Disturbing Ground (19 page)

It was her custom to set the radio alarm for seven even though she didn’t need to be at the surgery until nine. It gave her time to listen to the local news bulletin, pad downstairs to make a drink while the adverts were on and bring the mug of coffee back to bed.

That morning her eyes were still shut when the radio alarm clicked on. She heard the pips followed by the announcement, “This is the news on Tuesday November 12th. You are tuned in to BBC Radio Wales.” Then there was the usual pause.

“The police are still searching for missing ten-year-old, Stefan Parker.”

She sat up, her eyes wide open. “Stefan has not been seen since early Monday and police are concerned for his safety. His mother left for work yesterday at eight o’ clock but Stefan failed to turn up at school yesterday morning and has not been seen since. Mrs Parker has appealed for her son to return home. Police have started searching the area around Llancloudy and are conducting house to house interviews. If anyone does have any information about the missing boy would they please ring Llancloudy police station at…” The telephone number followed.

Megan stared around her bedroom and felt cold. It was another disappearance. She flung the covers off and went downstairs. While she waited for the kettle to boil she stood, staring at the boxes in the corner and rubbing the side of her head with her fingertips.

She took her coffee back to bed and listened to an extended news bulletin with a heart-rending plea from
Mandy Parker for Stefan to return home. There would be, she tearfully stated, no recriminations.

Megan drew back the curtains on the dullest day in November and stared out over rows and rows of slate roofs dripping with rain. Beyond them must be the mountains. But she couldn’t see them.

On her way into work she bought the
Western
Mail.
Stefan had made headlines here too.

Megan scanned through the stories as she sat in the car, reading the story beneath the lead,
Missing
Llancloudy
Schoolboy.

Using the description, schoolboy, made Stefan sound an innocent - nothing like the little tough-head he really was. As she read through the story she was struck at the similarity between Stefan’s disappearance and George Prees and Neil Jones. Like the two boys, eight years previously, Stefan frequently missed school. He was one of the aimless kids who hung around the chip shop, the video shop, the recreation ground or hitched a lift to one of the nearby towns to hang around there. Maybe he would trip to the seaside on a fine day. But Monday had not been a fine day. It had been cold and drizzly. A truant would have been more likely to haunt a coffee shop or the house of a friend. But Stefan’s friends, Mark Pritchard and Ryan Jenkins had been at school and claimed not to have seen Stefan since the Sunday night.

According to his mum Stefan had been up and dressed in school trousers and a clean white shirt, his brown and red striped school tie knotted around his neck when she had left for work at eight o’ clock on the Monday morning. But he had not gone to school. Afterwards the police had looked at the Attendance Register. And by his name was a large, black cross - one of many.

Mandy Parker hadn’t worried when he was late home for tea. He would often get that from the chip shop anyway, wander the streets a bit, call on a few mates. When he hadn’t shown up by eleven o’clock on the Monday night she still didn’t worry but rang round a few of his buddies - and drew a blank. None of them had seen him all day. They hadn’t thought anything of it and neither did she. She still wasn’t worried. She knew her son. He was a wanderer, streetwise, tough, one who could look after himself.

So she hadn’t raised the alarm but had waited and waited for him to turn up, her anger compounding by the hour. Afterwards she said she did think about ringing the police but had rejected the idea. It would have been a foreign act to have spoken to the police, she had explained. Stefan wouldn’t thank her for alerting
them
when he got home. Which he would. And Mandy Parker had already decided she’d give him a “bloody good hiding” for not even bothering to telephone her. At that point she thought he might have hitched a lift to the Rhondda to see his dad. She had tried to ring there but had had no answer. Only a jaunty answerphone which had invited her to leave a message. So she had waited four more crucial hours before finally alerting the police at three in the morning. And by nine am they had followed her enquiries with more of their own. No one had seen Stefan since his mother’s last sighting, except for one neighbour who had spotted the boy letting himself out of the front door at eight thirty-five - and had assumed he was heading for school. It was now Tuesday morning and no one had seen him since. Not his mum, nor his dad, his
Mamgu
or any one of the cronies he usually hung around with.

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
van
ished.

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.