Disturbing Ground

by Priscilla Masters

  Doctor-like, she had been trying to gauge Bianca’s understanding. “You mean they’re in the car park?”

  “Not so as you’d see them.”

  “How do you know they are there?”

  “They take people. And the people are never seen again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think lots of people here, in Llancloudy, don’t understand,” Bianca had said. “And that’s because they are shuttin’ their eyes and their ears. They don’t believe me because they think I’m crazy. Instead they believe what the police tell them to believe.”

  “And why would the police want them to believe something which wasn’t true?”

  Bianca had stared at her with a look of soft pity. “Because it saves work. That’s why. And money. Once they’ve got an explanation they can wind down the investigation. See?”

  It was true. Megan could not argue this indisputable point. So instead she had veered off at a tangent. “Who disappears?”

  Bianca’s look of scorn had shocked her.

  “Read your papers.”

  And Bianca had swept out of the surgery leaving Megan staring at the Gericault.

  The encounter had intrigued her because Megan had come off worst.

  When learning about psychosis, as a medical student, the entire concept of detachment from reality had frightened her. To be blissfully unaware would be one thing. But to have any insight into the condition must be to sit on the steps of Hell. And in the last seconds of the consultation she could have sworn Bianca Rhys knew exactly what was happening to her. She had been lucid, logical, perceptive. And had rejected her doctor because she had not listened.

  Two weeks later, as though continuing the conversation Bianca had again broached the subject.

  “UFOs might not be real at all.”

  “Some people would agree …”

  “They could be a clever device.”

  “Ye-es.”

  “Made up to explain the inexplicable. Understand?”

  “I - think - so.”

  Bianca had picked up on her hesitation.

  “You don’t believe me either, do you?”

  To confront a psychotic with doubt can be a mistake. So she gave a non-committal answer.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Bianca had picked her handbag up from the floor. “I don’t believe him,” she’d said. “It’s him, see. And he doesn’t like me asking questions. At least, not the wrong questions. He doesn’t mind if they’re the right ones.”

  “Who?”

  “Never you mind.”

  “And another thing.”

  Megan had already begun filling the consultation in on the Lloyd George notes, struggling to select the appropriate Reed Code.

  “They can’t be saucers. They wouldn’t be big enough, see. Flying plates. That’s more like it.” And she had gone.

  So tonight Megan smiled into the fake fire. She could have pursued the line of questioning but Bianca had been twp. A Welsh word not quite parallelled by its English equivalent of simple. The word twp held affection while simple did not.

  Something struck her. One would have expected a schizophrenic to believe in UFOs rather than question their existence. Their nightmares consisted of being overlooked and overheard, frequently by extra terrestrials.

  She loosened the zip on her fleece, suddenly uncomfortably hot. Because, riding on the wings of these revelations, was the unwelcome thought that however high her ideals of returning to the Valley to help its inhabitants, she had failed one of her most needy patients. In failing to follow through Bianca’s precious flashes of clarity she had not recognised that - like glimpses through a keyhole - these confidences were part of a bigger story. And now the light was permanently switched off. Bianca was dead. The picture had gone. The room was dark.

  What if, she thought, Bianca had pieced together a story which no one else had fully understood, because a rational mind searches for rational explanations? But what if she had been the one to hit on the truth? That five people in this small town had been murdered. And only she and the killer knew it. Was it a such a giant step then to assume that she had herself been abducted and later murdered. Smothered maybe, and her body dumped in the Slaggy Pool?

  Was it a flight of fancy, a stretch of the imagination? Or could it possibly be - the truth?

  There was one huge difference between Bianca’s story and the fate of the other five.

  Her body had been found.

  She pulled the last box towards her.

  Chapter 15

  This box looked newer than the others, the cardboard less bleached and brittle. And Bianca had sellotaped the top down. Megan pulled at it fruitlessly before resorting to a pair of scissors.

  Inside were the papers, neatly folded, with the dragon rampant of the Western Mail showing on top. Megan lifted the top one and read through the lead article. She already knew the details - Alun had given her a graphic description of the background to the disappearance of the two boys. And he had described them. But she wanted to see their photographs.

  Faces of two eleven-year-olds, in school tie, V-necked sweaters, scrubbed faces and combed hair peered back at her from the piles of newsprint. She could guess which one was Neil Jones: “the ugliest little tyke” Alun had ever seen. Crooked teeth, hair that stuck up like Dennis the Menace’s, a pair of defiant, cynical eyes. The other one, George Prees, looked quieter, a little afraid of something.

  She spent a while searching their faces. They didn’t look “little buggers” even though their addresses were some of the worst roads on the estate and it was tempting to tar all inhabitants with the same brush. But in the police quotes on pages two and three she could read between the lines. They were known to them. There had been suspicion of truancy. They had been cautioned on previous occasions. And like the sniff of neglect present in the Marie Walker case their parents had not reported them missing until very late at night. These were not children closely watched, as Rhiann Lewis had been, but kids who had roamed the streets with their friends in gangs, finding and creating trouble. Just like Joel and Stefan Parker. Megan felt a sense of inevitability about this most recent disappearance.

  As though to agree with her observation she turned the pages and found, on page four of the Western Mail, a brief interview with Samuel Parker, Joel’s older cousin, about his missing “mates”.

  Megan read through curiously.

  “I did wonder when they didn’t turn up for the exam. See, the teacher had told us anyone missing the maths end of terms would automatically fail - whatever the excuse. But I thought that Neil and Georgey probably had such brilliant excuses they’d get away with it, see. That’s what I thought. So I didn’t say nothin’.”

  Megan smiled. Samuel Parker had invented the Parker stamp for his two younger cousins. Currently in prison for supplying marijuana to almost the entire valley he would soon be free to set up his business again. Megan knew him quite well. She had signed his doctor’s note to avoid Community Service more than once. There was no real harm in Sam. Buying and selling marijuana had seemed, to him, a perfectly reasonable way to supplement his income from a variety of poorly paid careers in Llancloudy.

  She pulled a sheaf of papers from the box and settled down to absorb the detail. The facts were now familiar. The two boys had last been seen walking towards Llancloudy Comp., school bags on their backs, uniform on - as though they had been intending to attend. One report said that two boys, answering the description of Neil and George had been seen at the side of the road, hitching a lift out of the valleys. But it only appeared in one article. The witness had not known the boys personally so identification was uncertain.

  That meant there was a chance that George and Neil had never left the valley.

  Which would mean another vanishing.

  Which would mean, in turn, that in the last thirty years five people had disappeared from the small village of Llancloudy. None had ever been seen again and there was no expl
anation.

  Bianca had saved the newspapers, Esther Magellan had been charged with their custody and she, Megan Banesto, had ended up with them.

  Make no deep scrutiny.

  The Hood poem again, wrong context but apt words.

  Make no deep scrutiny. That was exactly what she was doing. Too deep a scrutiny. Megan gathered the papers back together, put them carefully back into the box and folded the lid down.

  It was late.

  She lay in bed still chewing over the possibilities. Fact: People had disappeared. Something must have happened to them. Megan pulled the blanket right up to her chin.

  She patted the pillow and closed her eyes, ten minutes later flicking them open. She could not sleep with these shadowy visions of a killer who liquidated people every few years. She padded downstairs and made a cup of tea. Then she took a paperback to bed with her and distracted herself with Denise Mina’s Garnethill until she fell asleep.

  The weekend passed quietly, cleaning the house and necessary shopping on the Saturday, a visit to her parents for Sunday with the tradition of her and her father wrapping themselves up against the elements and taking the dog for a brisk walk across the beach and her mother curling up in front of the fire with a book. When they returned, the scent of roasting Welsh lamb made her salivate. And the mint sauce was freshly made from mint grown in the greenhouse. Megan hugged her mother and ignored the lurid cover of a thriller which peeped out from behind a cushion on the back of the sofa.

  After tea, she and her father settled down to watch the rugby on television, her father making sound and critical comment on the performance of the teams. They both stood up and cheered as Rupert Moon belted up the pitch and hurled himself - and the ball - right over the try line giving the Scarlets yet another victory. “Good lad there,” her father said.

  She could have asked them about the disappearances over the years from Llancloudy but she didn’t want to blight the weekend. Problems simply didn’t belong in this peaceful retirement bungalow.

  She left late.

  For a few years, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month had been marked by a two minute silence. Megan kept an eye on her watch. She always observed it. Not because she had any experience of war but because she did have experience of suffering. And to her the terrible slaughter of the two World Wars was something she felt never should be forgotten.

  Morning surgery presented the usual plethora of minor complaints, the medicine easy to dispense but the lifestyle problems, as usual, insoluble. At ten to eleven her last patient arrived.

  It didn’t take a brilliant process of deduction to see that something had upset Gwen Owen.

  And for once she seemed at a loss for words. She sat and fiddled with the strap of her handbag, a cheap, plastic thing she always housed on her lap, her eyes flickering around the room like a nervous wren, her forehead deeply furrowed.

  “I don’t quite know how to say this, doctor. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m …” There was despair in the heavily powdered face.

  “My doctor gave me some tablets for it.” She hesitated. “They seemed to help.”

  Megan had an inkling of what was the problem.

  It was five minutes to eleven.

  “You probably don’t remember. Years ago my little granddaughter let herself out of the garden. We never saw her again.”

  “Rhiann?”

  “You remember that?”

  “No - not really. I was too young.” Megan felt agitated. “The name - that’s all.”

  “It was awful. We thought she was safe. We never imagined … But it must have been her who unbolted the gate.”

  “Why would she …?”

  “It must have been someone she knew - someone she trusted. You see - we were always telling her not to open the door to strangers. And I can’t think she would have done so. And that’s the worst of it, doctor.”

  It was eleven o’clock. Gwen Owen had not noticed.

  Megan was puzzled. “So why are you particularly thinking about Rhiann now, Mrs Owen?”

  Gwen Owen dabbed her nose with a dainty cambric handkerchief which she then crumpled up. “Well - Bianca used to … I mean lots of people used to say they knew what had happened to Rhiann. But they couldn’t have. Nobody knew. Not the police nor anybody else.” She was wringing her hands as though applying a softening skin lotion. But the sound was rasping and dry.

  “And Bianca?” Megan prompted.

  “She used to upset me. Made me quite cross once or twice. Gave me awful dreams.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That Rhiann was with other people. That they were all together.”

  “What do you think she meant?”

  “I used to wonder if she was tryin’ to comfort me, that she was sayin’ she was with other people in Heaven. But the trouble was she might just as well have said aliens had taken her along with other people from Llancloudy.”

  “What other people?”

  The question was unnecessary.

  “Oh - she set great store over some teacher who went back to London to avoid facing some angry parents. And years later, after we lost Rhiann another little girl - quite a bit older - was abducted on her way to buy some chips. One of those paedophiles took her I wouldn’t be surprised. I hope…” She was screwing her handkerchief up into a tight ball. “I can’t bear to think that anything like that happened to Rhiann. But if she’d just wandered off and got lost we would have found her, wouldn’t we? Everyone was looking for her. But they never did find her, doctor. They never found anything. Not a sign of her. And then Bianca starting making out she had some knowledge what had happened to her. At one point I did wonder whether to call the police in again - to talk to her. After all - if she knew something it’s only right she should tell them. But I came to the conclusion she never knew anything really. Like us she didn’t have a clue. On another planet she was. Sometimes,” Gwen stared towards the window, “sometimes I’d wonder and I’d ask her. I’d threaten her even. If you know. Then tell me. For God’s sake tell me where my little girl is. Got quite vicious I did with her one day. I could have hurt her. But I stopped myself, doctor. She couldn’t help how she was. But now.” Her eyes were drifting towards the vertical blinds which carved the outside into narrow slivers of pictures.

  “Bianca’s been dead for nearly three months, Mrs Owen. Why are you thinking about what she said now?”

  “I didn’t think of it at first. But what if Bianca did know what happened to my little granddaughter? She’ll never be able to tell me now, will she? And then the other night I thought of something else. Bianca wasn’t right in the head. What if she knew what had happened to my little girl because - whatever it was - she’d done it?”

  Ten past eleven. The room was silent now.

  “I can’t stop thinkin’ about it.” To illustrate what she meant she held out both her hands. They were shaking, pink-painted fingernails vibrating.

  Megan reached for her prescription pad.

  Chapter 16

  She met up with Andy and Phil for coffee. “So - did you observe the two minute silence?”

  “No, Andy. Sometimes it seems that talking to the living is more important than remembering the dead.”

  Phil Walsh glanced up from the pile of prescriptions he was signing. “You’re a bit profound for a Monday morning, aren’t you?”

  She gave him a playful punch. “Kind of goes with the job, doesn’t it? Now then. When can I have a couple of weeks to soak up some sunshine on a long-haul holiday.”

  They chatted for almost half an hour before leaving the surgery to do their separate visits.

  A sudden cloudburst forced her inside the car. Rain spattered her windscreen and she felt a dreadful sense of boredom, of a lack of colour in her life and in the valley. People walked quickly, wearing dark, dull clothes, hoods hiding their faces, hands deep in pockets. She felt a desperate yearning for colour, for warmth, sunshine, flowers. Italy.

  On im
pulse she decided to call on Esther Magellan, now presumably settled in her new home; she had received no pleas for help from Catherine Howells. She took the road south out of the valley, diverted across the old stone bridge and drove up the side of a low hill towards the flats. These more modern homes were prettier than the Parker’s estate, built of red brick with pleasing design and good views back down the valley. The Social Services had looked after Esther well. The small block of maisonettes looked clean and civilised. The grass was clipped, there was no graffiti and it was quiet apart from the distant bark of a dog and faraway traffic. Peace was a rare commodity in the valleys where one family in two had a man’s best friend employed to bark at strangers and protect the family home.

  Megan let herself in to the entrance through an unlocked wired glass partition and climbed the steps to the yellow front door. From inside she heard shuffling, slippered footsteps. She started planning her interrogation. It would be tricky. Direct questioning was unlikely to bring any results. Esther would simply clam up or cry. They were her defence mechanisms. On the other hand if she was too circumspect she would learn nothing. Esther was quite capable of rambling on for hours in her flat, monotonous voice without giving away much of substance.

  Behind the door the shuffling footsteps had stopped. Megan could hear adenoidal breathing and she knew Esther was waiting, listening. She knocked again, impatiently, wondering not for the first time exactly how much Esther did know or retain in her suet-pudding mind. The truth was obscure. Still. However confused Esther Magellan was, she was the best chance Megan had of learning the truth about Bianca. For while Carole Symmonds had been close to her mother it would have been in her flatmate, her “one true friend”, that Bianca would have confided.

  She called out. “Esther?”

  The door was pulled open half an inch and a voice spoke, “I don’t want any milk today, thank you. Not today.”