Angel on the Inside

by Mike Ripley

  I pocketed my change and turned to go.

  ‘Who’s he then?’

  ‘Our famous local solicitor. They have all the luck, don’t they?’

  Not if I could help it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The rain hadn’t actually stopped – I suspected it never did – but it had thinned to a faint mist, or maybe I just didn’t notice it anymore. I reparked the Freelander in the public car park near Nodfa and perused the map I had bought.

  I used The Talbot to orientate myself, as most roads seemed to start from there; one running north-west towards Aberystwyth, two running south-west towards Lampeter on either side of the Teif river valley and one running north-east to the Cors Caron nature reserve and somewhere called Pontrhydfendigaid, which I didn’t attempt to say out loud.

  The road I was looking for, which the lad Derek had described, went nowhere. Literally. Well, technically it went up into the mountains to the east and then stopped dead in a conifer plantation. Single track, it followed what looked to be the ridge of another small valley, through which ran the river Berwyn, a tributary of the Teifi. There were half a dozen farms or houses off the road on tracks marked with dotted lines and, sure enough, just as Derek had said, there was one called Bryngwyn. It was less than a mile away up the same road Nodfa was on, to the left of The Talbot as you looked at it, but the road rose steeply up the mountains to about 1300 feet according to the map, and the rain had brought the clouds down, so I couldn’t see anything from where I was.

  I decided not to take the Freelander. It was a dead-end road going up a mountain and I preferred to go where I knew I had an exit. Plus, it was a vehicle that had already been seen and noted in the town and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. So I opted for a foot patrol and cursed myself for not bringing any hiking boots or waterproofs. There was something in the Freelander that could be useful, though. Amy always kept a pair of Praktica binoculars, with up to x 40 zoom magnification and light enhancing lenses, in the glove compartment. She claimed she used them at large fashion shows to make sure she didn’t miss a single pleat, cut or seam in a new item. A likely story, but they were perfect for the idiot bird watcher walking in the rain. I put up the collar of my jacket against the drizzle and set off down the road, hoping my shoes would hold up to the damp and that I wouldn’t meet an ornithologist coming out of the trees saying ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond’, as had happened once to Ian Fleming.

  The streets were narrow here, with front doors opening on to the road, and though there was little traffic, what they was seemed to move at 90 mph, and twice I had to take refuge in somebody’s doorway to avoid being scraped along the walls.

  Then suddenly the houses ended but the road continued to snake its way upward, flanked on one side by two-strand barbed wire fence to stop traffic – or at least sheep – from going down the scree slope to the river. To my right were a series of unmade roads leading off to individual farms or houses, some with their names on wooden arrows or carved into slate blocks: Ty Mawr Farm, Brynteg and Garth Villa and then, finally, Bryngwyn.

  I was relieved, because the cloud had come down, or I had gone up to meet it, and I could no longer see the town behind and below me. I was quite prepared to believe the scare stories about mountain walkers getting lost and dying of exposure, and I was less than a mile from an international centre of trot-racing, bagpipe playing birdwatchers and I’d left my emergency bottle of brandy in my bag back with Mrs Williams.

  Still, no need to panic yet. It wouldn’t be dark officially for about another three and a half hours, though the visibility couldn’t get much poorer, but it meant no-one could see me leave the road and follow what was little more than a farm track towards whatever Bryngwyn was.

  After about a quarter of a mile, the track dropped away to the right until I lost sight of the road. I reckoned I was heading back on myself around the slope of a hill and if I kept going down and in a circle, according to the map, I would eventually hit the back road to Lampeter, just the other side of The Talbot. I would have felt more confident if I’d had a compass.

  Bryngwyn was a ghost house.

  It was a low, black stone house with the obligatory slate roof, seemingly crouched down, burying itself into the hill, with a couple of ramshackle outbuildings at the side. There was no sign of life, no sign of a vehicle, and although there were overhead electricity wires running into the house, not a light showed anywhere.

  I was pretty sure there was nobody about to see me, but for the benefit of any Red Kites floating above, I walked up to the front door and knocked loudly. There was no answer, and judging by the amount of mould around the door frame, I guessed this wasn’t the most-used entrance anyway.

  I wandered around the side of the house near one of the outbuildings, which was a garage affair of corrugated iron sheets around a wooden frame. It had been so twisted by the damp that the whole thing leaned to one side as if a giant foot had squashed it. There was a tongue-and-hasp lock on the door, but instead of a padlock, it was held in place by a rusty six-inch nail.

  I reached out for the nail, then paused. I had Amy’s leather gloves in my back pocket and I put them on, as something was telling me it was better to be safe than sorry. It was only as I pulled them tight that I noticed the dozens of Twm Sion Cati claw holes that had gone through the leather but not the thick furry lining.

  The garage contained an old Kawasaki motor-bike that had seen better days, with a helmet and a pair of gauntlets balanced on the seat. I sniffed the exhaust pipe and slipped off a glove to feel the cylinders with the back of my hand. That and the fact that a spider was busy weaving a cobweb over one of the wing mirrors confirmed that it hadn’t been run for at least a couple of days.

  I continued round to the back of the house, where a flimsy half-glass door, obviously not an original feature of the house, led in to the kitchen.

  I looked around nervously but from the back of the house could see only cloud-covered hills. There was no-one watching me, not even a sheep. I turned the knob on the door and prepared to put my shoulder to it, but it opened without any undue pressure. Not locked. Well, they probably didn’t get many burglars up here.

  I stood there in the kitchen, and only when I was sure I couldn’t hear a thing did I breathe out.

  Somebody had been here until recently, judging from the dirty plates and cups in the sink and the pan on the Calor Gas stove, which contained the desiccated remains of some tinned ravioli. No great detective work – the empty tin was on the side of the sink.

  There was a parlour and two rooms at the front of the house. The first one I tried had a military-issue camp-bed in the middle of the floor, complete with a pillow wrapped in cellophane and a sleeping bag. Apart from a radio cassette player, a copy of Mayfair and a magazine called Big Ones, which I’d never heard of, there was no other furniture in the room.

  The other room was unusual as well. Not everybody has a Boxford lathe in their living room. They probably don’t have a metal work bench with a vertical drill either, or a digital calliper gauge, or a tungsten carbide parting tool, or interchangeable drill bits on a speedloader clip; nor, for that matter, a stack of about 20 12-inch mild steel bars by the skirting board in front of a blocked-off fireplace, probably removed and sold at an antiques market down the Portobello Road. These things are for sheds at the bottom of the garden.

  The floor was a concrete one and uncarpeted and had been swept by a long-handled broom, which was propped against one wall by a pile of dust and silver metal shavings. I poked around in the pile with a gloved finger until two solid objects surfaced. They were hollow cylinders that had been drilled out of a solid bar of mild steel, less than half an inch long with a rimmed end. They would have been drilled to a set depth and then reamed to the correct width. These two had been trial runs. They looked like newly-ejected cartridge cases from a hand gun. Except these hadn’t been ejected from a gun; the
y were meant to go in one.

  I turned on the lathe and it whined into life. I turned it off again at the switch. That proved the house had electricity, nothing else. It didn’t tell me when the lathe had last been used. Sherlock Holmes might have done a monograph on the oxidisation rate of freshly cut metal slivers, but I hadn’t.

  I had a good idea what the lathe had been used for, though. If he was following the plan cooked up by Keith Flowers and Malcolm ‘Creosote’ Fisher, then Ion Jones would have been churning out casings that would fit the chambers of a Brocock air pistol, replacing their gas-and-pellet cartridges. Inside each of these casings he would have inserted a real .22 bullet, and I remembered Fisher laughing when I’d asked if they were difficult to get hold of. I had picked up one thing off the internet that he hadn’t known: that a micron out in the tooling could make the live rimfire .22 ‘inner’ cartridge highly unstable. There were reports of the things going off when dropped during police confiscations, without a gun in sight.

  I stared at the blue-metalled lathe some more, but it didn’t tell me anything. There was still no sound from inside or outside the house. That was the trouble with the countryside; it was so damn quiet it was like being in solitary confinement.

  There was nothing for it but to check the upstairs, and for that I risked turning on the lights. I made it to the top of the stairs without being attacked by a knife-wielding maniac and looked into the two bedrooms, both doors of which were open. They revealed nothing; absolutely nothing, as they were empty of anything but dust. No furniture, no curtains, not even a light bulb in one.

  Tell a lie, there was something: two sheets of printed paper on the floorboards. They were particulars from a estate agent and letting agency in Lampeter and told me that Bryngwyn was available for short-term lettings (unfurnished) until the end of September, when the new owners would redevelop the property. (Estate agent code for second/holiday home bought by the English). I noted that it was ideally situated for wild trout fishing (with permit) and the pony-trekking/wildlife centre that was Tregaron. The other room upstairs was a bathroom that had been in use, with soap, a razor and a toothbrush on the sink. There was also a can of industrial grease-remover and a towel, which had one been lime green but was now basically black with grey-green stains. There was an airing cupboard, with some more towels and a couple of T-shirts hanging from one of the shelves. There was hot water in the tank for the central heating, and the T-shirts had been there long enough to dry.

  Lots of indications that Ion Jones had not gone far, and there was nothing to say he wasn’t coming back. He hadn’t taken his motor-bike, for a start, so maybe he’d just nipped down the hill into town. Maybe he was drinking in The Talbot at this very minute.

  I retraced my steps to the kitchen door and stepped outside. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing, making it lighter than at anytime since I’d arrived. It was just after six o’clock and the kitchen of The Talbot would be open. There was nothing like a walk in the fresh mountain air for working up an appetite. Come to think of it, the air did smell different up here. Apart from the ever-present scent of coal fires, there was a noticeable absence of petrol fumes, blocked drains and hot and sweaty humans. It must be all that rain.

  I took another lungful and decided to celebrate with a cigarette, leaning on a metal coal-bunker of the kind that seemed to be issued by the local council like dustbins around here.

  The plan for the evening was to have a giant steak at The Talbot – unless the Welsh lamb was compulsory – and keep a low profile. Thankfully I had hit the two weeks of the year when Tregaron was crawling with strangers.

  I had quite a view now, thanks to the clearing cloud, and I remembered the binoculars, so I opted for a bit of bird watching, or at least mountain watching as there didn’t seem to be a living thing in sight. Unzipping the Prakticas, I dropped the fake leather case on the ground and immediately bent to pick it up before I forgot it, not wanting to leave any trace of my visit.

  It had landed on a small pile of coal, leaking from the coal bunker’s small trap door, which you slide up to insert your shovel or coal scuttle. Coal was something you didn’t often see in London these days.

  Nor in a house, albeit in Wales, that has electric central heating.

  And no fireplaces.

  The lid of coal-bunker was about a yard square, weighed about half a ton, and I had to use two hands to lift it and slide it back. Inside was: coal.

  Or at least a thin sprinkling of small nuggets and a lot of coal dust resting on folded sacking. The sacking peeled back more easily than the tab on a carton of orange juice to reveal a cardboard box, of the sort you used to get in supermarkets to carry your groceries in (until some officious health and safety twit decided they were a fire hazard). This one had once contained loose Spanish red peppers grown and picked for Jose Suarez Ltd of Almeria.

  It now contained, give or take the odd one, 25 loaded revolvers.

  Well I couldn’t say they were unexpected, could I?

  It still unnerved me enough to slam the lid back on the coal bunker and look furtively around in case anybody had seen me.

  What if they had? Was coal theft – because that’s all it could have looked like really – a hanging offence in Wales? It probably was.

  There was nobody to be seen with the naked eye. But then, I had binoculars, and I used them to sweep the surrounding scenery.

  There were no other houses visible from this side of Bryngwyn, and the nearest properties off the road I had walked up were hidden by undulations in the hill. In front of me the ground sloped down and round to where I reckoned Tregaron was, and if I had read the map right, that was open country sloping gently down to the road near The Talbot and then up again into more mountain and the conifer plantations.

  Nothing. Not even a sheep. I scanned the area twice, and then noticed something to the right and down the hill in the direction of Tregaron. Because it hadn’t moved, I had dismissed it at first as a patch of brown ferns or a patch of weathered topsoil, but using the Praktica’s zoom function I saw that it wasn’t.

  I had been right about there not being another living thing on the mountainside.

  I don’t know how tall Ion Jones had been in life, but he was about three-foot-six in death, kneeling as he was in soft, boggy earth.

  He had slumped down and forward onto his knees, still clutching a cardboard box just like the one I’d found in the coal bunker. A few inches from him was a rubber torch buried in the mud. The switch said it was still ‘ON’.

  I circled him warily. From the front, I could see what had happened. He had stumbled, slipped – whatever – and one of the two dozen or so Brococks had gone off. Unluckily for him, it was one pointing his way. Right at his heart, judging by the brown stain and scorch marks on his shirt.

  Where had he been going? Obviously away from Brwyngwyn, but if he was going into Tregaron this way at night, instead of by the road, carrying what he was carrying, he was an idiot. Well, obviously he was; he’d shot himself.

  I straightened up and looked around me. Just hills – it was a sadist’s definition of an open prison. I jogged up the slope, in the direction of the road, and almost immediately went into a crouch. I was in the back garden of another house, except this being the wild west Wales frontier, there were no garden fences or hedges or anything. The house ended, there were a few plants and a square of lawn, and then the mountain began.

  Because of the dip in the slope, no-one from the house could have seen Ion Jones’s body, knelt in prayer like it was, not even from the upstairs windows. Not that the house – a bigger, more imposing version of Bryngwyn – seemed to be inhabited.

  The poor sod must have been there most of the night and all of the day, and because he was so far off the beaten track, not even somebody walking their dog had found him.

  The local foxes had though.

  ‘You look as if y
ou’ve had a good blow, Mr Fitzroy.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘A good blow in the fresh air,’ said Mrs Williams.

  ‘Oh yes, of course. Been for a walk, haven’t I?’ Damn, I was doing the accent again; but she seemed not to notice. ‘Just popped back to get changed before I have dinner at The Talbot.’

  ‘Ah, The Talbot. There’ll be parties and whatnot every night this week,’ she said disapprovingly, ‘what with the Irish in town for the racing. They always make an unholy row after hours. Sometimes into the small hours.’

  ‘Do you ever have to call the police?’ I asked casually as I started upstairs.

  ‘The police? Pah! The nearest station is in Lampeter, and it’s supposed to take them 18 minutes to get here. That’s what they call their response time. But it’s more like half an hour; that’s if they bother answering the call in the first place. The town council’s complained time and time again. Not that we’re always having to call the police, mind you. It’s the principle of the thing. Ooops, there’s my programme.’

  She had been keeping one ear on the television set in the lounge. I guessed it must be time for Pobol Y Cwm, of which even I had heard, usually in the context of a pub trivia quiz, as it is one of the longest-running TV soap operas in the UK (if not the world) and the only one not in English.

  ‘You carry on, Mrs Williams, don’t mind me.’

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ she said to my back, ‘I put a key in the lock of your room. You might like to keep it locked; you know, to keep the cat out.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

  Note that. Twm Sion Cati had to be locked out. Merely closing the door was not enough.

  I took the key out of the lock and pocketed it, closing the door behind me and reaching for my bag, determined to do some damage to the bottle of Italian brandy.