Disturbing Ground

by Priscilla Masters

  She eyed the last box. On the side were penned two names, George Prees and Neil Jones. The year against the headline was quite recent. 1992. Ten years ago. But again the names brought no recognition. In 1992 she would have been twenty-two, a fourth-year medical student. According to the article the boys had vanished in June when she would have been abroad, working out her elective period in Lusaka, studying the effects of malaria on an unprotected African population. A million miles away from Llancloudy and its mysteries.

  Whatever they were.

  Megan lifted the “Bleddyn Hughes” box onto the kitchen table and started pulling the newspapers out. Hughes had been a maths teacher at the local grammar school until 1971 when, like Marie Walker seventeen years later, he had simply vanished. Homosexuality was hinted at. He was, the paper said, “fond of children”, an ambiguous phrase. He had, apparently, run extra curricular activites at the school and in his free time - a chess club, swimming lessons, maths coaching. And then one Monday morning Bleddyn Hughes had failed to turn up for class.

  Megan stared at the kitchen wall, her eyes unfocused. “A teacher who had failed to turn up for class.” It didn’t sound much of a story.

  She bent over the newspaper and continued reading.

  Bleddyn Hughes had not shown nor telephoned all day and the headmaster, none too pleased at the non-appearance of one of his teachers, had visited Hughes’ rented room to find he was not there and had not been seen since Friday night. The headmaster had been the one to alert the police who had then raided his rented lodgings and uncovered a number of “suggestive” magazines.

  In fact the tone of the articles displayed less concern at the disappearance of a suspect maths teacher than the sudden vanishing of the ten-year-old child sixteen years later. The assumption Megan read between the lines was that Hughes had “gone to London” to pursue his activities in a more enlightened environment. The photographs showed an unprepossessing man, bespectacled, anxious, staring fiercely into the camera.

  Interest had quickly waned even though there was no mention of his owning a car or having been seen at either the coach or the railway station.

  But there was only one road out of Llancloudy unless you crossed the mountains - by foot.

  The pile of papers was half the size of Marie Walker’s. And there was no Er Cof. Bleddyn Hughes had not been “a local man” and the speculation had only lasted a few weeks. Two months after Bleddyn Hughes had gone from Llancloudy there was no mention of him at all.

  Megan gathered the papers up and returned them to the box. She would find no explanation here. In fact, reading between the lines she sensed the sentiment that the authors of the articles believed Llancloudy was a better place without Bleddyn Hughes, Maths teacher.

  She put the box back on the floor next to Marie Walker’s and turned to the third box.

  Which contained the saddest of stories.

  Of a little girl, Rhiann Lewis.

  “Little Rhiann” whom Bianca had mentioned, her wrinkled cheeks dripping because Little Rhiann was dead. “Definitely dead.” And she knew “he’d done it”.

  For Goodness sake, Megan thought. What was this? And so she read about Little Rhiann.

  The child had been just three years old, playing in her own back garden, behind a bolted door while her mother and her grandmother sat in the house, sharing a pot of tea. There was no way out of the garden except through the house or the bolted door out onto the street.

  Little Rhiann should have been safe.

  But the child had not been safe. Half an hour had elapsed between them hearing her singing and chattering as she bathed her dollies in a plastic paddling pool and the discovery of a door swinging open.

  Rhiann Lewis, the little girl who sang lullabies and was “always chattering”, had vanished.

  As Megan scanned the column inches she realised that, like the other two, Rhiann was never seen again.

  And now Megan was disturbed. Llancloudy was only a small village. Less than three thousand people lived here. Condense the three vanishings to boxes sitting on her kitchen floor and it seemed a strange town, a dangerous town, a black hole where people disappeared without trace. A town where a mad woman vanished on the Saturday morning only to reappear, drowned, in the shallowest of pools, on the Monday.

  Bianca, with her warped understandings of time lapses and disregarding hinted explanations put out by the Press, had preserved the newspapers because …

  Because they had intrigued her? Frightened her? Interested her? Because she thought she had an explanation? Or because she sensed a connection?

  “She’s definitely dead. I know it now for certain. I’d wondered before but when he told me this time I knew it was the truth.”

  Who had told her? Her “voices”?

  Megan read right through the hoarded newspapers searching for some clue. Mine shafts were mentioned, together with the accompanying photographs of miners, their lamps ablaze, as they prepared to search the warren of tunnels beneath Llancloudy. Strain etched lines across the face of Rhiann’s mother so she was indistinguishable from Rhiann’s grandmother. Rhiann’s grandmother. Megan recognised a much younger - and thinner - Gwen Owen. There was a photograph of the child’s father, gaunt and haunted-faced as he joined every single man in the town to look for his little girl while the women comforted the family, as women had done ever since the mines were first opened. But this was no pit accident. The mines had been searched and nothing found. Then the talk had turned to veiled hints of child snatchings, paedophiles, abduction. But the problem always returned to the fact that the police believed that the child herself had shot back the lock on the door of her safe haven.

  Mother and grandmother spoke of hearing the child chattering as she had washed her dolls. The dolls themselves had been found, slippery with soapsuds, still with dripping hair. Only the child was missing.

  They couldn’t say when the child had stopped talking. It had been no more than a background tune to their mother/daughter gossip.

  Megan took a long time looking at the photograph. The toddler laughed straight back at her, displaying beautiful milk teeth and a face framed by a shock of curly black hair. The picture had frozen her clapping her hands at some unseen photographer. And even through the yellowing pages of the Western Mail the child’s happiness was palpable - as was her parents’ grief in later pictures.

  Megan leaned back against the kitchen wall, hardly seeing the smart white kitchen with its blue ash units. Instead she saw faces, the thin-lipped child, the asthenic teacher, the happy three-year-old, clapping her hands, Bianca’s tear streaked face, powder washing down her scrawny cheeks, Smithson’s earnest pleas for someone to listen. The disappearances had spanned more than twenty years. Each had been under a different set of circumstances. Had Bianca simply been fascinated by the unusual and the inexplicable? Or was there some other explanation?

  And there was a fourth box, still holding its secrets. But like Pandora’s box she knew it held nothing pleasant. And once the lid was opened …

  She didn’t want to know.

  Who knows how long she would have sat still. She was snapped out of her reverie by the insistent tone of her mobile phone. She fished it out of her bag and read the caller ID. A local number. One she did not recognise.

  Always apprehensive it might be a patient she answered hesitantly. “Hello?”

  “Meggie.”

  It was a shock to hear his voice unexpectedly. “Alun?”

  He laughed, embarrassed. “We never did have that drink.”

  “No-o.” She wanted to meet him again and at the same time she didn’t. A deliberate assignation would be fraught with difficulties. Someone would see them. And the further away from Llancloudy they met, in the eyes of its inhabitants, the more surreptitious their relationship. And someone would be sure to spot them. Wales is a small country.

  Typical Alun, he lobbed the ball into her court. “Well?”

  Her eyes roamed the kitchen. And she suddenly realis
ed if anyone was party to the background behind the stories Alun would be. He was a police officer, had joined the local force straight after his A-levels. He might well have been involved in the two most recent disappearancess. She stroked the newspaper on her lap. “I never realised so many people went missing from this little town, Alun.”

  He laughed back at her. “You what?”

  “Bianca hoarded old newspapers. I’ve inherited them.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Esther was making a fuss about the council workers dumping them when she had promised Bianca she would keep them.”

  “You’re not still on about all that, surely?”

  “Bianca was my patient. And Esther is too.”

  Alun spluttered out another laugh. “I know modern day doctors are into this holistic nonsense - but isn’t this carryin’ things a bit far?”

  “I’ve found them interesting,” she replied stiffly.

  He sighed and his voice fell flat. “Oh.”

  He was losing interest.

  “Every box of papers deals separately with a missing person.”

  There was a pause before he spoke again. “How many boxes?”

  “Four.”

  “I don’t remember four people goin’ missin’ from Llancloudy. There’s been a couple of kids.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “We searched everywhere - with sniffer dogs. Extra police were drafted in from Cardiff. Everybody from Llancloudy turned out to look for the children. We found nothing. Not a trace.”

  “Were the mine shafts searched?”

  “Of course they were. But it’s a bloody city down there. You can’t search the whole place.”

  A swift, awful vision of a child, wandering in the black nothing of a coal mine flashed through her mind. “No.”

  “So who were these unfortunates?”

  One more unfortunate. His choice of words was terribly apt. “Marie Walker,” she ventured.

  “I remember that,” he said. “One of the first major incidents I was involved with. We never found her. Some paedophile got hold of her, I think.”

  “Rhiann Lewis?”

  “I’ve heard about the case,” he said. “Didn’t she unlock the garden gate and get lost somehow? There was no evidence anyone snatched her. She let herself out of the garden. She would have been safe if she’d stayed behind the door.”

  Megan turned turned her head sideways to read the names on the side of the fourth box. “George Prees and Neil Jones.”

  “Buggered off to London if you ask me. Pair of juvenile delinquents.”

  She asked the last name knowing Alun would hold as little knowledge as she. “Bleddyn Hughes?”

  “Haven’t heard about him.”

  “Way before you joined. 1971 he went missing.”

  Alun laughed again. “As you say - way before I joined. So the disappearances span quite a few years then.”

  “Thirty.”

  “We-e-ell. Not that many really.”

  Was he right? Was this the normal wastage of a village? Was it simply Bianca’s mind which had distorted events into a mystery?

  “Now about that drink.”

  Megan arranged to meet him on the following night.

  Chapter 13

  As she lay in bed that night, Megan tried to supply a rational explanation to Smithson’s and Bianca’s interest in the disappearances. But her dreams were filled with Alun, who kept running towards her then swerving at the last moment while she held her arms out, waiting. She awoke to a dull, blustery morning and a feeling of disappointment tinged with worry. It was not a good idea to be meeting Alun tonight.

  She dealt deftly with the morning’s patients and picked up the requests for visits - amongst them Triagwn.

  She walked into the hall and was immediately met by Sandra Penarth. “Morning, Doctor,” she said warmly. “And how are you today?” There was no hint of either embarrassment or aggression.

  Megan was anxious to repair the damage. “Fine, just fine. And how are my patients?” She spoke more heartily than normal.

  “Well, Mr Smithson’s been quiet since you started him on the Haloperidol.”

  “No more weird stories?”

  Sandra made a face. “No more than usual but at least he is quiet. And we haven’t had to have him transferred anywhere else, which suits Arwel better.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “After all - it would a shame to move him from here after so long.”

  “Quite.”

  Megan felt a snatch of guilt that she had been responsible for robbing the old man of what little fight he had had left. She had reduced him to yet another easily controlled geriatric when he had been such a demanding man all his life. Now he was everything the nurses liked - obedient, quiet and pliable, robbed of his tendancy to spill out disquieting stories and disturb the calm of the old people’s home.

  “I’d like to see him.”

  “Fine.”

  They ran the gauntlet of the patients in the ground floor sitting room before climbing the stairs towards room four. And already Megan was noticing how much quieter the place was. She entered the small room and realised. Even the smell was different. She knew instantly what they had done - given him a wash, sprayed him with plenty of deoderant, and the room with air freshener. Smithson had been sanitised. The room now bore the corporate scent of Imperial Leather and lavender Airwick. He was sitting in his chair, staring out of the window. He did not turn as she entered. A trickle of saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth. She sat in the chair opposite. And finally he turned and looked at her.

  “Well, Doctor Banesto?”

  He had lost weight. The skin hung down from his face. But his eyes still had some fight in them. “Hello, Mr Smithson,” she said.

  Give me the fighter - anyday.

  “It’s OK, Sandra, you can go now. I’ll talk to Mr Smithson. If I’ve got anything extra to say I’ll pop in the office on my way out.” The nurse was irritating her, hovering in the doorway.

  To her interest Smithson’s face flickered as the nurse moved away.

  Megan leaned in close to the old man so she wouldn’t have to talk loudly. Walls may not have ears. But people do. They say old men’s ears grow bigger as they age. It helps them to hear better. An evolutionary process? Old men have more enemies than young ones. They have had a lifetime to watch the numbers multiply.

  “How are you today, Mr Smithson?”

  His world weary face locked in to hers. “I’ll survive,” he said. “I expect.” A pause. “For a while, anyway.”

  “You must miss Bianca,” she ventured.

  He nodded. “A bit. Not much. No harm in the woman. A bit loopy. But not evil.”

  “No. Not evil.” She hesitated. “Was it from Bianca that you heard about Marie Walker?”

  Smithson was shaking his head.

  “The girl who vanished on her way back from buying chips?”

  He said nothing but stared at her.

  “She did tell you stories?”

  Smithson nodded, hooding his eyes with the wrinkled old lids.

  “Stories about missing people?”

  Smithson nodded again. More slowly this time.

  “Rhiann Lewis?” Megan ventured very quietly.

  “Poor kid,” he said.

  “What happened to her?” Megan waited.

  Smithson was silent.

  “What did Bianca think had happened to Rhiann?”

  “Look, doctor,” Smithson said slowly, “Bianca was not right in the head. Everyone knew that. Anyone who believed her stories…”

  “But you believed them.”

  “Let me finish,” he said. “Anyone who believed Bianca’s stories must be halfway to nutty themselves. Understand me?”

  “But the disappearances are fact. I’ve read the newspapers, Mr Smithson.”

  “That might be fact,” he said, “but not her explanations. They can’t be true.”

  His eyes were closi
ng.

  “What happened to the others, Geraint?”

  Smithson’s bony hand shook on the arm of his chair.

  “What did Bianca think had happened to them?”

  “She didn’t know what had happened to any of them. How could she?” Smithson’s eyes had flicked open and were boring holes into hers. “How could she,” he repeated. “She was just a mad old thing.” His eyes dropped. “Like me.”

  Megan stood up. She had a terrible feeling that she had asked questions just a little too late. She would have got more out of Smithson a month ago.

  She would learn nothing now. But as she reached the door Smithson spoke to her. “Llancloudy,” he said, “is not a safe place. You have to be careful.”

  She halted in the doorway. “What do you mean?”

  “It is not a tolerant place. Look around you, doctor. The valley is narrow. There never was the room for all these houses. People are squashed together and it makes life difficult. Nobody’ll put up with anything. And it causes problems. That’s all I’m saying.”

  He dropped his chin onto his chest and gave a couple of soft snores. She gave up.

  But she felt almost released as she walked outside the nursing home and into the walled garden. The colours were flattened now to their subdued winter tones. Black, brown, grey. Back to the subtle, depressing tones of Gericault; Rousseau and Gaugin suppressed. A couple of care assistants were braving the weather to puff on their cigarettes. Like most building allied to the medical or nursing profession, Triagwn operated a No Smoking policy. Megan tossed them a smile and carried on, towards the rim of pines that marked the edge of the trees. “What’s wrong with you, girl,” she scolded. “You’ve been getting this thing right out of proportion. Bianca just slipped and drowned. She had a love of sensational headlines. And like most schizophrenics, she cottoned onto one idea and simply stuck there.”

  “First sign of madness,” one of the care assistants called after her. “Talkin’ to yourself, doctor.” It was typical, chopsy, South Walean banter. But it sent a shiver running through her.

  Once you have conferred on yourself an aspect of strangeness, you begin to analyse your every action and then you are lost. She had seen it happen to a fellow medical student and had watched, horrified, as he had talked, late into the night, about the shaky issue of sanity, neatly and logically turning the discussion into a desperate plea for some precise yardstick by which he could prove he was not mad.