Disturbing Ground

by Priscilla Masters

  Ryan stared at her with pity. “We’re always annoyin’ someone,” he said. “Someone’s always shoutin’ at us.” And they scuffed away, down the street, hands deep into their pockets. She watched them go with a feeling of frustration.

  Megan selected a film, a Merchant Ivory classic but something was niggling at her all the way home. However good the film she would find it hard to concentrate. She was far too agitated. A night’s clubbing would be more appropriate than a polite film to blot up all this excess energy. Maybe she should have gone to the concert alone.

  The police car had stopped a little way up the road but she knew it was Alun even before she put her key in the door and felt his hand behind her. “Meggie,” he said.

  He followed her inside. She threw the video on the sofa. “Good to see you, Alun.”

  “You too.”

  “I - I - ”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he said awkwardly. “I should be at home, really.”

  She nodded.

  “Well - as you’re here you may as well sit down.”

  He sat opposite her and they smiled awkwardly. “I worry about you, Meggie.”

  She moved then, knelt on the floor and looked up at him. “I’m all right, Alun. I’ll be OK now. It’s been a bad year. But now I’m fine.”

  “I wish,” he began but she shushed him with a finger on his lips.

  “We move on,” she said. “It’s the best way - to move on. Put the past behind us, change. There was a point in time when we were - could have been. But we moved on.”

  “Did you love me?”

  She nodded and touched the thick, wiry hair. “I did,” she said. “Of course I did. Don’t you know,” she teased, “that your first love imprints on your mind so anyone you meet after that is compared to them?”

  He had beautiful eyes, dark green-brown, fringed with thick black eyelashes. She still loved those eyes.

  “Is that true?”

  “Oh yes.”

  His arms were around her. “Then …”

  She pulled away. “But you can’t lose what you have - a wife, practically two children.”

  “But it isn’t perfect, Meggie.”

  She felt suddenly weary. “Nothing ever is. If it seems so then we are deceived.”

  He drew her hair into a pony-tail, tilted her face up to his. An age-old, well-remembered gesture.

  “Do you really think if you dumped your own family what we’d have could be anywhere near perfect?”

  He nuzzled her neck and didn’t answer.

  “Do really think you could live with your conscience?”

  Again he didn’t answer.

  “Look around you, Alun. How many families stay together in this area? Not so many. Keep yours.”

  He was staring at her woodenly, his breath coming in short gasps.

  “I mean it,” she said. “You’re walking down Memory Lane. It’s too late.”

  He tried to pull her back to him but she felt disheartened. The image of the woman in the blue Celica depressed her. She whispered, “Cariad.”

  “The sun always shines down Memory Lane,” she said bitterly. “The birds never stop singing, the flowers are brightly coloured and always in bloom. Nothing ever dies down Memory Lane.”

  He came to, let go of her hair, sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help it. I’ll always carry a torch for you, Meggie.”

  And I for you.

  “But you’re right. I have responsibilities. And you did leave me. Besides, I am happy with Sandra.”

  She rejected the last part of his statement.

  “Anyway I didn’t only come to talk to you on a personal basis,” he said. “I’ve got a bit of news for you. I don’t think any of this is going to be relevant but it’s come up on the PNC and I thought you’d want to know.”

  She moved away farther. “What?”

  “There had been complaints,” he said, “about all of them, logged on at some time. Hughes, the teacher, George and Neil and Marie Walker too.”

  “What sort of complaints?”

  “Oh - general nuisance. Hughes - you know about. A few parents had said they were uncomfortable with the way he dealt with their children. Nothing specific, you understand, otherwise we’d have acted.”

  “And what about George and Neil?”

  “Vandalism. They’d smashed up a couple of phone boxes, nicked money, and a couple of weeks later they’d broken the glass in the bus shelters. That sort of thing. They’d been cautioned more than once.”

  “And Stefan?”

  “Him too.”

  “The same sort of thing?”

  “Yes. You know, shop windows broken, incivilities. Underage drinkin’ on the street.”

  “Alun,” she said, “what are you saying?”

  “That they weren’t wanted here. Llancloudy didn’t want them.”

  She turned around then with a smile touching her face. “So are you telling me that Llancloudy disposed of them?”

  He laughed, uncomfortably. “Don’t be silly.”

  She reached up then and touched his face, remembering the first, awkward, embarrassed time they had made love. The memory was strong, particularly when she searched his eyes. It had stayed with her, vivid enough to make her want him again.

  This time it was she who blushed.

  Chapter 23

  She knew where to look. Bianca had pointed the way, Geraint Smithson too.

  She had buried it deep. But now it was time. Everything was falling into place - the reason why a name on the side of one of the boxes had struck a chord.

  It was late when Alun left. She had stood on the doorstep and waited until his car had turned the corner before closing the door behind him. There was a frost. The night was pure and happy. Angels called. The stars glistened far above her. It would soon be Christmas.

  And Alun’s wife would bear him a second child.

  Early the next morning she drove to Barbara’s house. It had the look of a sleeping home. No lights were on. The curtains were still drawn. The front door was shut. She pulled up on the flattened tip and sat for a moment, savouring the warmth from the car heater, wrapping her fleece around her. But the minute she climbed out she could still sense the chill subterranean breath whisper to her. She locked the car door behind her.

  A mist hovered over the rugby pitch, which looked like a stage empty of actors. As she crossed to the far end she was dwarfed by the huge “H” bars with their thick padding wrapped around the bottom. And suddenly she was a child again, shrunk down like Alice, staring up at the crossbar and wondering how the ball could possibly be kicked over.

  But her errand was not here.

  Resolutely she continued to the edge and lost herself in the malicious gorse. Her skin was scratched before she’d penetrated even fifty yards. For a swift moment she glanced back at the empty pitch.

  “Pass it yer, mun. Take it out to the side. Don’t drop the ball, my boy.” She saw the grimace of an ambushed player felled. Not recent. Not Alun but long ago, as a child, when she had sat on her father’s shoulders to gain a grandstand view of the police team playing the local pub. The Oddfellows’ Arms. “A friendly.” By then she had grown too big to sit on Daddy’s shoulders for the entire match so he had set her down. But she had been plenty big enough to run away and wander through the undergrowth, find a path beneath the gorse, scrabble on hands and knees, lose the people. That had been the day she had found the ventilation shaft which she imagined then must lead right down into the centre of the earth. She had lain on her stomach and peered down the side of the hole. And been terrified by a sudden vision.

  Megan stood for a brief moment, turning through ninety degrees, away from the pitch to face the winding wheel at the head of the valley and had a vision of the men, faces blackened with coal dust, singing. And she longed for a return of this togetherness which had been at the heart of the coal industry, dying throughout the second half of the twentieth century, alm
ost dead by the time she had been born.

  She re-entered the pictures which were flashing through her mind like a flipchart. Suppressed for years but sparked subliminally into life by Bianca’s concerns.

  “Little Rhiann is dead. Definitely dead.”

  She had felt that too.

  She had dropped a pebble and waited for it to land. Her father was reading her a story.

  Deep in the bowels of the earth was where Gollum lived. Gollum of the huge eyes and the blanched skin, of the lisping, whispering voice, wanting his “pessus”.

  Scratching the floor with his long, long fingers.

  Down there.

  She knelt down and peered through the grill into the deep, black hole. That day while her father had been engrossed in a rugby match she had believed that she had found the entrance to Gollum’s lair. With her eyes tight shut she had counted to twenty … thirty … forty believing that when she opened them again he would be peering up at her, blinking at the light with his horrid, pale eyes. She stared at the iron grid, marveling at how well she had retained the entire memory. She had been a child of ten years old when three-year-old Rhiann Lewis had vanished. Ten was a little old for her parents to worry over a brief absence from the side of a crowded rugby field. But her own parents, like all the other mothers and fathers in Llancloudy, must have been twitched with fear for their own child’s safety. And transmitted those fears to her. So that day as soon as they had missed her they had panicked. She could still recall her father’s face when she had reappeared from between the gorse bushes, scratched and bleeding. There had been no opportunity for explanation. He had shouted at her, hugged her, cried in front of her, finally bundled her into the car and raced her home.

  There her grandmother had made dark reference to Rhiann. And her mother had made her promise she would never never wander off again.

  All she knew was that she had been very bad. And in great danger.

  But that night Gollum had entered her dreams by climbing up the iron footholes set in the side of the rock. Hand over hand. Slow foot behind foot. Inexorably coming towards the surface. Coming for her. She had tried to run back to her father. But children in dreams can find themselves unable to move. Her feet had been stuck to the floor. And webbed - like his. She had screamed as he had rattled the grid. And then she had woken up, her head against her father’s shoulder, his pyjama jacket wet with tears. For weeks Gollum had haunted her, made her too frightened to sleep. She had altered in character then, slept with her light on, developed a terror of the dark, formed other habits she as a doctor would now label obsessional; washing hands, avoiding walking on cracks in paving stones, under ladders, feeling a fear for the entire world outside. And it had all stemmed from the combination of that one book, and this place. And something else which until now she had locked inside her memory because while she had known Gollum was fantasy, something else was not.

  Megan forced herself to see that day with clarity. Why had Bianca’s reference to “Little Rhiann” disturbed her? Why had she had such a conviction that she had known something for years about the child’s disappearance that no one else shared? And why had that secret knowledge been tinged with sick guilt?

  At any time since she had been ten years old she could clearly have visualised every single bar or fragment of rust or the locks that secured this grid and kept her safe from Gollum.

  If she had wanted to.

  Now she looked again.

  And saw. The screw heads that held the grid against the metal flange were rusted. But the grooves were shining silver. Even the grooves would have rusted had they not been touched for years. She ran her fingers over them and they felt sharp.

  She touched the grid and remembered something else, before she had been witched by the vision of Gollum. Her own fingers were reaching through the metal because she too wanted something. Caught on one of the rungs of the ladder was a tiny, red and gold hair elastic. Hair caught in it. Black and curly. Megan rolled back, felt the dampness of the grass, heard the sheep bleating.

  Always complaining about something.

  Complaining that a child’s body lay here and no one cared. Barbara’s mother had been right. They did have something to moan about.

  She sat back on her haunches, ignored the assault of the gorse. And was oblivious to the soft rustling through the undergrowth.

  The wind?

  Again she peered down the shaft, and sensed a gasp of fetid air. She could just make out Gollum’s iron rungs until they vanished. As they had vanished. Or not vanished. Were they down there? Was Bleddyn Hughes ready to grasp her with his long sensitive fingers and his destroyed reputation? Was he with the two little girls, Marie, still with her bag of chips, and Rhiann, missing her hair elastic. Were the boys waiting to mock her? All of them, George and Neil now joined by Stefan Parker. All of them except Bianca whose body lay in the churchyard of the Bethesda Chapel.

  And Geraint Smithson who was the only one of all of them to have had a Christian burial?

  The decay wafted up the shaft on a draft of coal-soiled air. And the voice was behind her now, whispering in Gollum’s lisping tones.

  “Don’t you want to go down there, Meggie? Sssssee them all for yoursssself? How elssse are you going to convince the logical people of Llancloudy that they have harboured a killer in their midst for the last thirty years when they never have believed it before?”

  The voice was right.

  She peered over the edge. The iron rungs were inviting her to take a handhold, a foothold. She must go down.

  The voice came from behind her now. “You are mad. What do you think you will find down there?”

  “I must search for the vanished,” she said.

  “And who are the vanished?”

  “The people who disappeared without trace.”

  “And you think you’ll find them down there?” The voice was mocking her.

  “I don’t know. I can only look.”

  “You are sadly deluded.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you think Bianca knew where they were?”

  “I don’t think so. Only that they never had left Llancloudy - any of them.”

  “But Bianca was mad. How could she have known anything?”

  “Sometimes the mad know more than the sane.”

  “And if you find you are wrong?”

  “Then I am wrong.”

  “But if you are right?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She did turn around then and saw nothing but the sun rising behind the high straight line of the hill.

  No one was there.

  Chapter 24

  She reached the car and tugged the door open, the mundane action dragging her back to normality, at the same time strengthening her resolve.

  She would go down there. If they were there she would find them. The truth would finally be unearthed. And someone would be brought to justice. Not only for the vanishings but for the death of Bianca. The slurs, rumours and questions would stop.

  In the back of her car she carried a flashlight - one of the necessary pieces of equipment for out-of-hours visiting. And also a small tool kit, plus a can of WD40. She grabbed them all, locked the car behind her and strode back across the rugby pitch, resolute. The action felt positive.

  She was back at the grill in minutes. The screws were stiff. She sprayed them with the lubricant and tried again. And moved all six. But she dropped one down the shaft and heard it land far below. She felt a frisson of fear - and suppressed it.

  Fear would not help but hinder her.

  She lifted the cover and dropped it to the side, shining the torch downwards. All she could see were the iron rungs, vanishing into the void. She used her belt to secure the flashlight to her and stuck the toolkit in her kagoul pocket. Then she began her descent.

  Hand under hand. Foot under foot, a metallic chink as her zip struck the iron. She glanced up and saw the grey winter’s day circled above her. The wind felt like ice. She con
tinued the descent.

  Into the dank unknown.

  About thirty feet down the light had almost vanished but the air had changed. There was a breeze that came from another direction. Across her face.

  She flashed the light to her right and picked out a tunnel, about four feet in diameter. She could guess what it was - an early drift mine, probably worked in the eighteenth century. Later workings had been much much deeper.

  If she had wanted to hide a body she might well have chosen here. Accessible, protected by an army of gorse thorns, well away from the rugby pitch. Not part of the main mine workings so not subject to the rigorous search. Few people would remember it was here. At a guess, the police would not have thought to search here.

  There was another point in its favour. You could drive a car around the rugby pitch to within fifty yards of this place. And it would be concealed. A small dip in the land plus the thick vegetation ensured that necessary privacy.

  She crawled along the tunnel, partly crouching, sometimes on her hands and knees, the beam of the torch shining ahead of her. When she had penetrated maybe six feet she stopped and shone the torch back. Against the opposite side of the mine shaft she could see the palest pool of daylight. Ahead the air was slightly stuffy, the temperature warmer than on the surface. The walls were chillingly damp. She flashed the beam ahead, hesitated. Were they there?

  Thirty metres into the tunnel, the torch picked out a rock fall. Either natural or the tunnel had been deliberately collapsed when the last miners had vacated it. But it would be enough to halt her progress.

  She must have been wrong. They were not here.

  “Bugger,” she said out loud and listened to the walls mock her with an echo.

  “Bugger … Bugger … Bugger …”

  So had she been wrong?

  She flashed her torch up and down the rockfall and realised that a few of the top boulders had tumbled. In fact it was not a blind ending. There was a way over the top.

  She strapped her torch to her wrist and clambered over. It was tricky. The rocks were loose and shaley, likely to tumble and she could see nothing ahead. Besides, the air here was not pure. She had a suffocating attack of claustrophobia and tried to use one hand to flash the torch ahead. If she could only see something she could return to the top, persuade a professional team to search here for Stefan.