“I’m over at Troed y Rhiw should you ever need me,” persisted his companion. “Don’t forget. The youngsters round here think the world of you.”
That hadn’t been his impression.
Nevertheless, Lionel nodded his gratitude, and started on his way up the steep track to his right. At the halfway point, he took a deep and necessary breath. Despite the organist’s kind words, his earlier resolve seemed to falter. Neither the beautiful, unfamiliar sun hovering over Dinas Hill, nor the sight of his welcoming chimney could drive away this sudden melancholy. For two pins he’d hand in a letter of resignation on Monday; pack his meagre belongings in his father’s metal trunk, that had returned from the Somme without him, and leave this equally foreign hinterland once and for all.
But no. He’d made the newly-buried boy a promise. And the one thing his own father, whose name he’d been given, had said, “Always keep your promise, son. The one thing I learnt at the Front.” But as Lionel crossed the dirt road, buoyed up by this memory of the hero who’d saved many lives on Vimy Ridge, he spotted a small, black-clad figure standing by his gate, carrying a long riding crop. Male or female, he couldn’t say, yet with boots polished to the kind of shine rarely seen in these parts. And then he noticed their dainty heels, the immaculate riding habit accentuating a boyish frame. He wondered where her mount was, or if there wasn’t one, did she normally go around dressed like that?
This stranger, whom he’d not noticed at the funeral, turned to him, pointing the tapering crop in his direction. Her pale face caught in the sun’s rare glow. Her eyes hard as slate. “A warning, Mr Headmaster. For all our sakes, and yours, forget that foolish young boy ever came to see you. Do you understand?”
Lionel felt blood drain from his head, as he rested his weight on his stick. Her warning quite different from the graveside rebukes. This was another matter entirely.
“What foolish boy?”
“Walter Jones. I saw him going into your schoolroom.”
“Why would he come to me? He never attends.”
His adversary’s gloved hand clasped his gatepost. He wanted to hit it away. Hit her away...
“Don’t play games with me, Mr Hargreaves. I heard every lying word he said.”
She must have opened the schoolroom door and listened like a fox in the night. Now he was boxed in and not cunning enough to escape. “I hardly think he was lying, Miss…?”
“Never you mind.” She slapped the crop against his boundary wall, and before he could turn away, to walk down his path to Cwm Cottage, her other gloved hand reached down into her riding-jacket pocket.
The next few seconds passed as if he was encased in a slow-motion nightmare. The vivid kind he often experienced just before waking, where unwanted colours and sounds left him drained for the day ahead. The bombing raids over his widowed mother’s house that he’d shared with her. The shrieks of children at play nearby.
The girl was holding a gun. Not the usual heavy-duty pistol used round here on vermin, but small, compact. Aimed all too steadily at his heart. “Remember what I’ve said,” she fixed him with a stare, “or it won’t just be your job you’ll be losing.”
“My job? What’s that to do with anything?”
A short, mocking laugh. “I can say to the police and the coroner, if necessary, that while he was with you Walter Jones screamed for mercy. That I heard him quite distinctly as I was riding over to Cilycwm. It sounded as if you were doing him serious harm.”
Lionel’s empty stomach seemed to turn over, and bile began to work its way towards his throat.
“Who the Hell are you? Where are you from?”
A metallic click.
“I said, remember.” And with that, the stranger backed away from him, gun still in place, before turning the corner out of sight. Her boot heels clack-clacked against the stones as she went.
With a trembling hand, Lionel turned his key in the front door lock, then suddenly stopped, listening hard. Thinking hard. If she’d heard a young lad in such distress, why not enquire at the time what was going on? Why pass on by? It didn’t make sense. But something else did. Her threat. Could she actually be frightened? Didn’t children behave in the same way when protecting their friends from deserved punishment? And the more he thought about her, and her tense little face, the more he realised she was little more than a child herself.
He let himself into the cottage’s warm parlour, where the log fire behind its guard was still alive, wondering all the while who so desperately needed her protection? And why?
10.
Saturday 4th April 2009 – 9 a.m.
While the Welsh slate clock on the kitchen mantelpiece chimed nine annoying times, Helen finished setting breakfast for one and switched on the coffee maker. Her movements had noticeably slowed. Her body seemed to belong to someone much older. Lack of sleep, she thought, and excitement, because whatever her view on Jason Robbins scabbing an extra week off Mr Flynn for peanuts, there was something about him. An inner core of self-belief, perhaps. Plus his body wasn’t bad either. All that physical stuff before he’d lost his warehouse job, had honed his thighs; the same for his lower arms. His hands too, were a nice shape, with squared-off nails. She was used to observing detail. Been trained to. As for the ear stud, she could soon get used to that.
“Hi, sorry I’m late.”
So here he was. But nothing like yesterday when anticipation had shone in his eyes. She’d drawn and painted from enough models to recognise who was chilled out and who was burdened. He seemed to be definitely in the second category. “Is anything wrong?” she ventured, bringing over a full cafetière to the table, and the same mug he’d used for tea yesterday.
“Not sure. Perhaps I’m going mad.”
“Tell me,” she pressed, as he sat down and ran a hand through his now ungelled hair. “Is it a smell? You know, like the septic tank?”
“No.”
“Or roses? Sickly sweet ones? I smelt them here when I first arrived. Talk about The White Lady in the Tower of London. Mr Flynn just laughed at me when I mentioned it, saying The Rat had probably discovered a new brand of air freshener.”
“Nothing to do with any smell. Something much more weird.” Jason’s coffee stayed untouched while he recounted that strange bird’s antics in his room, then the incident involving his library book. “And when I woke up, it was on the floor with whole pages torn out. I just don’t get it.”
“Nor me.” She went over to the bread bin, pulled out a sliced wholemeal loaf and popped two pieces into the toaster. Her hand unsteady. Her mind on that top-floor room and how odd it had felt going in there for the first time. “Did the temperature seem to drop?”
He shook his head. “It felt warmer if anything. Especially near that stain.”
Ugh…
“Toast?” she asked, before clicking the switch to ON. Better than dwelling on what he’d implied. Ghost stuff really scared her. The roses’ stink had been bad enough. “One or two?”
“I’m OK, thanks. But he clearly wasn’t. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Is Monty Flynn around?”
How could she tell him that most days her boss rarely showed up till late morning and then it was off to the boozer. “He’s usually in his office,” she lied. “But like I said, that’s verboten, even for The Rat.”
“Is that me you’re referring to?” shrilled an all-too-familiar voice from inside the walk-in larder. “Because if so, I’ll be telling Mr Flynn right this minute. Then let’s see what he has to say. I was here long before you forced yourself upon the world.” She emerged brandishing not her usual riding crop, but a spray can of furniture polish and a wad of bright yellow dusters. Her crossover apron bearing a map of Wales was tied even more tightly over her mean little body. Helen noticed how Carmarthenshire lay folded in on itself around her waist.
“So what? That doesn’t give you the right to snoop on everything I or Mr Flynn do,” Helen said.
“I have all the right.” She came close enoug
h for Helen to see the pink veins in the whites of her angry eyes. Her bony forefinger wagging back and fore.
“What do you mean by that?” Helen challenged, hearing the cooked toast pop up.
“Cool it,” whispered Jason. “Let’s go.”
“And you, young man,” Gwenno Davies called after him, “if you’ve a whit of sense you’ll take yourself back to where you came from. This girl will endanger you with her lies.”
Helen saw him turn his back as the woman pushed past him out of the kitchen. A subtle move that drove him upwards in her estimation.
“I’m off,” he said.
“Where?”
“Don’t care. I need to think. Sort my head out.”
***
“Bitch,” Helen muttered after her enemy, who was creeping upstairs wiping off any possible finger marks from the oak banister as she went. Her patch of scalp glowing under the dusty chandelier. “No, Rat bitch.” And to the Irishman hovering on the top step in his well-worn dressing gown who wouldn’t say ’boo’ to her, “I’m not sticking that woman much longer. Who could?”
Mr Flynn let Gwenno Davies pass, and from her lower position Helen saw a small smile of triumph stretch her uncharitable lips. She also noticed how her boss sucked at his right index finger.
“Did you hear me?” Helen’s voice raised a notch to reach him. “Doesn’t it matter what I think? Am I that invisible?”
But he slipped away without answering, back into his office-cum-bedroom over the lock-ups, and in that moment, Helen realised it wasn’t just his sleeping tablets giving him that unhealthy pallor. She’d been there when he’d picked up Jason’s copy of Metro and read about that hanging in London.
Something was seriously wrong.
She took the shallow stairs two at a time and tiptoed along the first floor’s narrow corridor before turning the tight corner at the far end to reach his door. Here she pressed her ear to its cold, old wood long enough to hear him on his landline phone asking Directory Enquiries for that Islington Police Station’s number.
***
Helen didn’t hang about, instead raced up to the attic floor and Jason’s unlocked room where to her surprise, that MARGIAD sign on the door had gone. Likewise the dark stain she’d almost dared ask The Rat to clean. But more than any of this was the book that had inspired the Londoner to come here in the first place. It lay intact on his bedside table, not a page missing, and in perfect order. Had his story been made up? And if so, why?
This is crazy. In fact, more than crazy.
She glanced at his neatly made bed then out of the dormer window on to the persistent drizzle and that normally dominant hill opposite now just a harmless blur. Then something that made her heartbeat quicken again. Jason was standing in the gateway down below, beckoning her to join him.
She hesitated, ashamed at being so easily flattered. Yet no-one she’d so far met in Llandovery or on her one evening visit to the Fox and Feathers with Mr Flynn, had paid her any attention. No worries about her mam’s one big fear all too loudly expressed when she’d landed the cooking job. “Don’t for God’s sake get embroiled with the peasants there. Wait until a man with proper work and a healthy bank balance comes along. Someone safe.”
She should be so lucky.
And there was Jason Robbins gesturing to her as if stranded on some desert island. Another one down on his luck, but nevertheless, clinging to a big dream. Hers was to have her own place. New and clean, unlike Heron House, complete with funky chairs and a big IKEA bed with drawers underneath.
She locked Jason’s door just in case, and was about to go downstairs two at a time when she saw Mr Flynn waiting for her on the bottom step.
“I’ll be away for the next couple of days,” he said, before lowering his voice. “Keep an eye on the place, and if the Davieses prove tricky, just let it go. OK?”
What an odd thing to say.
Helen stared at his tense features. His crumpled dark grey suit she’d never seen him wear. Here was a man afraid. “Where are you going? Just in case.”
“London. You’ve got my mobile number, but please, only in an emergency.”
“There won’t be any.”
“Good. And don’t give it to anyone else without my say-so.”
“OK.”
He suddenly gripped her nearest hand and she noticed a fresh plaster on that same right index finger he’d been sucking earlier. “Thanks for that, Helen. “Means a lot.” He gave her the strangest look before snatching up a well-worn briefcase and fleeing away through the hall and out of the front door. Within seconds, he was revving up the Volvo then negotiating the central flowerbed on two wheels, spraying mud and gravel into the air as he went.
***
Having pulled up the hood of her waxed coat and zipped herself inside its slightly sticky warmth up to the chin, Helen checked that her limited set of house keys were safe in her pocket along with two snatched cup cakes, then joined Jason who stood eyes fixed on the grey saloon as it sped out of sight.
“I locked your room,” she said.
“Damn. Forgot. Cheers.”
“Now then, left or right?” she said as brightly as she could. Her employer’s news could wait for the time being. Jason had been waiting for her, hadn’t he?
“Talk about rushing off,” he complained, still staring after the car. “Nearly ran me over.”
“He ought to watch it.” She then nudged his damp arm. “Listen, I’ve something to tell you. It’ll freak you out.”
“What?” But she could tell he wasn’t really listening.
“Your library book’s fine. If the weather wasn’t so minging, I’d have brought it to show you.”
That made him focus.
“Evil Eyes fine? How come? It was ripped to shreds when I last saw it.”
“If you don’t believe me, come and take a look.”
“No thanks. I need fresh air.” He duly upturned his face and drew in a great gulp of drizzle. “I can’t get last night out of my head.”
“Nor me. Left or right?” she repeated.
“Your call.”
***
The mist that yesterday had made the massive hill almost invisible, now slipped away to reveal its shining greenness in awesome clarity against the sky. She could never reproduce that colour using manufactured paints. Viridian was too dark, too blue. Chrome green even mixed with gamboge, too dense. No, she’d have to search for some obscure plant dye, but right now, that wasn’t exactly top of her agenda.
“Any graveyards round here?” Jason asked unexpectedly.
“Non-conformist church? Chapels? Take your pick. Why do you ask?”
“Who was Margiad?”
“I’ve said, I’ve no idea. Can’t we just leave it?”
His answer was to follow the downhill track that his would-be tutor had just taken, his black jacket glistening on him like wet skin. His booted steps sure-footed. Suddenly, an M.I.A. track hit her ears. From where, she couldn’t tell, until Jason paused, pressing a sleek, black mobile phone to his ear. Orange Rome. Very smart, but how come his caller had got a signal? He looked back at her, a deepening frown on his face as he listened. Whoever it was, didn’t last long and, at the end, he seemed frozen stiff. “Remember me. Remember me,” he repeated as if in some kind of trance. “What can that mean?”
“God knows. What was the number?”
He checked all the options.
“Zilch.”
“Sex?”
“Hard to tell.”
Helen’s feeling of powerlessness turned her waxed coat into a prison. A hot, clinging one at that. She shook herself free of it letting the soft, spitting rain cool her face, her neck. She’d never had much patience with those who believe in the afterlife or the paranormal. Her mam had knocked those notions out of her young mind whenever she’d asked. Yet if something truly inexplicable did happen to her, she’d be off like a shot. As for her da, the man with a secret life, hadn’t he sometimes, like Mr Flynn, called her hi
s angel?
Meanwhile Jason’s call still bothered her. For a mobile to work, you either had to go two miles east or west from here, or to the very top of Heron House.
“It’s not rocket science,” Helen said. “You’ve got a help option, surely?”
But he was in another world. “Remember me. Remember me. I mean, who’d say that? My mother or her toyboy? My skinflint brother? My stores manager at Woolies? My dead mate Archie?”
She could tell by his frown he’d not meant to give so much away, but her encouragement nevertheless triggered his whole story and, by the time they’d reached an even more minor road off to the right, she realised why they both seemed to have more in common than she’d first imagined. How he was still grieving for the soldier, his best friend, probably buried in ten pieces.
***
Although dripped on by too many overhanging trees, they kept up the pace until an almost illegible sign for Nantybai appeared, together with a PERIGYL – DANGER OF DEATH warning sign about the lower lead mine’s old workings. This came complete with the graphic silhouette of a dead man.
Helen knew from Mr Flynn that a once-lively hamlet had existed next to the church dedicated to St. Barnabas. Its hub, the old school, had long been demolished after a mysterious fire, while the mill, shop and smithy had died with their owners. All that remained were a few former lead mine workers’ cottages, now holiday rentals or second homes. Way beyond her measly pay she’d realised, when one came up for sale last month. There was also the Red Kite campsite situated right next to the River Towy, and more than once, she’d been tempted to rent one of its static caravans and hike up to Heron House for work each morning. At least she’d have her own space, without The Rat listening outside her bedroom as she washed in its too-small washbasin.
Soon, at the lane’s end, she and Jason were staring up at that same church whose rain-blackened slates and grey stone walls lent it a forbidding feel, as did the fact it stood marooned in a crowded but silent graveyard.
***
For some reason, it was here they parted company. He to the older area, she to the brightly adorned cremation markers and newer burials of mostly men. She glanced over to see Jason’s head bobbing about amongst the tilting headstones, and just then experienced a profound feeling their paths might do more than continue to cross.
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