Scared of giving offence, Williams spends a long time admiring the 1950s retro board and even longer with the contemporary neutrals, but he heads for ‘Classic’ with the certainty of a pointer on a grouse moor. Kay, privately, rolls her eyes at me, but takes out a tape measure and starts to measure up.
Williams, relaxing now that it’s just me and him in the room, starts to talk. About Bethan. About him and Joanne. About all the things his life once was and the mess it’s now become.
‘I see now that I shouldn’t have asked Jo to stay up here. Be a farmer’s wife. We’d have been OK in Brecon or Carmarthen, but she just wasn’t cut out for this kind of life. She said that, you know, in her way, and I just couldn’t hear it. Stuck in my ways, I was.’
I nudge him about Bethan and her music. That first time I met him, he said that things would have been all right if Bethan had lived in Brecon or Carmarthen or St David. That didn’t echo much the first time I heard it: Brecon or Carmarthen are simply the two nearest towns of any size, and St David would be a nice place to live if you wanted to avoid the bigger cities.
‘But were you saying it was church music that she loved especially? St David is tiny, but it has a cathedral. A choir. Is that why you mentioned it?’
‘Oh yes, she loved singing. The organ. All that church stuff. She used to play the harmonium in St Cledwyn’s’ – that’s the village church – ‘but the monks had a harmonium too, and a piano and they helped her with lessons and harmonies and things.’
‘Did she feel a sense of vocation? Was she religious at all? Even just one of those passing teenage things, a temporary infatuation perhaps?’
‘Oh yes. She liked her music. That was probably the main thing, but she really got into the church stuff too. She could get quite intense, I suppose. Like you say, it was probably only a phase.’
‘The monastery? She spent real time there? She liked it?’
‘Oh yes, until she took up with Roberts, she probably spent more time there than anywhere.’
‘Evening services too? Compline, for example?’
He says yes, and why not? He’s somewhat defensive. Protective even. He starts telling me that the monks keep their farm ‘very tidy’. Tells me that he once bought a load of hay from them, ‘Really beautiful it was, cut just right, good bright colour, nice sweet smell and absolutely no dust.’
I nod, as if I care. Then ask, ‘It’s a fair way from you to the monastery. How did she get there? Was it you who drove her? Joanne maybe?’
‘Oh!’ Williams laughs at my city-bred assumptions. It’s three miles by road, he says, ‘but only two if you take the back way.’ He jerks his finger at the back of the farmhouse, indicating a footpath, I assume, that must run roughly parallel to the road. ‘Bethan never minded pulling her boots on.’
We talk more, but I get nothing that I much value.
Kay comes in from the living room, all clicky-heeled and in control.
‘Mr Williams, would you just like me to measure up elsewhere? The bathroom, perhaps? Your daughter’s old bedroom?’
He would, yes, is the answer. He stands up and straightens as he delivers it. Escorts Kay to the bedroom door, throws it open for her and stands back, chest puffed out like a guardsman on parade.
I don’t think Kay will do her job better if she has Williams puffing anxiously at the door, so I drag him away again.
He and I sit in the kitchen drinking tea, while Kay clicks around with her tape measure, makes notes. She photographs the rooms on her phone.
Then she’s done. She goes over the next steps. Promises to provide a ‘budget for your approval’. Says she’ll get started as soon as possible thereafter.
I realise I am extraordinarily proud of my sister. A feeling that has no basis in reason. I’ve done little enough to make her like this, after all. But I sit at the table and listen to this beautiful and self-possessed young woman explain how the lamp shades will be chosen to complement the curtains and feel quite unjustifiably proud that that a sister of mine should become this person.
And then we’re done. I walk and Kay precariously hopscotches to the car. She’s seeing a friend in Swansea after this, so I drive her there. Kay’s elated by her first taste of the interior decorating game. She relishes it the way she enjoys a new dress, a new look.
‘I’m not saying I’d go for interiors over fashion,’ she tells me. ‘But I could maybe see it as a second string to my bow.’
I laugh – she has a bow? – but encourage her. Tell her I think she’ll do a great job, which indeed I do.
I drop her in Swansea.
My phone jabbers with texts and emails from Burnett’s team. Most of them just FYI-type stuff, some good, some bad.
They’ve sent two uniformed male constables down to the south coast to interview Bethan Williams’s mother. A lousy move. I know Dyfed-Powys struggles with resourcing these bigger enquiries, but the interview really needed two women in plain clothes. Two burly Welsh coppers, in full uniform, filling Joanne Williams’s kitchen – that’s just not the way to tease out any long-concealed secrets.
There’s better news too. The taxi driver who dropped Alina Mishchenko off on that fateful night has been interviewed. He correctly picked her photo from a set of six different mugshots. And he remembered, or claimed to remember, the moment of her arrival. Said there was a dark-grey BMW waiting, lights on and engine running, just a little further on down the road. Said someone came out of the car and spoke to Alina. She walked on to the car, hesitated, then got in.
You wouldn’t normally believe an account that detailed three months after the event, but those black cab drivers have spent years honing their memories and, as the driver said in the interview transcript, ‘She was a pretty girl, nicely dressed, and you do remember those ones, I suppose. But also – well, I don’t know. There was something odd about it. She obviously wasn’t expecting anyone to pick her up. She was going home after a party. And there was just something about it. It was like she didn’t know this guy, but she went over to his car anyway.’
I wonder just how it worked. Presumably BMW guy said something – anything – to get Alina over to his car, then, once there, pulled a gun or a knife, and forced her to make the last, tragic misstep. We may never find out exactly, but that dark-grey BMW may be traceable. Burnett, needless to say, is already on the case.
He wants me back in Carmarthen, wants me to report back.
Phooey to that.
Do what you need to do, Fiona. Just do what you need to do. I opt to give that instruction priority over the rest.
Turn my phone off. Listen to my cooling engine.
Things appear differently depending on who’s observing them. Neil Williams would have told the original Dyfed-Powys inquiry something very similar to what he just told me, but they’d have heard it very differently.
Dyfed-Powys would have heard of a studious, rather earnest girl, who loved music and was a little enamoured of the religious life. They’d have heard of that girl being led astray by a man, ten years older than her, and a rough sort, a wild sort, an untamed man of the countryside. It’s little wonder they came to the view they did.
But we now know different. Bethan ran because something terrified her. And whatever that terrifying thing was – and I think we’re looking at more than simple kidnap – it has its epicentre at that damn monastery. There are simply too many paths leading to those same too-open doors.
I get out my copy of Revelations. Re-read the little bio of Mother Julian.
Almost nothing is actually known about her. She was an anchoress at the church of St Julian in Norwich. She was born about 1342 and died about 1416, though there’s uncertainty around both of those dates. Indeed, we call her ‘Julian’ because we don’t actually know her name, just use the name of the church she was attached to. She wasn’t a mother either, for that matter. Unmarried and never formally a nun.
Bethan never minded pulling her boots on.
I’ve never minded that either and
, phone still silent, I drive back towards Llanglydwen.
From the coast to the mountains.
From the flatlands to the high ones.
From this clamorous twenty-first century city to the quiet timelessness of deep Wales, old Wales. A Wales where old habits, old beliefs can live for ever, if they want to. Len Roberts and his way of life. The monks of St David and theirs.
Miles and the centuries fall away as I drive.
I don’t drive to the monastery. That place scares me now. I don’t go to Williams, to Roberts, or the cave.
Instead I park up at my favourite muddy junction. Where a little track fords a stream. Brown waters, brown rock.
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. I put my walking boots on, dried out now after their adventures beneath ground. Coat, scarf, gloves. My ordinary woollen ones, not the lovely ones Ed gave me.
Binoculars.
I wonder about taking a torch, but I’m not going to be out long, or go far. This track, I realise, runs all the way down the north side of the valley. The road, taking a more circuitous route, takes the south side. This track will pass just behind Williams’s farmhouse and head on into Llanglydwen proper, coming out on the road about halfway between the village and the monastery. It’s the track Bethan would have taken to go to her music lessons, to come back from compline.
If you want to know what Bethan saw, then try walking in her footsteps
I do just that.
Walk briskly to begin with. The track is rutted and wet. Choked with long grass and brown-stemmed dock. Hedges to either side. Hawthorn and elder and hedge maple. The hawthorn berries seem particularly abundant this year. Swagged in purple. Gifts left over from a generous autumn.
I walk for thirty minutes or so until I see the lamps of Williams’s farmhouse two hundred yards below me. There’s an easy path from there to here. In summer, especially, this must have been a lovely place to grow up.
I walk on, slower now. Towards Llanglydwen. Towards the monastery.
Bethan Williams walked this route frequently. She walked it, sometimes, at night. Coming home after compline.
She’d have been in a part of the valley where no one would have expected a pair of eyes, not here, off the road, after dark.
Walk on.
My view is occluded by the hedges, and the occasional bigger tree. An oak or an ash. But there are gaps in the hedges, or changes in the level of the ground which afford me the chance to look around.
And it’s obvious really. A cottage. Two-up, two-down. Whitewashed. An ordinary rural scramble of stone-built outbuildings around a little yard.
A Mitsubishi Shogun, or something of that sort, parked outside.
Somewhere, out of sight, a dog yapping in this air that is starting to grow heavy with the approaching dark.
And a driveway. Formed of some grey aggregate crush. Leading up from the road to the cottage. Intersecting my track. Bethan’s track.
Interesting.
I walk right on down to where my track disgorges into Llanglydwen. There are other farmhouses and cottages dotting the valley, but none where Bethan’s vantage point would have given her nearly such a clear view. When I hit the road, I walk back the way I came.
It’s after four now and lights are beginning to twinkle up and down the valley. We’re not long past the shortest day of the year, and you feel it here. This rural nightfall. Sheep bleating over damp fields. The burr of tractor.
I get back to the intersection between my track and that heavy driveway. The little cottage whose whitewashed walls might hide a deep interior darkness.
I clamber up a little bank, thick with the wands of dead willowherb. Press up against a tangle of elder and blackthorn and train my binoculars on the house.
The upstairs windows are dark, which doesn’t help. If I saw any children’s toys or posters in an upstairs bedroom that would, most likely, kill my theory, but I can’t see enough to know.
Downstairs, someone moves in a kitchen window. People are allowed to move and kitchens are a natural place in which to do so, but the person is a man and, as far as I can tell, he’s alone.
My theory stays alive.
Look at the Mitsubishi.
Again, hard to tell because of the light, but I think its rear windows may be tinted, perhaps even darkened.
My theory isn’t just alive, it’s starting to awaken. To gather force.
I don’t like being here now. The sense of peril is just too strong. I stuff my binoculars into my coat pocket and start to disentangle myself from the bank and its knotted trees.
Slither down. Fall. My binoculars go tumbling beyond my reach.
Land, as a savage ill-luck would have it, at the feet of a man.
A man I know well.
Father Cyril, Abbot of the Monastery of St David at Llanglydwen. He’s here with Brother Nicholas, possibly my least favourite of the monks.
I say, still stumbled, still fallen.
‘Evening, Father. It’ll be a beautiful night.’
The abbot picks up my binoculars. Slowly folds the leather strap round the hinge and focusing ring. Once he’s happy with his arrangement, he hands it to me, saying, ‘I think perhaps it will be, yes.’
His eyes are serious, clever, full of thought.
I say, ‘We don’t get walks like this in Cardiff. You never escape the neon.’
‘No.’
I start to say something else. A tra-la-la-la whistle of innocence. An I’ve-no-idea-what-dark-game-you’re-playing tune. I keep it light and bright and, as far as my shaking fear permits me, normal.
The abbot says, ‘You were taking a look at the cottage. That’s Dylan Parry’s place. We were just going to visit him.’
He gives me a come-with-us wave. One that is simultaneously gracious and commanding.
One that issues an order.
I say no. Say I need to be getting back. Say, ‘My boss was on the phone just now, yelling at me because I’m meant to be interviewing with him in forty minutes.’
The abbot looks at me. Says, very quietly, ‘I don’t think so.’
Brother Nicholas, meanwhile, is starting to work his way round me, cutting off my exit route.
I don’t let him.
I run.
Run like I have all the hounds of hell on my tail. The horsemen of an apocalypse in which these men believe and in which I never have.
I run for the road. The sweet road with its rare, but occasional, traffic. The road which might offer me safety.
Because the driveway offers the shortest way there, it’s the path I take.
My headstart is almost nothing at all. A couple of yards plus just a half-second of surprise. I’m much fitter than I ever used to be. Fitter and faster. All those good evenings spent with Bev at the swimming pool.
But a million evenings spent swimming couldn’t turn me from a woman into a man. Don’t suddenly turn me into some turbo-charged va-va-vroomy super-athlete.
As it happens, I do OK. Make a good twenty yards. Think that perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll make the whole distance, when Nicholas just catches my trailing leg.
It’s not a big touch. Just enough to throw my balance. I stumble once. Lose an ounce of speed. Feel Nicholas’s crashing force slam into me from behind.
I go flying.
Scrape along the drive, winding myself. My face protected only by my outstretched hands.
Nicholas, panting heavily, drags me upright.
Even then, I’d fight him. Guys – perhaps especially if they happen to be monks – don’t expect women to come at them like a bagful of angry cats. Still less will they expect that this particular petite and unimpressive woman has received many hours of combat training from Lev, a guy who used to teach for the Russian Spetsnaz.
I’m just gathering myself for a hard blow upwards to Nicholas’s jaw. The sort of savage first move that can give a second or two’s space in which to figure out the rest, but Father Cyril has reached us now. Grabs my scarf from behind. Twists an
d pulls till I start to see black. Choking.
I wave my hands in failed surrender.
Nicholas removes my coat, then puts it back on again, zipped up, but with my arms straightjacketed inside. It’s a very simple, very effective ploy. I can’t fight without arms. Can’t even run sensibly.
Cyril hands the twist of my scarf to Nicholas, who keeps an ungentle hand on it.
Cyril leads us to the little cottage.
The yard, the car, the barking dog.
I’m stupidly scared now. ‘I almost peed myself in fear.’ That’s what they say, don’t they? It’s not an experience I’ve had before, but I have it now. A kind of draining, shaking, emptying feeling that sucks at me. Weakens me.
When Nicholas pulls too hard at my neck, Cyril chides him, ‘There is no need to hurt her, Brother.’
The Shogun, I notice, does have darkened rear windows. Blacked out. How’s my theory doing now, I think. Evidence for and evidence against?
Some of the evidence for comes to the door at Cyril’s knock.
Dylan Parry. The intense tweedy guy from that day with Cesca at the monastery. He recognises me, with an ‘Ah! Our little police girl,’ and his dark eyes have a glitter that I do not love.
I’m bundled inside. An ordinary cottage kitchen. Tidy, homey and warm.
I’m squished down on a chair.
Nicholas keeps a hold on my throat as Cyril fishes in my coat for my phone. Finds it. Sees that it’s turned off.
Places the phone and my car keys on the table.
There’s a short and wicked silence.
Parry says, ‘All right. Let’s do this properly.’
He steps out into the hall. Comes back a moment later with cable ties. Binds me at the wrist.
At the ankle.
I say, ‘I don’t have to tell anyone what I’ve seen. I really don’t.’
Cyril says, ‘And could we trust that, officer? Would we wish to?’
I don’t answer.
On the wall above the small kitchen window, there’s an icon. Gold-framed. Precious.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 31
