Ghosts from the Past

by Sally Spedding

  “No worries. Are you able to ride?” he asked. “You don’t want to lose your nerve.”

  “I will and I won’t.”

  Another strained smile. Something was up. I wasn’t stupid.

  “OK. I’ll follow you,” he said. “I should have bought the bloody horse box. Don’t know what I was thinking of.”

  Meanwhile, Beti Morgan still stood there like a dark, thin rock with her back to the wind, so the fringed V of her scarf flapped over her eyes.

  “Took me ages to get through to Ty Capel,” she announced all of a sudden, in that high, sing-song voice. “Are all three lines there usually so busy?”

  “How come she knows we’ve three lines?” whispered Danny. “We’re ex-directory.”

  He was right, but I didn’t want to rile her up. Nor see her ever again.

  I swung up into the saddle and gathered up the reins. Turned around, even though my back muscles protested as I did so. “Yes, they are,” I replied to her intrusive question. “My Papa’s a very busy man, but never too busy to thank those who help him. Do you live locally?”

  “Me? I live everywhere.”

  With that, the dog walker hauled her terrier to heel and set off towards a track that seemed to lead back to the hotel.

  Weird… As Cerys my ex-College friend would say.

  “Let’s go,” called Danny from his half-open driver’s window, taking care not to rev the engine too loudly. “And when we get to this end of the gallops, I want you to stop.”

  “Why?”

  A pause in which clouds turned the rest of the sky to granite, and slanting rain began to fall. Icy rain already turning to sleet, pinging off the Land Rover’s bonnet. Burning her skin.

  “There’s something you should know,” he began, then stopped.

  Only then I noticed how his eyes had reddened.

  “Tell me.”

  “Laure, please. I shouldn’t have said that. Let’s just get there.”

  *

  Everything was going wrong again. I knew it. And as for tomorrow’s important race - never mind Vervain’s crazy escapade - the fact that his winter coat was taking far too long to shift would mean those ignorant TV pundits judging the best turned-out runner in the paddock, would give my hand-reared boy nul points.

  Danny gripped the wheel of his 4X4. His even features set hard when normally he was the most outgoing guy on the planet. This was serious. I kicked Vervain on into a controlled canter and, as if he too sensed trouble, behaved himself.

  “Wait!” Danny yelled after me. Fear on the wind.

  “I can’t. This horse needs a good rub down and I need…”

  But before I could finish, he’d overtaken us, forcing Vervain to slow up. Just then, through the screen of rain, I saw something that made me catch my breath. A blue and yellow chequered police car parked by the feed store beyond the gallops and their six brushwood fences. Within minutes, under that same store’s welcome shelter, I came face to face with Papa - a man I hardly recognized, Also, two other men, one older, shorter, ruddy-faced, wearing a trench coat. The other in a yellow cagoule over his police uniform.

  *

  It was the silent aftermath that I’d remember. The black void before Alain Deschamps for only the second time since 1986, forgot his usual pre-occupied self, and wrapped his waxed coat’s wet arms around me. A lifebelt in a bottomless sea. His heart drumming against mine.

  Eight-year-old Mathieu was missing. My recent misdemeanour with Vervain forgotten.

  “So, where is he?” I pulled away to ask the simplest of questions, unlike what was really churning around in my mind. “He must be somewhere.”

  “Danny said he saw him through the kitchen window around one o’clock, sitting at the kitchen table in his school uniform with his colouring book.” He glanced out of the store’s front opening, his eyes as dry as that day his Head Lad called him over to see his dead wife. Perhaps he’d cried at night, I told myself, aware of Kevin our stable jockey taking Vervain into his loose box. Papa was, after all, a very private man.

  “Why isn’t he here, for God’s sake?”

  “He will be,” I said. “I left him behind when he said he’d got some news but refused to tell me what.”

  All eyes followed the way I’d come, but of the black Range Rover or its driver, there was no sign.

  The shorter police officer with noticeable body odour who’d introduced himself as Detective Constable Eifion Evans, added, “so it’s possible he was the last to see the boy here?”

  A wave of guilt suddenly swamped my troubled thoughts. Everything had changed since Maman had died. I’d once told Cerys how much responsibility lay on my shoulders; the only female in a busy, successful man’s world. Unlike her, I couldn’t care less about housework and feeding the troops. As for being a substitute mother…

  “I should have kept my eye on him,” I said, wondering why this stupid flic hadn’t mentioned how his son had been Mathieu’s friend at primary school until the bullying started. “But you know what he’s like. If he doesn’t fancy school, he won’t go. Nothing will make him.”

  “So, he was truanting from Ysgol Dewi Sant?” said the younger officer in a tone I didn’t like.

  “Not a word I’d use,” complained Papa. I knew what he meant.

  “Nor me,” I said, with a sick feeling at the bottom of my stomach. “But he’d do it a lot. Wouldn’t you if you were tormented for being different?”

  The cop blushed and moved away. Tough. But I couldn’t finish what I’d wanted to add because all our hidden photos of Mathieu from baby to his first ride on Danny’s hack only last month, were passing through my mind like a never-ending slide show The other, more senior officer whose name I’d already forgotten, coughed as though embarrassed and glanced at his watch.

  “We’ve just checked the house and surroundings and will need to speak in-depth to everyone at these stables as soon as possible. We can’t rule out that he may have gone back to school. Kids can be unpredictable. And you’ve already said he was quick on his feet.”

  He looked from me to Papa. “We pride ourselves on our response time and this is no different. So, statements and prints first. I’ve got the kit ready. As for a wider search, our team will be finishing for the day once the light goes, so we’ve roughly three hours to work out what might have made an eight-year-old leave a warm, dry house without it seems, any outdoor clothing.” He then addressed me.

  “Laure, did your brother often follow you around? Did he ask to ride with you this time when you took out that grey horse?”

  ‘The ghost…’

  “Vervain,” Papa corrected him impatiently. He too, waited for my reply, and I didn’t plan to spare him or anyone else about how hard being a replacement mother had been.

  “Sometimes Mathieu drove me nuts. Laure this, Laure that,” I admitted. “I even had to give up my farrier’s course in Cardigan to see to him. And yes,” I caught Papa’s inscrutable eye. “When you agreed I could give Vervain his final workout before tomorrow, he had to bloody well trot along too…”

  I liked that particular swear word. Better than anything in French, but I knew the moment it popped out, I’d made a mistake.

  “And?” That older officer glanced at his colleague.

  “I said non. And actually…” Here I stopped. I’d slapped him, hadn’t I? Good and hard on his derrière. Only the second time since last summer when he’d climbed right up to the top of the hay loft. “I got his sketchbook and crayons out and told him to draw me ten different types of rocket before I got back.”

  “Rockets?”

  “Yes,” interrupted Papa. “He was mad about space travel.”

  “Was?”

  “Is. Of course.” A bright blush had appeared on those weather-worn cheeks.

  “You didn’t see him follow you?” The cop I’d just remembered was DC Evans, was on to me again, taking notes in a damp, battered-looking pad. I shook my head, suddenly hating Maman for her cowardice. For not facing
up to Papa and his ways. Then I crossed myself for that wicked thought, wondering if perhaps as a punishment for them, Vervain had bolted, and I’d nearly died.

  Black-clad Beti Morgan - if that was indeed her real name - who’d known so much about our family, suddenly returned to haunt me.

  Since I’d discovered Maman twisting lifeless from a lungeing rope in La Cathédrale - as our main barn had been known - I’d let most people slip through my life without so much as a second glance. But not that woman and, as the sky turned purple and the hail intensified, bouncing off the yard’s new cobblestones, I rewound in my mind our recent, odd meeting, all the while aware of poor, stubborn Mathieu out there somewhere in this bad weather, maybe trying to reach home.

  *

  DC Evans was studying the white mobile home poking out from beyond the last stable in the block. He turned to Papa. Water dripping from his nose.

  “Could you ask your farrier to join us all indoors? We need to push on.”

  But Papa wasn’t happy. Scowling, he pulled up his waxed coat collar. “You’ve seen Gilles already. Surely there are other things you could be doing? Ordering a damned helicopter for a start.”

  A shake of that too-big, shaved head while the other flic chipped in. “We’re not here to be abused, Monsieur. We’re here to help.”

  “I don’t want your help. You’re incompetents. Now, please leave my property.”

  “If a crime has been committed then we’re duty-bound to…”

  “There’s been no crime. Mathieu’s a dreamer. He’ll be back when supper’s ready.”

  “So, why phone Cardigan HQ and waste police time?”

  Silence.

  A bedraggled group of crows shuffled along the ridge tiles above Papa’s study window, then one by one, flapped away.

  “I never did. Was it a man or a woman?”

  “Man,” the fat cop said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Woman,” said the other, less sure of himself.

  “Surely you can check?” Said Papa.

  Meanwhile, Vervain was stamping his feet, and Kevin shouting at him. But all I heard was that nosy, black-scarved stranger’s weird boast amplified by the wind.

  “Me? I live everywhere…”

  “If it was a woman,” I joined in. “Why not ask that Beti Morgan who was quick enough to phone you that I’d fallen off? She said she works at the Sea Breeze hotel where they’ve plenty of phones. She also seems to know a lot about us.”

  My reward was a death stare from the smelly cop.

  “I don’t like your insinuation. Miss Morgan’s a pillar of our community. A councillor, a…”

  I’d already had enough. Needed to sort out my head. I made for the kitchen door pushed it open and slammed it hard behind me,

  3. Danny.

  Friday 11th March. 2.35 p.m.

  With a certain madness that shut out all possible repercussions of my actions, I kept driving. Every turn of the wheel, every gear change happening as if in a trance, but sometimes. I told myself, you reach the point when talking and theorising has to stop. I should know, with my track record that had, a dozen years ago, in response to an advert in the Racing Post, taken me from a point-to-point stables near Brighton to the Poitou-Charentes. France’s flattest, most fertile region. Not without its history too, if that’s what turns you on.

  I’d left behind a wife of four years who’d then buggered off to Northumberland, emptied our joint bank account, and only last month, been granted a Decree Nisi on the grounds of my unreasonable behaviour.

  Thank you, bitch.

  “Unreasonable behaviour takes many forms,” my solicitor had said, almost licking his lips at the prospect of a long and costly battle. “Your leaving for France could be construed that way.”

  Whatever. I’d now forgotten pretty much everything sbout her, except for the abortion she’d boasted on having four months after our honeymoon.

  “For Chrissake, man, don’t cry again,” I told myself. “Think of Mathieu. That’s all I have to do. And Laure, which I shouldn’t.

  *

  My left-hand windscreen wiper created a distracting blur as I sped on along the trunk road to finally join the end of the M4. I’d only stop if I had to. There was no time to waste. I had a past to unravel. Secrets to pick at until they bled, the way Christine had done from her beautiful nose up near La Cathédrale’s beam. Drip… drip… like poison into my brain. And what about Laure? I wondered. That unfathomable young woman, who every day since losing her mother, had seemed more of a stranger. Growing thinner by the week. Who last Wednesday night, had hacked off her once long hair and, with a compass point, scored the initials CAJ into her right forearm.

  “Why?” I’d asked while we’d been tacking up Vervain for his early morning workout the next day, and Mathieu still safe in bed. “What good will that do?”

  “I lied to the police and the Examining Magistrate, didn’t I?” she’d said “Remember all those questions like did Maman have any enemies? Had she crossed anyone or even had a secret relationship?”

  I’d coloured up at that, but fortunately the loose box had been too dimly lit for her to notice. Besides, Vervain had grown restless and stood on my foot.

  “I feel helpless. A total failure,” she’d added. “I should have spoken out when I’d had the chance but…”

  “About what exactly?” Trying to keep the big horse’s teeth from my ear.

  “Something I found.”

  Was all she’d say.

  *

  I glanced at myself in my rear-view mirror. Not a wise move. I resembled my grandfather - a tinker from County Kildare. My hair every which way, but worse, betrayal etched into every pore. That damned steeplechase was tomorrow. The first serious race of the season. My boss couldn’t withdraw from it without being hammered by a penalty. I should have stayed at Ty Capel and helped him with the Fuzz; making sure Vervain was okay and ready for his big day. Especially after Laure’s mistake this morning by going off piste.

  Or not a mistake?

  Fuck you, Lennox…

  And why had I left Mathieu out of the equation? Well, I hadn’t. Why else was I doing this? Risking everything?

  It was then I noticed the small, red Peugeot 104 that had pulled up behind me at the pumps near the M4’s Swansea East exit, was still there. I’d also noticed its bespecatcled woman driver wore a nurse’s uniform. I slowed up, expecting her to pass, but no. Perhaps she was in the kind of motorway trance I’d often experienced when driving the horse boxes from one end of the UK to the other. Cruise control, while thinking of different stuff. And Christ knew there’d been enough of that to last a lifetime.

  I slowed my wipers to intermediate and switched on Radio 4 to a discussion on the recent Zeebrugge ferry disaster, but having had enough tension already for one day, turned to BBC Radio Wales where a Plaid Cymru rant against English ’colonialists’ who couldn’t be arsed to even learn the name of their new homes, was interrupted by a total change of voice.

  “Cardiganshire police are asking members of the public living near the village of Glan y Mor, to report any sightings of eight-year-old Mathieu Deschamps of Ty Capel racing stables, who’s been missing since lunchtime today. Small for his age, he was last seen indoors wearing…”

  I knew exactly what he’d been wearing. A brown zip-up jumper, jeans that were still way too big, and blue socks with a Mickey Mouse pattern…

  Laure should have let him tag along with her, but she’s hardly been thinking straight for the past three and a half years, has she? She’ll be blaming herself and being aggressive. I should phone her, but how can I?

  Shit. Listen to this…

  “They are also looking for forty-year-old Daniel Lennox, the yard’s Head Lad, who vanished in his black Range Rover shortly afterwards. He has family in Northumberland. and may be heading that way.”

  Family? Bollocks.

  But hearing my name out of the blue like that made my hands slip from the steering wheel.

&nb
sp; What the Hell was I doing?

  Going back to 1984, that’s what. To when Christmas Eve’s snow had smothered Les Saules Pleureurs. When my boss was away in Paris and Laure was tidying the tack room. When the expected dinner for the Top Team of myself, the secretary, vet, and blacksmith hadn’t materialised. Neither Christine’s familiar voice nor the France Musique station she always listened to, was anywhere to be heard.

  As if that same snow was still falling, creating a white blindness in my head, I left the M4 behind. But not so blinding that I couldn’t see that clinging red car still in place like a persistent blood clot in my eye.

  *

  At least I wasn’t a foot passenger forced to schlepp on board La Princesse Poole via its slippery, metal gangway exposed to all weathers. At least there’d been room for my Range Rover in car deck A’s oily gloom amongst other 4X4s carrying skis and camping gear. My up-to-date passport had stood me in good stead, showing frequent trips back and fore to France. The uniform in the Truckline booth had merely scanned it before indicating the correct lane in which I should wait. Sorry, I didn’t want to read about cut-price Duty Freebies or the company’s villa holidays. Other more pressing matters had taken hold.

  *

  Having baled out of my car, I walked on beyond the car deck into the southerly gale, cupping my hand around my eyes to check if that red Peugeot had followed me even this far.

  Not that I could tell…

  Time to get organized. I returned to the semi-darkness and was about to pocket my Range Rover keys and make my way upstairs to the bar, when a half-familiar scent snaked up my nostrils.

  Poison…

  “Excuse me, Monsieur,” came a French woman’s voice from behind me. “But haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

  I spun round.

  Even in that gloom, amid the din of slamming doors, clanging chains and that final thud as the grey square of Poole’s quayside vanished, there was no mistaking the enemy.

  A brown beret covered most of her dyed, black hair. A belted, grey mac emphasised her toned, taut body, while as usual, that small face was caked in a thick foundation. I knew why, of course. A part of her past that would never go away.