Disturbing Ground (13 page)

She pulled the can out of the fridge, closed the door, and sat down on the floor.

She slid the box towards her and reached out the top newspaper, flattening it with the palm of her hand until the headline was clear.

Schoolgirl
goes
missing.

In 1988 a ten-year-old girl named Marie Walker had been on her way to buy some chips and had never been seen again.

It was a not uncommon story. She studied a school photograph of a girl with long, dark hair and a small, mean mouth and wondered what had happened to her.

So had Geraint Smithson been referring to this case? And if so why?

Megan pulled more newspapers from the box. Each one contained an article about the missing ten-year-old who had vanished on November 23rd, 1988 - almost
fourteen years ago. Some were entire newspapers, others carefully snipped articles. Bianca must have collected every single piece written about the disappearance of a little girl and Megan read right through them. The articles were peppered with quotations from friends and family.
“Going
to
buy
some
chips,
she
was.
”
“Nice
little
thing
she
were.
”
“She
was
my
best
friend
at
school.”
“We’ll
miss
her
somethin’
awful.
”
For weeks the editors of the
Western
Mail
must have racked their brains to keep the name of Marie Walker on its front page, hoping that the little girl would be found. There was a variety of headlines.

The
Parents
Who
Wonder.

The
School
That
Mourns

The
Friends
Who
Miss
their
Playmate.

What
Happened
to
My
Little
Girl?

Each headline was accompanied by pictures of sad-faced people who stared into the camera with only one question… Where was she? Megan pulled out more and more newspapers, scattering them all over the kitchen floor, wondering whether there was, finally, an answer.

But even though the newspapers spanned months, nowhere was there mention of Marie Walker being found, dead or alive. As time passed the articles moved from the front page towards the back, eventually resting in the “Other news” sections. The interval between features lengthened and finally rested in the
Er
Cof,
the
In
Memoriam
.

Megan spread the newspapers right across the kitchen floor and read through again, this time noting every single detail.

The basic story was this:

On the night of November 23rd 1988 at nine o’ clock, Marie Walker had been given five pounds to fetch the chips for the family who were sitting watching an old
video of
Jaws.
Bored with a film she had probably already seen too many times, she had offered to go to the chippie and her stepfather and two stepbrothers had thought nothing of it. It was, according to the
Western
Mail,
a trip she made a few times a week. Her mother had been working late as a barmaid at The Oddfellows Arms - otherwise she might have insisted one of Marie’s stepbrothers accompany her daughter. By ten o’ clock the three men had grown hungry and, assuming Marie had “bunked off” with the money and the chips, had cursed the girl’s delay It was only when Marie’s mother had returned home at a few minutes before twelve that the family’s threats of tanning Marie’s hide had translated into belated and worried action. They had made phone calls - to every single one of her friends. And drawn a negative. Marie had disappeared. At half past twelve they had called the police.

Megan swigged at the Red Stripe and continued reading.

According to the server in the fish and chip shop, Marie had bought four large portions of chips and put the salt and vinegar on herself. Witnesses testified she had left the shop with her fingers already dipping into one of the bags as she had started walking home. She had been spotted on her way still pulling at the chips and threading them into … Megan looked again at the picture and visualised the child’s thin little mouth greedily pulling at the greasy food. Again, witnesses had seen Marie walk along the main road and turn right into St Leonard’s Terrace. This would have been the direct path home, turning right again into Railway Terrace where she lived. Somewhere between the two roads she had vanished. And never been seen again.

The police opinion was that Marie had been heading straight home.

Megan hunched over the papers and absorbed the stories.

But, however deep she delved, Marie Walker never had been seen again. Years later her name cropped up only in the
Er
Cof
column. Every year on November 23rd.

And
Bianca
had
preserved
even
this
lingering
contact.
Strange how she had become absorbed in this case.

Megan sat back against the wall. Why had Bianca hoarded these articles of a missing child, charging poor old Esther Magellan with their custody? What exactly had she told Smithson? Had it been
these
stories she had shared with the old man, adding to his agitation?

And why had Smithson, in turn, tried to pass on the tales to the nurses and herself with such desperation?

Had Bianca’s stories disturbed him to such an extent? After all, she reasoned, Smithson would have been familiar with the story already. He would have read the newspapers. Megan glanced across the kitchen floor. There were plenty of headlines. What had made this story stick in his mind? And why did she not remember the case? Megan did some quick arithmetic. She would have been eighteen when Marie Walker had disappeared, and in the November when she was eighteen she had been a fresher at Cardiff University. That was why she didn’t even recall the child’s name. She had been living the riot of a first-year medical student. Hardly a time when she would have pored over the local newspapers. But it was strange that while she had been unaware of a child vanishing from her own home town for some reason it had been significant enough for Smithson to quote it more than ten years later.

And Bianca had not only hoarded the relevant newspapers but had charged Esther with the custody of
them. And at the back of her mind sat the words from Wainwright.

“It
is
not
unusual
for
people
who
have
delusions
to
retain
a
good
deal
of
perception.
”

What, Megan wondered, had Bianca “perceived”?

She reached another Red Stripe out of the fridge.

There were three other boxes.

She replaced all the articles into Marie Walker’s box and studied the others. Each one had a different name on the side, all written in the same writing, in black felt-tipped pen. Bleddyn Hughes was the name on the second box; Rhiann Lewis was written on the side of the third. “Rhiann Lewis”. The name was vaguely familiar but she couldn’t quite place it…

She lifted the lid and read the date on the top newspaper. 1980. Twenty-two years ago. Perhaps her parents had mentioned the name in front of their ten-year-old daughter as a warning.

She eyed the last box. On the side were penned two names, George Prees and Neil Jones. The year against the headline was quite recent. 1992. Ten years ago. But again the names brought no recognition. In 1992 she would have been twenty-two, a fourth-year medical student. According to the article the boys had vanished in June when she would have been abroad, working out her elective period in Lusaka, studying the effects of malaria on an unprotected African population. A million miles away from Llancloudy and its mysteries.

Whatever they were.

Megan lifted the “Bleddyn Hughes” box onto the kitchen table and started pulling the newspapers out. Hughes had been a maths teacher at the local grammar
school until 1971 when, like Marie Walker seventeen years later, he had simply vanished. Homosexuality was hinted at. He was, the paper said, “fond of children”, an ambiguous phrase. He had, apparently, run extra curricular activites at the school and in his free time - a chess club, swimming lessons, maths coaching. And then one Monday morning Bleddyn Hughes had failed to turn up for class.

Megan stared at the kitchen wall, her eyes unfocused. “A teacher who had failed to turn up for class.” It didn’t sound much of a story.

She bent over the newspaper and continued reading.

Bleddyn Hughes had not shown nor telephoned all day and the headmaster, none too pleased at the non-appearance of one of his teachers, had visited Hughes’ rented room to find he was not there and had not been seen since Friday night. The headmaster had been the one to alert the police who had then raided his rented lodgings and uncovered a number of “suggestive” magazines.

In fact the tone of the articles displayed less concern at the disappearance of a suspect maths teacher than the sudden vanishing of the ten-year-old child sixteen years later. The assumption Megan read between the lines was that Hughes had “gone to London” to pursue his activities in a more enlightened environment. The photographs showed an unprepossessing man, bespectacled, anxious, staring fiercely into the camera.

Interest had quickly waned even though there was no mention of his owning a car or having been seen at either the coach or the railway station.

But
there
was
only
one
road
out
of Llancloudy
unless
you
crossed
the
mountains
-
by
foot.

The pile of papers was half the size of Marie Walker’s. And there was no
Er
Cof.
Bleddyn Hughes had not been
“a local man” and the speculation had only lasted a few weeks. Two months after Bleddyn Hughes had gone from Llancloudy there was no mention of him at all.

Megan gathered the papers up and returned them to the box. She would find no explanation here. In fact, reading between the lines she sensed the sentiment that the authors of the articles believed Llancloudy was a better place without Bleddyn Hughes, Maths teacher.

She put the box back on the floor next to Marie Walker’s and turned to the third box.

Which contained the saddest of stories.

Of a little girl, Rhiann Lewis.

“Little
Rhiann”
whom
Bianca
had
mentioned,
her
wrinkled
cheeks
dripping
because
Little
Rhiann
was
dead.
“Definitely
dead.
”
And
she
knew
“he’d
done
it”.

For Goodness sake, Megan thought. What was this? And so she read about Little Rhiann.

The child had been just three years old, playing in her own back garden, behind a bolted door while her mother and her grandmother sat in the house, sharing a pot of tea. There was no way out of the garden except through the house or the bolted door out onto the street.

Little
Rhiann
should
have
been
safe.

But the child had not been safe. Half an hour had elapsed between them hearing her singing and chattering as she bathed her dollies in a plastic paddling pool and the discovery of a door swinging open.

Rhiann Lewis, the little girl who sang lullabies and was “always chattering”, had vanished.

As Megan scanned the column inches she realised that, like the other two, Rhiann was never seen again.

And now Megan was disturbed. Llancloudy was only a small village. Less than three thousand people lived here.
Condense the three vanishings to boxes sitting on her kitchen floor and it seemed a strange town, a dangerous town, a black hole where people disappeared without trace. A town where a mad woman vanished on the Saturday morning only to reappear, drowned, in the shallowest of pools, on the Monday.

Bianca, with her warped understandings of time lapses and disregarding hinted explanations put out by the Press, had preserved the newspapers because …

Because they had intrigued her? Frightened her? Interested her? Because she thought she had an explanation? Or because she sensed a connection?

“She’s
definitely
dead.
I
know
it
now
for
certain.
I’d
won
dered
before
but
when
he
told
me
this
time
I
knew
it
was
the
truth.”

Who had told her? Her “voices”?

Megan read right through the hoarded newspapers searching for some clue. Mine shafts were mentioned, together with the accompanying photographs of miners, their lamps ablaze, as they prepared to search the warren of tunnels beneath Llancloudy. Strain etched lines across the face of Rhiann’s mother so she was indistinguishable from Rhiann’s grandmother. Rhiann’s grandmother. Megan recognised a much younger - and thinner - Gwen Owen. There was a photograph of the child’s father, gaunt and haunted-faced as he joined every single man in the town to look for his little girl while the women comforted the family, as women had done ever since the mines were first opened. But this was no pit accident. The mines had been searched and nothing found. Then the talk had turned to veiled hints of child snatchings, paedophiles, abduction. But the problem always returned to the fact
that the police believed that the child herself had shot back the lock on the door of her safe haven.

Mother and grandmother spoke of hearing the child chattering as she had washed her dolls. The dolls themselves had been found, slippery with soapsuds, still with dripping hair. Only the child was missing.