Sympathy for the Devil (26 page)

She turned back to the woman. ‘Do you remember anything about the father’s job? What ship he was on?’ she asked.

Rhonwen smiled. ‘The
Pembroke
, I remember because it’s a local place.’

Catrin caught Huw’s eye. ‘Call up the Merchant Navy association archive site,’ she said. ‘The records are open to the public. I checked it last night.’

Huw pulled out his phone and called up various lists on the archive, a website he’d already bookmarked, scrolling down the pages. He ran his index finger over the screen, and pointed at a column of names and dates.

‘If Sion Mathews was on the
Pembroke
he was away at work from September ’71 until mid-February ’72, calling at Lagos, Cape Town, Fremantle.’

It was what she’d been half expecting. She moved the screen over so Rhonwen could see it.

‘Away from September ’71 until mid-February ’72. Might sort of rule him out of the running as Owen’s biological father?’

She watched Rhonwen carefully for a tell that would reveal prior knowledge of this, but with the drink glazing the woman’s eyes it was difficult to see what she knew. Finally she put her glass down.

‘Well, maybe he wasn’t,’ she said neutrally.

Catrin put her hand lightly over Rhonwen’s.

‘Did you ever see Megan with other men? Bit of a one, was she?’

‘No, never. She always kept herself to herself.’

‘In what ways?’

Rhonwen sighed, sat back heavily and looked at Huw. He put his hand in his pocket, waited to see what she’d do.

‘She didn’t really have what you’d call close friends.’

He looked at her as if he had all the time in the world. He kept his hand in his pocket, crinkled up a note so it made a slight noise.

‘Well, you know how it is around here, we like to think of ourselves as hospitable. But Megan never used to have anyone in over the doorstep. If she met anyone down the shop she never had time to talk. It didn’t go down well. People used to think she was stuck up.’

The woman stopped. He took out the note and looked down, as if just noticing it.

‘Did she ever make trips away from the area?’ he asked.

‘No, only to her mother’s occasionally.’

‘Where was that?’

Rhonwen knocked back the last of her gin.

‘I think she was living near Llan then. It’s a small village out in the west.’

Huw clicked the screen onto a detailed map of the area. The village was where the woman had described it, an isolated place, far up on the coast of the national maritime park. Catrin panned down. The place, she noticed, was about twenty miles north of where Rhys’s photographs had been developed.

‘And now?’

‘Up the road in Bancyfelin. She’s like Megan was, keeps herself to herself.’

Huw stood, reached out his hand to shake Rhonwen’s. Catrin got up, moved out from behind the table. She looked down at the woman, avoiding her eye. Huw had put the note on the table and was keeping his fingers over it.

‘Did Owen ever go to his grandmother’s out in the far west?’ she asked.

‘Well, he’d go there for visits with his mam when he was little. Sion was away at sea and Megan was doing night shifts at the hospital, so sometimes she’d leave him with his nan.’

Catrin nodded, then moved towards the door. Huw took his fingers off the note, the woman raised her hand in a farewell gesture.

Catrin waited as Huw stepped quickly after her. As he opened the car door she felt his hand briefly touch the small of her back. He stared out at the low, empty hills, narrow tracks petering out into small copses and beyond them the dimmer lines of more empty hills.

Bancyfelin lay about five miles west of Carmarthen. They arrived to find the area shrouded in mist, the frosted fields slowly regaining their deep greenness as the temperature rose, the bare sycamores along the roadside no more than blurred, skeletal presences.

Face’s grandmother’s house was one of a group of semi-detached properties on the edge of the village. Catrin began to think they had missed the place altogether, but as Huw slowed she saw a short tarmacked lane.

The houses all had immaculate lawns and tidily planted borders, as if a single gardener was responsible for the whole area. The one exception to this orderly scene was the front lawn to number 4a, which contained a high rockery topped with a statue of Jesus, a miniature well and garden gnomes.

They knocked on the front door. Up close they could see that, unlike its neighbour, the door had several additional locks, top and bottom. It seemed to be made, not from hardwood, but from some reinforced synthetic material. There was no response, no sound of radio or television from inside.

Through the thick net curtains and the concertina of security bars they could just make out the dim shapes of Victorian furnishings, pale antimacassars and religious pictures on the walls. To the side, the garden was blocked off by a high steel fence, its top covered with rusted barbed wire. Catrin knocked again, but still there were no sounds from within.

‘She’s old,’ Huw said, ‘maybe they’ve put her in a home.’

As they turned away they saw through the mist a middle-aged woman standing in the doorway of the next house along. Catrin showed her card, and nodded to Huw as if he was a colleague.

‘You two looking for Val, then?’ The woman spoke in the gentle local accent. She ushered them towards her open door with the speed typical of a woman with too much time on her hands.

She had clearly already taken a liking to Huw. ‘Just call me Gwen, love,’ she cooed at him, smiling approvingly at his broad shoulders. She sat them down on a three-seater while she made tea in the kitchen, bringing it in on a tray with cream cakes on a rack.

Huw was staring out towards the garden.

‘Val likes to keep herself to herself then?’ His voice was low, inviting confidences.

The woman followed his gaze, gave a quiet snort of laughter. ‘You’ll not get in there,’ she said, with an air of finality. ‘She won’t even have the delivery boy through the door when he needs paying.’

‘Not a sociable type then?’

‘She used to talk to me through the window sometimes when she saw me. Now she never comes to the front of the house except when there’s a delivery.’

Huw put his plate down on the table. ‘What sort of person is she?’

The woman settled her cup and saucer into her lap as if it was a favourite cat.

‘Very religious. She got herself a special satellite dish so she could pick up those evangelical channels. And she has one of these old-fashioned record players and nearly every record she plays is Welsh hymns; in Welsh, mind, and at full volume by the sound of it.’

Huw bit into his éclair. ‘That’s not so unusual though, is it? The male choirs still mostly sing Welsh hymns around here.’

The woman picked up a paper napkin with a Santa Claus design from the tray and handed it to him. ‘I used to be able to see in through the kitchen in the old days,’ she said. ‘And there was nothing on the shelves and walls there, no books or pictures, just crucifixes, row upon row of them. Now she’s moved upstairs, taken to her bed or something. Anyway, she’s gone quite peculiar.’

Huw put his plate back on the table. ‘Did she ever explain to you how she’d first become so religious?’ he asked.

‘Not really, no.’

‘Had she always been that way?’

‘It wasn’t like she was one of the regulars at chapel, and you get some real sticklers round here. But we never saw Val, not even at Easter or Christmas.’

Huw picked up his cup and hesitated. ‘How was she with her daughter?’

The woman swallowed a mouthful of tea, shook her head. ‘They never had anything to do with each other. The daughter never visited.’

‘But we’ve been told she used to visit. The daughter used to send her son to stay with the old woman out west.’

‘Well, here Val’s daughter never visited, nor did the grandson.’

‘So something may’ve happened to cause a rift between the two women?’

Gwen shrugged.

‘I honestly couldn’t say, love.’

Catrin leant forward in her chair. ‘Did the old woman ever mention why she moved back from the west?’

‘She said it was because of the type of people coming into the area. That’s what she said.’

‘What type was that exactly?’

Gwen dabbed at a spot of spilt tea with one of the Christmas napkins.

‘That was back in the time a lot of hippies and such were coming from the big cities to live out there.’

‘Was there any group in particular?’

The woman sighed, rolled the napkin up into a ball, placed it in her teacup. It was something she didn’t appear comfortable talking about. Catrin gave her most understanding smile.

‘It’s probably not important, but if you could try to remember.’

She had the feeling that the woman remembered perfectly well. She wondered if the hippie groups had offended her sense of what was proper. She glanced over at her again, as if to say she understood.

‘There was one group, well, a cult she called them. She said all the members dressed alike. Their leader reminded her of that American man, you know from the Sixties, with the beard, the one they put in prison . . . Charles . . . Charlie . . .’

‘Charlie Manson?’ Huw put down his cup.

‘Yes. Manson. That’s right. Val said he was like him, an evil man, she said, a disciple of the devil himself.’

Catrin saw Huw smirking at this, covering his mouth with the napkin. She leant in closer so the woman didn’t see him.

‘But why did she think he was evil, apart from his beard?’

‘Well, there was talk among Val’s neighbours that the man had . . .’ here the woman paused and lowered her voice, ‘. . .
relations
with all the women in the group. That sort of thing didn’t go down well, as you can imagine.’

As Catrin put down her cup it rattled slightly. ‘Did this group have a name?’

The woman hesitated for a few seconds.

‘They weren’t around for that long, no more than a couple of years, Val said.’

‘But something she saw this group doing made her leave the area?’

Gwen hesitated.

‘I don’t know. The way she described it, this group were very private. They kept to their big house further north, so it’s not likely she’d have seen anything they did.’

As if sensing Catrin’s eyes on her, she looked down at her lap, where her hands were twisted tightly around each other. Catrin sensed that something the old woman had told Gwen had stayed with her, marked her in some small but indelible way.

‘Her daughter was involved with them, wasn’t she? That’s what upset the old woman.’

‘Well, she never said so.’

‘But you suspect that was why Val no longer had contact with her daughter.’

Gwen sat motionless in her chair. Catrin watched her fingers, but they remained still. ‘Did she mention her grandson Owen much?’

‘Hardly, only when I asked.’

‘Didn’t you think that was odd?’

Gwen thought carefully before replying. She was taking deliberate, deeper breaths now.

‘I’m not sure, maybe I did a little.’

‘Because even if she’d fallen out with her daughter, she would have still tried to see her grandson. Yet she never mentioned him. That seems rather unnatural.’

Gwen seemed to be weighing this up carefully before commenting.

‘Unless the grandson was part of the problem . . .’ She said this hesitantly, as if fearful that Catrin would contradict her.

Gwen had started gathering the tea things together. Catrin waited for her to go through to the kitchen. Then she looked over at Huw.

‘This leader, the one who looked like Manson, he sounds a bit like the figure who used to pick up Face.’

‘Maybe. You’re thinking Megan got involved with this group?’

‘I don’t know, but it sort of fits. Megan is alone a lot, lonely, gets with this group, maybe gets pregnant by one of the members while her husband is away at sea.’ She thought it through for a moment. ‘So by sending Face to see his grandmother in the west, Megan could’ve actually been sending him to see his father. When the grandmother discovers this it pushes her over the edge.’

‘It’s possible.’ Huw glanced again at the fence in the back garden. ‘All the security measures seem a bit over the top, though. I can’t see why she’d be worried after all this time.’

Outside the light had subtly changed, the greyness of the day already taking on the deeper tones of dusk. The sky had filled with strands of pale mauve, signalling more snow to the west. The woman picked up the remaining cups, then stood at the front door, received their thanks for the tea.

‘Do you remember the Angel Jones case?’ Catrin asked softly. She’d waited for Huw to go on ahead. She was embarrassed to bring it up again in front of him, but something in her wouldn’t let her leave until she’d asked the question. ‘The man who held those girls in cellars for years.’

Gwen nodded, seemed only too eager to change the subject. Catrin looked the woman straight in the eye. ‘Val never made any connections between this Manson figure and Jones, said that she thought it was Jones when he was younger?’

‘No, never mentioned him.’ The woman paused, her hands dug deeper in the pockets of her apron. ‘Funny you mention Jones.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, a neighbour here.’ She pointed to another house in the close. ‘She was shopping in Aber the other day, swears she saw someone looking like Jones walk right past her, close as you are to me now.’ She laughed slightly. ‘Knew it wasn’t him of course, but still, gave her quite a turn.’

Huw had come back into earshot. Catrin felt ashamed. She knew asking questions on the sly went against one of the basic rules of trust between investigating officers. And he was still an officer at heart and abided by those rules.

The woman seemed subdued. Huw turned to face her. ‘You said at that time this cult had a house up the coast. Did the old woman ever mention where they were based?’