by Thomas Brown
He’d taken care not to mention that place by name. It was she who’d turned a general query into the very particular.
“They? What do you mean?”
The girl set her book aside, got to her feet and reached up to whisper in his ear.
When she’d finished, Lionel stepped back. If his most conscientious pupil was to be believed, then she, too, was in a very vulnerable situation. His cheeks began to redden, not from the modest fire, but the realisation that Walter Jones had inadvertently witnessed Margiad Pitt-Rose torn from her meeting with Robert Price and driven back to Hell. To The Order, as her father and his ‘guests’ called themselves.
“Her baby’s due in the New Year,” Betsan added. “But it’s not Robert’s. Oh, no. They’ve only done kissing. She’s told me everything, see. Before that, she’d been losing blood. Too much blood. So a blessing and a curse, I suppose.”
Lionel was no doctor, but he remembered his own mother’s monthly problems. How in the end, she’d had her womb removed. “Every month?”
Betsan blushed. Glanced at the door, still whispering. “No, sir. Every time she did it.”
She snatched at his coat sleeve. Her round, open face tense with fear. “Please help her, sir. Please help to hide her somewhere away from her father and those other men. That’s what she wants. She told me last week. Please sir...”
Those wide blue eyes had begun to cry. Her mouth to tremble. He mustn’t risk Mrs Griffiths hearing anything or bursting in without warning.
“I promise I’ll do what I can. Tell her that, won’t you?”
“Yes. And thank you, sir. But watch out for Idris and Gwenno. They’re…” she hesitated, glancing around the room as if there was a chance of being overheard, “evil.”
That last word stung him like a needle, coming as it did from such a normally mild-mannered girl.
“So why did you ever go there?”
“For company, sir. I’d no friends at school or in the village.”
“Any sign of a young brother Charles?”
She then must have heard her mother hovering behind the door because she quickly picked up a porcelain figurine of a child holding a spaniel puppy and placed it in his open palm.“For you, sir. It’ll bring you luck.”
“No, you don’t,” came her mother’s voice from behind him. “It’s not hers to give. Besides, and the Lord knows I’ve tried to be civil, Mr Hargreaves; but you’ve caused enough trouble here, what with Walter going the way he did, and now my Betsan a changed girl.”
Lionel returned the ornament and, having given her daughter a reassuring smile, squeezed past the broad-hipped Welsh woman, into the kitchen and outside.
***
No sooner had Lionel closed the back gate behind him, than he was aware of being followed. Of heavy breathing and the rub of boots against the stony ground. Without turning round, he quickened his pace. Memories of his impromptu visit to Heron House and that sharp-faced girl in riding clothes with a lethal-looking crop and gun, kept him moving, twisting off balance on loose stones, occasionally grabbing the nearest piece of fencing to steady himself.
“Stop, please, sir!” Came the unfamiliar voice of a young woman, and Lionel half-turned to see the organist’s photograph come to life. An awful, frightened life.
“I’m Margiad Pitt-Rose. From the prison up there. Take me with you. I’ve heard you’re a good man. Carol and Betsan both said I could trust you.”
Carol?
He stared at that stricken face dominated by a fresh bruise around her left eye, then at the pronounced swelling of her stomach under her coat. His shy pupil had been right. Margiad Pitt-Rose was unmistakably pregnant.
“Who’s been hurting you?” he asked.
“All of them.”
“The Order?”
She turned away. “Who told you that?”
“Never mind. Just give me names.”
“I can’t. Not ever. You’ve no idea what they could do to you.”
A pause, filled by the sudden rush of rooks overhead, flying towards the forestry.
“Walk in front,” he suggested recklessly. “I’ll shield you. But please, even fields have ears.”
What on earth was he doing? He asked himself repeatedly as the track widened and the short cut down to the road appeared. He’d only the one bed; one of everything. And what if the baby arrived prematurely, like he himself had done?
‘It’s not too late to say ‘no,’ urged his censorious inner voice. ‘This is madness.’ And yet, Betsan’s concern had been genuine. This young woman whose black, wavy hair was lifted from her shoulders by the rising breeze, whose moving shadow connected with his, had nowhere else to go.
***
“There’s a back way into my cottage,” he said, once they’d reached the road with thankfully no-one else in sight. “I’ll show you.” And within the minute, she was indoors, removing her coat and gloves and warming her blue-tipped fingers by his still-guarded fire. Lionel drew up the same chair that Peris Morgan had sat in and asked if she’d like a cup of tea. If she was hungry.
“You’re very kind, Mr Hargreaves,” she said, “but I’d rather you draw your curtains and make sure both your doors are bolted. Does that sound mad?”
“Of course not,” and while he busied himself, realised with a rising sense of danger, that from now on, his previously ordered life wouldn’t be the same. “You need to be safe. That’s what Betsan said.”
He detected an almost eager flicker in her lovely eyes.
“Did she say why?” She leant towards the fire’s warmth, still spreading out her cold fingers. “Did she explain what I’ve had to bear since I became a woman?”
“Without too much detail, yes. But...”
“I’ve money,” she interrupted, without turning round. “Been well paid for what I do. But it’s dirty money, and Robert Price must never learn how I’ve earned it.” She fixed those large dark eyes on his. “You didn’t seem at all surprised when I said his name. Have you been speaking with him? Have you?”
Lionel paused. He imagined being a trapper faced with an angry, frightened bear. “I had to borrow some sheet music for school,” he lied too easily. “But he did seem tense. Apparently, your father and another man he’d never seen before had warned him off.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“May they burn in Hell,” she whispered, then crossed herself. “And where’s Charles when it matters? Precious, selfish Charles. My young, carefree brother.” She transferred her gaze to the fire. Lionel noticed the heave of her thin shoulders, a tear drifting down her cheek.
Just then, came the click of his cottage’s front gate latch and an urgent knock on the door. Margiad sprang to her feet and, with some difficulty, crouched down behind the armchair she’d been occupying. Lionel peered through a tiny gap in the closed curtains, his carotid artery banging in his neck. Curtains drawn like this halfway through the morning could only arouse more suspicion.
Carol was standing with her cob by the gate. But not the Carol he knew. His sigh of relief short-lived. She gestured him to join her. Her face tense. Her grip on Lucky’s reins tight enough for him to toss his head up and down in protest. She handed over an envelope postmarked Carmarthen. Probably to do with his ever-encroaching inspection.
“Sorry I can’t ask you in,” he said to her, and meant it. “I’m afraid. I’ve got company.”
“Oh?”
“They won’t be long,” he dissembled, aware of his sudden blush.
“Doesn’t matter,” she lowered her voice. “Listen, I had to tell you about yesterday. I’d just been delivering the mail up at Heron House. You won’t believe it. No-one would.”
“Believe what? That everything there’s all sweetness and light?”
Carol frowned. “This is serious. For a start, I’ve proof that Glyn Prydderch our local constable is in cahoots with them up there. Standing next to that Pitt-Rose brute, he was bragging about his sexual prowess. How some tim
e it would be fun to try a…” she hesitated. “A really young one… a virgin. Even another boy. It’s disgusting. I wanted to wash my eyes and ears out after hearing it.”
“Are you sure it was him?”
Lionel’s precious class reappeared in his mind. Innocents, born at the wrong time, with fathers, uncles, even grandfathers ruined by war. And what about those like himself, in positions of trust? It was beyond horrible to believe her.
“Another boy? Are you sure?”
She nodded.
That clear, fragile sky seemed to darken as if a cold dusk had descended. Like a rock meeting river water, he stepped forwards then back. It was too soon to hold her close. To feel her rapid heartbeat connecting through his pullover, shirt and vest to his own. That would have to wait.
“Where was this?” he asked instead, as Lucky whinnied in impatience.
“By the pool. Having heard voices, I sneaked over there, wondering what was going on. And that’s not all. There she was as well. Bold as brass, I’m telling you.”
“Who d’you mean?”
Now it was her turn to blush. “Margiad, you know, pleasuring one of the other men. I could tell that’s what she was doing by…” She stopped to compose herself. “Early thirties he was, like her father. Him and the constable were watching and enjoying it. Egging her on. Edmund Pitt-Rose’s own daughter. Can you believe it? And she’s pregnant. I wish I’d had my old camera. The prints would have been real proof.”
Lionel didn’t need her to spell it out. That noose he’d already felt round his throat was tightening with every second.
Carol looked up at him with pink, swollen eyes. “Never forget what old Peris Morgan said.”
“How can I?”
Although he could have held her close all day and night, Lionel guided her out into the road. “And what you’ve just witnessed, well, it shows the old soldier wasn’t making things up.”
She faced him again. Her tone suddenly changed. “So why, if he’d warned you, is that trollop inside your cottage? Look at her, staring out at me. Bold as brass.”
Trollop?
Lionel whipped round to see Margiad’s face framed by each curtain. Her bruise now more black than blue.
“So, she’s your company. The reason I wasn’t invited in. You must be seeing her, too.”
Lionel’s neck began to burn.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Carol. She’s desperate. And I mean desperate.”
“If you believe that, forgive me, you’re a fool. She loves what she does up there. Everything. Even screaming when poor little Walter saw her. All put on for effect.” Carol brushed the worst of the dirt from her knees then began to walk away. “Just don’t come to me when the kitchen gets too hot. She’ll bring you down, Lionel. She’s bad luck.”
Carol half turned his way and, although she’d stopped speaking, her lips still quivered. “Just when I thought you and I might become more than friends.”
31.
Sunday 5th April 2009 – 4 p.m.
Jason jumped down from the Nissan still dwelling on Helen’s shock at his stop-start account of Gwenno Davies and the equally expert Margiad. He had to grab the nearest fence post for support as yet another bout of dizziness cocooned him. He wished to God he’d kept quiet about the whole sordid episode, but the cleaner was a loose canon. Better his version of events reached Helen’s ears first. But would she ever trust him again?
“You’ll have a cup of tea?” suggested Gwilym Price who’d recovered his rifle and a battered copy of Farmers’ Weekly.
“Brilliant. Thanks.” Yet he walked towards that immaculate new gate as if his confession and Helen’s bombshell about Monty Flynn and his writers’ courses still weighed him down. The lying git. He’d be getting a refund the moment the Irishman stepped over Heron House’s doorstep.
Gwilym Price unlocked the farm gate’s padlock and pulled it open, but Jason held him back. “Please,” he urged. “What I’ve just told you was just between us, OK? I don’t want the ‘pervert’ word on my CV.”
The other man’s mouth stretched into a smile as he indicated the two tall chimneys poking through the distant foliage. “It’s not you who’s perverted. Remember that.”
Once inside the farmhouse, he carried a spare chair into the spotless kitchen. A space devoid of any woman’s touch, observed Jason, warming his butt against the old cream-coloured Aga. He noticed an empty dog basket and the pine Welsh dresser opposite, laden not with fancy plates and trinkets but photos, ranging from sepia to bright colour, of an attractive woman at various stages of her life. A woman whose useful years on earth had ended with Llyr Davies.
He left the Aga’s warmth to study the pictures in close up. A typical land girl posing with a rake. Next, a postmistress astride her sturdy horse, and finally her marriage to Gwilym, ten years younger. Not that he looked it, with his brooding looks. Those serious Welsh eyes.
“Who’s that?” Jason pointed at a smaller image of an equally serious young man who’d obviously moved before the camera’s shutter had come down. His dark form had blurred; and was that St. Barnabas’ Church’s delicate bell tower lurking in the background? Something about him seemed familiar.
“That’s uncle Robert,” said the widower filling Jason’s Cymru mug and its tea bag with boiling water. “A true non-conformist, like the church who paid him.” He then passed Jason an already opened packet of chocolate digestives. “I’ve had this psychical research society wanting to pick my brains about him. Do some digging. But I told them to bugger off and leave things be.” He set down his mug, picked up his and Jason’s uneaten biscuits and returned them to the packet. “Robert often comes to me, you know. Whether I’m asleep or awake, makes no difference to him. He pulls at my arms, breathes his cold breath on my neck. Begs me to find her. His Margiad. Carol thought I was going doolally. Told me to get help. But it’s not me that needs help. It’s Robert.”
A persistent tremor passed through Jason’s body. His hands seemed sealed like ice to a rock around his mug.
“He sings that same William Williams hymn over and over like some old record: ‘O’er those gloomy hills of darkness, look my soul be still, and gaze...” Gwilym Price’s singing voice was more like a death rattle.
“Why?”
“For consolation, I suppose. He’d heard she’d gone off to London to start a new life, you know the sort of thing. Like you coming all the way here. But deep in his heart he didn’t believe a word of it. I remember him coming over one Sunday after church, just after the Headmaster had disappeared. Early November it was. 1946. I was only nine at the time, but I’d never seen a grown man cry like that. Nor since. Grieving for both of them he was. Carol had been upset too but I never probed too much.”
“What did Robert do then?” Jason glanced out at the sombre sky beyond the window. At the rickety line of trees along the brow of the hill opposite. He tried recalling that Headmaster’s name as the other man shrugged.
“We never found out. The Christmas Eve carol concert was the last time anyone heard him play the organ. Not long afterwards, Beynon ‘The Shop,’ who’d been in the congregation, recognised him trudging through the snow along the road to Llandovery. Suitcase and all. Sounds of a scuffle then, he said, but no proof, mind, except for a mess of footprints. “Good riddance, conchie,” we’d heard people say, but for us – what was left of his family – him disappearing like that was nothing but a worry. My mam tried getting the police involved, but they just shrugged their shoulders.” He looked at Jason. “Nothing’s changed, has it?”
“Nope. And Helen’s already seen his ghost twice up by the old lead workings. Including yesterday when we were together. He seemed to be waiting for something or someone. Dressed all in black.”
“Margiad, like I said. Sure to be.”
“But definitely no singing.”
“Saves that for me, then.”
Gwilym Price stood up. “Sixty-two years of unrest have passed since that Christmas. Too many of the living s
till draw breath who know the truth of what really happened to him and Margiad.” He regarded Jason with a question clouding his old eyes. “Are you up for helping me get to the bottom of it all?”
For a panicked moment, Jason thought about Helen. The thriller he’d planned to write. ‘Thriller’ now a faint, feeble word for another time, another life.
“OK,” Jason said.
“Whatever it takes?” The widower came over, clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Getting those freaks in the asylum to talk? And their son who shot all the herons?”
“Llyr?”
“Still in short trousers he was. All hushed up and I never found out till after Carol...” He paused to pick up his rifle and check the barrel. Jason gave it a wide berth. “We only gave Llyr work to keep him out of more trouble, but he got sent away, just like Margiad’s young brother, Charles. So Betsan says. Poor sod he was. No wonder he’s just topped himself.”
“Is that what you really think?”
“What else, given his background?”
“Did you ever see him around the place?”
“Never. Nor Betsan nor Uncle Robert.”
“If it is murder and he’d been left Heron House…”
“Answer my question,” Gwilym said.
Shit.
“You’re on,” Jason replied.
They shook hands on it, and once the determined rook-killer had locked up and accompanied him out into the thickening drizzle on to the track leading past Betsan’s taped-up bungalow, towards the old mine, Jason added his own lengthening list of unexplained occurrences. Beginning with Margiad Pitt-Rose’s invasive demands, and ending with those four portly men he’d glimpsed by the swimming pool.
***
The whine of saws and distant quad bikes accompanied them both up the hill via a different route Jason had taken with Helen, on to more boggy ground, bristling with fan-like reeds. Here, rough-woolled sheep scattered in fear. That dead ewe and lamb now all gone. He saw how that vast crescent of scrubby hillside darkened by pines, harboured nothing but dereliction.