by Dan Clark
The internal voice is now shouting at her. Answer their questions, Carolyn. They’re waiting.
“I… I… really don’t know. It was very dark. I’m not sure if I…” She tails off, looking from one shopper’s face to the next. They’re all standing around in a circle watching, as if witnessing a witch’s final moment at the stake, waiting for the confession.
She braces herself, expecting that at any minute they’ll start throwing rotting vegetables and spitting at her. The woman wiping at her face with the tissue begins to sob again. “Did you see his hair? Did he have blond hair?” she asks.
Again, Carolyn can’t answer. Her throat won’t allow her to speak. The image of the body is now non-existent in her memory.
“DID YOU SEE ANYTHING AT ALL?” the woman shouts.
At this point, the man in the overalls has abandoned his trolley and begins walking the woman out of the shop with his arm around her shoulders. The nosey shoppers stand aside, creating an exit, and the man and woman leave. Some of the customers are covering their open mouths. Carolyn turns her trolley around and heads for the till, ignoring the quiet remarks of the shoppers. She lifts two tins of soup into her trolley as she passes. That’s dinner sorted.
The cashier is a redheaded girl, skinny and shy-looking.
“Be careful with them. Don’t get yourself caught up with him,” the cashier mumbles under her breath while scanning the items.
“Excuse me?” Carolyn says.
The girl looks around to be certain nobody is within earshot. “I said, don’t get yourself caught up with him. He wouldn’t think twice about beating you to a pulp. I’ve seen his wife in a few bad states in the past. He’s… He’s a very nasty man…”
Carolyn begins packing her bag. “What’s their name?” she asks.
Again the skinny cashier turns and checks she can’t be heard. She waits for an elderly woman to pass.
“That’s the Lloyd family. Their son went missing a few years back.”
Carolyn nods, looking down at the girl’s name badge. “Thank you, Sophie.” She pays for her things and leaves.
She unlocks her mother’s car and places the shopping in the back, then heads to the driver’s side and notices the long scratch in the paintwork which runs from the bonnet to the back door. She can only imagine how worried and annoyed her mother is going to be. A large pickup truck makes its way past behind her, the engine growling loudly under the bonnet. Its wheels slow down, almost coming to a stop.
Carolyn turns and sees the man with the greying moustache driving, his evil glare piercing her eyes. The crying woman in the passenger seat is wiping her face again. The man driving keeps eye contact with Carolyn for an uncomfortable moment and takes off with a loud screech on the tarmac. She hurries into the car and starts the ignition. She wants to be gone from this car park and away from these people. She wants to be back in Leeds. She wants to be back with Simon and Ryan.
Carolyn backs out of the parking space and heads for home. She drives until she comes to a lay-by next to the old bed-and-breakfast, then stops. Her heart is thumping hard against her chest. She places her hands on the steering wheel, watching them shake and rattle uncontrollably. She has never been one for confrontation, and she isn’t used to people looking at her with such hatred. She wipes at the tears running down her cheeks and restarts the engine.
Chapter Nine
Carolyn sits at Jeanette’s kitchen table with a cup of tea, made with fresh milk. The one her mother had made last night was made with powdered milk, and it had tasted like warm cardboard.
Her hands have eased shaking enough for her to hold the mug in one hand and her worn stress ball in the other. She’s wondering if it was Inspector Williams who’d told the first couple of people. Maybe it was the smokers outside The Red Fox last night, waiting for the police to return and find out the gossip. Or perhaps it was PC Riley. He’d given her a look of disapproval the moment she’d stepped through the doors of the station. She shakes her head with disbelief.
“Whatever happened to police confidentiality?” she grunts.
I must be crazy, she thinks, and drinks the last of her tea. She stands up, drops her stress ball onto the table and heads out to the back. She decides to check out the well again, to put her mind at rest and come up with a reason good enough to explain the hallucinations. It was almost dark, after all. There must have been a tree branch positioned a certain way for her to overreact and imagine the corpse. As far-fetched as that sounds, Carolyn needs something to justify what made her see a body. If she can’t find anything, then maybe she really is crazy.
She heads through the gap in the fence and walks in the direction of the well, then stops, turns to her right and walks along the bushes at the back of her mother’s bungalow. There must be another opening to this part of the woodland.
Carolyn heads straight on, keeping to the side of the bushes. After a five-minute walk, she comes to an opening between the trees. She pushes bare branches from her face and stamps down nettles to fit through the gap. Once out into the opening she can see a metal swing-gate with a rusted padlock. She climbs over it and steps out onto the concrete of a small road. It’s cracked and filled with potholes and overgrown with weeds. It’s also a dead end.
Some time ago it must have been an entrance into the woodland via the metal swing gate, but now people use it to dump their rubbish: old plastic Christmas trees and scattered bags of garden waste. Carolyn heads out onto the main road, then onto Alexandra Drive. The roof of St Peter’s church can be seen not too far away. She wonders if this is the route taken by the person who’d dumped the body.
Carolyn heads back to the start, to the path just outside the gap in the fence, and begins walking in the direction she had previously taken. Standing a few yards away from the opening of the well, she braces herself for the gruesome, stomach-wrenching corpse her brain will imagine.
The sensation of anxiety is back, and her breathing increases.
“Come on,” she says out loud. “This is silly. Get a grip.”
She peers down. The well is empty, of course, just as it had been when Inspector Williams, the other two officers and the angry-looking firefighters had been here.
The feeling of relief strikes her, and she exhales, tears filling her eyes.
It must have been those damned tablets, she thinks.
Carolyn walks the circle around the well, admiring the beauty of this Disney-like place. She imagines herself and Jeanette bringing along some camping chairs and forgetting all about the hallucinated boy in the well.
Then, at the back of the well, she comes to a stop. She kneels down on the grass, examining the red brick that had caught her eye, and picks up her find. It’s a melted lump of purple candle wax.
Her beautiful scenery is starting to chip away again. Very slowly, but it’s happening, and she can feel it.
Surely there is an explanation for this. She looks up at the sky and waits for the clouds to turn an angry grey colour and for lightning forks to strike across, just like it does in the Disney world when evil is approaching.
Of course, it doesn’t change.
Why would candle wax be next to a disused well in the middle of nowhere? Who would bring a candle out here? She tries, but fails, to think of a good enough reason. The only assumption she can think of is that somebody knew about the well. Somebody even cared enough to visit, enough to light a candle in the boy’s honour. The idea of her being a crazy woman begins to drift away. On one hand she’s happy; on the other, it means there really is a deranged killer out there, toying with her.
Maybe the deranged killer was on his or her way back to the well, Carolyn thinks. To visit their kill, bringing with them a new candle to light, to sit and relive their horrific crime. Then I found their dumping ground and messed the whole thing up, and now they’re not happy about that.
The sensation of being watched hits her, and her arms and back begin to shiver. She hugs herself as she spins around to check there
isn’t anybody out there now watching from behind a tree, maybe even laughing at how silly she must look to the people of Llanbedr. Maybe the killer was even at Llanbedr Convenience earlier, amongst the crowd of bystanders and watching her lose her head. She steps to the side of the well, the spot where she puked the night before, now washed away by the rain. She looks down the well again, searching for anything she and the rest of the rescue party might have missed.
It was raining and dark then, after all.
She steps to the right, circling the well again. She feels the corners of her mouth rise. There, on the brick inside the well, are white scrape marks, presumably made by a ladder.
How did they miss this?
I’m not crazy. Once I show Inspector Williams this new evidence, he’ll have to take DNA samples, return with a team of forensics, and climb down the well. The tests will show there was a corpse down there, a corpse of a young boy. They’ll find fingerprints from the bricks inside, and then PC Riley on reception will apologise for ever doubting me.
She races to the kitchen and searches through a drawer for a sandwich bag to place the lump of candle wax in – her newfound evidence – to take to the police.
Out in the car, she backs down the path. The sandwich bag with the candle wax sits on the passenger seat. She slips the car in gear and is about to take off when she hears her mother calling from outside the church.
“Where are you going now?” Jeanette asks, heading over. Carolyn winds the window down and beckons with her head. “Get in. I’ll explain on the way.”
Jeanette climbs in the passenger seat, moving the wax to the side, and fastens her seatbelt. “What the hell is going on?” she asks. “And why do you have… Is that wax?”
“It’s evidence, Mum. I found it at the well. I’m taking it to Richard Williams. He needs to come back with a team of forensics and inspect the inside of the well.”
“Carolyn… love, pull over and let’s go back, shall we?” she insists, her face sympathetic, with questioning eyes. It is the same look Carolyn received last night from Williams, Hughes, Dixon and some of the firefighters.
Carolyn feels herself getting annoyed. “I know what I saw. At first, I thought it might have been the tablets. But it was too real, too vivid. There’s no way I could have imagined something that gruesome.” She takes a left turn, keeping the car at thirty now she isn’t alone. “And then I find candle wax and markings inside the well.”
Jeanette’s face turns pale, and her eyes show confusion. “What type of markings?”
Carolyn goes on. “Something is going on. Do you know if there’s a boy missing?”
Jeanette nods. “There are two boys missing. Elwyn Roberts was seven years old and Dylan Lloyd was fifteen.”
“Lloyd… That’s the parents I met today. They were asking me questions about their boy.”
“You spoke with the Lloyds?”
“Well, it wasn’t a planned visit. We sort of… bumped into each other at Llanbedr Convenience. They don’t seem like very nice people,” Carolyn adds. She can sense Jeanette is thinking of something.
“That’s because they are not very nice people. When their boy went missing, word got back to Frank Lloyd, the dad, about a man… What’s his name now…? Juan? No… JULIO! That’s it. Anyway, word got back to Frank that Julio has served time and is on the Sex Offenders’ Register for being involved with kids. Police found him beaten to within an inch of his life. He never confessed it was Frank Lloyd. But we all knew.” Jeanette looks at Carolyn. “Please don’t stir anything up. It won’t end well.”
Carolyn ignores Jeanette and pulls into the police station car park.
***
PC Riley is on a call. He watches Carolyn come through the door, with Jeanette following behind. Rolling his eyes, he holds up his index finger indicating that they should wait. The glare he gives them is unkind, as if they’ve just trodden in a trail of dog mess under their boots. He ends the call and takes a long noisy slurp of his coffee, studying Carolyn and Jeanette over his mug. They look at each other and think the same thing: Arsehole.
Richard Williams comes out of a room behind the reception counter, accompanied by a man in a suit. They shake hands and Williams waves him off before acknowledging Carolyn and Jeanette.
“What is it today, Mrs Hill? We’re very busy,” he says, pulling at his tie to loosen it from his thick neck.
Carolyn steps closer to the desk. “I went back to the well earlier. You need to take another look. There’s scraping on the inside brickwork.” She lifts the sandwich bag from her pocket. “I also found this, at the side of the well.”
Williams takes the lump of wax from her and inspects it. “Wax, so what? You want me to waste useful resources and valuable time because you’ve found a lump of wax?” He looks from Carolyn to Jeanette before going on. “I would have thought you would have spoken to her, Jeanette, instead of allowing your daughter to make a fool of herself again! I gave you the benefit of the doubt the other night.”
Jeanette places a hand on Carolyn’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go home. He can’t do anything.”
Carolyn shakes her hand away, filled with anger that this man can’t be bothered and isn’t interested in looking into this any further, when it could potentially be a lead to one of the missing boys.
“It’s not that he can’t do anything, Mum. It’s that he doesn’t want to,” she says scornfully as she brings her hands down, slapping the desk.
Williams’ complexion turns an angry red. “I won’t, because I can’t, Mrs Hill. There is no body, nothing for me to go on or even look into.”
Riley slurps his coffee again, loudly and with a smirk on his face, clearly enjoying the drama unfolding in front of him.
“Let’s go home,” Jeanette beckons, holding onto Carolyn’s arm. Williams hands back the bag of wax, and Carolyn and Jeanette head for the door.
Carolyn turns before leaving. “Inspector, will you at least speak with that Julio person, and see his reaction? He might have something to do with this.”
Williams stares at her, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead and dripping down above his eyebrows.
“Julio Alcala is the probation officer’s concern, Mrs Hill, not yours or your mother’s. Now how about you go home, stop interfering and let us get on with our police work? Oh, and if we need a cake baking, we’ll give you a call.”
Riley chokes on his coffee and almost spits it out over the reception desk. He wipes at his stubbly chin and looks up.
I bet that’s going to be the joke around the station for the week, Carolyn. The internal voice tells her. She walks out to the car, making a mental note of Julio’s surname. She figures there’s no point in trying any more. The police have already made their mind up about her; she’s the crazy woman who thinks she can lecture the police on how to do their jobs.
Jeanette is driving them both home, and with good reason; Carolyn’s hands are trembling with frustration.
“How can he just push us away like that?” Carolyn says.
“Well, there isn’t a bod—”
“And I’ve brought him evidence.” She throws the bag of wax into the footwell. “If they just looked into it, and came to see the scrapings on the inside of the well… Surely that’s enough evidence to run some sort of DNA test?”
“Carolyn, Richard did say that—”
“He’s too lazy, Mum. Too lazy to even look into it and put my mind at rest. I’m not crazy. I know what I saw. You believe me, don’t you?”
Jeanette is quiet for a moment and then releases a sigh.
“Doesn’t matter. I know what I saw.” Carolyn opens the glove compartment and rummages through, pushing an A-Z, takeaway menus and out-of-date shopping vouchers out of the way. She finds a small notepad and pen and tears out the last shopping list, crumples it and drops it into the footwell. At the top she writes Julio Alcala and then turns back to Jeanette. “What were the names of the two missing boys again?” Jeanette tells her as she slo
ws to give a tractor space. Carolyn writes the names down. Elwyn Roberts and Dylan Lloyd.
“Why?” Jeanette asks, watching her. “Why are you writing them down? Can’t you just forget about it? You’re going to get yourself into trouble.”
“I’m sorry, but would you want somebody to forget about it if it were Ryan missing?” Carolyn doesn’t give her mother time to answer. “No, I’m too emotionally involved now. I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see, and if the police can’t help me… I’m going to do what I can to make things right.”
Jeanette is silent for the rest of the journey home.
Chapter Ten
Carolyn had hardly slept last night. The smirking faces of the officers played on her mind throughout for hours. A few times she’d felt the urge to open her phone and search for the names of the two missing boys, but she knew that once she started a search she’d be up all night, reading article after article on various online news websites.
No, she’d decided to leave it until today. But she needs a place with a printer. The closest library is in St Davids, so the internet café in town will have to do. Carolyn had been surprised that internet cafés still exist, and had first thought the address she’d found on the web must be out of date. That was until she turned up and saw it with her own eyes.
From outside, the grimy-looking windows make the place look closed or under refurbishment. The crinkled blinds are also shut, though this seems a pointless attempt to close out the light, given the amount of slats that are missing.
Carolyn approaches the door and peers through the glass. She sees a small room with at least six elderly-looking computers positioned around the wall.