Disturbing Ground (20 page)

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.”

She could have flung her arms around him.

The story of the schoolbag broke the next morning and fuelled a fever of speculation in the
Western
Mail
and the
Welsh
Mirror.
It was displayed by the police on Breakfast TV; a sad, scruffy item, faded red, placed on a table. A blonde WPC held the straps up and the camera zoomed in to show where the stitching had torn, while a burly DI stood in the background and explained that the bag looked as though it had been ripped off the ten-year-old’s back.

Even though she believed it was hopeless, Megan braved a biting wind to volunteer and help the search on the following afternoon. But as what light there had been finally faded, nothing more had been found of the missing boy.

He
would
not
be
found.

The evening paper was full of speculation. The boy had been kidnapped. The boy had been murdered. He was walking the streets of London selling his body. Someone claimed to have seen him in Swansea, standing on the jetty, staring out to sea, like the French Lieutenant’s Woman. Megan cut out all the stories and placed them carefully inside “Stefan’s box”. The police, she noted, were hiding behind bland statements - enquiries were proceeding …

And from Alun she heard nothing more.

But life - and death - must go on in some muddled way or other. By Monday morning Mandy Parker was beginning to substitute her son for a supply of Temazepan. It was her way of surviving. Megan listened as she unburdened herself, racing through the entire spectrum of emotions in a few minutes - from denial to acceptance
through guilt and anger with some terrible anguish thrown in. It would have been difficult for any doctor to help her through, fatuous to pretend that there was an answer; pharmacological, physical or mental. So Megan felt no responsibility as she wrote out the script and handed it over with the usual warning about not becoming too reliant on the drug. As Mandy’s eyes scanned the prescription, Megan studied them and read there a shocking vulnerability. She never had been a well nourished person. Now she looked thin, haggard, old way beyond her years. It brought home to Megan what pain there was in these sterile disappearances.

“Do they have anything to go on?”

Mandy was too choked to even cry. “They spoke to Mark Pritchard and Ryan Jenkins.” Her voice was flat, lifeless. “Thick as thieves the three of them were. If Stefan had plans to do anything he would have told them what they were.”

“And?” Megan denied that she was asking through morbid curiosity. She was the woman’s doctor. It was right that she should know everything.

“I can’t imagine what happened. I
thought
he was going to school. He looked as though he was going to school. But he never went near the place he didn’t.” The anger burst through. “Deceitful little swine. If he’d gone…”

A great flood of tears welled up inside her eyes. “What’s happened to him? I can’t sleep. He could be alive - somewhere. He might be dead. He might be with people. He might be on the streets. He might be cold. He might be suffering. All I know is he isn’t with me. I don’t know he’s safe. I don’t know he’s warm. I don’t know he’s fed. I wonder sometimes, doctor, if I’ll ever know what’s happened to him.”

Megan made soothing noises and touched Mandy
Parker’s arm. A moment later she left the surgery without saying another word and Megan finished her morning’s work feeling grey, as though some of Mandy’s misery had been left behind in the consulting room.

Even the face of Gericault’s Mad Woman seemed to soften in the presence of such grief.

But the encounter spurred Megan into action. As soon as she had seen her last patient she drove to the “chicken coop” estate. She knew enough about Stefan’s buddies to be sure they wouldn’t be at school either. They would have some excuse ready to wave in front of any authority who challenged their presence on the streets this afternoon. As she had expected, they were loafing around the bus shelter, sitting full length along the wooden bench, efficiently blocking the seats from being used by an ancient crone holding on to a “sholley” and a woman so heavily pregnant she looked as though she was expecting triplets today. Megan greeted them both. They were well known to her. The two boys dropped their feet to the floor and eyed her silently and suspiciously when she addressed them. “Any chance of a word?”

“We’re not at school because we’ve got time off to grieve, see.” Mark Pritchard had learned a new set of lines quickly.

“Grieving for Stefan?”

Both nodded.

“But no one knows what’s happened to him.”

The two boys exchanged glances and Megan felt a sudden jump.

Did
they
know?

Something that unnerved even this tough little pair? Because buried deep beneath the bravado Megan could read change in their faces. She sat down on the bench
between them. “I think you should help find him. He is your friend - after all.”

She wasn’t exactly surprised that they scoffed at her suggestion.

“How?”

“If the police can’t find him …” This was Mark Pritchard - marginally more intelligent than his mate but wearing the same uniform of huge T shirt showing skinny, cold-blued arms, nylon combat trousers bristling with pockets and trainers with soles thick enough to increase his height by a bright orange four inches.

“Yes - but you know something the police don’t.” Megan stared at the ground as she spoke. These two were suspicious of everyone and everything. Eye contact was especially suspicious. She kicked a stone across the floor.

So did Ryan. “We told the police what we know.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Mark again, stroppy this time. “We did, doc.”

She decided to play her dummy Ace. “You two think you know what happened, don’t you?”

Both lads shot to their feet. And Meggie instantly saw the reason. The police car cruising like a surf watcher, spanking white with fluorescent pink streak. The jam sandwich. The boys didn’t wait. They simply legged it.

Alun dropped the window and she crossed the road towards him. He was not alone. Police Constable Jarvis Watkins eyed her with a faintly confused air. She smiled the same smile to both of them.

“What are you up to, Meggie?” Alun’s voice almost soft enough to persuade her that this was a personal question. And she had her answer ready. Up her sleeve. “The boys, Stefan’s friends, are off school. They’re disturbed by what’s happened to their mate. I doubted they’d come to
the surgery to see me so I thought I’d seek them out on their own home ground. Make sure they were OK.”

“Liar.” It was said with grudging admiration. “Well, find out anything?”

“No. I didn’t. But …” she stared along the road, frowning. “I think they know something.”

“Well in that case they know more than us. We don’t know anything, Megan, except that he isn’t around. Anything else is pure speculation.” Alun gave a small smile half to himself. “I followed up one of your helpful leads.”

“Oh?”

“Bloody mistake. Thought I’d pay a call on Esther Magellan. What a nut.”

It was then that Megan began to realise. Without prejudice and with access she could move in where no one else could. She could communicate with “nuts”.

“She wasn’t helpful, then?”

“Once I’d calmed her down and told her I wasn’t going to arrest her she gave me a load of tripe.” He gave Megan a hard stare. “I’ll be honest with you, Meggie. I don’t know where I am in this case. It’s weird. I’m not even quite sure what we’re investigating.”

She gave a non-committal nod. “But you’ve looked at all the cases on the police computer?”

“Yes.”

“And Stefan Parker?”

“He could have hopped it down to London - or Brighton - or any one of those places that attract kids who want drugs. A good time. Don’t mind how they get either.”

“Except that he didn’t.”

He looked straight up at her then, full in the face as though trying to read all that she held in her mind, from
her approach to Bianca’s death, to the disappearances, to how she really felt about him. She stared back. She had no secrets.

Jarvis Watkins cleared his throat noisily. It was that that broke the spell. Otherwise she and Alun would have stared at each other until they had both confessed where they stood.

And
it
would
have
been
a
mistake.

Alun slid his hands around the wheel, depressed the clutch and slipped the car into gear. “I’ll be seeing you, Meggie.”

She stood on the pavement and watched the pink flash disappear around the corner, then turned back to the bus shelter.

The two boys were instantly back, jeering with a “Whoah. Fancy him, do you?”

She shrugged.

“He’s a rozzer. I wouldn’t have nothing to do with him.” How often it was the smaller kid who was the tougher. Megan started to walk towards her car. Before she got there she was surrounded by the two boys. “You do know something about Stefan, don’t you?”

“No.” But there was fear in their eyes.

Ryan began to back away.

“Don’t you understand,” she said urgently, longing to shake the pair of them, “it’s dangerous. Stefan’s gone. You don’t want to be next. If you know something tell me. Please tell me.”

Mark’s eyes drifted towards the spot where the police car had finally turned the corner.

She knew he was needing reassurance. “I won’t say anything.”

“You can’t. You’re our doctor.”

Megan smiled to herself. “I’m only bound by the laws
of confidentiality if I learn facts through the fact that I
am
your doctor. But I won’t tell, anyway.”

“Look, we don’t really know anything.” Ryan was getting cold feet. This was a plea to his friend to stop speaking.

Mark turned on him with a jutting chin and mouth furious enough to intimidate a grown man. “Stefan’s fuckin’ gone. And all you think of is chickenin’ out. You’re pathetic, Ryan. Pathetic. Whatever Stefan did at least he had guts.” He directed the conversation back at Megan. “Look, we don’t know but a couple of times he’d say he was frightened of someone.”

“Who?”

Mark Pritchard simply stared at her.

As
though
she
had
mounted
one
of
the
horses
on
the
carousel
it
began
to
spin.
The
ride
had
begun.
And
once
spinning
it
would
move
faster
and
faster.
There
was
no
getting
off
until
the
ride
had
finished.
And
the
music
stopped.

As she drove back towards the surgery for her evening patients her mobile phone rang. She pulled off the road and answered it.

“Doctor Banesto?”

She should have recognised the condescending, supercilous voice with its “posh” Cardiff accent. He introduced himself.

“Franklin Jones-Watson here. Pathologist. Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“No.” She was bemused.

“Why wouldn’t you issue a death certificate on Mr Geraint Smithson?”

She had forgotten about Smithson. “Well - I - I didn’t know what he’d died of. The sister at Triagwn wondered whether he might have had acute heart failure but I wasn’t sure.”

“Did you have any, er, suspicions?”

He sounded a different person from the cocksure doctor who had given evidence with such aplomb at Bianca’s inquest and she was curious.

“He’d been difficult to handle lately, very agitated. We’d needed to sedate him fairly heavily. Why are you asking me this? What
did
Mr Smithson die of?”

“I’m not sure. It could have been… Unfortunately the bedding was missing. The forensic evidence is tricky. It could have been…”

“What are you talking about?”

“It
could
have been acute heart failure. But the bedding had been washed. The pillow was missing.”

“So?”

“Some fibres were in his nose. And there was a tiny bruise on the inside of his lower lip. As though …”

She could work it out for herself. “Pressure had been applied. You mean?”

“There isn’t a lot to go on or even to be sure but I think it’s possible that Mr Smithson was smothered. Only possible, mind.”

And all she could think of was two deaths. Two cunning and clever deaths which had hoodwinked the pathologist. And Franklin Jones’ arrogance was born out of competence in his job. He was no fool.

Someone clever was behind this. Clever enough to hide bodies where no one could find them. Ever. And the bodies he did leave to find were impossible to attribute as homicide.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’ve referred the matter to the police, explained everything. Including the fact that there isn’t any concrete evidence. Geraint Smithson was old. It’s up to them whether they investigate. I rather think not.”

“So what will you write on his death certificate?”

“Inconclusive.”

A
s
you
should
have
done
on
Bianca’
s
death
certificate.
And
prevented
her
burial.

But she said goodbye with a touch of sympathy for the pathologist. Gleaning evidence from corpses was not always so easy.

The search for Stefan continued but Megan sensed the hope of finding him frightened, yet alive, was fading. And there was another death. Two days after she had supplied Mandy Parker with her Temazepam she was summoned to Triagwn again. Old Mr Driver had succumbed to his broncho-pneumonia.

Icy rain was sheeting down as she turned up the drive. Winter was beginning in earnest. The cherub spewing water contrived to look cold. And for Mr Driver life was over.

So
take
him
up
tenderly