She didn’t seem connected with any vehicle, so maybe, with just that leather holdall, she was a foot passenger, except that her outer clothes were bone dry.
“What the Hell are you doing here?” I said.
“I could ask the same about you.”
“Beat me to it, eh? But then like your sister used to say, you always came too quick. With Alain…”
Her face was a picture,
I was back again in La Cathédrale - that cavernous barn, gripping a little boy’s hand, engulfed by death… That same musky scent drifting in behind me from the freezing night. A ladder lying askew on the stone floor.
“Where is he?” I wanted to smack that over-lipsticked mouth out of shape. Re-organise those immaculate, slightly-pointed teeth. “Where’s Mathieu?”
Her painted eyebrows moved upwards.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve just been over to Ty Canol to see everyone. Tante Elisabeth springing another surprise. Wanting to take both little pets to Les Tourels for their Easter holiday. But no-one was around. Not even you. No-one answering the phone. The place all locked up. So disappointing. And expensive.”
“Liar.”
She fluttered her caked-up eyelashes. Tilted her head like a coquette.
“Talking about yourself again. How typical.”
She placed herself closer. That pungent perfume even stronger.
“What’s happened to Mathieu?” I said. “I can hold up this ferry until I know he’s safe” I was about to raise my hands to her skinny throat when something hard pressed against my gut, moving upwards. Inch by inch.
A silencer connected to a gun?
Fuck…
Other passengers milling around us were too busy hunting for access doors to seats and cabins to notice. I should have seen this coming. A cold sweat crept over my skin as a guy in an orange boiler suit shouted for everyone to leave the car deck.
“I’ll do a deal,” I whispered.
“No deal, Monsieur Fornicator. All too late.”
Jesus…
I was back again at Ty Capel on my retired point-to-point mare on the high land between fields and the sea, with Mathieu up front chattering as usual, imitating the seagulls’ cries. The warmth of his small body spreading to mine…
That gun was on my ribs. Pressing harder. Again, going north. I envisaged his sweet face turned to me. Heard the one word I’d waited eight years to hear.
Phut…
Fuck. My eye…
Then another, to my chest, bringing a deep, different burn. That blowy day had become night. I was falling, down amongst the car deck’s oily stink and my own waste, sliding between one tyre and another.
Unseen. Unheard. Losing it…
Laure…
4. John.
Friday 11th March. 3.15p.m.
Sometimes in life, I reminded myself, making my way towards Reception in the hotel’s entrance hall, you have to let things go. I’d lost Alison, that was for sure. My calls to her every quarter of an hour from the pay phone near the bar, had come to nothing.
After a lonely, late lunch in the otherwise deserted conservatory dining room, it was time to go. Unless Mathieu Deschamps, from a place called Ty Capel, was extremely young, extremely old or badly handicapped, he’d surely come to no harm. One thing I’d learnt from my experience last spring - the French don’t lack resourcefulness. Nevertheless, that name niggled in my mind.
“Where’s Ty Capel?” I asked the hotel owner, busy slotting fliers showing the region’s attractions into various holders. A woman I guessed from the Home Counties, well into her sixties. “Is it far?”
“Chapel House? Let me think…Yes. It’s stables…You know, horseracing…”
“I could check Yellow Pages,” I said. “There can’t be many Deschamps around.”
“Now I remember. Someone visited us a few weeks ago on his way to see that very same trainer. Glan y Mor’s the nearest village. Best you take the A487 up to Cardigan and turn off at Nevern. There’ll signs for the Sea Breeze Hotel. Can’t miss the place. Normally it’s a nice run but take care today.”
She peered at me through her winged glasses and I expected her to mention my confrontation with Sion Evans and the recent arrival of the law. Instead, she added, “I’m sorry about your girlfriend going off like that. You’d both only just arrived.”
A glance at the carpet runner showed still-fresh trails of damp footprints leading to and from the front door. There was something about this underheated place I couldn’t quite work out.
“Thanks. I’d planned to foot the bill…”
“She paid for herself.”
“Right.”
An awkward pause followed, after which the owner asked. “Will you be staying on or has that animal done his worst?”
Hello?
“Course I’m staying. But I don’t understand…”
Her relieved expression didn’t last long.
“It’s what Sion Evans does, you see. You’re not the first to complain and won’t be the last. He’s had a problem with us - I mean me and my late husband - since day one when we began renovations. And it’s always the brother – DC Eifion Evans - who covers for him. To be honest, Mr Lyon, me running this place since my Len died has been like pulling teeth. I do it because he’d have wanted me to after all the work we’d put in together.”
“What problem?” I had to lean on my stick. My left ankle playing up again, despite the painkillers.
“Way back, this land belonged to the Evans family. Used to be a sheep farm and slaughterhouse till they ran into debt, and then of course, we’d come in from Guildford, hadn’t we? Waving more cash around than anyone else round here could afford to. But I tell you, no-one’s driving me out of here. No-one.”
“What’s been going on?”
“Have you an hour to spare?”
“I want to see this bastard scorched like a smoky. Carcass and all.”
Suddenly the sky outside turned black, sending giant-sized rain drops at the windows. The afternoon being sluiced away. She lowered her voice to a whisper.
“Driving over my flower beds. Taking stones from the walls, things like that.”
“Where’s he based?”
“Dan y Foel. Tucked right away about five miles from here. Doesn’t stop him behaving as if he still owns this place, though. His brother knows, but too scared to cuff him. Jobs like his don’t grow on trees round here.”
I could believe it.
“I saw him with that rifle out there when you’d arrived and wondered what on earth he might do. In fact, I saw everything. You were right to hit him. A few more around here should do likewise. But listen,” she leant closer. “I’ve got a gun too. Used to be my Len’s. Evans doesn’t know that. I keep it on me all the time.” She patted her skirt pocket. “I have to…”
Not the best time to ask about a licence.
“And your staff? Have they been targeted?”
She shook her head.
“But I am considering having CCTV installed inside and out. “Whatever it costs.”
“A wise move.”
I’d never ceased to be amazed at other people’s sheer bloody-mindedness in the face of adversity. And what was I going to be doing? Taking it easy like Dr Singh had advised? Resting up in front of daytime TV? No thanks.
“If you want me to step in, I can,” I said. “I’m a retired ex-Detective Inspector with still a few friends…”
She immediately glanced through the double entrance doors, still on edge, “No thank you, Mr Lyon. That’s very kind, but not just yet. I’m giving him plenty of rope with which to hang himself.”
*
I took the latest edition of Yellow Pages over to one of the empty coffee tables by the window overlooking the car park. Through the rain I noticed the motorbike had also gone, leaving my VW forlornly on its own. But at least here in the marginally better light, I was able to read the most relevant advertisements’ small, slightly smudged print
. Nothing on Ty Capel, but there was a trekking centre near Cardigan. I optimistically pulled out my cell phone.
I needn’t have bothered.
Engaged.
Try again.
I picked up my small case and made the return journey along a connecting corridor to the first of four linked cottages converted from either stables or a barn of some sort. Its king-sized bed meant for two not one. As I turned my Yale in the lock, I remembered the owner mentioning a former slaughterhouse and wondered if this had been part of it. Also, when the charming Sion Evans might return to cause yet more problems.
With the downpour thrumming on the slate roof overhead and the central light beginning to flicker, I used the room’s landline phone to dial that same Cardiganshire number, then waited. Yes, they and the Deschamps shared a vet. Yes, the trekking centre could help. I would soon be on my way.
*
Darkness had sneaked in early to that wild part of west Wales. A foreign country in more ways than one, with the flooding rain and road signs in Welsh taking too long to de-cipher. I tried not to glance at the empty car seat next to me. Alison would be on the train back to Carmarthen then north to Coventry, Nottingham and Bottesford, maybe phoning someone else from her past. Even the Police Surgeon whom I’d noticed eyeing her up and down more than once.
I mustn’t think about her.
Her body lotion scent still lingered, but one wet blast through her open window soon dispelled it. I had the strangely calm Alain Deschamps to think about, and the fact that he’d sent both DC Eifion Evans and PC Gwallter Williams away with fleas in their ears. I began to doubt what I was doing. In Nottingham, missing kids was an hourly event. On the loose, playing the arcades, forgetting the time. Perhaps his young lad often wandered off. Perhaps with boyish secrets of his own…
*
Hearing such a distinctly French voice answering the phone, had brought everything back that I’d tried to bury, but the man by his own admittance at the top of the racing game, needed help. My help, because I was an experienced outsider and because his normally loyal Head Lad had, with his old black Range Rover, vanished into thin air.
Then I spotted an expensive-looking sign positioned at the end of a narrow, waterlogged lane,
Dan y Foel.
Should I or shouldn’t I? My pulse got busy and, for a mad moment I was tempted to drive up there and warn the thug off his destructive antics.
Get real, mate…
I was fifty-five, unarmed, not fully mobile - a fact I’d deliberately kept from Alain Deschamps when he’d asked if I’d call in. I had to reach Ty Capel as soon as possible to help throw some light on why a seemingly content eight-year-old had apparently, in foul weather, left a warm house wearing no outer clothes.
*
I was selfishly missing Alison reading the AA map that kept sliding off my dashboard and on to the floor, especially since the windscreen wipers were doing nothing to shift what had become hail.
“Keep going north-east,” the hotelier had said. “And good luck.” But divine intervention not luck, was what I needed.
It came in the form of Nantyfer - Nevern - and a ghostly, ruined castle rearing up beyond low-lying water for as far as the eye could see. After twenty long minutes and a buffeting trip over the Teifi estuary, came the lights of Cardigan before a sign for Gwbert and Glan y Mor. The village I was looking for.
CROESO Y CEREDIGION
Thank you, God.
*
Higher here, with the hail more fierce, driving in from Cardigan Bay. I was the only imbecile out in such weather, and even Glan y Mor village itself, drenched and cowering beneath a backdrop of ragged hills, was deserted. Its frothing gulleys spewed their overflow across its main street lined by small terraced houses whose curtains were all drawn. Most front rooms were lit, and those with thinner curtains showed silhouetted figures standing, as if on guard, waiting for daylight.
I slowed down enough to spot a small stone-built school with all lights blazing, then a pub, a closed chippy and a Post Office. No-one was answering the phone at Ty Capel, so I had a choice of places to visit first. Too many, in fact.
Ysgol Dylan Thomas still smelt of recent occupation. A mix of socks, dinner and more obviously, dust from a number of unseen but whirring vacuum cleaners..
Once I’d explained who I was, why I was there and and shown my card, the middle-aged secretary in her office checked through the relevant year 3’s register and tutted.
“Half a day here, half a day there,” Mair Owen looked up at me. “But have we ever seen his tad? Or big sister? No-one’s too busy to care, are they? It’s horses, horses, horses with that lot.” She closed the register and stood up.
Time to go.
“If you do see, hear or remember anything however trivial about Mathieu,” I said, handing her my card to keep. “Please do get in touch.”
She sniffed. Began switching off lights.
I reached the door, then turned around. “Was he bullied? I mean, he’s hardly a native round here.”
“What are you implying, Mr Lyon? That we’re racist?”
Her glare was all I needed and, having parking up the kerb, I sloshed my way through the torrent that threatened to invade the pub’s main door. Salt in the air, and a kippery smell in my nose as I pushed my way in, soon realising this was the second mistake of the day. No-one in this gloomy hole was going to help me out, and my appeal for directions to the stables died in my throat as all six drinkers looked me up and down with suspicion in their uniformly black eyes before turning away. As for any kind of helpful bar person, forget it.
In stark contrast, the Post Office three doors up was well-lit, welcoming and even proclaimed a café area at the back. The moment I mentioned Ty Capel to the fresh-faced peroxide blonde woman behind the counter whom I’d guessed to be in her mid-forties, she soon regaled me with her version of recent events there. How most decent folk including Kevin, her son who was the stable’s jockey for an important race at Chepstow tomorrow, were already out searching for the little lad.
“The police round here are rubbish,” she announced. “All related. All Masons… You’re not one of them, are you? Or,” upon seeing my stick, “ex-army?”
I paused, recalling that secretive group in the pub. Tongues a-wagging, spreading news of a stranger at large, as if this was the Wild bloody West. No, not as if. This was it.
“I’m in bloodstock,” I lied. “Come to look at one of their yearlings.”
“Right.”
But did she believe me? I wasn’t sure. I cursed this limp and stick, that made most fictitious jobs just that. Improbable.
“Has your Kevin any theories about Mathieu?” I said.
“Only that he hated school. That one over there,” she pointed to further up the street. “Old, inbred harridan for a headmistress and as for the kids… I wouldn’t let my lad attend, that’s for sure. On one occasion last month, Mathieu actually began walking home on his own. In the snow if you please. I gave him a lift.” She lowered her voice. “Imagine having to learn Welsh as a first language if French is your own. No wonder he’s bunked off.”
“Was he bullied? The school secretary dismissed that idea.”
“Typical.”
She kept those frank, brown eyes on mine. A smile creasing the sides of her mouth. “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”
Here goes…
“In another life. In Nottingham.”
“Nice. We’re from Coventry, and I’m Fran Lockley, divorced and dare I say it, happy.” She withdrew a cigarette from a packet below the counter and offered me one.
“Sorry,” I said. “Given up, like most things.”
Her smile widened. “Like that is it?”
I felt the back of my neck begin to burn as it had done in the VW with Alison, while the postmistress blew smoke up to the ceiling.
“Mind you, there’s even more going on here than in the Midlands, get my meaning?” she said. “I’m just waiting for a masked gang up
from Swansea to appear, and that’ll be the icing on the cake. As for Mathieu being bullied, yes, he was last year. A lot. But then so were most of the kids till Rhys Evans got removed. Nasty piece of work, him. Used to steal from our Pick ‘n’ Mix display when it was at the front, and that wasn’t all.”
“Evans?”
She nodded. “Dad’s a cop, would you believe? Can’t keep his own bloody house in order…”
“Do you know his brother Sion? A slaughterer. Drives a dark blue transporter and a white van?”
But before she could reply, the shop door opened behind me, bringing with it a squall of rain.
“Bore da, Mrs Harris, said Fran Lockley without much enthusiasm. I turned to see one of those women from the friendly pub standing too close. Her breath beery. I sensed immediately she wanted me gone, but I hadn’t finished. My glove box was empty of anything to eat and this might turn out to be a long day.
“Two Mars bars and those crisps, please,” I said, knowing the calorie-counting Alison would have been appalled. As I dug a note from my wallet and passed it over, the stranger prodded my arm.
“You got a bet on that French horse for tomorrow?”
“Why?”
A loose-tooth cackle followed. “He’s askin’why?” She prodded me again. “Made my day, that has.”
Fran Lockley scrolled her eyes towards the ceiling while I excused myself, and the woman shuffled forwards, speaking again. “Talk is, the favourite’s just bolted. You know, the grey your son’s due to ride. So, can I have my pound back? It is your sweepstake, after all…”
*
An empty, wider road this time, with dramatic glimpses of sea through my de-misting windscreen. I could imagine the riding being good round here, with bright green grass as far as the eye could see. Precious little shelter for anyone lost, however, and as I drove on, kept a look out for any possible sighting of a young boy struggling to reach home.
In any normal circumstances, I’d have called into the school again, checked out other possible contacts, but things were far from normal. For a start, if Alain Deschamps hadn’t called the police at Cardigan, then who had?
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