together, sharing the secrets that no one else was allowed to hear. But Nan was dead now and no one else was left to grieve over the memories, so why couldn’t she speak at last?

Back in my room, I went through my box of Owen trophies again, retrieved mostly from the detritus Dilys had left behind when she’d downsized and moved into her nursing home.

A black bible in Welsh. Not the family bible Jack remembered, which seemed to have vanished without trace. This one had a Sunday school certificate in the front. Gwenllian N. Lewis. There was a page of handwritten verses inside, also in Welsh, so I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. A hymn sheet from some service, maybe.

There was a folded strip of newspaper in there too, serving as a bookmark. I could date it because although one side was a long article in cramped Welsh, the other had part of an exhortation from the Ministry in 1943, ‘the most critical year in our history’. It told me I was to be thorough and timely in my cultivations, and plan for winter calvings. I’d thought of framing it as a memento of the war years.

And there was my grandparent’s marriage certificate, 1933. John Francis Owen, farmer, of Cwmderwen, to Gwenllian Nesta Lewis of 43 Pendre, Penbryn, at Beulah Chapel, Llanolwen, witnessed by Dilys Lewis and William George. William George. I hadn’t even noticed that before.

My Nan’s death certificate. Gwenllian Nesta Owen, 75, at Leicester Royal Infirmary. Cause of death, carcinoma of the breast.

A meagre handful of photographs: Gwen on holiday in Scarborough in her last years, already sickening perhaps. Slight and withered and barely smiling, in a flowered frock that hung upon her. My parent’s wedding – there was Gwen, just as solemn, but this time in an unforgiving suit and a dour hat.

Gwen and the boys in a park. Early 1950s? Gwen was the same. Weary. Jack, hands in pockets and one sock down, looked like any teenager whose mother had just tried to make him look respectable for the camera.

I never knew Jack except as a name and, once, a jovial voice on a cassette, along with equally jovial wife and daughters. He’d emigrated to Canada twenty years before I was born and an annual Christmas card to my mother with a letter about cousins we’d never met, plus the one experimental recording, was the only contact we had. My mother wouldn’t have dreamed of losing touch, but they’d grown up apart so they were never close. At least it meant she hadn’t been too upset at his unexpected death last year.

Robert, in the photo, already had the faraway unfocused gaze of a boy who was not all there. Where was he, if not in the park? Lost in another world. Had he been there in the house at the time of the murder? Seeing, hearing everything? Another traumatised soul?

In theory, as he was still alive and in Britain, I could ask him. But questions, even ‘How are you?’ were a problem for Robert. Of course it made perfect sense that a boy would finish up with psychiatric issues if he’d seen his own father murdered. Not that I could say that in front of Dilys. His sad history was of the many things she never talked about, but I was fairly sure he’d spent some time in a mental hospital after Nan died. He’d probably be there now if care in the community hadn’t put paid to it. He lived as a recluse somewhere in Yorkshire, in a battered old caravan. Or he did twenty years ago. We visited him once, when I was young; a smelly whiskery man who spoke in grunts and left my mother tearing her hair and trying not to cry. I knew she’d seen him regularly since, on her own, but Sam and I had been more than happy to forget him.

Yet he was the living evidence of the cruelty of the murder. The tragedy spread further than I had imagined. It was a sickening thought.

I turned back to my pictures. Photos from Cwmderwen. One was the wedding. Gwen was a frail pallid bride, her hair wispy and her wrists fragile. She had played the harp? It seemed far too strenuous for a woman who looked as if the slightest exertion would finish her off.

John. The singer. He stood stiff and formal. I couldn’t imagine him singing the blues at Murphy’s, but something more dignified perhaps. I tried to picture his lungs swelling for a recital as I revised my image of home life at Cwmderwen. Musical evenings in the parlour. Maybe that was why the house called to me so clearly? The song goes on?

There were other people in the wedding photo. A grim Presbyterian community, done up in their sombre Sunday best. I recognised Dilys as a very young woman, something of the Queen Mother about her even then, the only one daring to smile at the camera. And the old man with her, shambling in ill-fitting clothes; was he my great- grandfather? Henry Lewis, a shopkeeper, that was all I knew about him.

William George? I searched the faces, trying to match them to the wrinkled old man in the back parlour at Castell Mawr and the blurred newspaper clipping at Plas Malgwyn. That one, possibly, by the groom. Not a film star’s face, but comfortable and friendly, if on his dignity.

There was one other photograph, taken in those early years, still oddly posed but far less rigid. John was grasping a rake, like a warrior with a spear, and Gwen was holding a baby, with a young girl clinging to her leg, hiding her face in her mother’s apron. They were standing among mint and cabbages, the open back door of Cwmderwen behind them. I had thought about having this photo restored and enlarged, to take pride of place in the new Cwmderwen, but it probably wouldn’t be feasible. It was badly worn, flaking at the edges and at some time it had been folded, the crease slicing down through the faces of mother and daughter.

I studied the picture anew. The girl would be Rose. She’d died young, before my mother was born. Dilys had a photo of her in an album I’d been allowed to look through once, years ago. I remembered Rose because my mother had pointed out that I looked just like her, and Dilys had said, ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ as she would, and then they’d turned the page and were arguing over the length of my mother’s skirt in a photo taken at college. No further mention of the long-dead Rose, though she’d made her way onto my family tree. Dilys had never spoken of her since, but William George remembered her. She’d died and I had an idea from things my mother had said, that there had been other lost children, or miscarriages at least. That must have been common enough in the bad old days, but how tragic for Gwen and John.

The crease in the photo had obliterated whatever there was to be seen of young Rosie’s face, but John’s was clear enough. My grandfather. A fleshless face, high cheekbones, deep-set intense eyes. Compelling rather than handsome. I could feel the strength in him, sense his possessive love for his family, his home and his land. Gethin George said Cwmderwen had been too small to be viable. It must have been a heart-rending struggle, year after year, to hold things together. The rigid iron control was palpable in the photo. He’d have done everything necessary to survive.