by Rhys Bowen
But he still hadn’t gone on a fairy-hunting expedition with Sarah. Even though they now included him in their play, they certainly weren’t going to let Sarah go off alone into the hills with him. That didn’t stop Sarah from asking him questions at any opportunity she got. She would lag behind as the big boys scrambled up the hillside and call out to Evan to pull her up.
He also remembered the thrill as he took her hand.
It was five-thirty when Evan finally drove back to Llanfair. He had spent the rest of the afternoon checking out reported sightings that had come in as a result of the Sunday morning newspapers. After a couple of hours of phone calls, Evan was convinced that people had too much time on their hands on Sundays, also that too many people harbored secret prejudices against foreigners. One phone call after another found him talking to someone, and it could equally be a woman or a man, mostly older, who was reporting the man upstairs or the man across the street because he looked foreign, sounded foreign, and was therefore suspicious. As in the morning, two hours of making phone calls resulted in a handful of leads worth following. Among these was a sighting in Yorkshire, which was interesting since Ashley’s mother gave her current address as Leeds. However, this was on the outskirts of Skipton, on the moors, well to the northwest of Leeds. A man resembling the picture had come into a village newsagents to ask for directions a couple of weeks ago. The newsagent had particularly remembered the Russian accent—just like in spy films on the telly.
The fact that it was Yorkshire made this tip worth passing along to North Yorks Police, although the trail was now two weeks old. He could have come to Yorkshire to seek them out, and then found that they had gone to Wales. But surely he couldn’t have lost his way to the extent that he had driven past Leeds and wound up on the moors?
Who knew how people’s minds worked, Evan thought, as he drove home for the night. Perhaps Sholokhov had read Wuthering Heights in Russian and had taken off on a whim to see the landscape for himself? They needed to find out more about his personality, rather than blindly hunting for him.
As Evan slowed the car to a halt, he noticed a stream of people making their way up the village street. For a moment he wondered what was wrong and where they could be going. Then he saw his former landlady, Mrs. Williams, in her Sunday hat, and realized that they were heading for evening chapel. He had completely forgotten that it was Sunday and was stricken with that pang of conscience that remains with those raised in strict, religious households throughout their lifetimes.
Mrs. Williams spotted the car and was standing, waiting for him, arms folded, as he opened the door.
“Don’t tell me they’ve made you work again on the Sabbath, is it?” she said, shaking her head. “What sort of heathen institution are they running, I’d like to know?”
“Crimes don’t take weekends off, Mrs. W.” He smiled at her.
“Well, I hope you’ve got time to change and make it to chapel tonight,” she said accusingly. “You missed a beautiful sermon this morning—lovely just, it was. The reverend was in fine form. About the camel going through the eye of the needle and it being so hard to get into heaven that almost nobody’s going to make it—except for us, of course. Those people who go to chapel regular on Sundays, I mean.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “And the music was very uplifting, I must say.” She paused and examined him critically. “You’re looking peaky these days. I hope you’re eating proper. You need to hurry up with that wedding so that Miss Price can look after you. Toad in the hole in the pub—whatever next?”
And she went on her way up the street, leaving Evan staring after her. The Llanfair telegraph was so impressive that she had even heard about the toad in the hole! The smile faded as a thought struck him. Even though it was twenty-five years ago now, was it possible that someone in Llanfair knew something about the skeleton buried outside Rhodri’s cottage?
Evan sighed and went indoors to get changed for chapel. There was only one way into the Red Dragon pub on Sunday nights, and that was to follow Harry-the-Pub in through the back door after chapel was over. Although almost the whole of Wales now officially allowed pubs to stay open on Sundays, Harry had bowed to pressure from the two ministers and their wives and at least kept the front door firmly closed. It was almost six by the time Evan had changed into a clean shirt and slacks. He hurried up the street to make it into Capel Bethel before the big double doors were shut, thus making it impossible to sneak in late without being heard. As he approached the two chapels, he heard an imperious voice calling him.
“Constable Evans!”
He didn’t need to look around to know that the voice belonged to Mrs. Powell-Jones, wife of the Reverend Powell-Jones, minister of Capel Beulah across the street—the one he didn’t attend.
“A word with you before you disappear into—that place,” she said, her voice loud and clear enough for all those now entering Capel Bethel to hear. She made the words “that place” sound like a strip club or the anteroom of hell.
Evan dutifully crossed the street. “Can I help you with something, Mrs. Powell-Jones?”
“You most certainly can, young man. I know you are no longer officially in charge of the welfare of this village, but you are still a policeman and you do still live among us. Now that we have nobody watching over us and those wretched squad cars never turn up when summoned, I have nobody else to go to.”
“Is something wrong?” he asked, and wished instantly that he hadn’t.
“Of course something is wrong. Tell me, am I not right in thinking there is an ordinance on the books against excessive noise on Sundays?”
“If it’s causing a nuisance.”
“It is causing an extreme nuisance,” she said. “Electric guitars. One of those dreadful pop groups.”
“There’s a pop group in the village? I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes. Dreadful loud heathen music desecrating the Sabbath, making it impossible for good Christians to worship. I tried calling your so-called police hot line, and they refused to do anything about it.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll speak to them about it. Do you happen to know where the music was coming from?”
She pointed dramatically. “From that place.”
“From the chapel?”
She sighed. “Well, what can you expect? That Parry Davies man has to lure in people somehow, knowing that he doesn’t possess my husband’s ability to preach. So what have they got now but electric music—amplified music blasting out so that we couldn’t hear ourselves pray.”
“Dear me,” Evan said. “Well, I’m just about to go in there, so I’ll have a word, shall I?”
Mrs. Powell-Jones managed a smile. “I would be most grateful.”
Evan was intrigued as he joined the last of the worshippers to beat Charlie Hopkins closing the doors. He couldn’t imagine where Rev. Parry Davies had dug up a rock group to play in chapel. The question was answered almost immediately. Mr. Parry Davies came out of the vestry, wearing his black gown, and faced the congregation.
“For those of you who were here this morning, you’ll know we’ve had a slight mishap,” he said. “Mice have eaten through the organ bellows, and we can’t get any sound out of it. So until we can afford to have it fixed, Betsy Edwards has kindly volunteered her young man to accompany our singing. And we are most grateful to him for stepping into the breach like this.”
Barry-the-Bucket, still looking remarkably clean and well scrubbed, but also remarkably embarrassed, stepped out beside the altar, an electric guitar in his hands, and started strumming the chords to “Cwm Rhondda.”
Chapter 18
As soon as the service was over, the congregation filed out—the women out of the front door and home down the street to prepare dinner, the men out of the side door and along the footpath to the Red Dragon. Evan was about to follow when he thought of Bronwen. She’d had a weekend all alone—she certainly wouldn’t take kindly to his heading straight for the pub.
He ran out past the last
of the women and sprinted up the street to the schoolhouse.
“Evan, what is it?” Bronwen sounded anxious as she saw him standing there, breathing heavily after his run.
“Do you fancy a drink?”
She laughed. “You ran all the way here to ask me that?”
“Well, you see, I want to go to the Dragon to ask some questions and then I thought we could go out for dinner somewhere, but you know how you have to be let in with the crowd on Sundays or you don’t get in at all.”
Bronwen laughed. “Oh, I see. I’m not exactly dressed for going out tonight.”
She was wearing jeans and a big navy sweater.
“You look just fine to me.”
“You always say that,” Bronwen said, “but I wouldn’t feel comfortable going to a restaurant looking as if I’d just been hiking.”
“We can always come back for you to change after we’ve been to the Dragon. No rush.”
“All right then. Come on.” She took his hand. “Before they lock us out.”
The bar at the Red Dragon was subdued, as befitted a Sunday evening—a low murmur of conversation being considered suitable and not even Frank Sinatra on the jukebox. Bronwen followed Evan to the bar, even though most women still took their drinks through to the lounge. It was considered fast and loose to hang around with the men.
“What’ll you have?” he asked. “And please don’t say Perrier.”
She laughed. “All right. Ginger beer shandy then.”
“Ginger beer shandy and a pint of Guinness, please, Betsy fach,” Evan said, making sure not to call her cariad, with Bronwen and Barry both listening.
Betsy looked up to see who the shandy was for. “Oh, hello, Miss Price. Fancy seeing you here. I noticed Evan in chapel, coming in at the last minute, but I didn’t see you with him.”
“No, I wasn’t with him.”
“You weren’t raised chapel, were you?”
“I wasn’t raised much of anything, but I was taken to chapel when I stayed with my nain.”
Evan watched them and noted, with relief, that the tension had gone from their interactions these days. Since Barry-the-Bucket had come on the scene and Evan had become engaged to Bronwen, Betsy was no longer seen as a potential threat.
He took his drink and moved toward the men. While he was still considering when and how he should tackle the subject of the skeleton, they beat him to it.
“So what’s this about finding a skeleton at Rhodri’s old place then?” Evans-the-Meat asked him. “They say some woman from the university came to take a look at it. And Charlie says that if it’s old enough, they’ll want to dig up the whole place and you’ll not be allowed to finish your building, is it?”
Another point scored for the Llanfair bush telegraph, Evan thought. It was only surprising that they hadn’t found out who the skeleton was.
“It’s a child’s skeleton,” he said. “And not so old. Less than forty years, the anthropologist says.”
“Anthro—what?” Barry asked.
“Forensic anthropologist,” Evan said. “She’s an expert at identifying old bones.”
“Yes, you know, like you see on the telly when they can take a bit of rock or an old skull and tell you that it’s ten million years old.” Charlie Hopkins came to join them, pint in hand. “Wonderful what they can do now with science, isn’t it?”
Evans-the-Meat sniffed. “I always think they’re making it up, personally,” he said. “I mean, who’s going to tell them they’re wrong? It’s the same when they tell me some star is a billion light-years away. I mean, nobody’s got a tape measure that long, have they?”
Evan noticed Bronwen listening and about to tell the butcher how light-years are measured. Not wanting to get off topic, he forestalled her.
“So about this skeleton, then,” he said. “Who do you think it could be?”
“A child, you say?” Owens-the-Sheep asked. “How old?”
“About four, five, they think.”
The men looked at each other and shrugged. “I never heard of a child going missing from around here.”
“There was that little girl outside Bethesda.” Evan managed to keep his voice even and casual. “Remember, about twenty years ago?”
“Oh, yes,” Charlie Hopkins said. “I do remember now. Summer visitor, wasn’t it? But that was a good way from here. And she was never found?”
Evan shook his head. “Never found.”
“I can’t see why she’d end up here, though, can you? Rhodri’s cottage?”
“Rhodri was living in it then?” Evan asked.
“I’m sure he was,” Charlie said. “Twenty years ago?”
“More like twenty-five,” Evan said.
“That would make it—seventy-eight? Seventy-nine?”
“And you said something about water pipes being put in around that time, Charlie?” Evan suggested.
“You’re right. Around that time. I remember Rhodri getting angry because they had to dig up all his plants to put that pipe in. Not that he had much of what you’d call a garden anyway, but he liked it.”
“So those bushes by the gate would have been planted after the pipes went in, or did they leave those?”
“I think he had to plant everything new when the men had gone. I know he was hopping mad about the mess they left. Bloody great mounds of mud and dirt everywhere, he said.”
“And who put in these pipes?” Evan asked. “Was it a local contractor?”
Charlie shrugged. “I can’t remember anymore. Wasn’t it the water board? But I couldn’t say who they used. They did your farm at the same time, didn’t they, Bill?” He turned to Mr. Owens.
“That’s right. They connected all the hill farms at the same time. Seventy-eight, it was, because that was the year our Sioned was born. The wife was expecting any day, and she was worried that they’d dig up the track and we wouldn’t be able to drive down the hill to the hospital. But they were through and out very quickly.”
“And I understand that you didn’t own all this land in those days.” Evan turned to the farmer.
“No, I only owned about half what I have now. I bought the rest from some bloke over in the next valley. Not long afterward that would have been. He asked a really fair price so we took out a second mortgage and snapped it up.”
“So Rhodri wasn’t working for you until you bought the extra land?”
“He didn’t work for me for some time after that. I couldn’t afford to employ an extra shepherd in those days. We were very hard up, what with getting the farm going, building up the breeding stock, and then producing young ones of our own. Rhodri only came to work for me in the late eighties, after he had a falling-out with the farmer he worked for. Thomas, his name was, on the other side of the Glyders.”
“Was Rhodri the sort who had fallings-out?” Evan asked the general company. “I hardly knew him. He was a very old man by the time I moved here, and then he went to live with his daughter. But you said he was hopping mad, so I wondered if he had a bad temper.”
“Oh, a terrible temper,” Charlie said. “Especially when he’d had a couple. He liked his whisky chasers, you know. I recall him having many a set-to with the barman in those days. That was before Harry’s time. It was Dai Roberts then—and he’d refuse to serve Rhodri when he’d had too much. Oh, and Rhodri would get that riled. ‘As long as I’m paying, your job’s to keep pouring,’ he’d say. Didn’t he, Sam?” He turned to Betsy’s father, Sam Edwards, sitting in his usual seat, nursing his pint.
“Terrible, just.” Sam said. “And when he got home, it was worse. You could hear him and the wife going at it right down here in the valley. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill each other, the way they shouted. Of course, her temper was worse than his even, and that’s saying something. My, but she was a dreadful old woman.”
“But she was dead by then, wasn’t she?” Evan asked.
“By when?”
“When they put the water pipes in.”
“Oh,
yes. She went long before that.” Sam looked up and laughed. “You’re not saying that it’s her lying in that grave outside the front door? Well, I wouldn’t have put it past him, but she died of cancer when their daughter was still a little child.”
“Best thing that could have happened for that kid,” Charlie said. “Rhodri sent her to live with her auntie in Bangor. Not only did she get a decent upbringing in a God-fearing home, but she inherited the house and that’s where she’s still living. And he lives with her now, of course.”
“He’s still alive then?”
“Oh, yes. I saw him only a few weeks ago. Miserable as ever, of course. Complains about everything, but still hale and hearty and gets around.”
“I’ll be going to visit him this week,” Evan said. “Let’s hope his temper has calmed down a little with age.”
“Just don’t let him think you’re accusing him,” Charlie suggested.
“I’m not accusing him of anything,” Evan said. “But if someone buried a child outside his front door, you’d have thought that he might have seen something or his dog might have smelled something.”
The men nodded. “Yes, you would have thought so, wouldn’t you? Of course, he was off roving the hills from light until dark. Anyone could have sneaked up while he was gone, especially if it was lambing season.”
“So did you get anything out of that?” Bronwen slipped her arm through Evan’s as they stepped out into the chill wind.
“Not really, only that Rhodri had a terrible temper and he’s still alive.”
“But men with terrible tempers don’t go around killing strange children, do they? They get into fights and kill their mates.”
“There’s one more thing I hadn’t considered,” Evan said. “There would have been a team of laborers up here digging the trench for those pipes. The local council will have a record of who they are, I expect. It will be worth checking to see if any of them have any kind of history of subsequent child abuse.”
“I’m sure they must have checked them at the time, surely,” Bronwen said, snuggling closer to Evan as they caught the full force of the wind rushing down the pass. “A team of strange men working on the mountain would have been prime suspects.”