Angel on the Inside (33 page)

I had a good idea what the lathe had been used for, though. If he was following the plan cooked up by Keith Flowers and Malcolm ‘Creosote' Fisher, then Ion Jones would have been churning out casings that would fit the chambers of a Brocock air pistol, replacing their gas-and-pellet cartridges. Inside each of these casings he would have inserted a real .22 bullet, and I remembered Fisher laughing when I'd asked if they were difficult to get hold of. I had picked up one thing off the internet that he hadn't known: that a micron out in the tooling could make the live rimfire .22 ‘inner' cartridge highly unstable. There were reports of the things going off when dropped during police confiscations, without a gun in sight.

I stared at the blue-metalled lathe some more, but it didn't tell me anything. There was still no sound from inside or outside the house. That was the trouble with the countryside; it was so damn quiet it was like being in solitary confinement.

There was nothing for it but to check the upstairs, and for that I risked turning on the lights. I made it to the top of the stairs without being attacked by a knife-wielding maniac and looked into the two bedrooms, both doors of which were open. They revealed nothing; absolutely nothing, as they were empty of anything but dust. No furniture, no curtains, not even a light bulb in one.

Tell a lie, there was something: two sheets of printed paper on the floorboards. They were particulars from a estate agent and letting agency in Lampeter and told me that Bryngwyn was available for short-term lettings (unfurnished) until the end of September, when the new owners would redevelop the property. (Estate agent code for second/holiday home bought by the English). I noted that it was ideally situated for wild trout fishing (with permit) and the pony-trekking/wildlife centre that was Tregaron. The other room upstairs was a bathroom that had been in use, with soap, a razor and a toothbrush on the sink. There was also a can of industrial grease-remover and a towel, which had one been lime green but was now basically black with grey-green stains. There was an airing cupboard, with some more towels and a couple of T-shirts hanging from one of the shelves. There was hot water in the tank for the central heating, and the T-shirts had been there long enough to dry.

Lots of indications that Ion Jones had not gone far, and there was nothing to say he wasn't coming back. He hadn't taken his motor-bike, for a start, so maybe he'd just nipped down the hill into town. Maybe he was drinking in The Talbot at this very minute.

I retraced my steps to the kitchen door and stepped outside. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing, making it lighter than at anytime since I'd arrived. It was just after six o'clock and the kitchen of The Talbot would be open. There was nothing like a walk in the fresh mountain air for working up an appetite. Come to think of it, the air did smell different up here. Apart from the ever-present scent of coal fires, there was a noticeable absence of petrol fumes, blocked drains and hot and sweaty humans. It must be all that rain.

I took another lungful and decided to celebrate with a cigarette, leaning on a metal coal-bunker of the kind that seemed to be issued by the local council like dustbins around here.

The plan for the evening was to have a giant steak at The Talbot – unless the Welsh lamb was compulsory – and keep a low profile. Thankfully I had hit the two weeks of the year when Tregaron was crawling with strangers.

I had quite a view now, thanks to the clearing cloud, and I remembered the binoculars, so I opted for a bit of bird watching, or at least mountain watching as there didn't seem to be a living thing in sight. Unzipping the Prakticas, I dropped the fake leather case on the ground and immediately bent to pick it up before I forgot it, not wanting to leave any trace of my visit.

It had landed on a small pile of coal, leaking from the coal bunker's small trap door, which you slide up to insert your shovel or coal scuttle. Coal was something you didn't often see in London these days.

Nor in a house, albeit in Wales, that has electric central heating.

And no fireplaces.

The lid of coal-bunker was about a yard square, weighed about half a ton, and I had to use two hands to lift it and slide it back. Inside was: coal.

Or at least a thin sprinkling of small nuggets and a lot of coal dust resting on folded sacking. The sacking peeled back more easily than the tab on a carton of orange juice to reveal a cardboard box, of the sort you used to get in supermarkets to carry your groceries in (until some officious health and safety twit decided they were a fire hazard). This one had once contained loose Spanish red peppers grown and picked for Jose Suarez Ltd of Almeria.

It now contained, give or take the odd one, 25 loaded revolvers.

 

Well I couldn't say they were unexpected, could I?

It still unnerved me enough to slam the lid back on the coal bunker and look furtively around in case anybody had seen me.

What if they had? Was coal theft – because that's all it could have looked like really – a hanging offence in Wales? It probably was.

There was nobody to be seen with the naked eye. But then, I had binoculars, and I used them to sweep the surrounding scenery.

There were no other houses visible from this side of Bryngwyn, and the nearest properties off the road I had walked up were hidden by undulations in the hill. In front of me the ground sloped down and round to where I reckoned Tregaron was, and if I had read the map right, that was open country sloping gently down to the road near The Talbot and then up again into more mountain and the conifer plantations.

Nothing. Not even a sheep. I scanned the area twice, and then noticed something to the right and down the hill in the direction of Tregaron. Because it hadn't moved, I had dismissed it at first as a patch of brown ferns or a patch of weathered topsoil, but using the Praktica's zoom function I saw that it wasn't.

I had been right about there not being another living thing on the mountainside.

 

I don't know how tall Ion Jones had been in life, but he was about three-foot-six in death, kneeling as he was in soft, boggy earth.

He had slumped down and forward onto his knees, still clutching a cardboard box just like the one I'd found in the coal bunker. A few inches from him was a rubber torch buried in the mud. The switch said it was still ‘ON'.

I circled him warily. From the front, I could see what had happened. He had stumbled, slipped – whatever – and one of the two dozen or so Brococks had gone off. Unluckily for him, it was one pointing his way. Right at his heart, judging by the brown stain and scorch marks on his shirt.

Where had he been going? Obviously away from Brwyngwyn, but if he was going into Tregaron this way at night, instead of by the road, carrying what he was carrying, he was an idiot. Well, obviously he was; he'd shot himself.

I straightened up and looked around me. Just hills – it was a sadist's definition of an open prison. I jogged up the slope, in the direction of the road, and almost immediately went into a crouch. I was in the back garden of another house, except this being the wild west Wales frontier, there were no garden fences or hedges or anything. The house ended, there were a few plants and a square of lawn, and then the mountain began.

Because of the dip in the slope, no-one from the house could have seen Ion Jones's body, knelt in prayer like it was, not even from the upstairs windows. Not that the house – a bigger, more imposing version of Bryngwyn – seemed to be inhabited.

The poor sod must have been there most of the night and all of the day, and because he was so far off the beaten track, not even somebody walking their dog had found him.

The local foxes had though.

 

‘You look as if you've had a good blow, Mr Fitzroy.'

‘Pardon?'

‘A good blow in the fresh air,' said Mrs Williams.

‘Oh yes, of course. Been for a walk, haven't I?' Damn, I was doing the accent again; but she seemed not to notice. ‘Just popped back to get changed before I have dinner at The Talbot.'

‘Ah, The Talbot. There'll be parties and whatnot every night this week,' she said disapprovingly, ‘what with the Irish in town for the racing. They always make an unholy row after hours. Sometimes into the small hours.'

‘Do you ever have to call the police?' I asked casually as I started upstairs.

‘The police? Pah! The nearest station is in Lampeter, and it's supposed to take them 18 minutes to get here. That's what they call their response time. But it's more like half an hour; that's if they bother answering the call in the first place. The town council's complained time and time again. Not that we're always having to call the police, mind you. It's the principle of the thing. Ooops, there's my programme.'

She had been keeping one ear on the television set in the lounge. I guessed it must be time for
Pobol Y Cwm
, of which even I had heard, usually in the context of a pub trivia quiz, as it is one of the longest-running TV soap operas in the UK (if not the world) and the only one not in English.

‘You carry on, Mrs Williams, don't mind me.'

‘Oh, by the way,' she said to my back, ‘I put a key in the lock of your room. You might like to keep it locked; you know, to keep the cat out.'

‘Okay, thanks.'

Note that. Twm Sion Cati had to be locked out. Merely closing the door was not enough.

I took the key out of the lock and pocketed it, closing the door behind me and reaching for my bag, determined to do some damage to the bottle of Italian brandy.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, the bottle to my lips, when I felt the first rake of claws across the back of my ankle. Fortunately, Italian brandy is a good aesthetic, and I was too busy drinking to cry out, so I just leaned back and lifted my feet off the floor. In completing this complicated manoeuvre, I consumed more than I had intended, and when I had finished spluttering and trying not to wipe the mud off my shoes with the Williams' eiderdown, I realised that I now had the upper paw, so to speak.

Twm Son Catty was a big boy, I reckoned twice the size of Springsteen even allowing for the longer hair, and it was probably a bit of a squeeze for him under the bed there. I took another belt of the brandy and put the cork in. Then I pulled off my shoes, threw them into my bag and got to my feet and started bouncing. I hoped that Mrs Williams had the television on loud and that it was a particularly dramatic episode of
Pobol Y Cwm
. If she had come in then and found me jumping on a bed waving a bottle of brandy – well, she wouldn't have been the first.

On the fourth or fifth bounce, Twm had had enough and emerged from under the frame with as much dignity as he could muster, despite having to bend his back until his stomach scraped the carpet in order to do so.

I bent my knees and came to a stop, toasting him with another drink whilst he strode over to the door, sat down and began to lick every piece of fur that been ignominiously displaced, quite determinedly ignoring my presence.

So I ignored him.

But neither of us really took an eye off each other; neither of us was stupid.

Keeping the bed between us, I pulled my bag towards me and fished out a clean shirt. As I took my T-shirt off, he flashed both yellow eyes at me, like the headlights of an oncoming truck in the rain. I wasn't going to catch him with that one again. Very obviously, I put the T-shirt back in the bag. As it was, I couldn't spare another one.

My shoes weren't that bad, considering that I'd run down a mountainside without looking back; my socks were damp, but they'd mostly dried out when I bounced on the bed. I'd blame Twm for that.

But I also had to thank him for taking my mind off things.

I put my jacket back on and zipped it up the front, then I took a step towards the door and waited, arms at my side. Eventually he stopped licking his fur and stared at me for a good minute. I guessed at him weighing in at over 12 pounds, and with the long hair he could have been mistaken for a small pony at a distance. When he stood up, his paws looked the size of a puma's.

He took one tentative step towards the bed. I didn't move. Then another, and then he was on the bed in one fluid leap. When I still didn't make a move, he circled twice, not taking his eyes off me, plucking gently at the eiderdown. The he wrinkled the skin down his back, a gesture of contempt that only cats have perfected, and lay down, curling his great brush of a tail around himself.

But he kept his head up and his eyes open until I'd left the room.

 

I went as planned to The Talbot and ordered a pint of their local ale – which turned out to be keg Welsh Bitter – and their largest steak, with no fried onion rings. I got the onion rings anyway.

While I was waiting, the shakes started over what I knew was on the mountain less than half a mile from the cosy back bar, and through the French windows I watched the night fall on Ion Jones for a second night, or perhaps a third.

The bar was busy, with half the customers speaking Welsh and one or two groups speaking Breton, which I understood at least the gist of. A few said ‘Hello' and ‘Here for the races?' and I smiled politely but didn't get drawn into anything, even when the Breton band started up.