The tarpaulin, he had seen at first glance, was both big enough and long enough for him to wrap himself up in it several times over. Even one folding would blissfully do the trick, let alone the four or five that, he soon appreciated, he could in fact manage. Beyond the fence Pete had already spotted a little stone cairn, protected by two incomplete, roughly constructed walls, part of some sheepfold long since abandoned.
His brand of energy, originating in desperation, in a grasp of the seriousness of his situation, did not forsake him for so much as a second. He dragged the now pliable canvas sheeting over to the cairn, again having to tread carefully because of the wet treacherous slipperiness beneath his feet. He chose the side of the shepherds’ rude construction least vulnerable to the wind, protected to some degree by the unfinished walling. Turf here was comparatively dry and therefore free from the night frost now setting in by the minute. So, after lowering himself down with anxious caution, Pete wound the tarpaulin round him even more times than he’d reckoned possible. Then he let himself slump inch by inch down to the ground, and wriggle into a now-yearned-for horizontal position.
A little saying of Mum’s came into his head, one she’d used when he was younger (and employed to the Brats even now): ‘Snug as a bug in a rug’. Well, somewhat improbably, this was his condition now.
As he felt himself borne into unconsciousness, he involuntarily envisaged Sam Price beside him, also safe from the winter cold inside the black, rank-smelling canvas, his feet touching his own, and his eyes fixing their beams on his face, not with the fury and loathing of their last moments together, no, nothing like that, but with forgiveness, understanding, satisfaction in comradeship…
He was never to forget what he dreamed of in those tarpaulin hours. He was making his way back to Leominster, not by the slow slog of road in whatever vehicle, but through the air. He simply put his hands on the string of a huge kite, the plain old diamond-shaped sort like his brother Robin had wanted him to make, and floated effortlessly off this shank of the Berwyn Mountains to home and safety, a high flyer with the best imaginable goal for his high flight. Possibly this was the first time that particular play on words occurred to him – asleep on a stretch of Welsh wilderness.
When he was sufficiently awake to poke his head out of his tarpaulin cocoon, it was still dark and cold on the Disgynfa plateau. A dark which was nowhere relieved by any luminous flying object in the sky. Had there ever been such a visitant to these mountains? Perhaps only those saw who deep down wanted to see. Sam Price did want to see, fervidly, so maybe he’d met up at last with Don Parry (clearly another bloke who wanted) and had been rewarded with a brief, bright glimpse of some balloon-like form hovering overhead, little twinkles of light playing on its underbelly. But Pete himself, he did not ‘want’. Somehow the great peace on these Heights, which had enabled him to sleep so deeply these past hours had taken from him any desire for extra-terrestrial encounter. In truth this had been Sam’s desire, not his own, and he had borrowed, not to say appropriated or stolen, it. Surely, after all their joint quest had brought him – Sam’s obscene, hostile words and his vicious blows, which still hurt, to say nothing of his feelings of guilt and loss – it would be best for him to abandon UFOs once and for all. When he got back home to Leominster, he would write to Bob Thurlow and tell him, sorry, but he’d had a change of mind, and would instead go for…
No. That wasn’t enough. He must inform Bob Thurlow that he was, regretfully, unable to take part in the show. He still felt, of course, ‘honoured and appreciative’ etc etc. But the programme – under this waterproof canvas he suddenly understood – had brought him nothing but woe. What success it had bestowed on him had, even at its best, its most dizzying, been hollow – and it had always met resistance from those closest to him. Better by far to let the whole thing recede.
His parents would rejoice at his decision, would think it showed moral maturity; he could scarcely bear the wait before informing them. It’d be a while before this would be practicable. He looked at his watch for the first time since he’d lain down: almost half-past five; he had slept, he reckoned, for at least four hours, and probably longer. High time to be off and away, and sadly there was no likelihood of any kite coming to bear him back to Herefordshire. He had a horrible cramp in his right arm and right leg, indeed the whole of his right side was uncomfortably stiff, the consequence of the foetus-like attitude in which he’d slept. With every minute of fuller consciousness, he was more horribly aware of his profusion of bruises and cuts. As well as of the hideous truth that Sam had left him with injuries beside a quiet roadside to – well, to bleed to death for all he knew! Or, apparently, cared!
Bringing this improbable, almost impossible fact to mind enabled him to find the strength to crawl out of the canvas, lurch his shaky body upright, balance and support it on feet very wobbly at first, and then take forward steps. He must look like some flesh-and-blood scarecrow placed by some crude joker by this broken-down, dry-stone sheep-fold. Well, a fixture in this gaunt, frozen landscape he was not going to be. How he was going to explain himself – even on his homeward journey, let alone on arrival at Woodgarth – was a thorny matter to be postponed until he’d got properly started… His mouth tasted unspeakably foul, and even spitting out disgusting globules of yellow phlegm into the nearest clump of bracken didn’t relieve it. There was an emptiness around him beyond any past experience of night or countryside. For the first time since his arrival above the waterfall, he felt fear at the sheer scale of where he was. If this really were Annwn, then he was perfectly happy to quit it (though grateful for having stayed unscathed in it). He did not belong here; the Overworld was what he’d settle for.
Few other ramblers in the Berwyn Mountains scale the side of Pistyll Rhaeadr as he had done. Official notices oppose their doing so; there are other, far kinder and safer ways of getting up to the plateau from the base of the fall, and of coming down too, to end up where they began, in the hostel and café of Tan-y-pistyll. From here the tarmac road leads down the Afon Rhaeadr valley to Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, which Pete now felt he’d visited in another life. Pete took far less time to reach the normal path to Tan-y-pistyll than he’d anticipated. Could it be that, however remote and arcane his sleeping-place had appeared to him, in geographical reality he’d never been all that far from where other people could, if they wished, walk without any feeling of entering wilderness? That his psychological state had created the sense of great space? Anyway soon he was back in the world of recognisable sounds. Among the trees and bushes he was now passing there was, at this pre-dawn winter hour, enough rustling, scurrying, wing-flapping, to have given him at least a few frissons, had he been suddenly placed down here among them. But, in his fervent resolve to make for Llanrhaeadr and means-of-transport home as quickly as he could, he was scarcely bothered by these noises, not all of which he was able, first off, to identify. Tan-y-pistyll, like the farm houses beyond it, appeared still rapt in sleep. Pete however strode forward defiantly in the direction of his goal, with something of the spirit in which, against common-sense, he had scaled the side of the waterfall.
But he still felt he had to sing to keep up his spirits, particularly as he would soon pass the place where Sam had stopped the Beetle and assaulted him viciously. When he did actually pass it, he deliberately swivelled his head to the opposite side of the road, lest rage rise too strongly in him.
He made himself remember happier things, and went through the successive verses of many songs until – really not so far now to the little town of last night! – he’d reached the junction of the road down from the waterfall and the road down from the village of Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog; clustered houses were imminent, thank heavens!
But now from the direction of Llanarmon DC (as most signposts call the place) a car was coming, to Pete at this moment a more unnerving sound than any late-hunting owl’s hoot. Though what else do you expect to hear on a road? It was, in point of fact not some little Beetle like Sam’s, nor an
ything remotely rustic, but a black Volvo, obviously bound, like himself, for Llanrhaeadr. Pete judged it best to take no notice of this intruder – perhaps, he told himself only half-facetiously, it’s driven by an alien? And he walked on, purposefully looking straight ahead of him.
The ploy didn’t work. The car was drawing up alongside him.
It seemed to Pete now a truly immense while since he had seen another human being. The night had thoroughly removed him from his kind, with all its capacity for hostility and treachery, and he’d been glad. But now he felt a stab of pleasure at seeing an indisputable man. Especially one so utterly normal-looking as the bloke now leaning across the empty passenger seat, and winding the window down. Expressly to address him, no doubt of it. He was about his own dad’s age, with dark, curly hair, and, would you credit it, wearing a formal suit. Talk about swallowing pride, Pete would accept the lift the chap was surely about to offer him.
‘Morning, young man!’ the latter said, with the play of a smile (rather than an actual one) on his round, red-cheeked face, ‘unusual sort of time to be taking a walk!’
His face expressed only too readably the unsuitability, the sheer unlikelihood of Pete’s gear for a pre-dawn Welsh mountain road. ‘Well, it’s not a walk,’ Pete answered, breezily all things considered, ‘I’m just heading home after a night out.’
‘Quite a night out too, by the looks of you,’ said the man. To Pete’s discomfiture he now switched off his car engine, ‘did you enjoy yourself?’
‘Well… I found a good place to kip down,’ and that was no more than the truth, was it now? ‘which was all I was wanting by then.’
‘After your fight with your mate over a girl? You lost, I suppose – and took yourself way up here to lick your wounds?’
‘Sort of!’ A little less than the truth, but on the right lines, more or less, ‘in a way!’
‘Perhaps you gave as good as you got? Let’s hope his wounds are crying out for a good chunk of beefsteak on ’em as much as yours?’
‘I’m not sure,’ answered Pete, his hand involuntarily going to his face which indeed felt a mess still, whatever the overnight improvement, ‘I don’t know how he is now.’ The man’s interpretation of his condition flattered him more than somewhat, made him feel he’d come of man’s estate, at least in the world’s eyes. But he didn’t want to hear any more of it. He could not suppress a violent shiver. Just after six on a January morning in mountain country doesn’t make for comfortable loitering in talk, and temperature was certainly below zero.
‘Buried his body somewhere nearby, have you? Your mate’s?’
‘No, of course I haven’t!’ said Pete, realising as soon as he’d spoken that his indignation was not wise. Also it made him sound as if he really had disposed of Sam, along with his own shit-soaked underpants, somewhere on the waterfall road. Anyway, his tone impressed the man unfavourably enough for him to slip a hand into his jacket breast-pocket and take out a printed card. This he flashed at Pete with a professional’s expert gesture, following it by enunciating himself the all-important words on it: ‘Jim Maddox, CID. Hop in, young sir, if you will be so obliging!’
Pete was too bemused, and too grateful for the warmth of the Volvo’s interior, not to be obliging, though he also appreciated he couldn’t very well not comply. He felt curiously light-headed, what’s more. His whole body was now telling him that he hadn’t slept long enough to be properly ready for any challenges the day might bring. ‘Jim’s my dad’s name,’ he heard himself say, to his own surprise, as the guy started the car up again.
‘That’s nice to know? A Tanat Valley man, I presume?’
‘No, he’s not!’
‘Know you’re out here? And not in your bed about to get up for breakfast and school?’
‘No! Not at all!’
‘I reckoned not! Probably doesn’t even know you and your buddy go out with flash girls and then brawl about them?’
This was true. ‘No, he doesn’t know that. He’s a well-respected accountant in Leominster.’
‘I can well believe it,’ said the CID man, ‘and I expect he’ll be very far from pleased to find out what his son has been up to behind his back miles away from where he should be. What will please him, I’ve no doubt, is seeing you at home in one piece. If that’s what you can be said to be. You look a right dog’s dinner to me!’
‘Yes, he’ll be relieved to see me!’ Pete agreed. He could see lights ahead of, as well as below, the road: the town that had been last night’s destination, home of the mysterious Don Parry. Fires were now being lit in households to start the morning, fathers would be polishing shoes and boots, mums setting out breakfast things on kitchen tables, maybe even frying mushrooms and sausages. And, of course, making tea (he could use a cup of that himself, right now). Newspaper boys might be starting their rounds, bringing tidings of ‘Aliens Have Landed in…’ Well, very possibly right here or as near here as damn-it – here in – the lightness in his head made him, uncharacteristically, hesitate over the little town’s name. But Jim Maddox was telling him something…
‘You’re aware, are you, that all behind us, between Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant and Llanarmon, and on all roads over to Corwen, there are scores – bloody scores – of my colleagues, plain-clothes and otherwise, plus a few of our military friends just for good measure.’
Fear stirred in Pete’s stomach.
‘Thought not! The road I’ve just come down is chocker with the force. Thanks to our efforts no one’s allowed to stray onto Cadair Berwyn or Cadair Bronwen at all. Not so very far from where you had your kip, I’d reckon… Any idea why there’s all this fuss?’ His tone was the light casual one he must have used, with success, on many a dubious-looking character on many a chase. Pete fell for it.
‘The sightings?’
Jim Maddox gave him a quick, interested, appraising glance. ‘To coin a phrase!’ Jim Maddox said, ‘but then everyone else has been bloody coining it since about…’
‘Half past eight yesterday evening?’ ventured Pete. The man mustn’t think him (that favourite term of Sam’s) a moron.
Another dart from the assessing eyes. ‘Exactly! Do you know I wouldn’t be surprised if, along with the lassies, news of aliens arriving here didn’t play a part in your nocturnal fun so far from home base? I didn’t arrive here myself till gone half past bloody midnight. None too pleased at having been summoned out here either… These godforsaken mountains are, at this very moment in time, as big a hive of activity as anywhere in Britain. Probably as anywhere on the bloody globe, since we all seem to be thinking in inter-planetary terms…’
‘And have you,’ Pete struggled to sound calm, mature, and what he thought of as ‘natural’, ‘have you actually found any…’ What word would it be most dignified to use here? Well, why not the one Detective Inspector Maddox had himself employed? ‘aliens?’
‘Just a few of the blighters. Here and there, you know. Usual types. Green skin, blue hair, three horns growing out of their foreheads, forked tails.’
‘In other words – nobody?’ Was he disappointed or relieved? Or just hearing what he’d have expected all along.
‘Sod all as yet. Not that I’d be allowed to tell you owt about it if we had found ’em. Anyway it’s not been for want of trying, or for want of time,’ he glanced at his watch, ‘or money, come to that. What’s being spent on this bloody lark, at a time of national financial crisis, is anyone’s guess!’ He snorted with derision. ‘Now in a moment we’ll be in the main street of the metropolis that goes by the outlandish name of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant. Me, I’m heading onto Llanfyllin. Can that be of any use to you?’
‘It could be a lot of use,’ Pete said with a rush of enthusiasm he couldn’t control, ‘though Sam may still be down right here.’
‘Sam? The lad you’ve been fighting with?’
‘Yeah!’
‘Well, I think we might leave him to steam in his own belliger-ent juice down here in Llanrhaeadr. It’d certainly be agai
nst my professional instincts to liberate you just so’s you can have another set-to with this local Sonny Robinson… I didn’t quite catch your name, I’m afraid.’
Best not to give his real one. But he didn’t feel like telling a complete lie either. This was a decent man he was lucky enough to have encountered. Well, Mrs Richards, at The Mikado, had confused him with one of the Brats, the one who in the past had irritated him most, so why didn’t he give the name of the other one? ‘Robin,’ he said, and then added, ‘Price’. Practically every other person in The Marches (not only Trevor, Susan and Sam) was called Price, so he would be believed.
Enshadowed houses, still wrapped in the night’s cold, with roof-tiles whitened by frost, showed themselves on either side of the street… ‘Well, Robin, on to Llanfyllin, where I am going to meet up with reinforcements for this madcap operation, but where I’m told there’s an excellent café, serving its own bread, famous for miles. We might grab ourselves a bit of makeshift breakfast, and I’ll try to grab you a lift back to Leominster. It is still Leominster, isn’t it?’ He implied that someone as patently shifty as Pete might well have changed his destination already.
‘Yes, of course, Jim!’ Bit forward to use a first name to an inspector from Scotland Yard perhaps, but Pete had warmed to him. And the man himself didn’t appear to mind, seemed pleased rather than otherwise. Clearly he resented at having been sent all the way out here – on what he thought a fool’s errand which would devour already ill-stretched funds.
Several times on the way to Llanfyllin, Jim Maddox slowed down to talk to fellow-cops in cars travelling in the opposite direction, to cheer them on, or inquire if they’d had any fresh news from Bala or Llandrillo in what he called the ‘night’s shenanigans’. Pete found it difficult to construct any clear picture of these. Often the operations mounted sounded as complex as for a Soviet invasion: men sent to Bala, men sent to Corwen, men just arriving in Llangollen, men who hadn’t turned up in Llanderfel, but others well in place in Llangynog and Llandrillo, ‘and a bloody tough bunch too, thank the Lord. Unlike some of the other wankers they’ve chosen to send along!’ Perhaps the arrival of non-human beings, the very sight and sound of whom were total unknowns, made more demanding and alarming task than facing any number of Russians. To deal with whom you could at least have found interpreters.
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