Stefan Parker had vanished.
Each subsequent news bulletin described how the search intensified. Inhabitants of Llancloudy turned out to search the hillsides. Some began to explore the old mine workings. And the police formed road blocks to question motorists.
Through the slats of her surgery blind, Megan could sense the heightened action. Police cars raced past and vanished into the beyond. Figures loomed around the Slaggy Pool, and shapes formed and disappeared through the mist on the hillsides beyond. The lunchtime news contained no sightings, only a repeat of the morning’s appeals. And when darkness fell early at three-thirty, Stefan was missing for the second night. When the evening paper dropped on the mat at six o’ clock Megan picked it up and scanned the headlines with a feeling of inevitability.
He would not be found but would join the list of the vanished.
The photograph that filled half the page of the South Wales Echo only emphasised the fact that Stefan Parker had plenty in common with the two boys who had disappeared in 1992. So loosely supervised as to be pratically vagrants. And there was something else which Marie Walker, George Prees and Neil Jones all shared - an air of jaunty, defiant, cheeky bravado. Megan stared down at the picture of the boy’s face, smiling at her from the front page, one chipped incisor, gold sleeper in his left ear, number one haircut making him look tough enough to be an escaped convict - had he not looked little more than six years old. Stefan was small for his age.
Megan took the paper into the kitchen and spread it out on the kitchen table, perching on the chair. She didn’t move until she had devoured every single word written about the boy’s disappearance. The main article she folded into four. Then she took a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer and carefully snipped around every column which mentioned the missing boy. He had been gone for less then forty-eight hours, yet there was a small pile by the time she had finished. The story had received plenty of coverage. A missing boy was the biggest story to have broken in South Wales that day and plenty of people had plenty to say - on truancy, on the safety of children, even - strangely - on the lack of recreational facilities in the valleys. The columns were full of conjecture.
But like the other vanishings in which Bianca had been so interested, there was no clue as to what could have happened to Stefan from the time he had left his home. Megan sat and stared at the clippings wondering what to do with them. Then she walked through the back door, along the concrete path to the garden shed, unearthed a cardboard box and carried it into the kitchen. She dropped the cuttings in, the full sheets floating to the bottom. Next she found a black felt tipped marker pen which had been anchored to her shopping list with a length of green thread. She snapped the thread. And on the side of the box she wrote Stefan’s name in large, neat italics. Only then was her feeling of agitation replaced by one of peace. She had done what should be done. Someone must care. But as she peered into the bottom of the box she sensed that what would fill it would be speculation. He would not be found. That was the pattern of events. That was what had filled all the other boxes - conjecture. In years to come the papers would print Er Cof, mab annwyl, beautiful tributes and no answers.
This was not how she wanted it to be. She lined the box up against the wall, next to the others. But when she stepped back she had to acknowledge what she was doing.
Acting like Bianca.
And now she felt frightened. Her behaviour was not quite rational. She was being over-curious. Stefan Parker’s disappearance was not personally connected with her. Putting the clippings in the box was not her direction but a blind following in another’s path. And that other had been a documented paranoid schizophrenic. What had been Bianca’s mad obsession she had adopted for her own. She felt a suffocating need to escape and flung open the front door. But there was no escape. The lights were paddling around the hill. They were still searching.
They will not find.
Bianca’s voice. Not hers. She was still in touch with reality. Why should they not find a naughty truant?
But she stayed on her doorstep and watched them search as though it were a computer game. Dark figures, flashing lights. A missing child - a goblin - a troll in pursuit. Nothing but a gameboy. Far enough away to lose its reality. Even the sound effects were dead right. Distant traffic. Short blasts of pop music as doors opened and closed. Shouts that echoed from far away, doors slamming. And to make sure the players knew this was a Welsh game there was, in the background, the plaintive bleating of sheep. Over her head she saw in the light polluted, orange glowing sky a lone shooting star. Nothing else. She listened to the people’s voices to gauge their tone. But there was no excitement there. They hadn’t found him. The game was still running, the fugitive still pursued.
She moved back into the house and closed the door behind her.
But it was not possible to think or concentrate on anything else.
At nine o’ clock she switched on the Welsh news. Here too Stefan had made the headlines. But the child experts dragged in to pad out the bare fact - that he had gone missing - offered only one explanation - that he might have run away to escape some unspecified family conflict.
This item was followed by a touching appeal from his dad - with a veiled accusation against the boy’s mother that she had not cared sufficiently for his son. It seemed they had had “words” the night before and Stefan had retired to bed on Sunday night in a sulk.
Mandy Parker was mascara-smudged for her thirty seconds of fame and she looked as though she had not slept for a week, or combed her hair which was heavily bleached and gelled, pinned with ugly looking clips. Her words were part appeal for her son to return and part defence - that she had not been that angry, that the row had not been that fierce.
The entire focus of the first ten minutes of the evening news was an appeal for the prodigal son to return, pick up a phone, and be forgiven. Only as Megan watched a home video of Stefan passing a rugby ball to his older brother she knew he would not return. She was tempted to switch the TV off. There was no point in these heartrending appeals. They were a waste of time.
The programme returned to the studio for a brief resume of the rest of the Welsh news before returning to the main story, this time showing a panoramic view of the masque Megan had just seen enacted outside her front door; the searches of the surrounds of Llancloudy, the old mine shafts, the mountains, the derelict buildings, the winding wheel which had once lowered the miners to the coal face and was now carrying the searchers below ground to the catacombs in the hope of finding a lost and frightened boy. Even the river and the Slaggy Pool were scanned by helicopter. The aerial view was an unfamiliar one but she could recognise the flat top of the surgery building, the road between, the small, black area which was the pond, a cluster of houses and the river beyond. But Bianca’s death was not mentioned. Neither were any of the other “vanishings”.
No one had connected them. No one except Bianca. And she had been mad and was now dead. And Smithson. He had been - not mad - simply old and strange, but he was dead too. And now her. Megan hugged her arms around her and carried on staring at the TV.
The next clip was of a motorist being stopped at a road block and shaking his head regretfully. A jerky camera followed the police making a few house to house searches. And more shaking heads. They were in the street next to hers. But she didn’t recognise the police officers. Maybe they’d been drafted in from Cardiff. Extras. She watched the entire news, all twenty minutes of it with a feeling of unreality, detachment. This had happened before.
Only they didn’t know it.
She switched the television off and wondered who would listen to her.
No one.
She sat in the chair, staring at the blank screen knowing there was nothing she could do - apart from clip cuttings from the newspapers like a mad woman.
She was wrong. On the Friday, three days after Stefan’s disappearance had officially been acknowledged, she was washing her hair at the bathroom sink in the early afternoon
when there was a knock at the front door. She wrapped the drips up in a towel and pulled it open. Alun was standing outside in his uniform. She felt as awkward as he looked. “Meggie,” he said quietly. “I was just passing. Saw your car in the road. Knew you were home. Maybe it’s time you and I had a little talk.”
She nodded and backed into the house.
This time she had learned her lesson - to allow him to take the lead. To be circumspect and wise. She sat down on the sofa and watched him drop heavily into the armchair.
He gave an amused glance at her headgear. “Hadn’t you better finish your hair off?”
“Umm … Yes.” She patted the towel. “I’ll be a minute. Can you wait? There’s beer in the fridge. Help yourself. Pour me one. I’ve just got to rinse the conditioner out.”
The water splashed everywhere, soap stung her eyes. She half dried it with the hairdryer, gave up on the rest. When she returned to the sitting room he had opened two cans of beer and was leaning back on the sofa, looking around him. “Nice,” he said approvingly. “It’s really nice in here. Clean-looking. Light. Bit soulless though.”
“Glad you like it.” She eyed him over the rim of the beer can. “So?”
“Was it you up at the tip on Monday night?”
“I was calling on an old friend.”
He smiled. “I thought it was you - before I got pulled under.”
She nodded. “It looked rough.”
“Mmm.”
She was determined he must be the one to broach the subject. She wasn’t going to help him.
“We went to Guido’s restaurant.”
“Oh?” He was uninterested.
“So?” she said.
“I came round to bring you something,” he said. “I thought you’d want to see it.”
She knew what it would be even before he opened his hand to show a shaped piece of stone, about five centimetres long. Megan picked it up, studied the green moss that stuck to all sides of the gryphon’s claw except where it had recently been broken off. This was granite grey, clean and sharp.
She looked up at Alun. “And this was in Bianca’s pocket?”
He nodded.
She handed it back. “Another piece of the puzzle,” she said.
Alun nodded. “I didn’t take any notice of you,” he said, “when you talked about people going missing from here. I thought. Well, you know what I thought. I thought you’d been misled. I mean, it was typical of Bianca that she should pick up on something and make a science fiction story out of it.”
“The flying plates?” She laughed.
“Quite.”
He was finding this difficult. But she wasn’t going to help him.
“Then I decided to try and see things from your angle,” he said. “I started asking myself some questions. Like, what if …?”
She leaned forward. Eager. But still guarded.
“The first question I asked I put to the pathologist. I asked him whether it was possible Bianca had not drowned in the pool but drowned somewhere else.”
“And he said?”
“He said it was possible. That given the circumstances surrounding her death it was unlikely. But not impossible. He hadn’t tested for some things called…”
“Diatoms,” she supplied.”
“Yes well. Then I asked him if it was possible that she had not drowned at all. And again he said he could not rule it out. That it looked as though she had died of heart failure. Which could have been brought on by hitting the water. He called it a - ”
“Vaso vagal.”
“He said it was even possible she could have been suffocated.”
“And the head injury?”
“Wouldn’t have been life threatening or he wouldn’t have discounted it. It would have just stunned her.”
Megan nodded.
“I asked him if he could be more precise as to when Bianca had died.”
“And he said?”
“At the earliest Sunday morning. At the latest Sunday night. Late. Up until midnight. So then I began to wonder why Bianca hadn’t been seen since the Saturday morning.” Alun was squirming. “Umm, where she could have been. You know. If Bianca wasn’t seen after Saturday morning but didn’t die until some time on Sunday where was she? Was somebody holding on to her.” He spoke tentatively, almost apologetically, as though he expected her to laugh at the sheer drama of it all.
But she wasn’t laughing. She was shivering. Part of her mind was struggling with the concept of Bianca being imprisoned by someone who intended to kill her.
“Did you mention this to Jones-Watson?”
Alun nodded.
“What did he say?”
“He said it was possible. That he couldn’t rule it out. She could have been kept prisoner, been suffocated elsewhere. There was plenty of dope inside her. And her body could have been dropped into the pool. He said that circumstances suggested otherwise but that he couldn’t rule out the possibilty of my theory being correct. It was all down to an index of suspicion. In other words, Meggie,” His eyes held mute apology. “If we’d alerted him to the fact that there was something suspicious about Bianca’s death he could have come out of the post mortem with a different set of findings.”
She was silent.
Alun gave another tentative half-smile. “Then I asked myself another stupid question. Why would anyone want Bianca dead? Why would they go to all that trouble to kill someone who was so nutty nobody took a blind bit of notice whatever she said? In fact if she made allegations against someone we’d be almost sure to give that person a clean bill of health. See what I mean?”
“Did she make allegations?”
“That’s the trouble, Meggie. She said things about everyone.” His face was brick red. “We didn’t take any notice.”
Then she knew. “She said something about Guido, didn’t she?”
Alun fixed on a point in the corner of the room.
“That he looked more at boys than girls?”
Alun said nothing.
“Well, that was true.”
He nodded and looked uncomfortable. “And then I thought about your stupid boxes,” he said next, his eyes drifting around the room. “I suppose those are them, in the corner of the kitchen. I had a look while you were rinsing your hair.”
“Yes.”
“I remembered the names you’d told me, Meggie. And I decided to run them through the computer with a bit more of an open mind. There’s very few similarities between the cases, ages of victims, circumstances surrounding their disappearances, things like that. But the one thing that struck me was that no bodies, no clothes, no clues were found of any of them. There were no real suspects - if you discount a local paedophile who was dragged in any time something happened to a child. There wasn’t anything to connect him with Marie Walker’s disappearance. And there were no sightings either - of anybody from the four cases. Once they’d gone they really had gone as though they were spirited away in a space-ship.”
She couldn’t resist a smile. Alun, the pedantic, literal policeman sharing fanciful ideas with Bianca? It was enough to make her smile, which Alun misinterpreted. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d find it funny, Megan,” he said severely.
“I don’t, Alun. I promise you, I don’t.”
“So you see what I’m saying?”
Spell it out, Alun.
“I think it’s possible Bianca did stumble on something accidentally. Goodness knows what or how. And I don’t understand what she could have understood when no one else did.”
“It was something to do with having an open mind, Alun.” She struggled to explain it. “Rational beings hunt for rational explanations. She didn’t. And - ”
This time it was he who finished the sentence for her. “She accidentally got too near the truth.”
“I think so.”
“Well. Chance or luck. Bad luck,” he corrected. “It was certainly bad luck for her.”
“So now you believe in the whole thing?�
�
Alun looked even more awkward. “I’m not saying that, Meggie,” he said. “It’s just that I’m not dismissing it out of hand. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Why now, Alun? Why are you suddenly prepared to believe in it all when before you dismissed it as rampant wanderings of a nutcase?” She thought she already knew the answer but she wanted to hear from his lips.
“Stefan Parker,” Alun said shortly. “He isn’t at any of his usual haunts. He went everywhere with Mark Pritchard and Ryan Jenkins. Thick as thieves the three of them were. Stefan never got into trouble on his own. He didn’t have the guts and he was too small. He needed his two big mates to lead him into mischief and to protect him if he was threatened. We’ve tried every avenue. He didn’t have any money on him. And the family are worried sick. He hasn’t rung to say he’s all right and he was close to his ma. Stefan hasn’t run away, whatever the child experts say. He was intending going to school that morning. I’d swear it. He’s been taken. I think he’s probably dead.”
“There’s some new evidence, isn’t there?”
Alun nodded. “His schoolbag. One of those cheap rucksack affairs. Turned up in someone’s garden in Bethesda Street. The straps were ripped off. We had the teacher look at the books inside. He’d done his homework. All of it. There was no need for him to bunk off school.”
The address rang a dull chime in her mind.
“So where do you go from here?”
“Feed all the details onto the Major Incident programme of the National Computer,” he said. “Talk to my superiors and put the word around that we’re reopening all the previous cases of disappearances around Llancloudy.”
Disturbing Ground Page 18
