‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going back to see the farmer.’
‘According to Mrs Pugh, he’s curled up like a baby.’
‘I’ll uncurl him.’
‘What if he doesn’t know anything?’
‘I’ll make him remember.’
Calamity grabbed my arm. ‘Louie, I’m sorry about Barney and Betty Hill.’
I ran my hand over her brow and smoothed down her hair. ‘I know. Don’t worry about it.’
I drove and thought about Eeyore’s school photo. There is something profoundly disturbing about that means of outwitting the universe. It violates our trust. Still photos record an instant, whatever an instant is, but this trick fuses two instants and makes them one. And that one fused moment becomes the truth, the official footprint left in the sands of time. I recalled the words of the old con out at the pub in Taliesin, about the woman who left in a 1963 Austin A35 and came back in a 1962 model with the same number plate. He could have been lying; most people who didn’t know better would say you can’t trust a word of a man like that. But the paradox is, you can. Precisely because he never spoke about it all these years. Normal people would have done nothing else but talk about it, but Caeriog Richards was a man who didn’t blab. That didn’t mean he didn’t know things, it just meant in the absence of a compelling reason to do otherwise he wouldn’t talk about them. That was the code by which he lived. It didn’t indicate moral approval or disapproval. It was the code: you didn’t speak about the things you knew.
I wondered about the pictures of Doc Digwyl’s fiancée in the front room of his house. The picnic on the dunes. Behind, in the distance, the sea roars unchanging. The girl stands with one foot pointed slightly inward and her weight shifted a bit, to compensate for the shifting sand perhaps. The strand of hair across the eyes and the slight blur of the left hand that is about to make the journey up to brush it away. At her feet the picnic basket, on a tartan rug from the boot of the Austin. Was she the original Rhiannon? Or the one who came back in the wrong car? Where was the original one now? I saw a vision of the white bones, the skull filled with earth, lying in a shallow grave beneath the gorse on a hillside somewhere. That’s how I would do it. In the middle of gorse bushes so thick no one, not even a dog fetching a stick, would venture there.
I ignored the turning to Borth this time and headed directly across the flat marshland towards Furnace and Ynys Greigiog. But you can never quite elude the calling sea. Away to my left, far but unmistakable, a long, thin line of silver sparkled on the horizon; forever glittering, forever restless.
Farmer Pugh was no longer curled up in a ball. He answered the door himself; he was unshaven and he looked tired, but otherwise seemed pretty normal. He was wearing his glasses too and looked at me with suspicion and without recognition.
‘Yes? I’m not talking to the press.’
‘I’m not the press. They’ll be here tomorrow if you don’t talk to me.’
‘Cops?’
‘They’ll be here this afternoon. I’m private, I don’t like cops and they don’t have to know, that’s up to you. I’m here to talk to you about the smell coming from the cellar in your old house. I haven’t got much time and I need some information fast and you’ve got it. If you give it to me, nothing happens. If you don’t we start digging up the concrete. I suggest you invite me in.’
He pulled the door open and I walked in.
‘Shall I put the kettle on?’
‘Not unless you can’t go five minutes without a cup of tea. I want to know what went on in the hypnotism session with Mrs Bwlchgwallter.’
‘But I don’t know, I . . .’
‘I know the story; you were found curled up in a ball gurgling like a little girl. You can’t remember a thing. But I’m not buying it. I’m here to talk about your brother Rhys, whose head you smashed in with a spade because you caught him messing around with your sister; buried him in the cellar. Killed the dog too with a house brick. I’m a compassionate man, I don’t see any reason any of this has to come out now, when it’s all too late to change anything. I can see you’ve grieved in your own way over it, I can see the life you have lived since that day has been punishment enough. We can let it all lie, let those dogs, both sleeping and the one with the head all mushy like a smashed-in boiled egg, sleep. But I don’t have to play it that way. It’s up to you.’
‘But, really, I have no idea what I said, really I don’t.’
‘You’d better start remembering quick, then.’
‘How can I do that?’
‘If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in gaol think of something.’
‘Please, I can’t remember.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Maybe it wasn’t your brother messing around with your sister, maybe it was you. Maybe he caught you and you had to silence him. Was that how it happened?’
‘No.’
‘I can find her and ask.’
‘You leave her out of this.’
‘I want to, really I do, but I need you to help me.’ I moved to the door.
‘Stop!’ His voice filled with anguish. ‘Stop, please, don’t tell my sister. Why don’t you ask Mrs Bwlchgwallter?’
‘Her memory isn’t so good these days.’
‘But the tape, she can play you the tape.’
‘There’s a tape?’
‘She recorded it. She brought one of those portable tape recorders . . . it was in her handbag.’
I scrutinised his face for a second or two and then decided to believe him.
I drove back to town and went to see Doc Digwyl. I found him sitting in a dressing gown shivering next to an unlit fire in the front room of his house on Laura Place. He was eating beans on toast and listening to a 78-rpm gramophone record of the Merry Widow. Apart from the cold, the room was not greatly changed since the last time I’d been there when Mrs Lewis the housekeeper had been still alive. And yet everything was different; it seemed as if the doctor’s life had imploded.
He stared past me, addressing his words to a fireless grate. ‘Thirty years Mrs Lewis served me,’ he said. ‘Ministered to my every need, nursed me in sickness, comforted me, was my solace through the dark times, and in all that time I never said a pleasant word to her. I thought I despised her for her silly ways, all that endless demented polishing, the gossiping and perpetual insistence on seeing the bright side of things.’ He snapped the fork down onto his plate with an air of pointless finality. ‘Now look at me.’
‘Do you think . . . is it possible that . . . that the mayor could have killed her?’
‘And why would he do such a thing?’
‘I don’t know, it’s just a suspicion . . . because she talked to me about that night in 1965 when the boys robbed the Coliseum cinema, when Iestyn Probert came round here with . . . with . . .’
‘With an alien?’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what it was. It was a boy in a strange silver suit.’
‘Preseli took him away. What happened after that?’
‘I don’t know, how should I?’
‘You must know. I need to know.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m an empiricist. I can only tell you of the things I have seen with my own eyes.’
‘You don’t always need to see something to know it. The truth isn’t like that. Truth is the wolf I have spent my life tracking.’ I stood up and walked to the mantelpiece to look at the photos. ‘You track with the heart, not the eyes. The eyes are easily deceived; easiest thing in the world to show something that isn’t true and make people believe it. The truth is more elusive, but sometimes you know when you are in its presence. The first time I came here I knew there was something wrong about all these pictures.’ I lined them up and arranged them, straightening some, moving others. There were no clues to indicate the chronological sequence; such clues had been carefully filtered out. But even so, they fell into two broad camps. In one group the woman was always shown too far away, so you couldn’t recognise her. ‘A man and woman fall in love, they plan to marry, but something goes wrong. She tries to walk out on him, but he doesn’t want her to. Perhaps she has found another. Sometimes, when men are in love, they love so much they would rather no one has their love if they cannot. She left the neighbourhood, or so it seemed. And so the neighbours’ tongues start wagging. In the meantime, the doctor helps the sheriff out with his own little difficulty. He agrees to keep quiet about the events of a strange night that some have called the Welsh Roswell. One good turn deserves another. So the following year the sheriff helps the doctor silence those wagging tongues. The missing fiancée returns for a week. There can be no doubt about it because the sheriff sees and speaks to her. But there’s one funny thing about it. The car.’ I placed two photos side by side. ‘It was the same number plate, but the wrong model car.’ I turned to look at him.