The Wrong Boy

by Cathy Ace

  Her daughter hovered and nodded. ‘Of course I will, Mum. What can I get you? Detective Sergeant Stanley, Detective Chief Inspector Jenkins – what will it be?’

  Nan watched as the woman deferred to her male superior, as was right and proper, even if the man looked like a pathetic wimp. The woman seemed to have a bit more about her.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Jenkins. High voice, reedy. ‘Coffee, black, no sugar. Tidy. Ta.’

  ‘Me too, please. Same thing. Thanks ever so much,’ said Stanley. Nan thought it an unfortunate surname for a woman.

  Deciding to make sure they knew she was no fool, Nan said to the woman, ‘I can tell he’s from the Valleys, but you’re not Welsh.’

  The young woman blushed. ‘No, I work here now, but I’m from Bristol. Not far, really.’

  ‘If it’s over the bridge it’s far enough,’ replied Nan, keen the sergeant should know that being English in a Welsh village mattered a great deal.

  ‘Yes, DS Stanley has joined us from across the Severn,’ said Jenkins, ‘but, you’re right, I’m from the Valleys, myself. The Rhondda.’ To Nan’s mind, he smiled too brightly as he held out his hand to shake hers. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘Being from the Rhondda doesn’t have anything to do with anything,’ replied Nan tartly. ‘Most people can’t wait to get away from there, I hear. And with good reason too, I should think.’

  Helen’s curt ‘Mum’ was totally uncalled for, and she made sure her expression told her daughter so. If the police wanted to ask her questions in her own pub, they’d have to know who was in charge before they started.

  Jenkins continued, ‘I’ve heard a great deal about you, Mrs Jones. I understand this pub is the heart of the village.’

  ‘As for this pub being the heart of Rhosddraig, well, we all know that, so telling me something I already know won’t work if you meant it as flattery. Say what’s on your mind.’ Nan paused, glowering at her still-hovering daughter. ‘I’ll have tea, of course, Helen,’ she said pointedly. ‘Now then, tell me – what’s occurring? Your lot’s been disgruntling the entire population. I think it’s time you told us why.’

  Jenkins exchanged a look with his English subordinate that Nan couldn’t quite fathom; she wondered if the two of them were at it, then thought maybe not, because the woman seemed to think she had to look as much like a man as possible – with her short hair, trouser suit, striped cotton shirt and thick-soled black lace-ups – while the man . . . what was it about him that Nan didn’t like? She couldn’t put her finger on it. Then she did.

  ‘Remind me a bit of my late husband, Jack, you do,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Ah . . .’ was all the policeman said; nodding his head gently, his emotions were masked by a blank expression. To be fair to him, Nan didn’t know what else he could have said without understanding the nature of the relationship she’d had with Jack. If he’d known anything about that he’d have said something more telling.

  To business, Nan told herself. ‘So, what’s up?’ she asked.

  ‘Knowing everyone from hereabouts, as you undoubtedly do,’ began the sergeant, ‘we wondered if you could tell us if anyone’s gone missing, or not been seen around for a few days. You know the sort of thing.’

  Nan did. ‘No one,’ she replied confidently.

  ‘You seem very sure of that,’ noted Jenkins.

  ‘I am. A group of us had a lengthy conversation about that very matter last night, here. Bound to when you hear a body’s been found in the area. No one’s unaccounted for. Well, those who haven’t been seen out and about in a while have since been contacted, and are just hiding from the weather, or aren’t here for a good reason. Like Dilys and John Watkins, for example; she’s in the Morriston cardiac unit and her husband’s with her. Not long for this world, if you want my opinion. Her, not him, of course. Though apparently he’s not too good, either. What is it, anyway? The body you’ve found, is it a man or a woman?’ Nan didn’t see any point mincing words.

  ‘We’re not at liberty to divulge that at the moment, Mrs Jones,’ said the Englishwoman. Nan quite enjoyed the way the Bristolian spoke; a rare treat to hear the accent.

  Nan made no attempt to help Helen when she brought the tray of tea and coffee to the table. It was best to let her get on with it her own way, and if she messed it up then they’d know how useless she was. But Nan had to admit Helen managed alright.

  Helen sat. ‘Mum and the Corries did a good job of working their way through everyone in the village. Lower Middleford too. All present and accounted for, as of this morning,’ she said brightly.

  ‘The Corries?’ asked Stanley.

  ‘A group of Mum’s friends who come here to watch Coronation Street then chat about it afterwards. They’re a very active part of the pub community,’ replied Helen. She offered a plate of chocolate digestives, which Nan thought was a bit much; custard creams would have done just as well.

  ‘Well, that’s a big job taken care of for us right there,’ said Stanley. ‘Thanks. We knew we’d come to the right place, didn’t we, sir?’

  ‘We did indeed, Stanley,’ replied Jenkins.

  Nan reckoned these two didn’t know each other very well, after all. In fact, they both seemed to be on pins with each other, and she couldn’t work out why. Didn’t the police work in pairs, always together? Like Morse and Lewis, or Barnaby and Jones . . . or whoever it was in each series of Midsomer; they chopped and changed a bit, but Jones had been her favorite. They even got themselves a new Barnaby at one point, which Nan didn’t understand at all. Why couldn’t he just have a different name? He was a completely different person, after all. She thought they’d been stretching it a bit with that one.

  She straightened her back in the chair and asked, ‘So, if you’re asking if anyone’s missing, and if you can’t say if it’s a man or a woman, that means it’s definitely a person you’ve found up there, then.’

  Stanley and Jenkins exchanged a glance. Nan was delighted; she’d caught them out on that point.

  Jenkins took the lead. Nan had expected he would; the woman had messed up. ‘I was hoping we could keep that confidential for a while longer but, you’re right, we have discovered human remains up at the old RAF listening station.’

  ‘How long have they been there?’ asked Helen, which was just what Nan was about to ask. She glared at her daughter, who sipped her coffee.

  Jenkins sighed. ‘It’s hard for us to be exact at this stage. The conditions up there, the weather the past week or so, you know.’

  Nan pounced, ‘I watch my fair share of police series on the telly, chief inspector, so I suppose you’re trying to make the window of opportunity as small as possible. I suggest you ask who was up there last, when you carry out your door-to-door enquiries. I believe Hywel only went because he was trying to get hold of Nip. No one might have been up there for weeks. Could the remains have been there that long?’

  ‘It’s hard to say, because of their condition,’ said the sergeant.

  Got you again, thought Nan. ‘Hywel mentioned only bones were visible. I don’t think a body would have had the time to go to just bones in the past few weeks, do you?’

  ‘We believe a fire was involved,’ said Jenkins. ‘Have you, any of your friends, or maybe even anyone else who’s been in the pub and talking about this, seen a fire up there recently?’

  ‘Fire, you say? Well, now, that’s something, isn’t it? A fire?’ Nan was delighted to have a fact confirmed. ‘We can’t see the place in question from the pub. We’d have to be out and about. Have you seen anything, Helen? I haven’t.’ Nan poured herself a cup of tea.

  Helen shook her head. ‘Sorry, no. Like Mum says, we don’t have a view up the hill, only out to sea on one side, and along the back of the dragon on the other. The people most likely to see something up there would be the ones who live on the road to Lower Middleford. Or people who were out and about, you know.’

  ‘We’ll be asking everyone in the village. Thank you,
Mrs . . . um?’ said Stanley, her pen hovering over her pad.

  ‘She’s Jones again,’ said Nan quickly. ‘Ms Helen Jones. Got rid of her married name when she got rid of her husband. Better to be a Jones around here than a Thistlewaite. I mean, Thistlewaite. Sadie’s a Jones, too. Thank God. Don’t know what they were thinking calling her Sadie Thistlewaite. It’s like a tongue-twister.’

  Helen piped up with, ‘You know very well that Sadie was named after her father’s grandmother.’

  Nan glared at Helen, who started to nibble on a chocolate biscuit, something Nan believed she could well do without, given the size she was getting to be.

  Nan snapped, ‘Sadie’s my granddaughter. In school at this time of day, of course. She’d have mentioned a fire if she’d seen one.’ Then she decided to give it one more try. ‘Any idea when this fire might have been?’

  This time, Jenkins’s sigh was heavier. ‘It’s early days yet, Mrs Jones.’

  ‘Ah,’ Nan nodded sagely. ‘Still establishing a timeline, I see. Well, there’s no one local missing, but I dare say you’ll be expanding your enquiries. It must be difficult for you, not knowing when it happened. Doesn’t help you know where to start really, does it?’

  ‘Not as such,’ replied Jenkins.

  He’s a cagey one, thought Nan. ‘Do you have an idea of age?’

  ‘Again, not something we can talk about at this time,’ said Jenkins. Nan reckoned he was beginning to sound a bit snappy.

  She decided to be helpful. ‘We get a lot of youngsters down here for the surfing, you know, and those people who do hang-gliding. Plus there are the birdwatchers, and the people who just like to go for a walk. The dead person could have come from anywhere really. A visitor.’

  ‘Have there been any unclaimed vehicles in the car park, or in other areas around the village that you, or your customers and friends, might have noticed or mentioned?’ asked the sergeant.

  ‘Good question,’ said Nan, acknowledging that maybe the woman had a brain after all. ‘We can see the main car park from here, as you can tell.’

  She turned and waved toward the window behind them. ‘There’s a few other places you can park legally – in the church car park, for example. But I’m intimately connected with the church and I can tell you for certain there haven’t been any abandoned cars, motorbikes or bicycles left in either car park since the summer. September, anyway. About six weeks ago a couple of young friends of the son of the family who own the café a couple of doors along left their bicycles chained up in the church car park for about two weeks, then one of the fathers came and took them away on the back of his camper thingy.’

  ‘You mean the Rhosddraig Cwtch?’ asked Stanley, making notes.

  Nan couldn’t help herself but tut. ‘Cwtch, my eye. It’s been a café and a tea room, but nowadays – because there’s an English couple running it, I daresay – it’s a cwtch. Full of driftwood and fancy coffee machines, and they charge an arm and a leg for food that’s no better than we serve here, it’s just all lah-di-dahed on the menu. Nice enough woman, I suppose. Husband’s one of them lot who do all that gliding stuff. But that son of hers? A bit on the wild side, I’d say.’

  ‘Oh come on now, Mum,’ said Helen. ‘They’ve done up the old place a treat – it looks lovely now; light, bright, and welcoming, not like it used to be. And they sell some interesting bits and bobs there, too. Though I will admit it’s stiffer competition for us; still, we can cope.’

  She turned her attention to the officers. ‘Stew’s alright. Him and Aled are good friends, and he’s very enterprising – got his own little surf shack in the garden around the back of the place there. He makes some lovely little birdhouses in the winter, when he’s not doing so much business with the board rentals. Nice boy, chief inspector. In school with my Sadie, and with Aled, who works here some evenings and lives in the village with his grandmother. Both good boys. Both servers for communion at St David’s. Reliable types.’

  ‘Could I get some full names, do you think, please?’ asked Stanley.

  Helen replied before Nan could. ‘Aled Beynon, lives at Green Cottage – though it’s white nowadays – with his grandmother, Gwen – though it’s really Gwendolyn – Beynon. And at the Rhosddraig Cwtch it’s Maggie and Stephen Wingfield, and their son Stewart, known as Stew. Stephen’s away a lot; he’s a consultant in something or other. Travels about all over Europe.’

  ‘English like you, they are,’ Nan managed to insert, nodding at Stanley. ‘Moved here not long ago from up north somewhere.’

  ‘They moved here from Colchester, five years ago,’ said Helen, with what Nan thought was a totally unnecessary sigh, ‘not that that’s got anything to do with anything.’

  ‘And I take it your ex-husband is no longer in the area, Ms Jones?’ asked Stanley.

  ‘He can’t be far enough away,’ snapped Nan.

  ‘He lives in Slough. I believe he still travels a fair bit for work, but only around the south-west of England and Wales. He hasn’t lived in this area for many years, and certainly doesn’t come anywhere near Rhosddraig anymore, nor even to the general area.’

  ‘Thank the Lord,’ said Nan, with feeling. ‘I don’t know what that waste of space has got to do with this. You don’t think he’s come here and murdered someone, do you?’

  ‘We don’t know that anyone’s been murdered, Mrs Jones,’ said Jenkins sharply. ‘All we can say is that we have found human remains.’

  ‘Well, whoever it was you found, they didn’t drop down dead of natural causes, then cover themselves up with a load of old stones, now did they? So there’s got to be something underhand going on, hasn’t there? Just ’cos we live out here in Rhosddraig it doesn’t mean we’re all twp.’

  ‘No one’s saying you’re twp, Mrs Jones,’ replied Jenkins. ‘That’s a local word suggesting a slowness of comprehension, Stanley,’ he added quietly, looking at his puzzled sergeant, ‘and I would tell you more if I could. Really, I would. But, given you’re a woman who certainly knows her onions when it comes to police work, Mrs Jones, I’m sure you understand we have to be very circumspect about what we say, because we could let something slip we don’t want people to know.’

  ‘Ah yes, the thing only the killer would know,’ said Nan, glowing.

  ‘There might not have been a killer,’ snapped Jenkins.

  Nan wasn’t having that. ‘Oh rubbish. You’re not telling me that someone spontaneously combusted on our hill, then someone else came along and covered them nicely with stones for no good reason, are you? No. A deliberate attempt to foul-up a crime scene, that’s what it is. Anyone who watches telly knows that much. It might be a serial killer’s work. They’re popular at the moment, on telly, aren’t they? Someone might think it’s a good idea – you know, to become famous. I might work every hour God sends in this place, but I record all my favorites on TV. Sometimes Sadie and I watch them one after the other to catch up. Highly educational.’

  Jenkins stood, rather abruptly thought Nan, so she must have touched a nerve. ‘Sergeant Stanley and I had better be getting along, Mrs Jones, Ms Jones. We have some uniformed officers coming to talk to local residents, and you’ll continue to see some activity on the hill.’

  ‘When will we be able to get back up there?’ asked Helen.

  ‘It’ll be too early for him to say, Helen,’ replied Nan, keen to retain the upper hand. ‘All that lot in those bunny suits are still up there, so it’ll be a while. Luckily for us it’s hardly peak tourist season, so I don’t think you’ll be turning a lot of people away, chief inspector.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it, sir? I’m sure it’s lovely here when the weather’s a bit better,’ said Stanley, also rising. ‘One of our officers, Detective Inspector Glover, has been coming here since he was a boy. He was telling me all about the beach, and the church. I look forward to being able to see out to the Dragon’s Head, one of these days.’

  ‘Glover? Yes, he was the policeman they sent in the first place,’ said Nan.
‘I recognized him. I used to know his grandmother Vi, and his mother, before she married. Lived in Lower Middleford, they did. Nice girl Shirley Pritchard, even if she was a bit of a lump.’

  The pair left, as Nan waved at their backs.

  ‘Going sideways is that rain,’ said Nan as the figures disappeared and the door slammed shut. ‘Horrible weather.’ She picked up her cup. ‘You can take this lot away as quick as you like, Helen. We don’t want people seeing you serving me at a table like this. They’ll think we’re turning into a restaurant instead of being a pub. Can’t have that.’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ said Helen as she loaded the tray. ‘I’ll leave the pot so you can have another cup. Did you get everything you wanted out of them?’ Nan wondered if her daughter was making fun of her.

  ‘I’ll manage with what I’ve heard, ta,’ replied Nan, thinking about how best she could present her findings when the Corries arrived that evening.

  Sadie

  That stupid cow Rhian can’t do anything right! I’ve been looking forward to hearing Aled read Romeo’s part in the balcony scene for ages. I know it off by heart, I’ve gone through it so many times, imagining him saying those words to me in front of everyone in class. And she messed it all up. That bit where she’s supposed to say, ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.’ Well she said it nice and loud alright, but she sounded like she was talking to a log. No passion. No feeling. If Mrs Lee had let me read Juliet instead of her, they’d all have seen how it should be done.

  Aled and me as Romeo and Juliet? There’d be no stopping us. Not in class, and not in life.

  But maybe it’s just as well Rhian is doing it, after all, because everyone would guess about us if we were reading it together. And we can’t have that. Our grandmothers wouldn’t hear of it, though I don’t know why. Nan just goes on and on about me having to be careful to choose the right boy. Maybe Grampa wasn’t nice to her, I don’t know. He was dead before I was even born, so all I know is the little Nan has said – which isn’t very nice at all – and the few bits Mam has told me, which isn’t a lot, though she seems to think he walked on water. Maybe I should ask her – though I might not, because then who knows where that conversation would go.