Evan Blessed

by Rhys Bowen

  As the postman drew level with Evan he didn’t slow, but shouted out: “I left a letter for you at your house.”

  “Who’s it from?” Evan shouted back.

  Evans-the-Post was known for reading the mail before he delivered it.

  “They didn’t say. No signature. All typewritten. Boring.” The words floated behind him as he shot over the hump-backed bridge and disappeared down the pass.

  Evan grinned to himself. If Evans-the-Post could only deliver the mail to the whole of North Wales, there would be considerably fewer crimes. He certainly had the knack of reading the most amazing amount through sealed envelopes. In fact, if the whole world operated a bush telegraph system like the village of Llanfair, the police would have a far easier job of tracking criminal activity. Not much went on in the village that everyone didn’t hear about within five minutes. If Evan had been to visit Bronwen when she lived in the schoolhouse, his time of arrival and departure were duly passed along to his landlady. Evan suspected the village probably even knew what he and Bronwen were doing behind closed doors. In fact—he stopped short as a thought struck him. Several local men had joined in the search that first afternoon. It would be worth asking them what they might have seen on the mountain. And if he had to have a pint of Guinness, just to keep them company—well, that was part of the job, wasn’t it?

  As he crossed the road to the Red Dragon, he admitted to himself that this was also a way of delaying another evening of confrontation with his mother and Bronwen. Evan couldn’t understand why his mother was being so difficult. What was there not to like about Bronwen? If he had been about to marry a brassy, gum-chewing hussy, he could have understood her attitude. But Bronwen was everything a mother should wish in a daughter-in-law—intelligent, pretty, gentle, caring, well educated, well liked. What more did she bloody well want?

  He pushed open the heavy oak door of the pub and marched inside.

  “Watch out, here comes the future bridegroom, and from the look on his face, they’ve just had a tiff,” Evans-the-Meat called out, giving Charlie Hopkins a dig in the ribs that almost made him spill his pint of Robinson’s.

  “We haven’t had a tiff,” Evan said. “I’ve just got things on my mind, that’s all.” It would have been disloyal to complain about his mother, however annoying she was being.

  “It must be having his mother in the village, keeping an eye on him,” Charlie Hopkins commented to the men gathered around the bar. “She makes sure Bronwen goes home by eight o’clock at night, and no creeping up the mountain when it gets dark, either.”

  Evan grinned.

  “I’m glad you came in, Evan bach,” Betsy said, pouring him a pint of Guinness without being asked. “I want to show you and Bronwen what I want to wear to the wedding. Barry thinks it’s too revealing, but then you know what a fuddy-duddy he is.”

  “That’s not being a fuddy-duddy, expecting my girl to look refined and classy and not all tarted up.” Barry-the-Bucket, Betsy’s current beau, stood up to his full six feet two inches from where he had been leaning against the bar. He was wearing his usual mud-spattered overalls. “I don’t want blokes ogling her cleavage.”

  “Just because I’ve got a very nice cleavage.” Betsy smoothed down her T-shirt, riveting every pair of male eyes for a few seconds.

  “A wedding is a solemn occasion,” Barry said. “You’re supposed to dress like for chapel.”

  “But it’s not chapel, is it? It’s church and they are more liberal,” Betsy said. “And what’s more, there’s going to be dancing afterwards, isn’t there, Evan bach?”

  “So I gather,” Evan said. “Bronwen’s really the one to ask. She and her mother have been making all the plans.”

  “You’re doomed, boyo,” Evans-the-Meat said. He turned to the other men. “Already he’s letting the little lady make all the decisions.”

  “Only because I don’t have time,” Evan said. “She’s got school holidays, hasn’t she? And I’m working hard on this case.”

  “The missing girl, you mean?” Charlie’s face was suddenly solemn. “They never found her?”

  Evan shook his head. “That’s why I came over here. Some of you helped in the search that day, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” Charlie said. “And so did Barry, and you two, right?”

  “Did any of you go right up as far as Glaslyn?”

  “I did,” Barry said.

  “So did I,” Fred Roberts, one of the other men, answered.

  “You didn’t happen to notice a red glove lying close to the waterline, at the bottom of that steep scree slope, did you?”

  Barry and Fred exchanged looks. “A red glove?” Barry said. “I remember looking down at the lake and asking myself if she could possibly have fallen in. Then I thought that she’d have had to be bloody stupid to try to climb down that scree—and if she had been on the path above and just stumbled, then she wouldn’t have fallen all the way down. There are those rocks that would have stopped her fall.”

  “So you would definitely have noticed a red glove then?”

  “I’m sure I would have,” Barry said.

  “None of you saw a mobile phone, I suppose? Any vehicle tracks?”

  “Vehicle tracks? There were search and rescue vehicles up there. They’d have made tracks, I suppose.” Barry looked puzzled.

  “We weren’t looking for vehicles,” Charlie Hopkins said. “We were looking for a missing girl.”

  “And what about mine shafts? Did any of the searchers check around any of the mine openings?” Evan asked.

  “I’m sure they did,” Barry said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be easy to fall into one of those mine shafts—they’ve all got warning signs and they’re mostly sealed off. She’d have to be particularly bloody stupid, in fact.”

  Evan downed the last of his Guinness. “I’d better be going,” he said. “Thanks for your help, boys.”

  “I don’t know that we’ve been any help,” Charlie Hopkins said. “What do they think happened to her, then? They can’t possibly think she fell down a mine shaft, can they?”

  “It’s one possibility they are considering,” Evan said. “They’ve also had divers in the lake.”

  Charlie shook his head. “You’d have thought, with all those people around, someone would have heard a splash, or a cry for help, wouldn’t you?”

  “You’d have thought so,” Evan agreed.

  “Well, she can’t have vanished into thin air,” Charlie said.

  But that’s just what she had done, Evan thought as he stepped out into the fresh evening air.

  He opened his cottage door carefully, half expecting to find his mother lying in wait, but mercifully the place was quiet and empty. He heaved a sigh of relief and bent to pick up his mail. Among the usual number of offers for double-glazed windows or cheap trips to Turkey there was a slim typewritten envelope, addressed to Constable Evan Evans and the future Mrs. Evans. The one that Evans-the-Post had been curious about. When he opened it, he saw why. He found, to his surprise, that it contained music. No words, no heading. Just two lines of musical notation. He stared at it for a while but he couldn’t read music and it meant nothing to him.

  Bronwen could read music, however. Evan made his way up the hill as quickly as he could. It was a hard slog at the end of a long day and in semi-darkness. That four-wheel drive vehicle was obviously a necessity, he decided.

  “In here, cariad,” Bronwen called as he let himself into their new cottage. Evan followed her voice into the bedroom. Bronwen was on her knees on the bare floor.

  “I’m measuring.” She looked up. “I was down at the antiques shop today and Mr. Cartwright thinks he knows where he can get us a brass bedstead. So I’m trying to see which way it would fit.”

  “I hope you’re going to polish it,” Evan said. “Brass tarnishes awfully quickly.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport.” Bronwen scrambled to her feet to kiss him. “You know very well that you would hate a house furnished with all
that cheap modern stuff. We have to have furniture that belongs, and a brass bed definitely belongs here, doesn’t it?”

  “As long as it’s got a comfortable mattress on it, I really don’t care,” Evan said. “But stop doing that for a moment, please. I’ve got something to show you.” He handed her the sheet of paper. “Take a look at this.”

  “It’s music.” Bronwen examined it. “Where did it come from?”

  “Somebody sent it in today’s post. No return address. Typewritten envelope. I have no idea why anyone would want to send us music.”

  “Perhaps some budding composer has written us a special anthem for our wedding,” Bronwen said excitedly. “What a pity we don’t have a piano anymore. I’ll miss having the school piano to play, but I can’t see how we’d have room for one up here, or how anyone would be able to carry it up the mountain.”

  “You have your guitar,” Evan said.

  “Yes, that will have to do, if I can unearth it. I’m afraid this room is still in total chaos.” She rummaged among boxes of clothing, more books, hiking boots, until at last she located the guitar in the far corner, dragged it out, and took it from its case.

  “Now let’s see.” She carried the guitar through to the living room and sat at one of the chairs in the window. “Put the music down on the table here and I’ll play it.”

  She played the series of notes, then looked up. “If it’s an anthem for our wedding, it’s not very good, is it?” she asked. “It doesn’t really go anywhere.”

  “It’s not really a proper tune, is it?” Evan said. “Repetitive.”

  “It’s very strange.” She examined the paper. “No title, no hint of whom it’s from. I wonder what key it’s supposed to be in? It may sound better with the right chords to accompany it, but the person hasn’t written in the clef or the key signature. No sharps or flats, I mean, so I don’t know what chords to put with it.” She continued to stare at it. “Starts on b, ends on d. That really doesn’t make sense. I mean why would anyone write music that goes BAD DAD, DAD DEAD—”

  She broke off, staring wide-eyed up at Evan.

  “What are you talking about? Where does it say that?” Evan asked.

  “I was reading the musical notes, and that’s what they spell out.”

  “Bad dad, dad dead?”

  Bronwen nodded, still staring at the paper. “And then it goes on to say BAD DEB, DEB DEAD.” She dropped the paper as if it burned her. “Oh my God, Evan. Somebody’s sending you a message.”

  Chapter 12

  An hour later, Evan stood in the forensics lab at police headquarters in Colwyn Bay, watching impatiently as the technician tested the sheet of paper. The technician had already gone home for the day and had to be called back in. He wasn’t too happy about it.

  “It’s a piece of music,” he said in disgust as Evan handed him a manila file containing the page. “What sort of crime are we looking at?”

  “Not sure,” Evan said. “I’m asking for a rush on this just in case it has anything to do with the missing girl on the mountain and the bunker we found.”

  “That bunker was pretty clean of prints. Only the one good set, and you’ve already spoken to that bloke, haven’t you?”

  Evan nodded. “And ruled him out, I believe. This may be something quite different, but just in case …”

  “Two sets of prints on it.” The technician looked up. “Both pretty clear.”

  “Those would be mine and Bronwen’s,” Evan said. “We both handled it. What about the envelope?”

  “Multiple sets on that, of course, but if your man has been careful to wear latex gloves when handling the paper, he’ll have kept them on when he touched the envelope too.”

  “Right,” Evan said, disappointed. “So we’re none the wiser. There’s no other way of finding who might have sent it?”

  “If he licked the stamp, we can probably extract DNA, but that’s no use to us unless we have his DNA on file. And we’re not likely to have that unless he’s already been arrested for a sex crime.” He put the sheet of paper back into a file. “What we need is to have everyone’s DNA registered when they’re born. It would save us a lot of trouble. They’ll get around to it eventually, I suppose.”

  Evan left the lab, and drove to meet Inspector Watkins in Caernarfon. He had also been on his way home when Evan called him.

  “This better be good,” he said as Evan came in through the police station door. “I thought I was finally going to get a hot meal on time tonight.”

  “Me too,” Evan said. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t know what to make of it.”

  He handed Watkins the sheet of paper, plus another sheet on which he had written the letters spelled out by the music. “Pretty ingenious,” Watkins said. “That’s the first time in my career that anyone has sent us a message in music. How did you find out what it said?”

  “Pure luck. Bronwen played the tune and thought it was badly written music. So she said the notes out loud.” He shrugged. “It may just be some kind of sick joke, of course. It is the summer holidays. Maybe some local kids have got nothing better to do with their time.”

  “But whoever created this took the trouble to wear latex gloves, right?” Watkins shook his head. “Would you go to all that trouble for a prank? And the bloke who dug the bunker wore latex gloves too. My feeling is that we have to take this seriously until proven otherwise.”

  “And since it’s music, sir, it made me wonder if there was any connection to that other musical thing yesterday.”

  “What thing?”

  “Remember they were laughing about it at the station? Someone requested a piece of music to be played in honor of my upcoming wedding on Bore Da North Wales.”

  “Right. What was the piece?”

  Evan shrugged. “It didn’t mean anything to me. Some heavy classical Russian thing. Bronwen will remember what it was.”

  “You’d better get a copy and see if the notes spell anything out,” Watkins said.

  “Good idea. And we finally have something to work on, don’t we? Someone called Debbie or Deborah has been killed, and maybe it’s her dad as well.”

  “Or maybe it’s the sicko’s dad. The Deb part will be easier to work on. We can contact the national crime center and see what unsolved cases they have on their files.”

  “Not necessarily unsolved,” Evan said. “Our man could have been released from jail or a facility for the insane. The cases could be decades old.”

  “True enough,” Watkins said. “We’ll have Glynis do her flying fingers bit on the computer in the morning.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do what I can, right away,” Evan said. “I keep thinking about the missing girl, you see. I mean, if the divers don’t find her in the lake, it means that she could be with him and still be alive.”

  “I know what you mean,” Watkins said. “I’ve been feeling the same way. This case is really getting to me. I keep thinking what her family must be going through.”

  “It’s so frustrating not knowing what to do next,” Evan said.

  Watkins nodded in agreement. “Tell me about it. We’ve searched. We’ve put her picture in the paper, we’ve contacted other police regions, but it seems that we should be doing more.”

  “Now we finally do have something to go on,” Evan said. “Someone is leaving me musical clues. That must mean that music is important to him. We can work on that, can’t we? I mean, check local music societies and choirs—see who buys classical music at local record shops.”

  “Yes, we can do all that,” Watkins said, “but I’m not optimistic. If you ask local music societies if they have any loner male members who might be a bit odd, I bet they’ll name you quite a few.”

  “We can follow up on them.”

  “We can. But men who dig bunkers probably are not joiners.”

  “One of my National Parks workers sings in a choir. I suppose I’d better recheck him, even though he wasn’t working on the day in question.”
>
  “It wouldn’t hurt, I suppose.”

  Evan sighed. “And I’ll go and see what I can dig up on girls called Deborah, Debbie, or Deb.”

  “Check out the name on the list of missing girls, too,” Watkins said. “She might never have been found, like this girl now.”

  Evan felt sick. He couldn’t get the image of those handcuffs in the bunker out of his mind. No girl would be that tall, which meant she’d be hanging there—

  “Right,” he said, switching his mind back to business.

  Watkins went to move away, then suddenly clapped him on the shoulder. “Hold it, Evans. We’ve neither of us had anything to eat. Let’s pop across to the pub first and grab a pint and a meat pie.”

  “It’s a bugger, isn’t it?” Watkins commented as he took a long swig from his beer glass in the Ship across the street. “Between you and me, Evan, I don’t know about this one. They tell us to go for the facts, and if you examine the facts, we don’t have a crime. The girl could have run off with a young man she met at the hostel. She could have dropped her glove. The bunker could have been made for an amateur film. The musical clues could be some of your mates having a laugh …”

  “And yet you don’t think so?”

  Watkins shook his head. “If I trust my gut, then my gut gives me a bad feeling about all this. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s been meticulous in not leaving fingerprints. Nobody goes to that amount of trouble unless it’s important.”

  “We can’t give up until we find her body, anyway.”

  “No, we can’t do that.” Watkins took another swig of beer. “This is a bloody awful job sometimes. I wish I’d listened to my old mother and gone into accounting.”

  “You’d have died of boredom.” Evan chuckled.

  “Maybe I would. Right, then. Let’s down the rest of this and get back to work.”

  It was after ten o’clock when Evan finally arrived home. Their search had produced only one Deborah—Debbie Johnson, age fifteen, who was last seen trying to hitchhike home after missing the last bus from a cinema near Birmingham. It seemed that Deborah was not a popular name among those to be murdered or abducted. Evan let himself into his house and stood in the hallway, savoring the silence. He went through to the living room and discovered Bronwen, fast asleep in his armchair with her coat over her. She looked so young and peaceful, like a princess from a fairy tale, that Evan stood there, gazing down at her. She must have sensed his presence because her eyes fluttered open. “What time is it?” she asked with a sleepy smile.