Read White Trail Online

Authors: Fflur Dafydd

White Trail (2 page)

BOOK: White Trail
3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

There was nothing for Cilydd to do but wait. His father-in-law, Anlawdd, was on the phone daily, shouting at him to get things moving. A formidable figure, a former chief constable, he had never thought Cilydd – a lowly loss adjustor – good enough for his stylist daughter. ‘It's an adequate first marriage,' Cilydd overheard him saying to one of the guests on their wedding day, ‘but let's hope there are no offspring and that we can move on from this nasty business with minimal damage.' From the second Goleuddydd told him she was pregnant, it seemed Anlawdd was waiting to catch him out, to bring the whole thing to an abrupt end, and to claim his daughter back as his own. Cilydd could see him working away at her during her pregnancy, a cup of coffee here, a lift there, until she was staying overnight at her father's house on a weekly basis. ‘He's taken such an interest in this baby,' she would say, while Cilydd knew full well that the interest was not so much in the baby but in controlling the
damage
, as he would have it. And now the damage was colossal. It had started with the undoing of his daughter's fine, shapely body, and had now ended in her obliteration in a supermarket on a wintry afternoon, while everyone else was staring at flour dust.

‘She's got to be somewhere!' he shouted at Cilydd down the phone. ‘Don't snivel at me, Cilydd, just do something about it. Get that cousin of yours on to it. Lord knows he needs something to crack on with. I always knew this marriage would come to no good.' Cilydd heard the reluctant gunge of grief in his father-in-law's windpipes. ‘I'm just very, very worried that something awful has happened here. So get that cousin of yours to look into it. Right now. I shouldn't say this really, having been in the force myself, but don't bother with the police.'

The cousin Anlawdd referred to was Arthur, Cilydd's private-eye relative whose business was anything but private. He lived on the main street of the town, with only his first name printed on a plaque outside his house. ARTHUR, it said, in bold, gilded letters, against a red-painted backdrop.

‘It's ambiguous, don't you think?' Arthur always said, flicking his dishevelled fringe over his left eye. ‘I mean, just giving one name like that, without any details underneath. They see it and they don't think – accountant, lawyer, physiotherapist. They know I'm something else. But they won't bother to find out what until they really need me. So it's a win-win situation. Completely conspicuous but somehow entirely ambiguous at the same time.'

Whenever you asked anyone on that busy main street what the ‘Arthur' referred to they told you it was the house of the local private eye, and that he'd not managed to solve a single investigation since he'd started practising. They would also tell you he'd tried his hand at a million other things too, all of which had been unsuccessful. Carver, painter – candlestick maker. The only thing he'd been any good at, they would stipulate, was working as a street artist a few decades ago. His sketches were said to be uncanny likenesses, whipped out of the stub of his pencil in minutes.

It was evident even from the state of Arthur's house – his
HQ
as he called it – that his methods left something to be desired. Here was a man who'd been searching for a whole host of missing persons for twenty years and who couldn't find so much as a clean knife in the kitchen. He ushered Cilydd in, between huge stacks of dishes, books and shirts that seemed to be looming in every corner, waiting to topple. The walls were covered with newspaper clippings and pictures of missing persons – they stared out at Cilydd from every corner of the room – hundreds of pairs of lost eyes which Arthur, as far as he knew, had never been able to locate. Accompanying most of these were Arthur's own sketches of the missing – some of them a myriad of images of the same person ageing, over time; the guessed faces becoming dense with age, crinkling in charcoal. It sent a shudder down his spine to think of his wife, and maybe even his baby ageing, minute by minute, even as he was ascending the stairs now.

And yet there was a kind of feverish excitement about Arthur which made someone believe that if enthusiasm were the only thing needed to solve a crime, he could do it. He had created a space in the living room, forging a little clearing in the mad woodland of his life, where he'd placed a pot of coffee, two surprisingly clean, new-looking cups, a notebook and some pens. Cilydd sat down and was surprised by how the day fell in through the skylight, illuminating, it seemed, only this particular corner. It was a light untainted by the dirty greying sky above – light that made him think of Goleuddydd. Suddenly, staring at the crisp paper, the concave china mouths waiting to be filled, seeing Arthur's pen poised with sincerity and hope – it seemed possible that Goleuddydd and his child could be brought back to him.

‘I mean, there are bound to be other private eyes working on this, but they won't have the inside info that I have – they won't be hearing it all from the horse's mouth,' Arthur said proudly, passing the sugar bowl to his cousin as though he were expecting him to take one of the sugar lumps in his mouth and neigh his appreciation. This was the moment at which Cilydd realised Arthur saw Goleuddydd's disappearance as rather a piece of luck, something that gave him an edge over other private eyes in the area.

Cilydd learned that his wife's case seemed to match another disappearance in a town fifty miles to the west. If they could crack this one, Arthur said, his eyes gleaming with hope, then it was likely to be the key to a major operation happening somewhere. Which could certainly guarantee that his reputation would be somewhat restored.

‘A fourteen-year-old girl disappeared just like that – from her bedroom. She was up there, listening to music, but when they called her down for supper, she was gone. When they examined her room they found these peculiar little dents in everything and her magazines had been torn to shreds.'

‘So what are you saying?'

‘I'm saying they might be linked.'

‘And what about the money?' he asked.

The police had told him that Goleuddydd had taken a rather large sum of money out of her bank account the day before her disappearance. He caught the policeman and policewoman looking at each other as they told him this; it was as though a gust of cold air had blown into the room. The information changed their attitude towards him; the policewoman's hand on his went limp. He found them sweeping him with their eyes – trying to work out exactly what it was about him that was so overwhelmingly
present
, to make a woman want to be absent.

‘No, there was no money missing in this case. But the girl had been acting strangely for a few weeks, according to her family. Look, just let me look into it. Trust me.'

Cilydd trusted nobody. As the days wore on, the likelihood of Goleuddydd coming back to him diminished. The light and day of her name drained from him in thick, ugly sobs. He stopped answering the phone to Anlawdd, who left angry messages which overran the tape of the machine. He sat in the dark most evenings watching the traffic going by, watching cars slipping and sliding on the black ice, wondering where in the cold world Goleuddydd and his baby were. So she had done it; she had escaped from him, like she had joked she would. And it seemed unfair that there was no escape for him. She was everywhere. In all the papers. The photos he gave the police were all of a pre-pregnancy Goleuddydd. Her beauty and boldness took your breath away. ‘Fears mount for missing beauty', one headline roared. He could not bear the thought of her beauty becoming ink stains on jam-sticky breakfast thumbs, of Goleuddydd entering every single household but her own.

Every now and then he went for a walk in a nearby seaside town, walking out across the cliffs to a small island which was always deserted. You could cross over when the tide was low, but you had to be quick, otherwise you might get caught there. He stayed a little longer every time. Until the dark waters started to seep over the bridge of land –which he saw as the bridge back to his life – before deciding to return at the last minute. He knew the tide of his grief was rising, and that it was only a matter of time before he would stay put on that island. But he wasn't ready yet. He couldn't do it while there was still hope Goleuddydd would over-come whatever madness had taken hold of her and come back to him. And in the absence of a body there was still a chance that his baby's ferocious beating heart – a lovely heartbeat, the midwife had said at their last appointment – was still echoing somewhere in the world.

And when they finally came – three police officers, two men with furrowed brows and a woman whose face was a fixed, constant apology – to tell him they'd found his wife's body, the first feeling he experienced was one of vindication, of righteousness. Rather than give in to true, genuine grief, which twisted his innards with biting ferocity, he found himself engaged in a rather elaborate tirade at the police, before fainting into the lap of the female police officer at the end of the garden path, clutching on to her curtains of blonde hair. They brought him inside and gave him hot, sweet tea. It was the classic antidote to trauma – he'd read all about it in his birth book – a short, sharp elixir of caffeine and sucrose. Even as he was drinking it he wondered how an elated father would approach the steaming cup. He wanted to pour it all over himself, let his emotional pain be replaced with a physical one. Instead he politely gulped it down and burnt the roof of his mouth.

‘So you've found her,' he said.

‘Well, yes, we've found her. And I'm afraid she's...'

‘Well she's dead, obviously,' he muttered, imagining the foetus hibernating inside, never to be roused from its lair. ‘I always knew she was going to be dead.'

‘Yes, she's dead, and I'm very sorry for your loss. But I'm afraid it's more complicated than that...'

More complicated than death? What could be more complicated than the sudden termination of a life that had been thirty-three years in the making? He thought suddenly of paperwork, his wife's clothes, books. What do to with them all? The traces of a life suspended, as though the person would return at any moment. These thoughts were followed by more unpleasant ones – he thought of that abundance of red hair, her lovely smooth shoulders, the scar on her little finger; what would become of those?

Then he looked up into the officer's dolorous eyes and suddenly understood what they meant by
more
complicated
.

‘Oh, I see. I know. She was pregnant. So it means, two funerals, I suppose. Does it?' He wasn't sure. Or would it merely mean a bigger casket? Again, he was trying his best to appear sensible, to take control. ‘Two caskets?' he said, looking up, in a tone that could very well have intimated something quite ordinary, like: ‘two biscuits?' By striving for ordinariness he had reached the register of hysteria now, a semi-tone away from suspicion. The police officer told him to slow down, to take his time.

‘It's about the baby,' the male police officer said before looking meaningfully at the female police officer. ‘There are some things we need to discuss about the baby she was expecting.'

‘My boy,' Cilydd said. Goleuddydd had told him, after the second scan, that it was a boy. Had he imagined her smiling then, knowing he had wanted a girl? He suddenly regretted not accompanying her to the hospital, to see his boy's first tumble through the dark. But then, she hadn't wanted him there. He had felt entirely separate from the pregnancy all the way through, as though it were nothing to do with him. The female police officer moved closer to him, until she was practically on his lap. He inhaled her sharp, floral perfume; wrinkling his nose in distaste. Why did they always push a woman on the bereaved? The doe-eyed creature stared at him and grappled with his hand.

‘Yes, the boy. He wasn't, he wasn't there when we....'

The police woman's hand crept up his sleeve.

‘Will I have to register him? Formally I mean?' he asked, pushing the hand away.

‘Sir, I'm afraid there was no baby. She'd been, she'd been... there is no easy way to say this, sir. She'd been cut open. I'm afraid your wife may have been the victim of foetal theft.'

The words made no sense to him. Foetal theft. A foetus in a bag. Men in balaclavas looting around in someone's abdomen?

‘Someone's taken the baby. It looks as though the whole thing was premeditated. Whoever did it may have had some experience, but we have to be realistic here – in the absence of medical attention we don't hold out much hope for the baby having survived. But the thing is now, to find out who did this and...'

‘But my son... my son
might
be alive?' Cilydd asked.

‘It's possible sir, yes, but...'

His son might be alive. It was the only thing that truly registered. Suddenly to be still missing seemed a glorious thing.

‘But why?' he felt his throat constricting now with the anticipation of grief. ‘Why would someone do a thing like that?'

‘Well, we can't say for sure, but these days there are all sorts of people just desperate for a baby. I suppose they just, well, they must have seen their chance.'

The female police officer tried slinking an arm over his shoulder; he got up just as she was doing it, so that she fell slightly into the sofa. He went to look out of the window, at the garden gate that he had seen Goleuddydd coming through hundreds of times in his life. These past nine months he had seen her struggle with the latch, sometimes heaving herself over it, just to make things difficult – knowing he was watching. Wanting him to know what a sacrifice it was being pregnant, with its million inconven-iences, with this slowly ballooning body. He couldn't quite believe that he'd never see her walk up that garden path again.

‘We'll let ourselves out,' whispered the female police officer. ‘We'll be in touch.'

BOOK: White Trail
3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Merline Lovelace by Untamed
Parallel by Anthony Vicino
FromNowOn by Eliza Lloyd
Savage Satisfaction by Dubois, Lila
The First American Army by Bruce Chadwick