Authors: Rhys Bowen

Evan's Gate (8 page)

BOOK: Evan's Gate

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“Not much,” he said. “The caravan park is almost empty. Nobody saw anything of the little girl at all this morning. The only thing that seemed strange to me was a German couple. They were leaving three days early, and they couldn’t wait to get out either.”

“Did you let them go?” Hughes demanded.

“Yes, sir. I had no reason to detain them. But I did take their car license number, and I have all their particulars, including mobile phone number.”

“Ah. Good man,” Hughes said, at last handing out a small morsel of praise.

“And they did have an alibi for this morning,” Evan said. “They
climbed a mountain and then went for coffee in town. That should be easy enough to verify.”

“I don’t suppose their departure had anything to do with this, anyway,” Watkins said. “And we can always find them again if we need them.”

D.C.I. Hughes stood up. “Well, I’ll leave you to it then, Watkins. You’ve got someone working on tracking down the father, have you?”

“We’ve sent out a message to all the ports of exit to be on the lookout for him and the little girl,” Watkins said, “but as of now it’s still a missing child report, not an abduction.”

“If I were you, I’d proceed as if this were an abduction and track down the father right away. It’s just possible that he paid someone to snatch the child and have her delivered to him. I’d have him tailed right away, Watkins.”

“Very good, sir. Thanks for the suggestion.” His face was expressionless.

The moment Hughes made his grand exit, Watkins muttered under his breath to Evan, “What the hell does he think we’re doing—waiting for him to tell us when to breathe? Sanctimonious git.” He looked up at the officers in the room. “Sorry about the interruption. Now where were we?”

“Roberts was just about to give you his report, sir.”

“Ah yes. Roberts—beach area?”

“Nothing, sir. I only saw one suspicious person, and he turned out to be Constable Evans.” This got a good laugh.

Watkins consulted his notes. “So everything has turned up negative. No possible sightings in Criccieth or Borth or Porthmadog. Nothing found on the beach or the dunes. And all the adjacent homes have been contacted, have they?”

“Yes, sir. Jones and I did that. No one’s seen her.”

“And Evans, you had another go around the caravan park. What was this about the German couple?”

“They were rushing to get away, sir. The man said something
about his girlfriend being upset by the whole thing and just wanting to get out of there.”

“And you thought there was more to it than that?”

“I really don’t know. I’d like to have searched their caravan. I did take a look inside the car, it was one of those Beetles and easy enough to look inside, and I didn’t see anything suspicious there.”

“You don’t think they could have taken the child? They really were German and not Russian, I suppose?”

“They sounded German to me,” Evan said. “And they had a German license plate.”

“We should keep an eye on them,” Watkins said. “Where were they heading, did they say?”

“Maybe up to Scotland, they thought.”

“Okay. Give me the car number. We’ll get it to the ports in case they decide to do a bunk on us. The port authority police are going to be fed up with hearing from us.” He adjusted the papers in front of him. “Right. So what have we got? Searches of the area negative. Dogs turned up nothing. Did they manage to bring in the bloodhound?”

“Yes, sir, but he couldn’t pick up a trail on the beach. We thought the original area where she’d been playing was probably underwater by the time the dog got there.”

“That’s a lot of bloody use then. So the only thing we’ve got to go on, apart from Evans’s Germans, is the mother’s suspicion that the father is responsible. I’ve already got someone working on contacting the father. And just in case it wasn’t him, but a stranger abduction, we’ve got someone printing up posters for us to put up around the area. Any other suggestions?”

“Has anyone searched the mountain yet?” Evan asked.

“You mean the hill behind the site?”

“I know it’s not over one thousand feet, but I’ve always thought of it as a mountain myself,” Evan insisted. “I’ve just spoken to someone who says he saw two or three people up there this morning. By the way, you’ll never guess who it was. Remember Daft Dai?”

“The one who claimed he’d killed those men on the mountain?” Watkins grinned.

“Daft Dai? Oh, we all know him,” Roberts said. “He’s always coming into the station and asking to be arrested. I think he likes the tea and buns we give him.”

“Excuse me, sir,” a young policewoman raised her hand, “but shouldn’t we be checking him out? I mean it has been known before that someone who is mentally unbalanced goes after a little girl.”

“This one’s harmless, I think, Gwen,” Watkins said.

“And he was genuinely startled when he heard that the little girl was lost,” Evan said. “Given his desire to be arrested, I think we have to take it that he had nothing to do with her disappearance.”

“And yet you still think we should search your bloody mountain, Evans?”

“Just a thought, sir. To make sure we’ve covered all bases.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. It would be easy enough to hide a child up there among the rocks and heather. How do you boys feel? Are you up to another search party before it gets dark?”

“Of course, sir.” One of the constables got to his feet. “Anything we can do to find the little girl. You’ll want the dogs, won’t you?”

“Absolutely. Then let’s get back there. We’ve got four hours before it gets dark. That should be long enough to give it a thorough going-over.”

“There’s one more thing I thought I should mention,” Evan said, as the meeting dispersed and they walked to Watkins’s vehicle together. “You know Mrs. S. said that Ashley had had an operation ? Well, the park owner says that it was a heart transplant.”

“A heart transplant? Bloody hell,” Watkins said.

Evan opened the passenger side door and got in. “So she’d be on all kinds of drugs, wouldn’t she? So how could her mother have forgotten to mention them to us?”

“We’d better pay her another visit on the way over,” Watkins said, as they pulled out of the car park.

“I tried to as soon as I found out, but apparently the W.P.C. had taken her to get a cup of tea.”

“She should be back by now. Did the park owner say anything else interesting?”

“She said that Mrs. S. went out a lot, always coming and going.”

“Bit of a nosey parker, this park owner, would you say?”

“Definitely. She’s miffed with Shirley Sholokhov because she thought they could have some good chats, and then Shirley kept herself to herself.”

Watkins chuckled. “But if she notices when Shirley comes and goes, you’d have thought she’d have spotted a strange car or a strange man, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what I thought, but she says there are several places where someone could slip through the hedge to a car parked in the lane.”

Evan shook his head as they left the town behind. “You’d have thought someone would have seen something, wouldn’t you? It’s so exposed here. If someone grabbed Ashley from the beach, he’d have had to sprint across a couple of fields with the child in his arms. Don’t tell me that nobody would have noticed.”

“It is pretty empty at this time of year,” Watkins said. “Even so, he would have been taking a terrible risk.”

“If it were Ashley’s father, he was obviously willing to risk anything to get her. You’d risk anything to get your daughter back, wouldn’t you?”

“Yep. I suppose I would,” Watkins agreed.

And yet Mrs. Paul had described him as a bastard, moody, violent.

They drove into the meadow and parked beside the blue car. This time the door was opened by W.P.C. Howells. “Oh, hello, Inspector, hello, Constable Evans,” she said. “Any news yet?”

“Not yet. How’s Mrs. Sholokhov holding up?”

“Not too well. The doctor’s given her a sedative,” she said in a low voice, glancing back into the van.

“Is she still awake because we have to ask her something,” Watkins said.

“You can try, but don’t upset her again if you can help it, will you? She was in a terrible state earlier, threatening to kill herself if anything happened to Ashley.”

“It won’t take a minute.” Watkins stepped past her into the caravan. Evan followed. Mrs. Sholokhov was lying on the bed, looking pale and haggard. She opened tired eyes as Watkins sat down beside her, then struggled to sit up.

“Any news?” she asked.

Watkins put a hand on her shoulder and eased her back down. “We’re doing everything we can, but don’t worry. We’ve alerted all the ports. Your husband won’t be able to leave the country with her. It’s only a matter of time before we find them.”

She nodded, pressing her lips together.

Watkins looked up at Evan, who stepped forward. “There was one thing, Mrs. Sholokhov,” Evan said. “I understand that your little girl had a heart transplant. Is that right?”

She nodded again. “One of the youngest recipients the hospital had ever done,” she said.

“So she’s presumably on medication?”

“Of course she is.”

“But you didn’t think it was important to mention it to us this afternoon?” Watkins asked.

“I should have done, shouldn’t I?” She brought one hand up clumsily toward her face. “I just can’t think straight. But don’t worry, if she’s with Johnny, he’ll make sure she takes it. He was always fanatical about her taking her pills. And he has copies of her prescriptions for the times she stayed overnight with him. So she’ll be fine, unless he takes her to Russia.” A sob rose in her throat. “Oh, God. Who knows what kind of primitive medicines they have over there?”

W.P.C. Howells sat on the bed beside her and patted her reassuringly.
“They’ll find him before he gets to Russia. Now you just try and have a little sleep.” Her look told Watkins and Evan to leave.

“She’s pretty much convinced that Ashley’s father took her, isn’t she?” Evan said, as they walked back to the car.

Watkins stared up at the mountain. “I hope to God she’s right.”

Chapter 8

The sun was sinking as a red ball into the layer of sea fog on the horizon as the tired search party finally picked its way down the mountain. They had found nothing but a child’s hair slide with a teddy bear on it, which could have been lying there for ages. Evan and Watkins had taken the main path up to the summit while the crew fanned out, moving up through the rocks and heather from the road. After all the rain, the path was extremely muddy.

“We might just get lucky and pick up footprints if anyone brought the kid up here,” Watkins said. “Of course, if anyone brought her up here, he was probably carrying her, but then his prints would be heavier than usual.”

Evan stared at the path ahead. “That’s interesting,” he said. “Those Germans said they hiked the mountain this morning, but they certainly didn’t take this path. Look at this—a herd of sheep came across here and there were no sheep on the mountain today —and there are no prints on top of the sheep, are there?”

“They could have chosen not to take the path,” Watkins agreed. He glanced up at Evan. “You suspect those Germans of something, don’t you?”

“Let’s say they made me a trifle uneasy.”

“I think you’ve got good instincts, boyo. When we come down, I’ll have their car stopped and searched, and we’ll get in touch with the German police too—just in case.”

Pink twilight was glowing on the mountainsides and highlighting the last of the snow as Evan finally drove up the pass to Llanfair. Rivulets of water cascaded down the steep green slopes and danced along the side of the road. The bleating of new lambs floated on the evening breeze. Evan felt the tension melting away. Now he knew why it was so important to live in the cottage. It was remote, removed from all the tensions and tragedies going on in the world. Once he got home, he’d be in a haven of peace.

For now, of course, home was not a haven of peace on the mountainside, but a dreary two-up-two-down terraced miner’s cottage in the village. Evan had been living there since he moved away from Mrs. Williams’s tender care to prove that he could fend for himself. In truth, he hadn’t been doing too well at the fending. He had learned to boil eggs and cook spaghetti, but that was about the limit of his culinary skills. When he got home, he was usually so tired and hungry that it was easier to fry up eggs and bacon than learn a new cooking skill. And at the back of his mind was the thought that someday soon Bronwen would be doing the cooking.

The place felt cold and damp as he let himself into the front hall, this being one of the few homes that had never had central heating installed. It had never really warmed up after the winter, and he was usually home too late to think about making a fire. Instead he put on the kettle to make some tea, then opened the fridge to see what he might eat. The choice was egg or cheese, and he didn’t fancy either. He turned off the gas under the kettle again and did something he’d promised he’d never do. He went across the road to the pub.

The RED DRAGON sign was swinging in the stiff breeze, each swing being accompanied by a loud squeak. Evan pushed open the outer door, then ducked under the oak beam that led to the
main bar. He was greeted by warmth, voices, and Frank Sinatra in the background—the village’s taste in music being a little behind the times. A fire was burning in the fireplace at the far end of the bar. A group stood around it, silhouetted against the firelight. Another group stood around the bar, in the center of which was a tall young man wearing a turtleneck and smart sports coat. Evan took a moment to register that the man was Barry-the-Bucket, the local bulldozer driver who had never been seen in anything but dirty overalls until recently. He was leaning on the polished wood bar, his face inches from barmaid Betsy’s as he whispered something to her and she responded by blushing and slapping him playfully.

A minor miracle had taken place in the village when Betsy and Barry fell for each other, Evan decided. He welcomed it as it meant Betsy had stopped her relentless pursuit of him. She was no longer wearing sexy sweaters and exposed midriffs, but a demure white blouse. As she moved away from Barry, she spotted Evan making his way through the crowd to the bar.

“Well, here he is at last, then,” she said loudly. “We thought you’d got lost, Evan
bach.
What will it be? The usual?”

Her hand had already moved to draw a pint of Guinness.

“Lovely, thanks. And what have you got to eat tonight then, Betsy? What delicacies to tempt a hungry man?”

“Ooh, listen to him,” one of the men chuckled. “You want to watch it, Evan, boyo. Barry’s standing right here and he gets awfully jealous.”

“I thought you were supposed to be learning to cook.” Betsy gave him a stern frown. “I’ll have to tell Bronwen if you keep popping in here for your dinner.”

“I don’t keep popping in. I’ve been looking for a missing girl since this morning, and I’m starving.”

“Missing girl, eh? Oh, that’s bad. Did you find her?” Old Charlie Hopkins turned to Evan from where he had been propping up the bar, his hands nursing a half-empty glass.

“Not yet. It seems she might have been taken by her father.”

“That’s what always happens when people get divorced, isn’t it?” Betsy said. “They do it to spite each other and don’t think about how it might upset the children. They should make sure they’re marrying the right person before they start bringing children into the world, that’s what I say.”

“Quite right, you tell’em,
cariad,
” Barry said, patting her hand. “But not everyone can be as lucky as you, meeting a spectacular bloke like me.”

“Anyone would think you were Irish, the amount of blarney you talk, Barry,” she said, pushing his hand away. “I hope you find her, Evan
bach.
Now what were you wanting to eat? I’ve got a nice toad in the hole or I can do you some plaice and chips.”

“Toad in the hole will do nicely, thanks, Betsy.”

“I’ll just pop it in the microwave. It won’t take a second,” Betsy said, darting away from the bar.

“Are you going out tonight then, Barry?” he asked the bulldozer driver. “I’ve never seen you all tarted up on a weeknight.”

Barry actually blushed. “Betsy took me shopping in Bangor and helped me pick out some things.”

“Ooh, you want to watch it, boy,” Charlie Hopkins chuckled. “Next it will be picking out home furnishings, and then you’re done for.”

“He could do worse,” Evan said, reaching across to pick up his glass of Guinness. “Everyone has to settle down sometime, you know.”

“There speaks the voice of experience,” Barry said. “Just because you’ve been caught, you want every other poor bloke to suffer too—and don’t you dare tell Betsy I said that!”

Evan smiled and was just taking a long, appreciative sip of his Guinness when a hand slapped him on the shoulder.

“Well, look who’s here.”

Evan managed to move his glass away without spilling stout down his front, and turned to see Evans-the-Meat, local butcher, standing behind him.

“Careful, man. You nearly made me spill my drink,” he said.
“And why shouldn’t I be here? I’m here most nights.”

“I just thought you’d be wise to stay away, on account of how Mr. Owens-the-Sheep wants your head.”

“Owens-the-Sheep? He’s not still mad about what happened during the foot-and-mouth epidemic, is he? I thought we’d patched that up long ago.”

“Not that, boyo. Today. That man you took to see the cottage today—that’s what’s upset him.”

“Why would that upset him?” Evan frowned. “We only walked up the track and back again. We didn’t go over Bill Owens’s land. Oh, don’t tell me he left the gate open when he came down.”

“No, worse than that. You left the bugger up there, didn’t you? Left him to make his own way down.”

“I had to. I was paged by my boss.”

“I dare say you had to,” Evans-the-Meat said, “but you should have brought him down with you, not left him on his own to do more mischief.”

“He couldn’t keep up with me,” Evan said. “I was in a hurry. Why, what happened?”

“Let Bill Owens tell you himself,” Evans-the-Meat said. “He’s over by the fire and he’s on his third whisky chaser.”

Evan took a deep breath and followed the butcher to the group by the fire. “I understand that you had an unpleasant encounter, Mr. Owens,” he said.

“I did. Thanks to you, young man,” the farmer muttered, his face red and his consonants slurred. “You brought trouble to me today.”

“I did? What kind of trouble?”

The old man stared down at the empty glass in his hand. “That bloke was a National Parks inspector, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right. He had to inspect the cottage I want to rebuild. Did he do any damage to your property?”

“He damaged his wallet, that’s what,” Roberts-the-Pump, owner of the local petrol station, exclaimed with a loud laugh.

“You wouldn’t find it funny if it happened to you,” Owens said.
“Trouble was, Evan
bach,
he didn’t go straight down the mountain, he starts snooping around where he’s no right to, and he finds my new barn.” He sucked through his teeth in disgust. “You know that compensation I got for losing my flock last year. Well, the wife says why put it all back into sheep at our age? You’ve kept saying you were going to rebuild that old barn. Now’s the time to do it before it falls on someone’s head and kills them.”

“Oh,” Evan said, realizing where this conversation could be going. “And you didn’t get planning permission.”

“What do I need permission for? That barn’s been up there since before that little squirt was born. I don’t need permission to rebuild something on my own land.”

“That’s probably not how he saw it.”

“It wasn’t. He tells me I could be in a lot of trouble. He says I have to submit plans for approval before the committee, and the structure has to comply with National Park standards and be built of local materials, just like everything else.”

“That’s what he told me too,” Evan agreed.

“Bloody daft, if you ask me,” Roberts commented. “Next they’ll be telling me that my petrol pumps have to be chiseled from local slate.”

“They probably will, boyo. You’d better watch out.” There was general laughter.

“But you need a barn on your farm, Mr. Owens,” Evan said. “Tell them that. Tell them the old one was falling down, and you have to take your lambs inside if the weather turns nasty like yesterday. I’m sure they’ll understand.”

“I’m not at all sure,” the farmer said. “None of them are locals, are they? This bloke comes from Lancashire so he tells me. Speaks no Welsh. What would he know about sheep farming? I’ve already had to deal with one lot of bureaucracy within the last year; I’m not standing for another. I told him the barn’s going up and if he wants to tear it down again, he’ll have me and my shotgun to deal with.”

“That probably wasn’t a good idea,” Evan said, thinking of the officious Mr. Pilcher.

“No, I don’t think he took it too kindly,” Mr. Owens said. “He stomped off, not looking very pleased, and I told the dogs to follow him, just in case he felt like more snooping. You’ve never seen anyone get down the mountain so fast in your life as when he saw those dogs coming after him. As if they’d hurt a fly!”

His old body shook with silent laughter.

“All the same, Mr. Owens, I think you’d better go down to National Park headquarters and convince them that you’re just rebuilding the barn the way it always was.”

“Maybe you’re right, young man,” Owens said. “You don’t seem to be able to fight authority these days, do you? Not like the old days when a man’s farm was his own property and people had to ask permission to walk across it.”

“So did he give you your permission then, Evan
bach?”
Roberts asked.

“Not exactly. He thought it might qualify as a listed building.”

“What does that mean?” someone asked.

“You know, of historical value, worth preserving.”

“That old shepherd’s cottage? Historical value?” There was a loud outburst of laughter. Evan smiled too.

“That’s what I told him, but he thinks the walls and foundation might have been there long enough to make it qualify.”

BOOK: Evan's Gate

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