Cold Remains

by Spedding, Sally;

  Suddenly, in this wild, sullen world of the red kite and other airborne predators, she spotted something odd, out of place, just beneath the tallest spoil heap. Was it some large dog or wild creature escaped from the forestry? Hard to tell with rain now lashing her face. And then, using both hands as blinkers, she could see that whatever it was, had straightened up and now stood still as a post. But why there of all places? In such foul unforgiving weather?

  4.

  Friday 3rd April 2009 – 6.30 a.m.

  Jason’s bribe to his brother hadn’t worked, so here he was, upstairs in the borrowed bedroom, getting ready to leave. He folded the last of his boxer shorts and added them to his dad’s ancient suitcase. Alongside this, on his now stripped single bed, lay leftovers of a Woolworth life he never wanted to see again; takeover or no takeover. Four ballpoint pens, a red file crammed with hassling memos from his store manager, and a matching cap that had made him look like the village idiot. So there’d been an ex-employee in Dorchester who’d reopened the defunct shop as Wellworth’s, but no way was he schlepping down there on the off-chance of a job. In fact, with that Easter week’s course looming, job hunting was, for the time being, on the back burner. And God only knew when Monty Flynn would be getting his first chapter from him, never mind a mug shot.

  He looked around what had been home for the past two months. His brother could have these crap souvenirs and the wonky swivel chair bought with the first bonus back in 1999; plus his framed Frith print of Bradwell-on-Sea where he and Colin had been brought up, and where their mum still lived in the clapperboard cottage within sight of the power station. He hoped both his brother’s and The Girlfriend’s consciences would ping when they saw them, but knew they wouldn’t.

  OK, he’d done well to find a bed after his landlady had defaulted on a buy-to-let mortgage. But he’d paid Colin the going rate, no favours asked. The mean sod could have let him stay on just one more week. Bribe or no bribe.

  He closed the suitcase, giving each rusty lock a shove. Then, having checked in the mirror that his new, dark stubble was giving him the desired Max Byers look, lifted his leather jacket from the hook on the door and slotted Evil Eyes into his inside pocket. Combined with the drone of jets flying in and out of Heathrow, its story had kept him awake at night. But how could he return it to the library before reaching the end? He couldn’t.

  “Ciao,” he muttered to himself as he crept along the thickly carpeted landing and left his brother’s keys outside his bedroom door. Just to hear his and The Girlfriend’s separate snores and to imagine their warm closeness, delivered a sudden and bottomless sense of loss. His dad, Archie, everything had gone.

  Having hefted the remainder of his worldly goods downstairs and left two twenty-pound notes on the kitchen table, he hesitated for a few seconds, wondering where on earth could he go now?

  ***

  He pulled up his jacket collar against the thickening drizzle, feeling the hardback’s solid weight against his breastbone. He’d cheated and turned to its bleak ending which left open the possibility of a sequel. After that brief panic attack in Colin’s hallway, this gave him some hope. His life too would go on. And just then, as an Eddie Stobart truck drew up alongside him at the lights and its driver gave him a thumbs up sign, he had an idea.

  Never mind that the one public phone in Ali’s Café was slimy with grease and the small booth itself was stickered with mug shots of various ‘masseuses.’ Until he topped up his mobile, this would have to do. He pushed in a one pound coin and punched the number he now knew off by heart. Nothing ventured, he told himself as the ringing continued.

  Don’t sound too desperate...

  “Yes?”

  He took a punt. “Mrs Davies?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Mr Robbins. I spoke to you on Tuesday, remember? And Monty Flynn. I’m due to start the writing course on the 9th and was just wondering if…”

  “Best you speak to him. Here he is now. Light sleeper he is, despite them pills. Drinks far too much of the whatjecallit, see; but will he listen?”

  Jason hesitated, not only because of her lack of discretion. Maybe he should wait until later. He heard the Welsh woman pass on his name. Noticed a black guy in overalls come into the café and browse through the copy of Metro he himself had found on the table.

  “Up with the lark, eh?” said the Irishman now on the line. Despite the woman’s unflattering comments, he seemed as fresh as a daisy. “Is it about your first chapter?”

  “No. And I’m sorry to call so early...” Jason’s voice was almost lost to the espresso machine spitting out steam. “But I’ve a problem.”

  “A writer’s prerequisite. The more the merrier. What problem?”

  For a moment he wondered if the man was now on his own. His news wasn’t public property. Not yet. He heard Mrs Davies being asked to start the washing machine and, having heard the faint slam of a nearby door, began his real-life story.

  ***

  He should have been feeling relieved that thanks to the Irishman’s empathy, he’d be spared flat hunting as a Department of Social Security case in the scummiest parts of London for the next week, but he wasn’t. Scabbers were other people.

  “There’s always mum,” a small voice persisted inside his head as he sat with a third mug of tea, watching the rain slew against the café’s window and those people still with jobs to go to, leaning into it as if crossing the Mongolian plains. No way. Bad enough he’d had to rely on Colin for so long. Besides, Shirley Robbins had found herself another bed mate – not the first since his dad died after falling off scaffolding in Dalston. An ex-boxer, this one, wanting her all to himself.

  Jason picked up the freebie rag for yet more sound bites on the recession and case studies of some of those affected, including a graduate in Media Studies who’d been one of hundreds queuing for one vacancy at KFC in Balham, to a pensioner whose nest egg had slipped down the pan. And then, on page 4 between news of a knife attack in Clapham and lane closures on the South Circular, was a paragraph headed:

  WEALTHY EX-BUSINESSMAN FOUND DEAD

  A seventy-two-year-old man, iden-tified as Charles Pitt-Rose, was found by police last night, hanged in an underground garage beneath his mansion block apartment in Islington. Anyone with information should contact the Metropolitan Police at their Tolpuddle St. station.

  But why, with the café filling up and the busy din increasing all around him, did Jason feel as if someone had slipped an ice cube down his back?

  “You done with that?” The same black guy was eyeing the paper.

  “Not yet.”

  The stranger moved away, but not the sense of a dank, dark space and a lonely man maybe driven to the brink and beyond. Jason extracted Evil Eyes from his jacket. The victim, whom Vasilich had thrown in the water and shot, had been a Moscow gang member. Perhaps Charles Pitt-Rose had also been in deep trouble. Perhaps his death wasn’t suicide after all. Whatever, stuff like this could be useful in his novel. Corruption and betrayal, ending with a car chase along Beachy Head.

  Jason got up, checked his watch. That cold feeling still there, but excitement too.

  He stepped outside into the hostile morning and passed the boarded-up Woolworth’s without pausing on his way to Tesco Express to top up his phone, then on to the Tube. Suddenly, like a wraith, his brother’s Merc glided by. Both Colin and The Girlfriend just shadows behind its tinted glass. Nevertheless, Jason waved, but to them he was invisible. A nobody. A failure. But not, he told himself, for long.

  5.

  Friday 3rd April 2009 – 2 p.m.

  Having heard the hall phone ring early, Helen had stopped in the middle of brushing her teeth to open her bedroom door and listen. That same Jason guy had been trying to cadge an extra week at Heron House. Bloody cheek, she’d thought, having herself been told in no uncertain terms that if any of her arty mates wanted to freeload here, then tough. They’d have to stay at the Fox and Feathers. Heffy, however, was the exception. Mr Fly
nn had liked the sound of her.

  But why had The Rat still hung around, even though he’d ordered her into the laundry room? One day, when the pest had gone or died, she’d snitch on her big time. But right now, until a better job came along, she must cling to this one like a bluebottle to a fly strip.

  “Mr Robbins will be arriving at 5.20 p.m. at Swansea station,” Mr Flynn informed her later as he was getting ready for another stint at the pub. “I told him there’d be a car waiting, and afterwards, a nice three-course meal. Can we do that?” His eyes with their well-worn twinkle, weakened her defences as he pressed a crumpled twenty-pound note in her hand.

  “We?”

  “Come on, Helen. It’s just a figure of speech. You know you’re my main man round here. It’s crucial we get things off to a good start. Our Londoner sounds like the kind of punter who’ll spread the word. And right now, the word’s what we need...”

  ***

  For a start, her hair out of its pony tail scrunchie, for the first time in yonks, stuck out in all directions, refusing to lie flat against the nape of her neck. Secondly, her car, an aged Ignis with a dodgy tyre and even dodgier clutch, hadn’t seen a vacuum cleaner since the day of her interview in February. Soil and dead leaves covered its once jolly mats, while a layer of stubborn green slime lined each of the windows.

  At least it was a car, she told herself, still ratty at having to drive a round trip of eighty miles to include shopping en route. If Mr Robbins so much as mentioned the state of it, he could damned well leg it up-country on his own.

  So preoccupied was she with overtaking those caravans and camper vans, that seemed to have sprouted on the roads overnight, she forgot altogether how two events had freaked her out recently. The first, on Wednesday’s walk to Aunty Betsan’s bungalow up on Pen Cerrigmwyn, when she’d spotted what must have been the remains of that poor Collie dog Mr Flynn had mentioned. Bits of black and white fur lying in rain-thinned blood.

  Next, a dark, motionless figure standing in front of the silent lead mine workings. She’d stayed there holding her breath for a few minutes until, as if she’d been dreaming, it faded away.

  As for this strange experience, her boss didn’t need to know everything, but Betsan Griffiths did. The neatly turned out spinster who’d claimed she’d once catered for local weddings and hotels in Llandovery and Llanddewi Brefi, had neither seen nor heard of any mysterious watcher. “Rain and wind, mind, can cause some right old tricks,” she’d said, handing Helen four of her easiest recipes for main meals. “Mind you, some say that since that village was drowned under Llynn Brianne, there’s been a few dead folk wandering about, looking for their homes. So she says.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “The cleaner over at your place.”

  “Gwenno?”

  Instead of a nod, the woman had frowned. Something clearly bugging her. “I never call her that. She’s done me too much harm. Her and her mouth. And she’s not the only one.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You watch yourself.”

  “I will.”

  And then the back door had closed behind her, for the rods of rain to hit her skin and deliver, not for the first time, a gnawing sense of unease. What had Aunty Betsan meant by those strange remarks? What harm exactly? And who else had she meant?

  ***

  “Can I help you, madam?” asked a large guy trapped inside a navy blue tabard at a Fforestfach store. “You seem lost.”

  “Parmesan,” she said, suddenly realising why she was here. “And bay leaves. For a spag bol.”

  Once outside in the busy car park, she checked her watch. Ten minutes left for a rush-hour trip of six miles. She’d miscalculated the volume of traffic. So little passed by Heron House, that even the post van or forestry lorry was an event.

  Her resentment at feeling used, mounted with every lurch and stop of her car. OK, so Mr Flynn had soon come clean about the writing courses. But had he seriously been expecting her to rustle up the promised fare with no notice? Of course. That’s how he operated. Impulse his middle name, with others – meaning her – picking up the pieces. Idris Davies, the groundsman, said the same on the rare occasions he’d communicated with her, but like his wife, he’d been at Heron House for years. So long in fact, that the oaks and dead chestnuts, the banks of rhododendrons and the bluebell trail, had become closer to him than any close relative. And, in his eyes, no-one, not even Mrs Davies, it seemed, matched up to them.

  The wind was different here. Sharper, more gusty, coming off the sea. The rain too with no mountain barrier between these outskirts and the Bay. Helen switched on Radio 4, only to turn it off again. She’d given up listening to the news, but not so her mam up in Borth. An energetic primary school teacher, full of suggestions for what her only child with – in her eyes – a useless degree, should really be doing to ‘ride the recession’ as she’d put it. Undertaking had been top of her list of suggestions. ‘Everyone has to die sometime. The one sure thing.’

  So it was. But not just yet.

  ***

  Once in Swansea, near the station, Helen parked her Ignis up on the kerb outside a greasy spoon café and switched off its grunting wipers. Her curiosity about the emergency arrival now outweighed her resentment at his nerve. Perhaps he was as old as Mr Flynn. Or older. Perhaps he had a shady past best kept hidden. As she tried opening her knackered umbrella against the wind, she realised with a churning pulse, she was soon about to find out.

  Commuters. Swarms of them, striding, clack-clacking along the platform towards her like a dark, rough sea. Who was she looking for? There’d been no description asked for, or given. Just that Jason Robbins would be wearing a black leather jacket plus jeans, and carrying a battered suitcase.

  And then she spotted it. Attached to a guy in yes, black leather and stone-washed denim who seemed paler than his travelling companions, with a more wary look in his eye. His gelled brown hair bristled from his head, and from the lobe of his left ear, glistened a small stud.

  Not her sort at all.

  However, she’d been trained to observe, to look hard at her subject, and saw that although that suitcase with its rusted steel corners, seemed medieval, the shoes weren’t cheap. Nor the jacket that hung from a pair of broad shoulders. As he handed his ticket to the waiting inspector, she noticed there was no wedding ring. She also wondered what job he did to be able to take an extra week off. Why it was so important to come to Wales now, and whether or not he had a return ticket tucked away somewhere.

  He glanced up, caught her eye, then walked past her, probably thinking that a representative of the grandly-named Heron House would at least look the part.

  “Hi.” She ran after him, pushing her wet hair off her face. Aware how naff she looked in the black suit not worn since her uncle’s funeral three years ago. “Are you by any chance Jason Robbins?”

  He stopped, turned to face her, that same wary expression giving way to a smile. “Are you Patsy Palmer?”

  “Funny, not. I’m Helen Jenkins from Heron House.” She held out her right hand like Mr Flynn had told her to do. “Welcome to wet and windy Wales. Or, as they say here, Croeso i Gymru.”

  6.

  Friday 3rd April 2009 – 6.25 p.m.

  The motorway’s commuter cars and delivery vans were soon replaced by muddy 4X4s and horse boxes, reminding Jason of rural Essex until he saw hills that almost appeared to be moving as rain clouds shifted overhead to reveal promising scraps of blue. He wound down his window to let cool air bathe his face. “Why Heron House?” he asked his less than talkative driver. “Do they breed herons there, or what?”

  “They did,” she replied, taking the road signed for Ammanford and Llandeilo off a big roundabout. “Some time in the seventies. Long after the lead mines had closed.”

  “Lead mines?” Monty Flynn hadn’t mentioned anything about these when describing the surrounding landscape as being a second Garden of Eden. A wild, unspoilt refuge. Balm for the soul. However, it was ea
sier to ask questions about their destination than having to explain to someone he didn’t yet know why he was arriving a week early. As it was none of her business, he assumed Monty Flynn had kept his confidentiality.

  Every time she hit a drain cover or pothole, his knees butted the glove box, his seatbelt tightened across his chest, and it was while stop-starting through Llandeilo’s busy main street, that a rush of panic quickened his pulse. He shut his eyes and opened them in shock. For a split second, yet as if in slow motion, all the colours of shop fronts, traffic and passers-by seemed to morph into a uniformly dull brown colour; the pavements empty save for a few people moving around, dressed in clothes from what he guessed was the World War II era. This busy street had been replaced by a weird stillness, with just a few ancient Austin and Morris cars and a solitary pony and trap labouring up the hill in the opposite direction.

  The Ignis was travelling on dirt, not tarmac, where scattered piles of droppings lay uncollected. The smell of wood smoke and manure met his nose.

  “You OK?” asked Helen Jenkins, throwing him a glance.

  “I’m not sure. Can you see something odd going on?”

  “Where?”

  “Outside. It’s like… really strange. As if we’re part of some old photograph.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  He produced his mobile and turned its screen to face the now open window. “What are you doing?” Helen asked.

  “Taking a video. You never know. For posterity.”

  Passers-by, wearing long black coats, noticed it and immediately shielded their faces.