The Shiver Stone

by Sharon Tregenza

  Jago hadn’t said a word. He shuffled his feet, checked his fingernails, twisted his hair, but not once did he raise his eyes to look at his father.

  ‘I don’t care what you did, I just want to find Tia.’

  Tristan stopped pacing. ‘And you’re Jago. I can’t believe you’re my boy.’

  At any other time that would have been funny. The likeness between them was startling.

  He reached out a trembling hand and placed it on Jago’s head. ‘Do you want to know what happened all those years ago, son?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jago said.

  The metal door of the shed scraped open. ‘Then why don’t you tell the boy, Tristan?’

  Kemble Sykes made his entrance like some evil movie villain. He sauntered to the centre of the shed, his dark clothes and black beard sinister in the bright sunlight streaming through the windows.

  ‘Tell them what happened to that child.’

  Tristan’s reaction was immediate. He half-crouched with his fists up like a boxer.

  ‘You tell them, Kemble; it was your fault, the fireworks, everything.’

  ‘I hold my hands up to that,’ Kemble said, and, as if to prove it, he held both his hands in the air. ‘It was to do with fox hunting, which was legal then.’

  ‘We know about that,’ I said. ‘We know about Vulpes Vulpes too.’

  Tristan was slowly circling Kemble, jabbing his fists at the air but going nowhere near his enemy. He didn’t look threatening – he looked silly.

  ‘Tell them what you did,’ Tristan said.

  Kemble was turning in a small circle, keeping eye contact with Tristan. The result was weird. Like the earth orbiting the sun.

  Jago and I watched them from the sofa, hardly daring to breathe.

  ‘Tell them, tell them what happened,’ Tristan insisted.

  ‘We threw firecrackers under the horses.’

  ‘You did. You threw them.’ Tristan was punching the air with more energy, more anger, like he was working himself up to something.

  ‘I threw them.’ Kemble’s voice had dropped so low it was difficult to hear him.

  Although Tristan’s fists were now punching the air closer to him, Kemble kept his arms to his side. He continued his small circles, speaking softly like he was remembering.

  ‘I threw the firecrackers. They caused panic, terrible panic. Horses reared, riders fell off. At first it was funny, we watched the chaos from behind the hedge, remember? We were laughing…’

  ‘You were laughing, Kemble.’ Tristan pummelled the air. ‘You were laughing like a maniac.’

  ‘At all those people in their bright red coats tumbling off into the mud – but then there was the child…’

  ‘The child,’ Tristan said. And he lowered his head.

  ‘We didn’t see her at first, but we saw her pony, a white pony. He was crazy with fear: eyes rolling, nostrils flaring, rearing and bucking. She tried to hold on, tried to control him, but she was just a small girl, she didn’t have the strength. He bolted towards us, towards a high brick wall. We saw them crash straight into that wall. And we saw the horse fall, bleeding, onto the child.’

  I heard Tristan sob. ‘He was screaming. That poor animal was screaming and writhing and underneath him the girl was still as death. And what did we do? I’ll tell you what we did. We ran away. Real heroes, huh?’ He dropped his fists and wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I still hear that pony screaming in my dreams sometimes.’

  Jago and I listened.

  ‘And when we got back to my place, we fought,’ Kemble said. He looked at Jago. ‘Your father wanted us to hand ourselves into the police. To face whatever we had to. He was desperate to know if the kid was hurt. I wanted to keep quiet. No one knew it was us. That’s when we fought.’

  ‘Some fight, it was over in minutes.’

  ‘That was just a lucky punch you threw.’

  ‘But it put you through the plate glass door.’

  ‘I’ve never seen so much blood,’ Kemble said, ‘and it was all mine.’

  ‘And then you pulled a knife on me.’

  ‘I was bleeding like a stuck pig. The glass cut me everywhere – my arms, my chin.’

  The two men batted the sentences back and forth. Jago and I shifted attention from one to the other as they spoke.

  ‘And I pulled a knife,’ Kemble said, softly.

  ‘And you told me you were going to the hospital and then you were coming after me. That you’d find me; hunt me down like the huntsmen after the fox. And I ran away again. But not any more, Kemble. What we did was wrong and I’m done running!’

  The last sentence was a shout and without warning Tristan charged, head down like a bull right at Kemble.

  I screamed.

  Kemble dropped to the floor, but was quickly up again. ‘No Tristan, no!’

  Tristan clasped him round the middle and tried a sort of judo throw on him. They tussled and wrestled but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. It wasn’t much of a fight. They looked ridiculous.

  I saw a fight once outside the pub. It was frightening, horrible, fists and blood. Dad pushed me behind him and hurried me away.

  This was more like two small kids in a playground.

  Now Kemble had hold of one of Tristan’s plaits and Tristan was shouting, ‘Oh, oh, oh.’

  ‘I said stop!’ Kemble shouted. ‘I’m not here to hurt you, I’m here to warn you!’ They were grunting and panting and sweating.

  Jago and I stood up to get a better view.

  At last Tristan managed a messy judo throw and Kemble went down, banging his head on the coffee table that Polly had collapsed onto just a few days before.

  Kemble sat up, rubbing his head.

  ‘Okay, you win, if that’s what you want. Now can I tell you why I’m here?’

  Tristan slowly got his breath back and then put his hand out and helped Kemble to his feet.

  ‘Phew! I could do with a cold drink or something. How can you live in this tin can? It’s boiling.’

  Tristan got another can of fizzy out of the fridge and handed it to Kemble, who sat on the coffee table, still rubbing his head.

  ‘Could I have a drink too … um … Dad?’ Jago said, quietly.

  Tristan smiled slowly, showing the same gleaming white teeth as his son. He got a drink, handed it to Jago.

  ‘So what’s the story?’ Tristan perched on the edge of the sofa. His hair had come loose in the fight and he fiddled with it, plaiting it neatly without even looking.

  Kemble took a long swallow of his drink. ‘It’s the girl. Well, she’s a woman now. She’s out for revenge. She’s going to make us pay for what we did. The pony had to be shot and she was seriously injured, could have died.’ He was pacing the room restlessly.

  ‘You’re crazy.’ Tristan frowned.

  ‘No, but I think that poor woman may be.’

  His pacing had brought him to the door of Tristan’s workroom. He glanced in and said, ‘What the hell…?’

  ‘It’s a coblyn,’ Jago and I said together.

  Tristan’s face flashed with surprise that we knew, but immediately changed back to a frown. ‘Never mind that,’ he said. ‘How did this woman know it was us?’

  Kemble dragged his eyes away from the ugly goblin and shrugged. ‘Research? It’s easy enough on computer. There’s stuff on the net about us and how we formed Vulpes Vulpes.

  ‘It wouldn’t be too difficult to email the others either, ask questions. I know I wasn’t Mr Popularity back then. Anyway, trust me, she knows it’s us. She probably saw you on telly as well. That’s how I knew you were here. Several people made it their business to tell me that someone, with the same tattoo as me, was playing around with mysterious sculptures on a Pembrokeshire Beach. There aren’t too many of these around, Tristan.’ He held up his arm to show the tattoo.

  Tristan began rubbing angrily at his as if he wanted to scrub it away.

  While all this talk was going on, I was worrying about Tia.


  ‘Look, I’m going. You don’t seem to care too much,’ I said to Tristan, ‘but Tia is still missing. I’ve got to find her.’

  ‘Of course I care…’

  ‘Wait. What?’ said Kemble. ‘That little dog, your dog is missing?’

  All three of us nodded.

  ‘Then I may be already too late.’

  CHAPTER

  14

  ‘My cats, your dog? That’s how she’s going to do it. God, I suppose, in her mind, they have to pay the price for what happened to her pony,’ Kemble said.

  This was starting to sound nuts.

  ‘Your cats?’ Tristan said, rubbing at his forehead like he was trying to wake up from some dream. Jago and I sat forward, tense and listening, as the day took another weird twist.

  ‘I’ll tell you quickly, but we’ve got to do something if you want to see your dog again.’

  The sick feeling crept back into my stomach. Jago grasped my arm.

  ‘She came to work at my clinic.’ Kemble stood and began pacing.

  ‘Your clinic?’ Tristan said, surprised.

  ‘Yes, I’m a counsellor.’

  ‘A counsellor?’

  ‘Yes, my wife and I…’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Tristan, stop repeating everything I say, you sound like a parrot. Yes, I’m married, with two children and I’m a qualified counsellor with my own clinic. I help people with problems.’

  ‘You do?’ Tristan couldn’t have sounded more amazed.

  ‘It’s not as odd as it seems. After I got myself stitched back together…’ Kemble rubbed at his chin. ‘This beard hides a six-inch scar, by the way.’

  If he expected sympathy he didn’t get it.

  ‘While I was getting sorted out at the hospital, I was in a lot of pain and furious with you. A nurse suggested I needed anger management. I laughed then, but a few days later I found myself at a clinic. I learned a lot.

  ‘Anyway, I’m wasting time. In a nutshell, this woman came to work for me. She got friendly with my wife and kids and offered to look after the house and our cats while we went on holiday. When we came back there were no cats and no Emma Carr.’

  ‘Emma Carr – is that her name?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Kemble scattered another shower of orange tic tacs into his mouth and chewed. He peered into Tristan’s workshop again. ‘That really is an ugly thing,’ he said.

  ‘It’s just something I’m working on,’ Tristan said, irritably. ‘What happened with Emma Carr? Did you go to the police?’

  Kemble took one more nervous look and went on with his story. ‘The police weren’t interested – suggested she’d accidently lost the cats and then disappeared rather than face the music.’

  ‘Maybe that is what happened.’ Tristan had moved so that he was next to Jago on the sofa. I saw him rest his hand lightly on his son’s shoulder.

  ‘I would have thought so too, except she left an odd little poem on my desk. She also left a piece of paper with my name and yours. My name had been crossed out with red ink. It gave me the chills, I can tell you. Like some scary movie. I Googled her. That’s when I found out she’d had a serious horse riding accident and years of surgery. It happened when she was ten and on a fox hunt near Bristol. It was too much of a coincidence. I knew then I had to get here to warn you.’

  A suspicion was creeping into my mind. ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Long fair hair, glasses,’ Kemble said.

  ‘There’s a woman who’s been kind of hanging around us. She says she’s a birdwatcher but she’s not. She found Tia when we lost her and then when Jago … um … fell in the sea…’

  Jago gave me a dirty look but didn’t say anything.

  ‘When Jago fell in the sea, she helped me pull him out because he can’t swim.’

  ‘You could have drowned.’ Tristan’s grip tightened on Jago’s shoulder.

  ‘Yeah. I could have.’ Jago gave me another dirty look.

  I wanted to change the subject – quickly. ‘Can’t be her though. This woman’s got short black hair.’

  ‘She’s got a long scar right down her back.’ Jago screwed up his nose.

  Kemble turned sharply, waving his hands in the air. ‘It’s her. It’s got to be her. The scar? Back surgery after the accident.’

  ‘But she’s got short black hair,’ I said again.

  ‘Maybe she’s trying to disguise herself. If you’ve got long blonde hair, you’d change it to short dark hair, wouldn’t you? If I could only see a photo or something I’d know if it was her.’

  ‘Anyway, she found Tia when she ran off at the caravan park,’ I said shaking my head. ‘She was taking her to the police.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I thought back to when the woman was running in front of me, cradling Tia in her arms. Something wasn’t right. Then it hit me.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘She was trying to hide Tia in her jacket. She hadn’t found her, she was taking her.’

  ‘If we could be sure it’s the same woman, we could get the police involved,’ Kemble said.

  ‘We’ve got a video of her,’ Jago said softly. He turned to me. ‘I got bored videoing you diving. I focused in on that woman because she was watching us.’

  ‘We’ve got to get that video. It’s on my phone at home.’ I felt hope coming back into my bones – at last we had something, we could do something.

  The four of us ran outside.

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ Kemble said.

  ‘I’d better take Carys on my motorbike. It’s faster. Is that okay with you, Jago?’ Tristan said.

  He nodded.

  I snatched the crash helmet from him and leapt astride the bike. Tristan kicked the starter into action.

  I held on tight as we bounced along the lane and took a sharp left down towards the village.

  With a jolt and a roar we were off down St Winifred’s Hill and into the centre of Carreg. The bike smelled of petrol and leather and heat.

  The red traffic light held us prisoner. The idling bike seemed to hold its breath. I found myself counting off the seconds.

  The green light, another roar, and through the traffic to my street. The first half of our road is all shops and cafes and every tourist in Wales was there that day. We bumped and jerked along as people criss-crossed in front of us, and dawdled along the pavements in hoards. Twice we had to stop to let families with pushchairs pass us. And an old lady on a walking frame took forever to get from one side of the road to the other. It felt like the whole world was trying to slow us down. It was all I could do not to scream.

  At our flat, I jumped off and hurtled up the steps.

  I thrust the door open. Linette was in her dressing gown, drying her glowing red hair after a shower.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘Still searching the village for Tia. I said I’d wait here in case the RSPCA called, or the police.’

  I was too twitchy to listen. ‘My phone?’ I said.

  ‘Any news of Tia?’

  ‘My phone,’ I said, ‘where is it?’

  ‘Carys, you know your phone’s been confiscated.’

  ‘You don’t understand, pleeeeeease.’

  ‘I can’t … Tristan?’ The last bit of her sentence was said in shock as the tall figure appeared at the open front door. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘My phooooooone,’ I wailed.

  ‘I’ll explain when I can.’ Tristan said. ‘We really need Carys’ phone.’

  ‘But her dad…’ Linette was moving towards the sideboard. She opened the drawer, took out my phone and held it to her chest. ‘You’re going to get me into trouble, Carys. What’s so important that you need it now?’

  ‘Jago took a video of me diving. There’s a woman on the video we need to check if…’

  A sharp knock at the door made me turn. Jago and Kemble stood outside the open doorway.

  I beckoned.

  Linette was viewing the vi
deo on my phone, screwing her eyes up with concentration. ‘Oh, nice dive, Carys, I didn’t know you could dive like that. Did Dai teach you?’

  I stood there, holding out my hand for my phone, getting more annoyed by the second.

  Linette rattled on. ‘I recognise that woman with the binoculars. She’s the reporter I told you about, Carys. The one that came into the Crab’s Claw and then followed you down to the harbour.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about any reporter,’ I said.

  ‘Really? Must have slipped my mind. She said she wanted to do a follow-up story on the sculptures. She came back and said she’d missed you, so I told her where you live.’

  ‘Good ploy,’ Kemble said.

  Linette looked up with a start. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘He’s Kemble. Give him the phone,’ I said.

  ‘You’re Kemble Sykes? The mysterious skinny-beard guy? But I thought…’ She frowned and looked from Tristan to Kemble and back to Tristan.

  ‘He’s okay, Linette, honest. Give him the phone.’ Tristan said. ‘The woman on that video may have Tia. She may be going to hurt her. It’ll take too long to explain now.’

  Linette reluctantly handed me the phone. I passed it over to Kemble without even looking at it.

  His fingers flicked rapidly over the buttons and he studied the screen in silence. We waited.

  ‘It’s her,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to the police.’

  I turned to go with them, but Linette grabbed my sleeve. ‘Wait just a minute.’ She said to Tristan, ‘Do you really think I’m going to let Carys rush off with you lot when I’ve got no idea what’s going on?’

  ‘Linette.’

  ‘No! Tell me what this is all about.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Kemble said.

  We sat down although I couldn’t stop jiggling my legs. I wanted to be off doing something. Who knew what was happening to Tia while all this talking was going on. When Linette asked if anyone wanted coffee, I gave a kind of growl. She deliberately ignored me. ‘Or tea?’ she said.