Sympathy for the Devil (35 page)

She looked down the files at the accompanying details: the dates and places of birth, the schools they had attended, their parents’ backgrounds. Some of the mispers had been privately educated, others had been children of the long-term unemployed and travellers. None seemed to have known each other, or appeared in each other’s notes. She moved all the faces closer to each other.

For one fleeting moment she thought she sensed a faint resemblance between all the faces. But if there was some connection between any of the cases she couldn’t see it. The weak light was making her eyes swim, the images merging, multiplying, swirling in the shadows, as at the onset of a migraine.

She reached down into her bag for her pills, pushed open the door to breathe the fresher air from the passage. She knew now she had to get out into the air immediately or she would black out.

The faces of the dead boys and girls swam before Catrin’s eyes. At first, she walked blindly. The damp air had a weight and solidity that promised more fog. The sea mist was rolling in again from the direction of the cliffs. Through the low clouds came a hard, steely light, a watery glare that stung her eyes.

In the window of the first cabin a display of apothecary’s bottles containing coloured liquids created a sudden brightness that she shrank away from. In the glass was a reflection of a vehicle parked behind her on the road. It was a van, its roof piled with a ladder and tarpaulins.

She turned and saw a man inside beckoning from behind the condensation on the window. The vehicle’s engine was ticking lightly. Against the steamed-up pane, a hand was rubbing the moisture away in rough circular motions.

Catrin strained to see some details of the face but failed. He wore a dark coat and a scarf half covered his face. He had half opened the window and was waving. She looked around, but there was no one else on the road.

Now she heard a tapping sound. He was knocking something silver against the window. The end of a cane. It must be that strange man we saw yesterday, she thought. But why doesn’t he just call out, why only beckon silently like that? She began to approach the van, but it moved away into the mist. Everything was still again, silent.

After about five minutes she came to the top of the hill over the high coomb, a natural amphitheatre of rocks that surrounded the narrow strip of beach. There were no cars parked out in front of the cottages and nothing on the road behind her.

At the edge of the sea the only thing she could see moving was a large brown dog, playing on its own near the rocks. It was crouching down with its nose almost touching the sand, barking at the waves as they came in.

She scanned the rocks and road behind her, but there were no other signs of life. For a moment she stood looking at the metallic tint of the sky reflected in the sea. Then slowly she made her way up to the path between the cottages.

The buildings had the same general appearance as moorland crofts. They were stocky, low to the ground, built from the same dark rock as the cliffs around them. All had the same slate roofs, the same dark plasterwork around the back doors. It was not possible to tell from where she stood which had been the cottage they had entered the previous night. The path led up above a shorter second row of cottages built back to back with the first, then stopped abruptly at a fence. From there a steep run of untended land stretched up between the rocks, the view beyond obscured by the overhanging heads of the cliffs.

It seemed there was no passable route to the cottages from the rear, the only points of access being from the road or the beach. As she climbed higher Catrin saw there were no yards or gardens behind the upper cottages. Their doors opened directly onto the path, and she felt increasingly as if she was walking through a tight crevasse, bounded by the cliff on one side and on the other by the blind backs of the houses. All sight of the road and the beach had disappeared, the only view down was through a series of narrow alleyways that ran between the cottages to the bottom of the bank.

She walked back in the direction of the road. As she looked down the first of the alleyways she could just see the outline of a boy wheeling a bicycle along the duckboards over the mud. At least it looked like a boy. From that distance she couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t tall, and had the frail, attenuated physique of a child in early adolescence. He had stopped and was staring straight up at her.

She put her head down, continued down the path. As she passed the mouth of the next alleyway she saw the boy had paused again and was turning once more to look up at her. At the next gap between the cottages she looked to her left, and the boy was there again. He seemed to be deliberately mirroring her movements, turning his head towards her at exactly the same time as she looked down.

Once she had moved back behind the cottages she knew that his sightline would be interrupted. This time she walked on only a few steps, then ran back to the point she had just come from. She held her breath, looked down the mouth of the alleyway she had first passed.

The boy was there again. But with him this time she saw a man, just a faint silhouette. His head was raised slightly, as if he was looking for someone or something particular but could not see it yet. He was standing back from the boy, in the middle of the pathway. Catrin could see little else of him but his long dark coat.

He was beckoning to her now, silently. The coat looked like the one worn by the man in the van. Why didn’t I hear his engine? she thought. Her breathing was becoming rapid and shallow. Each time she reached the mouth of the next alleyway the man appeared. He was walking in tandem, beckoning her down, then she couldn’t see him any more.

She turned, ran down as fast as she could towards the seafront. Both the boy and the man had disappeared. The alleyways were empty.

Catrin thought she could hear above the cries of the seabirds the faint calls of children, but as she listened more intently the cries faded again like echoes and she heard only the wash of the sea. The dog had moved to the far end of the beach, no more than a vague shape now at the edge of the waves.

She looked out to sea. The wind had dropped but the waves were bigger than the night before, five or six feet high at their peaks as they crashed down on the beach in front of her.

She thought she could make out something shimmering above the waters. The dim light played tricks with her sense of perspective and at first she thought she was looking at a large bird, swooping low over the waves. It was only when the shape came nearer that she saw it was a man in a black wetsuit.

The surfer was bobbing in front of a rising cliff of black water gathering pace behind him. It seemed impossible that he would not be crushed beneath its bulk. Catrin held her breath. Then as the wave crashed around him he became one with its foaming spray and disappeared.

For a few moments there was nothing but the onward mass of the dark waters. Then she saw a slim form skimming down the front of the wave and criss-crossing it again. His wetsuit was jet back apart from a flash of silver across the heart. The wave was moving closer now. There were jagged rocks on either side of it and more, no doubt, unseen beneath the water. But the surfer made a sudden corkscrewing move that took him away from the rocks to where the waters were deeper. As a wave crashed over him its successor bore him almost gently into the shore.

He picked up his board and clambered carefully up the steep incline of the rocks. As he got closer she recognised the man with the cane and long greying hair. She felt suddenly disconcerted. A few minutes previously she was sure she’d seen him up on the road, and then in the lane. Now he was emerging from the waters in front of her.

She thought at first he was going to walk right past her without so much as a glance, but at the very last second he stopped dead in front of her. His eyes were the purest green she’d ever seen. He gave a quick low bow, then turned and carried on walking into the mist.

‘Who are you?’ Catrin called, and began running after him. ‘Who are the children?’ But there was no one there. As quickly as he’d appeared he had vanished again.

She spun around, scanned the rocks, the cottages. Nothing was moving. She stood for a few moments looking at the sky reflected in the windowpanes. Then slowly she made her way back up the road, back towards the inn.

Huw wasn’t in the bar. He wasn’t in the dining room at the back, nor in the small lounge next door where the curtains were still drawn, the chairs all lined up in front of the television. She went upstairs to their room. Someone had tidied it, removed the breakfast tray, made the bed, taken away the towels that Huw had left heaped on the floor. His cases were as he had left them at the end of the bed, the slim one for the laptop locked, pushed to one side under the table. The car was still where they had left it the previous night.

She went back down to the bar. The barman was alone with his back to her, wiping glasses. She coughed and he turned, smiled shyly, didn’t meet her eyes. He looked as if there was something he’d just mislaid.

‘Where’s my friend?’ Catrin said.

He looked out to the car by the old pump.

‘Car like that, picked him up. He said to tell you he’d be away a few hours in Abergwaun.’

The man’s accent was deep, he sounded as if he wasn’t used to speaking English. Catrin wondered why he seemed nervous. He couldn’t have known Huw had a second car the same. It sounded like Huw had left in the company of his security people. She wondered if he’d found something else in the missing persons reports, gone to check on it. She went to the payphone, but couldn’t reach him on any of his numbers.

The barman was standing by the fridge. The rubber inside was perished, hanging down. He glanced nervously out at the yard. Through the dirty panes she could see nothing moving there.

She went down the passage and looked into the yard. It was empty. At one end were some beer barrels, at the other mouldering crates. The doors to the storerooms were closed. She looked up at the windows. On one side she thought she saw something moving, behind one of the curtains in the lounge.

She went back along the passage to the door. Inside it was dark, most of the curtains still drawn. She saw a tall man with greying hair standing in the corner facing out of the window. He was wearing a long coat that seemed to be made up of many different small animal pelts. Some were grey, others brown but most were black. It looked like something ancient, something tribal.

As he turned she recognised the man who’d just passed her in the mist, the surfer. His coat was open, and under it she could see his wetsuit, sleek and black, still glistening with patches of water.

If he was feeling the cold, he didn’t show it. He seemed completely at ease. He was smoking a cigar, a large one. It already looked half smoked.

‘How did you get here so quickly?’ Catrin asked.

‘There’s a short cut, by the cliffs.’ His voice was deep, relaxed. It sounded local though overlaid with something more unusual she didn’t recognise.

‘I saw you coming past the other morning,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’d come the same way.’ He offered her a cigar. She shook her head.

‘No one seems to heed the smoking ban out in the country,’ she said.

He didn’t reply, but smiled at her as if she’d just said something faintly absurd. His features were dark, deeply lined as he smiled. They seemed as hard, as harsh as the black rock of the cliffs.

‘But you’re a smoker yourself,’ he said.

She felt for the Drum and papers still in her pocket. She hadn’t been smoking down on the beach.

He smiled again. His teeth were surprisingly white for a man of his age. His features seemed as timeless as the rocks and the winds. He took a book of matches from his pocket, lit one with one hand and brought it up to his cigar. He’d let the lit match drop onto some papers piled by the fireplace. Silently Catrin watched as the flame began to broaden, creep across the surface of the paper. She moved her foot towards the flames to stamp them out. But as the man glanced down at them, just as suddenly as they had spread the flames contracted, guttered out.

‘You from round here then?’ she asked.

‘Was once, a long time ago.’ She thought she saw a kind of reverie in his eyes, as if the man was running some old movie in his head that was infinitely more seductive than the world he saw around him.

‘So what brings you back?’

‘Just doing up a few ruined cottages, hoping to rent them in the summer.’

‘You’re a developer then?’

‘A developer, you could say that.’ He seemed to find this amusing, let out a brief, sonorous laugh. ‘A late developer you might say.’

She showed him her picture of Rhys, pointed out his earring. ‘Seen him about?’ she asked.

He looked, shook his head. She wondered how old the man was, it was difficult to tell. Late fifties perhaps, though there was the vitality about him of a much younger man.

‘You were here in the early Seventies?’

‘Off and on,’ he said.

‘Remember a commune, up where the clinic is now?’

‘Yes but they kept themselves to themselves, weren’t here long.’ These were the exact same phrases she’d heard before from Tudor and the woman in the village. They felt to her now almost like lines from a play, rehearsed, learned by rote.

‘Any idea where they went?’

He was shaking his head again, blowing elaborate smoke rings out to the side of Catrin’s head. He stepped forward and shook her hand. His grip was firm, lingering, almost painful for a moment

‘Fransis,’ he said. She waited, but he didn’t give her a second name.

‘Catrin.’ Looking at his expression, she sensed she’d just given away more than those six letters.

He passed her his card, which looked cheap, the sort printed by a machine. There was a Cardiff address on it, and something scribbled on the back. The writing was slanted, very old-fashioned. She couldn’t read a word of it.