A Night With No Stars

by Sally Spedding

  ‘Oh yeah? Then he’ll quietly rip you off like the rest of them. He’s just got himself a brand new Daimler, did you know?’

  ‘All I know is, he’s lost his niece and her twins.’

  ‘OK. So I’m a heartless bastard.’ He moved over to a nearby ledge and re-opened the book on a new chapter entitled Omens and Portents. He noticed her eyes on his fingers as he scanned the various paragraphs. How a scream will bring a death, how white feathers on a raven spell good luck. Nothing he didn’t already know. He shut the book quickly. ‘My brother was into all this stuff,’ he found himself saying.

  ‘So are you, it seems.’

  He shook his head and handed it back to her.

  ‘I mean, obsessed.’

  ‘Right.’

  In the pause which followed, Lucy made her way to the store’s exit. Here she paused and took a deep breath as if she was about to ask a question. He was right and made an effort to look normal.

  ‘I know it’s none of my business,’ she began, ‘but I’m just curious, okay?’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Supposing something happened to Hector . . .’

  ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘Who’d inherit Ravenstone?’

  This was a bolt out of the blue. He blinked in surprise.

  ‘What’s the old man been telling you?’

  ‘Nothing. Why would he?’

  ‘The Truth is the Word, Lucy. It’s the one who was sent away.’

  ‘Richard?’

  ‘Yup.’

  She frowned. It didn’t suit her. Then a funny little laugh followed. He didn’t like that either.

  ‘Given what happened, that’s ridiculous, surely?’

  ‘Like I said, Truth is the Word and the Word is sacred and divine. Why I write what I do. And why my next poem for you will knock the air out of your lungs.’

  She edged away still frowning.

  ‘It’s stopped raining now,’ was all she said.

  And so it had. Outside, a slash of brightness pierced the penumbral sky and made them both shade their eyes. A split second of blindness in which the tall brown-eyed man who’d been observing every move, slipped away unnoticed and headed for the town’s main car park.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  All this beauty

  and all this pain

  of beholding it emptied

  of those not deserving.

  It is the morning of a world

  become suddenly evening.

  MJJ 27/8/01 (with apologies once more to RST)

  So, either Mark, or worse, Martyn Harries had lied. But why? She wasn’t too befuddled to realise that the Ravenstone inheritance was an issue and probably a complex one. Whatever, she must find out, and told Mark she had to make a call to London.

  ‘OK, I’ll wait then you can drive back behind me. It’ll be foul out of the town.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She then punched in the lawyer’s number, only to hear a recorded message saying the office would be closed until Monday the 3rd of September.

  Damn.

  Hardly surprising, she thought, feeling suddenly drained by the day’s events. Her stints at the bungalow and the police station had been demanding enough, and although DC Pugh and his team had been grateful for both her prompt action at Maesybont and her contribution to the Rhiannon George case, there’d been far too much paper to fill in. Too many questions she’d been unable to answer.

  On the other hand, Iolo Thomas the fisherman knew everything about everyone with theories to match. He’d divulged how the bachelor’s post-Rugby life had been blistered by disputes and grudges which, in that part of the world never healed. So, she thought, seeing the sawyer’s reversing lights come on, small wonder Williams had said to her he didn’t want to be next. Mark was right. However, no one on this earth deserved that kind of savagery. Neither a ratty little tradesman or a glamorous mother of two.

  Yet why had Mark been so edgy when he’d met her outside the police station? What didn’t he want the police to know? And why had he kept looking around like a meerkat all the time? This was Rhayader not some dodgy part of Moscow. And why that slip about Parc-y-Nant, the local mental hospital? A quick enquiry there wouldn’t do any harm, she decided. Just to make sure.

  These questions preoccupied her as he waved at her then set off out of the car park and along the still busy main street leading to the Clock Tower. She glanced at it, fast-forwarding to Thursday. Just then, its glistening stonework seemed to represent the one beacon of hope she so desperately needed.

  Mark’s head showed darkly silhouetted against his windscreen. A man she could have loved, would willingly have shared her new life with, but he was a man she couldn’t fathom. Whose past and his way of coping with what had happened fourteen years ago, had already taken her way out of her depth. Like that bay just north of Caernarfon where her family had rented a holiday caravan. Where the sloping shelf of sand, suddenly sucks you down, down into the sea’s grey-green womb. It had happened to her once, when she was twelve and proudly wearing a new yellow swimming costume. Her mother was busy reading on the beach, her father examining shells with his usual curiosity.

  She’d waved to him, like Mark had just done to her, then felt her ankles gripped by the sand. One heavy step to free herself, then another, until to her horror, the cold salty sea had reached her mouth, her lungs, filling her up so her scream was drowned. She’d vomited water then screamed again, feeling nothing under her feet, until a hand fastened on hers. A strong, pulling hand dragging her to safe dry sand.

  Yes, her father had saved her life. Just like she knew he would again, before it was too late. So, had those screams she’d heard at Wern Goch and the waterfall been some kind of echo from her past? A warning, even? She told herself no. That sort of notion was more Mark’s domain – the cyclical world of the Celts. A world she was growing more and more reluctant to enter.

  He waved yet again and sounded his horn. She replied, observing how the whole region seemed to have sunk in upon itself by the sheer force of the morning’s rain, and that normal daylight wasn’t going to be resumed.

  She continued in tandem behind him as far as the Coed-y-Bryn Forestry on her way back to the Hall, then watched his white van take the rough track off the main road and disappear among the firs. He gave a further series of toots on the horn as he went which sent a coven of back birds into the sky. He’d planned to offer himself for the number 4 shift which would mean a late return that evening, however, thirty quid’s pay was thirty quid he’d said, smiling, especially as he’d just stumped up the same amount for Chanel No.5 eau de toilette and body spray.

  To keep herself sane, she thought about Thursday. At least she’d bought herself another new T-shirt – pink, this time – which would go well with her River Island skirt. Six mother-of-pearl beads lay beneath the low neckline and, considering it had come from Dorothy’s Dresses, whose archaic window display was hidden behind a shroud of yellow cellophane, not bad at all. Anna would certainly have approved.

  Flirty, feisty Anna who’d made the step up to editor two years ago and for whom, just the once, on the day of her appointment, Lucy had felt a moment’s jealousy. However, Anna had never flaunted her success, often telling her friend that her time would soon come. And before freelancing, hadn’t she on more than one social function with drink in hand, nobbled Hellebore about their lack of foresight in not promoting her? Yes, good old Anna. Her one true mate. Yet surely there’d been plenty of other birthday cards to choose from? And talk about pot calling the kettle black, she thought meanly.

  Maybe she was over-reacting, guilty about her imminent date with a relative stranger. Maybe after her busy, horrendous morning, she was simply going mad.

  She stepped on the gas and by the time she’d manoeuvred the Rav on to the Hall’s driveway had convinced herself that somehow, by divine intervention with the guardians of both herself and the sacred land fully activated, the only way, surely, was up.

  *

  To her
surprise the Hall’s front door was locked and for a few seconds she tussled with the hideous handle wondering why if Hector was around, he’d done that. Maybe he was out on the estate somewhere. Maybe down at Wern Goch. She wanted to ask him why he’d lied about Hughes and Evans. In a nutshell, to tell him to stop taking the piss.

  She used her own key, and sneezed repeatedly in the bright yellow hallway, praying that full-blown flu wasn’t on its way. She unpacked her shopping and left the Persil and fabric conditioner in the scullery. So far no sign of the man who’d promised to go to Llanfihangel-Nant-Melan, and even the usually cluttered kitchen table was ominously bare.

  She unwrapped one of the cereal bars she’d bought and jammed half of it in her mouth as she made her way back down the hallway to his study. She listened outside the door but her chewing was the only sound she could hear. When she turned the handle she realised that this too, was locked.

  ‘Hector?’ she said. ‘It’s me, Lucy.’ Sensing that earlier optimism slipping away and unsure where to try next. If he’d been outside somewhere, surely he’d have heard her car and come to see her. This was very odd, she decided. Very odd indeed, when all she wanted to know was if he’d managed to find anything more about what she’d heard at Water Break Its Neck.

  She poked her head round the dining room door which was next to the kitchen. A room where the curtains were still drawn and the smell of damp from that nearby soil bank pervaded. Rarely used, she guessed and because it wasn’t somewhere she wanted to linger. She was about to close the door when, to her horror, she noticed a dark shape slumped in the farthest dining chair at the end of the long oval table.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she called out, ready to run if necessary, then slowly recognised the familiar shape of a head, shoulders and body as Hector Jones began to raise himself from the chair. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ she blurted as a deep shiver made her teeth tap-tap together. ‘I was just wondering how you got on in . . .’

  Here she stopped, because this dishevelled man who was advancing ever closer, none too steadily on his feet, looked as if he’d just risen from that very grave outside.

  ‘My God. What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ She felt the door press into her back and for a split second realised that here she was, alone in a huge old house with someone she barely knew and who was now clearly disturbed.

  No one will hear you scream . . .

  But scream she did. Then with her shoulder bag clutched to her damp fleecy chest, she fled the Hall. Within ten seconds she was in her car, heading full tilt back to the Coed-y-Bryn Forestry. She had no choice. How else could she reach Mark to persuade him to get back home? If he’d been truly part of the twenty-first century, he’d have possessed a mobile. But no. Not him. And as the overgrown hawthorn hedges brushed the Rav’s sides, she was vaguely aware of some white van behind her. She tried to pick out the driver’s features, even the shape of the head, but in the poor light it was impossible. She cursed the sawyer’s almost primitive insularity at being phoneless, and wondered yet again if she’d been hearing things as she’d pelted down those Hall steps.

  ‘Come back, Lucy. For Christ’s sake. Come back . . .’

  The white van slowed up behind her then continued on its way after she turned right on to that same unmade track down which Mark had driven only forty minutes earlier. It was therefore impossible to read its numberplate, or to identify the make, and she wished she’d pulled over to let it overtake. Could it be the same one shown up at Sion Hughes’s farm? How on earth could she know? And if it was the same vehicle, who was keeping tabs on her and why?

  Her ponytail suddenly fell loose around her face as she entered the sombre daylight of the plantation and followed signs for OFFICE over a wide stone bridge. Yet again, Martyn Harries’s comment about Celtic nights came to mind as the day’s gloom deepened and the Wye stormed in turmoil beneath the bridge’s old stone parapets, its din even through the glass, blasting what was left of her brain.

  She saw at close hand how the rocks, despite their size and number, were treated with contempt by this river’s powerful flow. The only concession to their presence being flimsy bursts of spray which vapourised as quickly as they’d appeared, and to her just then, this watery chaos seemed to symbolise everything she’d so far experienced in this strange unpredictable country.

  She opened her window a fraction just to hear for herself the roar which seemed to devour not just her but the whole universe, then quickly closed it, amazed that this racket hadn’t made Mark deaf.

  To her relief she soon reached a Portakabin fronted by a dirt yard where two lorries were being loaded up with timber. Here a different bedlam assailed her the moment she got out of the car. A tinnitus-inducing whine of saws coming from an adjacent open barn, drowning the drivers’ wolf whistles as she jogged over to the office’s main door.

  ‘Is Mark Jones anywhere here?’ she asked the young lad who sat with a ledger and thermos in front of him on a trestle table. ‘He’s a sawyer. About my age.’ The din was only marginally less inside and she could barely make out his reply.

  ‘I dunno. Just standing in till me mam gets back.’

  ‘He must have arrived half an hour ago,’ she persisted. ‘He’s got a white Renault van, for God’s sake. He’s tall, dark, wearing jeans and a dark green parka . . .’ Not so long ago she’d have added attractive, hunky, just like Ewan McGregor . . . But not now. That was Paul, unencumbered, uncomplicated.

  ‘If he’s on the saws, he’ll be down The Cwm.’

  ‘The Cwm? Where on earth’s that?’ Minutes were ticking by. She had to get Mark home as soon as possible.

  ‘It means valley.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘’Bout a mile from here, I reckon.’

  ‘Is there any way you can get hold of him for me?’ She looked around the office in vain for any signs of a mobile or two-way radio. ‘It’s urgent.’

  ‘You’ll get to it easy enough. Just follow the blue markers down past the nursery slopes. You should see him there.’

  She ran back towards her car, acutely aware that with such lax security, anybody could just wander in and out at will. This wasn’t a reassuring thought as the trees now seemed closer together, usurping the few remaining fragments of grey sky. She strained to catch sight of the blue markers, wondering why the hell they weren’t yellow instead, and as soon as the ill-defined route, criss-crossed by mountain bike tracks dropped downwards, an almost total darkness encased her.

  ‘Damn.’ She narrowly missed a group of firs and just as she was praying for some evidence of forestry work, some legitimate human company, her left wing mirror showed a white vehicle threading its way between the more sparsely planted younger-looking pines. Was it a car or a van? She couldn’t tell. Then when it was sideways on, she knew, and panic followed. Surely if it was Mark and he’d seen her Rav, he’d have made a beeline for it. So who could it be?

  She was distracted by the track suddenly widening to a clearing and a group of men about to set off into an older plantation of broad-leaved trees, their saws slung over their bodies like the weapons they were.

  Mark seemed to freeze when he saw her.

  ‘It’s your dad,’ she shouted through her half-open window, allowing that familiar sap smell to fill her car. ‘Hurry.’

  ‘Something’s come up, boys,’ he yelled to the rest of the team as he pulled off his protective gear and his saw then disappeared round the back of a makeshift shed. ‘I’ll be in at 6 a.m. . Tell the boss if you see her, eh?’ Within seconds his van appeared from behind it and he led the way back through the secretive darkness, his red tail lights intermittent between the trees.

  Of that other van there was no sign, but her immediate anxieties centred on what was awaiting them at the Hall, and why Hector Jones had seemed like a man who was losing his mind.

  ‘Open up, you pain in the arse!’ Mark repeatedly banged the solid brass knocker because neither his keys nor hers could unlock bolts. While they waited for
a response, she glanced down at Wern Goch’s one chimney which had once naively represented a hoped-for peace and independence. Fat chance of that now, she thought bleakly. For a start this afternoon had been completely sabotaged and her TRUTH STRATEGY lost in a mire of imponderables. Yet now wasn’t the time to let on she’d been to Bwlch Ddu. The two inhabitants of Ravenstone Hall weren’t the only ones who could lie.

  ‘Who is it?’ Hector called out.

  ‘Mark and Lucy, you old fuckwit.’

  ‘Move to the right where I can see you both.’

  ‘Shit, he’s losing it this time,’ muttered Mark, placing himself directly in front of the study window and beckoning her over.

  She caught sight of Hector’s face staring out. More a death mask than anything living. He suddenly banged on the glass. ‘You’ve not been playing tricks have you? You didn’t turn up about an hour ago and just circle round and round out there?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Mark turned to her, perplexed. ‘I’ve been at work . . .’

  ‘So who was it?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘There was just the one person inside, I’m sure of that.’ Hector moved away from the study window, slid the front door’s bolts and pulled it open. ‘But when I took a proper look from the door here, the thing had gone.’

  ‘Did you see the plates?’

  ‘No. Covered in mud they were. But I’d swear it was a Renault.’

  ‘Look,’ said Mark his eyes roaming around the drive and surrounding marshland. ‘It could have been anybody. I mean think who’s got white vans round here? The fish, the papers, the fruit . . .’

  ‘We’ve not had fucking fruit for years.’

  ‘OK. You know what I mean, and by the way,’ he added, letting her in through the door first. ‘If you’d been behaving like a rational human being just now, she wouldn’t have had to drive all the way to Coed-y-Bryn and I could be back there earning some dough.’

  Without replying Hector re-bolted the door behind them both. Then he prodded Mark’s shoulder.